I am currently in the midst of planning a trip to Sri Lanka. The place that most that know me would call my home, where I was born, and (with now surprising contentment) spent the majority of my childhood and adolescnece. But I cannot help being overcome by the feeling that I will be returning as a Tourist. The reasons for which I am currently parsing through with professional aid but in the meantime feel it is pertinent to note-
Tourists seem to be catching a particularly bad rap as of late. Particularly in comparison to their outwardly more enlightened, self-appointedly superior counterparts, the Travellers; a collective I would place near the top of my list of undesirable characters, wedged tightly between real estate agents and men who deemed it suitable to purchase their first skateboard over the age of thirty.
Being aware that these distinctions are largely of my own creation, allow me to elaborate:
To me, Tourists tend towards a simultaneously loud yet discrete lot, benignly attempting to escape the drudgery of their day-to-day for the time allotted by their captors (read: employers) to a place whom history has been particularly unkind to, in the hopes of temporarily being treated to some dignity, some comfort, and if their funds allow, some third-world luxury. To enjoy the simple pleasures of a meal by the sea, a cocktail overlooking a blood-stained sunset, and fellating their lover behind a bush growing at the foot of a coconut tree. Then continuing on their journey, often in a herd, shepherded by an exasperated local tour guide, to often be returned by bus directly to the foot of the airport for their journey home. To which they will return completely unchanged, but hopefully at least a bit recharged.
Travellers however, carry the outward appearance of a more bedraggled, bohemian, even humble nature. And believe themselves to be as such, where-in lies my issue with their existence.
On the family holidays of my childhood, I recall the indifference of tourists to us, and in hindsight appreciate it immensely. They came, they lounged, they paid, they left. As opposed to the troubling habit of Travellers to stick around, after having “fallen in love” with a country after a short few weeks there. With places as with people, if anyone claims to fall in love with anything within a few weeks of coming into contact with it, that says a lot more about them than the object of their fickle affections. Upon sticking around, many tend to open businesses of their own, often (in the case of Sri Lanka at least) taking advantage of lax immigration and business regulations to siphon money that would otherwise go into the local community into their own coffers.
I would rather Sri Lanka be a country that would not have to depend on tourism at all for its survival, but that is not close to the case now, and likely will not be in my lifetime. There is a particular precarity to know that the state of your country almost unilaterally depends on how welcoming you are to the rest of the world. It does something to a people. Most commonly when meeting someone off the back of a recent sojourn to Sri Lanka, one of the first two things mentioned is “How nice the people are”...
-- Before I continue I would like to state, that I am entirely aware that these statements are made entirely in good faith and as an attempt to connect with me based on the knowledge that I am from the same place they visited. However, if one reserves their right to make lazy conversation, I reserve my right to remain an angry immigrant, but I digress --
... how kind, how accommodating, how hospitable. This is not by choice, but rather a coping mechanism. You wouldn’t compliment an assistant for being polite to their boss. When your financial stability depends on how special you make visitors feel, being nice to random foreigners is just a part of the gig. Add to that the post-colonial hangover given form by an island-wide preference for the less melanated among us, and you get what much of the world knows Sri Lankans as. Smiley, docile, subservient little people. Shit is patronising as hell. I find disparaging the people of a nation to be a sign of respect, and long for the day when Sri Lanka is spoken of in a context much like Germany’s, where “Sri Lankan Engineering” is revered as a mark of inherent quality and rigor, and “Sri Lankan People” are known as odd, precocious, and prone to genocidal tendencies if not kept a close enough eye on.
But at the very least, tourism in its conventional sense does provide a boon for the locals, particularly of rural areas, to make a living. Hotels in their building alone provide jobs for everyone from middle-class Colombo architects to manual labourers in the provinces, and consistent employment for many more after they start running. A hostel on the other hand, while being far more economical for its foreign consumers, does close to fuck all for anyone back home. In a Traveller’s search of an “authentic experience”, they often encroach on the haunts of those with exponentially less financial resources than them for the sake of trying on the costume of a different, poorer, but purer, life. And it’s fun because it is deliberate and temporary. Instability is not really instability if you’ve got a strong social security system and your parents’ house(s) in the country to go back to if your frivolity might go awry.
Tourists are, albeit begrudgingly, accepting of being ripped off. And I love that about them. I have grown weary of seeing tips from first-world 20-somethings on how to haggle down the price of goods in a street market an amount that is minuscule to themselves but makes a tangible difference to the life of the person they are haggling with. Yes, if you are foreign, and particularly if you are white, vendors in most developing countries will try to fuck you over. And it is your responsibility to let it happen. It is the very least you could do in exchange for the circumstances that made it so you could live for more than a month in their country for less than a days work in yours.
But what bothers me most tends to be the supposition of any significant enrichment of the soul occurring on any of these trips, be it by a Traveller or Tourist. The difference being that the latter often carry no notions nor illusions to this effect. It is my opinion that the process of being introduced to yourself happens through dealing with the realities of life, the pains of growing. Realities and pains which are unlikely to occur when you are leagues away from anyone that might hold you accountable for being the worst version of yourself, in a place no one knows your name but treats you as if you were their best friend. Having visited many places and lived in a good few, it seems to me that it is living in a place, and having to reconfigure yourself around its contours not relishing in it doing the same for you, that has any chance of growing the scope of what you know the world to be. It’s the reason I will likely always feel a tourist in Sri Lanka. I grew up there, but have never lived there as an adult. Never made memories, fond and regrettable, found the spot to meet and complain after work, where to get fucked up come the weekend and where to hide when I need hiding, that it will likely never completely be a part of my internal history. I currently have no plans of moving back as an adult, and no plans of changing those plans either.
In my time in the western world, which has encompassed the majority of my adult life, I’ve often heard a version of the phrase “I went travelling” to so-and-so far off place, but did not do the “usual tourist-y stuff”. “Tourist-y” often uttered with the same implied vitriol I might ascribe to “cringe-y” or “mass murder-y”. A strong emphasis placed on *getting to know the locals* as a way of growing more worldly and “finding oneself”. Most importantly, with no thought given as to if any of these locals have the slightest interest in knowing *you*. Forbid that the inhabitants of a developing country might have a purpose to exist outside being a conduit for the self-actualisation of a western middle class youth fresh off the back of an overpriced humanities degree.