Director Pegi Vail
Director Pegi Vail (center) with her cameraman Melvin Estrella and local guide on the Tuichi River in the Bolivian Amazon
GRINGO TRAILS B-
USA Bolivia Thailand
Mali Bhutan (79 mi)
2013 d: Pegi Vail Gringo Trails Official Site
Take only memories,
leave only footprints. —Chief Seattle
More than ten years in the making, the film explores the
effect of institutionalized tourism in remote regions around the globe, where
the tourist mindset, especially when they arrive in droves, alters the natural
landscape and turns whatever natural beauty the site offers into a money-making
theme park, where instant gratification outweighs long term gains or
benefits. While the director is an
American anthropologist who is also Associate Director of the Center for Media,
Culture and History at New York University and a Fulbright Scholar, the film
exposes a kind of hedonistic behavior that is altering the face of the
planet. Whether one travels on the
luxurious high end of the economic scale using Fodor’s or Frommer’s Travel
Guide or backpacks on the cheap scouring through The Lonely Planet guide of must see places around the world,
tourists are continually looking for a bigger bang for their buck, searching to
discover new unexplored worlds. Using an
episodic structure, the director takes us into some of the most remote regions
of the world, beginning with the harrowing adventure in 1981 of Israeli backpacker
Yossi Ghinsberg in the Bolivian jungle of Rurrenabaque,
where he and some friends set out on an authentic jungle experience hiking into
the wilds of the rain forest in Madidi National Park, though they had little
knowledge of wilderness survival. Using
maps that were nearly unusable, they were unable to track the overflowing
riverbanks of the Tuichi River that cut a path through the Bolivian
Amazon, causing him to lose contact with his companions, where Yossi was
stranded in the jungle for nearly a month before he was rescued by search
teams. While he was fortunate to have
been found, where the boat slowed to turn around at the exact same spot where
he happened to be, his emaciated body resembled photos of concentration camp
survivors. Writing a book about his
experience, Back from Tuichi in 1993,
it attracted the interest of similar wilderness seeking tourists, especially
from Israel, where they descended into the remote region by the thousands, all
searching for that same authentic jungle experience, where people who had lived
quietly and peacefully for generations were suddenly called upon to act as tour
guides on hastily put together expeditions, where the myth of Yossi Ghinsberg
only grew more exaggerated by the retelling of the tale, turning a poor
indigenous community into a tourist trap.
Another British tourist enthralled by LAWRENCE OF ARABIA
(1962) and OUT OF AFRICA (1985) was realizing her dream by finally traveling to
Timbuktu in
Mali, one of the poorest countries on earth, where this once-thriving mythical
village on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert exists in a time warp, once
one of the thriving cultural centers in Africa, featuring the Sankore
Mosque and other scholarly university centers for Islamic study, where
literally nothing has changed, as the town is surrounded by sand dunes and the
streets covered in sand as well, seemingly preserved for centuries. While remarking on the beauty of the region,
locals had a differing view, claiming nothing could grow in the desert, that
life is nearly impossible, making it one of the poorest towns in the world,
where the culture has all but disappeared as the population moved elsewhere, so
there was nothing beautiful about any of that.
The romantic fantasies suddenly meet the reality, yet the next day they
arrange for a camel ride, where each of the tourists is decked out in flowing
white robes that resemble Peter O’Toole in the movie, where she’s finally
excited by the thrill of adventure, sleeping out under the stars, yet when they
return to town the next day it only takes them 5-minutes, as they simply moved
them to the other side of an existing sand dune where the town was out of
sight. In another desert on the other
side of the world, Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flat in the
world, measuring four thousand square miles, where tourists began gathering in
the 1980’s to collect cactus from Incahuasi
"island" in the middle of the flats. Twenty years later, after being listed in
various guidebooks, people started arriving in SUV’s to visit Fredo Lazaro
Ticoma, the self-professed “first inhabitant,” having built his home on the
site which he turned into a tourist museum where he could profit tremendously,
creating a spot where crowds of visitors would gather at picnic tables bringing
with them large quantities of alcohol, showing little respect for the fragile environment,
while leaving behind plenty of garbage for someone else to clean up. By 2010, tourists had swelled to 300 to 400
per day, where Fredo can be seen serving lunch, as the government now runs the
island. Travel writer Rolf Potts asserts
that “since modernity kicked in, displaced middle class people have to look to
poor people [for authenticity].”
The most egregious example of beauty turned to ruination
started out as an unspoiled paradise, where National
Geographic travel editor Costas Christ describes his own unbridled
enthusiasm about visiting Ko Pha Ngan Island in Thailand in 1979, taking a ferry
down the river in southern Thailand with about a dozen or so other backpackers,
and when they disembarked, he was met with a flurry of tourist hawkers, all
trying to steer them into their own business, which was exactly the last thing
he wanted to experience, so he asked the ferry pilot where he was going? He was told the next island had no tourists
as there was nothing to do there, so he hopped back on and seemingly had the
entire island to himself. After walking
a few miles, he came to an overlook of a spectacular beach below known as Haad Rin
Beach, where he met another couple living there, so he spent a month with them
in what can only be described as idyllic conditions, as this was literally
paradise on earth. Ten years later small
bungalows were built along the beach to accommodate the tourist traffic, but by
the Millennium New Year’s Eve Full
Moon Party in 1999, closer to 15,000 drunken revelers showed up, and by
2010 that number was closer to 50,000, where there were simply no sanitary
facilities to accommodate everyone, so human waste and refuse, especially
plastic bottles, littered the beach afterwards in what resembled a disaster
zone. In contrast, the breathtaking
beauty of Bhutan,
nestled at the foot of the Himalayas, opened up to tourists in 1974, adopting a
policy of “gross national happiness” rather than gross profit margins, where
they charge tourists $250/day, attracting only the most affluent, threatening
visitors with expulsion if they don’t comply with their cultural
traditions. This attracts older
tourists, retired professors or the economically elite, where a tour group is
seen climbing 2500 feet on foot just to get to a desired restaurant. This two-tiered economic plan, one price for
the locals, another for the tourists, brings much needed money into the region
in order to properly maintain the natural splendor. This same policy is implemented at the
Chalalan Ecolodge in Bolivia in what’s called eco-tourism, as the tourist money
is used to help explain the value of the land and its resources to their
indigenous culture while helping to sustain the upkeep and pristine beauty of
the region. Costas Christ observed that
while there used to be plenty of empty spaces around the globe that hadn’t been
visited, “now it looks like a Jackson Pollard painting.” While this might be required viewing on all
transcontinental flights, reminding prospective tourists that they are “guests”
in another country, the film only artificially examines the surface realities,
as Vail never digs any deeper to explore the real underlying causes of why
tourists tend to be so uniformly disrespectful to the nations that they
visit. Whether it is the economically
elite or the more frugal backpacker, both exhibit the same sense of entitlement,
where the sole criteria appears to be to have a good time, irrespective of the
consequences to others.
