As a side note: I have the feeling spiegel.de is getting worse and worse by the day. Ever increasing click-bait titles, aricles with little depth, more and more content paywalled. And don’t get me started on the page filling ads... or is it just me?
Paradise Lost: How Tourists Are Destroying the Places They Love
11–20 of 156 posts
Re: Paradise Lost: How Tourists Are Destroying the Places They Love
#12Always worth posting Wallace's quote on the subject: "To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without yo…
> you become economically significant but existentially loathsome
Ouch
Re: Paradise Lost: How Tourists Are Destroying the Places They Love
#13I grew up with stories of people like Maco Polo and love of travel but my recent trips to Europe has almost repulsed and disillusioned me. Tiny European countries are being swamped by huge swath of tourists, everyone with Rick Steve’s guidebook, they all go look at exact same thing, take exact same pictures and even eat at exact same recommended restaurants. There is a lot to see and little to reflect when you are am…
I often wait until I have a personal connection to a place, such as a friend or related hobby, before traveling. The experience becomes very removed from that of a tourist, and so much more rewarding. Am I selfish if I put extra effort into maintaining friendships with foreign friends so I might end up visiting them?
This is one of my favourite ways to travel (when feasible), but if there's somewhere you want to go, just go.
I was lucky to work in a city full of expats - so I now have friends all over the world to lean on.
In return, they lean on me when they want to visit my home country and I happily oblige.
Re: Paradise Lost: How Tourists Are Destroying the Places They Love
#14In my mind, this could be solved fairly simply with government regulation. The government can sell tourism passes to enter the country, therefore socializing some of the profits of tourism, or even just hand them out in a lottery. It seems obvious that this will need to be done at some point; there are fundamental limits on how many people a country's infrastructure can support. Without the government stepping in, it…
This is actually done with certain destinations in the US. For example, after "The Wave" in Southern Utah became tremendously famous (driven, IIRC, by a very nice desktop photo distributed with Windows), access became permit-only determined by BLM lottery.
I've been trying the lottery w/o success most months of the last year. It's frustrating not to win, but it's a fair way of meeting the demands of both access and preservation.
Re: Paradise Lost: How Tourists Are Destroying the Places They Love
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lots of tourist from outside Europe use "hub" airports and then travel to their final destinations, often using low cost airlines. This why German and Dutch airspaces are so busy.
It would usually be the same airline that did the long flight or one of their partners - but Ryanair and Easyjet don't do those partnerships with Chinese airlines. I've also gotten a lot of their flights and hardly ever see Chinese tourists, mostly local (or other European) tourists in fact.
Well that's why airlines like Ryanair exist. If say Lufthansa is booked up by Chinese tourists and prices are rocketing, that leaves a gap in the market that these airlines fill.
Also people aren't stupid. They shop around and find good deals. I've seen many South Americans using London or Amsterdam as hub airports before jumping on cheap flights to Spain/Portugal etc.
Re: Paradise Lost: How Tourists Are Destroying the Places They Love
#16Always worth posting Wallace's quote on the subject: "To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without yo…
> you become economically significant but existentially loathsome Ouch
This Wallace guy is certainly proud of his opinions, I'll say that for him. The important thing is that he's found a way to feel superior to pretty much everybody.
I especially like how he can write something as prescriptive as, "To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American, alien, ignorant, greedy..." while literally admitting that he can speak only for himself ("for me."). The greatest magicians are the ones who come right out and tell you that they're going to try to snow you, and then proceed to do so.
Re: Paradise Lost: How Tourists Are Destroying the Places They Love
#17Always worth posting Wallace's quote on the subject: "To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without yo…
"alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have"
I find this hugely classist. (Edit: and I'm generally not someone to use that terminology)
Most (even American) travellers are just trying to see some sights, have a normal and are not particularly rude or problematic.
The issue is now that 'everyone' can afford to travel ... it's causing problems.
This is a problem of prosperity.
Re: Paradise Lost: How Tourists Are Destroying the Places They Love
#18Traveling is overrated. Often times in modern life it feels as thought traveling is a competition rather than for leisure and pleasure. People are often competing to take pictures and say they have been to as many places as possible. Props to travel companies for propagating the travel craze and selling people on the allure of taking pictures and eating food in another spot on Earth. Count the number of people's profiles on social media that do not say they like traveling.
Okay let's be honest for a second what does most traveling boil down to? You basically use a form of transportation to ping pong from one point of Earth to another to say you visited a piece of land named X or Y, a country let's call it, named by some person or group who is no longer alive and maybe started a war with other humans to solidify the country name and its artificial border lines. We are moving people from A to B back to A every day and in the process destroying our planets climate because people are bored with the lives in the place they inhabit.
We need to find out what is causing the boredom. Understand it and work to solve it so that people can enjoy the places they live. To embrace our shared humanity and environment in front of us everyday if we do not overlook it during the hassle of everyday life.
Re: Paradise Lost: How Tourists Are Destroying the Places They Love
#19Always worth posting Wallace's quote on the subject: "To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without yo…
The hedonic rush of social media is an unfortunate aspect to modern travel. Vacations and trips have always had the aspect where the traveler plans how to tell friends/family about the trip after the fact. However, I've caught myself mentally planning out a social media post about something I'm seeing right at the moment.
I wonder how we would treat our travels differently if somehow we were not allowed to share anything visual with other people. There's something diminished that happens when it becomes so easy, so low-effort, to capture something about a place you're in. You don't have to observe or be in the moment; you just run from place to place collecting views you can horde in exchange for likes and clicks. It's a mechanization/industrialization of experience.
Re: Paradise Lost: How Tourists Are Destroying the Places They Love
#20Funny that they blame Ryanair and Easyjet, who only serve Europe, in the first sentence, then plaster a big photograph of a field full of Chinese tourists that most likely did not use Ryanair or Easyjet to get there.
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