The first time I went to Mar del Plata, 1979, when I was 9, I went to the syndicate hotel of my parent’s guild: textile trade union. There were two weeks, in which we had to dinner at a stablished time and respect the schedule. The same thing happened in the city, the most popular and traditional beach in Argentina. There were huge lines for everything, it was like if the entire country decided to head for the beach, where by midday was so crowded you couldn’t fit a pin in the sand, which boiled under the summer sun.

The memories I kept from that trip are not the best: to me, Mar del Plata seems an ugly an uncomfortable place, above all, crowded with people, to the point that I never went back. Marplatenses, don’t get mad, don’t leave insults in the comments, I promise to go back, it’s time to leave my childhood traumas behind. Remember, it’s about my memories, not the objective beauty of the city, or how well you manage the subject of tourism.

Without me wanting to, I’ve had contact with vacational fordism in all its splendor. The one that mobilizes a large number of people to the same places. In this case, the argentinean coast. To manage such a number of tourists requires the intensive use of planification strategies for hotel occupation, food time schedules and spaces, which at the end seems a lot similar to those of people’s everyday life. Fordism stood out for its rigid schedules, repetitive works, concentration of masses in the same place at the same time. And when people went on vacation, they followed the same scheme.

I’ve always had a trouble with accepting as obvious the model of ‘now, in the summer, we’re heading for the coast’. Maybe the childhood trauma has moved me to take the backpacker path: in the summer I headed for Bolivia, Peru, the North of Argentina, anywhere but the usual vacational centers. I even felt uncomfortable when I met a bunch of people in a ‘tourist’ plan, as sometimes happened in Cafayate.

Are Fordist touristic enclaves in decadence? If I glance at my travel practices, and most of my friend’s, I feel tempted to say yes. That we don’t like to go every year to the same place, that we wouldn’t think of buying an appartment at the beach, that as much as possible, we prefer not to visit crowded places. But when I look at the statistics of the latest summer in Argentina and see how the coast burst in its number of tourists, I find it hard to easily assume that my travel practices can be generalized to the rest of the tourist market. It is clear that at the time of choosing where to go for vacations, people opt for what they can afford. An, in many cases, the choice is limited to relatively cheap destinations, where the wide supply of lodging and transportation allows for the existence of affordable prices.

But still, I can’t deal with it: when I think of those images of the boiling beach and people making long lines to eat, I feel the urge to be eating boiling soup in a chilly corner of the argentinean north. Same way as I never got used to work under a fordist regime, it’s going to be difficult for me to be happy with a vacation model that characterizes for crowded places and strict schedules.