Travel and Tourism

A moral tourist huh?

Now that’s quite an interesting way to put it. Honestly, when it comes to forms of travel, I don’t really think there should be a better way to travel. I mean, we can all say that as tourists in other countries we have to respect their traditions, cultures and habits. We can say that we must not criticize them for anything. We can say that we must not break rules, or endanger anyone or do something ‘immoral’ in another country. But what’s the point to it?

Don’t get me wrong. I know those things are important. But chances are, if we travel legally in this era we are currently at, we already know those things. In fact, I think we have been saturated with that piece of information to the point where acting out the proper behaviour in another country as a tourist becomes second nature to us. We don’t have to make a conscious effort to not break the rules the country has in place, or we don’t have to push ourselves to try and not be offensive to people or harshly critical or degrade another culture, no. The laws already ensure that. But perhaps I am talking about the wrong kinds of tourists here.

When we visit a country for amusement or sightseeing, no one in the world should be able to argue against that being a bad thing. In effect, we will surely bring along some cultures from our part of the world that may integrate into the behaviours of the people we interact with, but that’s accepted. That is an aspect to globalization that one must accept. There can no longer be a completely original or isolated culture. Modern society has already written against that. In fact, you can almost say that governments nowadays ordain an intermingling of cultures, whether it be for tourism, economy, diversity, the list goes on.

But what did I mean by the wrong kinds of tourists? My point is it doesn’t take long to figure out in this day and age that there’s a black market for everything. Every law has a loophole, and every loophole has powerful people readily exploiting it. It is in this sense that tourism can be deemed immoral. If our intentions of travel are to harm or benefit at the expense of others, then yes, we are engaging in an immoral tourism industry. But we already knew that didn’t we?

Perhaps what I am saying here is that in my mind, for now at least, the lines between tourism, moral and immoral, are quite finely drawn. Should the intentions and follow through lean towards what society deems moral, and should our actions line up with what the global laws, and the countries’ law dictates, I see no problem with such travel. But perhaps that is privy to change in the upcoming days. Who knows?

-Raving Ranter