The Lonely Planet Club
The trouble with truth is that it so often adheres to stereotype. This is bad for artists, novelists and unshaven women from Turkey, and, in the lurid playpen of student life, there are a group of people who have had similar problems of late. The gap year traveller has in the last few years, found a place in everyone's hearts next to couples who wear matching shell suits.
Perhaps this is because it is becoming gradually better established as a rite of passage. A year out in India for example has become as socially acceptable as going to Oxford: neither should be admitted when attending Socialist Worker Party meetings, or when cruising the ghetto in the company of one's homies from Woking. A first year student at Brasenose, when asked what she had been doing over the summer, replied, " Not a lot really, although I feel like I should have gone and taught in a Buddhist monastery in Nepal like everyone else". Most of us know someone who finds that everyday situations remind them of that time back in the East, when they taught those blind Mongolian nuns to do the Macarena.
But apart from their stories, their trousers, and their self-consciously laid back attitude, all criticism could be interpreted as sour grapes. The wise speak only of what they know, and the gap year travellers were a year older, and had been to places whose main criteria seemed to be somewhere that no-one else would have a clue about. Like the returning soldiers in Vietnam films, they could shout, "You haven't been there, man, you don't know what it's like." Or perhaps marginally more to the point, as a gap year student at UCL complained about the people in his halls, "No-one gets it. No-one really gets it. There is maybe one person who went travelling in Africa who gets it, but...", (he carried on although I didn't really understand the rest). A friend who is at Edinburgh university at the moment, summed up more succinctly, "People ask me what I did in my year off, what it was like, and I just say, 'It was really good', and that's all I can say, and all they want to know".
However, in 1997, William Sutcliffe's 'Are You Experienced?' was published, to instant acclaim. It is a sharp satire on the generations of teenagers from the Home Counties finding themselves in India. Time Out lauded it as the perfect antidote to year out bores in the first year of university. The novelist, in an interview on Greater London Radio, admitted that once he had decided on the subject, material was extraordinarily simple to come by. He had his own year out to draw on, as well as the vision on a work placement a few years later, of so many more sweaty teenagers acquiring experience in the guest houses in Goa. This has since become a rich vein of inspiration for hacks and comedians alike. 'Goodness Gracious Me' had their middle-class Indian couple react with shock that their neighbour's son should be going to 'India of all places'. The Now Show on Radio 4 runs a weekly sketch involving a public school boy who ends his monologues with the words, "Go travelling, yeah?".
Yet, this is all a bit unfair. It is a very easy stereotype to exploit, especially when you've been there yourself. Sutcliffe's first novel ridiculed a independent school in North London, not unlike the one which he himself attended. 'Are You Experienced?' was similarly unflinching in its condemnation of green school leavers following in his footsteps. But does he have a point? Are all travellers trumped-up package tourists seeking CV points for their future career in the city? How long before they put away their cotton clothing, and whore themselves on the commercial bandwagon, get a job in advertising?
Travellers tend to think of themselves as trailblazers, livin' la vida loca, a cut above Neil and Sharon in their shell suits in the Costa del Sol, or Edward and Mary with their room at Shangri-La International Hotel in Kuala Lumpur, because apart from the matching shell suits, some dreadful things have been done in the name of mainstream tourism. National parks in Kenya catering for safaris, providing areas for conservation, have also excluded the Masai from their traditional homelands. The practice of placing metal collars around the necks of the women of the Pelung tribe in Thailand has been revived of late to cater for the tourist cameras, a custom as dangerous as the binding of feet in China. Worse still, the recent beautification of Burma in order to attract package tourism was carried out by chain-gangs of government debtors.
But the most obvious censure against package tourists, that they are not sustaining a cultural exchange, but are buying up an artificial utopia possible because of their superior currency, can be levelled as much at the dirty backpackers, Will and Suzi, with their kaleidoscopic trousers and their enlightened sense of being.
They are part of the biggest tour of all, the Lonely Planet Guide Book Tour, that sends its readers to all corners of the globe to follow the same routes, in the same towns, with the same thoughts, to provide a beautiful background for their drug taking activities. The pitter-pattering of their unwashed feet across these ancient sites is just as damaging as those of Neil and Sharon, Edward and Mary. "You very quickly begin to realise", says Luke Walker, attending a 'People and Planet' conference this weekend, "the immense effect of your being there on the society through which you are travelling; in the Himalayas. Tourists produce non-biodegradable rubbish in places where there is no effective refuse service, and contribute to the destruction of local culture by encouraging the construction of backpackers-cafes that replace local houses."
Then should no-one travel? Tourism Concern, an organisation that aims to raise awareness of the problems inherent in tourism, argue that a different attitude is the first step towards responsible travelling. It is more respectful to follow codes of dress and custom, to buy local produce rather than Coca Cola, and to make an effort with the language.
Clearly an appropriate attitude can make a difference, but there are exceptions. Heightening awareness in the West does not always wash. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the opposition to the Burmese military government, protested that as long as Burma remains undemocratic, it is patronising to think that tourism helps anyone but the government treasury.
Still, this does not apply everywhere, as Luke argues, "it would be far too simplistic to say that therefore nobody should travel, because...the traveller himself can learn a huge amount from travelling...It is up to every individual, wherever they are in the world, to take responsibility for making sure that they give back to the society in which they find themselves, and to the world as a whole, as much as they take. "
4th Nov 1999