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Ben Jennings' illustration on tourism and terror
‘Confidence is shaky and horizons narrowing, with some tourists now avoiding Muslim countries altogether and fighting for villas in parts of the Mediterranean they don’t see on the news.’ Illustration: Ben Jennings
‘Confidence is shaky and horizons narrowing, with some tourists now avoiding Muslim countries altogether and fighting for villas in parts of the Mediterranean they don’t see on the news.’ Illustration: Ben Jennings

The world is becoming more violent, but we shouldn’t be afraid to explore it

This article is more than 8 years old
Gaby Hinsliff
The grim propaganda of bloodstained sun loungers is having an effect, but staying away isn’t the answer – for host economies or British holidaymakers

My grandparents never had much time for Abroad. They went there somewhat reluctantly once, on a coach trip after they retired, but I don’t recall them liking it enough to ever do it again.

So who knows what they’d make of the way their grandchildren are now scattered across three continents, or the insouciance with which their great-grandchildren hop on planes to far-flung places. My grandparents would have regarded anything as exotic as a bowl of pasta with extreme suspicion, yet now it’s the one thing even the fussiest modern child will eat. Well, the past is another country, as they say.

The great generational leap forward we mostly take for granted isn’t social mobility, but the geographic kind. Anyone born in the 1970s, into a world where beach holidays meant huddling behind a breakwater to shelter from the freezing North Sea wind, grew up just in time to see the world break open at our feet. Cheap air travel, relaxed borders and higher incomes changed our tastes and habits for good. Only now it feels suddenly as if that big wide world is shrinking again.

The last few days alone have seen 37 people killed by a bomb in Turkey, an American tourist fatally stabbed in Israel, a mass shooting at a beach resort in Ivory Coast, and three police officers shot during a terror raid in Brussels. Bookings for Turkey were down by 40% even before the latest attack, and travel agents report collapsing demand for north Africa too, after last year’s beach shootings in Tunisia. Confidence is shaky and horizons narrowing, with some tourists now actively avoiding Muslim countries altogether and fighting for villas in parts of the Mediterranean they don’t see on the news.

Over a nostalgic lunch last Sunday with old friends, someone produced a wad of photographs of us travelling together two decades ago. Our kids were naturally bored rigid by pictures of their mothers snorkelling in the Red Sea and sleeping out in the desert to watch sunrise over the pyramids, but those pictures are as close as they may get to Egypt for a while.

The sleepy backpacker haunts in those photographs have long ago mushroomed into sprawling package holiday destinations, but flights to Sharm el-Sheikh remain suspended following last year’s terrorism scare, and it will be years before many families are prepared to risk it. The same is true for the tiny island off Malaysia where years ago I saw baby turtles hatching on a moonlit beach; I’d love to take my own son there, but not while a terrorist group with links to Islamic State is kidnapping people along the coastline.

In the wake of last November’s shootings in Paris, people talked a brave game, approvingly retweeting the Tous au Bistrot campaign asking visitors to carry on defiantly enjoying cafe culture. But bookings for Paris are down too, suggesting not everyone wants to spend a romantic weekend being brave. We initially declined to go to war in Syria, but war has come to find us anyway.

The real victims, of course, are not rich western tourists discovering the world is no longer their playground. It’s the millions living in countries where bombs and shootings are routine but barely reported if they don’t kill foreigners – closely followed by the poor and vulnerable in Muslim countries who are heavily dependent on tourism for an income.

The logic behind al-Qaida and Islamic State (Isis) attacking holidaymakers, however, is remorseless. It’s not just about the grim propaganda value of bloodstained sun loungers but a grotesque form of economic policy. Deny tourist dollars to countries that may never have been all that politically stable, and the resulting joblessness, hopelessness and anger against the existing order may provide excellent breeding conditions for extremism. If Isis’s strategy is to prevent the relaxed and happy intermingling of faiths and cultures it so fears, by keeping infidels out of Muslim countries and vice versa, there are signs that it might actually be beginning to work.

So perhaps there are good reasons to grit one’s teeth and go in solidarity this summer to places we have started to fear; to stay curious, adventurous, open-hearted and generally the opposite of everything Isis desires. After all, staying at home in London is hardly without risk these days. And if the threat means spending your time in quieter places, away from the tourist traps that make glaringly obvious targets – well, that’s probably a better way of getting to know a country anyway.

But while the young and the intrepid will doubtless carry on pushing at the frontiers, it seems a lot of us are slinking away. Families are naturally risk averse, reluctant to put our kids in anything remotely resembling a line of fire when there are a million other places we could go. Nobody wants to be nervously looking over their shoulder on honeymoon either. So the temptation is to stick to the safe, the bland and the familiar, telling ourselves that there’s always next year.

We’re hardly going back to the days of my grandparents, of course, when people didn’t bother getting passports or know what an avocado was. The internet has already made the world our children’s oyster, giving them digital horizons in some ways bigger than ours.

But while physical travel doesn’t always broaden the mind – there are few unique cultural insights to be gained from flopping by a five-star pool, or getting hammered in Magaluf – if you do it right it can teach you not to be afraid of the new, to see difference as exciting rather than frightening.

And just as my generation didn’t really get that from being forced to exchange painfully stilted letters with French penpals, our kids won’t get it from looking at pictures on Instagram, or even from virtual reality games. You have to be there, sensing the heat and the smells and the colours and the sounds: people-watching in cafes, striking up chance conversations, getting lost and found, doing routine familiar things in places where they are done in wholly unfamiliar ways. And then you have to come back, and see home through newly questioning eyes.

Travel teaches tolerance, empathy and mental flexibility, the idea that there are other ways of living – which is precisely why tyrannical regimes close themselves to tourism, and religious fanatics want to shut the world down. How dangerous it would be to let them.

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