Famous Footsteps

Just thought I'd post a couple of travel articles I wrote for my student paper. Enjoy!

Famous Footsteps

Pop­u­lar cul­ture today is dragged along like a puppy on a leash by the media and its craze for celebri­ty.

When Vic­to­ria Beck­ham wears a new style of tiny jack­et teenage girls across the coun­try can be seen sport­ing the same with­in weeks. If Kate Moss is spot­ted watch­ing an un­known band they are al­most guar­an­teed a hit, and when­ev­er Richard and Judy re­view a novel it hits the best­seller list im­me­di­ate­ly. The media pre­sents us with ide­als of per­fec­tion to fol­low and the tourism in­dus­try is no ex­cep­tion to this bizarre rule of causal­i­ty.

The hordes of tourists cur­rent­ly in­vad­ing quiet Greek is­land Skope­los prove that celebri­ty sells when it comes to hol­i­day des­ti­na­tions too. The so called ‘Mama Mia ef­fect’ has seen hun­dreds of tourists trek to the film’s set­ting, a forest­ed is­land in the Aegean Sea. Until its re­lease last year, Skope­los was known only for plums, pears and pine trees. With a pop­u­la­tion of just 4,696 and with­out an air­port, it had man­aged to es­cape the fate of other gaudy Greek re­sorts.

Nonethe­less, the suc­cess of the film is per­fect­ly timed to boost this strug­gling econ­o­my which de­pends heav­i­ly on tourism. In the ABBA mu­si­cal Greece is idyl­li­cal­ly fig­ured, much like it was in the 1970s when the tourist in­dus­try there first boomed. As a re­sult many have praised the film as a much-​need­ed ad­vert for the area, de­spite wor­ries that this in­flux could de­stroy the un­spoilt beau­ty of the is­land.

Mama Mia is not alone; films have long been recog­nised as a great mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy to boost tourism. Aus­tralia, re­leased this year, is ex­pect­ed to in­crease tourism down under, par­tic­u­lar­ly to quirki­er des­ti­na­tions like Dar­win, where much of the film­ing took place. The Lord of the Rings tril­o­gy acted as a stun­ning ad­vert for New Zealand and Cap­tain Corel­li’s Man­dolin did more for an­oth­er Greek is­land, Cephalo­nia, than any­one could have imag­ined.

An­oth­er pow­er­ful fac­tor in­flu­enc­ing tourism is the hol­i­day choic­es of stars them­selves. Brad Pitt and An­geli­na Jolie’s choice to make Namib­ia the birth­place of their child, Shiloh Nou­v­el Jolie-​Pitt, was wel­comed by its tourism board.

In ad­di­tion to spend­ing a for­tune at a lux­u­ry re­sort in the town of Swakop­mund they helped put this rea­son­ably un­known coun­try on the map. There a prob­a­bly mil­lions of Amer­i­cans who had never heard of the South West African coun­try be­fore Pitt and Jolie’s ex­tend­ed stay there.

In fact the gov­ern­ment val­ued this celebri­ty en­dorse­ment so high­ly they were will­ing to risk their demo­crat­ic rep­u­ta­tion in order to at­tract the at­ten­tion of US gos­sip mag­a­zines. De­spite a media free­dom which is often held up as a stan­dard for the rest of the con­ti­nent, the Namib­ian gov­ern­ment im­posed strong re­stric­tions dur­ing the celebri­ty cou­ple’s stay.

They de­port­ed three French jour­nal­ists and ar­rest­ed a South African pho­tog­ra­pher to make Jolie and Pitt feel safe enough to have their baby in the coun­try. As a re­sult Namib­ia main­tained a place in world­wide news for months and the tourist in­dus­try there is on the rise.

Ad­ven­ture trav­el too often takes a lead from the celebs. Ewan Mc­Gre­gor and Char­lie Boor­man’s hit se­ries, The Long Way Round, was not only a huge TV suc­cess, but also in­spired hun­dreds of other bik­ers to take copy­cat trips. How­ev­er, the pair were in turn in­flu­enced by leg­endary mo­tor­cy­clist Ted Simon, whose book Jupiter’s Trav­els pro­vid­ed the idea for their ex­pe­di­tion.

Due to the media, all our trav­els, even those of the celebs them­selves, are in­vest­ed with cul­tur­al and his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ences. There’s no such thing as an orig­i­nal trav­el idea, but that is what makes every jour­ney im­por­tant, it is part of being human that we nec­es­sar­i­ly fol­low in each oth­ers’ foot­steps.

This is proven by the fact that mod­ern celebri­ties are not the only ones to draw hordes of tourists to des­ti­na­tions across the world. His­tor­i­cal fig­ures are of course great tourist at­trac­tions: that’s why York­shire is so keen to claim Robin Hood as their own. (Can I just say, as a Not­ting­ham girl, he’s ours. Hands off!)

These kinds of at­trac­tions can be big busi­ness for the in­dus­try: Lon­don’s Whitechapel hosts daily ‘Jack the Rip­per’ tours for those with enough mor­bid cu­rios­i­ty to see the exact spots where he mur­dered his vic­tims, and they don’t come cheap.

Lit­er­a­ture too has had a pro­found im­pact upon trav­el trends his­tor­i­cal­ly. Wordsworth and Co­leridge pi­o­neered the idea of walk­ing as a pur­suit rather than mere­ly the nec­es­sary bur­den of the poor. Michael Palin, who has him­self in­spired count­less trav­ellers, fol­lowed in Ernest Hem­ing­way’s foot­steps in an­oth­er hit trav­el se­ries based on the mem­o­ries of peo­ple who knew the Amer­i­can icon.

Ker­ouac’s On The Road is large­ly re­spon­si­ble for the ul­ti­mate ‘cool’ trav­el mode, the road trip. In­nu­mer­able trav­el writ­ers and fans have traced his route across the US and an in­dus­try has sprung up along it. Thanks to the beat gen­er­a­tion writ­ers, San Fran­cis­co is still seen as a hub of cul­tur­al ac­tiv­i­ty and the Vesu­vio café in the cen­tre of the city, where Ker­ouac was once a reg­u­lar, thrives on his rep­u­ta­tion.

Nowa­days our fas­ci­na­tion with celebri­ty ex­tends to every reach of life and we’re so in­ter­est­ed in where they like to go that The Times even has a week­ly fea­ture, ‘My Hols’, which fo­cus­es on the trav­el pen­chants of a va­ri­ety of stars. Who wouldn’t be fas­ci­nat­ed by the fact that Moby en­joys bungee jump­ing in Patag­o­nia while John­ny Vegas loves nowhere bet­ter than Scar­bor­ough?

When Colin Firth isn’t pranc­ing around on a Greek is­land prov­ing that there’s a rea­son he never be­came a rock star, the West of Scot­land and the Sa­hara are his haunts of choice. Per­son­al­ly I’d give any­thing to run into him re­lax­ing by Loch Fyne, which he ad­mires for its ‘im­pos­si­bly ro­man­tic glow’. Scot­land sud­den­ly seems a very at­trac­tive des­ti­na­tion.

It’s a phe­nomenon that has ex­ist­ed for thou­sands of years; since the birth of re­li­gion peo­ple have been trav­el­ling the routes of their idols hop­ing to gain some new in­sight into them. With new media forms and the in­creas­ing ease of trav­el these trips are no longer con­sid­ered pil­grim­ages, but ul­ti­mate­ly that is what they are.

Whether we ad­mire a fa­mous fig­ure for pro­found re­li­gious teach­ings or a par­tic­u­lar­ly im­pres­sive per­for­mance of ‘Danc­ing Queen’, fol­low­ing their foot­steps is still as­pir­ing to a per­ceived level of per­fec­tion. Sure­ly there can’t be any harm in that.