Better travellers, better planet(s)

Tourists ‘vamping’ with the somber marker at the Trinity bomb test site in New Mexico – photo by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

I’ve always loved reading books that featured travel to exotic places. It was Agatha Christie’s murder mystery Death on the Nile, or more specifically the magnificently-filmed movie version in 1978, that cemented my desire to actually go to a country I’d been dreaming about since I was a child.

Adding those elements to my novels – urban fantasy grounded in our real world – was a natural extension of that, bringing the adventure to my own readers.

My hubby and I have been fortunate to be able to visit six continents and twenty-four countries, and I’m proud to say that we’ve never once disgraced ourselves or Canada. But we’ve seen bad travellers throughout our journeys.

When my hubby and I travelled to Egypt for our 10th anniversary, locally we were like rock stars (yes, Billy Idol, I hear you ). Not many people from the area we live in travelled abroad back then, and a trip to Egypt was practically unheard of – suddenly we were the modern version of Indiana and Marian.

We’d booked a tour through a company that no longer exists, unfortunately. It was called Transglobal, and had been recommended by acquaintances who were very widely travelled and had used it themselves to go to the same destination.

I found a 15-day excursion that we liked, and in the preparation, we read the travel info guide the company sent us from cover to cover and back.

One of the things covered in the booklet was etiquette in visiting a predominantly Muslim country – valuable information because we wanted to have a good time but also be respectful. We were careful to keep our shoulders and knees covered, and I made sure that my buttoned shirts weren’t undone very far. On one of the days I’d neglected to do enough buttons up, and I got a lot of attention – not exactly hostile, but less than happy.

While out and about on our second day in Cairo, our tour guide took us to a great restaurant downtown with assortments of kebabs and mezze for lunch – massive skillets sizzling with food and sending great billows of smoke toward the ceiling. We watched with our mouths open as another group came in shortly after and sat down, with one young female dressed in a black lace cropped top and mini-skirt. We wondered, did she realize what country she was in (or even what planet she was on)?

At the Citadel in Cairo, a historic fortification built by Saladin and containing his tomb, we all had to either take off our shoes, which are considered unclean in several cultures, or ‘rent’ little striped cloth shoe covers (what we did). Inside the beautiful main chamber, there were a number of men on carpets quietly conducting their afternoon prayers along the walls, and we were appalled to see some tourists running right up to them and snapping their photos as if they were Disney exhibits.

For a long time, there weren’t a lot of bad tourists because there weren’t so many tourists in general, but in the 21st century a lot more people have begun travelling around the world, and treating both local and foreign destinations like their own personal theme park.

I saw an article last year on National Geographic, Nudity, sex, and disrespect: Bali looks to rein in bad tourist behavior. I read it, but didn’t need to. Even back in 1994 when my hubby and I were there, we saw some of it – mostly nudity on the wide beach in Denpasar, which, if the perpetrators had read anything about their destination before hand, is considered really disrespectful by the Balinese people.

Last December, a gondola in Venice capsized when a group of travellers refused their gondolier’s instructions to stop taking photos and sit down.

Here in Ontario in 2018, inconsiderate tourists trampled an entire sunflower field so badly trying to get the perfect selfie that the police made the owners shut the event down for safety reasons, then verbally abused the owners. It made the news in other countries.

Sunflower farm bans visitors after being inundated with selfie-seekers

Recently, when we visited the Trinity Bomb site in New Mexico just a few months before the Oppenheimer movie came out, some people were posing with the black obelisk that marks the locus of the blast laughing and smiling as if they were posing with Mickey Mouse. It was bizarre. They weren’t hurting anyone, but they seem to have missed the point of both the import of the development of such a terrible weapon as well as the protestors at the head of the road leading into the site campaigning for the rights of the many local residents who’d become ill because of the bomb test (something that wasn’t mentioned in the movie either).

An article this month on the BBC site, The world’s revolt against ‘bad tourists’, describes how quite a few destinations are putting their foot down. I recall reading another article in 2019 about how Ayers Rock, more correctly called Uluru, was being completely shut down to tourists because it’s sacred to the local Anangu people – and yet one woman who was interviewed said that she was aware of the restriction and why, but was going to do it anyway ‘because she wanted to’. How selfish!

When we were in New Orleans, we visited Bourbon Street, of course. Its roaming denizens are entirely tourists – the locals just work there, then go to other parts of the city when they want to let their hair down. We saw some very strange street performers, watched the spectacle for a short while, and had a fabulous meal at one of the restaurants. But a lot of people were simply flat-out drunk. While we were waiting for our evening ghost tour to begin, we watched one gentleman come lurching down the street, leaning entirely on his wife because he was so plastered he couldn’t walk on his own. He had a glass of wine in one hand and dropped it, shattering the pieces all over the sidewalk, while the locals looked at him in frank disgust.

Now, in the interest of fairness, a lot of destinations, like Fort Lauderdale, heavily marketed to attract tourist traffic over the decades, and are now paying the price as thousands of drunken partyers create havoc, so they have their share of culpability.

Our world is a wonderful place to travel around, to enjoy other cultures, other landscapes, but in order for everyone to have a good experience, we have to be respectful guests! I want to ask some of these transgressors if they would go to a friend’s house and trash it in such a way? (Sadly, some of them might.)

Last fall we visited a farm in eastern Ontario for a festival. The farm includes a large field of sunflowers, with trails among them to walk around, and I was very pleasantly surprised to see visitors keeping to the paths and enjoying the beautiful bright heads on a gorgeous autumn day – not a single stalk was trampled in a selfie frenzy. That’s what happens when people behave themselves: everyone gets to enjoy a place, and so do succeeding groups of visitors.

Glorious, undamaged sunflowers in autumn, photo by E. Jurus, all rights reserved

My hubby and I have never been treated badly through any of our travels – in fact, some the best parts have been our interactions with the people who live in the places we’ve gone to. We’ve sat on the banks of the Nile river to share campfire songs with our guide and a local farmer, had an entire group of schoolgirls practice their English with us at a temple in Bangkok, gotten hugged by a school principal in Botswana, had a hotel concierge entertain us in Alabama with his description of “Southern” road directions, had a British barkeep explain how to tell if other barkeeps aren’t doing a correct ‘pour’ of beer.

These are the things that great travel is made of. If you can come home from a trip with those kinds of memories, not of pissing off the locals and damaging the place you’ve been to, then you’ve done it right.

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