A sinking ship?

This of course is a knee jerk reaction to a grave and complex problem and will solve nothing. It is merely a gimmick to assuage the wrath of the beleaguered destination’s inhabitants. If the mayor had charged €100 per person to enter or €300 per family, I’m fairly sure numbers would drop like flies but a mere €5? He’s having a laugh. Besides, this surely is not a time to shoot down tourists. The city needs them, but it also needs balance.

Incompetent politicians, lack of affordable housing and low wages could all be cited for why everyone is so cross. Tourist numbers can be restricted but there’s far more to this nitty gritty problem, as is so obvious in the Canary islands. Airbnb, illegal rents and the ease with which people can hop on and off budget airlines for the weekend whether it’s Dubrovnik, Paris, Rome or Salzburg are all factors for the overcrowding, but ultimately local governments have to solve the problem of lack of affordable housing and fair wages for their own people. A lot of people gain by tourism, but many do not.

Take Soller, my local town. Countless businesses and individuals thrive on tourism, but a chunk don’t, and they are increasingly resentful of the massive crowds now flooding into the valley. Young locals are desperate for cheap long-term accommodation and gnash their teeth to see wealthy tourists renting expensive properties well out of their reach or buying second homes for investment at exorbitant prices. To redress the balance, they want affordable housing, but nothing seems to be done, whoever is in power.

We’re not even in the tourism season yet and it’s becoming near impossible to drive due to heavy traffic or to park in the town. I walk everywhere with my trusty rucksack for this reason but not everyone has my level of mobility. What do the elderly Sollerics do? Stay at home and miss market day because they can’t walk? Seems more than a little harsh and unfair. Some have disability status and car stickers, but these aren’t always a guarantee of getting a hallowed space.

The good old days

In Japan, authorities are erecting a wall behind a supermarket to hide Mount Fuji because it is filmed and photographed constantly by thousands of badly behaved tourists who lie in the road, snarl up traffic and don’t allow locals to go about their business. In fact, one tourist is in a coma having been run over for pulling such a stunt. It’s such a shame that visitors who show respect and want to keep visiting beautiful places without causing upset to the locals, are also tarred. Maybe it’s simply that too many of us are jumping on the travel bandwagon. How has the world of travel got so out of control?

I can’t excuse myself. I’ve always been an inveterate traveller and have visited some of the most extraordinary places and cities in the world. I remember visiting a ghostly and silent Venice with my sister and being spooked by all the feral cats lurking in the misty, dark alleyways at night. It was just like a scene from Nicolas Roeg’s atmospheric film, Don’t Look Now. There were very few tourists but easyJet didn’t exist then and you had to be quite intrepid to go travelling alone on a shoestring.

My sister and I would hop off to mad places on a whim without money or of course mobile phones, reps or travel insurance and just hope for the best. Our poor mother just prayed and hoped we’d be alright. We had a lot of scrapes, some dangerous, not least in places such as Bucharest, then under the rule of the scary Ceausescus. We had to be rescued by an undercover operative in a speeding car to escape the secret police and once spent a night in an Italian bordello as we were broke, and it only cost two quid per night but we had to keep the wardrobe up against the door. Fun times. Now it’s all very vanilla. Things are a good deal safer aside from random acts of terrorism and freak accidents, and everyone has access to a mobile and few places are free of the crowds. True challenges lie in wild and natural places off the map and far away from the fray, but these are the preserve of adrenalin freaks and wilful adventure seekers - and I should know. You’re blissfully on your own in every sense, and that surely is worth the incumbent risks.

Cut the stairs

It’s official. If you avoid lifts and plod up steps instead, you can cut your risk of early death by a quarter and coronary disease by 39 per cent. This nugget has arisen from a medical analysis of 480,000 people between 35 and 84. This is good news for me as I loathe lifts with a passion. I’ve had some bad incidents in lifts when they broke or fell down and avoid them like the plague unless really necessary. There’s good news on step goals too. Just 4,000 steps a day lowers your risk of early death by 20 per cent and if you can face getting up to 10,000, you’ll be 39 per cent less likely to die prematurely. Now go and eat that ensaïmada. You deserve it.