Surfing, the new-age ideal of a return to nature, a voyage of initiation and a quest for identity, has become one of the many avatars of neoliberalism: so the first pioneers, discoverers of virgin waves, have been closely followed by hordes of developers, tour operators and profit-hungry concreters, and many Surfing Paradises, lost forever, have become seaside hells.
Jérémy Lemarié, De la sportisation du surf en Californie du Sud et à Hawaï…, co-author of Surf à Contre courant, une odyssée scientifique, describes the emergence of the first surf trips in the 1960s and 1970s as a tool for reinforcing American imperialism.
The surf trip market
Although there are grey areas in everything, we can distinguish 2 types of travelling surfers:
1. The pragmatic surfer wants to consume waves in the sun, with the local culture seen as vague decorum, something secondary. In the image of a society that cherishes speed and profit, he travels to consume waves. The boat trip is the perfect illustration of this profit-driven approach.
2. The surfing adventurer is as much in search of cultural authenticity as he is of waves, and believes that true travel means moving away from mass tourism and standardized beach policies and meeting local populations. Getting off the beaten track takes time, and comes with its share of hassles, which, from his point of view, is what makes travel so interesting.
At a time of global awareness of the need to preserve natural and social resources, everyone is talking about “sustainable development”. As a result, alongside the perpetuation of concrete tourism, we are witnessing a worldwide blossoming of ecolodges, many of them overpriced.
Just as camping has disappeared as a means of access to vacations for the working classes (tent pitches have now been replaced by more and more expensive and luxurious mobile homes), the ecolodge has enabled a whole generation of apprentice hoteliers to offer spartan accommodation at prohibitively high prices: indeed, energy savings can sometimes be used to justify a lack of comfort. Rapacity and greed can then be draped in virtue. In Indonesia, a bamboo hut with a moldy mattress cost €5 a night in 2002, but now sells for €100 because it has been branded an “Ecolodge”.
In this way, a destination for backpackers becomes a destination for the rich. In the Seychelles, the ecolodge is accessible only to a well-to-do segment of the population, and is a luxury product that lives up to its price claims, with Jacuzzi, refined cuisine and all the rest.
For sociologist Bernard Duterme, author of La Domination Touristique, it’s pointless to differentiate between virtuous and deleterious tourism practices, since they all correspond to segments of the same market economy. Discover this vision in his uncompromising article on the tourism of the world.
