6 Lifestyle explorations: Third World for sale Honduras: a great place to visit; an even better place

Box 7.6 Lifestyle explorations: Third World for sale Honduras: a great place to visit; an even better place

to live Ever wish you had made your move to Tahiti or Hawaii years ago, before development,

tourism and inflation? . . . there are still places in the world where you’ll find lush, unspoiled nature, low prices and an opportunity to create the life you’ve always wanted.

Honduras is one of those places . . . a naturalist’s dream with mountains, pine forests, bass-filled lakes, pristine beaches and islands . . . The friendliness, honesty and generosity

13111 of the people are legendary. A growing number of them speak English as well as Spanish. Honduras today is stable and democratic. What’s more, the government has recently established a pensionado program with many advantages for North Americans relocating here.

Experts are calling Honduras ‘the number one “sleeper” investment country’ in the western hemisphere. To start a small business, you only need a small investment. And the law makes it easy for foreigners to own businesses here.

Your dollars go a lot further here. Imagine buying a prime lot for $3,000, where you could build a two-bedroom, two-bath home for $20,000 to $30,000. Or renting a comfortable apartment for $150 to $175 per month. One person can live well on $500

a month . . . Medical care is excellent with US trained physicians and with state-of-the-art equip-

ment. A visit to a private doctor costs under $6, and the total for an operation, including hospital stay, might be about $1,000.

There’s a small but growing expatriate community. You’ll find Rotary Clubs, Inter- national Women’s Clubs, church services in English. People who travel with us aren’t ordinary travellers. Ours is a tour for people who don’t like tours! . . . you’ll also visit North Americans, talk to them and hear their stories. At our on-site seminars you’ll meet highly placed officials. You’ll get bottom-line facts and figures difficult to get elsewhere. Find out about taxes, residency, estate planning, real

estate, health care, banking and insurance.

(Lifestyle Explorations brochure, 1991) Sara Laing, tour director of US-based Lifestyle Explorations is also a self-styled environ-

mentalist and compiles its Earthpilgrims Journal. In this, she writes ‘Fragile Paradise of Honduras – as in all the other scenic and quaint areas of the world, these places are threat- ened to be overrun by tourists and developers, but may be saved from this by intelligent and insightful legislative action.’

The new environmental managers

Reference has already been made to the way in which large tourism companies are restructuring their management systems to include environment departments. Along with the creation of such new departments come new posts. Thomson Tour Operations, for instance, whose environment department was noted in the last section, employ an

11111 environment manager, a post held in 1995 by Paul Thornton, after earlier employment

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with the Disney Corporation and ten years with Thomson Travel, predominantly in mar- keting management, but also in ‘a variety of other projects for the company including strategic and marketing issues as well as having . . . launched Thomsons on to the Internet’ (Commonwealth Institute Symposium, ‘Managing Tourism: Education and Regulation for Sustainability’, 16 November 1995: biographical notes of speakers, 1995).

Reference has already been made to Thomson’s tourist code of conduct and of the code’s palliative nature and lack of significance. A few of the statements made by the company’s environment manager during a conference at the Commonwealth Institute in 1995 served to underline the company’s lack of commitment to environmental sustain- ability and its use of the terms ‘environment’ and ‘sustainability’ to demonstrate publicly

a supposedly ethical lining to their policies. In response to questions regarding the responsibility to educate about the impacts of tourism, Thornton explained that they were there to sell holidays and that the question of ‘commercial realities’ meant that there was no culture within the tour operating business to consider the impact of tourist developments on the environment. Despite the WTTC President’s statement that hotel companies were plunging in to reduce, re-use and recycle, Thornton suggested that tourists should have as many baths as they want and because they have paid for it they should be able to ‘abuse [the environment] if they wish’. He also suggested that Thomson already does a great deal for their customers by producing their leaflets in a number of different languages, but at the same time he considered this effort to be more than what was required.

There is of course an argument expounded by free marketeers that sustainability can only be achieved if market forces are given the freedom to operate. But even free marketeers acknowledge that environmental, social, cultural and other ethical factors are externalised or ignored by the market. The logic of the argument then assumes that environmentally unsustainable practices allowed by the market can only be rectified after the fact, that is, after they have produced the particular form of pollution associated with that factor. But sustainable development, as far as it can be defined, is something that happens before or during the fact rather than after it.

It seems odd, then, that such a large and renowned tourism company, which is osten- sibly trying to pursue the goal of sustainable development through its day-to-day prac- tices, should appoint an environment manager who seems to espouse the cause of the free market. It has to be added, however, that other (types of) environment managers exist.

The new service providers

Not only are tour operators, airlines, hotel chains and travel agencies attempting to adapt their practices, publicity, language and clientele to the new tourism, so too are the smaller-scale service providers, the hoteliers, lodge owners and managers, restaurateurs, minibus companies, guides, and even craft salesmen and saleswomen. Take the example of the Illusig family from Italy. The family are illustrative of a new wave of First Worlders seeking to try out their luck and their entrepreneurial skills on a new ‘fron- tier’ – a kind of globalising gentrification. In Box 7.7, Jacopo Illusig describes and explains the reasons for his family’s move to set up a pizzeria in Puerto Viejo de Talamanca on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica.

For the Illusig family, the move was opportunistic; they sought to escape their dis- enchantment with life back in Italy. In other cases, the move is linked with altruistic motives, such as a desire to save the tropical rainforest. Also in Costa Rica, for instance, Amos Bien, an American ecologist, ‘decided that the best way to convince people not to cut down rainforests is to demonstrate that conservation through tourism and

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Box 7.7 The Illusig family in Costa Rica ‘In Italy, we worked so that we could earn, eat, dress ourselves and pay taxes. We had

to dream about going on holiday. Then he [my father] went to Spain to open a pizzeria. We were in Spain for one year. It was a different kind of tourism, one of drunks, fiestas, wild holiday living.

Then some people told us that Costa Rica was very pretty and very cheap and that it was possible to buy a small restaurant easily. He returned to Italy and sold the house before leaving for Costa Rica. He was here for a couple of months and then he called us and told us to come. I arrived first, in April 1994, and then the rest of the family.

I find it enchanting here; we live differently; it’s calmer and quieter; there are no fiestas, 13111

or if there are, they are calm fiestas. We earn less than we did in Italy, but there’s more time here – to go to the beach, to rest, to read a book, to live. There’s less money, but there are fewer costs. It’s a different life – you work four or five hours a day and say that you have worked hard; in Italy, you work 12 hours a day and say that you haven’t worked very hard.’

Have you observed a growth in the number of tourists since your arrival? ‘From what I have seen during my year here, there has been a big increase. Every month,

there seems to be a new place opening, a new lodge, a new restaurant – always more services, followed by more tourism, and so it goes on. I believe that more services, more infrastructure will bring more tourists – it’s going to grow. It’s not always good competition.’

Source: Author’s transcripts (1995)

ecologically sound management is the best use of land from an economic standpoint’ (Blake and Becher, 1991: 171). The result is Rara Avis, a 1,500-acre private forest reserve, established in 1983, close to the Braulio Carrillo National Park. But Bien has since been joined by many of his fellow Americans in Costa Rica, not all with the same sincerity of motive as his. Indeed, the North American influence is in strong evidence in most of the tourist locations within Costa Rica’s remaining natural ecosys-

tems, especially in the business of providing the services that the tourists require.

This is not to say that all the service providers for the new tourism are from the First World. A majority come from within the national boundaries, but even in many such cases the seeping influence of the First World and its business values and practices have an effect through the mass media, conferences, and general contact with more and more First World tourists and operators. Gradually, as more contact at conferences and trade fairs takes place and as more linkages between the companies in the First World and the service providers in the Third World are made, the balance between what the supplier can offer and what the visitor wants tips towards the latter. The service providers purchase more and different items and expand their range of services. And slowly the prevailing and dominant value system shifts to that of the consumer from that of the indigenous caterer.

The new financiers

OPIC is a US-based organisation that seeks to link US investors with investment oppor- 11111

tunities overseas. Annually it transfers slightly more money from the US private sector

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