The paradox of modern mass tourism is that we all want to visit beautiful places that aren’t spoilt by tourism, and yet each of us is a tourist who contributes in some sense to the destruction of those places.
This is a subject that the visionary French writer Michel Houellebecq (pronounced “Welbeck”) explored brilliantly and with unsparing truthfulness in his 2001 novel, Platform, concerning sex tourism, terrorism and the narcissistic nihilism of the West.
After the death of his unlamented father, the central character Michel reflects on the lust for faraway travel: “The minute they have a couple of days of freedom, the inhabitants of Western Europe dash off to the other side of the world, they go halfway round the world in a plane, they behave – literally – like escaped convicts.”
