The double-edged sword of tourism

30.8.2010 | Day 30 | 14 275 km | Hoi An, Vietnam

Since we left Sapa, it has been more traveling and sitting in different forms of transportation than actually exploring and doing sightseeing. But, while the 48 hour from Sapa to Hoi An, I had lots of time to think about how tourism is changing the world, and not necessarily into the right direction.

There’s no doubt that tourism creates a lot of jobs and makes especially cities and towns near ocean coastlines blossom with all the money tourists bring and use while on vacation. But then there is the other side of the story; Tourism can (and will) destroy something that has been original for centuries. I felt really heart broken to see in Sapa - a small mountain town with many villages surrounding it - that it has turned the lifestyle of some villagers totally upside down.

You couldn’t walk the streets one minute, without a villager woman or a child dressed in their traditional clothes starting to show what she has to sell. They start asking where you are from and more you answer and reveal, the more they stick and try to sell to you - even if you’re at a terrace of a restaurant having a lunch. Because of tourism, their lifestyle has changed.

Waking up early in the village, walking into Sapa and spending the whole day there trying their everything to sell various items to Western travellers. Even a 10-year old villager kid now can speak pretty decent English so that they can sell better. Is that really a life that they should be living, compared to the time before tourism? Earlier they weren’t roaming the streets of Sapa, but were with their families in the villages they live. It’s an impossibility for me to say how happy they were back then, but looking the smiles of those farmers and villagers who can be seen driving up and down the mountain roads, I just get the feeling that they are happy.

The more we give the villagers money by buying something we probably never need, the more we encourage them to live like that. That’s what is the problem of tourism; Western travellers have way too much money in their hands to change the lifestyles of some villages, or even some cities. Driving through Da Nang to reach Hoi An, we saw miles and miles of ocean shoreline “destroyed” because there were about a hundred different resorts and golf courses in construction, with all the advertising signs written only in English. Not hard to guess for who they were designed. Even in Hoi An, the shoreline has been taken by hotels and villas, and only a fraction of a beach remaining in public use. As I went for a swim yesterday to the public beach after the sun had set, I saw a lot of locals arriving to that same small public section of the beach to enjoy themselves. Again, I felt pretty bad, since a lot of beach that had been untouched earlier are now built for Western travellers to enjoy.

It is what it is, but at least we can say that we’re living in small hotels and eat in different small restaurants, so we know the money goes to locals, not to international companies that have luxury beach resorts all over the world. The double-edged sword of tourism...