OK, when I saw this I found the energy! Amazon town bans tourists Nazareth in Colombia says travellers don't spend much and show little respect to indigenous people.

This is an article from the Guardian about tourism.

Tourism in the Amazon

Basically this is a small village near the Amazon river, part of a region which is experiencing rising levels of tourists.

Locals have declared their town off-limits to travellers, even though this stretch of the Amazon river is playing host to more visitors than ever. Their main complaint: tourists' behaviour, and that only a fraction of the money they spend trickles down to the indigenous. "What we earn here is very little. Tourists come here, they buy a few things, a few artisan goods, and they go. It is the travel agencies that make the good money," said Juvencio Pereira, an Indigenous Guard, Nazareth's unofficial volunteer police force.

The town of 800 people, a 20-minute boat ride from the tourist hub of Leticia, takes its ban seriously. At the entrance, Pereira and other guards stand armed with their traditional sticks to deter unwelcome visitors. Nazareth resident Grimaldo Ramos feels that some tourists can't distinguish between the wildlife and the Amazon's residents, snapping photos of indigenous families as if they were another animal. "Tourists come and shove a camera in our faces," he said. "Imagine if you were sitting in your home and strangers came in and started taking photos of you. You wouldn't like it."

It is so sad that they've had to go to these lengths but unfortunately I'm not surprised. One of my pet hates are what I think of as entitled snobby travellers. I have nothing against people who go abroad on holiday or tourism in general. What I dislike are the sort of people who think they are vastly superior because they've been able to afford to get on a plane. 

There is an attitude amongst certain tourists that travelling is an essential right of passage in life, that without it you are an ignorant and lesser person. They will size you up and judge your worth depending on the number of countries you've been to and how distant they are.  There is a competitiveness in this attitude too. If you get two of these people together they will compete over who had the most 'extreme' experience, who went the furthest, the most unusual accommodation, the most rural location. 

One phrase that really gets on my wick is 'unspoilt' and I think it's pretty much tied up with the attitude the residents of Nazareth in this article are complaining about. I have often heard people saying how 'unspoilt' this particular village or location they 'discovered' was and how they think you should get there before it is 'spoilt'. In this case what they mean by spoilt is that it is visited by lots of other western people (and is therefore somehow less authentic) and generally a higher level of development usually geared towards tourism. Often they will then produce photographs which are very similar to the ones complained about in the article, shots of local people seemingly taken without their consent. 

What is particularly irritating about this attitude is that often they don't particularly care about the people they have taken photographs of and aren't particularly interested in the region. Instead it's a middle-class badge of honour, a way of demonstrating their superiority of taste and judgement. They have proof they have the wealth to travel far and have better taste so don't visit the places the 'masses' go to. It's all about showing off and not really about the travel or the place itself. 

For example I once met a classic case of this when I was at a party. Unbeknownst to the gentleman in question, I'm a Buddhist and had been for some years at that point. Because of this I'm not only fairly well versed in the various forms of Buddhism across the globe but also because I keep up with news about what's happening to Buddhists around the world; have a fairly good idea of their economic and political situations as well. 

This gentleman went on to proudly and condescendingly regal me with his stories about the South East-Asian country he had visited and to tell me all about Buddhism in that country - but he got it totally wrong. It's hard to explain but if I was to use Catholicism as an example, he essential suggested that the Catholic Church was headed by Santa Claus and that Catholics worship evolution. In short, he'd been there, he'd bought the T-shirt and was claiming to have 'done that' - except he hadn't. He hadn't listened, hadn't take anything in and he'd learned nothing from his experience. All he had was some pretty photographs, of locals of course, and a smug sense that he was better then the rest of us. When I questioned him on the political situation at the time of his visit, which was quiet tense, he was clueless. 

What's also irritating is the idea of somewhere being 'unspoilt'. A place isn't unspoilt just because it doesn't usually cater to tourists, it's just natural. A place isn't spoilt either because it's commercialised - what snobby entitled tourists refer to as 'spoilt' might just be normal living for the people who live there, it might be the course of action that they have chosen for their community. The irony of this attitude is that people who complain of an area being spoilt are part of the very so called problem that they complain about, they are tourists themselves.