By Catherine Bennett
 After bumping about the lower end of the human development index for a few
years, Sierra Leone again arrived at the bottom last November: 177th out of 177.
Introducing its latest figures, the United Nations Development Programme
explained how a combination of factors, including life expectancy, education and
standard of living, helps establish whether a country provides 'an environment
in which people can develop their full potential and lead productive, creative
lives in accord with their needs and interests'. Life expectancy in Sierra Leone
is 40.
On the plus side, Sierra Leone has miles of fantastic beaches, which score
highly for all key seaside indicators, among them white sand, crystalline water
and the all-important relaxation factor. 'With some of the most perfect
palm-lined sands on the continent,' the Lonely Planet guide to Africa confirms,
'it won't be long before Sierra Leone takes its place in Europe's packaged
beach-holiday scene.'
To this end, airline BMI has announced that an increased number of flights
between London and Freetown will start in May, with its CEO Nigel Turner
assuring the newcomers to the resort (recently likened by one writer to a
'stinking refugee camp'): 'One always needs to be careful, but you need to be
careful in Brixton, frankly.'
You certainly do and if it is early days to make Brixton a separate entry in
the human development index, it is surely time the Foreign and Commonwealth
Office began issuing guidance reminding visitors to the region to exercise
caution. Or they could avoid the area altogether. As the Lonely Planet guide
reminds visitors to Freetown, with its traffic jams, rubbish and power cuts, 'if
you spend all your time in the tourist-focused areas, you'll rarely encounter
those problems'.
There can be no guarantee, however, that the visitor will not, from time to
time, be confronted by potentially distressing evidence of human suffering, even
if most of Freetown can be successfully shunned. Some 6,000 of those who
survived the civil war are terribly mutilated, their limbs hacked off by
Revolutionary United Front gangs. Are such sights consonant with two weeks of
blissful rest? The Lonely Planet guide is soothing: 'Most locals hang on to
their optimism.' Then again, that might have been written when Sierra Leone was
still number 176.
But such fortitude in the face of adversity will be familiar to more
experienced travellers, whose reports from ill-starred, faraway places
invariably stress the tremendous good cheer of people who have, on the face of
it, little to look forward to beyond privation, illness and death. Even in
Brixton, they report, it is common to see the most deprived children laughing
happily as they enjoy a refreshing fag or sip from a cooling alcopop.
As for the travellers: one can only marvel at their resolute commitment to
their holidays, undiminished by boycotts, wars, climate change and anything else
that consistency, decency and good taste can throw at them. Few of us, for
instance, may want to visit Sudan just now, but a quick internet shop brings up
a variety of leisured challenges to genocide, from a Sudan camel trek (16 days,
from £2,959), to Responsible Travel's Nuba People and Villages (15 days, from
£2,400). 'Sudan is an emerging destination for adventurous travellers,' says the
company, which prides itself on low carbon footprints and a principled approach:
'The tribes we meet have no idea of tourism and we have a huge responsibility
when exposing them to a different culture.'
If somebody is going to introduce Nuban tribespersons to the benefits of
Rohan's Dynamic Moisture Control, we should perhaps be grateful that the
emissaries supplied by Responsible Travel are likely to be ever so ethical, long
accustomed to weighing up the arguments for and against their foreign trips
before they decide to go on them anyway.
Since Aung San Suu Kyi declared, in 1996, that to visit Burma under the junta
was to condone its regime, informed tourists have hardly been able to avoid
wondering if the benefits of their own presence, complete with a copy of Ian
McEwan's Saturday and lots of money, can really compensate for endorsing
tyrants, in Burma or anywhere else. For the confused, Lonely Planet's guide to
Burma still offers a summary of this 'debate', along with the conclusion that
tourists do the oppressed a favour, by offering 'outside contact'.
Inevitably, the success of this outreach work is hard to evaluate. Is it even
necessary? In North Korea, where Amnesty reports continued 'systematic
violations of human rights', a tour operator tells customers: 'Far from being
downtrodden and disconsolate, you will be welcomed by our guide amongst the
merry faces untroubled by worries of money and crime.'
Equally, should we introduce Western values to the citizens of Belarus and
risk damaging what another operator depicts as perfectly preserved Soviet charm?
'If you are interested in experiencing what is one of the last remaining havens
of the "good old days" when the Iron Curtain separated Europe into two camps,
then Belarus can provide it in spades.'
F or the truly concerned traveller, interested in experiencing authentic
communism, dictatorship or abject poverty, it's clearly far better to emulate a
visitor getting close to a turtle in the Galápagos Islands: respectfully
approaching the different form of life without upsetting nature's delicate
balance in any way. As Krishna Pujari, who first encouraged poorists to view the
Mumbai slums, once put it: 'We want to show tourists the reality of Dharavi and
change any negative ideas they might have about this slum. We respect the
privacy of the residents of Dharavi and ensure that the tour does not disturb
them in any way.'
With human rights out of the way, resourceful tourists are now proving that
ecological objections, which had not even surfaced in 1996, are equally unlikely
to threaten their right to travel now. Just as arguments about cruel regimes
encouraged some tourists to portray themselves as liberators in shorts,
complaints about carbon emissions have merely prompted a new generation to
reinvent themselves as the most self-righteous trippers in history, swapping
gripes about M&S packaging on the flight to Papua New Guinea.
'Does anyone have any ideas about the best way to dispose of
recyclables/other rubbish over there?' queries a contributor to Lonely Planet's
Thorn Tree travel forum, anxious about garbage arrangements in Dharamsala.
Posting on another forum, a traveller offers tips for saving plastic: 'When
flying, bring an empty plastic bottle.'
So perhaps that famous Sierra Leonean optimism is well placed. So long as
greener travellers do not boycott its shoddy recycling system, there is no
reason why the white sands beyond Freetown should not, as predicted, soon be
darkened by tides of ethical sunbathers. Assuming, of course, the beaches can
survive the inundation expected from climate change. But even then, all is not
lost. As any ethical tour operator can tell you, these days tsunamis and melting
icecaps are seen not so much as unalleviated catastrophes as sustainable
holidays you haven't yet taken.
Catherine
Bennett: Trips to war-torn countries are smug, not ethical | Comment is free |
The Observer
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