Page 536 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Tour sm and the Sell ng of Cultures | 1

the Banana PanCake trail
From Cape Tribulation in Australia to Marrakech in Morocco, there is the budget-traveler
phenomenon of the cozy guest house or traveler hostel in which trusted comforts from
home are served up to weary travelers. This can be glossed as the “banana-pancake trail,”
which serves as a shorthand—an obviously gratuitous reference to the ubiquitous back-
packer snack—for the contradictory adventure of experience of “otherness” that third-
world travel can be. In search of otherness but in need of the comfortable trappings of
home, backpacker discussion in the guest houses and lodges is so often about where
travelers are from, what they would like to eat when they get back, how the food gives
them “Delhi-belly” or similar, the mosquitoes, the toilets, the rip-off taxis. Quite often,
such discussions go on while the traveler is served cola or chai or French fries by a 12-year-
old who has worked since dawn, seven days a week, sending money home to the rural
periphery that the traveler will rarely see.

and Gamelan, not to mention less salubrious traditions, are maintained through
nightly performances for businessmen who pay top dollar for entertainments
they need not fully understand. Or rather, they pay for the experience of differ-
ence, of not understanding otherness. The exotic is its own reward—does it mat-
ter that these traditions are reduced in cultural importance on the way? Some
would argue against such traditionalism.

ThE BEnEvoLEnCE oF Tourism anD ChariTy work
A guilty secret resides at the heart of third-world tourism. Holidays in other
people’s misery seem inappropriate and though the beaches are beautiful, the
tsunami was a tragedy. The equation can be resolved by charitable donation or
by the presence of the tourists themselves. After the Asian tsunami of 2004, re-
building of destroyed tourist resorts in India, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia
was soon followed by calls for the tourists to return, as part of the reconstruc-
tion. There is a cultural maintenance aspect here that deserves attention: In cir-
cumstances of dire wealth disparity and limited economic means, the tourist
economy provides cultural workers with an expressive outlet. Ritual forms morph
into entertainments, but are nevertheless preserved—albeit in museumized
forms. This is a difficult evaluation to make—as many of the needed tourist dol-
lars are not actually spent in the affected countries when one takes into account
the destinations of profits from tourism after airline ticketing, charter and pack-
age tour bookings, hotel and food chains (McDonald’s and Coca-Cola all over
Thailand, for example) and even sale of travel guides and the market in televi-
sion travel shows. Ultimately, only a very small percentage of the economic re-
turn from global tourism reaches local entrepreneurs in each case: the structure
of colonialism prevails where the brochures are printed in the United States;
the airlines are based in Paris, Denver, or Frankfurt; the booking agencies in
London or Tokyo.