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| Where can I take an ethical holiday? | |
| 2007-10-08 | |
Well, people, my first tip is: relax. Just the fact that you're thinking about the environmental impact of your actions means you're already more ethical than a person on a package flight to Dubai. I'm guessing that your new holiday wardrobe is 100% organic, your sun-cream's Fairtrade, and even your buckets and spades are vintage: well done. Next question: Is it ethical to fly? Well, yes and no. There's no denying the 10 tonnes of CO2 your average family getaway will contribute to global warming. But, increasingly, responsible travellers are turning the question around and asking: is it ethical not to fly? Fact is, examined from a holistic perspective, there's no comparison between the amount of real good you can do in two weeks outside Falmouth, and the incredible impact that just a couple of days of your presence might have in a place like Burkina Faso. In my view it's all too easy to holiday in this country - drive to Norfolk, show everyone how green you are - but much, much harder to fly some place where the economy would literally collapse without you. Last year, Rowan and I took the tough decision to take the kids to a remote atoll in the Indian Ocean, travelling for an arduous three days each way - but believe me, the knowledge that without us our cook and three maids would have been peeling yams for a living more than made up for the disapproving looks when our friends found out where we'd been. And here's another tip: if, like us, you've got talkative kids, why not just tell them the atoll's called Bournemouth? How can you be sure your presence will make a difference? Check before you leave that the region is rich in beggars, and take plenty of small change. If orphans are plentiful, think of combining your sunshine or safari holiday with a fast-track adoption. Once you've completed the paperwork, you'll have the child as a permanent reminder of your break. Try Guatemala, or head for Madonna's favourite, sunny Mali. Alternatively, you could leave a few hours of your trip free for some unpaid work as a goodwill ambassador. The high cost of insuring celebrities means that, increasingly, amateurs are volunteering to visit places that might never, otherwise, see a concerned westerner, let alone a Powerpoint presentation on climate change. Find an area where you can swim in the morning and visit people with malaria in the afternoon, and you may even, like us, pick up some sponsorship from your local school. Even the most unethical-sounding holiday can be turned round with a bit of thought. Heading for China? Pack your suitcase with ready-sorted recyclables which would otherwise have travelled there by sea, then fill up with Fairtrade shopping for the return journey. Fancy New York? Manhattan's just the place to repatriate a North American crayfish. Finally, if you want something closer to home, try Monte Carlo. With all amenities squeezed into a country not much bigger than Bath, trust me: you'll end up guzzling less petrol on an ethical gambling break than on shuttling between Southwold and Aldeburgh. Bon ethical voyage! | |
| Posted by:Seafarious |
| #12 Every 10 years or so I get to take a vacation which I do driving across this wonderful, beautiful, enormous United States of America. The last time I started out from Antioch, CA, drove up to Cheyenne, WY, dropped down to Denver, CO, went across to Colby, KS, then dropped down to Dodge City, KS, then on to Oklahoma City, OK and on up to St Louis, MO then on to Columbus, OH. Along that route I visited Dodge City and saw the show, found a place in Oklahoma I'd love to retire to on the banks of a little river, spent 2 days visiting the 1st Infantry Division Museum, and spent some quality time with some old friends in Ohio. On the way back I took a couple days and visited some friends at Fort Riley and the 1st Cavalry Museum (which they arranged to keep open for me after hours) before returning home. Round trip was 15 days and around 7 thousand miles. I've previously visited Gettysburg, Stones River/Murfreesboro, the Cowboy Museum, the Barbed Wire Museum, been to the National Rodeo, Washington, D.C. (in my elementary school days), eaten the best chili I ever had at a little roadside rest about 20 miles west of Albuquerque, and made friends in a lot of little places across this country. Eventually, I'd like to visit Belize and Japan, but for sheer enjoyment and refreshment of the knowledge of what this country is all about, nothing beats a driving vacation. |
| Posted by: FOTSGreg 2007-10-08 17:14 |
| #11 Just the fact that you're thinking about the environmental impact of your actions means you're already more ethical than a person on a package flight to Dubai. I'm guessing that your new holiday wardrobe is 100% organic, your sun-cream's Fairtrade, and even your buckets and spades are vintage: well done. Ah, the central argument of the enviro-wackos in a nutshell: "See, we're better than you!" |
| Posted by: mcsegeek1 2007-10-08 12:51 |
| #10 Ah, Zenster, another fan of Monty Python, I see! |
| Posted by: Sgt. Mom 2007-10-08 12:32 |
| #9 Here's an "ethical" holiday. Why not take your children on a tour of your own country and carefully instruct them about its history, the people who gave their lives to defend it and why living in a free nation is so damned important? Visit a few military cemeteries and pay your repects to those who made the ultimate sacrifice for your liberty. Try instilling some pride of place and sense of history into your kids. Give them an understanding of why the fight against tyranny and despotism is so important. Make them proud of their heritage and give them the precious gift of historical perspective without which so much of critical analysis is near-impossible. Screw the idiocy of being crammed into cattle-car airliners and travelling thousands of miles so you can get the trots from unhygienic food and drink in some third world hellhole. Stop leaving thousands of dollars in some foreigner's pockets and, instead, direct that wealth back into the hands of your fellow nationals. I mean what's the point of being treated like sheep. What's the point of going abroad if you're just another tourist carted around in buses surrounded by sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering and Coventry in their cloth caps and their cardigans and their transistor radios and their Sunday Mirrors, complaining about the tea - "Oh they don't make it properly here, do they, not like at home" - and stopping at Majorcan bodegas selling fish and chips and Watney's Red Barrel and calamares and two veg and sitting in their cotton frocks squirting Timothy White's suncream all over their puffy raw swollen purulent flesh 'cos they "overdid it on the first day." And being herded into endless Hotel Miramars and Bellvueses and Continentales with their modern international luxury roomettes and draught Red Barrel and swimming pools full of fat German businessmen pretending they're acrobats forming pyramids and frightening the children and barging into queues and if you're not at your table spot on seven you miss the bowl of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup, the first item on the menu of International Cuisine, and every Thursday night the hotel has a bloody cabaret in the bar, featuring a tiny emaciated dago with nine-inch hips and some bloated fat tart with her hair brylcreemed down and a big arse presenting Flamenco for Foreigners. And then some adenoidal typists from Birmingham with flabby white legs and diarrhoea trying to pick up hairy bandy-legged wop waiters called Manuel and once a week there's an excursion to the local Roman Remains to buy cherryade and melted ice cream and bleeding Watney's Red Barrel and one evening you visit the so called typical restaurant with local colour and atmosphere and you sit next to a party from Rhyl who keep singing "Torremolinos, torremolinos" and complaining about the food - "It's so greasy isn't it?" - and you get cornered by some drunken greengrocer from Luton with an Instamatic camera and Dr. Scholl sandals and last Tuesday's Daily Express and he drones on and on about how Mr. Smith should be running this country and how many languages Enoch Powell can speak and then he throws up over the Cuba Libres. And sending tinted postcards of places they don't realise they haven't even visited to "All at number 22, weather wonderful, our room is marked with an 'X'. Food very greasy but we've found a charming little local place hidden away in the back streets where they serve Watney's Red Barrel and cheese and onion crisps and the accordionist plays 'Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner'." And spending four days on the tarmac at Luton airport on a five-day package tour with nothing to eat but dried BEA-type sandwiches and you can't even get a drink of Watney's Red Barrel because you're still in England and the bloody bar closes every time you're thirsty and there's nowhere to sleep and the kids are crying and vomiting and breaking the plastic ash-trays and they keep telling you it'll only be another hour although your plane is still in Iceland and has to take some Swedes to Yugoslavia before it can load you up at 3 a.m. in the bloody morning and you sit on the tarmac till six because of "unforeseen difficulties", i.e. the permanent strike of Air Traffic Control in Paris - and nobody can go to the lavatory until you take off at 8, and when you get to Malaga airport everybody's swallowing "enterovioform" and queuing for the toilets and queuing for the armed customs officers, and queuing for the bloody bus that isn't there to take you to the hotel that hasn't yet been finished. And when you finally get to the half-built Algerian ruin called the Hotel del Sol by paying half your holiday money to a licensed bandit in a taxi you find there's no water in the pool, there's no water in the taps, there's no water in the bog and there's only a bleeding lizard in the bidet. And half the rooms are double booked and you can't sleep anyway because of the permanent twenty-four-hour drilling of the foundations of the hotel next door - and you're plagues by appalling apprentice chemists from Ealing pretending to be hippies, and middle-class stockbrokers' wives busily buying identical holiday villas in suburban development plots just like Esher, in case the Labour government gets in again, and fat American matrons with sloppy-buttocks and Hawaiian-patterned ski pants looking for any mulatto male who can keep it up long enough when they finally let it all flop out. And the Spanish Tourist Board promises you that the raging cholera epidemic is merely a case of mild Spanish tummy, like the previous outbreak of Spanish tummy in 1660 which killed half London and decimated Europe - and meanwhile the bloody Guardia are busy arresting sixteen-year-olds for kissing in the streets and shooting anyone under nineteen who doesn't like Franco. And then on the last day in the airport lounge everyone's comparing sunburns, drinking Nasty Spumante, buying cartons of duty free "cigarillos" and using up their last pesetas on horrid dolls in Spanish National costume and awful straw donkeys and bullfight posters with your name on "Ordoney, El Cordobes and Brian Pules of Norwich" and 3-D pictures of the Pope and Kennedy and Franco, and everybody's talking about coming again next year and you swear you never will although there you are tumbling bleary-eyed out of a tourist-tight antique Iberian airplane ... |
| Posted by: Zenster 2007-10-08 11:49 |
| #8 "Last year, Rowan and I took the tough decision to take the kids to a remote atoll in the Indian Ocean, travelling for an arduous three days each way - but believe me, the knowledge that without us our cook and three maids would have been peeling yams for a living more than made up for the disapproving looks when our friends found out where we'd been." -there were so many money quotes to choose from, this just happened to be my particular favorite. I'd of sworn this was scrappleface or the onion. |
| Posted by: Broadhead6 2007-10-08 11:07 |
| #7 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Modern_Parents |
| Posted by: Bright Pebbles 2007-10-08 09:22 |
| #6 My vacation this year shall be an unethical vacation. Think Col. Kurtz' compound..... |
| Posted by: Mark E. 2007-10-08 09:13 |
| #5 It'll be Walvis Bay for me. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2007-10-08 07:37 |
| #4 Hummer uses less fuel. |
| Posted by: 3dc 2007-10-08 02:00 |
| #3 Terrific parody. From the Guardian no less. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2007-10-08 00:44 |
| #2 Ethical holiday? If you are looking for a respite from ethics, Congress is hard to beat. |
| Posted by: SteveS 2007-10-08 00:38 |
| #1 I'll rent a Hummer and drive up for the Indy 500. Gaia's my bitch! |
| Posted by: badanov 2007-10-08 00:11 |