“The european character of Buenos Aires has reached the status of myth. A touchstone in the conviction about this city’s exceptionality in the latin american context or a consign to repudiate its interest manifested by the country and the continent it “leaves behindâ€?, the european character of Buenos Aires had been preserved, until not long ago, in the principal representations of the city, as if it were a fact of reality whose urban, historic or cultural evidence doesn’t deserve to be questionatedâ€?.

At “European Buenos Aires?�, a chapter of Miradas sobre Buenos Aires. Historia cultural y crítica urbana, Adrian Gorelik brings up the always present topic of Buenos Aires european ways. His intention is to show how this representation carries long years of decadence, particularly facing the “northamericaneization� and “latinamericaneization� of the city in the las three decades. While the categories stated here deserved a more detailed analysis, my intention is to draw your attention to how the “unquestionable character� of Buenos Aires “european ways� is already being questionated in areas that go beyond academics. As Cecilia Palacios work already showed (spanish only), in the european tour guides the description of Buenos Aires has left the european way issue behind long ago.

More likely, the description of Buenos Aires is the description of identity construction failure. That is, the “europeanâ€? aspect that the city pretends to have is never entirely achieved, in the same way argentineans don’t get to construct themselves as “europeansâ€?. The latinamericaneization of the city, something the guides points out only at its negative side, is part of the fact that the Buenos Aires project hasn’t succeeded. This correspondence between “architectureâ€? and “identityâ€? is interesting. The decadence, for example, of the “europeanâ€? center of the city, such as the Avenida de Mayo, is analysed as the country’s economic decadence. As if it could only take a look at a few blocks of Buenos Aires to talk about the state and a project of Argentina.

Obviously, all of this can’t stop being a particular politic lecture: Argentina’s economic crisis being read from the decadence of its “european waysâ€?. As many travel guides put it, the eurocentric look becomes patent in this correspondence between “latinamericaneityâ€?, with its negative attributes, and the recurrent economic crisis. As if other details -the unequal commercial trade, the support of the main countries to coup d’etats in this part of the world, the looting of Latin American resources since the times of the conquest, the huge inefficiency of the argentinean political system, the lack of a local strategy for the development of education and production, etc.- were not some issues to be taken into consideration.

Every now and then we find out that the academic field produces some interesting tools for classification and organisation of information. A case that really interested me H20 Playlists, a site that allows us to organise, by using tags, academic papers, journalistic notes and alls kinds of texts to build our own selections from a thematic classification the we define ourselves. One of the most interesting functionalities is that it lets us search by word or keyword among lists generated by other users, and add them in a simple way to our own. Then we can publish it under a Creative Commons license and share it with the rest of the site’s visitors.

Since this tool is still in beta phase, it still lacks a few things, such as the possibility to edit massively certain lists. But it has some interesting points, like the possibility of separating by using subtitles the different fields within the list.

In my case, I’ve been developing a list of studies about Mobilities, a category that sums all sorts of physical and virtual mobility given in our society -and, hence, comprehends tourism, interaction on the Internet, for instance. Since I built my list starting from others already existing in the site, it’s still a little messy. But you can see it in this link. The RSS feed of the list is here. Each item on the list is a different thing in the feed, which is really something positive.

I got to H20 Playlists thanks to two notes published at CultureCat; more exactly at this and this entry.

A couple of years ago, Gustavo Solotano, now somewhere around Italy, gave me a photo taken in Toledo, Spain. In the picture you could see a band of peruvian musicians playing in the streets. The problem is they were wearing apache indiam costumes, with those large tuft of feathers on their heads, just like in old cowboy movies. It seems to be that this is not an isolated fact, since at Cada Chango a su Mecate a similar story is told, and a photo of one of these bands is published.

Issues related to identity and authenticity are far from simple. In order to appear “authenticâ€?, many social groups, particularly those related to ethnic tourism, tend to represent a role that makes them look “realâ€? to the tourists eyes. Almost a year ago, I wrote this: “It’s obvious that even this can be put in scene: diverse small towns in Latin America know perfectly how present themselves as authentic to an auditorium of tourists, anthropologysts and government officers. This implies the strategic use of costumes, ornaments and environments, prepared or preserved for those visitors, that understand as authentic, precisely only what they consider authenticâ€?.

In the case of the peruvian musicians in Europe, there’s a particular strategy: presenting themselves as “indiansâ€?. Someone will wonder: is this necessary? Isn’t it true that even in Peru, as well as in the rest of Latin America, “mestizosâ€? are usually stigmatized as “indiansâ€?? Apparently, according to their own evaluation, in Europe this is not enough. To be recognized as such, they have to present themselves as indians, but in the U.S. version. That is, to make your music look like “authentic indian musicâ€?, it’s best to present ourselves as something we’re not. In this case, an “apache indianâ€?. Which takes for granted that they consider their public unable of distinguishing, either by ignorance or by imaginary, among a latin american indian and a U.S. Indian. It’s a way in which the relations of domination are clear: I’m “authenticâ€? as long as everyone else assign me that category; in this case, “indianâ€?. In many cases, “authenticâ€? is not, at all, an objective category of description of reality, but the product of a long historic process in which politics participate as much as the movies.

Since I’ve written a lot about the topic of authenticity in this blog, you can check these links if you want to know a little more about this concept:

Authenticity as an explanatory concept

The readers of this blog know that destinations such as Cuzco are getting further away from our pockets and the reach of backpackers or travellers aware of everyday’s expenses. Now, at Tim Leffel’s Cheapest Destination blog, the author spreads the word about Peru not being considered among the cheapest destinations for travellers anymore, and lists a series of relevant costs -how much does it cost to do the Inca trail or to ride the train to Machu Picchu, among other things. I don’t think this is surprising news. A few months ago, Peru’s Economics office chief, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, declared quite openly in an interview to a local newspaper -El Comercio- that “I’m in favor to backpackers who will become the industry’s leaders of tomorrow, but for now they have no moneyâ€?. In itself, the progressive distance of backpackers from Cuzco is part of an strategic plan, designed by the government, that seeks to have the tourists that visit Cuzco spend as much as possible. This increase in costs will decrease the number of tourists visiting Peru, but the profitability per visitor will be higher.

At least for now, if we consider the demand that this touristic destination has, things are going quite fine. Although this bothers many of us who don’t get our paychecks in dollars, but in devaluated local currency.

More articles on this blog, about Cuzco:

Cuzco
Tips to visit the world’s navel
Tips and international tourism: Cuzco as an exclusive destination

I found Tim Leffel’s article through a note published at El Sur.

During may this year, the argentinean version of the Rolling Stone magazine published and article signed by James Kunstler about the end of cheap oil, and the tendency to finish up this valuable resource’s reserves in the next few years. The note is available in english at this site.

My idea is to focus on Kunstler’s prospective on the relation between the end of oil and the travel’s industry.

The hypothesis is simple: the end of oil in the next fifty years will provoke a collapse in the mobilities industry. Airlines will not be able to work, cars will become much more expensive and will reach lowe speed, and in general, the whole industry around mobility will enter a brutal crisis. Next to this, suburbs will collapse, since they depend on automobiles, and so will all shopping centers and businesses that are along the highways. Quotidian life will suffer a long series of transformations, that will totally change society’s form of organisation.

Part of this diagnosis doesn’t soun too new. It has the same tone found in books as The limits of growth, edited in the 70s, where it was established that the correlation between population growth and the running out of natural resources will lead the world economy to disaster. But in this article, Kinstler rather stresses on one point only: the problem of running out of oil. He says that in this year we’ll reach the production peak and that, slowly, this will decline year after year. While he estimates there still are big reserves, as years pass, these will become harder to reach, situated far away from the most developed countries borders, and where the cost of extraction will be much higher.

Along with this problem, we have to point out the development of alternative fuel has not provided of any option that can completely replace refined oil. Not to mention the problems arising from the lack of energy in other areas, or the absence of plastic and how it will impact on many industry’s costs.

It’s interesting to think how the travel industry is strongly linked to oil and the fact that this can be sold at relatively low costs. The increasing decline of this resource’s supply will force us to look for other alternatives. Now, when will huge aircrafts be able to move on some kind of alternative energy? In the case of cars, one could say that there will be a sensible loss in speed since new engines can’t develop such potency, but in the case of aircrafts, these might just remain in the ground. Will the 1950-2050 period be remembered as the physical mobility period? Because with the increasing cost of oil, covering long distances at reasonable costs will become much harder. Unless, of course, we turn to the Internet in resignation…

Through El Sur I discovered a column by Andres Oppenheimer about tourism in Latin America, published by The Miami Herald (it requires free registration or Bugmenot, of course). Oppenheimer states that despite its growth, Latin America still concentrates a small fraction of the world’s market and it’s growing slower than in Asia Pacific and the Middle West. One of the reasons he points out is the “overregulationâ€? of airlines, which makes tickets expensive in the region. Add to this the lack of marketing policies to promote tourism in the area and the famous insecurity. I’m afraid Oppenheimer’s analysis it’s quite incomplete. It’s not only about visitors; it’s about the fraction of the total income that our countries receive on internation tourism. This phenomenon is known as leakage, and I wrote about it some time ago in this blog.

Nobody doubts that airlines’ high rates and the lack of policies about tourism have a negative impact on the movement of tourism in Latin America. But the factor that causes the biggest impact on our countries, when speaking about tourism, is the poor development of the local market, which is not a result of “overregulationâ€? issues or anything like it. It’s, simply, a consequence of the lack of better economic incomes of the people who live in this part of the world. Without a strong local market, without a strong local consumption of local touristic offers, we’ll remain in this problem for a very long time. In any case, if we’re basing all of the market’s development on foreign tourism, then we’ll have to count on policies aimed at making the foreigner spend as much as possible, as has been the case, for a long time now, in Cuzco.

Version en español

It’s probably the most relevant news about tourism in Argentina right now. According to official information, during 2004 there were 3.4 millions of tourists in this country -11.9% more than in 2003. The revenues exceeded US$2500 millions, which makes tourism the fourth most important economic sector in Argentina. You can read more about this at this note in the argentinean newspaper, Clarín.

Update: there are more references about this topic at Infobae.
Amazingly, the website of the Secretaria de Turismo de la Argentina hasn’t published anything about this topic yet.

The creators of 43 things can’t stop from launching new projects. On one side, there is the original 43 things, in which users help to create a social network of specific goals, the “I want to lose weight” or “I want to write a novel” kind. For some months now, they’re working on All Consuming, a project that allows us to include, as long as they’re in Amazon, all of our cultural comsuptions (books, cds, movies, etc.) and share them with the rest of users. I’ve been using this service for a few weeks now on the sidebar to add books about tourism and travel.

Now, the creators of 43 things have launched another thing, more related to the interest of this blog: 43 places. The goal is simple: to point out all of the places we’ve been at, or want to visit and create a list of places related to ourselves. Thus, we’ll have a list of locations we want to go to, and another one of places we’ve been to, where we can add notes to share them with the rest of users. Since I recently discovered the site yesterday, my map is not still quite complete, but you can see at my personal site at 43 places. As with other projects from the people of 43 things, they provide us scripts to add the info we add directly to our blog. So, get ready to see a new element (yes! yet another one!) to my hypercrowded sidebar on the right. By the way, this is the RSS feed for my personal site there.

More on the launching of 43 places at Technorati.

Online Travel review comments about Continental airlines launching a press gazette where they say they’re still giving on board food service without extra charge.
It really is interesting to see how things have changed, particularly with the entry of airlines that offer lower airfares. Precisely, to lower their costs, they’ve begun to charge for food and have become more strict with the topic of luggage weight. This way, they can sell cheaper tickets and get funds from selling other services or from charging fines.

As Online Travel Review says, ten years ago few people would have imagined an airline would come up with an announcement claiming they still offer free on board meals… Times and the market, of course, change.

Spanish Version Here

Myanmar (also previously known as Burma, in english, and Birmania, in spanish) is probably the least Pacific Asia country known by western travellers. To add some light to a destination, there’s an interesting review at WorldHum of Finding George Orwell in Burma. The writer lived there for many years during the 1920s and the book analyzes his life there.

Myanmar, by the way, has for a long time lived under a dictatorship that has the worst records on human rights issues. While all opposition has been suppressed a long time ago, in the latest months some terrorists attempts have occured, causing a great number of deaths. Anyways, the presence of Myanmar in the big media news is close to zero, which forces us to use the Internet to find a little more about this country.

If you want to know more about this destination, you can check the site of Lonely Planet on Myanmar, or check the FreeBurma sites, a movement that seeks the democratization of this nation, and Burma Project, where you can find recent news about the economic situation of its inhabitants, which by the way is not quite good.

Spanish Version Here