When Josie gets to Siwa, she heads straight for the oasis. My first impression is a panoramic drone shot of the perfectly rectangular turquoise salt lakes shimmering against the white desert sand. Then, like on the cover of Vogue magazine or a French perfume ad, Josie is shown sunbathing next to the turquoise water. She looks completely alone. Her framing creates the impression that there are no other tourists at the oasis – but I know she’s travelling with at least two other people.
As someone who loves beautiful scenery, at first this makes me feel the familiar yearning of wanting to be there. Of wanting a beautiful, undiscovered place all to myself. It makes me think about greed and exclusivity. Why do I (and people from my culture) prefer not to share? Especially when it’s in unknown places, on other people’s land. But it also makes me think about loneliness, and how the two go hand in hand. The Western ideal is to have beautiful places all to ourselves, but the price is being there alone.
Between the ages of 7 and 13, I lived on the South Coast of South Africa. During summer holidays, (almost) the entire inland of South Africa would head to the seaside. When my mom and stepdad, who came to think of themselves as locals, wanted to go to the beach, they’d walk until they couldn’t see a single other person. They too wanted to feel like they had a beach all to themselves. They called the tourists “vaalies” (from the old South African name for Gauteng—Transvaal), and like other locals, would get annoyed at their driving—slowly “like they were on holiday!”. They would rather swim far away from the shark nets and lifeguards in the so-called ‘shark headquarters of the world’, than share a space with holiday makers.
This need for exclusivity seems to be part of a broader pattern in how Westerners relate to space and land. How it isn’t something to be shared and enjoyed together, but owned and withheld from others. In the west, the more money you have, the more space you get to withhold from others. The western tourist’s relationship to land – private property, exclusivity, and isolation – shapes tourism in ways that displaces locals.