Recent events up at the lake have reminded me of two works that sit at pivotal moments in the development of budget long-haul travel.
First there’s Alex Garland’s The Beach which presciently pinpoints the era when the molotera of young backpackers stopped being explorers and morphed into something more akin to colonists, or at least semi-resident populations with a damaging impact on local communities and the environment. The fate of the beach used in the 2000 movie version of the novel is further testament to this phenomenon.
Then there was a documentary I saw in the early 90s about a wealthy old German with a substantial lakeside property on Atitlán who was quite aggressively resisting the efforts of the inhabitants of a nearby indigenous village to construct their own road which would connect them to the main highway and thus to the rest of the world. The film exposed the multi-dimensional nature of developmental issues.
One wonders if those villagers now realise that they should have been more careful what they wished for.
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