The ethical travel group teaching tourists to respect, support and learn about places they visit
- Hong Kong-based Civil Wayfarers hopes to change not just how tourists see other countries, but more importantly, how they see themselves
- Co-founder Wong Kim-fan says the biggest problem with travelling now is that people are not aware of the impact they are having
Wong Kim-fan, a part-time lecturer in the philosophy of travel at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), first learned about the Silk Road as a 14-year-old high-school pupil when a substitute teacher played a documentary exploring long-lost civilisations along the ancient trade route.
Mesmerised, he immediately planned a trip to northern China. It was the first time Wong, who was raised in a working-class family, had ventured outside his hometown of Hong Kong.
“Learning history is just not the same once you’ve personally been to the places in the textbooks,” says Wong, whose adventure inspired a lifelong passion for travelling.
Nearly two decades and countless trips later, Wong combined his own experiences under a theoretical framework to study why people travel today. He arrived at some disturbing findings.
There has been a huge transformation in how and why people travel, he observes.
With the rise of the middle class in emerging economies such as China, India and Brazil, millions more people have the luxury of taking a holiday abroad. Budget airlines, which have undergone rapid expansion in the past decade, enable frequent flying, justifying even weekend international getaways.
