This week's post is about my experiences as a tourist and reflections on how tourism affects people, cultures, the environment, and more!
I grew up in a family that prioritized visiting family. We made every effort to fly to Santiago, Chile or to Frankfurt, Germany to visit family every few Christmases or summer holidays. We were the only people from both sides of my family who lived more than a few hours drive from another family member. Unfortunately, as we got older, finding enough time to make the trip worth the cost and effort became more difficult. Nevertheless, I grew up used to the idea of seeing new places not as a tourist, but rather a person of that country who happens to live somewhere far away. I only ever felt like a tourist when my parents, sisters and I took what we would call a vacation to see somewhere completely new for all of us, by ourselves.
I have never done a service-learning program or volunteered in another country, largely because of the expense and being wary of how temporary and fragile the situations can be. While I was on my FSP in Madrid, Spain last fall, I had every intention to volunteer and sent a few emails to connect to a few community- based health initiatives. None of the steps I took ever blossomed into a project and the months passed fairly quickly immersing myself in Spanish culture and living in a city with so many different cafes to study in, streets to wander, and museums and gardens to visit.
I have traveled to Chile every couple of years to visit family but never experienced the country as a tourist until my sophomore year of high school when my parents, sisters and I planned a trip to the Atacama Desert and went skiing. Up until then, my visits had consisted of having a home base at my grandmother’s apartment and spending the two to three weeks going from the home of one of my mother’s eight siblings and their many kids to another. We would also travel to the family ranch, the coast, and southern lakes region, but the trips felt different from any other forms of tourism I have experienced. Upon reflection, I’m not sure what made them feel so untouristic. I didn’t learn Spanish until 7th grade and even with some command over the language, I was always the gringa cousin unfamiliar with the people and places we spent time in, and my family did share some of their Santiago with us. Perhaps it was the intention and itinerary that made the trips feel different from traveling with my family though Europe. We always went to Chile with the intention of seeing family.
The setting was secondary and so even the museums and parts of Santiago we visited together felt different as they were so much smaller of a portion of our trip, my family and I were never in charge of deciding what we were going to do, our pace was much laxer, and it was becoming familiar with my mom’s past. I think there is a form of agency that comes with tourism when one decides how one will get to know and navigate the place that is inherently different from visiting family who largely decide the whats and whens.
I think there may also be something to be said about having homes to stay in as my experience studying abroad in Madrid showed that even a foreign city could feel like home while traveling elsewhere in the country as I had a home base that allowed me to be much more established and trusting.
Our time in the north in the Atacama Desert was spent at a resort and going on planned package excursions with other tourists in the resort vans with prepared meal spreads and checking off the things to see in the area from natural salt reservoirs to walking through some of the little towns.
After watching Gringo Trails and using the readings to guide my reflection on these experiences, I realized that my experience in the Kunza Resort in the Atacama was perhaps more similar to the most uncomfortable vacation I’ve ever taken with my family to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic than I had previously thought it was.
The Kunza Resort was one of the few and new resorts in the desert that had recently just become accessible to visitors. My mom, born and raised in Chile, had never been able to go and so it was completely new to all of us. This form of cultural and natural tourism put San Pedro (the town) newly on the map and it’s not until today that I am wondering what footprints I left by being a part of that- what does it look like today, several years later?
It had all been so new and barely developed that nothing there had cued me into feeling as if there was more beneath the surface of my trip, the way I felt in Punta Cana. My experience in the Dominican Republic was solely in the airport and the resort. While my family at that point had desperately needed a week at the beautiful beaches just relaxing, I felt as if we didn’t actually visit the DR as I knew nothing more about the country after our visit than before because I had stayed within the walled boundaries of the resort. The excessive behavior, falling apart infrastructure left behind or covered up, and immense difference in wealth and situation between the spaces within the resort walls and the rest of the island made the whole experience feel like a disturbing temporary reality.
All in all, each one of these experiences have been a unique and shaping experience. But as I’ve articulated some of my reflections, I realize how much more I have to think about and better develop to understand what is it about each of these experiences that made me feel like a tourist, consumer, native, or something else.