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Everyone’s talking about their travel plans with the upcoming holiday season, and also thanks to the recent MATTA fair.

I wasn’t bothered to go because I don’t like crowds and persistent agents with brochures.

And I’m still trying to decide where to disappear to for a week or two. I have relatives and friends scattered like pebbles all across the globe, living in places as far flung as Venezuela and as close to home as Hong Kong.

Traveling is always a fascinating experience for me. And it need not be in an exotic locale that’s a million miles from home. Even in Kota Baru, en route back home from Perhentian, I enjoyed wandering the streets, getting a taste of authentic ayam percik and exchanging casual banter with the locals. It’s a quiet little town - which I guess is a nice way of saying "boring shithole".

Okay, so I won’t exactly be visiting Kota Baru anytime soon. But at least I can say it certainly wasn’t commercialised - which seems to be one of the main concerns for modern tourists these days.

This is why a lot of people my age sniff at arranged tours that take you to ‘tourist traps’ and ‘commercialised places’. But what do they mean by that? As if they’ll go to China and not visit the Forbidden City which, by the way, has a Starbucks within its walls. How much more commercialised than that can you get?

Commercialisation is pervasive, no doubt about it. You’ll find dozens of billboards and cheap gift shops built on ‘natural’ heritage sites. Any pristine beach in Thailand is replete with peddlers hawking their massage/manicure/hair beading services.

I was just reading in the news the other day about how so much of the Arctic ice cover has melted that a ship can now sail unhindered from Europe’s most northern tip straight to North Pole, possibly the last slice of truly unspoiled, virgin territory on earth (if you discount the nasty effects of global warming). Can you imagine the implications? Cruise ships. Polar bear trainers. Man will always find a way to exploit nature. And often in the guise of "eco-tourism", either out of pure greed or just to clear our own conscience about destroying the very thing we have sworn to protect.

And yet I can tell you I would pay good money to take a cruise to the North Pole. Am I a hypocrite? Not quite. Just human.

But really, we’re always reacting with pure outrage when we hear how mega-corporations are degrading the environment and encroaching on natural habitats all in the name of a couple (million) bucks.

You want to help save the environment? Don’t go there. Don’t go to Sipadan if you don’t want dead coral. Sure, blame the developers and even the government for not setting enough restrictions if you must. But it’s an easy economic rationale: it’s supply meets demand. More tourists will naturally result in the construction of more hotels, more shophouses, more pollution. And enforcing a quota on the number of visitors, like what has been attempted in Sipadan, has only proved to be a miserable failure.

Maybe, like the lead character in Alex Garland’s The Beach, we’re perpetual tourists always in search of paradise, for that last earthly sanctuary that’s still pristine and undamaged.

But now, it looks like there isn’t a place in the world that still holds any mystery. Everything has been discovered, everything has been explored, everything has been filmed for a documentary, everything has been trampled to death. It’s not such a lonely planet, after all.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 25th, 2006 at 10:51 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.