Two
tourist spots and two different forms of extraction of your dollar.
At the
end of the day we are just dollar signs to the locals at the tourist areas, observed
a seasoned travel writer. Locals driven by different needs than the tourists
who are either pushed (dissatisfaction with their lives at home) or pulled
(attraction of exotic) there, think of their paychecks, tips and other mundane
aspects of their lives rather than the cultural aspects of Serbia or the peculiar
eating habits of Norwegians. To be fair, the majority of the tourists also have
very little interest in the local culture, while paying lip service to off the
beaten track, immerse in local culture.
What if
the local culture is minimal to non-existent and an imitation, a poor Xerox copy,
of the very same culture you came from?
Examples
of such fractured societies abound, more common in the Caribbean than
elsewhere:
Cayman
Islands
Saint
Martin/Sint Maartin; the island I just left
The same
cannot be said of the islands of the Pacific, where people had been living for
thousands of years when the European adventurers of that time arrived looking
to “discover”.
In the
span of a few days I was in two places, very different from each other, both
attracting thousands of tourists.
MAHO BAY IN SINT MAARTEN OVER WHICH PLANES FLY PERILOUSLY CLOSE TO THE BEACH GOERS
Siem
Reap in Cambodia
Saint
Martin in the Caribbean
SAMBOL PREI KUK A PRE ANGKORIAN RUINS DATING BACK TO THE 7TH CENTURY OF THE COMMON ERA IN CAMBODIA
They are
visited by different kinds of tourists, the merits of visiting either is
varied. One is very easy to reach, just three hours from the east coast of the
USA, but also has direct flights to Paris and Amsterdam, because of a colonial anomaly.
Siem
Reap is difficult to get to, have no direct flights from Europe or USA or
Australia. Most of the tourists to Siem Reap are either European or Australian;
whereas the majority of tourists to Saint Martin are from the USA.
ROAD SIDE ATTRACTIONS IN CAMBODIA: LOCUSTS, SPIDERS
Why do
people leave their comfortable lives and subject themselves to heat and flies
and humidity? Not to mention unfamiliar food, as in Cambodia or cheap imitation
of the bad food from the USA, as in the Dutch Sint Maartin? Saint Martin is familiar and Siem Reap is
exotic. One has a beach and very little else, the other necessitates fairly fit
physique and at least a mild interest in history of these millennia old
archeological ruins, the largest in the world.
These
varying aspects define the kind of tourists who go to either of the places.
The idea
of a comparison of these two recently visited places occurred to me when I was
leaving SXM, a flight full of Americans going home:
Mainly
middle aged
Almost
entirely White
Many
married couples, mostly looking unfit.
There
were some young couples with children.
This
variety of tourists would be a rarity in Siem Reap. The visitors to Siem Reap
exude gaiety, mainly young single Europeans looking for exciting experiences,
in search of off the track adventures along well-trodden paths laid down for
the tourists.
DUTCH SIDE OF SINT MAARTEN
Culture?
What
culture?
For
whom?
In Saint
Martin, many of the workers that the tourist encounter are immigrants from
other islands, and ignorant of the rudiments of history of this bi governmental
island.
When I
was a child, being very curious about the geography (before age 10, I could
name a variety of countries and their capitals), I knew that two unique geopolitical
entities existed: the condominium of New Hebrides where the islands were
governed six months at a time by Britain and France respectively as well as the
island of Saint Martin divided between France and Holland, with the locals
holding nationalities of their metropolitan countries.
The
island of Saint Martin is barren, a producer of salt in the olden times, with a
shabbiness, especially on the Dutch side, of a poorly run colony, and the
appearance of “France” with their baguettes and bistros on the French Side with
prices in Euros to match, where the inequality is camouflaged under the
tricolors displayed on Fort Louis.
Locals
on either side of the “International Boundary” are poor, but in different ways.
Poverty of Culture does not exist in Siem Reap but a culture of can be seen and
felt in Saint Martin, much similar in other tourist islands whose focus is USA
and its very superficial icons.
Being a
traveler and very proud of my millennial culture, but well integrated into the
countries and cultures I visit, what I want to tell people on both these
tourists spots is this:
Keep
your culture, it will always be valuable. It was VS Naipaul, the Nobel Prize winning
writer from Trinidad who labelled the Caribbean as Fractured societies. Pablo
Neruda exhorted people not to become vessels without anchor in a storm, the autochthonous
culture replaced by a poor photocopy of some metropolitan culture.
Give up
your culture without being an immigrant, you become a foreigner in your own
land. You become shadows of your own selves, not knowing where you are going or
what you are doing. On the Dutch side no Dutch is spoken, USD is the currency
(the official currency is NA Florints), the orientation is to USA, where they can
visit without a Visa on their Dutch passports.
You
cannot be Dutch even with a Dutch passport, if you can’t even speak Dutch. (You
cannot be a Cuban if you don’t speak Spanish and non-Cubans are not entitled to
Cuban nationality)
The
history of these islands, even the ones densely populated, are not difficult to
comprehend. Their histories before Cristobal Colon largely unknown, there has
not been much happening in the last 500 years: all the islands have very much
similar histories, warfare involving various metropolitan navies, introduction
of sugar and slaves, then indentured labourers from India and China and the
arrival of Tourism. Caribbean remains a strong draw for American leisure travelers.
Siem
Reap is a Travel of Not Plenty compared to Sint Maarten’s Travel of Plenty.
Majority of tourists to Siem Reap do not spend too much money locally, stay in
cheap guest houses (in Siem Reap, you can stay at guest houses which are only 10
dollars per day, and eat meals which cost only a dollar or two. Interestingly
Cambodia also uses USD as its currency of the day whereas the local Riels are
widely available but not preferred). The tourists to Saint Martin better come
with some money in their pockets. The hotel I stayed at was a throwback to
another time and very generic with immigrants from Jamaica and Trinidad
handling its operations, would have bought me three nights at an elegant
boutique hotel in Siem Reap.
The
flight was staffed by DC based ex-US airways crew, thus friendlier than the
usual AA ones and I had my first taste of American Food, after being away from
the USA for one month on journeys to the Far East.
Curiously
enough, I had a desire to return to Saint Martin, to explore the French side,
and I was even told of a resto called Kakao..
