What are your future travel plans?

Being in a position to make travel plans is a great privilege. You could name almost any city in the world, and I would like to travel there. Paris, Kampala, Lusaka, Buenos Ares, Kathmandu – every city has its attractions. Being connected to almost every part of the globe is fantastic. You can tour the Okavango Delta in one issue of the National Geographic, and then view the splendours of Petra in Jordan at the Smithsonian magazine.

However, let us examine what travel has become in our current socioeconomic conditions. Tourism has become a profit maximisation project, with tourists performing as bit players in an industry that exploits natural resources. While tourism is not new, and people have travelled to experience awe and wonder in places with cultures foreign to their own, mass tourism has devolved into a corporatist exercise.

Let’s explore what that means for international travel.

Crowds on Mount Everest

In 2019, and subsequently to that, climbers of Mount Everest have shared on social media a rather telling photograph. There is a long queue of people, waiting in line in their heavy jackets, to reach the actual summit of the mountain. Wait a minute – there are crowds when summiting Everest? Yes. The scene resembles, in the words of one commentator, a queue at the Motor Vehicle department.

Everest, throughout the ages, represented an awesome yet unattainable goal. Summiting that mountain was the stuff of legend – only the most resourceful and resilient could even hope to climb that lofty peak. From the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, attaining the claim of summiting Everest was the subject of geopolitical competition.

Not anymore. Now, increasing numbers of socially mobile internet savvy corporate types can indulge their childhood fantasies of summiting that venerable mountain.

To be sure, climbing Everest takes courage and determination. These qualities do not in any way distract us from the adverse environmental impact of mass tourism on the mountain. in an increasingly interconnected world, the American and British investment banker, the advertising executive, the banking consultant – all can now realise their dream of summiting Everest by taking advantage of the tourism industry that nurtures such dreamy, once-in-a-lifetime adventures (hallucinations?)

In a previous article, I wrote about the impact of global economic connections and the expansion of adventure tourism on Everest. The mountainous terrain is no longer the exclusive preserve of the Nepalese Sherpas. In fact, Everest now features the dead bodies of previously highly motivated climbers, tonnes of garbage, empty beer cans, cartons and faeces, and assorted detritus left over by the tourist interlopers.

If you want to climb Everest, nobody can stop you. Just remember the kind of industry that profits from a desire to achieve that objective. No, I am not making a condemnatory judgement on everyone who intends to summit the mountain. We need to balance our individual interests, and whether those dreams of adventure are being manipulated by a destructive and profit-hungry business model.

Billionaire space travel, and Muhammad Faris followed his conscience

Travelling into outer space is the ultimate destination. Numerous TV programmes, documentaries and specials (not to mention sci-fi series) deal with the topic of space travel and exploration. Yuri Gagarin became world famous as the first man in space. Valentina Tereshkova, also from the Soviet Union, was the first woman cosmonaut. Today, we are living in the age of the billionaire space race.

The rivalry between the space barons, as CNN put it, is all very interesting. However, this obsessive focus on which billionaire is going to ‘win’ – Bezos or Branson – misses a crucial dimension of space travel.

The exploration of space began as a quest to understand and answer basic scientific questions about other planets, cosmic objects and the stars. Rocketry was envisioned by pioneering Russian astronomer and scientist Konstatin Tsiolkovsky (1857 – 1935) not as an adventure to satisfy the egomaniacal dreams of the wealthy.

Tsiolkovsky, an expert in aeronautical sciences, advocated space travel to discover the mysteries of cosmic phenomena. The billionaires today have harnessed space travel as an adjunct to their fantasies of ‘conquering’ space.

Muhammad Faris, who passed away earlier this year, was Syria’s only astronaut. Born in Aleppo in 1951, he passed the demanding and stringent tests to successfully pass the Soviet space training programme. Becoming a pilot and cosmonaut, he travelled into space to the Soviet space station, Mir, in 1987. He became a national hero in his native Syria, earning honours and plaudits from the Ba’athist regime.

Yet his story does not end there. Yes, he returned to his homeland, and gave lectures on space travel, rocketry and astronomy. Hailed as a hero, he did not allow adulation to inflate his ego. In 2011-12, with the anti-Ba’athist Syrian uprising, Faris defected to the opposition. He had been a general in the Syrian Air Force, and refused to run bombing missions against his fellow Syrians in rebel strongholds.

Targeted by the Syrian regime, he fled with his family to Turkey, where he lived out the rest of his days. Whether his decision to side with Turkish-backed Syrian opposition groups was right or wrong, I do not know.

What I can say is that he placed his ego in neutral, and spoke out against a regime which was committed crimes against its citizens. His remarkable achievements in space did not negate his sensitivities regarding the plight of his fellow countrymen-women.

Let’s make travel plans for sure. Economic globalisation has made the world more interconnected, but we have to wonder whether this connection has come at the expense of cross-cultural understanding. Indeed, what corporation globalisation has achieved is a kind of consumerist monoculturalism. A McDonald’s and Starbucks on every corner is not necessarily an indication of an interconnected world, but one where we as consumers worship at the altar of profits.