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Vancouver Sun
5 days ago
- Vancouver Sun
The golden age of international travel is over, says Pete McMartin
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?
Vancouver Sun
07-07-2025
- Vancouver Sun
Opinion: Canadian wildfire smoke chases us to France
This is the first of a two-part account of a trip to France and the changing nature of travel by Sun columnist Pete McMartin. It was perhaps a precursor, or omen. The Air France jet sat unmoving on the hot YVR concrete, delayed, its engines whining peevishly, its cabins un-air-conditioned. We trooped back to economy class, wedged ourselves into our seats and sweated. An hour later, still earth-bound, I flagged a passing attendant who ignored me with French hauteur when I asked her if the air-conditioning could be turned on. I took her quickly receding figure to be a 'Non.' It was only after take-off, with two glasses of champagne and a mini-bottle of wine later, that the cabin and I cooled off. Then, nine hours later, Paris. Start your day with a roundup of B.C.-focused news and opinion. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of Sunrise will soon be in your inbox. Please try again Interested in more newsletters? Browse here. Then a connecting flight to Nice. And then: Heat. It struck us as soon as we stepped outside the terminal. We winced under the glare of it. It felt oppressive and sharp, a blow to the brain pan. We sought out shade while we waited for our ride, called up the weather app on our iPhones, and cheered at the forecast for southern France. It promised an unbroken week of sun — azure skies over the Côte d'Azur. Our rental villa sat atop a hill outside the medieval village of Seillans (pronounced say-yaw), an hour's drive northeast of Nice. We juddered up the property's steep gravel driveway, stepped out of the car and smelled … jasmine. Flowering hedges of it perfumed the air. And the trees! Olives. Figs. Palms. Stately, resinous umbrella pines. Cypresses as thin and upright as exclamation marks. From the backyard, we could look across the forested valley and see Seillans — stone and stucco homes with red tiled roofs and wheat-coloured walls huddling on the hillside opposite us. It was like a travel brochure laid out before us, the southern France of popular imagination, the brightly-lit rustic, unspoiled landscape of Cézanne and Monet. The villa itself had walls two feet thick and polished stone floors that were cool on the feet. Its eight bedrooms were enough to accommodate all of us — my wife and I, our three children and their spouses, and our four grandchildren. The villa, newly renovated, offered all the modern conveniences, and the property boasted a large swimming pool, a big sand court for boules (the French version of bocce) and — a nice touch I thought spoke to the benign French summer — an outdoor ping pong table under a grove of trees. We spent the week swimming, and playing games, and eating our meals al fresco on the shaded patio. We walked into Seillans to ramble through its narrow cobblestone streets. We drank the local wines. We ate farm-fresh tomatoes as big as softballs, and grilled pizzas shingled with medallions of the local buffalo cheese and spiced sausage. It was all lovely, and we relaxed into the week's slow rhythms. In the entire time we were there, however, the daytime temperatures never fell below 30 C, and the temperatures began climbing from there. The unshaded walk into Seillans became uncomfortably hot. During the day, we confined ourselves to the swimming pool or the shade of the garden. All of southern Europe, we learned, was in the initial stages of a heat wave, and that heat wave would lengthen over the three weeks during our time in France to become unprecedented, with temperatures in Europe rising well above 40 degrees. Water shortages were being reported, and an early start to the forest fire season, and tourists were being warned by the UN to be cautious in their travel planning, that this prolonged heat in Europe was 'the new normal.' On our second-last day in the villa, I was on the patio cooking lunch on the barbecue when I smelled something. It was something other than the briquettes and the grilling meat, something … threatening? Is that the right word? … and I looked up, and settling there in the valley was a lid of smoke that had not been there before, a blue haze blurring the landscape. I wondered if a forest fire had started in the area, and if I should I think about evacuating the family. But I looked around the surrounding hills and saw no sign of fire. It was only hours later that we learned from a local that smoke from forest fires in B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba had risen into the upper atmosphere, been carried by the jet stream across the Atlantic Ocean and was now covering most of Europe, where it was causing worsening air quality and gaudy, technicolour sunsets. And improbably, here I found myself, 8,500 kilometres from home, in southern France, drinking, eating, swimming, playing boules and ping pong, living the good life with my wife, my children and my grandchildren — with all the people I loved and cared for in the world — and we were all suddenly, alarmingly vulnerable, visited by catastrophe halfway around the world, caught in another country between a joyful present and a threatening future, and fiddling while home burned. Next: Is Paris burning?
