Tourist, come back!

Residents of popular tourist regions of Europe shooting at vacationers with water pistols along with other, less active methods of passive aggression such as homemade signs “Beware of man-eating jellyfish”, “Gargoyle Threat” and ‘Recidivist Anal Catfish in the Sea’ bring protesters a pleasant sense of belonging and self-worth (in some cases, even direct participation in saving the world). Still, from the outside they often look like nothing more than another sign of global infantilism, increasingly common in well-fed societies.

(This article was written as part of a debate with Izzet Enyunlu's article “Tourist, Go Home” published a few days ago)

In early August 2020, amid the COVID perversion, my family and I miraculously (notarized COVID tests with a wet seal and a half-full charter from an empty Zhuliany airport with a smoking room locked forever) managed to go on vacation to Montenegro for the first time in almost six months of forced isolation. 

Montenegro was an anti-tourist's paradise - only three of us and maybe twenty other people were in Kotor. (Plus, there were probably a couple of Russians wandering around somewhere else. They weren't allowed to fly to Montenegro at all at the time, but they were Russians, they get in with groundwater.)

The community (at least on our side of the bay) had one desperate restaurant, one supermarket, and one lucky taxi driver, whom we once gave a job to drive us 5 kilometers in the heat with full backpacks from the supermarket. The taxi driver charged us 3 euros (taxi prices were lowered centrally at that time so that at least someone would use them at all), and he was almost happy. All along the way he cursed the damned covid, the damned politicians who destroyed the tourist season in the country and put the locals on the brink of survival, praised us for not being afraid to come, and we in turn praised Montenegro for not being afraid to accept us. The owner of the apartment, where we were the first guests since the beginning of summer, brought us mullet caught by her husband, personally helped us light the grill, and said the same things as the taxi driver, but in English and in a more intelligent way. The man on the luxury boat spoke even worse than the taxi driver about his shitty life without clients, and he drove the three of us around the bay for half a day, with stops at all the beautiful places for 50 euros. It's unlikely that this money would have paid for his fuel, but he had fuel and no real money. One day, finally getting brave, we took a taxi across the country from Ulcinj to Kotor (with stops in especially beautiful places) for another 50 euros and made another soul happy.

Dorado in the Bay of Kotor was as small as ever. Previously, it was believed that large specimens fled to the open sea because they were frightened by giant cruise ships. Since the fall of 2019, not a single cruise ship has been seen here, but for some reason, nature has not been cleansed, and no decent fish have returned.

It's easy to guess that after such a memorable season, no Montenegrin would ever pull a water pistol on a tourist even in a bad dream. Yes, tourism is the main source of income for this country, and you can't bully visitors, but the Spaniards, for example, can afford it. After all, in Spain, unlike poor Montenegro, money comes out of thin air - in the worst-case scenario, it can always be obtained by inserting a card into an ATM. In the absence of tourists, only 1.3 million people will lose their jobs there, and the state budget will lose an unfortunate 108.7 billion euros - but the environment, peace, and low prices for renting apartments for students with sea views!

In this regard, I would like to advise Spanish activists and, in their person, other anti-tourists in prosperous Europe not to stop at half-measures - water pistols alone will not drive such stubborn scum as tourists out of Mallorca. It's time to move on to effective means - punish traitors who rent their apartments to visitors on Airbnb, break windows in hotels, shave the heads of female guides, and it wouldn't hurt to beat up a couple of tourists and rob them, and if that doesn't work, stab two or three to death - and that's just what comes to mind first. If you think about it, ideally, of course, we should introduce some cool governmental bans, like in covid, so that no asshole in swimming trunks can get through, and enjoy the silence, ecology, and empty monuments of world architecture for a couple of happy years.

And in a few more years, the first three tourists will arrive in let’s say Mallorca (where there is nothing else but beauty), whose inhabitants will be wondering what is going on, why everything has become so bad because it was so good recently, and now it is so bad. And a lucky taxi driver will drive them around the island for 50 euros.

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