All this is new in world history: Lencek wrote of
the transformation of the beach from an alien, inaccessible, and hostile wilderness devoted to conquest, commerce, exploration, and the primal customs of tribal cultures, into a thriving, civilized, pleasure and recreation oriented outpost of Western life style, where so many sybaritic impulses of culture have been indelibly concentrated.67
With this background in western perceptions of the coast, some case studies will show the varied impact of tourism on coastal areas. I will start with Goa, the former Portuguese colony on the Indian west coast, a place I have visited frequently over the last thirty-four years. Numbers have shot up recently. In the 1985–86 season, roughly October to May, twenty-four charter flights brought 3,568 passengers, in 1995–96 there were 337 flights bringing 75,694 passengers. In 1985 the total number of tourists was 775,212, of whom 682,545 were Indian and 92,667 foreign. Ten years later the numbers had risen to a total of 1,107,705, of whom 878,487 were Indian, 229,218 foreign. Of the foreign arrivals, 58.6 per cent were from the UK. The most up-to-date data available puts the population of the area at 1,400,000, of whom 400,000 are dependent on the tourist industry. Foreign tourists number 300,000 a year, and domestic 960,000 a year, so the number of tourist who visit each year is just below the total local population.68
Goa offers the tropical paradise stereotype: palm trees, sunsets over the Arabian Sea, white sand, cheap accommodation, readily available alcohol, English-speaking locals, and some reassuringly western elements such as a coastal population which is largely Christian, and huge churches in the deserted city of Old Goa. Three broad tourist phases can be distinguished. In the 1960s Goa was a haven for so-called hippies, who lived rough on the beaches or in beach shacks, and outraged the local population with their inappropriate dress, or total lack thereof, and massive drug consumption. Soon after a new strand appeared, of middle class Indians attracted by the availability of alcohol, and by the presence of the hippies. Brochures for bus sightseeing tours promised old churches, and beaches where 'naked hippies will be seen'. More recently the Goa government has discouraged budget travellers, and instead promoted short-stay mass market tourism, along with very up-market tourism in a handful of luxury beach resorts. The latter is increasingly being favoured by the government. Europeans fly in direct to Goa, have two weeks in a hotel, get sunburnt on the beach, and fly out again. This is hardly an exotic experience; better to describe it as enclave tourism, where the only locals met are waiters, servants, and taxi drivers.
A beach scene frequently found in Goa, and in other beach resorts on the west coast such as Kovalam, is typical. Portly western men in G-strings self-consciously help traditional fishermen haul in their nets, which may contain enough for one meal. Their bikini-clad women enthusiastically take video pictures of this picturesque scene. Two telling changes, from Kerala, seem also to sum up what is happening. The traditional rice boats which for centuries have transported rice in the backwaters inland from the coast, are now being converted into luxury house boats for western tourists and Indian yuppies. Similarly, the monsoon in Kerala has always been a dramatic sight, redolent with meaning for the local people, for indeed their livelihood often depends on its arrival. Today 'monsoon cures' have become popular with middle class Indians, who travel from all over India to take part in what is essentially a 5,000 year old ayurvedic tradition.69
The larger hotels in Goa are often owned by groups based elsewhere in India, or even by foreign capital. Lufthansa, Club Mediteranee and Hyatt are all involved. Smaller hotels may be built by Goans who have made money in the Gulf and invest in this new industry. This is a very fragile and vulnerable market indeed. Any minor perceived threat means bookings dry up. The terrorist attack on the United States in September 2001 and subsequent military campaign in Afghanistan affected tourism worldwide. Bookings on charter flights, usually 130 or 140 a day, fell to only 10 or 12. Hotels remained nearly empty, and packages at absurd rates were advertised, such as return flights from England to Goa and bed and breakfast for seven to ten days for as low as £79. This was obviously exceptional, yet in previous seasons an over-supply of accommodation had produced similarly uneconomic results.
The effects on the ecology of the area have been dire. There are now at least fifty swimming pools in the tiny Calangute–Baga strip alone, when thirty years ago there were none. The government privileges hotels over local rice farmers when it allocates water, so that the swimming pools will be full, and the lawns green. The three Taj hotels at Fort Aguada take more water than that available to the population of all the local villages of Calangute. Golf tourism is a new trend, and whole villages are being relocated to make room for a planned six new courses, most of them foreign controlled. 'Development' has often been uncontrolled, leading to massive violations of the environment, such as building far too close to the maximum high tide level, discharge of sewage into the ocean, and mounds of discarded plastic containers disfiguring the sand. One of Goa's main attractions, pristine beaches, is being violated and ruined; it is in danger of becoming less idyllic, and falling out of favour.
For the local people all this has been a very mixed blessing. A recent acerbic analysis claimed that tourist development in Goa 'in the process of creating global tourist sites, determines that (local) people's cultural and ecological space is dispensable to its requirements.' Tourism 'is predicated upon a development ideology that defines local people's space as dispensable to the needs of national and transnational capital.' The same author comments on what is called 'staged authenticity', that is the 'typical' Goan fisherman, villager, toddy tapper, who performs in hotels. 'Goa has been constructed to serve as one of the world's pleasure peripheries, a cultural space for the leisure consumption of tourists divorced from the needs and concerns of everyday life.'70
Much the same can be seen on the Swahili coast. However, the setting is rather different. The main historic population centres were the Swahili port cities that we have written about previously. In particular, the Stone Towns of Lamu and Zanzibar, even though they mostly date only from the nineteenth century and later, are considered to be heritage attractions, and distinctive enough to be preserved. Yet as tourist attractions some changes had to be made. Many of the old houses have been reconfigured to make hotels, and some unsympathetic 'development' has taken place both within the stone towns and on their edges. Lamu is, as we have already pointed out, an Islamic town which acts as a focus for Muslims all up and down the coast. Many of its women wear very all-enveloping robes. Ten years ago the only place a tourist could buy alcohol was in a rather dingy cellar attached to the hotel in the centre of the town. Now the bar has moved out onto the main street, which runs along the waterfront and is the centre of Lamu life. It even boasts a small collection of bar girls. Westerners complain that the exotic is being destroyed, but the real question is whether 'tradition' should be preserved for the benefit of foreigners. Most Swahili probably would prefer not to be living in a museum, but rather have up-to-date plumbing.
We found in the case of Goa that much of the profit from tourism does not stay in Goa. Similarly in the Swahili town of Malindi, now really an Italian resort, with a line of Italian owned hotels controlling the beach front. More generally, it has been estimated that 45 per cent of funds generated by tourism remain in the third world country concerned. Of the money spent on a beach holiday in Kenya, 70 per cent goes back to the first world; in Thailand it is 60 per cent. There is also, again as in Goa, internal colonisation in that investment in tourist spots often comes from an elite from the interior. This applies to much of the Kenyan coast.
Coasts are one thing, but islands are another: the ultimate in the tropical fantasy for westerners. This perception fits nicely with the fact that most Indian Ocean islands have fragile economies. Helped by pressure from the World Bank, many of them have found western tourists to be their best source of foreign currency earnings. This has now been recognised by people promoting islands to jaded travell
ers, witness a web-site come-on:
Somewhere in the Indian Ocean, far from African coast, a bunch of islands offers to its visitors a range of tastes, smells and visions at the crossroad of Asia and Africa. Whatever you are looking for – white sandy beaches, rocky mountains, luxuriant forests or plain deserts – you'll be fully satisfied. If your fascination relates to snorkelling in coral reefs, trekking, or birdwatching in a unique nature, you will enjoy what you'll discover there. Away from commercial ways, those countries: Madagascar, Seychelles, Mauritius and Reunion Island, thanks to their isolation, preserved among their inhabitants an incomparable kindness.
Of these, the two most developed for tourists are Mauritius and Reunion. Madagascar still seems only for the very adventurous, or those interested in 'ecotourism', where more is expected than just white sand beaches and fawning 'natives'.
Mauritius benefits from the fact that French is still widely spoken, even though France lost the island two hundred years ago. Nearly half the arrivals are from France. A total of 422,000 arrived in 1995, and 487,000 the next year, and they spent close to $US1,000 each. Mauritius has opted to aim at the top end of the market, unlike say Malindi or Goa. There are no charter flights, though this situation may change as competition increases. At the Royal Palm Hotel 'a team of ladies attired in brilliantly-coloured saris scrub the coconuts on the trees to a shine, rake the sand, vacuum palm leaves from the bottom of the pool and snip the grass into patterns with tiny shears.' Tourism and how to interact with foreigners is an important part of the curriculum in local schools. There are positive and negative elements to the boom. On the one hand, most of the industry, unlike elsewhere, is locally owned, but then profits are held back by the necessity to import food and other 'necessities' for the tourists. The island is only about 2,000 km2, so there is pressure on the disposition of sewage, on the water supply, and on the relatively small number of good sandy beaches.71 Reunion predictably draws nearly all its tourists from France. Its lack of good beaches is compensated by its many good hotels, popular places for conferences and meetings. The Seychelles have little else but tourism in the way of assets, especially once the end of the Cold War resulted in the USA closing down a satellite tracking station in 1996, which meant the loss of the annual rent of $US4.5 million. Again the European up-market tourist is targeted. Arrivals rose from 86,000 in 1989 to 110,000 in 1994.72 So also in the Maldives, where only about 200 of the total of 1,200 islands are inhabited. The government has tried to locate tourist facilities on those previously uninhabited, creating about fifty enclave resorts popular with western honeymooners. Visitors usually go straight from the airport to their resort, having little or no contact with local people. The local population is rigorously Muslim, so alcohol is available only on the resort islands, and is served by foreigners imported so that no Maldivian has to handle this forbidden product.
It is easy for elites to sneer at mass tourism, and to stress the negatives, some of which have just been outlined. Some would see first world tourism to the third world as analogous to sweat shops in Thailand making expensive shoes and clothing for a rich overseas clientele. Certainly there is a danger that what attracts westerners to the coasts of the ocean will soon be lost. Beaches are increasingly polluted, palm trees are cut down to make way for new hotels, the coral reefs are disappearing thanks to uncontrolled access to them, polluted waters, and souveniring of bits of them. The comments of the authors of a previous book in this series on the Sea in History are apposite and generally applicable: 'it behoves thinking, as people flock to the shores in ever-increasing numbers, how fragile is the line between our need for recreation, peace or spiritual sustenance from the sea, and the effects of our recreation on the sea itself.'73
* * *
Tourism is an obvious part of globalisation, but there are other implications of these increasing connections. We pointed out that Aden was for a time left behind while ports in the Gulf, nearer to oil, flourished. More recently the dominance of Dubai has been challenged by Salalah in Oman, and Aden in Yemen. Maersk and Sea-Land, two big shipping companies, have bought stakes in Salalah, and the Port of Singapore Authority is running Aden. Dubai has an agreement to manage Beirut port.74 The links spread far and wide. So also with people. Thanks to cheap air travel, Nigerians now work in Jiddah and Mecca, and Koreans and Thais in the Gulf. Somalis working in the Arab world are numerous, and in the 1980s the remittances they sent home were thirteen times the Somalia-based wage bill.75 The sea is also now becoming territorialised. We noted earlier that much of the ocean is the commons, open to exploitation by all, and this is still the case overall. Yet littoral states now claim as their actual territory a zone of 12 nautical miles from the shore, and their Exclusive Economic Zones extend to 200 miles from shore. More and more of the ocean is 'owned' by some state or other. This is facilitated by the way modern techniques, using satellite navigation, can draw lines in the ocean to show boundaries, just as has been done on land for centuries.
Another deleterious, albeit controversial, aspect of a more integrated world is that environmental problems are often global in scale. Global warming, mostly a consequence of rich world industry releasing greenhouse gasses, is claimed to be causing a rise in the level of the ocean. Average global temperatures went up about ½° C in the twentieth century, and the sea level rose between 4 and 10 inches over the same period. Records show that 1998 was the warmest year ever since temperatures began to be recorded 150 years ago. As an Indian Ocean consequence, the Maldives, where most of the 1,200 islands are no more than a metre above sea level, are likely to be under water within thirty years.76
Coral reefs are important tourist attractions, and form a fascinating natural underseascape. They have been under threat for at least fifty years. In the late 1960s Jacques Cousteau worried that coral reefs were in danger as the purity of the water declined. Equally threatening, conchs were being taken to sell their shells to tourists, but they are the deadly enemy of a kind of starfish which is very destructive to coral: consequently coral suffers. More recently global warming has had a catastrophic effect on coral reefs all around the Indian Ocean. At least half of the total died in the two years up to 2000. Coral cannot tolerate a rise in sea temperatures of more than 1 or 2°C for more than a few weeks, yet in the Seychelles in 1998 the temperature was 3°C above seasonal norms for several weeks. The results have been far-reaching. It is estimated that in 1998–99 the death of the coral, or its bleaching to an unattractive monochrome, cost the Maldives' economy about $US 36 million in 1998–99, a result of the impact on tourism and on local fishers.77
There is atmospheric pollution also. In 1999 a haze of air pollution covered some 10 million square kilometres of the Indian Ocean. It was caused by burning fossil fuels from India, China and southeast Asia blown over the ocean by the northeast monsoon. The result was acid rain and lower temperatures. In 1997 the warming of the western Indian Ocean is considered to have caused excessive rain over East Africa, and consequently a rise in the level of Africa's lakes, and severe flooding on the Nile. In many of the littoral countries indiscriminate clearing of forests has had very adverse effects. It is estimated that for ecological stability one-third of any given area needs tree cover, but in India this is down to 10 per cent. This leads to greater flooding, but also the reverse: as the forest cover diminishes, rainfall declines.78
Threats to the environment are not that new. The ecology of St Paul and Amsterdam islands was radically changed around 1800 by imported and then feral pigs, deer and rabbits, so that, as a contemporary mourned, 'Once they were green, now they are brown, desolate and despoiled.'79 The dodo was rendered extinct by European hunting and introduced animals. In the early 1950s Cousteau was at the Aldabra islands, which consist of four small atolls. He found thousands of giant land tortoises, some with shells five feet long. Herbivores, they graze on grass and seem to have no enemies. Then he went on to a neighbouring island and found heaps of tortoise skeletons. All the grass and shrubs had been eaten by f
eral goats, and the tortoises had starved.80 The dugong, or sea cow, is threatened by poachers with modern nylon nets. They even use dynamite sometimes. In the southern Indian Ocean both the Patagonian toothfish and whales are threatened by illegal fishing boats. One estimate puts the value of this illegal trade in the toothfish alone at about $US150 million.81
Other littoral areas have been detrimentally affected by various governmental policies. We wrote earlier of the Marsh Arabs and their unique culture (see page 42), but their whole way of life is now close to extinction. Over the last 25 years the size of the marshes has dwindled by no less than 90 per cent. This has been caused by drainage to provide irrigation water elsewhere, and by building massive dams up stream, not only in Iraq but also in Turkey, Iran and Syria. Saddam Hussain has favoured the end of the marshes, for they provide a refuge for Shia Muslims often opposed to his dictatorship. Much of the landscape is now salt deserts, the people are in refugee camps. The smooth coated otter, once common, is now extinct, and migrating birds are left with no havens.82
A final ecological problem is the vast traffic in oil from the Gulf to the rest of the world. Years ago Thor Heyerdahl had a bad time in the Straits of Hurmuz:
By midday we found ourselves for the first time in a terribly polluted area. Small clots and large slices of solidified black oil or asphalt floated closely packed everywhere in a manner that clearly testified to recent tanker washings. But the black tar soup was all mixed with bobbing cans, bottles and other refuse, and an incredible quantity of solid, useable wood: logs, planks, boards, cases, grids and large sheets of plywood. One such sheet carried a deadly yellow snake as passenger. All the wood was smeared and clotted with oil from the seas that tossed it about.83
The Indian Ocean Page 46
