From the Amazon to the Antarctic: Seeing it before it disappears

By Allen Salkin

Dennis and Stacie Woods, a married couple from Seattle, choose their vacation destinations based on what they fear is fated to destruction.

This month it was a camping and kayaking trip around the Galápagos Islands. Last year, it was a stay at a remote lodge in the Amazon, and before that, an ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro. "We wanted to see the islands this year," Woods, a lawyer, said last week in a hotel lobby here, "because we figured they're only going to get worse."

The visit to the Amazon was "to try to see it in its natural state before it was turned into a cattle ranch or logged or burned to the ground," Woods said. Kilimanjaro was about seeing the sunrise on the highest peak in Africa before the ice cap melts, as some forecasters say it will within the next dozen years. Next on their list: the Arctic before the ice is gone. The Woodses are part of a travel trend that Ken Shapiro, the editor in chief of TravelAge West, a magazine for travel agents, calls "the Tourism of Doom."

"It's not just about going to an exotic place," Shapiro said. "It's about going someplace they expect will be gone in a generation." From the tropics to the ice fields, doom is big business. Quark Expeditions, a leader in arctic travel, doubled capacity for its 2008 season of trips to the northern and southernmost reaches of the planet. Travel agents report clients are increasingly requesting trips to see the melting glaciers of Patagonia, the threatened coral of the Great Barrier Reef, and the eroding atolls of the Maldives, Shapiro said.

Even the sinking of the Antarctic cruise ship Explorer, which hit an iceberg last month, has not cooled interest. Other Antarctic tour operators say they have received frantic calls asking for last-minute berths from those who had been scheduled to take future Explorer voyages. Since most trips are already full, would-be paying customers are being turned away. What these travelers are chasing may be a modern-day version of an old human impulse — to behold an untrammeled frontier. Except this time around, instead of being the first to climb a mountain or behold a glacier-fed lake, voyagers like the Woodses are eager to be the ones to see things last.

Almost all these trips are marketed as environmentally aware and eco-sensitive — they are, after all, a grand tour of the devastating effects of global warming. But the travel industry, some environmentalists say, is preying on the frenzy. This kind of travel, they argue, is hardly green. It's greedy, requiring airplanes and boats as well as new hotels. However well intentioned, these trip takers may hasten the destruction of the very places they are trying to see. But the environmental debate is hardly settled. What is clear is that appealing to the human ego remains a terrific sales tool for almost any product.

"Doom tourism has been with us for a long time indeed," Jonathan Raban, the travel writer, said by phone from Seattle, his home. "It's about the world being spoiled and the impulse of the tourist industry to sell us on getting there before it is too late, before other people spoil it. "I'm thinking of the opening up of the West by the railroads aided by unforgivable painters like Albert Bierstadt, who sold that idyllic version of the pristine West populated only by deer and their fauns and picturesque Indians. There was a rush from the East to get there one step before the miners, who were going to spoil it, and before other tourists started trampling it."

Back then, the images were of geysers and antelope-dotted Rocky Mountain sunsets. Now the worried traveler, motivated by promotional Web sites showing images of smiling natives in face paint and flocks of colorful exotic birds, hastens to the vulnerable Amazon. Not that this tourist will be roughing it: bamboo-floored lodges await, where hot showers come courtesy of solar power and squawking toucans can be viewed from laddered observation towers. At hundreds of dollars or more a night, people do want hot water and other comforts.

In November, Travel + Leisure magazine came out with a "responsible travel" issue and listed on its cover "13 guilt-free travel deals," No. 5 being an Inkaterra Rain Forest package. For $497 a person, it included a three-night stay in a cabana on stilts, an excursion to the hotel's private ecological reserve, a boat trip to a native farm and a 30-minute massage at the hotel spa.

To be continue in other article...

(Jakarta, Kamis 21 February 2008, 07.39 pagi)

Re-publish by Jacob Paradox from link (www.routers.com),(www.iht.com), (www.routers.com), (www.nytimes.com)