Faith in Greek Tourism Restored

Is there really a difference between travellers and tourists? Yes, of course! Right now I’m touristing Greece along with a very special person and I’m savouring every moment of it. And even if you think 'touristing' is not a word, I'm still going to use it. Yes, it’s definitely touristing; with hotel rooms where you can sleep in with no fear of the ceiling falling apart or the rats falling upon you at any minute. You can really fall back on hot showers and travel-sized soap and shampoo bottles. The only anxiety is for some major Ancient Greek monument to fall through the cracks.

Everything falls into touristy place: internet hotel reservations, good meals, nice rental car (with effective braking system no less), GPS and proper maps. No more ‘hellowhereyoufroms’ smiles or potent haggling abilities needed. It’s touristing! It’s easy.

Even when I tried to do it the hard way, getting to a remote little touristy town in the South-eastern part of the Peloponnesian peninsula without a hotel reservation and trying to find some cheap accommodation on the spot, things turned out differently than I expected.

This is Tourist Country and, against all my expectation, everything seemed booked out. So, when we asked at a small guest house whether they had a room available, the lady there with her minute English knowledge told us – with the help of some particularly effective aerobics moves – that her place was full, but she somehow explained that she would check other places on the internet. Not only did she come up with some alternatives (booking.com really comes in handy at times like these), but she gave us a map and encircled the affordable places on it, and gave us her blessing to go look for the best deal. Which we eventually found.

Dear kind, friendly and helpful guest house owner/manager from the guest house in Nafplio which I don’t remember the name of: this is me thanking you in the name of all travellers (and some of the tourists) for your wonderful and astounding gesture (and I don’t mean your funky calisthenics)! Flowers and/or candy coming soon… Touristing is easy!

Rip-Off Sri Lanka

Meditation can wait. Frustration cannot.

Even though I’m supposed to be calm and shanti after the meditation retreat, I decided that this is the place where I can enumerate my frustrations like on an extensive grocery list (better yet, a discarding list). Sri Lanka is the land that can fill up a whole tome of grocery lists of frustrations, frustrations that surface mostly when you’re spotted as being a foreigner, and trust me when I say that being anywhere over 1m50, with a non-dusky skin complexion, and with dreadlocks blending in might be considered somewhat extreme. And they’ll spot you faster than you can blink. When I say ‘they’ I mean everybody. You see, they’re not stupid, I’ll grant them that; they’re actually pretty smart and cunning and have been able to turn any remotely interesting thing on their island into a business opportunity (just like the Lonely Planet, but that will be the subject of a future post), attracting gullible tourists like a light bulb attracts moths. I’m not even going to enter the ‘hellotaximadam?’ on the list, even if it tends to get on my nerves when 10m away from my guesthouse not one, but all the taxi drivers on the road ask me if I want a ride; or that when I’m patiently waiting for the bus at the bus stand, two separate tuk tuk drivers offer their services or just simply say ‘come, I’ll take you’ (and they don’t even know where I want to be taken and probably don’t care)… I hold that it’s good to try your luck and, of course, business is business and there may well be credulous tourists around, so the better your people skills are, the greater the chances to get some work. I can deal with that and usually try the polite approach, amicably refusing their magnanimous offer (at some point I found out that sarcasm or derision have proven to go sky-high above their heads). No, these widespread Asian techniques cut no ice.

The seed of my revolt lies a lot deeper, implanted with the precision of a sharp dart in the bull’s-eye of the shattered tourist paradise that is Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka is a beautiful country. Trust me! And it’s a country where tourism is in bloom but not so much for backpackers and ramblers as for the classic tourists; people who leave their daily jobs and lives for 2 or 3 weeks and look forward to a nice relaxing time either visiting historical sites and experiencing cultural aspects, or chilling back on beaches and hilly tea plantations, or both. They’re looking for Services, Wi-Fi and swimming pools and they’re prepared to pay the price; the tourist price; the price that is being asked. The overpriced price. Which means that the rest of us have to struggle to find the backpacking scene, the underground scene, the authentic scene.

Cheap accommodation? It’s either $15 per person in a not really run down place (but usually painted in a baby-pink or Paris green shade), or the shabby, shady dorm room or YMCA, which is hard to find and can use a good sweeping (or, in some cases, a big barrel of petrol and a match). Cheap food is easier but as soon as a place makes it in the Lonely Planet or on TripAdvisor, the prices shoot up like fireworks in a Maltese factory. And that’s only the least bothersome of issues.

The bulk of the problem lies with the attractions and, as luck would have it, everything is considered an attraction. Also, every attraction has a price. An overpriced price.

Anuradhapura is one of three very old, very important historical cities in the cultural triangle of Sri Lanka. And it wasn’t really surprising that the entrance ticket to the ruins and temples of the old city had a price on its head that locals would surely never afford (they don’t have to, as they have their own ‘local’ prices, but still): $25. The other attractions in the triangle range from a measly $10 for a temple in Kandy to an obscene $30 for the Rock Fortress at Sigiriya. And even where there’s no entrance ticket, you’ll have to pay the friendly-looking elderly Sri Lankan who accompanied you for a while to make sure you don’t get lost when trying to get to Ella Rock (as business is better not to maintain a proper pathway and thus let the poor, ignorant Westerners lose their way and squeak for some assistance in mid-trek).

And then there’s the Dowa Temple, a low-key, highly religious site, the actual reason why I started this vicious rant.

Yesterday was marked in the Sri Lankan calendar as Binara Full Moon Puya Day, an official Buddhist holiday, when people go to temples to pray and give offerings to Buddha. The monks chant (through speakers, no less) and pray and there’s a festive atmosphere all around, with parents guiding their barefooted toddlers to and fro the temple grounds, offering flowers, lighting oil candles and sitting in prayer all over the place. I walked through the temple grounds feeling quite peaceful, smiling to amused Sri Lankans and taking photos of the 4m high unfinished Buddha statue carved into the rock face. And as soon as I entered the temple, an elderly caretaker surrounded by pre-teen monks greeted me with ‘’Scuse me, madam, ticket here.’ I was more than willing to offer a small donation for the conservation of the temple and I even had my 20 rupees handy (it’s the usual amount I’ve seen locals donate), but the guy beckoned me to his desk and extracted a bunch of colourful tickets to hand one over to me. His mistake: after saying ‘ticket’ he also said ‘h’ndrd rupees’ so I took a closer look at the alleged ticket and even upside down I managed to read the bold black letters on the paper: DONATION. My 20 rupee’d hand stopped in mid-air and the guy and I locked stares and for a second there didn’t move, like two tomcats preparing to jump at each other’s jugular.

‘What?’ I asked. ‘Donation, no?’

‘H’ndrd rupees…’

But he probably realised his tiny tactical error and stared intently at the ticket stubs lying flawlessly in his hands. He then ignored my 20 rupees and waved me inside so I went in and looked around. Five minutes later when I emerged he suddenly found something else to do and hurriedly left his station, leaving the kid monks to negotiate a donation, which didn’t miraculously increase because of any sudden enlightenment on my part.

Does It Pay to Be German?

Since it’s a lot harder to come face to face with the puzzled confusion of local people when I answer the ‘what country?’ question, I adopted Germany as my native country: Nepali know Budesliga, Indians know ‘wie geht’s?’ and Sri Lankan know Volkswagen, which makes everybody happy, as opposed to the worried countenances people get when faced with the real answer. I think it’s always easier (for me and for my conversational partner) to choose this win-win situation because they beam with the pleasure of knowing something about my Heimat, and I can smoothly avoid the ‘which country is near? Hmm? Ukraine? Ahh, Russia! You speak Russian? No? [disappointed face]’ line of questioning.

But on the other hand, my being German converts people’s faces from happy-to-meet-you to borderline exuberant, as, in their eyes, I suddenly turn from smiling foreign tourist to a walking dollar sign (better yet, euro sign), ensuring my interlocutor good impending fortune somewhere down the line.

It’s never entirely clear when this strategy is best employed. But in Jaffna this answer ensured several conversations with German-speaking Sri Lankans, conversations that left me flabbergasted no matter the language. Who would expect such German fluency from the inhabitants of a small island in the Indian Ocean? So, on more than one occasion my white lie almost came back to bite me in the arse, only I was faster: if they have worked in Hamburg, I came from the Austrian border; if they moved to Switzerland, I came from Berlin and so on, so that my somewhat shady German accent would not give away my true secret identity.

But on one occasion, the Bundesrepublik Deutschland came to my aid in the least expected way: I set out to buy a men’s sarong for my imaginary brother because of the pretty batik patterns I had seen on some of these male skirts flapping around the Sri Lankan male shins, and because it’s always nicer to buy stuff for other people than for yourself (or at least that’s what you are supposed to say to the sellers in order to impress them). All around the Jaffna bazaar the prices ranged from exorbitant to outrageous (that is, if you consider $5 a bit costly for a 2m long piece of fabric turned into a comfy cylinder) and the traders didn’t even think about budging or haggling. They even seemed on the verge of bursting out in a fit of an infectious laughter at the mere thought of settling for a lower price and I got sniggered at from shop doors in front of which I passed twice. Feeling like not getting the great deal I was hoping for, I just walked around aimlessly, letting the alluring invitations to buy saris and skirts with flower patterns bigger than my head pour over me like a jar of spilled honey, contemplating my ever diminishing chances. And, as I responded to another ‘hellowhereyoufrom’ with my mechanical ‘helloGermany’ answer, again I got spoken to in German.

A middle-aged fellow with a sad receding hairline but grinning like there’s no tomorrow fancied a good German speaking practice session and tackled the situation not with the usual ‘aaa, Volkswagen’ but with an effortless conversation about the German football team and the FIFA World Cup and lured me into the normal conversation that comes after the first introductory lines: you came alone? are you married? what is your work? I like your hairstyle…

‘You know, I live in Switzerland' he said. 'My family is still there but I’m on holiday and help my brother with the shop… Come in, look around. Want to buy a sari?’

‘Well, actually I’m looking for a sarong for my brother…’

With a palpable feeling of pride and self-importance, he felt that it was his duty to translate all my German words to his brother and their helper and all the other curious spectators, who by this time started their own parallel conversations with me along the exact same lines, only this time the dialog was in English. I felt like being transposed in a second superimposed universe, the latter being the English dubbed version of the first German one, both having a strange storyteller laid over. And the only main difference between the two was the price of the sarong: the English universe offered me the sarong for 450 rupees, while the first one clearly stated (as I repeatedly checked) that the sarong was dreihundertfünfzig, 350. By this time I was already so confused as to which conversation to square up to in which language that I decided I would entirely ignore the English one and concentrate on the one that promised the better deal. And by this time, the Swiss Sri Lankan and his brother also figured out that they were rear-ending each other and decided to reunite their universes. To make up for the bad business decision of his Swiss brother, the shopkeeper ceremoniously presented his best merchandise: a lovely pair of plastic training trousers, in case the sarong proved too airy and the wearer would prefer a better shielded option. I dismissed the trousers, reverently accepted the sarong and the receipt nicely wrapped in a FIFA World Cup plastic bag, and victoriously, Germanly exited with a ‘Tschüss papa!’

So, does it pay to be German? Sometimes, it pays less.