An anti-tourism
manifesto
Not exactly and completely anti-tourism, but close enough:
I do not endorse long-distance air travel because of its
very high greenhouse gas footprint. Long distance travel by road, train or ship
consume way too much time. Air travel within India is acceptable – just so long
as it is not too frequent.
Also I am lazy and stingy so international travel is a
problem. Visa rules are getting to be much more stringent (British rules are
exemplary!), and the natives of many countries are becoming increasingly
unfriendly. Better to get murdered in your own country (also becoming more and
more likely)!
There is now no terra incognita, no unmapped legendary
Shangri La for an adventurous Marco Polo to seek out.
We can talk about
re-enactment tourism like visiting NZ to see the locales where LOTR was shot,
or Abbey Road where the Beatles stood, or any other memory that strikes you at
a given time. But as Dubrovnik in Croatia will attest, over-tourism is a fact of life; better just watch GoT on HD-TV!
Pilgrimages, like the Amarnath or Kailash Manasrover Yatras, have to
be actually undergone on foot for it to ‘count’, but for the rest, VR will do
just fine, thank you!
Instead of actually going anywhere I would advocate armchair tourism.
I just finished visiting the Tatra mountains of Poland courtesy of my laptop. I
can go check out the Torres del Paine in Patagonia next… One may even go so far as to
contemplate VR tourism. For example, one can visit the Louvre online. OK, it
requires a good broadband connection.
Admittedly you cannot get to smell the air or touch the soil,
but with rapidly-developing haptic sensors the latter should be possible soon
at a commercial level for a paying customer. Smells? Well, some of them are
doable… the others, they are still working on.
Anyway, with VR you can tour worlds that do not even
exist…or you could just read Pico Iyer.
Let us face it: you get less than 100 bits per sec through
your senses.
"The
maximum information rate at which we humans can learn is only a few tens of
bits per second. Our eyes and ears do not impose this is low information rate.
It is limited by the need for our brain to integrate what we sense into our
internal mental model of the world."
VR, at present, is still a bit clunky. I have experienced VR just once, at the Kiran Nadar Museum: "Kalimpong (2016)" by Shezad Dawood. There was no sound (as there is elsewhere) and I was lucky I did not trip on the wires attached to the headset, but having said that, the 3D was pretty good and Dawood has done a really good job of visualizing the town of Kalimpong with the surrounding mountains and the obligatory Yeti. Certainly the resolution could be better, but you can indeed pick up a book in the library.
By comparison, I saw a couple of short treks of the Werribee Gorge hikes in Australia in 4K and it's close to being there:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ht04Sn04FXU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGzGmnyIghY
But you did not get all the aches and pains (that could be a plus or a minus)!
And there are now drone's-eye views of practically anything, available on the internet. The stuff is being uploaded at unbelievable rates onto the internet.
For couch potatos: ....the future belongs to you! Others may huff and puff all the way up Everest, but they will upload breathtaking 360 degree views...just to prove they dunnit...and the couch potato may subscribe to their channels...or not.
It does not matter where you are: you could be travelling in Greece or you could be watching a video or a movie in a theatre. Your brain, with its limited processing capacity, will (soon) be unable to tell the difference.
Want to meet people? Just Skype!
They always urged you to travel to broaden your mind. Now we have the Internet, you do not need to travel any more.
Travel is passe.
Travel is for the birds. Migratory birds, not the sensible ones.
