Tourism Tips for Developing Countries

We here at Adam is Freaking Out Right Now have had the great fortune and pleasure of traveling all over the globe. And in our many travels, well, we’ve noticed some things. So here are a handful of our best tourism tips for developing nations around the world:

Congratulations! If you are reading this it means your country has finally begun attracting tourists! Way to go! Bang up job overcoming that genocide/natural disaster/Western-interest-motivated “conflict.” Things got really nasty for a while there, but thanks to your grace under very literal fire, you’ve officially moved up the international tourism ladder from “backwater” to “only-brush-your-teeth-with-bottled-water.” That’s a two-rung leap! We’re sure you’ve noticed the subsequent influx of white people to your country, and if you haven’t, you can be sure your pickpockets have! Ha, ha, but this isn’t about the well being of your street urchins, it’s about keeping new tourists to your country happy. The first impression these vaccinated pioneers take back to their duty-free-Toblerone-devouring acquaintances is crucial to the establishment of your nation as a tourism hot spot, an international destination for the future! And you don’t want to screw this up, developing nations; early miscues can result in a tourism death sentence. Just ask Singapore. They caned one unruly, white miscreant and next thing they knew it was thirty years of, “Maybe we should go to Thailand instead.”

But you’re no Singapore are you, developing nations? Of course you’re not. Here then is a simple guide for not only continuing to attract Western tourists to your country, but for making sure they have a good time while there.

Food

There’s an old saying we just invented that goes, “A well-fed traveler is a happy traveler,” and should you wish to achieve that vaulted, burgeoning hot spot status, developing nations, should you wish to reach the fabled heights of Prague back in ‘97, or a Bali circa 1992, you’re going to need to satisfy your visitors’ stomachs.

Easy enough, our native cuisine is delicious and unique. We’ll just treat tourists like we would a guest in our home and feed them all the great stuff we eat!

Whoa, ho, ho, not so fast, faceless tourism officials! That might be all well and good for visitors from your surrounding countries, but Western travelers are notorious for their delicate stomachs. Years of wobbling around the globe with money-belts strapped tightly across our lower bellies has rendered our collective maw a virtual minefield, capable of fantastic, fecal explosions upon even the slightest of coriander transgressions. So abandon your naïve what’s good-for-the-goose-is-good-for-the-colonizer mindset and learn to cater to our palettes instead. Festoon your hotel menus with Western staples. Think BLT sandwiches, French fries, pizzas and milkshakes. And with regard to those BLT sandwiches, be sure to leave out the “L.” Lettuce absorbs a large amount of water and as the underpaid plumbers of your five-star hotels will soon find out, that shit gives us the runs. Might as well leave the “T” out while you’re at it. And would it kill you to actually cook the “B?” Surely Americans can’t be the only people who like their bacon crispy.

In the unfortunate event that a Western visitor be forced to dine “in the field,” be sure to have appropriately anesthetized versions of your native fare at the ready. It’s actually quite easy. Simply take all of the most popular dishes that your people eat and remove the flavor while jacking up the price. The goal is to be exotic enough for us to feel that we’ve gone local, but sufficiently watered down to where our palettes will accept the fare. Though you may initially feel guilty overcharging like that, don’t sweat it! Even at three times the price, the cost will seem laughable to us. That’s how much a Coke costs in our country, a normal one too, without all your weird tasting sugar in it. And for God’s sake, make places that peddle such edibles easy to find. The last thing we want is to be driving the 200 kilometers from one UNESCO World Heritage site to another and actually have to search for something palatable to shove down our necks. Simply pick one place in the middle of two tourist destinations and construct a restaurant right there on the side of the road. But only construct one. That way we’ll have no other options and the dozen or so tourist company busses flocked out front will inform us that therein lies a culinary sympathizer, like hobo-notches on fence-posts during the Great Depression, except with surly, smoking drivers instead of notches. Also, seeing the same pink, pin-cushion tourists over and over again at these feeding troths will help reassure us that we haven’t strayed too far from the sanctioned path, thus rendering us safe from the effluvial threat of whatever animal seems to be most effectively transmitting its disease that season. Lastly, please install a gift shop in the corner of these roadside eateries. If we’re going to be getting out of the bus in the middle of fucking nowhere it’d be nice to be able to send a postcard.

Awkward, Garish Displays of Forced, Native Culture

We cannot say enough about your native people. They are fascinating. Their clothing, their music, their strange, almost comically angry gods, it all seems so…indigenous. And we love that about them. We eat that shit up with a spoon made out of digital memory cards. But much like your native cuisine, we need to eat that shit up in a setting that is, how you say, less poor. Let’s be honest, watching dish-lipped women twirl around the bush is great up until the point some Dane contracts Ebola. Then it’s all Jens gushing eye-blood on a frantic plane ride back to the Continent and irreparable headlines in The Guardian. See you later, tourism bucks, have fun backpacking up Kilimanjaro! Er, excuse me, “Kili.” So why not avoid the whole messy scenario by gathering up your top purveyors of native lore and transporting them to the lobby of our hotels? Or at the very least a mutually agreed upon building where our women won’t have to micturate into holes? Your native entertainers will no doubt appreciate performing in air conditioning and we Westerners will enjoy not having to politely shoo away stray, pregnant dogs while we watch. Sure the experience may feel a little less authentic, but here’s the thing: you can fake a native looking backdrop. Any tapestry or a painting will suffice! We’ll make sure to only take photographs of your performers directly in-front of aboriginal scenery and you can make sure to alter any part of the performance that directly challenges our Judeo/Christian traditions.

Win-win!

Oh and please try to keep the performers from tweeting on their iPhone 4’s directly in front of us. It really shatters the illusion.

Vice

Gambling, drug-use, prostitution, all pretty heavy stuff, isn’t it developing nations? We’re in total agreement with you on that one. Such activities are banned where we come from as well – besides gambling of course, but hey if you did what we did to the indigenous people, you’d probably throw them a bone too! Ha, ha, they’re eternally fucked, but here’s the thing: the further you get from your home, the lighter such vices become. It’s a scientific fact that those activities are really only heavy domestically. Travel, after all, is about experiencing new things, cutting loose a little bit, but it’s hard to let your hair down when you can’t lift your arms because your skin is crawling from withdrawal. So why don’t you let us get a taste, developing nations, just a little taste? For example, if we get busted, oh, we don’t know, snorting a line in a bathroom stall of the hottest little club in the hottest little beach town making noise on the Mexican Riviera, shouldn’t we be able to buy our way out of it off a thinly mustachioed police officer?  Of course we should. Would you rather we spend the night in lock-up or out there on the dance floor supporting your local economy? But that type of leeway comes from the top down, developing nations; so put it out there early. Have a system in place before we show up that allows for inevitable yet delightful “international misunderstandings.” Let your officials know that if a tourist finds his way into an opium den  – or a sixteen-year-old – to look the other way; or at the very least, the way towards a fist-full of your devalued, native currency. These are mere cultural differences, after all, and no one wants to visit a country where a Westerner once rotted in a cell. Or do you really think Myanmar changed their name from Burma for “political reasons.”

In closing, developing nations, we encourage you to add your own little flourishes to whatever you feel the experience of traveling in your country should be. Sweaty, hairy men following our blonde women down dark alleys and aggressively flirting with them? Why not? Western girls are self-conscious; they’ll love the extra attention! The option to have single strands of hair braided on the beach with oddly scented, colorful string? Yes please! Ooh, how about writing our names on a single grain of rice? Fun for the whole family! How do they write so teeny like that?

Such unique travel experiences create memories that can last a lifetime. And we do want you to be you, developing nations. Just our version of you. Which is why we’d really appreciate it you would please get out of the way and kindly allow us to rape your natural resources. Pretty please with some NATO troops on top? You will? Hooray! Thanks so much, developing nations! We’ll make sure to send the Let’s Go kids right over there for doing us that solid. Which reminds us, you should probably get a few vegan, GLBT cyber-cafés going post haste. It’d really be a shame of you to let us down.