How mass tourists exploit developing countries and pretend to be adventurous travellers instead
Like last year, also for this year’s summer holidays I have decided to travel with the (in)famous Italian tour operator specialized in organizing hard-core trips. I am talking about Viaggi e Avventure nel Mondo (Trips and Adventures Around the World), the tour operator funded in the 70s targeting people who have so many holidays that can afford to go travel with them first and then take a further week off to recover.
Photo by Glenn Carstens
The question now arises: why in the world did I decide again to embark on a trip with them knowing full well that afterwards what would have been waiting for me was certainly not a week of spa? In fact, like last year, what would have been waiting for me upon my return was a 12-hour-work routine until Christmas. I wish I could say that, as a wannabe blogger, I chose them again to get some interesting content to write about. Last year’s trip to Hawaii inspired a blog post that was appreciated by the (very few) people who read it. So attempting to force inspiration might have seemed a sensible strategy. Or I wish I could say that, during the wintertime, I went through an identity crisis and that at the end of it I discovered the joy in the pain while on holidays and the privilege of paying for it.
Unfortunately, none of the above applies. The reason why I joined them again is that, like last year, I still have no time to properly plan my holidays. The way I want to book my holidays cannot be further from the good principles of a traveller interested in discovering the world. In fact, it resembles any other online purchase. I mindless scroll through the website of the tour operator to see what trips are aligned with my preferred date of departure. I find a destination where I did not go yet, input my data and credit card number and click “Confirm”. Done. A two-week trip on the other side of the world booked in less than 10 minutes. This amazes me not because discovering a new country has never been easier. But because it entails the very same clicks it takes to get a pizza delivered to your door those evenings when you don’t feel like cooking. By reducing everything to the same mechanical actions, digitalization has equalized dynamism and laziness, adventure and comfort. The foreign collapses onto what is familiar, and travellers are indistinguishable from mass tourists. Paradoxically, Viaggi e Avventure nel Mondo was funded to attract people with strong travel ethics and instead ended up attracting frivolous and consumeristic folks like myself. And yes, these last sentences may sound like the end of the blog post. But this is still the beginning, so keep reading! :)
Photo by Vojtek Bruzek
Last year the destination I picked after a few minutes of mindless scrolling through their website was Hawaii. Despite the almost three weeks spent waking up early and hiking for hours every single day, that trip may not be regarded as a “legit” one. After all, Hawaii remains one of the most expensive destinations to go to. Also, the fact that those islands are part of a rich Western country certainly removes a lot of the exotic flavor that is expected from a trip to the other side of the world. That is why for this year, probably to counterbalance my frivolous and consumeristic attitude, I decided to redirect the mindless scrolling a bit and made sure to visit a poor country. Poor, but not so poor that the local population would die by starvation in front of me. Or where the health conditions would be so, well, “poor” to require a long list of vaccinations. You know what I mean: just the right amount of poverty that discomforts you without making you feel guilty for being born in a rich country. Or for being alive. This is how I decided to go to Vietnam.
On the day of departure, I joined a group of 15 individuals with whom I had little in common except for the (sudden) interest in visiting a developing communist Asian country. After hours and hours of flight, we arrived in Hanoi and started our hard-core visit of Vietnam. The tour was a fast paced 13-day-long journey around the northern part of Vietnam. We kayaked in the Ha Long Bay right after joining a Tai Chi class at 6 am in the morning during a one-night cruise. We stood in front of every reproduction of ancient house, clothes, hat, bicycle, grave of the ethnographic museum of Hanoi. We exited only to melt like candles in front of every monument due to the 43 degrees and 100% humidity. We walked extensively in the old part of the city, risking being hit by the hundreds of scooters and bikes. We visited every single pagoda and temple that we could find, including a whole sanctuary aggregating ten of them. We went on a 14 km hike at the border with China at 7am right after having slept only a few hours on a night train. And we never stayed for more than one night in the same hotel. And so on and so forth.
Photo By Ammie Ngo
Besides the places we visited, the trip gave us also the chance to discover Vietnam’s culture, habits and food. We ate plenty of rice in every shape and form possible: noodle soups, stir fried rice, steamed rice. We even went to visit the rice fields and slept in the homestays of the ethnic minorities inhabiting that region. It was at one of the local markets of these ethnic minorities that I had the biggest cultural shock of the whole trip. While queuing to go to the bathroom between the cages of a guy selling animals and the counter of woman selling vaginal lubricants, I saw two chickens being killed in front of me and threw into hot boiling water. And as my turn came, dizzy for the brutality of the scene, it took me a couple of seconds to realize that the bathroom I was queuing for was, in fact, a hole in the ground with no running water. “Come on Giulia don’t complain, this is the true spirit of adventure. And this is what drives a true traveller!” said one member of the group who was queuing behind me and attended the same scene.
And the “spirit of adventure” and how it sets travellers apart from tourists were the main themes of the conversations we were having in the group. Dinners were especially filled with nostalgic narrations of the past adventures which, of course, were more adventurous than those we were currently experiencing. The 14km hike we did after an overnight train trip of 9 hours? Oh, but that time in Uzbekistan we hiked for 23km after a night trip of 12 hours. The poor hygiene of some of the restaurants where we ate, where bowls were washed with little to no soap? Oh, but that time in India the hygiene was so bad that we all had diarrhea for three days and lost four kilos. Bikes and scooters almost hitting you when trying to cross the street? Oh, but that time in Bangkok one of us had an actual accident while crossing the street and went to the emergency room to get her leg casted. That homestay where we had to share two showers among 15 people and brushing our teeth under the rain because the washing basing was placed outside? Oh, but that time in Indonesia we had to share half a shower among 20 of us and it was the bedrooms that had no ceiling, not just the washing basin. That one was not at all a touristic place!
Photo by Tran Phi
The highlight of the (mild) Vietnamese adventures culminated when the true nature and idiocy of this very spirit of adventure manifested itself clearly. At least to me. One day, we arrived at a homestay at around 1pm and were supposed to go on a two-hour hike around yet another rice field right upon checking in. Instead, we (they) decided to wait so that the temperature cooled down a bit. The point was that according to the weather forecast, a monsoon was supposed to arrive by 4pm. And what time did we start the hike in the end? The bus came fetching us at 15:45 and after a short ride we begun the hike at 4pm. The monsoon started exactly five minutes later, giving the bus driver enough time to leave and go at the end of the trail to pick us up afterwards. The entire landscape got all of a sudden dark and in matter of seconds we found ourselves in the middle of the monsoon, completely wet and completely stuck. My shoes were full of mud. The rain was so heavy that, despite wearing a raincoat with a hoodie, my hair looked like the fur of a poodle and even my underwear was wet. I was furious. Yes, there was also a good dose of disbelief in what I was feeling, but mainly I was furious. The other group members noticed that I stopped walking and started to encourage me to continue instead. I expected at that point one of those remarks on the adventurous spirit, which did not take long to come. “Come on Giulia, that’s the true spirit of adventure! Oh, and this is nothing compared to that time in the rainforest when we walked six hours under the pouring rain and we had leeches sucking the hell out of us”.
Photo by Down Tuan
Nope, weirdly enough that was not the moment were I exploded in rage. After all, that remark was expected as much as the monsoon at 4pm was expected. It was an annoying remark, yes, but it did not affect me much. The emotional breakdown came when another member of the crew shouted: “Keep on walking, Giulia! Think about when you’ll get back home and proudly say that you hiked in Vietnam in the middle of the monsoon for two hours without seeing anything. Imagine what a success you can bring home!”. Pride? Success? That sentence was a true epiphany. In that very moment I realized that the folks I was travelling with were not, as they were claiming, travellers willing to discover the world and who only accidentally happen to book the whole trip in just a few clicks like I did. Those people were not driven by a sense of curiosity for what is foreign and probably had less interest in other cultures than I did. Instead, they were driven by a sense of revenge that they disguised as the spirit of adventure. The reality was that they not only were callous mass tourists like myself, but they were also a bunch of losers.
Losers leading dull lives with not much purpose nor excitement, who desperately needed to turn things around during their holidays to be able to tell at least one success story at Christmas. Normal people go on holidays to take a break from the competitive environment they have to deal with during the rest of the year. Losers, instead, deliberately fabricate adventures during their holidays so as to bring home a bunch of achievements and counterbalance a life of failures. And for the very definition they arbitrarily assign to the word “achievement”, these adventures cannot be fabricated but in poor countries. Because nowhere back home would they be able to get diarrhea by mistakenly sipping a drop of water while showering. Or sleep in a hotel with no ceiling. Or find such underdeveloped roads that a 400 km journey takes 12 hours. The truth was that the people I was visiting Vietnam with weren’t travellers willing to get exposed to new cultures, habits and traditions and get a fresh look into the world. On the contrary, they were the worst species of mass tourists, those that exploit poor and developing countries to look adventurous, interesting and cool at home.
Photo by Silver Ringvee
The guy who addressed me like that could not have possibly imagined what went through my mind during those milliseconds that separated his sentence from the answer I gave him. And the answer I gave him was a poorly articulated one (to say the least), screamed from the top of my lungs while waving my arms and acting like a crazy person: “I am not a loooooooooooseeeeeeeer!”. Yep.
Photo by Minh Luu
The last day of our trip arrived sooner than expected. It was a free day in Hanoi where the only constraint was to arrive on time at the airport to departure that night. I decided to visit the new part of the city, full of tall skyscrapers, luxury hotels, shops and restaurants. It was the only part that we purposely skipped during the tour because what type of adventure could have we crafted in such an area anyway? That day I had lunch at a famous restaurant with two Michelin stars, where food was so delicious that even tofu tasted good. It was while enjoying the best meal of the whole trip (duh!) that I realised how similar the landscape was to any other Western urban area. And also how the folks sitting there seemed to lead lives that were similar to ours, juggling between a corporate job, the gym, family obligations and some social life. Clearly Vietnam is catching up with economic growth and technological advances and will soon not be a developing country any more. Like it happened already or is currently happening for other countries around the world. But then without the crowded old cities, the poor health conditions of certain regions, the difficult roads, the cultural shocks, the dietary habits of the developing countries, what will be left as travel destinations for the losers? Where will they go to fabricate their miserable adventures and bring home an idiotic badge of honour? Maybe they will be soon extinct ;)
Breaking Thirty Quote
Now I would love to hear from you! Have you ever experienced any cultural shocks when abroad? What do you believe are the underlying motivations of travellers and mass tourists? Do you think that digitalisation made them more alike than different? Let me know in the comments below and do not forget to subscribe for more blog posts like this one.