The documentary 'Gringo Trails' delves into the transformative effects of tourism on remote locations across the globe, focusing on areas like the Bolivian Amazon, Timbuktu, and Koh Phangan. It uncovers the environmental and cultural impacts driven by the influx of backpackers, portraying both the positive outcomes and the potential threats posed by unchecked tourism. The film intertwines personal survival stories, such as that of Yossi Ghinsberg, with broader themes of sustainability and the quest for authenticity. It poignantly captures the dichotomy between the allure of undiscovered places and the profound responsibility travelers hold in preserving the natural and cultural fabric of the destinations they visit.
Highlights
Yossi Ghinsberg's survival story in the Amazon drew global attention and changed Bolivian tourism. 🏕️
Backpackers initially led tourism into remote places, but this has often led to over-tourism and cultural disruption. 🌍
Chalalan, a community-based lodge in Bolivia, symbolizes the benefits of sustainable tourism. 💚
Rescue stories and personal narratives create lasting impressions and influence travel trends worldwide. 🌐
The pursuit of authenticity can sometimes cause tourists to unwittingly damage the cultures they admire. 🎒
Key Takeaways
Tourism can transform undiscovered places, but it often risks overwhelming local cultures and ecosystems. 🌍
Backpackers seek authentic experiences but may unknowingly contribute to the depletion of the very cultures they admire. 🎒
Community-driven tourism models, like Chalalan in Bolivia, exemplify sustainable tourism's potential to benefit both locals and visitors. 💚
Stories of survival, such as Yossi Ghinsberg's, spark global attention and influence travel trends. 🏕️
Travelers hold a responsibility to respect and preserve the cultures and environments they explore. 🌱
Overview
Embark on an explorative journey with 'Gringo Trails' as it unveils the intricate layers of tourism's impact on hidden gems around the world. Through vivid storytelling and real-life accounts, the documentary reveals how once-unseen locales like the Bolivian Amazon have morphed into tourist havens, attracting global wanderers yet facing the threat of cultural and ecological degradation.
Travel with Yossi Ghinsberg and experience his miraculous survival in the Amazon, a story that forever changed Bolivian tourism and sparked a backpacker influx. While thrilling, this influx presents a double-edged sword—bringing economic opportunities but also risking environmental and cultural welfare. As you follow these journeys, contemplate the delicate balance between exploring and preserving.
Discover how sustainable tourism initiatives, exemplified by Bolivia's Chalalan eco-lodge, are paving pathways to ethically embrace travel. These models point the way towards harmonious interaction between tourists and local communities, striving to preserve the charm and authenticity of untouched territories, urging travelers to be more conscious, respectful, and responsible.
Chapters
00:30 - 01:30: Jose's Expedition Jose embarks on an unexpected journey across the treacherous Rocky Mountains, driven by a mysterious letter from an old friend. Along the way, he encounters harsh weather, wild animals, and meets a group of fellow travelers who become vital to his journey. As he pushes forward, Jose discovers not only the secret within the letter but also a deeper understanding of friendship and courage.
02:00 - 02:30: First Visit to Bolivia The chapter details a significant event in Jose's life; it has been 25 days since a major loss affecting him emotionally.
03:00 - 08:30: Uncharted Adventure The chapter titled 'Uncharted Adventure' begins with the narrator acknowledging the slim chances of finding 'him.' Despite this, they organize an expedition and set out on the journey. Upon reaching the potential location where he might be, they attempt to signal him by making noise, hoping he would emerge.
10:00 - 13:00: Backpacker's Perspective On the third day of their search, the group hears screams. Initially confused due to the presence of many monkeys, they realize it is a human scream and decide to investigate.
17:30 - 21:30: Cultural Expectations The chapter 'Cultural Expectations' begins with a personal anecdote from 1981, where the narrator recounts their first visit to Bolivia as a 21-year-old backpacker traveling across South America.
23:00 - 36:30: Tourism Impact The speaker is motivated by a desire to be a hero in their own story, not just a reader of others' adventures. This drives them to seek out remote, unusual, and tribal experiences, which they find romantic. During a visit to La Paz, the speaker encounters a man who talks about the uncharted Amazon. Together with two other backpackers, they leave behind civilization to explore the real, uncharted Amazon.
37:00 - 44:10: Personal Reflection The chapter titled 'Personal Reflection' delves into the challenging journey the speaker experienced. They highlight the lack of a map of the region, their reliance on following rivers, and the initial expectation of the journey taking 10 days. However, the journey was extended to several weeks due to encountering the worst rainy season in a decade.
53:00 - 57:30: Myth and Reality Two weeks after experiencing severe floods, the protagonist finds themselves in a state of utter exhaustion, unable to walk due to severe injuries on their feet with skin stripped away to raw flesh. In this moment of physical vulnerability and emotional despair, they begin to feel drawn towards death. However, a miraculous turn of events occurs when a man named Kevin, showing great commitment, organizes a search party with villagers from further downriver, leading to the protagonist's rescue.
58:30 - 73:00: The Search for Authenticity A group came into a boat to help Tico navigate the challenges of traveling 120 miles off river into unknown territory. By a remarkable twist of fate, they stopped at the exact spot where the narrator had collapsed the previous night. Upon finding the narrator, he was in a horrifying condition reminiscent of individuals from Nazi concentration camps.
80:00 - 94:30: Impact on Local Communities In the chapter titled 'Impact on Local Communities,' the narrative describes an encounter with a person who resembles someone known to the storyteller. The individual is described as dragging himself in a dejected manner, akin to a snake, which invokes a sense of embarrassment. This meeting evokes a vivid emotional response marked by hysteria. Upon discovering this person, there is a significant moment where he repeatedly expresses gratitude, feeling that he has been saved. His reaction suggests relief and a turnaround from a previous state of distress, underscoring his emotional and possibly physical rescue.
115:00 - 121:00: Sustainability Efforts The chapter titled 'Sustainability Efforts' provides an emotional narrative that captures a pivotal moment in the narrator's life. It begins with the expression of overwhelming emotions and tears, transitioning to an acknowledgment of being spared and saved from an unspecified challenge. The chapter indicates a life-altering experience that marks not an ending but a beginning, deepening the narrator's relationship with a particular region. This introduction sets a tone that promises further exploration of personal growth and connection within the context of sustainability endeavors.
124:00 - 129:00: Final Thoughts The chapter 'Final Thoughts' reflects on the author's experience of writing a book about their adventures. The book, published in 1985, gained international popularity as it was translated into numerous languages, attracting backpackers from around the globe to visit the Bolivian Amazon. The author conveys satisfaction with the widespread impact and success of their work.
Gringo Trails 2013 Transcription
00:00 - 00:30
00:30 - 01:00 It had been 25 days since Jose's loss.
01:00 - 01:30 I know that the possibility
is too high to find him. I organized the expedition and left. We arrived at the place where he could be. We shot to hear him and he could come out.
01:30 - 02:00 On the third day of the
search, we heard the screams. We were always confused
because there were a lot of monkeys. I said, that's a human
scream. Let's go that way. We ran that way and we heard
that it was a human scream.
02:00 - 02:30 1981, this was the first
time I visited Bolivia. I was backpacking throughout South America. I was 21.
02:30 - 03:00 This was my time to be the hero
and not to read about the hero. I was driven to the remote
and the unusual and the tribal. Romanticizing about that. One day, a man in the markets of La
Paz tells about the uncharted Amazon. There are two other backpackers. The four of us live civilization and
penetrate the real uncharted Amazon.
03:00 - 03:30 Of course, there's no map of the region. We're trying to cut our
way and follow rivers. Initially, it was supposed to take 10
days, a few weeks in a rainy season, which in retrospect was
the worst in 10 years.
03:30 - 04:00 Two weeks later, after the floods, I was completely exhausted
and I couldn't walk anymore because my feet would not carry
me because they were just raw. There was no skin, just flesh
exposed and after weeks alone, I felt the lure of death. My rescue was a miracle where
Kevin was in this commitment to arrange a search party with
villagers from far down river.
04:00 - 04:30 They came into the boat to help Tico
negotiate the challenges of the river. Now we're talking 120 miles
off river in the uncharted. By unbelievable coincidence,
they stopped to turn the boat in the place where I
collapsed the night before. They found me. When we found him, he looked like a
person from the Nazi concentration camps.
04:30 - 05:00 He was just like him. It was embarrassing. We ran and he came. He came dragging himself
like a snake with his bare feet. When I saw him, I saw an attack of hysteria and that state of his
reaction when we found him, saying, thank you, I'm
saved, I'm saved, I'm saved. Thank you, thank you.
05:00 - 05:30 It was something exciting
that even the tears fell on us. My life was spared and saved, but my story and connection to this
part of the world just began, in fact.
05:30 - 06:00 I wrote a book about my experience and the book was
translated to many languages and backpackers from all over the world started visiting the Bolivian Amazon. Very good, right? Very good. This book came out in 1985.
06:00 - 06:30 I mean, four years after what happened, because the rescue was in 1981. The Yossi Guinz World
Book is the biggest thing that makes all the Israelis
come to South America, to the jungles, because it's very difficult and crazy. Everybody wants to
experience the life of the jungle and see and eat and smell
06:30 - 07:00 and maybe have a little
touch, like in the book. At that time, I was very young,
07:00 - 07:30 so I was a guide, a cook, and I always went with them. At that time, there was only one hotel. Now we have 45 hotels and they're all full. I think it's very different. Here with the book in the 80s, I think things are very different here now. Our guide speaks Hebrew better than I do.
07:30 - 08:00 I'm liking the Yossi. Look at the alligator, the alligator. I love Tarzan. I was walking along and
the guide just gave it to me,
08:00 - 08:30 so it looks kind of cool. He said it's traditional to wear one. I heard from my friends in Ruinabake, mainly Tiko and his daughter Roxana and other visitors that the entire village is becoming a jungle town. Part of its growth is based
on the book and the story.
08:30 - 09:00 It's an industry on its own. Dugout canoes go every
day up the Tuichi River. Every guide knows the story and usually every guide
makes himself part of the story, saying that they were theirs themselves and they saved me and embellishing and exaggerating in a very South American way, enjoying the art of storytelling.
09:00 - 09:30 I feel like all this area is over tourist. Everything is so easy here. You come in, there's
50 different companies. Everyone does the same three-day pompous and four-day jungle or ten-day jungle.
09:30 - 10:00 We depart about 8.30, 8.30 to 9.00. It takes three hours to go
to the Madidi National Park. The tour includes everything. Breakfast, lunch, dinner,
campsite, transportation,
10:00 - 10:30 guide, everything. You get a guide that
carries all your baggage. It's not the same. So it's hard to get off the beaten track, pretty much, at this stage. Yeah, I think so. I think you can if you want
to and if you have the time. But it's very easy to stand the gringo path and just say, you can enjoy it and it makes everything easy and fun also.
10:30 - 11:00 When I hear the word the gringo trail, I think of a dusty, unpaved road crisscrossing the entire planet with many details on the way, but most of the same characters. It's the blue highway of the
global village in some ways. It's the road parallel to
the one in which people who need to get something done are moving. And it's the road for
people who want to get lost and who don't necessarily
want to get anywhere, but for whom all the joy is the journey and not the destination.
11:00 - 11:30 Backpacker travel is predicated on the idea that you're doing something different than the mainstream tourists, but a lot of their patterns are similar to what the mainstream tourists are doing. I don't want to be snarky about that. It's just how people end up. People end up seeking out
certain manifestations of home
11:30 - 12:00 and in a luxury hotel it's going
to be a nice shrimp pasta dinner. On the backpacker trail it's
going to be banana pancakes.
12:00 - 12:30 There's always a sense of wanting to keep certain things secret and private and for me and my friends and somehow there's that other side of me that says, well, I believe
the place is so great I should probably include it in the book. But I know that it's going to change. The moment I put it in a guidebook, it's going to change and
it's going to get overrun.
12:30 - 13:00 It's a huge responsibility, especially in places like Bolivia where tourism can really
make it or break it in some ways. I feel that even more.
13:00 - 13:30 We got to inside the Pampas now. Pampas have different types of snakes. Anacondas, cobras, green mambas, private snakes, different types. Oh, shine a light. Look, now I've found an anaconda. The other groups, look.
13:30 - 14:00 Now it doesn't move because I feel a little bit of fear
because there are many people. Oh, it's quite smooth.
14:00 - 14:30 What made you want to touch it? I don't know, just because I can. Can I touch it? Can I touch it?
14:30 - 15:00 Sometimes a tourist
comes and I want a photo and I want to touch this animal. I want to grab this animal
because I paid a lot of money. So it's very bad, right? Before, this happened a lot. That the guide wanted to give a fruit so that the monkey comes and
goes up to the body of the people.
15:00 - 15:30 But now, since there are more courses and more knowledge for the guides, this is not just about the tourist. You also have to put
the rules in the guide. You give him wings so
that he can do many things, he will destroy them. They don't stop. It really boils down to
educating all travelers. Whether that traveler is a
wealthy individual on a luxury trip
15:30 - 16:00 or whether they're just
setting out for the first time as a college student with a backpack on. Remembering that proverbial cliche, we are guests in another culture. So I'm walking along the
shore of the Luango River, which is a tributary to
the Zambezi in Zambia, about three feet behind
a guy with a very big gun. The gun is because there's
a lot of big animals around. It's been a magical day
filled with the creatures
16:00 - 16:30 that inhabit our childhood imaginations. There's been elephants,
there's been giraffes, there's been hippos. But what's about to happen is a smaller creature is
going to hijack the moment. Because as we're walking along the shore, we come upon a part of the bank, a sand bank that has collapsed, and it's collapsed on the nesting area of these beautiful little birds. They're red, and they're sparkly, and they've got these
turquoise underbellies. But they're stuck, and they're dying, and their beaks are in the sand,
16:30 - 17:00 and their tail feathers are wobbling, and they're trying to get out. There's dead ones, there's broken eggs. It's kind of a scene of carnage. And I say to my guy, Jacob, I say, we got to save them. And he says, well, it wouldn't
be fair to the scavengers. And I say, well, they can get
something that's already dead. And he says, well, maybe we
should let nature take its course. And I say, you know, and I'm stuck. It's a moment of cultural conundrum. It's where my travelers'
prime directive is just,
17:00 - 17:30 you know, it's where
the rubber hits the road. I don't know what to do. I want to be sensitive and respectful to my local guest and authority. I want to honor the realities of survival of the fittest, natural selection, all that stuff. But every instinct in me is screaming, jump down that bank and save those birds. So I do it. I jump down,
I start digging them out. The first one comes
out, it's kind of comatose. But I rub it, and it comes back to life, and it flies away.
17:30 - 18:00 And another, and another, and another. And every time those
birds go up into the sky, a little bit of my heart goes with them. It's a gorgeous moment. And it's a moment that you
could not have convinced me was wrong. In that moment I was doing the right thing. But a few years later, the moment is still with me, and I'm not quite so
sure I did the right thing.
18:00 - 18:30 But not with ideas of
getting together with tourists,
18:30 - 19:00 but with the search for fresh fruit.
19:00 - 19:30 It's very delicious, very delicious. So that fruit, we, the season of April, May, a little more, we always came to the harvest. We brought some boxes and we arrived. But when we later saw
that a tourist group came,
19:30 - 20:00 we already said that in Salares an extraordinary tourist attraction. We started to program, if here you have to advance tourism. Well, I am the first inhabitant, and I save a lot of your
comments in Europe. And even the books
and information are there. And when they come to visit me, when the book says where
the first inhabitant is looking for.
20:00 - 20:30 They feel very happy to have contacted to go crazy on the island.
20:30 - 21:00 When you're traveling, every so often, you'll see something, go experience something, and be like, wow, this is one of those things that I'm going to bring people back to and show them. This is a part of my experience that I want to come back and share with everyone else. And that's here, because it's just that amazing. This is quite possibly cooler than Machu Picchu, and that was cool.
21:00 - 21:30 It's that always the backpackers establish, open the first paddles, right? It doesn't demand, let's say, infrastructure, comfort. In reality, the backpackers, young people who are more adventurous and risky,
21:30 - 22:00 they are the people who have started coming and are still coming. In any case, the principle is education, education of tourists. It consists of, let's say, the ecology, the route, the garbage, so that the island can be preserved
22:00 - 22:30 in the future, we are going to regulate and not exceed excessively tourists, right? And besides that, it won't allow to make, let's say, infrastructures or hotels or other very modern houses similar to the ones that are the cities, no. For me, as an original, I don't allow it.
22:30 - 23:00 Mr. Alfredo.
23:00 - 23:30 Hello. And I'm Peggy
23:30 - 24:00 and Melvin, and I was born here in 2000 with a camera. How are you? Right now, I'm going out. Yes. And I have a video of you. Really? Yes, with us. There, there, there. I also have the last one. Ah. There are many changes in the island, no? Right now, yes. It's natural.
24:00 - 24:30 We deteriorate, let's say, the image of nature of the island. The impact is to say that the tourist route increases a lot already. A small island like this is a little a lot of cargo, let's say, of the tourists. The last few days it's not 100 tourists but here it's only 300 or 400 tourists and that...
24:30 - 25:00 You don't have to visit those places so that there is not much cargo, let's say, of tourist visit to the island or something like that. It's so small,
25:00 - 25:30 it's over 2,400 meters to the continent. It's like four hectares and a little more. Since the year 2002 that we had 40,000 tourists 40,000 and a little more has increased the amount and has doubled. Well, what affects the attractions, the deserts
25:30 - 26:00 because of the infinity of wells that each vehicle uses a different spring to take care of the vehicle but the excessive speed makes no road maintenance can last enough to be in good condition for a long time. So that makes many landscapes damaged by the wells, mainly. Because of the excessive amount of vehicles in certain areas
26:00 - 26:30 many animals have changed their behavior. Some of them have become accustomed to human presence but sometimes there are guides or drivers that scare the animals. So they become areas where there will
no longer be animals. They leave their place where they generally lived.
26:30 - 27:00 You have to go down. Mano, are you okay? Out. We're out. Yes. The way the tours there are led, they're really geared towards backpackers and a lot of travelers go in, they start negotiating
the price, they start haggling and they get a cheap low-low price but what they're not realizing
is that by them doing that
27:00 - 27:30 you are actually affecting the environment, you're affecting this amazing attraction. So you have a lot of people just trying to make quick money and not really caring on how this is going to impact the next generation and you're turning it into a totally non-sustainable type of phenomenon. I think younger travelers who maybe have less money are a little bit more fundamentalist about trying to pinch every single penny and there is definitely one
27:30 - 28:00 downsmanship among backpackers that somehow if you're
traveling too comfortably then you're not hardcore. It's one of the cliches of the backpacker trail is that there's these little
pissing contests that go on between who's spent the least money or whose clothes are the most beat up.
28:00 - 28:30 For me it was really difficult
28:30 - 29:00 on how to actually cover a salar at the union. I remember devoting two pages in a book on how to actually approach the next generation of backpackers This is the very fine line I think that I'm working a lot as a guidebook writer on how to actually encourage sustainable development of tourism and at the same time how to make travel accessible to people. It really needs to be done on the side of the Bolivian government I think. So introducing
29:00 - 29:30 a whole set of rules and regulations that will ensure that the environment at that Salar the union actually remains as it is because I don't think it will for too much longer if it continues as we're seeing it now. What are the limits of acceptable change? Yes, there's an economic opportunity here. Plan it in such a way that the beauty of this area, the environment
29:30 - 30:00 isn't destroyed, that there is an economic benefit that comes in but not at the cost of destroying culture or the land around this particular area. What is our environmental footprint? What is our impact on the very cultures that we're visiting the very things that really we're selling? At the end of the day tourism is about selling nature and cultural heritage.
30:00 - 30:30 All in all I've been to
about 35 different countries around the world and sometimes you realize that people
actually love America they love our culture, our movies, our music, our TV our money and other times you realize that people may not necessarily like the US at all. At least we think so and it's not high on their list of most favorite nations and you
have to keep that in mind when you travel. Well as a black American who has
30:30 - 31:00 a multi-ethnic look ever since I was a kid
people always thought I was Puerto Rican or Cuban or Dominican and that list expanded
when I started traveling include Brazilian, Colombian, Venezuelan Cape Verdean, Afro-European Indian, Filipino and I can use it to my advantage sometimes when I'm traveling. If I want to walk down the street and not get robbed I pretend like I'm local or if I'm harassed by the police then ta-da I'm American. Well I go to Egypt my first time
31:00 - 31:30 in the Middle East and North Africa and I figure I really don't know how they feel about us so I figure hey why not be Venezuelan you know. So I'm walking around town, around Cairo looking at the sites. I go to the Egyptian Museum which is this amazing collection of antiquity and I come out it's closing time I walk towards the gates there
are these two guards who are standing there and they look at me and they bark at me in Arabic
31:30 - 32:00 and I'm shivering because they raise their guns up. Not to my face but at least up enough to make me nervous and I say I'm sorry I don't speak Arabic and one of them looks at me and he goes I'm American and I go yes sir and then he goes you don't leave you have Egyptian face and I'm thinking Lord have mercy mama I'm coming home in a box
32:00 - 32:30 then they laugh ha ha ha we joke welcome to Egypt more the getting there than the the actual staying
32:30 - 33:00 in Timbuktu the trip there was so exciting because we got lost because we got into troubles we were in a flat land so the water was just rising around us and we just got really scared and we just couldn't wait to get there we had this adrenaline I think the whole group was full of adrenaline finally getting to this Timbuktu
33:00 - 33:30 I can't remember when I started hearing about Timbuktu as this far away place mysterious place the end of the world and it became immediately associated with the dream of travelling so when I became aware of the fact that actually I could go to Timbuktu
33:30 - 34:00 it was the place where I wanted to go the references I had in terms of images were films like Art of Africa Lawrence of Arabia we stayed the night in this village and we seemed like we were never going to get there the time it took us to get to that village
34:00 - 34:30 was my memories endless I just remember lying then and covering myself and looking up at the starry sky
34:30 - 35:00 that mountain was so bright it was unbelievable it was so bright this is a concept oh yeah the morning course what really made me think about what I was doing there was the questions I was asked I was asked quite often by really diverse people why are you here what are you doing here and this was really difficult to answer
35:00 - 35:30 this is what really made me think about things here and I remember looking at some land and seeing to him you know this land this beautiful look at that and the color of this land and this guy he said to me but what
do you mean it's beautiful this is not beautiful look nothing grows there this is so dry this is like arid land it can't feed us it can't grow anything good why is it beautiful and that made me feel so stupid and it really hit me that
35:30 - 36:00 I should be thinking
about a lot more than I was all of us alive now especially those of us in a privileged world sitting on this opportunity that was unimaginable to our grandparents when my grandparents were growing up not very long ago they would look wistfully on the map or through their newspaper at Bolivia
36:00 - 36:30 or Africa or even Thailand and never dream of being able to see those countries or even meet people from those countries and suddenly the world is open to us as it's never been to humanity before the great blessing of travel too is that it throws you
into the kind of situations you would never confront
in your day to day life and it kind of pitches you into a moral and emotional mind field and the main souvenir of travel for me are all the questions unanswered and
unanswerable that I bring back
36:30 - 37:00 we got there and there
wasn't very much there I couldn't really explain the myth around Timbuktu as a travel destination once I actually got there it's very beautiful place but not that different from other cities in Mali and it was empty and desolate and and poor I was there and I had nothing to do I had nothing to bring I couldn't help in any way
37:00 - 37:30 I didn't have a role really you know we're just traveling we quickly realized there wasn't that much to visit in town so we thought let's go to the desert we went to the main market and kind of huggled our way to a camel trip and we're
very excited about that
37:30 - 38:00 we all got to mark camels and took hours and hours
to go through the desert under the the sun and camel traveling is
not the most comfortable traveling ever a journey through the night because in the desert in the desert
38:00 - 38:30 there is no desert only the desert they took us to this place in amongst the dunes and it was amazing and we slept there and it
was something out of a dream we always dreamed of sleeping in the middle of the desert under the stars and it was only like when it got really dark that we started seeing
some lights in the background I mean in the far away on the horizon not even on the horizon it was closer than that so we started questioning
the people who took us there
38:30 - 39:00 what the lights were they didn't understand because they just didn't understand what they didn't want to understand well slept well last night yes it was well spent a pair of scorpions
39:00 - 39:30 the next morning off we go back to timbuktu and that's the end of our trip it took us about five minutes on the camel to go back to timbuktu and we realized we were
basically at the back of the town only there were like dunes in the middle between us and timbuktu and we couldn't see it and that was quite funny as travelers we seek authenticity
39:30 - 40:00 so desperately that host communities will stage authenticity because it's economically advantageous for them that for some reason
since modernity kicked in that sort of dislocated middle class people have to look to poor people for manifestations of what one thinks authenticity is supposed to be and it's sort of a national geographic cover shot timbuktu as a destination is good value because you can always pull it out in conversation and have the attention
that you wouldn't have
40:00 - 40:30 with any other destination you would say oh just drop it I've been to timbuktu and you would get oh my god the myth lives on you know when I first set out to travel there were two things that were on my mind
40:30 - 41:00 one was I had this fear that I had missed it already I had been reading all these books Richard Burton's early travels all these 18th century travelers and I felt like goodness gracious I was born 100 years too late and so the stories I carried back for me when I first started traveling were really focused around remote places unspoiled places places where people hadn't gone yet that's what I was looking for that's what I was trying to get to
41:00 - 41:30 I was 21 years old and I was backpacking for a couple of years and I was getting tired of the herd mentality the tendency of backpackers to stay on the same route and just keep following each other so I just wanted to get away from it all and I was hoping to find
some place unspoiled
41:30 - 42:00 I had heard about this island called Kosmui in southern Thailand which is this island in the middle of nowhere this is back in 1979 and I got on the boat and as Kosmui came into view and we pulled up to the dock and there was the backpackers on the boat mind you're not that many probably about 12 or 15 people but on the dock there were about six Thai guys there
42:00 - 42:30 come stay at my bungalow come stay at you know my place and needed this restaurant I'll take you to a good place to stay and I was so disappointed I was like no you know I don't want this anymore so I went to the captain of the boat and I said where do you go next and he nodded his head like that and I looked up and I saw this island on the horizon and I said what's that he said and I said I want to go to and he said to me no
42:30 - 43:00 no no no no tourist copanggan nothing for you but you don't understand I said to him I want nothing I'm looking for nothing and all the backpackers got off we sailed over to copanggan and I got off the boat put on my backpack and I started walking and I walked by Thai fishermen and some small Thai huts there were a couple of young girls and they looked up and they screamed when they saw me and they ran and I just kept walking
43:00 - 43:30 and I must have walked I don't know four or five six hours until right around sunset I got to this point and was the most spectacular beach that I had ever seen I mean like just dramatically beautiful and I was stunned and there was a Thai fisherman sitting on this beach and he was cleaning the
barnacles off of his little dugout and suddenly he looked up and he looked at me and he looked
43:30 - 44:00 really startled and he said in this perfect time warp 1960s English whoa man like where did you come from dude his name was Samboon and Samboon and his wife Chom had worked for the US military during the Vietnam War so they hadn't spoken English since then and they had two little children who lived on this incredible beach this incredible beach called Hot Rim and they opened
44:00 - 44:30 their doors and I stayed with them for a month and it was paradise not only was I the only traveler there but no travelers were going there period they weren't there yet there had been a German couple who I had met in northern Thailand months before and we talked about rendezvousing in Koh Samui and I told them about this beach this incredible beach
44:30 - 45:00 you know unspoiled that nobody knew about and that I would take them there but I asked whatever you do don't tell people about this place because what will happen is backpackers will end up going there
45:00 - 45:30 I was a backpacker I didn't have very much money and I was looking for some adventure and I was looking for something
45:30 - 46:00 I met a young man who spent three months in Hot Rim and there was these amazing people there, this little community it was a traveler's scene that's where the backpackers were I got a bungalow at Bobo's bungalows it was about 15 baht, it was about 50 cents and very quickly realized there was this little community of a couple hundred people with no locks or doors on the bungalows and living very simply and very cheaply you're with 100 or 150 people from all around the world you maybe can't speak the same language and yet we all knew each other, we were one
46:00 - 46:30 and wow, I was in paradise and I knew it and I knew we all knew it this was it, this is it this is something going on here very very special that time the motorists were coming myself was buying frocks from Bali and selling dresses and jewellery this working mark does not suit me it's up every afternoon at 4 o'clock down to the market
46:30 - 47:00 for 2 hours and 6 o'clock we let them drink beer and listen to boring music oh god yeah, you have to drink beer filming speaking to the camera why not you want a bung first parties was on the main beach and it was just I remember 40-60 people just really meeting and joining
47:00 - 47:30 and dancing to summarize the full moon party as I knew it was one group of people with one sound system and one party usually down at paradise bungalows the ties were a little bit resistant but they caught on very quick that these parties were very popular and people were starting to come more from simuli and other word of mouth and travelers seeing the goa scene it was a completely unregulated phenomenon over time
47:30 - 48:00 certain hubs started to emerge like a few others in india goa and batangan for the full moon, no moon quarter moon whatever festivals never got 3 or 4 a month they put fire on the beach and have everybody around the fire and have dancing a little bit mr. cow and hadrin was very cooperative
48:00 - 48:30 in the beginning because
they were glad we were there nobody else wanted to
be there and they were making money in the early 1990s I opened a magazine and the back page was this photograph of hotrin beach the beach that I had been at with thousands and thousands of people
48:30 - 49:00 just like unbelievable it was staggering millennium I think that was the
biggest kick off of all the place was absolutely rampact there must have been 10-12 thousand people there that night
49:00 - 49:30 I heard koepa nyang was a beautiful island a bit of a mid-20s summer camp so to speak where people
from around the world came and just partied I heard about the full moon parties I heard just people getting together and having massive
49:30 - 50:00 communal we had the whole tree if you can change you like to change like less party and like more have another activity not only parties totally I would like to keep clean keep something about
50:00 - 50:30 nature here because when they drunk they forget everything they drop everything on the road they care about that one 2010 baby it moved from drifter to backpacker
50:30 - 51:00 and presently it moves from backpacking to backpackaging with a complete institutional system serving them including all the tours and all these experiences they are looking for so you know that the whole
backpacker phenomenon becomes a subspecialty of institutional stories I don't think the ties realize how popular it would become
51:00 - 51:30 hadrons changed in the fact that like anywhere if you don't have town planning to begin with it can overtake
51:30 - 52:00 all tourists like for the full moon they like to go drink take a bucket we all come to party for the full moon party and experience the culture of the buckets that's the only thing the bucket culture
52:00 - 52:30 I think very important maybe two or three bottles for the sandstorm and one dose of bread and big bottle for coke mix together and many straw when I first came to Kaepernyang I was having fun I was part of this I was excited I was drunk
52:30 - 53:00 I had a great time and after three or four days it just you start seeing more and you start really seeing what's going on and really appreciating the sort of the complete lack of respect for any of this for any of this island and for the people and it just started to well, it changed my perspective on the whole partying scene
53:00 - 53:30 in the case of Hot Rim
53:30 - 54:00 you know, there was no development plan tourism should have never been allowed
54:00 - 54:30 to take place the way it did it was anarchy, it was a free-for-all there was nothing to guide it who was asking important questions like where's all the plastic going to go where's the waste going to go where are people going
to go to the bathroom it's all just going to end up on the beach it's all going to end up on the water 30 years ago people
weren't asking these questions but we didn't have the facilities it's just overtaken I would put it half towards the ties not knowing
54:30 - 55:00 what was going to happen and half of it the foreigners who do come here I think there's loads of lessons but I think it's very hard like anything in the world to look ahead and say what you could do to change it it's easy to say after it's so hard to say before cannot make plans again maybe other places on Kopanyan in Hadin cannot it's too late
55:00 - 55:30 the 1986 equivalent of Kopanyan exists somewhere in the Philippines
or Indonesia right now and that scene transforms and burns itself out here and comes back up in another place
55:30 - 56:00 so I'm in Thailand and I'm in the morning
market going to buy some fruit and I can tell that people
are talking about me because I'm hearing that word phurang phurang means foreigner and I'm in this town where I'm teaching and
I'm the only foreigner around and so I hear this word a lot everywhere I go I get a lot of attention it's always like phurang phurang and this day I've been there for long
enough that I have started
56:00 - 56:30 to learn a little bit of Thai and I know what people are saying about me so I go to buy a guava and I hear oh phurang like guava and everyone's excited and whispering and I wanted to turn and be like no I like guava because it had just hit me that I was really representing the western world there and I was like 22 just out of college and here I was kind of being an ambassador in this town
56:30 - 57:00 and you know if I liked guava then maybe all phurang liked guava so as I left the market I started to feel this real sense of responsibility you know like I had to give a good name to the phurang so I determined I wasn't I was so careful I didn't drink or smoke in public
I wore modest clothes I really learned Thai but then I got my first vacation and I went down to the south with the backpackers and it was so great
57:00 - 57:30 to like get to relax and drink and smoke and you know just have fun but even so I just couldn't help myself asking what impression are we making here because you know it's harmless when it's a guava but what about when phurang like the sex trade or binge drinking you know I wanted so badly to be able to shake that sense of responsibility but it just that question never went away
57:30 - 58:00 what impression are we leaving behind what name are we making for the phurang
58:00 - 58:30 Khutan is trying to
58:30 - 59:00 you know slowly you know slowly slowly try to you know develop it's not really very fast and lost everything so that's why very careful with our culture our unique so whatever we have is a unique to us and to everybody if we preserve our culture then we can share
with the rest of the world that's why we keep
59:00 - 59:30 very high volume and low impact we looked at models around the world and also we looked at
next on Nepal and Thailand you know there's mass tourism we said no we don't want that what's going to happen there's going to be the development of bars clubs prostitution centers massage parlors and everything is going
to be geared to its tourism where people are
going to lose their identity their culture people that have been
backpackers in the past when they were 25 below 25 years of age now they've matured
59:30 - 60:00 they've evolved and they've been there done that seen the world
and they're looking for a different experience so
they choose to come to Khutan we don't really allow like just the backpackers here just coming independent or tourists or whatever like we get only multi-millionaire retired professor Hollywood and those are really genuinely interested who can afford it doesn't matter who say ever comes
60:00 - 60:30 in power Bhutan policy maker they will not allow you to contaminate the lake and they will not allow
you to cut the forest in the mid-seventies when our fourth king was coronated as the youngest head of state people said how should you tell how can you increase your GDP and he was a visionary he said no I want to increase my people's GNH and people said what is GNH but gross national happiness aims at striking a balance
between the material the emotional and spiritual well-being
60:30 - 61:00 of its people so we follow the GNH
way which is a middle path and it's based on four main pillars one is sustainable development the second point is preservation and promotion of the environment the third point is the preservation of your culture without your culture you lose your identity and last but not least is the establishment of good governance did you help him all
the way up the mountain I did I don't think he would
61:00 - 61:30 how what's the elevation change from the parking lot to the restaurant should be about 2500 to the restaurant yeah and this is considered to be second Kailas so the entire cliff is in the form of magic dagger which is being used by Rupatmasambhava to subdue the evil spirit
61:30 - 62:00 okay other places are different they depend on the income of tourists we don't have to depend on tourist income so that's why we can preserve our culture less tourists we can educate them how to be in Bhutan
62:00 - 62:30 we have to also respect our etiquette we have to follow our etiquette don't follow if you find out you won't be any more welcome here
62:30 - 63:00 today's travelers are just crisscrossing the world a greater volume and intensity than ever before so that the map of our planet now looks like
a Jackson Pollock canvas it previously looked
like a great open space and I think that's all to the good because I think with each
generation of travelers travelers getting more conscious more responsible, more attentive to the needs of the people that they visit
63:00 - 63:30 and I think more and more
travelers nowadays are realizing that the first question they
have to ask themselves is would these people want us to visit them so I was traveling in Salvador, Brazil with my friend John and one night we got mugged and we didn't just get mugged we got mugged by these
little munchkin Brazilian kids that stole my $25
63:30 - 64:00 and much of my masculinity and so John and I decided we need to get out of Salvador and so we took a bus into the suburbs went to the beach and met these two sisters who were super nice started chatting us up and actually asked us out which was weird because
they were a little older they were there with their kids they claimed they were divorced and we'd like heard these stories that these Brazilian girls
asked the foreigners out then like slip something into their drink or shake them down for money or whatever
64:00 - 64:30 so we weren't sure but we said why not so the next night we we head into town and meet the sisters at this bar but it's not like a normal bar with like beer or vodka or whatever they have these like giant wooden casks that have some weird clear look liquid in it and they pour one glass for the four of us and the sisters start like sipping from it or maybe they're not maybe they're just putting it to their lips because like the amount in the
glass doesn't seem to be going down
64:30 - 65:00 so John and I aren't sure whether to drink it but eventually we kind of do we drink some of it and we end up leaving the
bar you know still on our feet we walk around we have dinner and the
evening kind of reaches its conclusion and we're at the bus
stop waiting to go home and the sisters say no no
no no don't get on the bus it's too late it's not safe to go home you should just come back with us and we're like hmm this could be really good or it could be really really bad
65:00 - 65:30 but against our better judgment we go home with the sisters and one of them grabs me by the hand and leads me into her bedroom and there's this feeling you get when you get mugged it's a terrible feeling if you've ever, not just mugged but any violent crime that just makes you so suspicious and like so worried all the time for days or weeks before it goes away but in this case it was totally misplaced
65:30 - 66:00 because the next thing that happened was the strangest thing in the whole night John walks in behind us and the sisters proceed to tuck John and I into bed together and then go sleep in one
of their son's little beds and from the bar to the bedroom their intentions were entirely pure
66:00 - 66:30 the end of the 80s the 90s was the strength of the motel tourists who
arrived to the renaissance
66:30 - 67:00 they were attracted by the story of Josie Ginsberg who had survived in the jungle although we worked as guides as carriers and in the end we realized that the people who came
67:00 - 67:30 guiding them didn't know about the jungle not the communists who have lived in the jungle and where people also participated helping them as local guides we didn't have the possibility of winning as guides in those periods where half of the population abandoned the community
67:30 - 68:00 where we stayed with few families most of the elderly here in the community who didn't want to abandon the land and 50 or more 60 families left the community and we had to think how we had to sustain our lives in that population so we had to do something and this idea was born
68:00 - 68:30 a tourism driven by the communists but with a vision that the community could control it the forest for us is like a pharmacy because in the forest we remove our medicinal plants we have always been able to remove the medicinal plants from the forest it's better natural than the pastillas
68:30 - 69:00 that's why we continue to believe in the tropical forest and we want to preserve for everything not only for us but for everybody for the whole world we did know this place was making a positive contribution did you read about it in the national and then we knew it would be written
69:00 - 69:30 about in the national geographic as well the people talking about it the guides really know their stuff as well they're really good they're amazing today you're just incredible, you're walking along and they're spots up with the light that you haven't seen get your telescope and they're up there we saw some howler monkeys today don't know how he saw them like they were there, seven
or eight of them in the trees and a green parrot in the trees behind leaves
69:30 - 70:00 and he was like look there's a green parrot Chalalan is one of the projects pilot that we call in South America one of the first community companies in Bolivia but we were still looking for something a little more different
70:00 - 70:30 something to share and that we can explain what it means for us the forest and what we really feel something that for our grandparents and for our ancestors means a lot what nature is that's why this idea was born
70:30 - 71:00 in this forest there are many things every day you can find the different things you can still walk the same trail but always you can find the new things for example in 2004 was find the new type of monkeys in this forest
71:00 - 71:30 many times that I eat once the income of the company Chalalan the ones that pay the tourists that helped a lot
71:30 - 72:00 the community in health it has been at least to read something that used to be a lot of children's deaths the project had a beginning to improve the conditions of life of the community and the conservation and that's where the idea of helping us came out I had no clue
72:00 - 72:30 about ecology or ecotourism or biodiversity or sustainable development I didn't know anything about anything I felt I'm there to say thank you and thank them for saving my life but I learned that I educated myself on all these issues I went to Washington DC raised a million and a half dollars brought it back to the region
72:30 - 73:00 I wasn't an NGO I was
just representing the people and I got the money so it was the bank Inter-American Development Bank financing a village in
the middle of the Amazon this was unprecedented finally in a moment we reached international conservation they committed themselves and they have already grown in order to seek more more funding having the only tribe choosing ecology choosing sustainable development because there was the lure of the loggers
73:00 - 73:30 the lure of the oil exploration and the gold exploration but when they went resort they went ecological sustainable development the entire area turned to be a national park the Maditi National Park
73:30 - 74:00 I was very naive
74:00 - 74:30 when I started traveling I thought of myself as this sort of invisible traveler who has no impact on the place they visit and so in a way my idea of traveling was a very selfish experience totally selfish just it was just about me
74:30 - 75:00 going to these places and being affected inspired and meeting people and that's something I had to reflect upon after my trip in Africa the stories that I bring back now are less about trying to show I've been to places that haven't changed it's actually coming back with stories about what those places are today in all of their manifestations
75:00 - 75:30 it's over 30 years since I was at Copangan and there are Copangans and hot rins all over the world that have suffered the same plight but you know what it's not too late maybe for some places it is but it's not too late for other places
75:30 - 76:00 I was once in a hotel in Peru with my girlfriend at the time and there were a bunch of travelers and they started telling the story about Josiginsburg and the survival stories about Josiginsburg his story was much bigger and I fought Jaguars
76:00 - 76:30 with my fingernails and we were just sitting them and listening and finally when they finished I just pulled out my passport and I gave the main storyteller I gave him my passport he opened my passport and he looked at it then he raised his eyes with total awe asked me how did you get that