The golden age of international travel is over, says Pete McMartin

Vancouver Sun

a day ago

This is the second of a
two-part account
of a trip to France and the changing nature of travel by Sun columnist Pete McMartin.
In the small town of Beaune, the hotel concierge warned us that the daytime temperature would rise to 36 C.
'Be careful out there,' he said.
It was mid-June. Temperatures were 12 to 15 degrees above average. Since our arrival in France, the heat wave had become progressively worse, but Beaune felt like another level of hell entirely. Other than a short half-hour burst of rain in Lyon, we had not seen a cloud in the sky for 12 days, and by the time we reached Beaune, our only thought was to retreat to the refuge of our air-conditioned hotel room. The power went out twice.
Famed for its vineyards, Beaune sits at the centre of the Burgundy region, and while wine may have been its cultural touchstone, the town had given itself entirely over to tourism. Rather than wine connoisseurs, we found the tourist profile largely to be composed of shambling groups of pale English retirees who — true to the old Noel Coward song that only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun — did just that. They shuffled about town in packs, poking into the dozens of tourist knick-knack kiosks and the schlock art galleries and the wine shops selling bottles of Burgundy that only Russian oligarchs could afford. Meanwhile, my wife and I sought shade and — rather than the local full-bodied reds — sipped on bottles of Chablis sweating in ice buckets. It was so blazingly hot we couldn't walk in the sun for three minutes before becoming light-headed.
On to Paris.
Was Paris burning? Oh my, yes. The heat wave followed us there, a fact driven home when we discovered our rental apartment, like much of The City of Light, lacked air-conditioning. The ambient temperature of our room? You know when you throw water on the heated rocks in a sauna? That.
Paris, as usual, swarmed with tourists. We packed into the open-air bistros and sidewalk cafés at night to escape the heat where, literally, we paid the price. The food? Atrocious, and so expensive it tasted of disregard. A limp Caesar salad came with chicken strips. A duck confit could have been cut from a saddle. And my first mistake after ordering two glasses of Sancerre in a sidewalk café next to our apartment was not looking closely enough at the menu. Those two glasses cost $76! My second mistake was to complain to the manager, who, after levelling a volley of outraged insults, pointed me to the exit.
We were in Paris when scores of anti-tourism protests erupted in Portugal, Spain and Italy. Protesters complained that tourism had not only made their cities uninhabitable by causing housing shortages and overtaxing local infrastructures, but had made their countries increasingly uninhabitable due to the environmental damage tourism exacted — the vast amounts of garbage generated by the tourist trade, the degradation of cultural treasures and historical edifices, and the anthropological-caused climate change brought on by emissions from ever-increasing air and auto travel.
(The growing disaffection with tourism in Europe wasn't new to us: Over a decade ago, we stepped out of our hotel in Barcelona to see spray-painted on a wall 'F— Off, Tourists' — accommodatingly written, I thought, in English, so as we were sure to get the message.)
The prolonged heat wave not only ignited these protests; it lent them an apocalyptic air. Record-breaking temperatures of 46.6 C were set in Spain and Portugal — and set off, too, talk of the increasing desertification of the Hibernian peninsula. Authorities closed the top of the Eiffel Tower due to the heat, and closed the Louvre after its exhausted staff, staging an impromptu strike, complained that the crush of tourists had overwhelmed their ability to deal with them.
Elsewhere in Europe, the heat wave took on more dire forms. At least eight deaths were reported from heat prostration. Schools closed in Germany, and while that might have gladdened the kids, it was offset by tragedy — ice cream-makers there said it was too hot for ice cream production. In Italy, fields of melons cooked on the vine, and farmers covered their fruit and vegetable crops with tarps. Most of Italy's regions banned work between 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and hospitals reported a 20 per rise in emergency admissions.
The UN climate agency offered little reassurance in the face of all this. Quite the opposite. It warned tourists that the heat wave was 'the new normal' — that Europe would increasingly experience not just singular bouts of record heat but prolonged periods of heat so intense they could affect health, disrupt vacation plans and, in worst-case scenarios, threaten lives. (Insurance companies, already facing a surge of claims due to weather disruptions, had adjusted their rates to this new reality by the time of our trip: Our health and travel insurance cost almost as much as a round-trip flight to Europe.)
Now, as typifies the climate of our times, there were those who pooh-poohed all this as alarmist — apostate scientists, climate-change deniers and online trolls who view the world as a conspiracy perpetrated by governments and their co-conspirators, the mainstream media.
To which I thought: They can believe what they want, though I would first welcome them to live through the intensity of the heat wave we did while in France, not only because it was alarming and scared the hell out of a lot of people, but because it was revelatory. It brought home the truth of my own hypocrisy and that of the many millions of other tourists who, by constant travel, help cause the very climate and local animosity that discomforted us.
So, a prediction:
The golden age of international travel is over. Tourists will not only think twice about locals who are clearly sick of them, or waver at the thought of climate-related extremes that could leave them stuck in a country not their own, although both those factors will come into play.
More importantly, tourists will begin increasingly to see travel — as we see much of the aspects of our lives now — as a moral question: Do we curtail our insatiable appetites, or do we help destroy the world we are so hungry to consume?