We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20676923.
I visited Venice in December '04. We stayed at a proto-Air-BnB (Air BnB didn't exist yet, but it was something very similar). Talking to the host we learned that she was from Moldova. The owners of the apartment lived elsewhere in Italy and only visited rarely. We went out to a restaurant and again, the people running it were not Italians - Eastern Europeans. It seemed very similar wherever we went in Venice.
The whole Venice experience seemed a lot like a sort of ancient Disney Land. It was the real old stuff, but somehow it just didn't seem real. Drunk tourists stumbling about getting their pics taken with people dressed up as masquaraders. It was kind of a bizarre experience. I much preferred the other out-of-the way, small Italian villages we visited on that trip.
I’m from the African continent and there is incredible culture to be found there.
While I agree that mass tourism is damaging, the Indians, Chinese and Africans can’t all be painted under the same brush of mass tourism. That is to miss the details. To assume that everyone coming from those places is like that. We used to think that all Americans were as you described: ignorant and willing to consume African culture with their dollars. How wrong I was.
I live in a popular tourist destination in the UK and there are busloads of Europeans damaging the city centre, leaving trash in the parks. Who are they and what right do they have? They’re probably from some European town suffering the same fate.
My point is that this kind of argument is inciteful and labels only a particular set of people as the ones to blame. This world has become consumerist. The whole world is at fault. You only see the newest emerging groups and blame them.
Let’s rather shift the conversation to the “culture of mass tourism” and not the “culture of the others” coming on their buses.
I do agree with you that there are beautiful parts of Africa, and interesting cultures to some degree, but even you don't want to be there, declare the white country you live in as the far superior to all others, including Africa, so it's not exactly like you are a good argument for why anyone would want to go to Africa ... especially if you don't want to be there ... as you try to be primitively manipulative in trying to slander people as "racist" for pointing out the reality of the destruction of the very engine that has driven all of humanity for thousands of years now.
I guarantee you are lying, or at the very least, exaggerating that "Europeans damaging the city centre". The difference is that Europeans traveling in Europe and the functioning society being able to handle sustainable levels of European tourists is not the same thing as mass Chinese tour busses or millions of Africans invading their continent and cities and then becoming burdens on the rest of society, just like they were unsustainable burdens where they came from in Africa. Reality is that by 2100 there will be about 9 BILLION Asians and Africans for the rest of the whole world's 1.5 billion ... There is simply no way but the way to hell to ignore the reality that this will lead to nothing but disaster no matter how any sane and intelligent person looks at it. It will end poorly no matter how an intelligent person looks at it, one way or another, if this insane LARPing continues that assumes that people who have not produced or contributed anything of value yet make up the crushing mass of humans on earth are somehow equal to the people who have essentially produced everything of value while being an actual tiny minority on the planet are somehow the same and equal. Exceptions as yourself simply don't make the rule, regardless of whether you are proving white supremacy by living in a white country or not.
Not sure why you'd single out the Chinese tourists.
Most American/English/German/Australian/Russian etc tourists are just as ghastly and vacuous - to the point of there being several idioms and cultural artifacts in Europe about that...
Also: your point can be applied to any consumption, not only to travel. Everyone of the 4.5 billon owing a car won't work either.
btw: even though you are asking for it not to be, your comment comes across as condescending.
we're not, but we are. There's a lot of potential but currently we are acting more like a cancer than bacteria.
Right now, Boston gets Chinese tour groups who are visiting just to enjoy cleaner air than they have at home. So it's true that they're not engaging with us locals at all. But when they go back, they'll be part of the pressure to clean China's air.
Sadly, it seems you suffer from the common mentality that seems rather pervasive among European people's overall, a sense of a kind of self-righteous ignorance, of presuming an equality mirrored on one's own culture, values, ideals, nature, and character; essentially the manifestation of the delusional belief that "we are all the same" and that muddling and mixing falsely equates to diversity.
Reality simply is that not all humans share the characteristics or values and ideals that have emerged from the rotten and pernicious western experience of abundance combined with various other cultural and traditional characteristics. No, the combined 3 BILLION people of India and China are not going to "meet each other, talk and learn" as they swarm and swamp Europe and the USA's measly combined <1 billion population, nor will the 4.5 Billion Africans somehow just want to talk and learn and meet in 2100 when the combined crush of humanity starts really gripping.
We are seeing these articles just now, as a relatively small subset of each of those populations has any means whatsoever to travel and become tourists, just wait until the exponentially rising numbers of them have the means to travel to swamp Europe and the USA, when citizens won't even have the ability to see their own cultural sites or artifacts in anything like peace or focus as billions of "tourists" flood into the relatively few places of interest.
no, this is just the beginning of far greater consequences of ill guided, self-righteous tyranny that is always common to the self-appointed authoritarian ruling class. This is the future you and we have condemned our children to, being overrun and dissociated with our own cultural heritage out of misguided delusional co-dependent and enabling policies of overpopulation of the planet.