Travel

Travel adventures

The Thin Edge of the Tourism Wedge

It’s fashionable to whine about how the place that once was super cool and undiscovered is now discovered and you are wrecking it for everyone, already, by walking all over it. I’ve noticed – since our return from Southeast Asia- a weekly diatribe against the horrors of tourism. Typically it’s written by some holier than …


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Book Review: A Voyage Long and Strange

It wasn’t just Columbus, you know. It was Cortez and DeSoto and Ponce de Leon and some French fop named Ribault and any number of other explorers and conquistadors. They sailed across the Atlantic fueled by lust for gold and their own obsessive convictions, landed on the North American continent, and proceeded to make life hell for anyone that was already there. Sometimes they started out okay, but instead of diplomacy and community building, they opted to steal food and supplies from the natives when their own imported supplies ran thin. In general, the lead up time to Columbus’s (equally messy) arrival in the “New World” was bad news for the locals.

You knew that, of course, but probably not in the exquisite detail that’s currently knocking around in my head. I’m reading “A Voyage Long and Strange” – a refresher course in pre-Columbus North American history. Yeesh, what a disastrous period for aboriginal populations. Yeesh.


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Full Disclosure: Travel Writer’s Income

So, yeah, you wanna be a travel writer and jet about the planet staying in swank hotels and swanning about the beaches and taking in the exotic markets of, oh, wherever. Whatever. Who doesn’t? And this: me too, duh. I thought you should know something: I sold a handful of stories in ’07 and worked …


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High Impact Tourism

Angkor Wat Traffic

Early morning traffic, Angkor gate

In 1993, after Angkor was added to Unesco’s World Heritage List, just 7,650 intrepid visitors ventured to the site. Last year Sokimex, the oil company controversially granted the entrance concession on behalf of the government’s Apsara Angkor management, sold almost 900,000 tickets worth $25m (£12.8m), with British travellers making up the fourth biggest contingent behind South Koreans, Japanese and North Americans. Three million visitors are expected in 2010. —Guardian

Three million visitors! Imagine three million visitors tromping through your home. It’s not built for three million visitors to start with, right, there’s no plumbing for that, and the couch can’t take it, plus, everyone’s going to be touching stuff they’re not supposed to be touching, and standing on that one step that you know is rickety but no one else does, and dropping stuff accidentally and leaning on things and just generally exerting massive wear and tear on the place.


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Kids Causes in Cambodia

Kids Selling Souvenirs at AngkorThey’re everywhere, all day long. They’ve got plastic baskets of bracelets, strings of origami fish folded out of silk scraps, little handbags, cheap photocopies of guidebooks, postcards, postcards, postcards. You see them at 6 in the morning and at 11 at night. You think they should be in bed, at school, on the playground… at an early morning breakfast in the Angkor Complex, I watched an 11(ish) year old boy go back and forth between taking orders and selling souvenirs while his much smaller brother focused on moving the postcard inventory. “You buy. Ten for one dollar. 1..2..3..4..”

I asked our guide why they weren’t in school. “Later,” he said. “They work in the early morning, then they go to school.” This might have been true of these particular kids, but everywhere we went, all day long, we saw children working the streets.


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Cambodia’s Land Mine Victims

After I’d calmed down enough from Toul Sleng prison to breathe, we headed back to the bus. We had a little time left before the rest of our group reappeared, so J, N, and I dropped in to a shop that sold handicrafts made by women. The place was full of beautiful silk scarves, beaded …


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