SRI LANKA: It’s Time for Culture-Friendly Tourism, Experts Say

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Jun 14 2001 (IPS) - A British professor walks into the dining room of a posh Sri Lankan hotel for breakfast and is confronted by the restaurant manager dressed in a double-breasted suit who asks him “sausages, bacon and eggs, sir?”

“I was horrified,” recalled the professor to a Sri Lankan conservation specialist later. “Look, sausages come from my country. I want some traditional Sri Lankan food, please.” The surprised hotel employee moves away.

In another locality, residents and the clergy protest the construction of a tourist hotel in a jungle location with extensive vegetation and bird life. Despite the protests, the hotel comes up but in a design that blends with the surroundings and does not disturb nature and the environment.

The hotel was recently the recipient of an international green award for ecotourism and has been accepted by the local people.

“Listen to the villagers. Discuss issues with them even before the design stage,” advises Ravi de Silva, engineer and conservationist who allayed villagers’ fears in the construction of the Kandalama hotel set alongside a lake and rock outcrop in the north central region.

Sri Lanka is aiming for a major shift from mass tourism, which brings in cheap, less-spending tourists, to a less-numbers, more quality destination in which ecological and adventure tourism, traditional values and culture play a major role.

But environmentalists and conservationists are urging the industry to beware of falling into a trap of ruining local culture and crowding villages and local communities with hordes of high- spending tourists.

“If we are being forced to venture into ecotourism, we beg of you, let it be researched and understood before it is marketed and sold. The environment is too precious and too fragile a commodity to be experimented with,” noted Ashley de Vos, a well-known architect and conservationist.

De Vos, vice president of Sri Lanka’s Wildlife and Nature Protection Society, said ecotourism should respect scale and carrying capacity.

Mountain areas are more scale sensitive than other areas by virtue of their slope geology, biologically rich flora and fauna, so the very nature of the fragile environment and its support base should be protected and conserved.

“This requires a carefully and systematically researched study and the formulation of strict standards that will control numbers and development, protect, respect and conserve the fragile environment it will intrude into,” he said.

Sri Lanka attracts more than 400,000 foreign tourists a year from mainly Germany, Britain, France, India, Japan and the Netherlands. Many are blue collar workers or budget-travelers interested mainly in lazing on beaches or visiting tea estates, an alien influence.

They spend less than 60 U.S. dollars per day in contrast to more than 100 dollars per day spent by tourists visiting neighbouring Maldives Islands, which draws high spenders.

In recent years, there has a marked increase in ecotourism with several hotels being set up with an environmental focus like the Kandalama hotel or the Culture hotel also in the same region. Both rely on a mix of Sri Lankan food, environmental-friendly surroundings and local customs.

Adventure travel is also on the rise with new operators selling white-water rafting, mountain climbing and trekking, camping in isolated sites and biking. Even bungee jumping – a western phenomenon – is being considered.

“There is tremendous scope for adventure travel in Sri Lanka and we have enormous resources that have not been tapped. For instance there was 50 old shipwrecks off the southern coast that should attract divers,” said Shehan Pilapitiya of Adventure Lanka Ltd, which specialises in this type of tourism.

But at a weekend conference on ecotourism in the central city of Kandy, environmentalists and conservationalists urged the industry to take a more pragmatic look at ecotourism so that projects preserve the environment and nature instead of only reaping the benefits in dollars.

“We need to involve local communities and cultures in tourism because tourism is all about learning about local culture and people,” said Professor Madduma Bandara, a conservationist and head of the geography department at the University of Peradeniya in Kandy.

He said: “If we don’t get villagers involved, tourism is not sustainable. On the other hand mass scale development of tourism must not be allowed to erode our culture.”

That may probably be hard to do though Dr Channa Bambaradeniya, head of the biodiversity unit of the Sri Lanka office of the International Union of the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), believes it is possible where indigenous villagers live.

He cited the example of the Sinharaja forest, Sri Lanka’s biggest rain forest in the south and central parts of the island, where indigenous villagers have helped to preserve and protect the forest from degradation and illegal logging.

Youngsters from the village act as guides, for a fee, for foreign visitors but are careful to ensure there is no over- visitation and local customs are not violated.

“This is a good example of how villages can blend into tourism without any harm to the environment or cultures but this may not be possible in the cases of villages where there are settlers,” he said.

Sri Lanka is listed among the top 25 biodiversity hot spots in the world.

But western cultures and influences have ruined local craft with western-styled crafts instead of traditional art being sold to foreigners as indigenous craft, laments Professor Nimal de Silva, director of the UNESCO-Sri Lanka conservation project.

“What we sell to the foreigners is not entirely traditional products mainly because our craftsmen are ignorant or want to make a fast buck,” he told the ecotourism workshop.

He said Sri Lanka was gradually losing its cultural identity, partly due to mass tourism and a huge gap between knowledge of the country’s culture and traditions and what people now know about these issues.

“Bring tourists in and let them blend with the people but we need to ensure our cultural values and traditions are preserved in the process,” he said, adding Sri Lanka should avoid the “Coca- Cola and McDonald’s culture.”