Tourist Robbers
I’m still at my desk… merely a week or so after a couple of awesome trips with the best company possible… and I’m back to feeling restless.
Perhaps it was all that research about Leh and Ladakh and biking…
Ladakh has long been on my list… though in recent times, I feel less inclined to go there. Ladakh has become India’s Thailand, once extremely exotic and the thing to do but now everyone heads there.
“There was black tarmac roads built, new passes were opened, signboards, guesthouses; home stays along the road, made this a very doable ride.” reads one post by a biker who headed there a few years ago. Perhaps that defines the essence of the things.
We want to be the explorers, step into those uncivilized lands and rough it out and discover raw nature. Having done it once, I know that there are absolutely no words to describe that feeling or the nature. No picture does it justice. No words capture the essence. And that is the way it should be… sometimes being able to capture it in a photo or words undermines it.
But when a place becomes so much dependent on the tourist trade, it loses something of itself. The things that once drew people there become plastic. Orchestrated.
I know I really cannot comment about how Ladakh is yet.
But consider wildlife tourism. A few elephants, a few deer and maybe, if you are lucky, even a few monkeys and a mongoose. And rarely a tiger. But when I see those animals, so carelessly standing by the riverside, not frightened by the sight of this mammoth, noisy bus filled with noisier people, i feel really sad.
It moves on to resorts in the area, softer hunting trips and such. And thereby the ‘wild’ experience you are supposed to have is completely tamed. And the cost of the forests and animals around you.
While it is inevitable that tourism will spread to all the unexplored areas, how much of the genuine culture can be retained under attack. Because tourism will bring a new culture into the place. People who were happy dancing around a campfire now want to wear Levis and dance around the campfire. Soon they think that dancing is lame and they’d rather do it in a Bollywood movie.
The loss of culture is inevitable. Right now, it just makes me a little sad too.
