Travel documentaries. Yes, I am still fiddling with the TV setup. Someone should do an expose on travel documentaries, I don’t have the time or money. But I do have the knowledge. First of all, they should ban the word “fantastic”. It is over-used and only true when you see things for the first time. Who ever looks out the window of their hotel suite after the first sunset? Also, the huge numbers of tourists have crowded out real travelers and made adventure expensive.
The producers of the documentaries run up against the same problems without knowing its been complained about before. Here are some, just some, of the things I do not like about travel today. First of all, there are no hotel rooms for the price you saw in the brochure. Unless you made a reservation, they are “out” of those rooms, even when the parking lot is empty (Microtel). Triple the price for the weekend, even if it is off-season (Lodi, CA). You have to walk into town to get a meal for less than two hours pay (Acapulco, Mex.). Forget about meeting anyone on singles tours. The Kens and Barbies are paired off after the first ten minutes, and the leftovers average age seems to be in the late thirties.
[Author's note 2017: here, I finally found a photo of the "taxi" I could not take in, when was it, 1983? It's written up elsewhere in this indexless blog, but I had a chance to take this taxi, or one just like it, to Chichen Itza. I had to decline to catch a plane.
The reason I refer to it as the same cab is because I lived on that street. That building on the left is across from the park which is across from the hotel I stayed. Back when Mexico was Mexico. This is photo is representative, as I recall my version had a trunk on the back, and the burrow had a hat with tassels that matched the fringe around the canopy. However, this was so rare, even in Mexico, that this could be the same taxi.]
There is no younger crowd in the travel circuit. They are all tourists, which has changed since the hippie days. Anyone under 25 these days is a pretend-hippie, or a married couple on a credit card honeymoon. Any prime waterfront property has had the native huts bulldozed and replaced reasonable barter for a week with incredibly priced hotel rooms. To me, anything over $50 per week is too high, it should not cost more to sleep in a third world country than it does at home. If the world were me, there would be no $500 a night hotel rooms (Hawaii).
The developers just can’t leave a native economy alone. Where before I used to take a canoe up the river and bargain for a hammock, it is now a helicopter ride (Canaima). Another sad outcome of our troubled times is the “theme” resort. You don’t need the local adventure anymore, you can take ballroom dance lessons and sky-diving lessons now (Phuket Island). Sometimes you live in a barbed wire compound to keep the locals out (Cancun). One theme I hate is the honeymoon hotel where the honeymooners are in their late fifties. Ugh, if I ever pretend I am a honeymooner at that age, even if I am, shoot me. By that age, the last thing I would do is pretend it was a major fling.
More accurately, I hate those thousands of middle-aged couples who were shacked up and then got married (“I had fun, and he had fun, and now we have fun together.”), the spirit is completely gone from their relationship. Now they are going to try to inject new excitement into their lives by taking a trip. Boring, after the first night it wears off. She spends the days gossiping with the other wives, and he is over at the sports bar with his new buddies. The trouble as I see it is that they are a majority, so the business that caters to these losers eventually crowds out the really nice places one would see otherwise (Barbados). Years ago, you walked on the beach and dived for your own shells. Now, it is dangerous, thanks to tourists, and you have to buy the shells in the hotel lobby at $35 a pop.
Travel requires a certain mindset that tourists don’t have. Tourism, no matter how expensive, is still second-rate travel. I think it should be advertised as such, but that is a different matter. It’s just that tourism has wiped out the real travel industry. It is harder and harder to find places without a McDonalds of which I swear represents a wonderful discovery to some tourists, “Oh look honey, real food!”
Again, it is not the actual rip-off hotel that gets me, it is that they make such a profit they take over the really pristine areas and turn them into garbage dumps with security guards. Along with this so-called progress come the drug problems, the upset of local customs and the sure sign of assholes in the vicinity: valet parking. Areas that remained truly mysterious and explorable for decades disappear overnight with the first tourist hotel. Every adventure is watered down so crippled little old ladies can come along, I mean we don’t want to discriminate, do we? Little old ladies are people too, so much so that they cannot be expected, apparently, to gauge an activity against their own physical stamina, see. They are tourists just as much as you, pal (Chichen Itza).
That last example is one of the oddest for me. I signed up for a tour bus because I had a deadline to get to the ruins and back, it was my second or third time in Mexico. The entire story is fascinating, how I attended the open air university at Merida, and almost took a donkey and cart out to Chichen Itza – and I would have if there had been time. Saturday night there was a promenade in the town square, free by the way, and crime was unknown except for a little monkey that would snatch pens out of your shirt pocket and scamper away over the awnings. A pina colada came in a huge glass, with a half pineapple.
[Author's note 2017: the monkey was trained to stay just out of your reach until he led you back to a little stall selling postcards and trinkets. That's brilliant, and the guy did a booming business.]
The tour was around the ruins. After an hour, all the tourists from the hotel in Mexico City (I didn’t realize I’d signed up for that kind of tour till we started) were played out. Once the guides figured out I could communicate in Spanish, we drove the bus back to the hotel, the only one in Chichen Itza back in 1980, and dropped off the old farts. Then they took me on the real tour of all the unexplored caves and ruins they used to play on when they were young. They shot six iguanas along the way and roasted them on stakes in the ground. We crawled up and down everything (the surrounding land is flat, so anything vertical is a tomb or tower). Years later I still have not read about any “discoveries” of pre-Columbian cave drawings, which I saw in abundance.
The point is, there were no real tours available. Where before, these guides would gladly have taken you around for a tour if you bought the beers afterward, there are now thirty tour companies who need money fast, so it’s the droves of old people they cater to. Today, the hotel I was in costs more for a day than I stayed for a month, the university has had to put up a fence, and the donkey ride is fifty bucks an hour. Other prices and qualities have followed the pattern, I’m sure.
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