The same cannot be said of many tourist cities, and being in Hue got me thinking about the notion of “sustainable tourism.” I paid a motorbike driver 100,000VND, or about 7 dollars this morning to take me to some of the tombs outside the city. It took 3 hours of his life, and allowed me to see what I wanted to see in the time frame I wanted to do it. If a moto-bike driver can get one customer like me each day, they are essentially making 2400 dollars a year, or over double the average per-capita GDP. Obviously, this is a good thing for said moto-bike driver, but less good for the fabric of the city. The temptation to eschew a traditional (and lower paying) career in hopes of making the same killing that the moto-bike driver or convenience store owner, or tour guide is strong. Given a choice, some people give up their farms, their educations , and their stable jobs for a chance to make the same money that a tourist-centric employee is making. Except that we all know not everyone can make that money, and that the initial development of tourism skews the local economies in such a way that when things calm down again, only tourists or the super-rich can afford to stay there (case in point: Venice.) So can tourism really be sustainable?
Monday, January 11, 2010
Tourism for Development?
I like Hue. It’s a cute little town with enough history here to make it interesting; there are nice monuments to check out, like the imperial citadel of the last Vietnamese dynasty and the tombs of some of the more famous emperors. Unfortunately, many of the monuments are being reconstructed, much like they are in China, completely from scratch, so I’m glad I got here earlier rather than later. At the same time, it’s not completely a tourist town, and has thus far managed to maintain its own identity. I always like going somewhere that still has a real city underneath the tourist veneer. Hue is still a functioning city, as the school children biking through the city and the local market along the riverside attest to. Case is, with or without tourists, Hue would still be here.
The same cannot be said of many tourist cities, and being in Hue got me thinking about the notion of “sustainable tourism.” I paid a motorbike driver 100,000VND, or about 7 dollars this morning to take me to some of the tombs outside the city. It took 3 hours of his life, and allowed me to see what I wanted to see in the time frame I wanted to do it. If a moto-bike driver can get one customer like me each day, they are essentially making 2400 dollars a year, or over double the average per-capita GDP. Obviously, this is a good thing for said moto-bike driver, but less good for the fabric of the city. The temptation to eschew a traditional (and lower paying) career in hopes of making the same killing that the moto-bike driver or convenience store owner, or tour guide is strong. Given a choice, some people give up their farms, their educations , and their stable jobs for a chance to make the same money that a tourist-centric employee is making. Except that we all know not everyone can make that money, and that the initial development of tourism skews the local economies in such a way that when things calm down again, only tourists or the super-rich can afford to stay there (case in point: Venice.) So can tourism really be sustainable?
The same cannot be said of many tourist cities, and being in Hue got me thinking about the notion of “sustainable tourism.” I paid a motorbike driver 100,000VND, or about 7 dollars this morning to take me to some of the tombs outside the city. It took 3 hours of his life, and allowed me to see what I wanted to see in the time frame I wanted to do it. If a moto-bike driver can get one customer like me each day, they are essentially making 2400 dollars a year, or over double the average per-capita GDP. Obviously, this is a good thing for said moto-bike driver, but less good for the fabric of the city. The temptation to eschew a traditional (and lower paying) career in hopes of making the same killing that the moto-bike driver or convenience store owner, or tour guide is strong. Given a choice, some people give up their farms, their educations , and their stable jobs for a chance to make the same money that a tourist-centric employee is making. Except that we all know not everyone can make that money, and that the initial development of tourism skews the local economies in such a way that when things calm down again, only tourists or the super-rich can afford to stay there (case in point: Venice.) So can tourism really be sustainable?
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2 comments:
Hey Wayne - Do you have some kind of graphic of Vietnam that shows where you have been / where you are going? It's interesting reading about these cities that you're visiting, but I know nothing about them except for what you write in your blog so I don't get much of a feel for the places that you're visiting.
Yo, I'll try to put one together soon. Good suggestion. I should do that for each of the places I visit. I have also been wanting to show a daily budget, but that's been really hard to keep up with.
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