Death Of The Destination
By NARAYANI GANESH The Times of India | September 4, 2005 http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1219770.cms Destination tourism is a crashing bore. To the globetrotter, Paris, New York, Dubai, Singapore, even the Alps, are ho-hum, so 'common'. For the domestic tourist, travel hotspots are where you bump into the very people you are taking a break from: Pesky colleagues and neighbours. Worse, 'quiet' destinations are invaded by cacophonous holidaymakers who explode the silence of valleys and mountains with their bone-rattling music and incessant chatter. Trekking, snorkelling, even bird watching are victims of mass tourism and brochure promotions. For the bored vacationer, the Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel offers refreshing departures. "Forget package holidays and classic routes", it says. Rewrite travel rules. Experience. Relate. Look at travel through a lateral filter. There are alternative ways to be a tourist. Visit the world in creative, exciting and unusual ways. The trick is to"discover places that have no reason to exist". Earlier, holiday-travel was for pleasure. It was escape from reality. Today, it is escape from comfort-induced boredom. Cable-car tourists who peered down deep valleys as they slid comfortably across treacherous mountains are passe. The buzz is hardship tourism the harsher the experience, the more esoteric the journey, the better. When the hippie culture galmourised 'drifting', travel became an alternative lifestyle choice to 'discover' oneself. Today's psycho-geographers seek to"record, celebrate and reclaim the forgotten, neglected and overlooked environments of a place". Disaster tourism or travelling to a scene of disaster to tsunami-ravaged beach destinations like Phuket and the Andaman Islands; terrorist-targets like Egypt's Luxor and Sheik-al-Sharif, New York's Ground Zero and the Bali Islands and visits to battle-sites like Kargil are being described more as voyeur's choice, a hindrance to relief and rehabilitation work. Promoters say it sensitises people to the plight of the affected and helps kick-start the local economy. A California-based tour operator offers reality tours designed to raise consciousness of actual conditions prevailing within the US. Participants experience first-hand how prisons and sweatshops are run, how toxic wastes are disposed of and the overuse of pesticides in fields. They talk to teens serving murder sentences and garment workers sewing round-the-clock. Outside the US, these trips have taken people to countries like Israel, Iran, Vietnam, Cuba and even India. Disaster tourism might sound politically incorrect even Lucresian but with special interest groups that include journalists and experts, it can help create public awareness, generating viable solutions. This newspaper recently reported the makeover of a crematorium in eastern UP from an unsightly, depressing burning ghat to a place of recreation. A project initiated and sustained by locals has transformed the place into a beautiful garden. More poignant and less hard than a pilgrimage, the yatra encourages reflection and retrospection. Surrealists and psycho-geographers, modern alternative thinkers, espouse a philosophy that seems to say: Let chance be your guide. A parallel is drawn between experimental travel and surrealist philosophy:"...it thrives on the tension between pre-meditation and spontaneity... The realisation that reason and anti-reason, sense and nonsense, design and chance, consciousness and unconsciousness, belong to each other as necessary parts of the whole". Experimental travel involves constant reinvention and creativity. Experiments include Blind Man's Buff, Slow-return and Ero-tourism. Ero-tourism is an experiment for couples, to arrive separately in an unknown foreign city and then find one another without having recourse to any means of communication, and without having decided on a meeting place. Blind Man's Buff, as the name suggests, is one partner blindfolding himself and 'seeing' and experiencing the journey and destination through the eyes of his companion. Slow-return travel means just that: Get to a destination via the fastest mode of travel and then chalk out your return through the slowest possible way. Steven Spielberg's film Terminal essayed the true-life story of a man in transit rendered stateless when his country ceases to exist following a takeover. The airport becomes his destination and temporary home, offering unusual experiences and insights. With state-of-the-art international airports like the ones at Singapore and Changi, the adventurous traveller needs look no further for that unique travel experience. Anachronistic adventure entails travelling back in time by using, for instance, a Penny Farthing or hot-air balloon, navigating a town or village in period costume, to experience the pace and style of travel of a bygone age with greater authenticity. Past-travel would include using an out-of-date guidebook to explore a city, while noting the changes that have occurred over time. The Lonely Planet calls this comparative anachronistic tourism. Counter-tourism a critique of classical tourism is doing the opposite of what you think a traveller should do, like taking pictures with your back to key tourist sites. The results could be exciting and revelatory. Experimental travel is a playful way of travelling, where the journey's methodology is clear but the destination is unknown. Get adventurous. Hasn't it been said that it is the journey, not the destination, that matters? ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Life without art & music? Keep the arts alive today at Network for Good! http://us.click.yahoo.com/FXrMlA/dnQLAA/Zx0JAA/uTGrlB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> -- This is ZESTGlobal. Post articles on international affairs to [email protected] If you got this mail as a forward, subscribe to ZESTGlobal by sending a blank mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR, if you have a Yahoo! ID, by visiting http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/join/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
