Idiots are ruining travel for the rest of us

This is why we can’t have nice things: because there will always be a few idiots who ruin it for the rest of us. The problem now, though, is that there seems to be a lot more idiots.

Case in point: the Arakurayama Sengen Park cherry blossom festival, in central Japan, has just been cancelled after years of unruly behaviour by foreign tourists.

When canning the 10-year-old festival, local authorities pointed to a history of tourists disrupting locals’ lives, walking into houses uninvited to use their toilets, littering, trespassing, pushing school kids aside on pavements, and even defecating in private yards.

Closer to home, meanwhile, the Blue Mountains City Council has recently decided to close Lincoln’s Rock lookout for at least three months, due to safety risks. The clifftop lookout is unfenced, and with a surge of visitors posing for photos on crumbling ledges – not to mention parking illegally, vandalising the area, littering, and using surrounding bushland as a public toilet – the council decided it was easiest to close it entirely.

A few elements link these two stories, and indeed many similar incidents in popular tourist sites around the world.

One is social media popularity. The Arakurayama Sengen Park cherry blossom festival has become hugely popular because visitors can take photos of the iconic flowers here with Mt Fuji in the background (a scene that artists have been lovingly capturing since Hokusai first carved a woodblock).

The photos have now made their way around Instagram and similar apps, and everyone wants the same shot. And they know where to get it.

Lincoln’s Rock, meanwhile, enjoyed a visit in 2023 from K-pop star Jennie from Blackpink, who posted photos of herself perched on a cliff edge.

She has nearly 90 million followers on Instagram. And many followed her to the rock.

The next link in these cases is the inability of local authorities to cope with the surge in visitor numbers, to adequately protect local residents and the environment from the influx, while also providing the necessary facilities for visitors.

The Arakurayama Sengen Park festival clearly doesn’t have enough public toilets or signage for tourists. Lincoln Point is the same. Where do you go to the toilet when no one has bothered to provide one?

Which brings us to the final link: the tourists’ behaviour in these places, which seems to have ranged from entitled and disrespectful to outright stupid. Who thinks it’s OK to carve their name into a rock in a national park? Who just barges into someone’s home and thinks they can use their toilet?

There are tourists behaving badly around the world. This isn’t limited to a single nationality or age group. It’s everyone, everywhere. And it’s a big problem.

To be clear: I don’t think humans are getting much worse. I don’t think the younger generations of travellers are any more idiotic than the ones that came before them (many Gen-Xers made drunken fools of themselves in Europe back in the day).

What’s changed is that there are now so many more of them. So many more people, as travel becomes cheaper and more accessible. The idiots have reached a tipping point.

And so now you have a tourist needing to be rescued twice in one week from Mt Fuji after returning to collect his phone. You have an American influencer trying to steal a baby wombat from its mother in Australia. You have tourists stealing cobblestones from Bruges. You have someone sitting on and breaking a crystal-covered artwork in Verona.

You have a resort town in France that now fines tourists €150 ($A252) if they walk around town shirtless or in their swimwear. You have farmers in northern Italy setting up turnstiles to charge tourists for stomping across their land to get to famous Instagram spots. You have people scratching their name into the walls of the Colosseum.

And all these stories are recent. Very recent.

So what’s the solution here? Is it really possible to educate the stupid out of people? Because I don’t think it is.

There have always been idiots, and there will always be idiots. Some of them will have passports. Some will take their stupidity with them on holiday. This is the world we live in.

That means local authorities will have to become increasingly involved, and the vast majority of tourists – that is, the non-stupid ones who haven’t done a whole lot wrong – are going to suffer. Attractions will be closed down. Access will become more limited. Freedoms for visitors will be increasingly curtailed in the name of protection.

There’s very little argument against this because the world’s natural and historic attractions – and the people who have always lived near them – deserve that protection. This, in other words, is why we can’t have nice things.