LIFE IN PARADISE

There is a pleasant ritual among beach walkers. You greet one another with good wishes, a nod, or a smile of acknowledgement. After two consecutive sightings a certain camaraderie develops between individuals. The retired couple who always sat out on the patio of their tiny, open, mint-coloured cabin in the grounds of the apartments would always wave and smile encouragingly as I approached, turned and made off in the opposite direction.

A few days ago I met them walking on the beach and we fell into conversation. They were from the USA and had been to Barbados before and loved it. They’d had a lovely time but this holiday was ending on a sour note. The previous day, someone had entered their cabin and robbed them of all their money and valuables. They didn’t quite know how they would get home at the other end, and had only just enough Bajan dollars to leave the island later that day.

They were fraught and genuinely disappointed. I was too. This was no well-off couple. You could tell they’d had a hard-working life. They were simple people who had earned the right, through diligence and self-discipline, to have a modest annual fortnight in the sun. But whoever decided to relieve them of their possessions could discern none of that. For him, or whoever, they were there to be fleeced.

I wouldn’t want to assert that in the mind of the average local person, living a penny-pinching life, a foreigner is no more than an object of prey. But you could see how misunderstandings might occur. There we are, happy natives in Paradise, except we know that it isn’t — it should be but it isn’t — needing not much more than the sun’s Vitamin D and the fruit of God’s Earth, to put it simply. Meanwhile we are possessed of the unshakeable belief that life abroad, almost anywhere, breeds fat cats with massive bank balances.

Once, it was tourism’s greatest claim that it fostered understanding between people. But that myth has been dying, and my little tale is yet another nail in its coffin. Now, we have to find new attributes for the largest and fastest growing industry in the world. Happily, we know tourism’s negative consequences have important implications for the sustainable development of economies, especially fragile ones such as ours in the Caribbean. We now know, too, that it must be carefully planned, managed, monitored and evaluated, and that the people must be involved in all levels of its development and security.

Back in the 1970s I made a study of tourism in Egypt, that poor, over-populated country with the enormous responsibility of having civilisation’s history to care for. It became apparent then that tourism, per se, would have to redefine itself if it was to be useful to anyone or anything. And, by and large, it has. In the last thirty years we have become acutely aware of the fragility of our relics, the planet, the eco-systems and the possibly corrupting effect upon individuals interacting with tourists.

Personally, I have always considered tourism a parasite industry, imposing itself and producing no tangible product, in the real sense of the word. Of course, food and “culture,” construction, catering and management skills are by-products. The best argument we can offer for tourism is that it creates employment and the worry of keeping the plant in good order has forced us into being conservationist and inventive.

For many countries tourism is both a blessing and challenge. Barbados, for example, with few natural resources except its beaches and its people — about 250,000 of them — had 100,455 visitors in January and February alone. And it must sustain such impressive figures to keep the country economically afloat. Yet, it’s a “mature” destination and has to keep fresh and ahead of the competition. A new focus is on excellence in service.

For Barbados’s sake I hope that doesn’t run to excellence in the art of theft but extends, rather, to those such as supermarket (probably underpaid) cashiers who appear to resent shoppers. Because, as I said to one last week, “I will take my money elsewhere.” And I did.