The Indian Ocean (61 page)

Mass tourism then is a phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century. The advent of larger aeroplanes in the 1960s facilitated its growth, as did generally prosperous economic times in the first world, which enabled lower class people to afford holidays overseas. There are differences, obviously, between different types of visitors, ranging from the fully catered and accompanied luxury tourists, who stay in hermetically sealed hotels in the third world, to the younger solitary travellers with their trusty
Lonely Planet
and
Rough Guide
books. There is even a certain snobbishness about who is a tourist, and who an implicitly more adventurous and 'authentic' traveller. As the saying goes, 'I am a traveller, you are a tourist, they are a coach party.' Or as Evelyn Waugh put it succinctly: 'The tourist is the other fellow.'

When western tourists stay in coastal areas around the Indian Ocean their relationship to the sea is very different from the fisherfolk with whom they mingle. For the traditional beach dwellers the sea is a source of a precarious living, often a dangerous or hostile place, not necessarily benign. Tellingly, their houses often face
away
from the beach. For leisured middle class westerners the sea and the coast is a space away from normal life. The impressive Australian novelist Tim Winton put this well. 'I often wonder about these two childhoods of mine, the one contained and clothed, between fences, the other rambling, windblown, half-naked between the flags.' Or again:

Freediving in the open ocean, for all the other things it is, is mostly a form of forgetting. Surfing, swimming laps, drifting a bait from a jetty or a boat are similarly forgetful things. They are forms of desertion, retreat, hermitage, a stepping-aside from terrestrial problems to be absorbed into the long moment. The sea is immense, trackless, potent, but above all, neutral.
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All this is new in world history: Lencek wrote of

the transformation of the beach from an alien, inaccessible, and hostile wilderness devoted to conquest, commerce, exploration, and the primal customs of tribal cultures, into a thriving, civilized, pleasure and recreation oriented outpost of Western life style, where so many sybaritic impulses of culture have been indelibly concentrated.
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With this background in western perceptions of the coast, some case studies will show the varied impact of tourism on coastal areas. I will start with Goa, the former Portuguese colony on the Indian west coast, a place I have visited frequently over the last thirty-four years. Numbers have shot up recently. In the 1985–86 season, roughly October to May, twenty-four charter flights brought 3,568 passengers, in 1995–96 there were 337 flights bringing 75,694 passengers. In 1985 the total number of tourists was 775,212, of whom 682,545 were Indian and 92,667 foreign. Ten years later the numbers had risen to a total of 1,107,705, of whom 878,487 were Indian, 229,218 foreign. Of the foreign arrivals, 58.6 per cent were from the UK. The most up-to-date data available puts the population of the area at 1,400,000, of whom 400,000 are dependent on the tourist industry. Foreign tourists number 300,000 a year, and domestic 960,000 a year, so the number of tourist who visit each year is just below the total local population.
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Goa offers the tropical paradise stereotype: palm trees, sunsets over the Arabian Sea, white sand, cheap accommodation, readily available alcohol, English-speaking locals, and some reassuringly western elements such as a coastal population which is largely Christian, and huge churches in the deserted city of Old Goa. Three broad tourist phases can be distinguished. In the 1960s Goa was a haven for so-called hippies, who lived rough on the beaches or in beach shacks, and outraged the local population with their inappropriate dress, or total lack thereof, and massive drug consumption. Soon after a new strand appeared, of middle class Indians attracted by the availability of alcohol, and by the presence of the hippies. Brochures for bus sightseeing tours promised old churches, and beaches where 'naked hippies will be seen'. More recently the Goa government has discouraged budget travellers, and instead promoted short-stay mass market tourism, along with very up-market tourism in a handful of luxury beach resorts. The latter is increasingly being favoured by the government. Europeans fly in direct to Goa, have two weeks in a hotel, get sunburnt on the beach, and fly out again. This is hardly an exotic experience; better to describe it as enclave tourism, where the only locals met are waiters, servants, and taxi drivers.

A beach scene frequently found in Goa, and in other beach resorts on the west coast such as Kovalam, is typical. Portly western men in G-strings self-consciously help traditional fishermen haul in their nets, which may contain enough for one meal. Their bikini-clad women enthusiastically take video pictures of this picturesque scene. Two telling changes, from Kerala, seem also to sum up what is happening. The traditional rice boats which for centuries have transported rice in the backwaters inland from the coast, are now being converted into luxury house boats for western tourists and Indian yuppies. Similarly, the monsoon in Kerala has always been a dramatic sight, redolent with meaning for the local people, for indeed their livelihood often depends on its arrival. Today 'monsoon cures' have become popular with middle class Indians, who travel from all over India to take part in what is essentially a 5,000 year old ayurvedic tradition.
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The larger hotels in Goa are often owned by groups based elsewhere in India, or even by foreign capital. Lufthansa, Club Mediteranee and Hyatt are all involved. Smaller hotels may be built by Goans who have made money in the Gulf and invest in this new industry. This is a very fragile and vulnerable market indeed. Any minor perceived threat means bookings dry up. The terrorist attack on the United States in September 2001 and subsequent military campaign in Afghanistan affected tourism worldwide. Bookings on charter flights, usually 130 or 140 a day, fell to only 10 or 12. Hotels remained nearly empty, and packages at absurd rates were advertised, such as return flights from England to Goa and bed and breakfast for seven to ten days for as low as £79. This was obviously exceptional, yet in previous seasons an over-supply of accommodation had produced similarly uneconomic results.

The effects on the ecology of the area have been dire. There are now at least fifty swimming pools in the tiny Calangute–Baga strip alone, when thirty years ago there were none. The government privileges hotels over local rice farmers when it allocates water, so that the swimming pools will be full, and the lawns green. The three Taj hotels at Fort Aguada take more water than that available to the population of all the local villages of Calangute. Golf tourism is a new trend, and whole villages are being relocated to make room for a planned six new courses, most of them foreign controlled. 'Development' has often been uncontrolled, leading to massive violations of the environment, such as building far too close to the maximum high tide level, discharge of sewage into the ocean, and mounds of discarded plastic containers disfiguring the sand. One of Goa's main attractions, pristine beaches, is being violated and ruined; it is in danger of becoming less idyllic, and falling out of favour.

For the local people all this has been a very mixed blessing. A recent acerbic analysis claimed that tourist development in Goa 'in the process of creating global tourist sites, determines that (local) people's cultural and ecological space is dispensable to its requirements.' Tourism 'is predicated upon a development ideology that defines local people's space as dispensable to the needs of national and transnational capital.' The same author comments on what is called 'staged authenticity', that is the 'typical' Goan fisherman, villager, toddy tapper, who performs in hotels.
'Goa has been constructed to serve as one of the world's pleasure peripheries, a cultural space for the leisure consumption of tourists divorced from the needs and concerns of everyday life.'
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Much the same can be seen on the Swahili coast. However, the setting is rather different. The main historic population centres were the Swahili port cities that we have written about previously. In particular, the Stone Towns of Lamu and Zanzibar, even though they mostly date only from the nineteenth century and later, are considered to be heritage attractions, and distinctive enough to be preserved. Yet as tourist attractions some changes had to be made. Many of the old houses have been reconfigured to make hotels, and some unsympathetic 'development' has taken place both within the stone towns and on their edges. Lamu is, as we have already pointed out, an Islamic town which acts as a focus for Muslims all up and down the coast. Many of its women wear very all-enveloping robes. Ten years ago the only place a tourist could buy alcohol was in a rather dingy cellar attached to the hotel in the centre of the town. Now the bar has moved out onto the main street, which runs along the waterfront and is the centre of Lamu life. It even boasts a small collection of bar girls. Westerners complain that the exotic is being destroyed, but the real question is whether 'tradition' should be preserved for the benefit of foreigners. Most Swahili probably would prefer not to be living in a museum, but rather have up-to-date plumbing.

We found in the case of Goa that much of the profit from tourism does not stay in Goa. Similarly in the Swahili town of Malindi, now really an Italian resort, with a line of Italian owned hotels controlling the beach front. More generally, it has been estimated that 45 per cent of funds generated by tourism remain in the third world country concerned. Of the money spent on a beach holiday in Kenya, 70 per cent goes back to the first world; in Thailand it is 60 per cent. There is also, again as in Goa, internal colonisation in that investment in tourist spots often comes from an elite from the interior. This applies to much of the Kenyan coast.

Coasts are one thing, but islands are another: the ultimate in the tropical fantasy for westerners. This perception fits nicely with the fact that most Indian Ocean islands have fragile economies. Helped by pressure from the World Bank, many of them have found western tourists to be their best source of foreign currency earnings. This has now been recognised by people promoting islands to jaded travellers, witness a web-site come-on:

Somewhere in the Indian Ocean, far from African coast, a bunch of islands offers to its visitors a range of tastes, smells and visions at the crossroad of Asia and Africa. Whatever you are looking for – white sandy beaches, rocky mountains, luxuriant forests or plain deserts – you'll be fully satisfied. If your fascination relates to snorkelling in coral reefs, trekking, or birdwatching in a unique nature, you will enjoy what you'll discover there. Away from commercial ways, those countries: Madagascar, Seychelles, Mauritius and Reunion Island, thanks to their isolation, preserved among their inhabitants an incomparable kindness.

Of these, the two most developed for tourists are Mauritius and Reunion. Madagascar still seems only for the very adventurous, or those interested in 'ecotourism', where more is expected than just white sand beaches and fawning 'natives'.

Mauritius benefits from the fact that French is still widely spoken, even though France lost the island two hundred years ago. Nearly half the arrivals are from France. A total of 422,000 arrived in 1995, and 487,000 the next year, and they spent close to $US1,000 each. Mauritius has opted to aim at the top end of the market, unlike say Malindi or Goa. There are no charter flights, though this situation may change as competition increases. At the Royal Palm Hotel 'a team of ladies attired in brilliantly-coloured saris scrub the coconuts on the trees to a shine, rake the sand, vacuum palm leaves from the bottom of the pool and snip the grass into patterns with tiny shears.' Tourism and how to interact with foreigners is an important part of the curriculum in local schools. There are positive and negative elements to the boom. On the one hand, most of the industry, unlike elsewhere, is locally owned, but then profits are held back by the necessity to import food and other 'necessities' for the tourists. The island is only about 2,000 km
2
, so there is pressure on the disposition of sewage, on the water supply, and on the relatively small number of good sandy beaches.
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Reunion predictably draws nearly all its tourists from France. Its lack of good beaches is compensated by its many good hotels, popular places for conferences and meetings. The Seychelles have little else but tourism in the way of assets, especially once the end of the Cold War resulted in the USA closing down a satellite tracking station in 1996, which meant the loss of the annual rent of $US4.5 million. Again the European up-market tourist is targeted. Arrivals rose from 86,000 in 1989 to 110,000 in 1994.
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So also in the Maldives, where only about 200 of the total of 1,200 islands are inhabited. The government has tried to locate tourist facilities on those previously uninhabited, creating about fifty enclave resorts popular with western honeymooners. Visitors usually go straight from the airport to their resort, having little or no contact with local people. The local population is rigorously Muslim, so alcohol is available only on the resort islands, and is served by foreigners imported so that no Maldivian has to handle this forbidden product.

It is easy for elites to sneer at mass tourism, and to stress the negatives, some of which have just been outlined. Some would see first world tourism to the third world as analogous to sweat shops in Thailand making expensive shoes and clothing for a rich overseas clientele. Certainly there is a danger that what attracts westerners to the coasts of the ocean will soon be lost. Beaches are increasingly polluted, palm trees are cut down to make way for new hotels, the coral reefs are disappearing thanks to uncontrolled access to them, polluted waters, and souveniring of bits of them. The comments of the authors of a previous book in this series on the Sea in History are apposite and generally applicable: 'it behoves thinking, as people flock to the shores in ever-increasing numbers, how fragile is the line between our need for recreation, peace or spiritual sustenance from the sea, and the effects of our recreation on the sea itself.'
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