There are good forms of tourism and bad forms of tourism.
Tourism has great potential to bring
wealth and development to areas.
However, it also has many downfalls.
It starts off initially at quite a low level.
You might get backpackers visiting a place
that's been previously undisturbed.
Gradually, more and more people will start to go
to this previously untouched paradise
as we see it in our eyes.
The people that live there usually make up part of this picture and this notion
of the exotic,
and as it becomes more popular,
the big operators, the big hotels, start to move in
and they start buying up vast areas of land.
This drives up land prices, it drives up the cost of living,
it displaces local people, it marginalises them economically.
Typically, foreign workers are brought in to work in large hotels,
or workers from outside the local region,
because they're considered to ask less questions.
The local people, where this has happened,
generally, their quality of life goes down
and there is vast exploitation.
In Goa, the traditional festival called Shigmo,
involved various performances and dances,
and over the last 10 years that's basically been turned into
a large scale street carnival for tourists,
including floats and large processions.
A lot of the meaning behind those performances and dances
has been eroded and taken away.
The issue of whether bad tourism is better than no tourism
is an extremely difficult question to answer.
The situation you have currently in northern Thailand,
where you have the Padaung, who are refugees from Burma.
They fled Burma many years ago now and took refuge in Thailand.
The women traditionally wear brass coils around their necks,
which pushes their shoulder blades down
and gives the illusion of them of having very long necks.
As a result, they've proved an extremely popular tourist attraction.
However, the Thai authorities will neither grant them Thai citizenship,
nor will they let them leave the country under resettlement programs
organised by the United Nations.
So they're effectively completely trapped by tourism,
but at the same time they're completely dependent upon tourism,
so, whereas some people might say boycott the northern Thailand circuit,
don't visit the Padaung, that would only harm these people even more.
There are serious economic issues with tourism.
Typically, mass tourism, the way it's practised today,
sees most of the money staying with
the large international tourism companies, tour operators.
Very little of the money that you pay for your holiday,
to go and stay in a developing country,
whether it be in Africa or Asia,
actually stays in that country.
In Kenya, if you were to pay for a safari holiday,
and that holiday included a visit to one of the Masai villages,
typically, about 1% of the money that you pay
ends up in the hands of the Masai people.
The money that you pay will go to your flight, but because the company
and the hotel, but because the company is actually based overseas,
a very, very small proportion will remain in that country that you visit,
either in terms of wages that go to the people that work there,
or in terms of taxes that are paid by the company,
which would go into the economy and also help local people.
In Kenya, there are trips now where you pay money to go and see the Masai,
but rather than paying money directly to the driver who takes you there,
you buy a voucher from the hotel,
and that ensures that the driver,
who perhaps previously would have taken that money,
rather than giving it to the village elders as he was supposed to.
This ensures that the money does actually reach the Masai.
Culture is always going to be changed and influenced by other factors,
but it's about the overwhelming influence of a massive influx
of Western tourists to what was previously a remote area.