Leave a little of your money behind wherever you go

Responsible tourism and the land of heart’s desire

I met an Irish neighbour of mine in the supermarket on Saturday, as I was busy musing to myself which butter to buy. “Do you always talk to yourself?” she asked over my shoulder. I turned and didn’t immediately recognise her. “Why, of course!” I replied. “Am I not the most interesting person in here?” Spar on a Saturday afternoon is a place where I can confidently say I’m the most interesting person in the joint. Aside from Tara, that is.

She and her husband, so the conversation continued, are planning taking the kids off to Dublin for the St Patrick’s Day celebration next month. Ryanair: cheap, cheerful, and “really not all that bad.” I didn’t ask, but I did wonder how bad Tara thought I thought Ryanair was, and my thoughts were cast back to an afternoon in 2020 when I’d stormed out of Charleroi airport into a rainstorm because the company wanted me to pay 55 euros just to get on the plane. My anger and impetuosity served me well that day: by baulking at a check-in charge for a flight to Spain (which I thereby cast to the wind), I saved myself from getting stuck down south when, a week or so later, a global pandemic descended out of the skies. Don’t ever say Providence doesn’t look after you.

On Monday, a friend in Wexford writes and says, “See you soon?” “Not on your side of the Irish Sea,” says I. And that for two reasons: I won’t step on an airplane ever again. Not without absolute necessity. I will not augment my carbon footprint more than I cannot avoid. That will not, of course, reverse climate change. It will likely not make a whit of difference, not one iota. Not so much as a smidgen. No one will notice it, no one will engrave my tombstone with an epitaph lauding my efforts to prevent climate disaster. So, why should I do that? Why should you? Why should anyone? Well, maybe because, everyone, together, could make a difference. And no matter how many may believe in their own consciences that they thereby do no harm, I cannot salve my own conscience by burnishing it with theirs. The second reason is I’m skint.

My last excursion before moving to the continent of Europe for ever was my law firm’s summer outing, which took us on a steamer, The Maid of the Loch, on Loch Lomond. Back from the boat trip, a repast was offered at Duck Bay Marina, which has an outlook terrace, where I stood that night watching the sun go down, the—in that latitude—northern sky a riot of purples, yellows and reds. John Welsh, the senior partner, sidled up to me and said, “You’ll not get a view like that in Germany.” He was wrong, of course, but it still made me wistful.

The islands are calling me back home again

And I long for the skyline of Skye.

A lassie is waiting, sweet flow’r of the glen,

’Neath the beautiful skyline of Skye.

I left her one springtime, oh, I loved her so,

The blue mountains whisper’d, “You’re foolish to go.”

As I sailed with the tide, something died here inside,

How I cried for the skyline of Skye!

In mem’ry I’m hearing the ghost of a tune

That keeps haunting my heart with a sigh.

It tells of our parting that sad afternoon,

It’s the song of the Skyline of Skye.

The road to the islands comes down to the sea,

And that’s where my love will be waiting for me,

And together we’ll stay till we’re both old and grey,

’Neath the beautiful skyline of Skye.

Where’s the most beautiful place you ever saw? The 1993 movie Shadowlands is about the romance and marriage of writer C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman. The two of them end up visiting a place of which there is a painting on Lewis’s wall: the Golden Valley, or the valley of the River Dore, which lies in the border country between England and Wales. Joy is captivated by Lewis’s picture and they eventually go and visit this most beautiful of places. I’m sure that, after they’d seen Shadowlands, many members of the general public also went to see it, and I don’t know if that made the small villages that dot the valley unbearably encumbered with tour buses and badly parked cars but, if it did, I like to think that those who visited this beauty spot left a little of their money there.

Image: Pontrilas station on the former Golden Valley railway.

Not everyone does. Some reckon they spend enough on the flight, or their package holiday, and the people who live in the places we go and gawp at should be grateful we go and gawp at them. We bring life, and animation, crowded streets, litter and ice cream sales. The view is just there for the taking, so we take it. We bring our picnics, coolers, and our cans, and the local authority cart all the trash away and we ... we buy an ice cream.

I saw a video and this Japanese guy was asking Japanese people how they feel about foreigners in their country, and this one guy says, “I wish they’d try and make an effort and learn a little bit of Japanese. Like, they always just speak to us in English, they think we all speak English. It’s Japan. We speak Japanese in Japan.”

The first Dutch I learned was in 1985. I mean, really learned. I was guiding a tour that ended in Amsterdam, my first time in the Netherlands. We stayed on a boat behind Central Station. Sorry, Centraal Station. They did a great rice table, but the cabins were wee. Someone back in England said, “What you wanna learn Dutch for? They all speak English.” But I learned the basics. I learned them in Czech, Polish, Italian, Urdu (from my local licensed grocer), and Hungarian. Köszönöm. That’s Hungarian for “thank you.” If you can’t say thank you, you shouldn’t be in the country. Regardless of how much money you leave behind.

Anyhow, one of the girls on the trip started to feel really unwell, so I had to call a taxi to take me and her and her chaperone schoolteacher to a clinic to get her seen to. I got the only taxi driver in Amsterdam who spoke no English. Another time, in Prague, I had an altercation with two police officers. Our hotel was just off Wenceslas Square, in the old town, where coaches were prohibited. I was supposed to tell 55 middle-aged, well-heeled, corpulent American tourists travelling with American Express Vacations to hoof it down a cobbled street with their 80-pound suitcases trailing behind them in the darkness of evening. The entire conversation with the Prague police was conducted in the infinitive of the verb, and not especially well pronounced at that. But they let us off with a warning. Probably because they reckoned we’d be leaving some money behind us. I always feel that if you try to bribe a cop, he’ll arrest you. How innocent I was in those days.

I met a Flemish guy who used to work as a cameraman for the local TV station. We were in line at the Apple Store on Toison d’Or, just down the road from where four guys got shot a few months ago. It was January and I looked down at his feet, and saw he was wearing just sandals. No socks. I thought This looks interesting and remarked on it and we came into conversation. Our phones needed about an hour to fix, so we waited outside in the cold, having a cigarette, me avoiding flicking ash onto his big toe. He was only in town for a few days, he lived in Brazil. “What do you do there?” I asked. “I pick up plastic from the beach where I live.” That was his job, not employment but, what he did. He picked up plastic from a beach, and for all I know, he still does so. Apparently there’s no shortage of it. He grew disillusioned with his home country and went to Brazil to live as a beachcomber. He gets fed by the locals, who like him, and he cleans their beach. He leaves no money behind when he goes to Brazil, but he leaves a little of himself behind. And the people there appreciate that. They care for him, because he cares for them.

Around 1999, my boyfriend and I were driving late through Philadelphia, looking for our hotel. We’d landed at Dulles and drove up to Philadelphia in a hired car. It was a sporty little red Pontiac with tinny doors, and I liked it. Stick shift, I think. Black plastic upholstery, so that you stuck to the car’s insides in the impossible humidity of the summer. It was late at night before we’d finally negotiated our way into the city and, near to some tunnel or other, a black woman flagged us down. I opened the window and asked what the trouble was. Her car had broken down in the tunnel, says she, and she had no means with her. Could we give her something to get a taxi home? I was sceptical, and looked at Peter. But he had a face of calm comprehension; he said, “It’s all right. Give her twenty dollars, that’ll be enough.” So I did. We didn’t just leave some money in Philadelphia, we left a little humanity. And, what’s more, we took a little humanity with us. The lady was very thankful. I hope she got home all right.

What makes tourists unpopular sometimes is when they forget that they’re still a member of society when they travel away from home. Viewing everywhere as home gives you a connection to others, so that they stop being them and remain as part of your us. And, when that happens, you realise that our world is yours and everyone’s. It changes perspectives. Holidays are not time away. They’re time to examine ourselves. Because we don’t always have time for that at home. Vacations are not there to see things that are different, but to see the things that unite us, that are the same.