FEARLESS TRAVEL
How your vacation plans can help a devastated nation, reports Bert Archer
Istanbul is in trouble.
As President Erdogan completes his character arc from secular reformer to authoritarian Islamist, this ancient seat of empire is suffering. One of the imperial centres of the world from the 4th century, when Constantine picked up sticks and moved the Roman Empire here, until 1922, when the sultans, as tired as the Habsburgs, finally collapsed, it is one of the world’s half dozen truly great cities. And yet, standing at the Karakoy tram stop, I feel like I’m the only tourist here.
There’s a reason the foreign tourists are staying away, of course. But it’s not danger, it’s fear. These are two different things, separated for the most part by the very thing travel provides best, as we walk through a new city’s parks, sit eavesdropping in a cafe or get into conversations at a bar: making the unfamiliar familiar.
I’m with Erk Erkaya. Behind us are transit posters with the faces of government supporters who died during the attempted coup. Erk, who looks like Gael Garcia Bernal during his Y Tu Mama Tambien years, runs Locally Istanbul, a business he founded in 2011 with his friend Umit Aggul. They lead € 200 tours of the city behind the monuments. It’s a tour for people who have seen the Aya Sofia and the Blue Mosque; for those more interested in Istanbul as it is, rather than as it was.
“We’re hurting,” Erk says, talking about his business. “We haven’t had a client in two weeks.” Since the summer, the tourism industry in Istanbul, and Turkey as a whole, has collapsed. Erk tells me that last year, Istanbul hosted about 300 cruise ships. This year, they were hoping for 35. Six hundred shops have closed in the Grand Bazaar. Erk tells me it would be far more, except that under post-coup laws, business are not allowed to declare bankruptcy until the state of emergency is over.
Once that happens, he expects the wave of closures across the city to become a tsunami. Erk picked me up at the Vault Karakoy hotel, a gorgeous Ottoman-era bank transformed into an impressive boutique hotel, complete with vault bar and old- fashioned cage elevator ascending through the centre of a spiral marble staircase. Rooms are usually around € 150 – € 200. I check Hotel Tonight: € 40. The Four Seasons, with rooms that typically go for more than € 400, are trying to entice guests for €80. And as I sit, later, at a sidewalk table at Orta Kahve in Kadikoy, on the Asian side of the city, charcoal heating the thrice- brewed coffee beside me, I hear only Turkish.
I’ve not been to France since the attacks in Paris and Nice, but the numbers tell me that this is not the way it is there. Their overnight stays – the most basic measure of how tourism is doing – are down by only 10 per cent. There are no reports of mass business closures or large-scale cruise cancellations. And though it’s been well and extensively reported (at least in certain Facebook newsfeeds), the United States has had 83 people killed and 143 injured by Islamic terrorists ( and many thousands more by other, supposedly less terrifying gunwielding folks) in the time since the Paris attacks.
And even as it experiences what could be the greatest governmental instability it’s had in decades, possibly centuries, no one’s talking about cancelling trips to the United States, never mind the type of ostracism Turkey is going through.
The reason is that we’re familiar with how America works, and are confident that it does work, even in the face of death and a certain degree of chaos. Ditto France, to an only marginally lesser extent. Not so with Turkey, though, where news of bombs or shootings can seem to much of the leisure-travelling world as characteristic rather than anomalous.
Where you choose to take your vacation is not generally treated like a decision that has implications beyond your household and Instagram account. But travel is money, and where you choose to direct it has immediate and measurable implications, especially if your choices are being guided by mass perceptions like the ones we’re talking about here.
Three years ago, after Air Transat became the first company in the world to offer package tours to Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere, I decided to go and take a look. Could you really vacation there?
In preparation, I asked a journalist who had covered the country for a major media outlet for some tips. She loved the place, she told me, but the roads were fatally dangerous, and you should probably get right the hell out of Portau- Prince as soon as you land. It’s way too risky. This dovetailed nicely with what I’d heard more generally about the place: forests denuded to make charcoal, beaches strewn with garbage, poverty everywhere – pretty much the opposite of a vacation spot.
I went anyway, and I found a different Haiti, one where people figured they were about as in need of our donations of clothing and volunteers as we are of theirs.
I drove from one end of the country to another, three years after the 2010 earthquake, and with the exception of some potholes in parts of the capital, the roads were fine. And while driving on them, I passed kilometre after kilometre of massive chadeque trees – the grapefruit-like fruit in profusion amid the foliage.
On the Côte des Arcadins, all I saw were pristine white sand beaches. I did take a boat out from the Moulin sur Mer, where I was staying, to a small island where the beach did, in fact, have litter on it. My fellow package tourists started casually picking it up as we were wandering, and by the end of our hour or two there – which included a meal of freshly caught crab and conch – there was considerably less of it.
I’ve been back again since, with G Adventures, who started offering trips in 2014. I’ve spent a total of three weeks there, and encountered a total of one beggar. When I mentioned it to another Haitian, he was appalled I’d been importuned that way. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “It’s so shameful.”
The food is the best in the Caribbean, the history is beyond remarkable and the art scene, led by a group called Atis Rezistans, with sculptures made of trash and the sorts of cast- off clothes and toys people across North America send to Haiti – as unwanted there as it was in well-meaning Red Deer – is the sort that could take the world by storm. If only the world bothered to show up.
Places like Haiti, Turkey, Tunisia and Jordan suffer greatly from having been in the news. Headlines with bombs and guns and bodies are often all we hear from these places, but what happens after the dust settles, the tsunami recedes and the living bury their dead? As anyone who’s suffered through a house fire, or even just a death in the family will know, there’s distress, maybe shock, mourning, and then … life.
Have you ever read one of those Facebook posts from someone with cancer, or another chronic illness, lamenting the fact that people tend to stay away, because they don’t know what to say or what to do? They are dealing with the sickness, they’ll often say, but the loneliness can really hurt.
Turkey and Haiti have problems, like many countries, but they’re not contagious. Turkey will have to figure out if it can be a secular nation, and whether it will put up with Erdogan’s creeping autocracy. And Haiti, which has always been poor, has to figure out how to progressively elect governments that are at least less corrupt than the previous. But these are not the kinds of problems that affect tourists, any more than Donald Trump’s operatic venality or the increasingly infrastructural depredation of the Cosa Nostra in Italy.
The people who rely on tourism for their livelihoods, and in Haiti’s case, the entire nation, could really use those travel budgets of ours, far more than any cheque you might write to Red Cross or World Vision. Booking a trip to one of these places, in addition to being fun and very much not dangerous, is a gesture of solidarity, a statement that we haven’t forgotten these places, these people, that we haven’t abandoned them. And perhaps most importantly to the people of the country in trouble, it’s not charity.
It’s you getting what you want, and them getting what they want. Rent a hotel room, buy a beer, eat a meal and take a tour. Maybe from Erk. Tell him I sent you. He might even give you a deal.