There should be a two-pronged effort to tackle over-tourism.
1. For ultra-popular attractions (Venice, Maya Bay...), keep jacking up the prices until the tourist flow trickles down to what can be sustained at those places. In case that sounds elitist, have supplemental measures like first-come first-served permits (like the ones at Half Dome, Yosemite) or procedural barriers which only the most committed ones would jump through.
2. Popularize hitherto unknown destinations. I am sure there are tons of gems in "the middle of nowhere". Spread the tourism everywhere around the globe, which will be appreciated by regions looking for economic boosts. Maybe, there are even known techniques like opening up non-stop flights from hotspot tourist sources (Beijing? Shanghai? Delhi?) or filming popular movies at such locations (like The Beach from TFA).
Rather, unknown destinations need to remain unknown. (by this, I mean secret trails, waterfalls, beaches, etc). I think locals should take steps to protect them, including removing trail markers and trash, and refusing to talk about them. Erase trip reports from the internet, and actively fight to keep them secret and protected. Problem is, any possible "cool thing" is economically exploitable--and the economy absolutely will exploit it in the end.
For #1, you realize that the same problem applies right? Economic incentives are all completely against this.
> Problem is, any possible "cool thing" is economically exploitable--and the economy absolutely will exploit it in the end.
"Economic exploitation" and "people enjoying the place" are the same thing. A beach with one person rather than 300 is great if you're that one person, but it sucks for the other 299.
> For #1, you realize that the same problem applies right? Economic incentives are all completely against this.
Not convinced. People are willing to pay a premium for a site in good condition, with enough space to explore, and exclusivity is a bonus in some circles. If you jack the price up by a factor of 10 (which may sound ridiculous, but look at the price of Everest climbing permits) and only 1/5th as many people come, that's a profit for you and fewer people coming.
For #2, you realize that the same problem applies, right?
Locals in poor areas will always prefer a few years of selling out to tourists to long term sustainability: kids need education now, you want to rainproof your house now or in essence: you want to better your life now.
For them, there is not a single incentive to follow your advice.
I've joked to people more than once that it is fortunate that Scotland has such awful weather - we have some utterly gorgeous beaches but the opportunity to visit them when the weather is actually nice and warm (which does happen occasionally) is an an experience to be treasured.
As someone who visits Scotland more often than would be reasonable, I can only agree. Beaches there are gorgeous, and you can't see any tourist around, even on sunny days, as there are not so many. Such a great country.
Port Ban on Iona is my favourite - a small pure white shell beach near the wonderfully named "Bay at the back of the Ocean" on a tiny remote island that is both stunningly pretty and absolutely loaded with history ("its cargo of mouldering kings").
The Yosemite system is a lottery now. It was first-come-first-serve but tour companies (read: scalpers) would buy them all up. There were a couple of years where it was incredibly difficult to get a permit. The lottery system is pretty great and we've been able to consistently get Half Dome permits (yearly trip) since.
Really? How long ago was this implemented? Last time I was at Yosemite I just bought a pass on the way in and drove all the way in to see things. Is this not the case anymore?
The parent commenter is referring to the Half Dome permitting system. There's no limit on people entering the park daily (which is why it's so incredibly crowded). They do cap the number of people allowed to ascend Half Dome each day.
There's a lottery system, then a small number of tickets are given out on a first come first serve basis from the ranger stations on the day of.
Venice is actually perfect for making it hard to reach. Give inhabitants of the island a special permit that allows them to use the only bridge freely. Everyone else has to obtain the permit (which is a highly bureaucratic procedure) or literally swim there (boats also have to obtain the permit to use the piers).
Which is, essentially, the scheme being currently implemented. Expecting jet-ski chases of illegally entering tourists - the city was built by sea merchants, water is still the main mode of transport, with streets secondary.
I'm sure there are indeed tons of gems in the middle of nowhere. A few will find them by themselves, and they'll stay gems. Anywhere and everywhere that gets popularised gets ruined, or well on the way to it. The very reason to go is eroded out of existence.
A few will popularise naturally, which is probably the only sustainable way to go.
I recall an article that discussed the impact Instagram and the like were having on previously little-known, lightly trafficked sites. People post selfies and geotag themselves, sites get more popular, more trafficked, risk of damage goes up, etc.
Hadn;t realised it was having that extensive an impact beyond the few that go viral. Has implications that maintaining some wilderness and limiting the damage is going to become challenging, if it's that widespread.
It does sound elitist, why not allocate by random ballot? I don't see an obvious benefit allocating access to areas of natural beauty to the rich. I suppose they may bring more money to an area.
Number 2 is a lot more possible now than just a decade ago due to the rise of smaller, more efficient aircraft (A350, 787) over jumbos and the popularity of point-to-point (rather than hub and spoke) airline networks. This decreases the cost of establishing a new route and popularising a new destination - Europe is leading the way here.
Croatia, Georgia, Estonia and others have all been opened up substantially by cheaper airfares.
There is an island in Malaysia I like to visit. It’s definitely not easy to get to. You’ll have to take a coach bus with the locals, then hop in a taxi, then take a ferry boat with the locals.
Also, there is no power at night (generator and solar powered) the reactions I get are telling; European friends are really keen, American friends are aghast at the lack of air conditioning. Like how will they charge up their electronics.
Tackling over-tourism is very similar to Brexit: you want to stop those ugly, stinking foreigners from coming and soiling your place.
If only they just kept sending you the money...
Only if you treat "tourist/local" as binary (and in your specific case, also conflating "foreigner+tourist"); the problem exists mostly at the extreme end of the continuum - "check it off the bucket list, immediately move on." Wrote a few more words on this earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17875576
Am currently living in the European Stag Party Capital :-/ Unlike Venice, it is landlocked, and also a normal city. 1. wouldn't work, unless you can strictly and correctly separate people into tourist/local bins. This might be possible for Venice, as it has natural barriers. Not here - the only way this would work is to kill the old city and make it into a disneyified taxidermist exhibit of itself (which is also happening, "naturally"). 2. is perhaps the only way out, but it takes time.
I'm on the neighbouring island, Koh Lanta and there is a genuine, positive local push for better ecological policies. The country reached a tipping point with the Maya Bay incident and there's a realisation now that the country will head to financial disaster if they don't keep their prized assets safe.
My mother stopped by Maya bay yesterday on her boat, and had this to say:
——
I was there yesterday, and was devastated to see that the new rules re beach/boat access are being broken. Several longtails/speedboats had tied to the buoyed demarcation line... which has been moved closer to the beach btw, and were inside the exclusion zone. Also, tour boats that were on mooring balls were belching filthy diesel exhaust fumes, leaving an oily film floating on the water. Add to that the plastic debris floating around, and it’s as disappointing as it has been for the 8 years I’ve known it. 2 boats actually landed on the beach, with the passengers walking around on the sand/in the water. Where were the rangers? Their boat was there, but not a ranger to be seen. They’re usually very quick to appear, to ask for the National Park payment. I’m happy to pay, although I have questioned before why the rubbish is in overflowing sacks on the small adjoining beach on Maya Bay. I think this is just a PR stunt, not a real effort. Come on Phuket/Krabi, you could do so much better.
——
So, the ground truth seems to be that this is little more than a PR effort. For my part, I’ve seen the rangers just burning and/or just heaping up trash a few meters inland from the beach on multiple “pristine” islands.
Also currently on Lanta. Lanta feels like a special case compared to the rest of the country, and it's interesting to speculate how it got that way. There's still an upsetting amount of trash on the island, but I've not seen organized grassroots trash pickups or free water fillups anywhere else in the country
All people want to do is go there to take selfies because there isn't enough beach or time to relax and enjoy... so, why can't we make non-natural things more interesting, and make nature super uncool so that people avoid it? a man can dream.
I'm glad they were able to nurse the coral back in a decade, but it just seems cynical to invest so much into 300 feet of beach and the comodifiy it. But if that is the only way to preserve it... It's like the hunter paradox: they claim hunting funds conservation. Or like the clearing the forest to keep it from burning paradox. Which forest rangers support. Maybe this is what sustainability looks like: having to just clean up after shitty humans day in, day out.
Did anyone else find the UI scroll reveals incredibly annoying?
> Did anyone else find the UI scroll reveals incredibly annoying?
Yeah, it disrupted the flow so reduced my comprehension and retention of the article. A shame: someone went to a lot of work, but made the article worse.
Same here. I think most of it is that I've gotten somewhat used to the weird reveals and stuff- it's more of a tool than anything to me now, and this one was well done, as was the Reuters article [0] that introduced me to it.
I was in Thailand last November and I spent some days in Krabi. It's so overly touristic that in most "paradisiac" beaches you cannot even take a decent nap with all the noisy long-tail boats going back and forth. Even though I contributed for the overexploration, I wasn't ready for this.
I wouldn't be surprised if they start restricting access to other places like Railay.
I stayed a few nights in Ao Nang and even though is quite packed you can still find places to eat without reserving beforehand. I used it more as a base to visit the surroundings, as the beach there doesn't look that inviting with all the boats and the occasional sewer.
I was expecting it to be more "Thai", instead as I walked down the street I heard the same radio hits I hear in Europe. But that's just my expectations hitting the globalization wall.
On a positive note I really liked northern Thailand, the days I spent in Chiang Mai were definitely the best days of the trip.
I was shocked when I got a Thai massage there some years back and the woman asked me where I was from. 'Germany.' 'And you speak ENGLISH?!?!' That was very telling about the kind of people they usually get I think.
Those sharks look like the perfect deterrence against anyone who tries to sneak inside by swimming underneath the demarcation line. Good job, nature! :)
Sadly (in this case) blacktip reef sharks are "Timid and skittish, the blacktip reef shark is difficult to approach and seldom poses a danger to humans unless roused by food."[1]. Happily that means you can swim near them safely, they hang out in Ao Leuk (I think?) on Koh Tao as well.
There's a huge irony in seeing a Hollywood movie about a deserted, tourist free beach. Then booking a package holiday to it, expecting the same, and dropping your crap on the beach anyway. Still, everywhere will be the same soon at this rate. Ruined.
I'm glad I experienced a few locations before they became commercialised and before I stopped flying.
Honestly it's completely understandable to be upset at large numbers of tourists (particularly if they do things like drop litter) but I can't help feeling this comment is lacking a little bit of self awareness
Not sure I see what you're getting at. I'm old enough that many places that are now heaving major destinations, with extensive damage, weren't terribly commercialised or even especially popular.
If I wanted an isolated, pristine beach I wouldn't pick one made globally famous. I'd actively avoid it.
Art imitates life I guess (or the other way around).
I always thought the book had its own set of ironies, in that this perfect beach existed, and it was the people that brought their troubles and fucked it up, regardless of how ideologically superior they thought they were.
I went all around there in 2005 and it was incredible. Especially the Krabi region and the nearby island (Koh Poda).
I resisted Krabi again 10 years later and was horrified. There was a McDonalds and Starbucks etc. Koh Poda was full of boats, dirty water and worst of all a literal rubbish dump of plastic further into the island. The Thais do not take care of the wonderful land they have.
I have never been there, but in my general experience, locals set the expectation for what happens with trash and nature. If there is no local interest in preserving nature, tourists won't take care of it either.
When I was there (2008) we could still visit (we didn't) the locals told us that it was a complete mess before but the tsunami actually cleaned the whole bay. In 2008 it was supposedly quite clean and nice there.
Hearing about the litter makes me aggressive, you go there to enjoy the beauty of nature and then you decide to make it a bit uglier and poison the environment?
Anger is just a stage. Carry some small trash bags and pick up a little. Hand some bags out. If you see someone litter, go pick it up yourself and then look them right in their face and smile, say nothing and move on.
I've found that people are reluctant to litter on a clean beach yet unthinkingly do it if the beach is already visibly trashy. So the strategy is to get a beach clean enough where it is obviously not OK to trash it. People will get it.
I watched a documentary on chinese zoos. Well, I watched about 10 minutes of it before I wanted to kill myself. There was a zoo where they could buy LIVE chickens and rabbits to feed to pitifully caged tigers. It was soul crushing. Culturally it seems they just don't value animals lives based on the docu.
Culturally it seems to me like no countries that I know of do value animal lives. Except some dogs and cats etc. Humans seem to have a hard enough time not killing other humans. Mostly for me it's depressing seeing westerners protesting Chinese cruelty, while not even noticing it in their own countries, because it's the way they were brought up, I guess; their own country's kind of cruelty is invisible. Where are you, maybe it's somewhere more enlightened?
When I first moved to Japan I was shocked at some of the food shows (of which there are millions on TV). It seemed that animals are either cute, poisonous, or delicious. In retrospect I think you are right, though. I've never lived in a culture that didn't have those kinds of demarcations. When I was in the UK several years ago they had a horse meat scandal where it was determined that most of the most popular prepared "beef" meals had substantial amounts of horse meat in them. "Finally", I thought, "People will realise how delicious horse meat is". Nope.
I once did a workshop on culture and common sense. It was in Japan and 50% of the audience was Japanese while 50% were from an English speaking country. I asked them to split up into groups, again 50-50 and debate what is better: standing up to take a shower or sitting down to take a shower (Japanese people tend to sit on small stools while showering). I had to break it up after less than 10 minutes because people were about to come to blows.
Common sense is the thing that people use when they don't actually have a reason for something. It's heavily influenced by culture and sometimes there is absolutely no justification for it. It's just the way you do it. When you ask why you do it like that, the answer is always "It's common sense". If you push and try to get a reason, people will come up with reasons, but are often surprisingly aggressive in their responses. Counter acting that cultural common sense is like a personal attack to many people.
Most people I know (from any country) value animal lives. However, they often express that in bizarre ways if you look at it logically. It's that cultural common sense. Would you put a glue trap down for a mouse and have it dehydrate to death (unbelievable suffering)? Would you do it for a kitten? There's no real reason for the difference. Common sense short circuits our reasoning, unfortunately.
> Counter acting that cultural common sense is like a personal attack to many people.
Perhaps people need all of this to keep their sanity. You just can not live in a complex world without these automatic cultural behaviours. For same people it seems to be quite hard to be concious about these in a way arbitary behaviours, without literally loosing their minds.
So unfortunately there might be a limit for quite a few people how much they can take in this regard, because it certainly would help quite a lot for increasing the tolerance and the understanding of different cultures.
I don't wanna be condescending or saying i'm better in any way. I have learned a lot over the years and grew.
I have never thrown trash on the floor but that is thanks to my mum and her 'teachings'.
My biggest issue with this is not necessarily that we kill our environment (worst case we 'used it up' we die and it might just come back) but i never stooped learning or being critical about something. You see so many people who got stuck and lots of those people got stuck on different things or habits or lives.
It took a long time and lots of rethinking about things, what if those people (few or many) will never reach this necessary level and we (the 'other') have to force them through zeitgeist / laws / punshiment?
Even if you have everyone reaching that necessary level, you will always have people in between. Shouldn't we start thinking on teaching live skills relevant for all of us?
I've thought a lot about this, and I agree in principle, but I can't figure out how to get passed the aggression. When people have their "common sense" challenged, they really seem to go off the deep end. As I said, people almost coming to blows over debating the merits of standing up or sitting down while showering -- never in my wildest dreams did I expect such an extreme reaction. I think the parent's post is right on the money. Most people are completely unaware of this short circuit as far as I can tell and probably it's just part of being human. The worst thing is that, being unaware, we simply don't register or recognise that we do it.
I don't know you and so I'll take your statement that you never stopped learning or being critical about something at face value. The thing is everybody thinks they are the same! If I accused you of not being critical, of unconsciously accepting superficial information and wielding it as if it were gospel, you can imagine how you would feel. This is a deeply threatening accusation.
The end result is that I can't effectively have that discussion. Has anybody here really (other than you, potentially) looked at their effect on the environment? Have they every thought about the impact that buying a new pair of trousers has? Or heating their house above 10 degrees? Or accepting sidewalks be built outside of their house (not to mention roads)?
I'm being extreme to try to illuminate a point. I don't know anyone who has ever even tried to find out what those impacts are. "My bare minimum standard of living has got to be OK" is just more common sense and we all do it. It's easy to draw the line somewhere and rationalise that the other guy has it wrong -- because they almost certainly do! It's much harder to be introspective and say, "Hey I have no idea what's going on here and mostly I'm going on hope that what I'm doing is OK". Even to suggest that concept to people is to provoke anger (and I really hope I have avoided doing that in you).
It's that anger that I don't know what to do with. There is no problem in saying, "OK, I've done the math and here is exactly the impact of my lifestyle and if everybody follows that lifestyle I can show that the planet will be OK" (well, really more than "no problem" if you can actually do it ;-) ). I'm sure you've tried suggesting to people ways of improving their lifestyle. What is always the response? "Don't be ridiculous.", followed by a lot of rationalisation. And if I say that even you with your enlightened ways are causing problems at about the same level of magnitude as others, then I am quite certain the response will be anger and a feeling of "Don't be ridiculous". The fact that such a comment from me would be completely unjustified is somewhat beside the point. Do you really know, or do you just hope that it's wrong? And if it's the latter, can you get beyond the anger of the accusation to improve? And even if you can, can you teach others to do it as well?
That's the problem that has been going through my head for a decade. While I've thrown some mighty accusations in your direction, I hope you realise that I'm not really accusing you of anything. These are the accusations I threw at myself. These are the areas where I realised that I was wanting. While you may be the first exception, I've yet to meet anybody who hasn't been found wanting in this area, so I'm still at a loss.
> I don't know you and so I'll take your statement that you never stopped learning or being critical about something at face value. The thing is everybody thinks they are the same! If I accused you of not being critical, of unconsciously accepting superficial information and wielding it as if it were gospel, you can imagine how you would feel. This is a deeply threatening accusation.
Yes, everybody has to be ignorant about quite a few things. In a complex world it is just not possible the other way, without getting insane or having a very miserable life. You can also become a quite misanthropic person, which at the end does not help you, other people or the world in any way.
But this also helps me to be more empathic for people, because if they are ignorant about something I care a lot does not automatically mean that they are a ignorant person, they might care about a lot of other things I am ignorant about.
Also I do not think that most people are doing something on purpose. In most cases they are just used doing it that way and not thinking about it. It would be nice if people would think more about their actions, but there just might be limits how much the average person is able doing this.
Acknowledging this also helps me being more empathic. I do not think the single person is the problem, but the culture they are living in, so helping to change this culture is the way to go. People will just follow the cultural changes.
But these are longterm changes and for the shortterm there is only empathy that helps.
I never understood why people are often enough so unlogical. But i heard a very nice theory which makes a lot of sense:
I was not very good in understanding the world around me, so i analyzed it and thought about a lot of stuff. Like debugging a computer program. My mental model is based on logic and on logic reasoning (of course not all actions, after all i'm a human being).
Religion is a easy target/example: It doesn't make sense as at the end of it, there is only faith. What i also didn't understood where contradicting beliefs: If i believe in religion i should submit to it. Like if you are not allowed to drink alcohol, you don't do it and if you don't wanna do it, you leave the religion. (there are probably more / better examples but religios people often contradict themselves much more often).
Anyway my worldview is based on that, therefore i also act on it. I don't believe so i left church.
But most of us don't build there worldview on logic but on what they see and experience. Those unlogical worldviews are not rational, not comparable and from person to person different. There is no issue for person a to throw that shit on the floor.
This helped me to understand those people better.
Now on how to interact with them: There are traingings in my exising and previous companies which go in directions of: Leadership, Sales, Teamwork, Conflict management etc. Those and similiar books and 'tips/tricks' for how to get people to accept your viewpoint or make them help you, are tools for me to try a non direct logical approach to those issues when you have a good argument or objective points and they just hit that wall.
Start not with the main point of the argument but nitpick small things which are easy to agree. Climate change: Do you see any issue in planting trees? Do you think in general, independend of climate change that it is not a waste to plant trees.
Or find different angles: When you drive a car, you do recognise that you do produce gases, right? What happens when you sit in your car and only breeth the exhaust fumes? You probably die right? So in general reducing those gases should be a good thing for our health right?
Or if you have an idea and some has only the negative viewpoint: Its a good idea but it will not work because of x. Okay that might be but if we start with y and the risk/cost is very low, do you have anything against it?
Or trying to get the other person on board: Hi, i'm super sry but i have this problem xy and perhaps you have an idea which can help me? Instead of "Hi, i need this".
Not sure how well i transported those ideas and concepts.
This gets much more difficult on bigger scale. But you see the Zeitgeist changing in our society. Frustrating slowly but i hope and believe that everyone who promotes it, lifes it and demands it, has an impact on it.
Look into modern farming practices in the west and you'll see far worse. There may be something to the fact that cruelty is institutionalised and done in the name of profit rather than localised and done in the name of entertainment, but I'm not so sure.
Thanks! For example, the mass destruction of male chicks. The horrible conditions that pigs and chickens are raised in in industrial farms. How zoos keep their animals or kill them for no good reason. People feed live bait to their pet animals too. Etc.
Chinese peasant tourists. Living in Shanghai the number of non peasants who litter is on par with Western Europe. In the countryside or cities where foreigners occasionally comment you’ll see way more litter.
I like to believe otherwise, saying "that group of people are notorius" is just too convenient. I've seen many locals stand up from a picnic in a city park in Munich leaving their rubbish behind.
My experience in Berlin from approaching people littering is that they're mostly not German. And what's fascinating, they're actually proud of their littering.
Locals. Yeah yeah, white man good, others bad! My experience is that the native youths don't give a shit, meanwhile people who sounded/looked foreign cared more about cleaning up after themselves. And in Berlin I had to yell after 2 Germans who just stood up and left their disposable coffee cups on the street bench they were sitting on.
You're right. I was stressed yesterday. There are filthy people of all backgrounds. I just happen to live in an area where people are both dirtier than average and not German. If I lived somewhere more German, I'd probably have more examples of German people doing dirty things.
Having visited just the year before they closed it - I felt like the beach itself was pretty clean. The woods right at the beach line though had some tourist trash. Apparently the worry is the coral is mostly dead and it will imbalance the rest of the ecology. It was beautiful when I visited and definitely far from being “trashed”. I don’t know a lot about ecological conservation, so maybe there’s lots of signs I didn’t notice!
Coral everywhere is dead or dying, I have not visited a site in the past ten years that does not have an alarming amount of that going. Something I never, ever would have believed as a youth really is going to happen, coral will be gone in our lifetimes :-|
It's likely all coral reefs will be dead before the end of the century. Corals are very sensitive to rising ocean temperatures, and something like 50% of them have already been killed by "bleaching" events as the water warms.
Thailand tourist places are full of mafia-style price controls (in phuket atleast it was mafia, so it's still in pattaya). They should be turned off and just suck up and go to do real work.
All the moneys (which is big!) coming to tourist attractions goes to few large pockets, and not giving dam about the environment, education, health-care, people and so on.
I went there in Sept 2017 and there were only a handful of people on the beach. I'm not sure how you restrict these places when you can pay a sailor $50 USD to take you to all of these places for the day. Overcrowded beaches are not a bad thing just have some sort of maintenance budget
1. For ultra-popular attractions (Venice, Maya Bay...), keep jacking up the prices until the tourist flow trickles down to what can be sustained at those places. In case that sounds elitist, have supplemental measures like first-come first-served permits (like the ones at Half Dome, Yosemite) or procedural barriers which only the most committed ones would jump through.
2. Popularize hitherto unknown destinations. I am sure there are tons of gems in "the middle of nowhere". Spread the tourism everywhere around the globe, which will be appreciated by regions looking for economic boosts. Maybe, there are even known techniques like opening up non-stop flights from hotspot tourist sources (Beijing? Shanghai? Delhi?) or filming popular movies at such locations (like The Beach from TFA).