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Courtesy TECchris @ Twitter Our species’ survival depends on how fast we embrace the moral shift from “patriot” to “global citizen”. Chris Anderson. Reminded me of a key post in the evolution of this blog: cosmopolitanism (or the implosion of nationalism) Thanks to my friends at PlanetEye for the tools and the Mexico Tourism Board for the images, I was able to organize a collection of images depicting interesting regions that may not be as popular as the beaches. Again, just to make the point that tourism promotion is usually biased to send people on charters to the beaches, but there is far more depth to this and any country. At a time when everyone in the industry is wondering how to restore the glorious days, this is only one idea that deserves attention. Your browser does not support iframes. For best results, use the zoom controls (+/-) to get closer on the map and click on the markers to preview the images within that area. This is a very cool widget that will continue to be updated as I keep adding photos to the collection. If you’ve been to Cancun, Vallarta, Los Cabos, Ixtapa, Acapulco, Mazatlan or Huatulco chances are you don’t know Mexico. Yes, you’ve enjoyed the privileged beaches, the top-notch hotels, a first-class experience and you fell in love with these places and the people that live in them. But you are probably missing the best part. As Manuel was saying a few days ago: “I dare you to find Holbox”. In reinventing tourism in mexico, I implied that all these beach destinations are going to have a really difficult time getting back on track: Mexico has a privileged geography and has exploited it through the continuous development of its traditional hubs, usually beach destinations flocked by charters full of travellers that prepaid the entire experience back home. I believe those days are over, not because those people will no longer consider Mexico as an alternative and will gradually rediscover its benefits, but because there are far too many options outside of Mexico where the exact same experience is available: blue waters, white sand, palm trees, cheap drinks and lots of sun. The quintessential beach vacation. As people are forced to try other options, they will find them [...] Courtesy Altamar @ Flickr The peak in the background is known as “Peña de Bernal” and is the second-largest monolith in the world. However, the pace of life in the town of San Sebastian Bernal is indifferent to such landmark except for the celebration of Spring equinox, when people converge around the peak, dressed in white to receive the new season. In The Art of Travel, De Botton suggested there are no more places left to discover. With the overwhelming amount of information available on each and every major destination around the world it is likely that I could discover the major landmarks just as well from my computer than walking through them. Of course travellers will argue that first-hand experience is what matters, even if millions of people have had the same opportunity. While exploring the best reasons to travel I had emphasized the quest for the “experience”: The tourist that never leaves the beaten path is likely only exposed to an esterile experience that has been washed out of all its original power. One could argue that the splendour of any famous landmark is constantly diluted by the ongoing attack of mass tourism, misguided by a market saturated of travel guides that most of the times reference the same top 10 or 20 landmarks not to be missed, while telling us every snippet of knowledge that travellers must know about these places, cancelling every attempt to make that experience unique. The age of discovery is over. Every corner of our planet has been documented ad nauseam… [...] Over the past few hours members of the Tamil community in Toronto blocked one of the main highways connecting downtown with the rest of the city. While I won’t claim any knowledge whatsoever of the situation in Sri Lanka, these demonstrations have me reading as much as I can about the current situation. I thought that was the least I could do, realizing that I live in the same city as 200,000 of them, according to MSNBC. The protesters had been taking the streets of Toronto at least since January, in most cases in a very organized fashion. Perhaps too organized since I barely noticed them before. But only events like this one get the attention of the masses and quickly echo through the news, blogosphere and twitter-verse, generating an overwhelming voice difficult to ignore. The tools of civil disobedience seemed to have produced the results they were hoping for: attention. As I got involved into the various streams of people commenting about the event, I realized there were two kinds of people participating in the online debate: the pervasive anonymous comment condemning the act and manifesting hatred for blocking a [...] Courtesy of Hector Garcia @ Flickr To support my last post about reinventing tourism in Mexico here is a shot of a small church in the south of the city. La Conchita is located in the Coyoacan area, but it is a few blocks away from the popular square, but it is a most sought-after location for weddings. This has me thinking about micro-tourism. More on that later. |
 Global Culture Blog by Juan Gonzalez is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. |
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