Off Centre | Wish you weren’t here: an end to mass tourism and the age of democratic travel?
Kenny Hodgart says with the rise of the middle-class traveller – as countries such as China become richer – authorities in tourist hot spots are struggling to cope with the hordes
As someone who is susceptible to how things look in the movies, I felt a tug when I saw the comedy crime caper In Bruges. With its medieval squares, cobbled streets and neo-Gothic churches, it seemed clear that Bruges must be pretty cool. When I mentioned this hankering to a Flandrian friend in Hong Kong, however, no sooner had I begun to lay out my plan to commit some act of villainy that would occasion going into hiding in The Venice of the North – as happens in the film – than he scoffed at me.
“Mate,” he said, in his hang-tough Belgian way, “You’ve been duped. It’s a tourist hell-hole.”
One might refer to this as the TripAdvisor conundrum: the places we most desire to visit are attractive, and therefore attract other people too
“Why do the wrong people travel ... When the right people stay back home, with television?” sang Noel Coward, in 1961. One might refer to this as the TripAdvisor conundrum: the places we most desire to visit are attractive, and therefore attract other people – wrong and right, alike – too.
The upshot is that there are now many destinations in the world where you can hardly move or breathe for other people, where there are queues for everything – and queues to join those queues – and where ducking out of the way of camera lenses is only really possible if you’re prepared to get in the way of road vehicles instead.
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