Thu, Mar 06, 2008 page13

• Wish you weren't here

  Visiting strife-ravaged destinations may produce lots of interesting stories, but claims that it benefits local people may be exaggerated

  • By Catherine Bennett / THE OBSERVER, LONDON
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  After bumping about the lower end of the human development index for a few years, Sierra Leone again arrived at the bottom in November: 177th out of 177. Introducing its latest figures, the UN Development Programme explained how a combination of factors, including life expectancy, education and standard of living, helps establish whether a country provides "an environment in which people can develop their full potential and lead productive, creative lives in accord with their needs and interests." Life expectancy in Sierra Leone is 40.

  On the plus side, Sierra Leone has kilometers of fantastic beaches, which score highly for all key seaside indicators, among them white sand, crystalline water and the all-important relaxation factor. "With some of the most perfect palm-lined sands on the continent," the Lonely Planet guide to Africa confirms, "it won't be long before Sierra Leone takes its place in Europe's packaged beach-holiday scene."

  To this end, airline BMI has announced that an increased number of flights between London and Freetown will start in May, with its CEO Nigel Turner assuring the newcomers to the resort (recently likened by one writer to a "stinking refugee camp"): "One always needs to be careful, but you need to be careful in (some parts of south London), frankly."

  You certainly do and if it's early days to make south London a separate entry in the human development index, it is surely time the government in London began issuing guidance reminding visitors to the region to exercise caution. Or they could avoid the area altogether. As the Lonely Planet guide reminds visitors to Freetown, with its traffic jams, rubbish and power cuts, "if you spend all your time in the tourist-focused areas, you'll rarely encounter those problems."

  There can be no guarantee, however, that the visitor will not, from time to time, be confronted by potentially distressing evidence of human suffering, even if most of Freetown can be successfully shunned. Some 6,000 of those who survived the civil war are terribly mutilated; their limbs hacked off by Revolutionary United Front gangs. Are such sights consonant with two weeks of blissful rest? The Lonely Planet guide is soothing: "Most locals hang on to their optimism." Then again, that might have been written when Sierra Leone was still number 176.

  But such fortitude in the face of adversity will be familiar to more experienced travelers, whose reports from ill-starred, faraway places invariably stress the tremendous good cheer of people who have, on the face of it, little to look forward to beyond privation, illness and death. Even in south London, they report, it is common to see the most deprived children laughing happily as they enjoy a refreshing fag or sip from a cooling alcopop.

  As for the travelers: one can only marvel at their resolute commitment to their holidays, undiminished by boycotts, wars, climate change and anything else that consistency, decency and good taste can throw at them. Few of us, for instance, may want to visit Sudan just now, but a quick Internet shop brings up a variety of leisured challenges to genocide, from a Sudan camel trek to Responsible Travel's Nuba People and Villages. "Sudan is an emerging destination for adventurous travelers," says the company, which prides itself on low carbon footprints and a principled approach: "The tribes we meet have no idea of tourism and we have a huge responsibility when exposing them to a different culture."

  If somebody is going to introduce Nuban tribes people to the benefits of Rohan's Dynamic Moisture Control, we should perhaps be grateful that the emissaries supplied by Responsible Travel are likely to be ever so ethical, long accustomed to weighing up the arguments for and against their foreign trips before they decide to go on them anyway.

  Since Aung San Suu Kyi declared, in 1996, that to visit Myanmar under the junta was to condone its regime, informed tourists have hardly been able to avoid wondering if the benefits of their own presence, complete with a copy of Ian McEwan's Saturday and lots of money, can really compensate for endorsing tyrants, in Myanmar or anywhere else. For the confused, Lonely Planet's guide to Myanmar still offers a summary of this "debate," along with the conclusion that tourists do the oppressed a favor, by offering "outside contact."

  Inevitably, the success of this outreach work is hard to evaluate. Is it even necessary? In North Korea, where Amnesty International reports continued "systematic violations of human rights," a tour operator tells customers: "Far from being downtrodden and disconsolate, you will be welcomed by our guide amongst the merry faces untroubled by worries of money and crime."

  Equally, should we introduce Western values to the citizens of Belarus and risk damaging what another operator depicts as perfectly preserved Soviet charm? "If you are interested in experiencing what is one of the last remaining havens of the "good old days" when the Iron Curtain separated Europe into two camps, then Belarus can provide it in spades."

  For the truly concerned traveler, interested in experiencing authentic communism, dictatorship or abject poverty, it's clearly far better to emulate a visitor getting close to a turtle in the Galapagos Islands: respectfully approaching the different form of life without upsetting nature's delicate balance in any way. As Krishna Pujari, who first encouraged poorists to view the Mumbai slums, once put it: "We want to show tourists the reality of Dharavi and change any negative ideas they might have about this slum. We respect the privacy of the residents of Dharavi and ensure that the tour does not disturb them in any way."

  With human rights out of the way, resourceful tourists are now proving that ecological objections, which had not even surfaced in 1996, are equally unlikely to threaten their right to travel now. Just as arguments about cruel regimes encouraged some tourists to portray themselves as liberators in shorts, complaints about carbon emissions have merely prompted a new generation to reinvent themselves as the most self-righteous trippers in history.

  "Does anyone have any ideas about the best way to dispose of recyclables/other rubbish over there?" queries a contributor to Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree travel forum, anxious about garbage arrangements in Dharamsala. Posting on another forum, a traveler offers tips for saving plastic: "When flying, bring an empty plastic bottle."

  So perhaps that famous Sierra Leonean optimism is well placed. So long as greener travelers do not boycott its shoddy recycling system, there is no reason why the white sands beyond Freetown should not, as predicted, soon be darkened by tides of ethical sunbathers. Assuming, of course, the beaches can survive the inundation expected from climate change. But even then, all is not lost. As any ethical tour operator can tell you, these days tsunamis and melting icecaps are seen not so much as unalleviated catastrophes as sustainable holidays you haven't yet taken.
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