A New Century, A New Tourism

The numbers, as they say, do not lie. Across the world, from Europe to Australia, and the United States and Canada, surveys consistently demonstrate that between 50-60% of respondents feel that travel should involve new experiences and offer learning opportunities. Increasingly, the traditional sand, sun, and beach holiday is being incorporated into a larger trend in which a day at the beach is complemented by specialized cooking classes, nature surveys, anthropological research, and a host of other activities.

Tourism is the largest business sector in the world economy. According to the International Ecotourism Society, the sector employs over 200 million people and generates USD 3.6 trillion in annual economic activity. Tourism is such a large business that if it were a country, it would have the world’s second largest economy, just behind that of the United States.

The unique dynamics of travel and tourism are very frequently leveraged across wide geo-political areas, with the result that in 4 out of 5 countries globally it is in the top five of export earners; that translates to 150 countries worldwide, and in 60 of them tourism is the top earner. Further, 83% of developing countries list tourism as a principle export – or, foreign exchange earner – and again, according to the International Ecotourism Society, tourism is the only industry in which developing countries have consistently posted a surplus over the past decade.

Ecotourism is broadly defined as responsible travel to areas in a fashion that conserves biological and human diversity. Although a relatively young industry, it has already carved out its particular market niche; and that niche is predicted to grow sizably in the near future as more and more people and families abandon the traditional holiday in favor of a more adventurous and educational travel experience.

From bird watching holidays in the Costa Rican rainforest canopy, to live-aboard diving cruises in the south Pacific, ecotourism and its facilities, packages, and resorts have taken root the world over. And it is interesting to note that a remarkably sizeable percentage of current and potential ecotourism destinations are in the developing world, where governments and other private and public organizations struggle daily to conserve natural diversity in an ever-modernizing world.

The connections between biodiversity and cultural diversity have long been noted and described by scientists and researchers. Places like the Amazon, the Congo, the Himalayas, and Indonesia’s eastern islands – to name but a few – are not only natural wonders, they are also human wonders; areas rife with unique cultures, isolated languages, primitive religions. And at the great risk of sounding like a cultural relativist, these areas are in their own way as unique and special as more developed and less remote cultures and places. In short, they are worthy of a visit, if for only the ‘wow’ factor.

But in visiting such places, the ecotourism industry must be extremely careful to not homogenize the very unique and special variety they are trying to promote and protect. Ecotourism should be about responsibility and conservation, and not a ‘slash and burn’ industry in which an area is discarded when too modern and a new area is then discovered, promoted, and in turn discarded also.

Unfortunately, the unique demand of the industry is also its great weakness: it strives to constantly locate and expose the new, the rare, and the undocumented. And in a world of limited resources and diminishing natural returns that is an unsustainable and volatile business.

There are several national and international ecotourism associations and organizations that seek to address this instability through networking and information. After all, the reasons to make a holiday in the Amazon Jungle are to photograph wild animals, view rare flora, and expand your knowledge of the world and your place within a complicated system of interactions that have taken millennia to build. In that, the goals of an ecotourist are remarkably aligned with that of a conservationist or research scientist. And if this is truly our one and only world – which, when the last time I checked, was a correct statement – then we as citizens of the world all share some token of responsibility for its stewardship.

The Trash Collectors of Pedungan and Bubugan

DENPASAR - Pemulung are the trash collectors you see pedaling around town on old bicycles. In the absence of any reliable and comprehensive public waste disposal system, they are the guys who, motivated by economic incentive, essentially do our dirty work. Pemulung, which means ‘scavenger’ in Bahasa Indonesia, also collect on foot, drive trucks, and act as agents who buy and sell and deal in a market of discarded items. From the moment you toss an empty plastic Aqua water bottle, until it resurfaces in a plastics recycling facility in Surabaya, where it is shredded and pelleted and then resold, the pemulung are along every step of the way.

I recently paid a visit to a pemulung area - you might call it a village - in Sesetan, an area of southern Denpasar. The area is home to many pemulung and, in some instances, their families as well. It consists of a shanty town-like assemblage of shacks and heaps of piled waste just off of Jalan Pulau Rote in Pedungan.

The pemulung of Pedungan are relatively small players in a complex system that, when we discuss trash and the island of Bali, involves luxury hotels, buying and selling agents in Bali and Java, public services, various provincial and regency ministries, and you – the reader (if you happen to reside in Bali, or indeed, many other places throughout Indonesia and the developing world).

The pemulung only collect waste that is economically valuable. In Pedungan they collect paper (Rp. 700/kg), magazine paper (Rp. 350/kg.), plastics (Rp. 1,500/kg.), cans (Rp. 8,000/kg.) and glass bottles that are then returned to agents. There are categories and sub-categories of waste, and each has a distinct value that is reflective of its relative importance in terms of re-making a profit from rubbish.

Across town in an area of east Denpasar called Kesiman is another pemulung area. Called Bubugan, the area is home to pemulung from Java, Madura, and beyond. The pemulung of Bubugan essentially collect the same items as those in Pedungan; though supply of rubbish is endless, demand is limited to certain items. Aluminum cans and clear plastics have an intrinsic material value – it is cheaper, for example, to reuse than to remake aluminum - while other items like plastic bags have none.

Though the pemulung, motivated by market forces, essentially provide waste disposal services in many areas around Bali, they are limited by the demands of the market. A major challenge when we talk of waste is not only what type of waste, but what waste is of value and what is not. If it were worth their while to collect all types of waste rather than just some types, this island would be a far cleaner place.

The Impossibility of Either Loving or Leaving Labuan

I was once laid up in Labuan Bajo with severe fevers, several large and infected skin abrasions, and profound stomach pains. Now, I grant you, the situation could have been worse; I could, for example, have been sick in rural Benin with the twin phantoms of typhoid and cerebral malaria (as a Serbian ethnobotanist of my acquaintance once was), or I could have been a Victorian-era adventurer condemned to a diet of raw rat flesh in a Central Asian dungeon (as Alexander Stoddart so suffered at the hands of the Emir of Bokkara), but in retropsect I can announce that the situation was sufficiently taxing that do not envy either the experience.

Labuan Bajo is well-known worldwide as the jumping-off point for travels in the Komodo National Park, in the Indonesian province on Nusa Tenggara Timur. For a dozen months I worked and lived in the mountains about 35 kilometers south-east of Labuan, with the Tado people in the Kempo ethnic region of West Manggarai. But that is not the topic of this brief essay, and I will not burden you with its intricacies.

By some accounts, Labuan Bajo can be considered a city, a town, or a hybrid mixture of the both. It hugs a marvelous sweep of coastline and its inhabitants are a polyglot rabble of Manggarai, Bugis, Bajo, Bima, Bajawa, the odd Javanese, a lone Balinese police officer, and various other ethnicities and sub-ethnicities particular to that area of the world. It is home to mosques and churches, to seaside fishing villages and hillside farming villages, quite poor food and some very impressionable nightlife that I would describe as charming and memorable, if a touch basic.

The doctor who administered my varying afflictions was a very commanding, if not incapable, Timorese woman from the provincial capital of Kupang. My fevers were tempered with aspirin, my skin infections with generous tips of foul-smelling liquids, my stomach pains with mashed bananas, and as a final flourish and for good measure my backside was the recipient of a fairly intimidating injection, which, if the skin infections gracing my legs are considered in tandem, made the simple act of walking rather challenging.

Over the course of several days I had made a sufficiently miraculous recovery so that my faith in the Timorese doctor was confirmed in side with my longing to again board a bus bound for the mountains and make the trek home to my village of Pusut. And a few dinners of grilled fish, made even more palatable by the addition of several large bottles of Bintang beer (antibiotics be damned) had reconstituted my strength and added the reassuring protein - and equally necessary alcohol - that my diet of pappaya leaves, cassava, and white rice in the villages had left lacking.

So I bounced upon rusted axles while inhaling a delicious perfume of cloved cigarrette smoke and exhaust fumes, happy that in this one regard (my health), I was again fit to fight a struggle that the rural poor in developing countries worldwide know so well.

Several months later I marked my birthday in a series of airports traveling from West Sumatera to Denpasar. In transit at Jakarta's Soekarno-Hatta International Airport I sat down and for several hours stared out a window and thought of Manggarai and the sunsets over that magnificent sweep of coastline, over those parched hills, over Labuan Bajo. And I longed to return with a conviction and force as strong as my desire to leave and never return once was.