The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [212]
Of course travelling is not new, but it may be that we can differentiate between travellers in past times, people we have quoted extensively like Ibn Battuta and Isabel Burton, and the modern tourist. Before steam, sea travel, even for the elite, was a long and hazardous undertaking. In the nineteenth century travel, both for work and pleasure, increased dramatically, yet the former far outweighed the latter. The Brasseys and their entourage were very exceptional (see pages 233–4). Most of the passengers on a P&O liner were not recreational travellers. If they were men they were almost all going somewhere to take up a job. Women accompanied their husbands, or travelled to seek a husband – the ill-named Fishing Fleet of marriageable young women who came out to India for a season hoping, so we are told, to catch a husband. Even more demeaningly, those who returned home unbetrothed were Returned Empties.
Mass tourism then is a phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century. The advent of larger aeroplanes in the 1960s facilitated its growth, as did generally prosperous economic times in the first world, which enabled lower class people to afford holidays overseas. There are differences, obviously, between different types of visitors, ranging from the fully catered and accompanied luxury tourists, who stay in hermetically sealed hotels in the third world, to the younger solitary travellers with their trusty Lonely Planet and Rough Guide books. There is even a certain snobbishness about who is a tourist, and who an implicitly more adventurous and 'authentic' traveller. As the saying goes, 'I am a traveller, you are a tourist, they are a coach party.' Or as Evelyn Waugh put it succinctly: 'The tourist is the other fellow.'
When western tourists stay in coastal areas around the Indian Ocean their relationship to the sea is very different from the fisherfolk with whom they mingle. For the traditional beach dwellers the sea is a source of a precarious living, often a dangerous or hostile place, not necessarily benign. Tellingly, their houses often face away from the beach. For leisured middle class westerners the sea and the coast is a space away from normal life. The impressive Australian novelist Tim Winton put this well. 'I often wonder about these two childhoods of mine, the one contained and clothed, between fences, the other rambling, windblown, half-naked between the flags.' Or again:
Freediving in the open ocean, for all the other things it is, is mostly a form of forgetting. Surfing, swimming laps, drifting a bait from a jetty or a boat are similarly forgetful things. They are forms of desertion, retreat, hermitage, a stepping-aside from terrestrial problems to be absorbed into the long moment. The sea is immense, trackless, potent, but above all, neutral.66
All this is new in world history: Lencek wrote of
the transformation of the beach from an alien, inaccessible, and hostile wilderness devoted to conquest, commerce, exploration, and the primal customs of tribal cultures, into a thriving, civilized, pleasure and recreation oriented outpost of Western life style, where so many sybaritic impulses of culture have been indelibly concentrated.67
With this background in western perceptions of the coast, some case studies will show the varied impact of tourism on coastal areas. I will start with Goa, the former Portuguese colony on the Indian west coast, a place I have visited frequently over the last thirty-four years. Numbers have shot up recently. In the 1985–86 season, roughly October to May, twenty-four charter flights brought 3,568 passengers, in 1995–96 there were 337 flights bringing 75,694 passengers. In 1985 the total number of tourists was 775,212, of whom 682,545 were Indian and 92,667 foreign. Ten years later the numbers had risen to a total of 1,107,705, of whom 878,487 were Indian, 229,218 foreign. Of the foreign arrivals, 58.6 per cent were from the UK. The most up-to-date data available puts the population