Transcript

Tourism and the force of change | Leonardo (Don) A.N. Dioko | TEDxUniversityofMacau

[Music] We're back in business. Uh I've I've been having a such a terrific time and congratulations to the organizers for putting this together. Uh tonight I'd like to talk to you about a different kind of force. uh and it's the force of tourism and it's such a massive force that it's affecting a lot of us in an individual sense and in also a bigger sense as much as the sense of our community. I'd like to talk about tourism because it's something that affects us all and it's such a massive force. In 1995, the UNW the UN WTO estimated that there were half a billion tourists around the world. 20 years later, the number more than doubled. In 2015, it was estimated that 1.2 billion people traveled around the world. And just think about that number. It's 1 in seven or about one in six roughly. And that means one profound thing that we live amongst visitors, that we live amongst strangers, that one out of seven of every person that we meet actually come from another place. And that's a very profound thought, but it's also something that changes our experiences forever. One other thing about this numbers is that more people now more than ever are traveling to more places more often. And that means one big implication. It means that our heritage sites, our visitor attractions are all buckling under the weight of this massive force called tourism. And it's not just our heritage sites. It's not just our visitor attractions. It's also our cities and our community. So think of this city called Venice, a very famous city, not Venetian. Um, and it's a very historic city. And do you know that now there are more visitors in Venice on a particular day than there are residents? And the reason is that there are these huge cruise ships that very often dock on its ports and disorges thousands of tourists on any given day. And it's caused a profound change, a very very dramatic change in the way the city has run its course that in the life of the citizens of its of its city. Venice now has changed so much that its shops has changed. No longer serving so much the residents but so much more the visitors. A lot of its residents can't find housing because a lot of the accommodations are allocated for visitors. And because of this, a lot of the Venetians are actually up in arms and protesting against tourism. But that's not it. uh in some of the most popularly visited attractions all over the world, people are actually saying enough of tourism. We can't take anymore. So this is Kyua, a small town near where Barack Obama used to live. And the people there are actually telling their state governments, we don't want any more tourists. And there are other places like Barcelona where the people have actually become very violent towards tourism. they have actually expressed very very uh in very obvious ways their antagonism towards tourists and even Barcelona's mayor has actually said go away we don't want any more tourists in Barcelona and it's these series of events that actually has made the New York Times a couple of years ago sort of like identify a trend that's occurring everywhere around the world and it's this revolt against tourism an anti-our tourism trend. And this is not all. In places like Lisbon, people have actually formed advocacy groups to oppose tourism and the kind of tourism that is inundating their city. And there I'm afraid there there are also worse reactions to this massive force of tourism. There's this picturesque village of Siner in Italy uh in an island that has actually closed off their islands to any more tourists. Before you can visit this island now, you're going to have to make pre-arranged pre-booked arrangements. And it's not just in Italy. Much closer to Macau is the island of Kotachai in Thailand. And the government authorities have recently closed off this island because it's been degraded to the point where they believe that it can no longer recover from the onslaught of tourism that it has experienced over the years. And in our own hometown of Macau, our streets, our narrow, charming cobblestone streets were never really designed to handle too many tourists, thousands of tourists. Macau is actually a very charming city and its streets are very very historic, but it's hard to get that when it's inundated and filled with visitors. Don't you agree? We seem to have lost the charm that actually draws tourists to Macau to visit. And this is a picture that I think is iconic with the great problem that tourism is facing all around the world. This is a small village, a very magical village in the Mechong River and it's the village of Luang Prabang and it's a very uh Buddhist village with many Buddhist temples and here you have a picture of Buddhist monks going about their daily uh solemn practice of collecting alms from the people and yet you have tour buses disorging tourists delivering tourists right in front of their faces. Uh it's very very intrusive. Don't you agree? And so much so that the personal space of these Buddhist monks to be able to practice their long traditions, their long-held traditions are actually very much um disappearing or under threat. I don't know about you, but this picture is very much like a stranger in my bathroom as I take a shower. uh and it's ve and it's that intrusive and it's that powerful a force that tourism exerts on many communities on which it bears upon. So I think the the force of tourism is all about guests and host and how we interact uh uh in a better way. Now we can take a lot of visitors as long as we keep a sort a certain kind of buffer zone between us and them. We can even become more closer and actually sometimes we like tourists. We like to interact with them. We we would like to befriend them and actually have a cup of tea with them, isn't it? But it's when tourism gets out of hand and it invades our personal space that tourism no longer becomes a force for peace and understanding. Instead, it becomes a force for hostility and conflict. A long time ago, my wife, who was not my wife then, taught me my first expression in Chinese, which was which I don't know what that that meant many many years ago, but roughly translated in English, I think it goes something like this, that it's great seeing you, but I don't want to sleep with you. And and remember this was my wife before before we got married and she was saying so I I I think she was sending me a message that I was intruding upon her personal space. But I think before you conclude that tourism is a force for harm and it's a destructive force. Please hold that thought because there are many places around the world that needs tourism. There are many communities that actually thirst for the kind of visitors that we receive here in Macau. This is a museum somewhere in the villages north of Bali Island. Uh it's in Ubud and this is a museum that curates many historic Balines traditional rice paintings. Uh and that was handed down by the parents of its present curator. And the problem with this museum is that it hardly gets any visitation at all. And the problem of the owner is that in order to preserve these Balan paintings which are painted on rice paper, he needs air conditioning. And in order to pay for the air conditioning cost, which is considerable, he needs visitors. And yet you have the island of the island of Bali and its surrounding areas receiving thousands of visitors. And yet there are pockets that don't receive any visitation at all. in Beijing. One of the biggest contradictions of tourism in Beijing is that Beijing is one of the most often visited place on the planet. And yet what's happening to Beijing opera is that it is losing its audiences. So much so that it can't fund anymore its apprenticeship program, that it can't train new people to take up the art of Beijing opera. And where I come from in a small village uh where there are fishing fishing fishing folks um what they did was in the past was to slaughter the biggest fish there is in the ocean. They're called whale sharks. Although they're called whale sharks, they're not sharks at all. They're very ve very very gentle creatures. And whereas before fishermen used to slaughter these for meat that they can sell, with the help of tourism, they are now able to earn much more money by bringing visitors more closely to enjoy these beauty uh of the ocean. And this is one of the reasons why tourism can also be a force for good. So it it's very important for us to find out what makes tourism so negative. What makes it a repulsive instead of an attractive force? Well, there's the usual reasons of uh increasing income, greater mobility, and a rising middle class. There's also greater connectivity, but there are also two other important factors that somehow destroys the tourism experience for all of us. And one of these is the lowcost transport and the lowcost carriers that we often always enjoy ourselves, don't we? But what it has done is that it has allowed us to travel far more than to understand the places that we travel to. It has allows it has allowed us to experience touristic experiences before we can even learn anything about them. I'm sure you've already probably booked a an air ticket for next year. And that's what lowcost carriers do. They make us travel before we understand. And there's another insidious thing about lowcost travel. It's because whenever we receive guest, it used to be that people will write you letters. Dear Dawn, I plan to visit you sometime summer of next year. And that's great. We welcome the the prospect of receiving guests. But what we what we hate now, what I really personally hate is somebody calling up, dawn, I'll be there on Friday. Can you pick me up? Don't you hate that? And that I think destroys the prospects for tourism. There's another factor that destroys tourism which is social media. Because instead of us discovering travel on our own, we tend to look at these must-see lists, these to-do lists. And this destroys something that's very important part of tourism, which is the art of getting lost. In other words, instead of discovering a place, we simply takeick off a list. Oh, did my friends go there? I want to go there, too. And that's a very very important part of the travel experience to actually feel lost. I think social media has destroyed serendipity in our travel experience. Do you know what serendipity is? Serendipity is being surprised by joy. And I think that's what makes travel such a pleasant experience. It's actually getting lost and finding your way back. But that is being destroyed by social media. So a very important question dawns upon us all. How do we tame this force? Well, there are some strategies that as a community we do. But I think the most important I will speak about later which is something that we can do on a personal basis. One is that well we can just simply absorb all of these tourists which means building bigger facilities like border crossings, building bigger airports, building more roads. The problem is that's good if you're a big country, not so good if you're an island or in a place like Macau where we have limited land, isn't it? Another strategy is to simply divert tourist. We call this dispersion. The problem with tourism is that it concentrates visitors on just a few areas and we call these islands or hot beds of tourist activity. And what it does is that it alters the city forever. Instead of spreading tourists all over, getting lost amongst uh the beauty and charm of our city, they're all congested and crowded in just a few places. And what this does, it it actually destroys some community. Some communities succeed and some others don't. Another possibility and one that we are practicing right now in Macau is to actually ask the question of how much tourism is too much. This is the strategy of preeemption and it and it boils down to a single idea which is finding that optimum balance not having too few tourists but not having too much either. So we have to find this magical range in which we can invite tourists to our uh city and serve them very very well. And we asked this various questions on how to find out what is the optimum number of visitors that we can handle in Macau. And we ask sort of questions like how is your quality of life? How do you find the pollution in Macau? How's your income? And how is your job? Is it stressful now? And with this we can actually find as we do in our research at the center where I work. We actually find some relationship. It's a very significant relationship to be exact about the number of tourists that we get and the kind of quality of life that people get. And what we discover is that there is a range of number that numbers that we can manage wherein we can say that there's already too much tourists visiting Macau. And remember it works both ways. When we need more tourists then we need to promote Macau more. It all boils down to marketing. I am always wondering why our marketing and many other destinations marketing has one central message which is to come and visit. I would like to see marketing and promotion of destinations that says don't visit now it's best to visit on some other time because we ourselves will get disappointed if we come to a destination spend all our hard-earned money and our leisure time and find that the whole place is filled with tourists isn't it so it's something that's what that that what many people call sustainability I think there's another thing that we can do in order to fix tourism instead Instead of making it a force for destruction, we can make it a force for construction. Instead of being a harmful force, it can be a beneficial force. And I think it all boils down to another thought which is to understand that we are part and parcel of this tourism force that we ourselves actually cause the negativity surrounding tourists. And why is that? Because it all is related to our behavior as visitors. How we travel, when we travel, and where we travel affects very much the destinations that we visit. What we buy and what we eat. I can't for the likes of me understand why some people would eat who eat hamburgers in their home place would travel hours and thousands of miles and eat hamburgers in that destination. So, it's very very surprising. If you aren't ready to eat the food of different cultures, maybe you're not ready to travel at all. And I think this speaks a lot about how tourism really either builds up a place or damages a place. And what we buy, we should not be buying from large malls or shopping centers. We should be going to the small and small businesses, going to the street stores and supporting local goods and products. And there's one more thing how we can be a force for good or a force for evil in terms of tourism which is how we engage with the locals, how we speak with them, how we treat them with respect or with uh with courtesy and politeness. And many times it's simply how we dress as we travel. Unfortunately, some people don't dress at all, which is what happened, which is actually what happened to two pathetic pairs in Barcelona a couple of years back. So, these two drunken tourists went about their daily visiting around Barcelona in their birthday clothes. And you can see the reaction from the residents viewing uh and this this picture is very iconic of the problem that we face in tourism today. Far more than the thousands of numbers of visitors is the few visitors that actually misbehave, that behave in a disrespectful manner. And if you think that's rare, well, here's another photograph. There were a group of tourists who climbed Mount Kinabalu in Saba, Malaysia. And after successfully climbing the summit, first thing they did, remove their clothes. Um, I don't know about you, what is it with young people removing their clothes, isn't it? uh maybe they felt triumphant, maybe they felt so happy having uh succeeded in climbing the mountain. Uh but let me ask you a question. When you graduate and get your degree, is your first action to tear off your clothes? Um I do understand that travel is all about freedom, isn't it? And maybe that's what they felt. You know, when we feel free sometimes when we go back to our homes, we remove our clothes, isn't it? And I think that's that's there's something uh understandable about that. But what is striking about these events is that they happen in a very public place. So the there are men who do these in the Grand Canyon and even as far as the salt flats of Bolivia. Why does this happen? It's simply again my first contention earlier which is we are traveling before we can mature. We are now traveling at a time before we even understand the places that we visit. It used to be that before we visit a place, we would even learn about that place. We would even pick up a language book. Do you remember that time? Perhaps you can ask your parents about it. Uh but now we are try we have made bookings for next year even if we don't know what our mental state will be one year from now. So we travel first without understanding. we experience without actually learning things. And I think this speaks to us tremendously. So I would like to leave you today with this simple thought that travel is not really freedom. Travel is freedom with responsibility. And I relate this to the problem that tourism faces nowadays. Far more than the numbers that we are getting of the number of visitors that is inundating our cities. It's really the behavior that we exhibit while we visit. Marcel P, a French novelist once said that in order to have a real voyage of discovery, you do not really need to see new landscape. All you need is to see with new eyes. We do not really need to see new landscapes. We need to see with new eyes. And I think this hits all of us very much at the core of our experience in traveling. We need not be one of these machines that travel as though we were a colonial consumer. You know, feeling arrogant and behaving in a way that we have earned this right to travel and so I am free to do whatever I want to do. No, we should change that. We should regard the places that we visit with a lot of dignity and with a lot of civility and with a lot of courtesy and respect. I think it's a privilege to be able to travel. So, we should treat travel in a very serene and solemn sense. Thank you very much.