Honest tourism.

Tourism can save the world. A week ago I thought this to be a great title for my new story, especially looking at the situation in the world. Save Money, go travelling and help so to save the world. I do like good ends, but I´m not very good in writing fairytales and I do like to give my stories some credibility. For this I decided to start my new story from our last destination and see how far I would come to prove both titles.

Tourists spread the flue, leave mountains of garbage behind, disturb wildlife and destroy archeological sites, direct or indirect. The anthropological governmental organization (INAH) and the tourist industry put already lights ón the ruins of Chichen Itza and want now want to put them ón the temples of Teotihuacan as well, to attract more tourists.

 More bad things which are indirect caused by tourists are very clear to me here on my sixth nigh! in Playa del Carmen, where tourism seems to  provoke greediness and destroy honesty…

 A wise man told me this tour that he doesn´t like the new type of backpacker. He says that they pack too heavy and try to be too cheap. He said that the first backpackers explored the world, put new places on the map and brought prosperity in the form of tourism to some far ends in the world. Nowadays the backpackers only seem to try to see as much as possible for as less money as possible, forgetting that the people in the countries where they are have even less to spend than them.

 Of course I defended ‘my kind’. With no place of my own to live and travelling most of the year, I´m still a backpacker. Although I have to admit that he has a good point, I´ve also seen a lot of cheap backpackers, but luckily I also met enough backpackers who do care about the money they spend, but not against the price of being cheap…

 Back here in Playa, the end of the famous Maya Route, ‘invented’ by a former director of National Geographic to promote tourism, I would love to have a new discussion with this wise man. Tourism could provide a new income of money, so nature on the Maya Route would be saved from deforesting.

 I already wrote before that part of his plan succeeded, but now the tourist industry went to far.  After even being ribbed off twice by two different ATM´s the little bit of petty I had for Playa for not receiving enough tourists is gone. These ATM´s ‘asked’ if I would accept a fee of 7.5 pesos administration costs. I accepted, but when I asked for a receive it showed that I got charged 34 pesos! Yes, I´m very disappointed by the results of the Maya promotions.

 Following the Maya Route you can clearly see which places are most known to tourists. Prices go up (also for the locals) and service goes down. They sometimes even try to invite you in their restaurants with a 20% discount and a nice card for good food, but while you are in they forget to mention the high prices for the drinks (often not even on the card), they forget about the discount and even want to charge you 15% for service? Which service?

While the food is served with fake cheap prices, the souvenir shops sell their T-shirts for such low prices that they must have been made by modern slaves working for huge Mexican and/or foreign companies also called Maquilas.

 No, I don´t think that the locals are still destroying most of the nature on the Maya Route, but what happens when foreigners build their new resorts? What happens with all the garbage the tourist industry produces and where comes all the water from they use? I just read in a newspaper that Playa has a shortage on drinking water.

I have to say that I´m glad that I wasn´t one of the first backpackers who discovered the beautiful white palm beaches of Playa del Carmen and invited the world to destroy it.

 I must admit that I did found a small shop with very friendly people and great sandwiches for an honest price, but no I don´t want to tell the world where it is…

After writing down all these complains I still believe tourists and also backpackers have also a realistic possibility to help saving the world. How? I will try to explain in the next part of my story.

 Remember how I ended my last story in Mexico City at the beginning of a new tour? By this time I had no idea yet how many new adventures were just ahead of me. It started with this swine-flu epidemic announcement, which supposedly started in Mexico City. It now has a new name, but the whole case still stinks, so I prefer to stick with the name of Swine-flu. Did you know that Mexico City is now already more than a week free of new flu cases, but 2 days ago a new victim died in the USA? No, after my complains about Playa del Carmen, I have to admit that Mexico doesn´t deserve the way the world is discriminating this beautiful country. Let´s try to do some responsible promotion, starting with some of the experiences my group and I had in the past month.

With this new tour came (of course) again an outdated map of information, but also a nice group of 10 very different people, so it should all work out fine. Even with this warning I just heard. A warning that recommends everyone to where a mouth cap in crowded places.

 The day after the arrival of the group we went direct on a tour to the temples of the sun and the moon from the Olmeca culture. This culture is often mentioned as the mother culture of all of Latin America (1200 BC until 400 BC). The site is now called ‘Teotihuacan’, which means ‘City of the gods’ and was given far later by the Aztecs. They couldn´t believe that some human been other than them could build something like this.

 It is the same tour I started with on my first day on my own in Latin America on the 3th of August 2003. This was a strange feeling, but again a great way to start a journey through the Culture of Latin America. A tour to learn more about the oldest culture and also directly getting to know the different individuals, which have to become a group the same way it happened years ago with some other individual travelers including me.

In the evening we encountered the first real inconvenient result of the swine-flu. We were attending a dinner show with traditional Mexican dance and music, but halfway some people of the health department came to close the restaurant. From then on they started to close many shows, concerts, bars, cines, football games and even museums and parks. They closed almost every place where people can gather close to each other, except for the metro, some public parks and most churches.

 For the next day most of us, including me, wanted to visit the special anthropologic museum, with a great collection about the history of whole of Latin America. But unfortunately this was closed as well. Luckily the centre of Mexico City is, different then you would expect, not a bad place to spent the day.

 In the evening things around the swine flu got worse when the government decided that for the next few days most restaurants in Mexico City (again most?) had to close their doors at 18:00h? Luckily we still found a place to eat at the top floor of the highest building of Latin America, Torre Latino, with a great view over the city!

Time to go to Oaxaca before these swine flu craziness gets worse.

 Although experts were already saying that those face/mouth caps were not good to protect yourself from getting the flu, because they didn´t fit perfectly and the material was to weak, it was still nice to get into Oaxaca and seeing far less mouth caps then on the streets of Mexico.

 We decided to go directly to the archeological site of Monte Alban, so the next day we had time to explore on our own the colorful streets of this pretty colonial city. In the morning I read that we had just ´missed´ a powerful earthquake of 6 on the scale of Richter, just outside Mexico City. In the evenings we ate with the group and it was amazing to find out that in both restaurants were we went the waiters knew more or less who had ordered what and could make individual bills. Unfortunately this is something which is becoming rare in the tourist industry.

After a long ride with a private bus and (after asking a couple of times) two drivers, we arrived in another colorful town, San Cristobal. Here we heard that the Mexican government had decided to also close all archeological sites in Mexico! Luckily we came here for the town itself, the traditional village of San Juan and the Cañon del Sumidero.

 The bars and other places to go out were closed as well, so we couldn´t bring our salsa lesson in practice L But we had already decided that his swine flu was not going to spoil our fun any more than needed, so we had developed a tradition of buying our own drinks and have a drink and a chat in the hotel before we would go to sleep.

Passing the border with Guatemala we had to fill in a form to declare that we were healthy and not infected with the swine flu. After that the doctors asked us if they could take a group photo with us. It would be published in the newspaper to show how the Guatemalan government was trying to keep the flu out or their country.

The crowded market in Chichicastenango was luckily far enough from the flu to be affected and also in the rest of the country we didn´t encounter any direct problems related to the flu. We did our regular tours and were fortuned to still be able to spot fresh lave streaming of the slopes of the Pacaya volcano.

Going into Honduras again we had to fill in some health related forms, but again we were not checked at all on our real health conditions.

Our only one full day in Copan was even to me so interesting that I can write a whole new story about it, but it is also a challenge to fit it into this story ;-)

 It started in the morning during our tour at the ruins of Copan. First we found out that the prices had been raised up until 15 US$ entrée and 7 US$ more for visiting the museum. According to the two guides we had today 5 US$ of the entrée money would go now to the Lemperias (since 1929 also the name of the currency of Honduras), one of the very few indigenous groups (5% of the inhabitants of Honduras) and descendents of the Maya which still lives in Honduras.

 Also during this tour I heard something new, our guide told us what the flag of Honduras stood for. Blue, white, blue stands for the Pacific Ocean, peace and the Atlantic Ocean, similar to some countries around, but the 5 stars stood for a united Central America. Right after their separation from Spain Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica were planning to become an independent United States of Central America, with open borders like the USA. Unfortunately greed from some parties then made an end to this dream. However now there is new hope for these poor countries. Recently the negotiating has started again and Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua already offer their citizens to cross each others borders without legal documents. I do think they still have a long way to go, especially with all the corruption in these countries and because Costa Rica, the only stable and not poor country out of the original 5 doesn´t want to join (yet).

 This makes it extra sad to know that the drugs cartels did find a way to unite (the underworld of) whole of Central America and Mexico. They smuggle drugs and people all over Central America to the USA and don´t stop at the borders of the different countries.

 Why I bring this up? It is the connection to the title of my story. In Copan I joined a reality tour given by a foreigner who lives already a long time in Copan, who has good connections and is very well informed. During this tour he told us several sad stories about the circumstances of live in Honduras.

 Did you know for example that the garbage in this town, which looks so nice and almost build for tourists, only gets picked up until 5 blocks away from the plaza? That there is a huge shortage of clean water and electricity and that the sewer system is leaking so bad that when it rains part of the water from the sewer start flowing through the centre of town? Good to know before you start complaining next time you are in Copan and there is more water in the streets then in your shower…

Our guide also told us that Honduras is ruled by 15 rich families and drugs lords and that last year it was acknowledged to be the second poorest country in the world, after Haiti. Unfortunately also Guatemala and Nicaragua are in the top 5 so they can´t expect much support from their neighbors.

The ‘best hope’ for a Honduran citizen to survive poverty is to send at least one or more relatives to work in the USA. At this moment the money that relatives send their family from the USA is the biggest legal income of Honduras! You can imagine that legally these relatives are not very welcome in the USA so how do the get there? They pay the Maras (the most important and dangerous gangs in Central America), to smuggle them across the different borders.

 The Maras ask 5500 US$ for this ‘service’. But how is a poor Honduran citizen with a minimum salary of 100 US$ a month going to pay this amount of money? Of course the Maras can ‘help’ with this problem as well.

 Part of the income from the Maras comes from drugs transport. Huge amounts of drugs are each year transported in power boats from Colombia to just in front of Honduras, In front of the difficult to reach and control beaches of La Mosquita, to be more specific. From here the Maras of Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico work together to bring it into the USA. One way of doing this is by using innocent civilians who have a dept with the Maras. Around Copan for example they get paid 50 US$ to walk a few hours across the hills between Honduras and Guatemala with 10kg of pure coke on their backs. Quick money for someone who else would earn only 100 US$ a month and the ‘best thing’ is that it is almost without any risk of being caught. Copan simply doesn´t have enough manpower to check anywhere else than on the main road from Honduras to Guatemala. Even when they would encounter someone with drugs, do you think that their low salary and the risk to make the drugs lords angry would encourage them to confiscate the drugs? Investigation showed that possibly about 23% of all drugs in the USA has passed the Honduran border on this way. Almost everyone in Copan knows, but when it costs only about 2000 US$ to kill someone semi legally, no-one will say anything.

 In the village of Rosita, close to Copan the situation is almost worse. In this village, which has only 2 police men and no police car, lives one of the biggest drug lords of Central America. Everyone knows, but no-one bothers him when he drives around in his Bentley. Even Bush didn´t seem to be very interested, which gives to think…

 In his ‘War against drugs’ why did Bush not arrested this drug lord and closed these drug lines? After the USA originally being responsible for bringing the Maras in Honduras to weaken the government I can´t imagine that they´re now afraid to interfere in the Honduran politics? Or maybe this has something to do with the USA still being in control of the Fruit Company and several other Maquilas, together the second and third biggest income for Honduras? Maquilas are huge factories which are allowed to import the materials and equipment without paying taxes to the country that hosts them. They pay very low salaries to people who can´t afford to complain to cheaply assemble many products. Often they are exported again to the countries where the materials come from, but which have a minimum salary that´s far more expensive to pay than the transport costs. Ad to this that the working circumstances in those Maquilas are often not allowed in any western country and … you get the picture.

Maybe you wonder now how tourism can help? Remember that I wrote that I don´t like my stories to end badly, so I started with the worst consequences of tourism. However, now it is time to talk about the positive sides of tourism. For this I will first continue telling you more about our beautiful and interesting tour through ‘Maya Land’.

After Copan we went on a tour over the Rio Dulce (sweet river) towards Livingstone, a nice tour through beautiful nature. After that we slept in nice little private cabañas on the river side and at night, sitting with our cocktails on the river side bar, we got treated with a splendid lightshow from a thunderstorm! The sky changed colors from black to white and pink with beautiful lightning!

To bad the American owner didn´t trust his employers and couldn´t appreciate our fun.

 In Flores our accommodation was far more basic, but at least the employers seemed to enjoy their job and we only used it as a base to visit the famous Maya site Tikal.

 The entrance fee went up from 50 to 150 Quetzales (about19 US$), but I´ve never earlier seen so many people working on the restoration of the ruins, so I guess it is worth it.

 I had also never seen so much wildlife during one visit of Tikal. We saw two different types of toucans, parrots, coatis and many spider and howler monkeys from close distance! All these animals in a jungle setting with ancient Maya ruins and temples and not many other tourists, gave me the feeling of going back in time.

A similar feeling I got at the mysterious hidden site of Yaxchilan. It is only reachable by boat, which makes it less visited and gives it a natural protection against stealing original pieces from the site. Maybe this is the reason that we could still see some original beautiful, but unprotected paintings above the doors of a small temple.

 This is very different from Bonampak, famous for its beautiful and luckily well protected paintings. These original paintings about the Mayan live are one of the very few ways to interpret the Maya history. They are now directly protected by the original inhabitants of this area, the Lacandon and we spent the night at one of their settlements.

 Unfortunately this wasn´t very authentic anymore, but the beautiful nature walk through primary rainforest, the next morning, made well up for it.

In Palenque we visited the famous Maya site and clear waterfalls around before we went of towards Campeche. Campeche? What are we going to do there? I had never heard of it to be a touristic location, but I was wrong. It has a well restored colorful city centre surrounded by segments of an old rampart. This rampart was build by the Spanish to protect the city against pirates, but now serves to protect the pretty city centre from the ugliness around it.

As group we had decided to visit the ruins of Uxmal on our way to Chichen Itza and this turned out to be a great decision. Even after we had already seen so many Maya sites, the temples and palace on this site where again very different and well worth seeing.

Because the flu scared the tourists to enter Mexico and hotels suffer from this, they have to close many hotels and send guests to other hotels from the same company. We got our hotel upgraded to one with its own entrance to the site of Chichen Itza, but even this couldn´t prevent our disappointment about this site. If it is because it now belongs to one of the new 7 World Miracles or just because it attracts so many tourists it just doesn´t have any mystic atmosphere anymore. What makes it even worse is that big parts of the site are now totally closed to public, so you get even more tourists on a smaller area. I have to admit that I did like the lightshow with a story about the history of the site. But I do hope they didn´t damage the ruins too much with the installation of the lights.

Arriving in Playa del Carmen we agreed as group that our tour was a great and learn full experience and the only disappointment was that we couldn´t visit the anthropological museum in Mexico City. Guess what. The groups flight from Cancun got delayed. Therefore they missed their plane to Holland and spend one more night and a full day in Mexico City on costs of KLM. This gave them a possibility to visit the museum. End well all well ;-)

At least for them, I still have to finish this story and go on a 24h bus ride to Mexico City. But no complains, now I was the tour leader during this special tour, but if my cradle had stood in Guatemala or Honduras, maybe I would have been one of the employers in the lodge in Rio Dulce, or in one of the Maquilas in Honduras. My point is: Be honest and look further before you start complaining. This is something what I want to recommend all the different tourists over the whole world.

We are less likely to understand and protect the things we don´t know. Traveling helps in understanding and appreciating the world around us, but this is not always enough. So in these economical difficult times I would like to promote honest tourism.

 It is proven that spending your own money is good for the economy. But spending it wisely in poor countries spreads it over the world and could improve more than only one economy.

 No matter if you are rich or don´t have a lot of money to spend, you have the luxury to be a tourist. You can spend money to enrich your live with new experiences and with this comes the obligation to take care of your surrounding and be honest with yourself and the people around you. If you are rich and want to pay more on food and accommodation, you are allowed to receive a better service, keeping in mind where you are.

 If you have less money to spend, no problem, but don´t expect to get the best for less. If you want to spend 1.5 US$ for food and 3 US$ for a night, what else can you expect than a plate with rice and beans and a mattress on the floor? Accept this and accept that anything more is a luxury for this amount of money and you come a long way.

 I do agree that “don´t expect anything for nothing” should be respected from both sides. If we treat our hosts honest, we may expect them to treat us the same way. If we receive good food and service we give a good tip, but no-one should expect (too much) money for doing nothing, or else there will always be misunderstandings and distrust, which isn´t good for either of us.

To end this story I want to go back to Honduras. Tourism is now the 4^th biggest income of this second poorest country in the world. However the country has beautiful white beaches and hardly unexplored jungle. What if more tourists start to visit this country instead of that the world keeps on giving money to the corrupt government? What if we bring more money and hope into Honduras so its citizens don´t have to leave the country for a better future or work in one of those maquilas?

 We only have to be careful not to make it a second Playa del Carmen, or go to far, like this last message I read on the internet:

The boy who became the first human victim and survivor of the swine flu now gets his own statue to attract tourism to his town, La Gloria, about 300km east of Mexico City…  The governor of this state in Mexico thinks that all the publicity about the swine flu will attract a lot of tourists towards his state, like Manneke Pis does to Brussels…