Soaring real estate prices; locals turned into
cleaners, drivers, tour guides…
Did you ever think that one day, surf
tourism would be a thing? Many years ago, of course, surfers
rejected the whole notion of tourism, where every whim, need,
desire is taken care of by troupes of indigenous workers toiling
for their western masters.
Hence adventures to the hitherto unknown islands of Bali, Java,
Sumatra and so forth, surfers melting into local
communities, learning the language,
connecting.
These days, surfers have been built towns in every crummy Third
World joint from Indonesia to Mexico. These ghettos, filled with
balayaged boys and girls, rely on two crucial factors: cheap labour
and cheap land. The four-hundred k that doesn’t buy you even a
piece of a studio apartment in New York gets you a palace by the
beach in Nicaragua; the thirty bucks an hour you gotta pay for a
nanny in Sydney gets you a fleet of industrious hands in Bali.
Good for the tourist; ruinous for the indigenous community. Real
estate prices soar. Trades and traditional crafts lost as everyone
becomes cleaners, drivers and tour guides.
In an essay on Pacific Standard, the fantastically
named Cinnamon Janzer skewers surf tourism. Here’s a good lil
excerpt:
“A 2009 study on global
mobility found that ‘Sayulita has become
transnationalized … by its real estate market, which is now mainly
advertised for potential clients in the north. These marketing
campaigns have [rendered] property ownership virtually inaccessible
to the local population.’ Even in 2009, property prices started to
reach into the millions of dollars in Sayulita, where average homes
used to cost just a few thousand dollars.
Once tiny fishing villages like Sayulita and San Juan are
touched by surf tourism, they begin to transform
culturally. Nick Towner, a lecturer at the
Auckland Institute of Studies in New Zealand whose doctoral work
researched the isolated effects of surf tourism in the Mentawai
Islands of Indonesia, explains that, ‘after a while, you start to
see a shift in the community. They sell their nets and the younger
people don’t fish anymore. Now they’re dependent on surf tourism,
but that’s seasonal.’
Communities that once relied on their own skills for subsistence
are now dependent on tourism, an outside force that naturally waxes
and wanes. Towner’s work also found that younger generations begin
to adopt both the appearance and behaviors of the tourists they
see. He explains that they begin to wear board shorts and sometimes
turn to activities like drug dealing to acquire iPhones that they
can’t otherwise afford.
Surfers often head to exotic locales on vacation with the
intention to relax and escape, often turning to drugs and alcohol
in the process, a trend reflected in the popping up
debauchery-fueled bar crawls like San Juan del
Sur’s Sunday Funday. Local
kids, however, don’t understand that the tourists’ vacations are
just that—vacations. What younger generations of locals perceive as
a lifestyle is really just a two-week break from what is likely a
job that involves sitting in front of a computer hours on end and a
dull commute to and from an office every day.”
Do you think, as I do, that eventually there’ll be uprisings
everywhere and the surf colonialists will have their heads removed
and placed on pikes as a warning to anyone else who might think
it’s a good idea to stomp into foreign cultures and takeover?
Or will it be biz as usual, money talks etc, forever?
Read the rest
here.
