Couchfish

Midway through The Last Tourist, an orphanage tourist thinks back to her time with the kids:

“I had all the best of intentions, but in hindsight I didn’t do my homework. ... and when I got there I really learnt the horrible truth—they were there because I wanted to be there, not because they needed to be there. And because of people like me, they were separated from their families.”

The Last Tourist aims to take a critical look at where tourism came from, is, and is headed. Born out of a 2018 request by G Adventures founder Bruce Poon Tip for a film on responsible travel, the result is mixed. Released in 2021 to the North American film circuit, it’s been on a pay-per-view release over there since. For those not in North America or mad enough to be doing a Masters (how I viewed it on Kanopy), the film is now seeing a wider release. [Update: A reader has let me know Kanopy is available through many libraries—no need to sign up for a Masters!]

Wasn’t the point of travel to get lost? Screenshot via Kanopy.

Dropping in on at least ten countries, it leaps from pristine jungle to cruise ship mayhem. The latter is a stereotypical glad bag of the horrors of tourism. Maya Bay has a slot, as does Ko Pha Ngan’s Haad Rin, tiger patting, elephants, orangutans boxing, dumb tourists and so on. Selfie sticks, smart phones and Insta-posing feature over and over. With an inference destinations are little more than dumb pipes, Elizabeth Becker asks “are we just travelling for the iconic photo?” In the background, Jane Goodall hauntingly declares that tourism can kill a place. Melodramatic? Yup. Accurate? Also yes. Is any of this new? No.

Costas Christ, editor-at-large for National Geographic Traveller has some words. He reminisces on his early backpacking days in the 1970s:

“When I travelled to Asia late seventies I was already starting to see negative impacts of tourism, so it set me off looking for the unspoilt, the uncharted, and that eventually led me to a place called Ko Pha Ngan in Thailand. When I arrived in Ko Pha Ngan in 1979, I was the first tourist to have arrived on that beach.”

The beach he is referring to? Haad Rin. At this point, I turn The Last Tourist off.

My pushing the off button may seem petty, but his words are indicative of the first of two issues with the film. As Tom Vater wrote in our long read on Ko Pha Ngan, by the time Christ arrived, tourists had been in the area for years. Indeed a ferry service ran from both the mainland and Ko Samui to Ko Pha Ngan from 1976. Looking further back, King Rama V first visited in 1888—one of five visits to the island. A local tourist for sure—but local tourists are the industry’s mainstay in most countries—yet the film ignores them.

Ko Pha Ngan’s Haad Rin in not 1979. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

Returning to it a few weeks later, I persevere. The first third of the film is heavy on talking heads—almost all from the West—discussing what ails tourism. They’re experts in their fields for sure, and do a good job iterating through the flaws, but something is missing. Where are the voices from China—the world’s second largest outbound market in 2019? Unless I missed it, in the entire film, China gets a single mention. Likewise there isn’t one governmental speaker. This lack of vital voices is the second problem. Another missing aspect is discussions around slow tourism, though to be fair there is only so much one can cram into a 90 minute film—or a 19-day tour itinerary.

These issues baffle and underline the film’s West-centric view. Then, everything improved. The founder of Sustainable Travel & Tourism Agenda, Judy Kepher-Gona, started speaking. And she knocks it out of the park.

An eloquent and passionate speaker, she’s also one who comes across as a no-b******t operator. Early on, while a bit wonkish, she summarises the whole mess in a few sentences:

“Tourism has created consumption patterns in the minds of the traveller that need to be deconstructed a little bit. We have to change our mindsets about travel. The leakage is huge. Tourism can perpetuate poverty by not integrating communities and you find, ... the most acclaimed tourism destinations also have the highest levels of poverty, but why does it happen? Because they were never integrated into the tourism value chain.”

This in essence, is a large part of the problem with tourism. Locals don’t get a say—indeed, more often than not, they’re never even asked. As the film progresses—and improves—it is these local voices that add an essential layer of magnitude to its message.

The film covers a few scenarios in some depth. Peruvian weaving, orphanage tourism in Kenya and Cambodia, taxi driving in India, and elephants in Thailand all feature. Together these represent sustainable tourism’s three pillars—economy, society and environment.

At the summit of Indonesia’s Gunung Tambora with some trekking friends. They’re local—and yet again, seem not to count. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

The orphanage tourism coverage is problematic. The film never flat-out states all orphanages are scams, but there is scope for far more nuance. There are real orphanages in Cambodia (and, I assume, Kenya) doing good, important work. It is funding—not white bodies—they need, and it would be a shame if this film makes their fundraising harder still. On volunteering though, there’s no need for nuance, and Clarissa Elakis of Childsafe International pulls no punches:

“Would this happen in your own country, probably not, so why do tourists think it is ok to do it in developing countries?”

I’ve written before on elephant riding and the role Intrepid Travel played in moving it to the industry’s s**t list. This is a good example of tour companies working as agents for change, yet their work isn’t mentioned. Instead we’re given a segment on phajaan and a mix of semi- to clueless tourists at elephant shows. One aghast European says the elephants are “forced to do things they would not normally do.” Pray tell, what did you expect?

I don’t want to get tangled in the weeds of a multi-million dollar industry as controversial as it is lucrative. Elephant Nature Park and its cofounder have long been a travel blogger and media favourite. The Last Tourist is no exception to this, and the centre gets one of the longest segments in the entire film. Here again I’d loop back to Christ’s words about seeking the uncharted—something The Last Tourist does not do. In lambasting the tendency of tourists to gravitate to the known—they make the same mistake.

For decades destinations built their tourism propaganda around exactly activities like this. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

Tying in with sustainable tourism’s social and economic pillars, Meenu Vadera, the founder of Sakha Cabs For Women is persuasive. Her India-based business runs a fleet of some 40 cabs with around 100 women drivers. In describing how a small change in tourist behaviour can make a big difference, Vadera says:

“A majority of Sakha clients are foreign tourists, tourism has played a significant role in helping women drivers, those who are in more vulnerable positions get opportunities for a livelihood, for dignity.”

This matters.

As with the European at the elephant camp, tourists need to educate themselves on small changes like these. Kepher-Gona talks about deconstructing tourists’ minds. Start by spending as long researching responsible behaviour as hotel choices. Saying “I didn’t know,” is not a viable excuse anymore.

Indeed, hotels, their construction, labour policies, and environmental impact, see the briefest of coverage. Bemoaning a wage of $50 a month strikes a chord, but where is the context? The minimum wage here in Bali is around US$150 a month, and some in the tourism pay far less. This doesn’t mean much though without talking about what alternative jobs might pay.

There’s a few lines about companies altering product, but the emphasis is on tourist-driven change. This is a mistake. It’s like the oil industry telling us all to carbon count while they continue business as usual. For fifty years, academic research has pushed sustainable tourism, yet, little has changed. No doubt in part due to the academic double-speak papers feature, but hell, if I can wade through them, so can others.

Talking about elephants… Photo: Stuart McDonald.

The cruise industry gets a well-deserved slagging off and leakages get a mention. Later, in an African context, Kepher-Gona notes that 14% of a safari spend stays in Kenya. I’ve written before on this, and specifically on G Adventures’ approach to it. If the companies are not going to improve their act, governments should force the issue. Hard calls to action like these are rare in the film, but Inca Trail tour guide, and founder of Evolution Treks Peru, Miguel Angel Gongora is emphatic:

“Making sure the travel companies are being held accountable, this is what you are saying, and this is what you are selling, so now I’m going to take the tour and I want to make sure that this is what you are delivering—not only to me as a traveller but to the workers too.”

Global warming, how tourism is hastening it, and the implication for locals, is barely mentioned. Where flying is discussed it is around its vast growth and the tourists that came with it—not the environmental impact. You’re better off settling in with Before The Flood, as you’ll get no answers from this film. Tourism to Antarctica is the obvious flogging horse, but it isn’t mentioned. As G Adventures runs Antartica trips for up to almost $17,000 a head, it would have been good to hear Poon Tip’s thoughts.

Three viewings in, my take on the film has softened. If you’re in the industry and any of this is still news to you, what are you doing in a sustainable facet of tourism? For the greater travelling public, yes the film contains a useful surfacing of issues, even if not new. I worry though that much of tourism remains stubbornly resistant to change. We’ve had 30+ years of educating tourists to varying degrees yet the needle has barely budged.

Will The Last Tourist budge it some more? Give it a watch and see what you think.

Couchfish is 100 per cent independent and reader-supported. If you’re not already a subscriber, and you’d like to show your support, become a paying subscriber today for just US$7 per month—you can find out more about Couchfish here—or simply share this story with a friend.

Don’t forget, you can find the free podcasts on Apple, Pocket Casts and Spotify as well as right here on Couchfish.

According to David Luekens over at Thai Island Quest, Thailand has over 800 islands. Don’t fret if you’ve only been to thirteen of them, as many are nothing more than a pile of rocks—others though, are more. Thailand’s islands range from huge and spoilt, to stuck-in-the-1980s near-deserted fare. There is it seems, something for everyone.

In 2019, Thailand greeted a smidgen under 40 million inbound tourists. At the time, some of the country’s most popular isles weren’t drowning in rising sea levels—that will come later. Instead, they were drowning in tourists, and Ko Phi Phi Leh was the most bandied around on the “sky is falling” front. Then the pandemic came, and the entire planet took a (masked) breath.

Super-size me please. Ko Nang Yuan, 2018. Photo: David Luekens.

Earlier this year, Thailand set a 2027 goal of 80 million inbound tourists (Google cache link, as PRD seems to have nuked the original), and while many feel it is unlikely, and that it flies in the face of any modicum of sustainability, I put all this aside and ask, where it will put them. I ask because, despite this story’s title, the TAT has not announced the discovery of 800 new islands. Indeed, thanks to rising sea levels Thailand may well eventually have less islands, but that’s fodder for another day.

In 2022, Thailand scored around 11 million tourists, so to reach its 2027 goal it needs a 50% increase every year. That will deliver around 83 million by 2027. I don’t know if you had the misfortune to visit Ko Phi Phi in 2019, but if you did, how sexy would it be with twice the tourists? 70 million new bums-on-seats? I would think not too sexy.

The illusion. Ko Lipe, 2018. Photo: David Luekens.

Yes, not all 70 million would be after retracing Leonardo’s frolics on The Beach, but some would. Some will argue that a trickle down effect of sorts, that some will hit the lesser touristed locales may play out, but will it be enough? The TAT seems to be aware of this, and I’ve been told they’re working to spread the butter.

A recent South Thailand familiarisation trip they offered to agents gave two options: Ranong and Chumphon, and Phattalung and Nakhon Si Thammarat. While not “top shelf” traditional destinations, they are, nonetheless, excellent spots. This is a good step, but still I have questions. For every trip like this, how many others ran to the “best hits” destinations? Even if operators add some of these locations into their greater trips, will it at the cost of these better-known spots? Unless it is, all those extra bums are still going to be hitting the best-of lists as well.

The reality. Ko Lipe, 2018. Photo: David Luekens.

As with everywhere in Southeast Asia, Thailand is awash in second- and third-tier destinations that few visit. So for every river in Pai that has so many rafters on it you can’t see the water, there’s another with not a soul on it. I talked to the founder of an inbound tour operator about this, and only half-joking they said:

“Yasothon has heaps of rivers—and legal weed—why not promote there?”

So while the TAT isn’t quite ready to launch the “2024 Get Baked In Thailand” campaign, “2024 Say Yes to Yasothon,” could work. Yet, travel writers have been flogging the northeast of the country for decades with little to show for it. Says Joe Cummings of writing for Lonely Planet back in the day:

“Likewise I touted Isan [the northeast region of Thailand] like crazy especially in the early days. Yet even in the peak tourism era, from 2000 onwards, only around 2% of international visitors bothered with Isan.”

Over the decades from the beginning of the “peak tourism era” Cummings refers to, Thailand’s tourism went from 10 million in 2000 to 16 million in 2010 and 40 million in 2019. Should we expect a better result than two per cent with 80 million? At least the TAT is making some effort to broaden the appeal—does it have a choice?

The under-appreciated beauties of Nakhon Si Thammarat. Photo: David Luekens.

I’d argue that if, with 40 million tourists, 98% of them are ignoring an entire region, then inbound tourism is broken. This is hardly unique to Thailand—look at Bali in Indonesia, Siem Reap in Cambodia, or Hội An in Vietnam. In all, a single destination bears more than its share of the burdens of tourism.

If the TAT got it wrong with 40 million last time, a better approach is to get it right on the second go. They should revise their target—bring it back to 20 million by 2027. In the intervening years they’ve got time to do more outreach, to help people travel better—and in a more sustainable manner. Nobody is suggesting—nor expecting—that 25% of tourists will spend most of their trip in the northeast. They could, but I’m trying to be realistic here, and elsewhere, outside the TAT, people are doing the heavy lifting.

Could Phattalung be Thailand’s hub for sustainable tourism? Quite possibly. Photo: David Luekens.

The TAT could do worse then to support the efforts of serial-Tweeter and incessant travel website maker Richard Barrow. He’s busy building yet another website (I think he has about 34,987 of them) dedicated to travelling the country by train. Aside from this being a shot in the arm for more sustainable travel, he’s also highlighting the lesser known. By the way, The Bangkok Podcast has a fascinating two-part podcast interview with Barrow—well worth a listen.

Much as I wrote in Navigating Nakhon Nowhere, it is always worth getting off the train, even if for a night. You’ll find stuff you didn’t know about before, and you’ll slow down. With this in mind, if the TAT could get to 20 million with 10-15% spending a chunk of time in the northeast, that would be a win. It wouldn’t though be a win that would be nice to have, rather it would be a win they need to have.

As a bonus, they wouldn’t need to find an extra 800 islands.

Couchfish is 100 per cent independent and reader-supported. If you’re not already a subscriber, and you’d like to show your support, become a paying subscriber today for just US$7 per month—you can find out more about Couchfish here—or simply share this story with a friend.

Don’t forget, you can find the free podcasts on Apple, Pocket Casts and Spotify as well as right here on Couchfish.

I’m a little out of sync this week thanks to some internet draaammmaaaaassss, so this is the free-to-read issue today rather than Friday.

A few years ago a friend and I were surfing at Seminyak in Bali and, not paying attention, got sucked out towards Java. By the time we finally made it back to shore, we were up near Old Man’s in Canggu and both felt like very old men. We collapsed on the beach, and tried to push the five kilometre walk back to the board rental place out of our minds.

After a few minutes, a couple of Indonesian women—tourists—wandered over and said hello, then asked if we were ok. It turned out they’d been watching us paddle and were curious why we were paddling in the middle of the ocean. It seemed a fair question. My friend, forever the clown, said we’d paddled over from Java—which, to be honest, felt true. Sitting together, we made small talk, local meets tourist stuff, and I asked where they were from. Padang, in Sumatra, they said. Neither of us had been there, and said so, and they replied saying they’d never been to Bali before either.

Time for some more offerings. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

I’d guess they were in their 20s and they seemed well-travelled, so I was a bit surprised they’d never been before. When I asked after why, they said it was too far, and this was when it came out that they’d come to Bali by bus. Well, buses to be clear, but buses that took a combined three days to cover the 2,500 kilometres. Suddenly our five kilometre beach walk didn’t seem so onerous.

Today on Couchfish I’m leaving Lake Toba but also Sumatra, and hopping across the archipelago to Java. Don’t fret, Couchfish for paid subscribers will be back to Sumatra later! As I’m lucky enough to have never caught a bus from Lake Toba to Jakarta, I thought I’d write about five bus trips to pass the time. As with the Lake Toba to Jakarta run, these trips are not all mine.

Plenty of time to learn how to say Oaxaca

This is my all time fave, courtesy of two British women I drove across the US with in 1992. Their travels in Mexico had been a challenge, worsened by their utter lack of language skills. Their first stop had been Tijuana, from where they wanted to go to Oaxaca. The plan was to start at the bottom and work their way back to the States. Being backpackers, they took the cheapest bus they could find, and understood the trip would take a day.

Somewhat amazed I wasn’t on this. Photo: Adam Poskitt.

By their accounts, the bus was beyond awful, and within hours they were counting the minutes of the hours to reach the magical 24. Twenty six hours in, they found a passenger with English and asked when they would arrive in Oaxaca. It turned out they were not even half way—the bus took two days, not one, and in the end took two and a half days. Morale of the story: Learn your numbers.

Getting bagged

The run from Meiktila to Kalaw by local bus is a fun one, well, fun in the sort of way you don’t tell your Mum about. The bus was not great inside—with seats for people half my size and already jammed with boxes of who knows what. No problems, the second said, jump on the roof. And so it was I spent an afternoon on a Burmese bus admiring the sights from up on high, with fresh air and space to relax. I was so relaxed in fact, that when I jumped off it was a good five minutes before I realised I was packless. My backpack, you see, was still on the roof.

Passing traffic en route to Kalaw. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

Never fear, a friendly local intervened, onto the back of his bike I went, and off we shot. Did I know where the bus was going? No. Did my new friend? No. Kalaw ain’t a big place, and yet in no time at all we found the bus, leaned to on the side of the road, sort of in the middle of nowhere, a bunch standing atop looking in all directions. They saw me before we saw them and when we pulled up there was much clapping and cheering. Fun times.

C is for cargo class.

Leaving Ko Pha Ngan after a stint on Ko Tao and bound for Bangkok, I decided to buy a through-ticket on the island. The agent gave me a choice of VIP, first and second class, with the latter being the cheapest. So, of course I went with second class—how bad could it be? On arrival at the travel agent clearing house in Surat Thani the bus pulled up—it was big and shiny—almost luxurious. The VIP passengers boarded, then the first class, then there were three of us left, two British women and me. We were in the cargo bay.

There’s always a cow

The backpacker bus was about halfway from Mumbai to Goa and it felt like we’d been in the van for about 800 hours. It was night time and I was a row or two back from the driver, sleeping a sapping hell-sleep as my watch span backwards. The horns and headlights, the sudden veers of the bus, my head cracking against the glass, all working to wake me over and over. I woke with a start and my blurry vision crystallised upon a cow on the road as the bus lurched and braked hard.

There’s always a cow, though this one was in Laos. Photo: Samantha Brown.

We hit the cow and the bus lurched further, onto the shoulder, then tipping like in the movies. That slow tip where you’re not sure if you are going to go, but deep down you know you will, and we did. Off the road, onto the side of the bus, but thankfully not over. Glass smashed, people screamed, the engine clunk-clunked then stopped where a grunt. It wasn’t till we were all out, perhaps twenty of us, and all ok save some minor cuts and abrasions, that we realised the crew and driver were gone. We never saw them again, and it was another five hours to dawn.

Bulldozers are multi-use

We were in Sangkeng, a nondescript town in Sulawesi, half way between Bira and Rantepao before a stint on the Togeans—yes, the plane crash trip. We’d hired a car and driver for the run because the kids were still young—that’s my excuse anyway. Sitting in a coffee shop, a French woman with two kids, barely above babies, caught my eye and said hello. She’d been in the wilds for a while, and was up for some chit chat. She was heading south from Poso, a little-visited town over the mountains to the north. The road was legendary—and not in a good way.

A Sulawesi cow. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

Seeing her kids I assumed she was in a car and asked after the road, however it turned out she wasn’t in a car, but a local bus. The road? It was even more legendary than I could imagine, she said. It turned out half of it had washed away and a bulldozer was pushing buses up a bad stretch of it—with the passengers on board.

She had that look of someone who’d been travelling in Indonesia that bit too long, but the trip had left even her shaken. Her gaze was blank and distant as she told me about the bus slipping and sliding towards the precipice, people praying and wailing. Yes, it was quite a bit scary, she said.

Got a bus story? Please share your tales of woe below.

Couchfish is 100 per cent independent and reader-supported. If you’re not already a subscriber, and you’d like to show your support, become a paying subscriber today for just US$7 per month—you can find out more about Couchfish here—or simply share this story with a friend.

Don’t forget, you can find the free podcasts on Apple, Pocket Casts and Spotify as well as right here on Couchfish.

On March 1, The Travel Foundation released “Envisioning Tourism in 2030 and Beyond: The Changing Shape of Tourism in a Decarbonising World”. Some teasers from it surfaced a while back, and while they were bad enough, the full report is a doozy.

Writes Travel Foundation CEO Jeremy Sampson:

“We have delayed action for too long, and as a result, our options have narrowed. This assessment should act both as wakeup call and motivation to act. There is huge opportunity for travel and tourism in a decarbonising world, but we must act with urgency and unite in our vision for a “good” transition.”

In the report, the authors consider a simple question—what does the travel industry need to do to meet the targets outlined in the Paris Agreement? To determine this, they put the travel industry through a series of scenarios, using 40 different interventions, to see how things would look in 2050. The grouped interventions fall into six broad categories: Alternative fuel and energy sources, technology, infrastructure policies, travel speed, taxes and subsidies, and travel behaviour.

And you thought your itinerary was complicated. Source: The Travel Foundation.

Their initial approach was to mix and match these 40 interventions into four main pathways, essentially a strong versus weak approach. The problem was, this yielded no scenario that came close to meeting the emission targets. Approach two was to take the four most often discussed categories—offsetting, technology, sustainable aviation fuel, and taxes and subsidies—and try again.

This approach also failed—no one of the four pathways would get the industry to where it needed to be. From here they came up with the TDS—the Tourism Decarbonisation Scenario—and ran with it. The report maintains the TDS can get the industry over the finishing line, but the yards, they are going to be hard.

We’ll be needing more bamboo straws. Source: The Travel Foundation.

There are some enormous assumptions built into the report. A proposal to cap airport capacity to 2019 levels. A 100% shift to renewables by accommodation and ground transport. The spending of US$200 billion per year on high speed rail—for the next 40 to 50 years. None of these assumptions are impossible of course, but yes, they are challenging.

Rather than summarising the report, I wanted to look at a few of its suggestions and consider what they would mean for Southeast Asia. As I found out, the disconnect is severe.

Aviation

It should come as no surprise to anyone that aviation gets a flogging. The report gets into the quagmire of what fuels the planes, but two other aspects leap out.

Cork the airports

The report suggests that airport capacity needs to be capped at 2019 levels. More than anything else in the report, this reads like screaming into the void. What is happening in the real world is the opposite of what the report advises. Here’s a few examples.

The TDS goal. Source: The Travel Foundation.

In Thailand, Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi is upgrading its capacity from 45m per year to 120m. The city’s second airport, Don Muang is going from from 30m to 48m. U-tapao, down near Pattaya, pretty much Bangkok’s third airport, is going from 1.5m to 5m. Vietnam plans to add nine new airports from the current 22. Singapore’s new terminal 5 at Changi will have a capacity of 50m passengers—more than Terminal 1 and 3 combined. Over in despot-ruled Cambodia, Siem Reap’s new airport will handle 10m, while Phnom Penh’s will welcome 50m by 2050.

You get the idea. If you’d like to get more depressed, my mate James Clark has a good wrap on airport developments ($) in the region.

Hit travellers’ wallets

The report suggests the cost of flying should increase from $0.06 pkm (2019) to $0.10 pkm (2030) and then to $0.18 pkm (2050). This represents a sixty percent increase in airfares by 2030 followed by an 80% increase further down the track. It this comes to pass some of the above-mentioned new airports are going to be pretty sleepy.

Distance matters

Another aspect the report looks at is the distance people travel. With long haul flights being the most damaging, this gets plenty of attention. Long haul, which the report describes as flights over 16,000 km return, accounted for only 2% of trips in 2019, but 19% of emissions. Left unchecked, the report estimates their share will grow to 8% of trips and 41% of emissions.

People will still travel, just not as far. Source: The Travel Foundation.

With this in mind, the report suggests a long haul flight cap to 2019 levels (around 120 million return trips). Given the share of emissions this form of travel accounts for, this makes sense. So with Southeast Asia in mind, what would this mean?

London, Paris or Frankfurt to Bangkok are are long haul, as is anywhere in the Americas. Closer to home, Australia, China, South Asia and parts of Africa slip in, but Europe and the Americas are all toast.

There are sustainability pros and cons to this. In 2019, Germans visiting Indonesia stayed an average of almost 16 days, with an average high of over 18 days. In comparison, Malaysians stayed an average of under six days with a high of almost eight. Given the relative distances, it should come as no surprise that almost ten times as many Malaysians visited. Of Indonesia’s inbound tourists for 2019, four of the top five sources (Germany, France, UK and USA) are both long haul and the longest staying. From an emissions point of view, which is worse?

Elsewhere, Thailand is after a doubling (by 2027, from 2019 levels) of inbound tourists—from 40m to 80m. Who knows what random number generator the number came from, but how does it work with long haul capped? By Southeast Asian standards, Thailand’s approach is particularly egregious, and yet regional destinations strive to model themselves ($) on its A-grade unsustainable approach to tourism.

Fewer, longer, better

The above ties in with the sections aimed at tour companies, tourism boards and so on. The report recognises that if the above all happen (big if), some destinations will feel the pinch more than others. Should island destinations such as Fiji, the Maldives or the Seychelles do the same heavy lifting as Italy or Germany? The report suggests no—the implementation of these changes needs to be equitable. Again back to Sampson:

“We also want to bring attention to the need for fairness and equity in the way tourism transitions to net zero. The policies we draft, the investments we make and the products we develop will either exacerbate or lessen existing inequalities. Will vulnerable communities once again be handed the worst deal? Or will underrepresented voices be listened to and acted upon?”

Long the mantra in national carbon cutting targets—there is precious little walking the talking. Small island nations and the developing world should be wary of holding their breath on this one, though it would be nice is Sampson’s wish is granted.

Allocating blame—and responsibility. Source: The Travel Foundation.

The report also pushes the incentivising of longer stays, which is smart. There’s a few ways to do this, and while the report doesn’t mention it, longer visas for tourists is the obvious one. One that does slip in is the mandating of minimum stays, something I strongly support. It also suggests tour companies should shape demand rather than be a slave to it—another strong agree from me. While they are far from the worst operator on the planet, a statement in the report by Australian tour company Intrepid Travel, highlights the twin challenges of inertia and can-kicking. They write:

“Our supply chain represents more than 80 per cent of our overall Scope 3 emissions, with a large portion accounted for in transportation. Decarbonizing our supply chain – specifically transportation – relies on availability of electrical vehicles and high-speed ground transport. That, in turn depends on different players, including governments, prioritising the phasing out of fossil fuels in favour of clean technologies.”

Get your wallet out. Source: The Travel Foundation.

As Emily Atkin writes, this waiting on governments is a fool’s errand, and is part of what got as here in the first place. Yes, electric vehicles are not widespread yet in Southeast Asia, but, as I’ve written before, domestic flights are a far bigger issue. Tour companies—at least those that purport to be responsible actors—need to remove them. Start reshaping that demand yesterday.

Reframe the travel experience

While many of the report’s recommendations are beyond the reach of individuals, one is. There is one thing that is within the control of every single tourist on the planet—how they travel. If you’re not sure where to start on your own reframing, reading the Travel Foundation report would be a good first step.

Further reading

If you’re a newish Couchfish reader and found the above of interest, you may enjoy the series I wrote last year on rethinking tourism. Links to the series are below—they are all free to read.

* National Chocolate Milk Day (World Tourism Day)

* Nice Tourism (Sustainable Tourism)

* The Benevolent Lie (Responsible Tourism)

* The Year Is 2006. The Town Is Luang Prabang (Pro-poor Tourism)

* Zoom in to the Red Plastic Chairs (Slow Travel)

* The Petro-bourgeoisie (Flying, carbon etcetera)

* Reality Check (Tour companies)

* Follow the Money (Money matters)

* Foundations Matter (Community Based Tourism)

Couchfish is 100 per cent independent and reader-supported. If you’re not already a subscriber, and you’d like to show your support, become a paying subscriber today for just US$7 per month—you can find out more about Couchfish here—or simply share this story with a friend.

Don’t forget, you can find the free podcasts on Apple, Pocket Casts and Spotify as well as right here on Couchfish.

If you were looking for a bonfire to incinerate your hopes for an improved approach to tourism, Thailand continues to deliver the goods. An early highlight were plans to double inbound tourism from 39.8m in 2019 to 80m—by 2027. Sounds like a totes sustainable and sensible idea.

Then the other day, came news that a long-threatened tourism tax would happen($). I’m not opposed to a tourist tax in principle, but this one is a whole mountain of stupid. So first a wrap on the stupid, then some thoughts on at an alternative approach.

Stupid 1: Complicated for no reason

The tax calls for a 300 baht or 150 baht charge for all “inbound visitors”. The 300 baht charge will apply to those flying in, with flight tickets scoring a 300 baht surcharge. The 150 baht is for those entering by land. These entries are cheaper “because they stay less time” according to the Ministry of Hot Ideas. It is unknown how collection of the land entry charge will work.

Indonesia has had some doozy tourist taxes, Fiscal was my all time favourite. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

As an added layer of complexity, those flying in but not overnighting are exempt from the charge. Diplomats, those with work permits, kids under the age of two, and “other categories” can also skip it.

I’ve not seen any justifications for these exemptions. Data supporting the suggestion land arrivals stay less time is also AWOL. Perhaps they’re thinking of all the Malaysian guys popping over the border for a ahhhh short stay. Who knows? My gut feeling is that among genuine travellers, overland entries would stay longer. But what do I know? If you work on the assumption that short stay tourism is a less sustainable form of travel, why give it a free ride?

Stupid 2: Unworkable rules

So if the fly-in fee is a ticketing add-on, how will the airline know you are staying one day only? I often fly in with one airline and out with another. Will airlines need to check the validity of my work permit? Seemingly no—good luck getting that refund expats. This is even more problematic with land entries. Are immigration officers going to ask how long one is staying? Will travellers need to prove they are leaving on the same day? How?

Keep it simple fellas. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

The upshot of the “no overnight, no charge” rule may be a move from an arrival- to a departure-charge. That would make it a departure tax. Oh wait, Thailand already has one of those, a 700 baht one worked into your ticket price. So, this is a second departure tax? Why does Thailand need two departure taxes?

Stupid 3: Why we can’t have nice things

A subtext to this tourist tax is a long-running gripe Thai authorities have been whining about for decades. It relates to a minuscule number of foreigners who do runners on their medical bills. Given the outrageous rates some Thai hospitals charge, the reasons for a runner are not impossible to fathom. Poor behaviour aside, let’s look at the numbers.

Insured no doubt. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

According to the Minister, between 2017 and 2019, runners cost the government around 400 million baht. Over the same period around 113 million tourists arrived in Thailand. To put the costs of the runners in perspective, it equates to a charge of three baht per tourist. One solution to this may have been to hold patients’ passports to make sure they pay. Hell no! Let’s charge every tourist one-hundred fold the cost of the runners instead. Sounds solid.

Stupid 4: Insurance

The Minister has forecast the charge will raise 3.9 billion baht in 2023. In January, Thailand targeted 25 million tourists for 2023, equating to 7.5 billion baht. One assumes the 3.9 billion fee relates to around six months of inbounds. In return for their 300 baht, tourists will be force-fed an insurance policy they didn’t ask for. Writes the Bangkok Post:

“Thailand will be the first country in the world to offer insurance covering accidents, death and the repatriation of bodies. The insurance is a government effort to boost confidence among tourists, she said.”

Will a country offering to repatriate your body swing the deal for you? Like many travellers, I already have insurance, so why must I re-insure? If I die which insurer gets to air-freight my corpse home? What about the costs of payouts through this policy? I’ve not seen any press coverage on this so far.

Stupid 5: It is regressive, discriminatory tax

As the tax is a flat fee, it is regressive and discriminates against budget travellers.

Stupid 6: Charge tourists to “make Thailand better”

Aside from the insurance blackhole and hospital runners, the tax also funds “the development of local tourist attractions.” You guessed right, no details on this one, though one story suggested there might be a focus on accessibility—no doubt a good idea in a country where accessibility is so often ignored, but why should tourists be the ones funding it when all would benefit?

Some things are best left alone. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

More generally, State involvement in the “improvement” of attractions has often yielded benefits of debatable value. Bangkok’s flower market or Khao San Road spring to mind. This isn’t though a totally stupid idea, so I’ll pivot to smarter here.

A smarter tourist tax

As I said up top, I’m not in principle opposed to a tourist tax. So what could a not-stupid tourist tax look like?

Smart 1: Per cent good, flat rate bad

Ditch the 300 baht flat rate and instead level a charge, say two per cent, at the accommodation point. Everywhere you stay adds an extra fee of two per cent to your bill. This is helpful for many reasons—for starters, it is nominal, simple and fair. For those who are exempt, they can show their work permit or Thai ID when they check in. Though I’d argue there is no reason why locals or those with work permits should not have to pay this as well. Diplomats should have to pay it—hell, I’d charge them triple. Properties—not OTAs like Agoda or Booking—should level the charge. At two per cent, guests would need to spend 15,000 baht on accommodation across their stay to hit 300 baht. Many spend far in excess of this.

Smart 2: Colour code the country

If you wanted to use the tax as a gentle push with regard to over-tourism, then have a shifting scale of charges. In Phuket, Samui, Chiang Mai or Bangkok? Make the charge five per cent. Nakhon Nowhere? Waive it. If you think the charge is too small to change travel patterns, increase it.

Sometimes the less touristed a place is, the better the food. Photo: David Luekens.

Smart 3: Keep the money local

Forget about sending this revenue into the consolidated revenue black hole of Bangkok. Keep the money within the province that collects it. Why? See next point.

Smart 4: Use the funds to support sustainable tourism

Forget the “development of local attractions” boondoggles. Instead find five local schemes to showcase true sustainable tourism at work. It could be a CBT scheme, an environmental education programme, community development, or something as simple as a beach clean up. Use both foreign and domestic tourists’ money to improve where they are.

Smart 5: Let tourists choose

When tourists check in to their accomodation, let them choose which of the five programmes in the province they want to support. When they pick one, tell them how much of the programme is funded, and the target goal. When a programme is completely funded, it drops off the list and another comes on stream. Tourists may even go all wild and crazy and go visit the joint they just paid eight baht of tourist tax to support.

Smart 6: Make it optional

The tourist tax should be optional. Give tourists the option of not paying. However, they should have to select on the form that they do not want to support any of the five programmes listed. Likewise—if they want to donate more—they can. Give people the option of not only knowing exactly where their money is going, but what it is achieving. People’s responses may surprise.

Give credit and gain some too. Photo: David Luekens.

Yes there would be a bit of work and dosh involved in setting all this up. That said, consider all the other schemes the Thai government wastes money on. An approach along the lines of the above could raise awareness, boost local pride, and support sustainable tourism. Hell, it might even raise more money than the stupid tourist tax—now that would be smart.

Couchfish is 100 per cent independent and reader-supported. If you’re not already a subscriber, and you’d like to show your support, become a paying subscriber today for just US$7 per month—you can find out more about Couchfish here—or simply share this story with a friend.

Don’t forget, you can find the free podcasts on Apple, Pocket Casts and Spotify as well as right here on Couchfish.

A month or so ago, my friend James sent me a link for a travel guide to Cambodia. James has a particular talent for sending me stuff that ruins my day, and this one, well, it was a doozy.

It was one of those typical “how to” travel blog pieces, with blow-by-blow instructions on how to do something. In this particular case, it explained how one can travel from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh by train. Over three thousand words long, it had everything—it even detailed the restaurant and drinks car.

There was though, one problem. There is no train—and never has been—from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh.

“You want a what to where? I’m telling you there’s no train man.” Photo: Mark Ord.

I wondered, why would anyone write this? I could see no useful reason to. The more I read it though, the more I thought, was this the pointy end of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) stick? I emailed the site, and asked after the reasoning behind the piece, but never heard back. I ran some of the text through GPTZero, a tool (yes, an AI tool) designed to detect AI written text and it said:

“Your text is likely to be written entirely by AI.”

AI has been flavour of the month for a while now. It was a few years ago I first saw it in action, and it wasn’t great. Even then though, with improvement inevitable, its potential was clear. I remember writing at the time something about it being the death knell for low-end copywriters. Late last year, ChatGPT opened up its playground for free. It is the brainchild of OpenAI, a startup which includes Elon Musk and Peter Thiel—neither renowned for putting humanity first—among its funders. The opening (now partly rescinded), brought the tool to the masses, and was no doubt the first step towards the funders’ inevitable mega-payoff.

Lets get ChapGPT to write a travel guide for Luang Prabang.

Social media filled with screenshots of the tool’s efforts to “answer” questions. Many, (not only from ChatGPT) veered between bad and iffy to awful and offensive, yet others were eerily good—including poetry, though not poems about athletes foot. To get decent answers, the right questions, in the right way, with the right degree of post-output massaging, were needed. In no short time stories by the dozen ran—sometimes of dubious quality—pointing out AI often displayed a racist and/or sexist tilt with a tendency to surface hate speech (which OpenAI pays Kenyans $2 per hour to address) and disinformation. This is all true, but you could argue if it aims to mimic humanity, this is sadly it doing its job.

Let’s return to the train example for a sec.

With the right collection of keywords, a bit of programming skill, and a dose of patience, AI could write a travel guide. I’ve tried to illustrate this with the (unedited) screenshots in this story. As you can see, AI can already manage a good bit of the process. The finished product isn’t great, it is often boilerplate bare bones, with a few factual errors, but as a collection of lists, it could be far worse. With this text generated, all I need do is dump it into Wordpress and I’m done. I’ll do another city over lunch. In that time, AI may well have improved yet again.

Note the different results when I complicate the question about Saffron Hostel.

How will it improve? To answer this, you need to look at how AI works. Boiled down, it crawls a bazillion websites then regurgitates the information it distills. This means it is only as good as the information it has devoured. If it hasn’t ever crawled information about the mating of the Mongolian Butterfly, it can’t tell you anything about it. As far as I know, there is no such thing as this specifically named butterfly.

Now for the important bit. This crawling of information sources took place without any consent from the creators. Nobody asked Lonely Planet, Getty, or other creators for permission and it should come as no surprise that courthouse queues are growing. It boils down to consent. These tools should be opt-in but instead, if at all, they’re opt-out.

ChapGPT’s take on eating in Luang Prabang.

Says Michael Running Wolf, an AI ethicist, and founder of Indigenous in AI, in this fascinating episode of The Sunday Show [any transcribing inaccuracies mine, it is a bit fuzzy in places]:

“The core conceit problem here isn’t the fact that the AI exists, it’s because they’re stealing data to create these AIs. If we had the ability to enforce our intellectual property rights either through some sorta legal entity who owned the data or even as artisans being able to stop it, this wouldn’t be a problem actually. The whole reason why you can have StableDiffusion, DALL-E ... there’s many other AIs out there, is because they scrape the internet. These AIs have seen Lakota artwork, these AIs have seen Lakota artisan work and pictures, and that’s why they can do it. If they don’t see it, they can’t do it.”

Sarah Andersen, an artist involved in a legal case against a number of AI engines, echoes this in an interview on Hard Fork:

“And I think for me, the big one is consent. People have talked about that maybe in the future artists will be able to opt out. For me, that’s not good enough. I really think if this is your life’s work, as an artist, you should be able to opt in. It should be up to you about whether or not you are part of these generators.”

If the sources of AI’s “intelligence” had needed to opt-in, AI would have had a far smaller information set to work with—and the results would be far less amazing—and no doubt attract less hyperbole … and less money.

Note the first attempt at Kwang Si was wrong, I had to add the Luang Prabang prompt to get the right waterfall, though you can’t see the falls from the Nam Kham.

Which brings me back to travel—the money.

In travel publishing there has been considerable interest in this area. Some paymasters see it as a way of generating content far cheaper (if not for free), and more tailored to a specific audience. Who needs whining human travel writers you need to pay living (or not) wages to, when AI will do it for near-free? To that I’ll quote what the Hanoi travel agent said to me the other day when I asked about two wildly different-priced Hạ Long Bay trips:

“You get what you pay for.”

Note, they all say this—and it drives me nuts.

Money aside, AI is only as good as its diet. So if that diet is predominantly “the top ten things to do in Luang Prabang,” chances are when you ask AI what to do in Luang Prabang, you’ll get that same list.

Stuff like transport and prices is handled, though it doesn’t note that catching a non-stop bus to Hanoi, while possible, is madness.

Back to Michael Running Wolf, in the same interview describing how AI “works” he says:

“The issue with AI is, it is not generating new content, it is actually a façade, these AIs are stochastic parrots, ... so they’re essentially just a statistical parrot, they see data and they’re really good at replicating it, at will, and it is only able to replicate what it sees, they’re not actually able to synthesise new information, ... they’re doing a really good job of seeming like humans to generate say new art, and every pixel that is being generated by these image AIs originates in a previously seen artwork.”

Before going on to say:

“It’s a pretend intelligence”

As with all travel writing, listicles feeding overtourism is a known area of concern, and I’m not sure a pretend intelligence is what the doctor ordered. Travellers need more deliberate guidance, writing that is informed by issues like better empowerment for local people, sustainability, reducing overtourism and protecting the environment.

These issues, AI doesn’t appear to handle well. When I asked it for the “best things to do in Luang Prabang” it gave me a boilerplate list. That it included “Take a tuk-tuk to the nearby town of Vang Vieng and explore its natural beauty,” was pretty funny. Then I asked it “what are the best things to do in Luang Prabang for a sustainable traveller?” and the list, still boiler plate, was largely the same—though the tuk tuk ride was gone. I’m not seeing the intelligence here.

When AI-created listicle websites start popping up daily, what sort of self-referential cycle will begin when robot readers scan robot writers? The situation is bad enough without thousands of new players writing the same top ten lists. Google Search may already be close to broken and this isn’t going to help matters. Some sites, StackExchange most famously, have already banned AI-written responses. Will Google do the same to AI-generated websites and stories? How will they distinguish between a bad writer and a good robot? How can you? Should you need to? Will publishers admit to using AI content? Should they?

All together now. You could generate one of these a minute and have a world guide in no time. Good luck Google.

To a point the consent cat is already out of the bag, but then the next thing is the credit cat. Where was the information sourced from? AI doesn’t give up its sources. When it comes to travel writing, knowing who the author is can be a vital bit of information—at least for me anyway. To my mind, the source is everything, to others, not so much. Theft? Not a big deal for some.

Christian Watts is the founder of Magpie, a CMS thing for tour companies. On Twitter, he declared he was “going all-in on incorporating ChatGPT throughout Magpie.” Yet, when a friend of mine specifically quizzed him about the possibility that some of that material would be lifted from Travelfish, and asked if that was stealing, he wasn’t fussed.

“The way I think about it: If it deems a source worthy, its already trained on it. Every wikipedia page, every lonely planet page etc. When it generates content, it's using its collective knowledge - never specific sources, always unique, so you'll never know. Stealing? probably.”

Always refreshing to see a founder having no qualms about using possibly stolen content in their product.

It’s worth noting in this though, Watts’ use of the term “collective knowledge” and assigning it to AI. It is anything but. Rather, it is humanity’s collective knowledge, co-opted without a penny paid, by the likes of Musk and Thiel who in turn will possibly make more than a single truckload of dosh out of the affair.

Takes a breath.

All service travel writing, to a point is derivative, and there is little writing (in English) about places not written about before. I read widely and I’d be lying to say what I read elsewhere doesn’t influence where I visit and what I write about. Most travel writers have their own take, they add their own nuance to whatever it is they’re approaching. They write for their readership, something that differs from publication to publication. AI strips out the nuance and the humanity—though you can prompt it to add its take on humanity back in. AI produces the sort of travel guide I’d imagine IKEA would write—albeit with clearer directions.

You need a travel guide for pirates? Can.

I took a random paragraph I wrote for Travelfish and ran it through the same tool I put the train site through. The irony of having a robot check if I was a robot wasn’t lost on me, but I was reassured when I was told:

“Your text is likely to be written entirely by a human.”

I don’t plan to change that approach, and I thinks others do at their peril.

Couchfish is 100 per cent independent and reader-supported. If you’re not already a subscriber, and you’d like to show your support, become a paying subscriber today for just US$7 per month—you can find out more about C

One of the many aspects travel gets flogged over are its carbon emissions. As I’ve written in the past, if you’d like to over-contribute in setting the planet on fire, getting on a plane works best. What about if you don’t? What about if you’d prefer to minimise your emissions? Skipping domestic flights is the obvious first step, but what next? With this in mind, over my recent three-week trip to Vietnam, I decided to track my carbon. Here’s what I found.

Before anything, I needed to decide what I should measure. Transport was a no-brainer, but what about food and accommodation? With flights removed, both can be significant contributors, but how significant? Well, it depends. How do you travel? What do you eat and drink? Where do you stay? It turns out no two travellers are the same.

Taking train-spotting to the next level. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

I needed a system that would track not only flights, but other transport, food and hotels. In the end I settled on two, one an app that I could use as I went, and the other a website I could populate at the end of my trip. There were pros and cons to each, and neither did everything I wanted to my satisfaction. That said, both show promise, and it will be interesting to see how they develop over time.

The two systems I tried out were the Capture app and the Path Net Zero calculator. While Capture has some usability issues, it is the more appropriate for travellers looking to measure their emissions as they go. If you’re a tour company wanting to figure out the emissions of a trip, Path Net Zero is by far the better option. I used Capture as I went, then at the end of it, inputted the data from Capture into Path Net Zero.

Capture would wake me each morning with an update on my environmental vandalism. Happy days.

There are some important differences between the two. Capture doesn’t include accommodation while Path Net Zero does. Each takes a different approach to food. In both you can calculate transport by distance or time, and as I used time for Capture, I used the same for Path Net Zero. Despite this, the results were often quite different.

As an example, Capture suggested 1,229.80kg for my two flights while Path Net Zero scored it at 824.52kg. This highlighted how tricky flying can be. How full was the flight, what class was flown (Path Net Zero allowed me to nominate class, Capture doesn’t). What type of plane was it? How was the weather? These can all impact the amount of emissions allocated. That said, in the scheme of things, does it matter? Probably not—flying is the wrecking ball. Using Capture’s numbers, the two flights accounted for a whopping 74% of my total emissions.

Tuk tuk versus Airbus at a glance with Path Net Zero.

Ok, so we all know flights suck for the planet, but what about if we removed flights? Then it got more interesting. With flights removed, train travel jumped to first place, at 43%, then food (26%), motorbike (15%) and car (12%). What about accommodation you ask? A mere 5%. Why? I stay in small hotels and homestays.

If you thought flights were hard, measuring accommodation was a veritable snake pit. For most hotels, electricity is the main emissions source—air-con, kitchens, laundry, pools, hot water, all need power. The more rooms, the more pools, the more restaurants, the more power. Despite what five-star resorts might proclaim, more often than not they are abject wrecking balls environmentally. They’re also some of the worst greenwashing scoundrels on the planet.

With an environmental vandalism pie-chart, air-travel wins.

I stayed at six places during my trip, all but one with twelve rooms or less, and only one had a pool. When it came to figuring out hotel emissions, rather than ask the check-in desk for their meter readings, I turned to the books.

The most useful was Carbon Footprint Assessment of Home-Stays in Thailand by Koiwanit and Filimonau. It looked at homestays in Ranong province, using actual data, and threw out real numbers. I took these figures, then doubled them for my stay—inexact I know. Path Net Zero’s hotel estimate was double mine, but they only go down to two-star properties.

Then I looked for papers on the emissions of flasher properties—you know where this is going right? First I grabbed one that looked at lux hotels in Taiwan—Analysis And Benchmarking Of Greenhouse Gas Emissions Of Luxury Hotels by Huang, Wang and Wang. Then, for the middle range, An Assessment Of The Environmentally Sustainable Hotel Operation: The Case Of Centara Hotels & Resorts, Thailand by Baxter and Srisaeng, worked well.

All those horizon pools add up.

Let me save you some reading time. Where the average of my budget digs came in at under 2kg a day, the midrange Centara was 37.88kg per day and five stars in Taiwan was 50kg. Note, these are average numbers. Throw them across a three-week stay and the 21kg of my stays was almost 720kg with Centara and 950kg with luxury. There is a fair chance my estimate for budget emissions was low, but doubling the research numbers was a good baseline. I added more still for the joint with a pool.

That said, there was no way on earth I was going to get my accommodation-related emissions up to 950kg. So, the best way to reduce your vacation emissions after removing flights, is to avoid five-star hotels. They are a garbage fire of emissions masked by certified greenwashing. Avoid. Instead, stay at small homestays where you’ll save money and may well have a better time. You’ll also have other positive impacts you’ll struggle for at some encroaching pile of concrete with bamboo straws.

Ok, now that I got that off my chest, lets move on.

Meet emission-creep as accommodation moves from 5% to 70% of your emissions.

The next quagmire is food, which Capture and Path Net Zero take different approaches to. The former gives six options: Lots of meat, medium meat, low meat, pescatarian, vegetarian and vegan. This reflects the fact that less meat equals lower emissions. Path Net Zero takes a different approach listing meals by meal type, say American breakfast or continental breakfast, with other meals split between meat, fish or vege, each with a different weighting. This was a bit too fiddly for me, particularly as I was stuffing face with bowls of noodles. I stuck with Capture’s approach.

The thing with food, or rather, meat, is that, like flights, it depends. A few strands of some unlucky local cow tossed into a bowl of phở has a very different emission range to an imported Australian three-inch-thick grain-fed, massaged-daily air-freighted (but still unlucky) cow. It depends how much you want to get into the number crunching. Concerned? Skip the Argentinian Steakhouse and grab a phở on the street.

Local street food isn’t always low on carbon… Photo: Stuart McDonald.

In my case, in three weeks, of all my eating, all but four meals were on the street, so for most days I chose medium meat or low meat. This gave me scores of 5.63kg or 4.67kg per day. The total over three weeks was a few bowls over 110 kg. I don’t drink, so imported alcohols etcetera were not on my radar.

Lastly, there’s ground transport. For trains, neither tool had an option for “clapped out Vietnam locomotive powered by dirty fuel.” I’d guess the data comes from Euro trains, but I’m not sure on this. Same goes for vehicles and so on. Is the car or bike electric? I guess these options will come in down the road as the solutions develop.

In the scheme of things though, it is important to keep a bit of perspective. If you want to go wild and have some crazy imported meal, do so, but try and balance it out with a few extra bowls on the street. If you want to minimise your emissions, here are my numbers-assisted takeaway five points, in order of impact:

* Do not fly domestically.

* Avoid high-end hotels.

* Don’t stay in a place with a swimming pool unless you need/want it.

* Slow down, spend longer in each place so you use ground transport less.

* Eat less meat.

The first two, are to my mind, no brainers. The other three are more calls for moderation. Think about your impact and act on that—and eat more phở.

Couchfish is 100 per cent independent and reader-supported. If you’re not already a subscriber, and you’d like to show your support, become a paying subscriber today for just US$7 per month—you can find out more about Couchfish here—or simply share this story with a friend.

Don’t forget, you can find the free podcasts on Apple, Pocket Casts and Spotify as well as right here on Couchfish.

Note: Our exisiting coverage for Cửa Đại and An Bàng on Travelfish which were researched and written in 2017 serve as good counterpoints to the following piece as they illustrate now much has changed in just a few years. I’ll be updating them to bring them in line with the following in the coming days.

Let me start by saying I’ve seen more than my share of great beaches. The flip-side of this is I’ve also seen my share of not so great, dare I say, awful, beaches. A product of travelling in circles in Southeast Asia for the last thirty years is that I’ve seen many a beach shift from the former to the latter. Few—if any, move in the opposite direction.

Despite this downwards shift, beaches remain one of the major calling cards for many a Southeast Asian destination. There’s the palm trees, the blue skies, the powdery sand, the warm and lapping turquoise water. You get my drift right?

What we need is a “no building” sign. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

I’ve written before about the perils that rising sea levels hold for the not too distant future. Yet, tourists’ favourite holiday spots washing away are the least of the concerns. The economic and social ramifications of a vanishing coastline will be as vast as the ocean that submerges them. Yes, the calamities associated with this are down the tube a bit—give it another twenty years give or take.

Yet, in some spots you don’t need to wait twenty years. For those who want front seats on the calamity, come to Vietnam. To An Bàng and Cửa Đại beaches, a short bike ride from tourist hub Hội An. I made the trip today to save you the bother, and the beach is an unmitigated disaster area.

What could go wrong? Photo: Stuart McDonald.

First a brief history.

I first visited Hội An’s beach strip in 1993 or 1994. As best I remember, at the time there was nothing tourist-facing on An Bàng, and Cửa Đại had three hotels—the Victoria and two others. The beach, still quite duney in places, went and went and went. To the south, the (then with no dams) Thu Bồn river emptied out to sea, while offshore, the Chàm Islands glimmered. You could walk all the way to Đà Nẵng’s Mỹ Khê Beach and see barely any construction whatsoever. I did it—once. Yes, 1993 was a lifetime ago.

Vietnam’s coast around Hội An catches a bit of weather in October-ish most years when tropical cyclones blow in. While the town often floods and has for decades, the beach districts bear the brunt of it. People die. For the rest of the year, thanks to current, wind cycles and the Thu Bồn, the sand returns—ready to get sucked away again. This combination of islands, estuary and storms create a complex and unique system. Still, this cycle of erosion and accretion (when the sand returns) has been going on forever. Well, almost.

What a difference 19 years makes. First two images (source), third image, Stuart McDonald, via Google Maps.

In recent decades, An Bàng, and Cửa Đại have boomed—a search on AirBnb for “An Bàng” delivers results for hundreds of “homes.” Many sit on what was once the sand dunes that formed a natural protective element for the beach. Off beach meanwhile, at least seven dams now sit on the Thu Bồn. Illegal sand dredging on the river is rife. In a few short decades, a system that has worked forever and a day has started to malfunction. The cycle of erosion and accretion isn’t what it used to be. Add to this, a worsening of the storm cells that hit the region each year, and none of the news is good.

But wait, there’s more!

At the southern end of Cửa Đại Beach, where the Victoria was once the southern-most resort, more resorts went in. Built within metres of the high tide mark, it should come as a surprise to nobody that they started to wash away. At the southernmost tip, everyone’s favourite enviro-vandal Vin Group dropped in the VinPearl Hoi An Resort. Built at the cusp of the Thu Bồn’s mouth, even by Vin Group standards, this was an epic brain fart. Work started on it in 2004, and when the beach washed away, they lined the resort’s periphery with boulders. Writes Do et al:

“Starting from Cua Dai Inlet and going along the beach toward the north, the first resort is Vinpearl Hoi An. The construction started around 2004. After the construction, the shoreline significantly retreated so that the investors chose to protect their resort by construction of a seawall in front of the resort.”

Reminds me of Bali. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

As elsewhere in the world, doing this changed how sand moved along the coast. Other, equally ahhh poorly-placed resorts, seeing “their” beach vanish, did the same. This wasn’t a coordinated response of course, so each wall was in a different style and in a different position. Giant black sand-filled socks dive into the ocean in front of some prime real estate.

The socks appear to be a part of a greater plan to turn the beach into a giant sandpit. This story covers it, along with an interesting video. Set about 250 metres offshore an underwater dyke is being built which will in theory protect the beach. Other reports note the area between the dyke and the beach will be backfilled with sand dredged from the Thu Bồn, which seems ... unwise. Past similar projects, costing millions of dollars, have failed. Similar beach nourishment exercises elsewhere have found the costs to be immense.

The have and have nots. Note the difference in the level of the sand. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

While the beaches to the far south are already gone, up the beach, at An Bàng, the hammer has fallen big time. An Bàng you see, straddles a higher dune than down the bottom of the beach, so while the development is lower key, the fall to the sea is greater. When I walked down the beach today, some places had sheer drops of three to four metres. Take my word for it, the fall is precipitous in places.

Traditionally a more affordable strip, An Bàng is often portrayed as some sort of bohemian whatever. There’s chic cafes and plenty of thatch roofing, distressed wood and washed out whitewash. Members of the informal economy (sorry I mean global nomads) ponder life on their MacBooks. Despite this deliberate rustic-ness, there’s a tonne of money turning over. Shabby chic (and often foreign-owned) joints on Airbnb pass for hundreds of dollars a night.

Watch that last step. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

An Bàng seemed to lack the deep pockets of the grander resorts that made the mess in the first place. Instead, over the years a range of efforts have been made to try to protect the dune. Sandbags failed, as did bigger ones. Even bigger ones also failed. Staggered walls made of bamboo poles, some built atop the failed efforts of earlier years. Sand-filled bags buttress the bamboo, but when the bags fall apart only the spiky bamboo walls remain. These are ideal for catching trash—including the remnants of the bags—it is as unsightly as it is dangerous. Fall on one of those fences after a night on Huda Beer and you will know all about it.

Meanwhile hotels, cafes, and houses continue to wash away. Bathrooms seem resilient, ridge-top solitary loos lord it over the sand, waiting to topple. Elsewhere, half collapsed rooms die a slow-motion death, cement detritus lining the beach. These are, in a way, the worst bit of the entire s**t sandwich. If authorities had a modicum of concern for beachgoer safety, it would identify these and remove them before they fell into the sea.

It is, truly awful.

I’ve run out of metaphors. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

So what should happen?

The Vinpearl should absolutely be levelled. Others that likewise rely on the walls that exacerbated this mess should go too. I’d stretch this north to the Marriott (according to Google Maps) garbage fire under construction, and Palm Garden. In their place, aggressive regeneration to return the dunes to their natural state needs to begin.

Up An Bàng way, anything on the cusp of the ever-growing cliff remains in a danger zone. These places haven’t made the mess in the way the southern joints have, and over time, they may be a little more tenable. Hard to say.

Is anyone awake at Hội An Tourism? Photo: Stuart McDonald.

Will any of this happen? No. It was suggested to me that local authorities will continue to affix bandaids while the connected firms that made this the mess it is continue to make money hand-over-fist. As a Vietnamese tourism insider put it to me, “our government prefers to half fix things so they can half fix them next year and the year after. There’s more money for everyone that way.”

Instead, the storms and floods will continue to get worse, as will the erosion. More places will fall into the ocean, littering the beach with chunks of smashed toilets and bathroom walls. People will continue to lose their livelihood. At some stage, when enough of the beach has gone, people will stop coming.

The biggest outrage? What I was charged for this coconut. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

Cửa Đại and An Bàng are the canary in the coal mine for the region. Other countries need to wake up and see what is coming and start planning today—not in twenty years.

Couchfish is 100 per cent independent and reader-supported. If you’re not already a subscriber, and you’d like to show your support, become a paying subscriber today for just US$7 per month—you can find out more about Couchfish here—or simply share this story with a friend.

Don’t forget, you can find the free podcasts on Apple, Pocket Casts and Spotify as well as right here on Couchfish.

Broad strokes, destinations want tourists to do three things. They want them to come, to spend, and to leave. In visiting somewhere—anywhere—a tourist does all these things by default, so the bar is low. The Holy Grail though, is to add another item—to stay—and more often than not, tourists do that too. But then the challenge becomes how to get them to stay longer. Not forever—after all we’ve all had guests camped in the spare room tooooo long—but to be sure, longer than a night is good. How does a destination get people to stay another day?

The Stay Another Day concept is far from a new one. Both Siem Reap and Luang Prabang have run initiatives built around this. But today, I’m writing about Huế, located more of less in the middle of Vietnam.

Slow down to xích lô speed. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

An ancient capital in times past, Huế is not short on attractions. There’s the Citadel, tombs, pagodas, museums, a beautiful riverfront, a fascinating “old city,” and a fabulous food scene. And yet, many foreign visitors give it but a night. This isn’t because they’re not interested in what the city has to offer, but rather two other reasons—both of which are out of the city’s control.

The single biggest reason is, as I’ve written before, travellers trying to see too much in too little time. Vietnam is a bigger place than most realise, and, particularly if travelling by train (which, by the way, everyone should), time goes fast. When one is trying to cram eight places into two weeks something has to give, and often that extra night in Huế is the first thing to fall off the wagon. Why Huế? For that answer, you need to look to the second challenge—which lies roughly four to five hours to the south—Hoi An.

Aside from Hạ Long Bay and Sapa, Hội An is the heaviest promoted destination in the country—and, to a point, with good reason. There is a lot to love, be it the shopfronts, the international food scene, the river setting, or (or a good day when they’re not covered in trash of washing away) the beaches. But all—Hạ Long, Sapa, and Hội An, among others—have been battered by the overtourism bat.

How about some offerings to keep overdevelopment at bay. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

Sure Da Nang sits between the two and that’s a destination in its own right I guess, but it is interchangeable with many other overtouristed beach resort strips in the region. What Hue and Hội An offer though, can’t be seen and experienced in the same way elsewhere. They’re each unique in their own way.

In looking for other “things” to convince people to stay longer in Huế, there is a concerted effort to add a “wellness” arrow to its quiver. It has a pretty hinterland and there is plenty of scope for spas, retreats, cycling tours and so on. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, but some will require a considerable chunk of change to do right. With this in mind, I’d suggest two other simple approaches that won’t break the budget, worth consideration.

The Citadel ticket has to change. From a historical point of view, Huế’s most marketed attractions are the Citadel and the Royal tombs that surround it. The former is downtown, a short walk from the city’s tourist hub on the south side of the Perfume River. The tombs are scattered around the surrounds, not all in the same direction and are generally visited by van or motorbike.

Hurry up, the clock is ticking. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

The Citadel and each tomb has there own admission fee, but you can also buy a variety of combination tickets. These allow you to visit a mix of the palace and tombs for a reduced overall price. This in itself is smart, but what isn’t so smart is the ticket is only valid for two days. In most cases what this means is a visitor will see the Citadel on one day and, best case, on the other day, see as many tombs as they can cram in. Take my word for it, after a long day of tomb wandering, the value added in that last one—whichever it may be—is low. Not an ideal experience for visitors. It also means that tourists have two action packed days, and then, “top shelf” sights done, they leave.

A better approach would be for the ticket validity to be open-ended—or say five days. Then, tourists would have the option of seeing a couple of tombs each day. In the meantime, they’re having a more relaxing experience, staying longer, and spending more. But, if the Citadel and the tombs are the top attractions, what else could/should they be doing? This brings me to my second point.

Huế may be a city of many hues, but it is also the culinary capital of Vietnam. Yes, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City—and pretty much everywhere else in the country—has great food. But—and I am willing to die on this hill—Huế has the highest ratio of great eating per square kilometre in the country. The problem is, much of the best food is in the northern part of the city, clustered around the Citadel, but the majority of the hotels are in the south.

Think calming thoughts. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

This eating is generally not in tourist-orientated restaurants. Instead it is street food or one step up, on red plastic chairs, consumed over a matching red plastic table. There are no English menus—there are often no menus at all—and there is almost never English spoken. Hygiene isn’t what it could be. If you don’t speak a word of the language and don’t know what you want, the whole scene can be a bit intimidating. In actuality it isn’t—I’ve never been turned away from a joint or felt unwelcome, but, for the uninitiated, I get it.

So while it is easy to say “spend five days seeing the palace and tombs and eat in between,” the next question is “how?” This is where Huế Tourism could lend a helping hand. They could come up with say a half dozen food walks suitable to different tastes, each listing places that are on board with the concept. This could then be reproduced alongside a map onto a flyer (yes, on paper!) and distributed to every accommodation venue in the city.

Each mentioned place could have a little poster inside, on the wall or something, reproducing the map, noting it is “Number 4 on the tour, features bún bò Huế, and the dish costs 25,000 dong. The owner is a women named Thanh who has been slinging bowls for 22 years. When you’re done, Number five is a kilometre up the road.” That is all people need—anything else they can discover under their own steam.

Give people time to explore to find out what is under the hood. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

Of course, food maps along these lines already exist. Vietnam Coracle has an excellent one, and there’s one on Travelfish, but here I’m talking about something coming from the destination’s end of the stick. The tourism board is the obvious candidate as they should have relationships with the hotels that could serve as distribution points for flyers and other information. Something that gets the local businesses involved, that gives them the kudos of knowing they’re part of the reason people stay in Huế for longer.

Something like this would not be expensive to develop nor distribute. While there might be a temptation to go high tech on it, that is overkill. Sometimes old tech—paper and pencil—works fine. Don’t overcomplicate matters.

My closing advice would be to highlight local small businesses. For every dish you get in a high-trafficked tourist restaurant in the south, there’s a better red plastic chairs version in the north. Each trail need not be exhaustive and could cater to different tastes—vegan or halal for example—or times of the day. Not all are like me—who’ll eat six bowls in six hours without complaint, so each trail could cover just four or five stops apiece. A coffee, a snack, a bigger snack, a bowl and a dessert.

Give people reasons to give Huế the time it deserves. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

Come up with say a dozen trails, six in the north, four in the south, and two striking out into the suburbs, and before you know it, tourists have instructions on a whole range of reasons to stay longer—the longer they stay, the slower they travel—a win for sustainable travel in a country just about bereft of it. Lastly, there’s no risk of putting the existing food tours out of business as they invariably don’t set foot in the old city!

All this for the costs of printing and a serious bowl budget for some of Huế Tourism’s best eaters—I know who you are!

Couchfish is 100 per cent independent and reader-supported. If you’re not already a subscriber, and you’d like to show your support, become a paying subscriber today for just US$7 per month—you can find out more about Couchfish here—or simply share this story with a friend.

Don’t forget, you can find the free podcasts on Apple, Pocket Casts and Spotify as well as right here on Couchfish.

Xin chào from Phan Rang in South Central Vietnam. I’m typing this after an extremely wet scooter day, and while this is only my fourth full day, it feels like double that. In a good way!

I’m in Vietnam to speak at a four-day conference in Huế, but I decided to turn a four-day commitment into a three week trip. It seemed like the right thing to do, but already I feel like I’m running out of time. The conference is on religious tourism and pilgrimage, which might not sound like it belongs on my page, but ... what is travel but a pilgrimage?

Hai Việt Nam. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

Titled “A sense of faith builds a sense of place,” my talk looks at the important role backpackers play in slow tourism. If, by chance, you’re in Huế next week, come along!

A few years ago, I was in some bar talking to some guy. The guy, he was aghast at my plans for a motorbike trip to the north of Vietnam. He compared it to Burma, Cambodia and Thailand’s predominant Buddhist faiths, Vietnam? No, no, no, no way man—he wasn’t going. “They’re all godless communists, why would you go there?” he said.

As we were not travelling together I wasn’t too fussed, but his thoughts were curious. He wasn’t, as far as I could tell from his behaviour over the hour I’d been talking to him, a religious guy at all. At all. And yet here he was getting all biblical on me. People can be odd.

First meal off the plane. Half hole-in-the-wall half motorcycle repair shop. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

When I arrived in Ho Chi Minh City the other day, I got a xe ôm from the airport to my hotel in Phú Nhuận District. I’d not stayed in the area before and wanted to explore somewhere new. I spent the first day in meetings and catching up with friends, but the second morning, I went for a wander.

Leaving my hotel, I walk down Trần Huy Liệu for about half an hour, past the coffee shop by the dozen, till I reach Lê Văn Sỹ. There I take a left, walking south to Chợ Nguyễn Văn Trỗi, a thriving fresh produce and a million-other-things market. After a walk through the shopping maze, I grab a street side coffee and continue south to the “river.”

Demarcating Phú Nhuận from downtown District 1, the Thị Nghè Canal, was once one of the city’s most polluted waterways. Now that’s saying something. Thanks to an almost US$400m World Bank project an enormous reworking was undertaken starting in 2002, and taking a decade to complete. A ten-year length this story blames on “unyielding clay [and] crooked Chinese contractors.” Cough splutter.

It is amazing what you can do with almost half a billion dollars. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

As a part of the process, some 7,000 houses, most belonging to the urban poor, were razed. Those with title had a chance at subsidised apartments, but many ended up landless, pushed to the periphery of town. Out of sight and out of mind and all that. Today, grass lawns and frangipani replace the grounds where the houses once stood. Lining both sides of the waterway, bench seats with canoodling lovers dot the lawns. Fishers dangle lines (no thanks!) and, by the lawn, on both sides, coffee-shop-lined roads run.

There’s also houses of worship. As I reach the canal, on my left sits Chùa Pháp Hoa, a large Buddhist temple with attention-grabbing cannon-ball flowers. Known for its bright lanterns, the name Pháp Hoa means “magic flower,” but I’m not sure if that refers to the lanterns or the flowers.

A little further east, on the south bank of the canal, lies Chùa Chantarangsay, a Khmer Buddhist temple. Walking around its grounds you could close your eyes and open them again only to find yourself in Phnom Penh. Further east still, lies Công Lý Church, one of a few in the area.

Love me a cannon-ball flower. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

After the church, I backtrack a little, and head to a cafe. My plan is to pull up a red plastic chair and have a coffee while life rolls by. Clearly the hang-out for a bunch of old guys, they eye me warily like I am spoiling the scene, but return my smile and wave me to sit. I speak exactly three words of Vietnamese—and those badly—so it doesn’t take long for our chat to dwindle. Not deterred by my lack of lingo, through sign language a decision surfaces—I have to arm wrestle each of them. No, I don’t understand either. My elbow still very sore from my motorbike accident a couple of weeks ago, I lose three times in quick succession. This seems to please them.

Coffee downed and elbow killing me, I bid my farewell and start back up Nguyễn Văn Trỗi towards my hotel. I don’t get far before I reach Jamiul Muslimin Mosque, with a bunch of devotees milling around out front. Leaning against her scooter, a young woman who is curious why I’m not in District One, chit chats me for a spell. She’d love to visit Indonesia she says, almost squealing when I tell her I live in Bali. We must look quite the couple—her head-to-toe in black and not a bead of sweat on her, me a dishevelled mess. The mosque closed, she tells me to come back later in the day, and I tell her to come to Bali. She says maybe once she gets married. As I’m not about to propose, I take my leave.

The Land Of The Godless Communists indeed.

This was the second of eight coffees along the walk. Photo: Stuart McDonald.

Almost back to the hotel, I drop in for a quick bowl and another coffee and it is time to collapse. Where did the day go? All I’ve done is walk around the block—it is so good to be on the road again.

Also, when you’re next in Ho Chi Minh City, rather than busy yourself on tours and ticking off sights, just go for a walk—you might be pleasantly surprised.

Couchfish is 100 per cent independent and reader-supported. If you’re not already a subscriber, and you’d like to show your support, become a paying subscriber today for just US$7 per month—you can find out more about Couchfish here—or simply share this story with a friend.

Don’t forget, you can find the free podcasts on Apple, Pocket Casts and Spotify as well as right here on Couchfish.