Must the Backpackers Stay Home?

By Michael Elliott Sunday, Dec. 08, 2002
    • One evening last summer I was chatting in a bar in Crete with a doctor from Tel Aviv, who was on vacation with his family. We talked about the Palestinian friends he hadn't seen since the start of the Aqsa intifadeh, his missions as a reservist in the Israeli army. I asked him how long he was staying in Crete. Just a few days, he said, then added wistfully, "Sometimes we just have to get away."

    These days "getting away" is easier said than done. Ask the Israelis who arrived at the Paradise Hotel in Mombasa just as bombs exploded there, killing three of them, or the passengers on the charter flight from Mombasa to Tel Aviv who barely escaped death by surface-to-air missile. Following the horror of the Bali bombings in October, the attacks in Kenya confirm that tourists are now in the terrorists' cross hairs. Soft targets, that euphemism of the month, seem to be softest when they're wearing shorts or sinking a few brews.


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    Terrorism doesn't lend itself to easy gradations of tragedy. But for me, the deliberate attempt to kill tourists — and those who work with them, like the local dancers murdered in the Mombasa bombing — is among the most distressing developments of the past year. Taking aim at resorts in the developing world hurts those who can least afford it. In many poor countries, tourism is the fastest-growing sector of the economy and the one that offers the easiest pathway from poverty to a better and happier life. In Kenya, tourism employs about 500,000 people and, with the collapse of prices for commodities like tea and coffee, has become one of the most important sources of foreign exchange. Those benefits are now at risk. As for Bali, the financial effects of the bombs are likely to be catastrophic. Employment on the island may fall more than 20% next year, according to a model developed by Thea Sinclair and Guntur Sugiyarto at the University of Nottingham in Britain. And since Bali was a flagship destination not just for Indonesia — more than half the visitors to the country in 2001 spent time on the island — but for all of Southeast Asia, the ripple effect from the bombings may be felt throughout the region.

    But this isn't just a matter of dollars and cents. The freedom to travel safely and cheaply is one of the great blessings of our time — something that immeasurably expands the range of human experience. If we ever manage to build a world based on mutual respect and understanding between peoples, tourism will deserve much of the credit. That's particularly true for one class of traveler: backpackers — precisely the group targeted in the Bali attack. Few modern social developments are more significant and less appreciated than the rise of backpacker travel. The tens of thousands of young Australians, Germans, Britons, Americans and others who wander the globe, flitting from Goa to Costa Rica, from Thailand to Tasmania, are building what may be the only example of a truly global community. Nobody has an accurate way of guessing the size of the backpacker market, but the growth of the Lonely Planet brand offers somewhat of a proxy. The first Lonely Planet guidebook was stapled together on an Australian kitchen table in the early 1970s; 30 years later, the company publishes more than 600 titles.

    Backpackers are not only more likely to respect local cultures than those tourists served by the mass market, but they are also, in their own way, valuable to host economies. Backpackers may spend less on vacation than their parents, but most of what they do spend stays local. Mark Hampton of the University of Surrey in Britain, who has studied tourism in Indonesia, estimates that 70% of backpackers' vacation expenditures go to locally owned businesses — like small hotels and restaurants — compared with only about 30% of the cash spent by "mass" tourists, who often stay in big hotels owned by foreign firms.

    The bombs in Bali have placed the phenomenon of young people tasting the world at threat. I find that unbearably sad. More than 30 years ago, I discovered Europe by hitchhiking around it each summer, sleeping on beaches and in cheap hostels, breezing into Barcelona on the back of a motorbike, watching French kids in Nimes cover a table with the ripe ingredients for a perfect ratatouille, selling my blood in a clinic off Omonia Square in Athens for $8--enough for a few more days on the islands. I learned more from those trips than from years in school, and I'd begun to look forward to the day when my daughters would light out on their own adventures — to go see their relatives in Australia or hike in Tibet or do things in Bali that they wouldn't want to tell Dad about. But that was before our world was curdled. So add one more reason to hate what the terrorists have done: they've stolen our dreams.