It’s only been in the last two years that I’ve been able to travel outside of the United States. Prior to meeting my husband, I’d been all over the United States (and to Canada, once). My primary exposure to the business of tourism had been during the summer before I turned 21, when I had worked on a very small cruise vessel for nine weeks in Southeast Alaska. I had intended the trip as a working vacation however I ended up moving to Seattle, as a result. When I met Shawn a decade later, his profession of poker dealer had enabled him to take cruise vacations at a reduced price, while still earning his weekly wage. A small tour company called Card Player Cruises marketed international cruises that offered their clients the ability to cruise the world while playing poker, and Shawn had signed up to deal poker. The first cruise we took together would be a return trip to Southeast Alaska aboard one of the smaller ships in the Royal Caribbean fleet.
My crewmates had always spoken somewhat derisively of the bigger ships. Our boat was only 150 ft. long, and sold “adventure cruises” that promoted nature based excursions such as kayaking and hiking. Passengers traveled in a small group, had the choice each night at dinner between chicken and fish, and on the last night, enjoyed the Captain’s Dinner featuring Prime Rib and an electrifying proximity to the Sawyer Glacier, while our boat rotated around its anchor. We followed the same route as many of the large cruise lines, and often times we’d see a large ship pass us by and brace ourselves for the wake our small, flat-bottomed boat was about to ride. “I hope they enjoy watching the glaciers calve from their staterooms,” one of my naturalist crewmates commented, once.
While my return trip to Southeast Alaska was a deeply personal milestone, I was also able to see what the naturalist had meant. Ports of call and shopping opportunity within those ports of call were the highlighted attraction, not the opportunity to observe nature. I was blown away by the level of what I call bombardment capitalism employed by the cruise line. Whether out and about within the faux village they’d ingeniously created within the ship’s centrum, or on the television in my stateroom, I was being asked, told, cajoled, or manipulated into spending money. It also became quite apparent that the cruise line had a rather interesting relationship with the diamond industry, a connection that made me exceptionally uncomfortable given my even limited understanding of the human rights issues surrounding diamond mining. The apparent formula in use was simple- get the people on the ship, take them somewhere novel, sell them diamonds on the ship, then funnel them into diamond shops in port. Never mind those beautiful mountains or the rich cultural life, buy, they’d whisper, buy diamonds.
During one excursion in Skagway, the tour leader commented that he’d had a tourist ask him if the residents of the town were “real people.” “What do you mean, real people?” he’d asked. “You know,” the tourist replied, “Do they, live here, or are they actors?” Staring out the window of our tour bus, watching the little town pass by and noticing the heavy curtains in the windows of the residences to keep out the gaze of tourists, I laughed a little. It would be this mind-set that later inspired my husband and I to suggest loudly that perhaps the reason we didn’t see as many waterfalls this trip was because the cruise line hadn’t paid the bill, and they had been shut off.
The next cruise we took was to Mexico. I was horrified. I couldn’t believe Mazatlan was actually sold as a vacation destination, as though seeing it was something worth saving up for, or perhaps more accurately, charging toward future repayment. The poverty I saw was profound and crushing. The face of every street merchant I saw made me want to cry. I’d watch the other tourists bargain for their wares, the serapes, sombreros, silver jewelry, pot pipes, sarongs, friendship bracelets, cowboy hats, and the masks the wrestlers wear. One woman on the beach was about 8 months pregnant. Another woman on the street had her toddler in tow. One man stood below the open-air dining area of our restaurant selling marionettes. He stood in one place on the hot beach for over an hour. Loopy on tequila, I focused on an imaginary point on the line between sky and sea so I wouldn’t see everything else.
I returned from that trip glad to be tucked under America’s safe wing of prosperity and clean streets. God Bless America, I remember thinking, despite my overarching lack of belief in either concept. I never wanted to go back. I remember wondering why Mexico couldn’t just get it together the way the US had. How had the United States managed to do so well, when other countries hadn’t? And as if by cue, the Universe sent me back to school. Literally.
I didn’t mean to take Central American History and Culture per se, I just needed the credits and the class fit my schedule. But within that class, I learned why the United States had done so well economically and why Mexico and its neighbors in Central America, hadn’t. The following quarter I would learn about how a fair portion of the western US states had been stolen from Mexico amidst the spoils of manufactured war. In this time, my own culture had been shifted- I’d left my grating professional life behind, and taken up the low-status job of cocktail waitress within a casino environment that was largely Asian and Asian-American. In short, I’d learned to interact with people differently. I’d learned to look closely at the interaction between culture and kinds, to see similarities and differences and most importantly, just see. I learned to speak broken English.
Our next cruise would be onboard the biggest cruise ship in the world, bound for the Western Caribbean. Actually, it was 6 inches shorter than the biggest cruise ship in the world, which was the Allure’s sister ship, the Oasis of the Seas. I boarded the ship this time aware of what I was participating in. I’d always been interested in the experiences of the crew based on my own experience as crew on an infinitely smaller vessel. But one major point of difference was that my crew had been comprised of Americans in exclusivity. The crew on the Allure wasn’t just multicultural, it was multi-national. Even then, there appeared to be a form of segregation. Most of the service workers were from the Philippines or China and appeared to be evenly mixed between male and female. It said so on their name tag, along with a little picture of their country’s flag. Cruise ship service employees seem unfailingly friendly, helpful and patient. I wondered how these traits were selected for during their interview process. I wondered if their attitude was genuine. I wondered how they felt about their jobs, if this job was about their personal quest for independence or about sending money home to meet family obligations. I wondered how they felt about us, given the way I feel toward my own customers. On the flip side, the workers who attended to the ship’s dazzling number of hot tubs and pools were exclusively Jamaican males. They did not bother to smile at me when I passed them late at night, and I silently applauded them for the likely rebellion.
We would visit Haiti on that cruise. The cruise ship doesn’t work very hard to make this fact known to their guests. In fact, it would almost seem that they try to conceal it. Labadee, the Caribbean amusement park is the marketing angle. It would be like visiting Disneyland, if Disneyland were located in the most socio-economically compromised neighborhood in Los Angeles. Labadee, Caribbean is also how the port is marketed on the glossy brochures and endless stateroom television commercials. It features a nearly-mile long zip line over the beach. The beach looks to be made of the created rock compounds that zoos use to create habitats for penguins and polar bears. I suspect this is to prevent beach erosion. The whole thing is sold as a private island, even though it’s just fenced off from mainland Haiti. Shawn and I sit under a tree and drink rum drinks, “Haitian Breakfast Smoothies” as we dub them, while watching the Americans move over the landscape like ants.
I left that cruise with a desire to fit the cruise industry, and its parent business of tourism into a neat category of either “good thing” or “bad thing”. I read Sharon Bohn Gmelch’s article entitled Why Tourism Matters found within the course text out of personal curiosity at the beginning of the term. Within the article, Gmelch calls tourism a unique form of globalization, and I would agree. She points out that the tourism industry as a whole has an interest in preserving the culture of the places being visited, so as to market those unique attributes as incentives to visit. She goes on to suggest that that “…tourism does not necessarily destroy cultural differences.” (358).
I think about this when I visit Falmouth, Jamaica. As an export hub, Falmouth had once been the wealthiest-and busiest- port in Jamaica. Trade ships would swarm the harbor, sometimes twenty to thirty of them, dropping off African slaves and picking up rum, sugar cane, and bananas. I learn this from our tour guide, Trisha. She describes the country’s history with a remarkable level of detachment. She repeatedly tells us that “Columbus discovered Jamaica in 1494,” and I wince. She tells us about Harry Belafonte being native to Jamaica. She sings us the song with the familiar refrain, “daylightcomanIwannagohome,” in a flat tone with her thick Jamaican accent and I think about slave songs. The song tells the story of workers in the banana fields, harvesting in the night. They ask the tallyman to come count their harvest, because daylight has come and they want to go home.
Slavery was abolished in Jamaica in 1838, Trisha tells us. It would seem the English had no responsible use for Jamaica after that, based on the hallmarks of poverty that appear along the road. We see a fairly endless distribution of concrete block homes in various states of construction. The rebar sticks up from the concrete forms taking shape on the round, grassy hills. She explains the Jamaican system for acquiring home ownership. It involves bidding on land, a process that can take over five years. Then, the owner pays for the land. Then they start to build their homes as they acquire the funds. Based on the number of incomplete homes, one suspects this can take a lifetime to actually accomplish. Little towns spring up along the main highway as we travel toward our tubing destination. Open air complexes, small shanty-like communities and people on foot characterize each town. Trisha explains that gasoline is over six dollars a gallon US. The sign says 119.70 in Jamaican currency. I see a country without a credit system. It occurs to me that the majority of the US may not look so much different than Jamaica, if we didn’t have the ability to finance our future. It occurs to me also that large parts of the US don’t look that much different than this, they’re just missing the beautiful Caribbean backdrop.
We notice the trash littering the streets in some of the smaller, more impoverished towns. Shawn asks me how much money it takes to just pick up the trash. None, I tell him, it just requires a person to care. Trisha tells us that the garbage is collected and burned in Jamaica. She also shares with us some of the favorite expressions in Jamaica, like “No problem.” “We say this in Jamaica, because here we have no problems, only situations.” I watch the countryside unfold from the window of our bus and think about this way of framing perception. When so much is largely out of one’s hands, it seems a clever way to make something hurt less, a variation on the theme of a slave song.
It will be a long, beautiful day for us in Jamaica. After our tubing trip run by locals, we will drink a rum drink so strong I’ll suspect I could light my breath on fire. Then we’ll climb Dunn’s River Falls. I notice one of our fall guides wears a wedding ring, and I nudge Shawn. “How do you suppose his evening routine goes?” I ask. “Hi honey, how was your day!?” I say, imitating the stereotypical American wife. “Oh you know,” I answer myself, “just another day leading the white American tourists up the waterfall over and over. But I made $75!”
I think about Gmelch’s assertion that tourism doesn’t necessarily destroy cultural differences. In this environment, she’s absolutely correct. Here, I see cultural differences reinforced. Here, amidst the giant port and bauxite stained mills, it looks like history, on replay- perhaps a modernized retelling of the same, exact story. It seems to me that the relationship with tourism is more of a modern day slave trade, because while it provides something, it doesn’t appear to provide enough. It’s a theoretical enslavement this time, a potentially forced dependence upon external direction and standard. It’s the is-ought fallacy being acted out, on a global scale- the political, social and institutional suggestion that that which is, is that which ought to be. And so, the cultural difference being upheld is that between the haves and the have-nots, more than anything else.
But it is, inarguably, too late to turn back. History has been written and now modern tourists enjoy the benefit of what was left after colonialism had its turn with the people and the region. But it’s hard to see that in exclusively negative terms, despite the history that lead us to this place. I asked myself, repeatedly, “if not this, then what?” If the people of the popular Caribbean islands didn’t have tourism to support themselves, no matter how meagerly, what would they do instead? In Jamaica, for example, bauxite is one of the primary exports, along with bananas. However, bauxite production has been in decline, I learn from the CIA World Fact Book. Additionally, for a young woman like Trisha, I’m certain being a tour guide to Americans is preferable to working in a mine. I know which job I’d rather have, at least.
It remains difficult to classify tourism as an entirely good or entirely bad thing, despite my desire to do so. The only conclusion I’ve been able to reach is I need more information about the significant impact tourism clearly has. It seems reasonable to think that tourism is something that can be conducted responsibly if we find a way to maximize the positive impact of the practice, while minimizing the negative impacts. In the end, responsible tourism lies with the tourist, and highlights the need, as Gmelch concludes her article to, “Be a good global citizen and care” (363).
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