About The Book
Beyond the Beach examines drifter-style tourism, a sanitized and institutionalized tourism alternative, in Asia. Over the last thirty years drifter tourism has developed its own myth and spawned a mobile subculture of Western travellers. The study seeks to illustrate the historical background, nature and ideology of present-day travellers in Asia and to present an "insiders view" of the subculture based on more than sixty in-depth interviews conducted in the field. The impact of those travellers on destinations in Asia is documented by chronicling the fate of the islands Koh Samui and Koh Phangan in Southern Thailand. Those islands, at one stage or another, were some of the largest travel centers in Southeast Asia and subsequently achieved Hollywood fame through Alex Garland's popular novel The Beach. However, even without Hollywood, Asia's travel subculture is worth paying attention to. With rapidly increasing numbers of travellers, it now represents a viable market in its own right, one that fits in well with an ecologically sustainable tourism product. However, development of this tourism alternative is frequently being undermined by unsustainable growth due to a lack of planning and by the destruction of its destination sites by other tourism sectors. Experience shows that without advance strategies for their development, many of those sites tend to develop either in an unsustainable manner or become the target of "hostile takeovers" by outside operators and competing tourism sectors. This state of affairs has been instrumental in condemning travellers to remain always just one step ahead of conventional mass tourism.
Preface
Alex Garland's successful novel The Beach and Hollywood's subsequent movie adaptation of the story have thrown the spotlight on a significant but otherwise neglected segment of the international tourism market by offering a brief glimpse of the world of Western travellers in Asia. They furthermore have exposed the perpetual dilemma faced by this subculture: the fact that wherever travellers venture in the search for yet unspoiled destinations, they become agents of change in their own right by initiating a process that frequently ends with a perceived "hostile takeover" of their destination sites by conventional mass tourism. Thus it is less the search for greener pastures that drives travellers' seemingly endless quest for novel destinations than an often futile attempt to remain one step ahead of relentless tourism development. The progressive institutionalisation of counterculture travel since the 1960s has seen the emergence of a significant alternative to conventional mass tourism. This particular alternative is denoted by the fact that it of-fers a significantly different travel experience than that encountered by conventional tourists. Its target market are those travellers whose intended absence from home exceeds the three-month maximum that permits the maintenance of existing career or study commitments. In contrast to mass tourism's offer of a temporary escape from the pressures of an ordered existence, long-term travel instead provides a whole way of life whose demands on body and mind tend to be far more challenging to the indi-vidual. As a tourism experience, it offers the opportunity for semiautonomy, fordable price. It is, therefore, not surprising that this form of tourism appeals to many of those who find that their day-to-day life in the West lacks these qualities. Travellers now form an established and economically significant tour-guidebooks and an already existing infrastructure have succeeded in making an institu-tionalised and sanitised version of "dropping out" available to anyone who desires to leave the conventional Western way of life behind for a while. Large numbers of young Westerners now visit destinations that a genera-tion ago were on the itinerary of only the most intrepid drifters. With its more mainstream appeal today and lacking negative connotations, staying abroad beyond the temporary period that is usually the norm in Western society has become an established tourism alternative akin to the Grand Tour of yesteryear. However, the true potential of this tourism alternative is continuously being stifled by either the unsustainable development of its destination sites in the name of short-term profit or the eventual transformation of those sites into "novel" destinations for the conventional mass tourism market. The locals, whose initiative accessed this neglected but poten-tially highly profitable tourism sector, now see their visitors leave and become passive spectators amidst a mushrooming development they no longer control. Without these periodic evictions, traveller centres exhibit a remarkable resilience as subcultural destinations where travellers determine their movements according to a set of criteria of their own. It is striking that, where permitted by circumstances to operate largely undisturbed by out-side encroachment, traveller centres have remained a part of the subcul-tural itinerary for decades.
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