Am I a tourist?

by Mark Nicholson

My immediate reaction to that question is “certainly not” or at least “I hope not”. I had to search online for a definition of the word and answers on Google vary from “no strict definition” to “a person traveling to another place for pleasure”. Tourism itself is defined as “a social, cultural and economic phenomenon which entails the movement of people to countries or places outside their normal environment for personal, business or professional purposes”. That of course makes us all tourists as soon as we leave our homes. In my case, I have left our house in the cold, grey, damp equatorial highlands of Kenya for the cold, grey, damp Scottish Highlands, and that makes me a tourist. 

As the world population increases, so do tourist numbers but at a far faster rate as people get wealthier and travel gets easier (in theory) and cheaper. Global population has grown in 75 years from 2.5 billion to eight billion today but tourist volume in certain places has risen 1000 percent over the same period. Mass tourism is leading to environmental damage, pressure on resources and increasingly to local resentment, as we have seen in the Balearics recently.

There are many iconic places in the world I have not seen and would have liked to visit: the Great Wall, Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat, the top of Everest or the Sistine Chapel are a few examples.  The numbers of visitors to these sites are now so great that I would pay to avoid both the place and more especially the crowds. It is not my idea of fun to queue for three hours and then crane my neck at Michelangelo’s frescoes for the allotted twenty minutes while jostling with a thousand other impatient, camera-toting visitors.   

Some I have seen when I was young when there were fewer visitors. Others I have seen by being first in the queue, like Petra. Being an early bird has advantages: I am quite happy these days to get up at 4am in Scotland to climb a Munro (a Scottish mountain above 3000 feet [914m]) before the tourists, sorry, hikers arrive. Fifty years ago, I and a small party of friends, would have had the ‘hill’ to ourselves. I climbed Kilimanjaro first in 1974 with two friends. It cost us $40 each, the huts were clean and the litter was non-existent. Now you will pay at least $2000, see hundreds of hikers, little ice and lots of trash. I saw the Grand Canyon on a glorious, early spring afternoon with snow still lying around  just before 9/11 and there were very few other people to share the spectacle.   

In early 1966 when I was 16, a good friend of my father’s was one of 55 tourists who visited Antarctica. He gave us a mesmerizing slide show on his return and entreated me to go one day. In 2023, 122,000 visitors did the same trip. So I am quite content to watch Frozen Planet.

Twenty years ago, I attended a lecture by the anthropologist Richard Leakey who told us that before the Second World War one could book the whole of the small Maasai Mara Reserve in Kenya for a weekend exclusively for one’s party. Today there are 3500 bed nights. At the Mara river crossing during the wildebeest migration, the numbers of minibuses and 4WDs on the bank can be so many that the wildebeest cannot get through to safety. Meanwhile in the adjacent Serengeti in Tanzania, which is twenty times the size of the Mara and twice as expensive, there are fewer tourists, which makes the whole experience so much more enjoyable. In the Mara, drivers all have radios these days and relay to each other the location of big cats. Vehicles then surround cheetahs, which are diurnal hunters, so they are unable to hunt effectively. Consequently, cheetah numbers are declining. Mass tourism is killing the goose that laid the golden egg.

Tourists awaiting the wildebeest and zebra crossing on the Mara river

Yes, tourism is an astoundingly important part of the world economy. Worth 8 trillion dollars (10% of the world’s GDP), the industry employs ten percent of the global workforce. Yet as we have seen in Majorca recently, locals, outnumbered by tourists by forty-to-one, are frustrated and angry. Native inhabitants can no longer afford housing on the island while foreigners buy houses that often remain empty for much of the year.

So what is the answer? Numbers keep on rising in every tourist destination on Earth except when conflict or plague threatens. Recent riots in Nairobi resulted in immediate widespread cancellation of safaris from North Americans in particular, despite the fact that they would never even have been near the protests. Friends went this year to Petra and almost had the place to themselves and I don’t suppose Kiev is the flavour of the decade at the moment.

Which tourist looks the tastiest?

Covid cut annual numbers visiting the Grand Canyon from the usual six million in 2019 to three million in 2020 but numbers have rebounded strongly since then to make up for lost time.

The first obvious answer is to increase prices substantially. Venetian authorities are now charging 5€ daily per visitor. Venice receives 20 million tourists a year (many being ‘day trippers’) but I suspect that that minimal fee will not be enough to dent numbers. I would have thought 50€ might be a better deterrent, which would cover the cost of infrastructure maintenance, environmental clean-ups and fresh water supply.

Another idea is to cap numbers by selling finite numbers of tickets by lottery or on a first-come-first-served basis. This is being done at the Taj Mahal and is being considered in the Mara Game Reserve.

                                                Ah, for a quiet day on the beach

An alternative is to make the attraction so expensive that only the rich can afford it. This is Botswana’s answer in the Okavango delta where bed nights start at $2000 and usually much more. Plenty of up-market lodges in Africa charge more than $6000 a night for a double, the price one pays for peace, luxury and exclusivity. Bookings at that price still remain difficult to get.

I foresee an environmental tax on airfares before long to mitigate climate change. This would be widely unpopular. Would people still fly off to Corfu if the return air ticket cost $1425, which is the same pro rata cost of a recent air trip I took in Africa ($0.35/km)? At least this might reduce numbers.

Most humans are social animals anyway so I suppose mass tourism does not faze the majority. On a cold and raining summer’s day last month in Scotland, I went for a swim at a nearby caravan park and chatted to the swimming pool attendant, a single mum from Edinburgh in her sixties. She lives permanently in a mobile home and loves the freedom to roam around. Yet instead of finding a remote spot in an empty glen, she finds a place in a caravan park and sets up shop, working for six months in exchange for a ‘pitch’ which normally costs £750 a month. Within a few miles of where I was staying, there were three caravan parks comprising well over 1000 caravans/campervans. Each vehicle was parked in a line with caravans on either side less than two metres away. The irony is that within a mile of these caravan parks were tens of thousands of hectares of completely empty land with nothing but sheep and solitude. 

So yes, I am a tourist, albeit a slightly misanthropic one and clearly in the minority with my abhorrence of crowds. For me, the secret is to know how and/ or when to avoid the masses. Wild and empty places are still abundant on this planet. So give me a patch of sand in the Mauritanian desert anytime over a square metre of sand in Benidorm. But then we are all different.