Sandip Roy: Can gatekeeping curb overtourism?

At a literary festival in Shillong, a government official was dreaming big.

He apologised that for many of the delegates it was a long slog to get to Shillong. They had to fly in to Guwahati and face a 3-hour car ride. In a few years, he promised, the airport in Shillong would be able to accommodate bigger airplanes. Then they could fly directly to Shillong. And the festival could be bigger and better.

Everyone clapped. But I remember wondering nervously if it might be too much of a good thing. Shillong is already “developing” at breakneck speed. Traffic jams are not uncommon. Is making it easier for droves of tourists to descend upon it necessarily the best thing to happen to it? Already one could not walk around the lovely Ward’s Lake without stumbling upon Instagram reel shoots under the cherry blossoms. On the other hand it felt elitist for a visitor like me to stand in the way of an airport that would surely make life easier for thousands of people in the state.

So I dutifully clapped along. Then, I came across an Instagram post from the culture and travel site The Great Planet that voiced similar misgivings. For decades the golden rule of travel was to share the beauty you find, it said. Now that same generosity is destroying the places we loved.

The examples are not hard to find. The Great Planet cites a couple. The view of Mt Fuji from the town of Fujikawaguchiko in Japan became so viral and led to such an avalanche of tourists that the town authorities, fed up with people parking illegally to get the perfect picture, blocked off the same view with a black net. The cherry blossom festival at Arakurayama Sengen Park near Mount Fuji has been cancelled altogether because of badly behaved tourists, some 10,000 people a day, who litter the town and even use people’s gardens as toilets as they rush from one Instagrammable spot to another. According to the BBC, the mayor said the town’s picturesque scenery threatens “the quiet lives of its citizens”.

In Iceland, Fjaðrárgljúfur Canyon, believed to have been formed at the end of the last Ice Age, makes for an otherworldly sight covered in moss and delicate wildflowers in spring and frozen waterfalls in the winter. In Game of Thrones, the dragons fly into the wintry gorge. In a 2015 Justin Bieber video, I’ll Show You, we see it at its lush green summer best. But since then hordes of Bieber fans showed up and trampled the soft moss which can take hundreds of years to recover. The Guide to Iceland website has an article called Five Reasons not to Behave like Justin Bieber in Iceland. Reason 4 is “Don’t roll around in the moss.” In 2019, the government closed it for most of the year to give it a chance to recover.

Meanwhile, cruise ship tourism is choking Venice. The Trevi fountain in Rome charges a €2 fee to access the close-up viewing area in the hopes it will help cut down some tourists. The reefs of Maya Bay in Thailand have been damaged. Boracay Island in the Philippines was closed for six months in 2018 to try and rehabilitate the environment. Machu Picchu is reeling under tourism. Over 1.5 million tourists visited in 2024. The government is building an airport in Chinchero, which would make it easier to get to Machu Picchu.

We are loving some of the most beautiful places on the planet to death.

Social media is part of the feeding frenzy. I love travel. I follow many travel accounts and keep adding places to my bucket list. But I realise I am part of the problem. When I go to those places and post beautiful pictures I am adding them to my friends’ bucket lists. When I carefully crop the other tourists out of that beautiful Himalayan sunrise photograph, I am creating an illusion of pristine beauty for my friends and followers. They too will want to come to that place for that pristine view (only to find influencers doing Instagram Lives as the sun rises). Now The Great Planet wonders if the greatest service we could do to a place of beauty is to enjoy it in digital silence. We should leave no footprints, not even digital ones.

It’s a tough choice. Years of social media training has wired our brains to share. It’s not always out of generosity. Sometimes we are just showing off. Either way if we don’t document something on social media, it’s as if we never went there at all.

We always think we are the responsible tourists, other people are the problem.

The impulse to document is old. Family vacations were always captured on film by my father. Years later we would leaf through the album and revisit our holidays through photographs whose colours were leaching away with time but the memories they evoked were still vivid. But few people other than the family saw (or cared about) those photographs of us running from the waves in Digha in West Bengal or watching the sun rise over the Himalayas from an ashram in Kausani in Uttarakhand. Now our pictures are no longer limited to the family album. Our family album is open to the world thanks to social media.

Yet who can stuff that genie back into its bottle? Few people will be as firm as the Japanese mayor cancelling a cash-cow cherry blossom festival. Or have the clout of a Gaggan Anand who has banned cellphones from his eponymous Bangkok restaurant, adjudged Asia’s Best Restaurant five times. He will not allow photos. He will not allow cameras. He will not allow phones.

It sounds harsh but digital silence might be what we really need to think about ourselves, not just have it enforced on us.

Social media has many plus points. I have found community, old friends, discovered many things I didn’t know. And on hopeless days I can watch videos about singing indie dogs and plushie-like capybaras that do nothing, and feel there is still good out there.

But digital silence might be the only way we have to protect some of our most precious places. Gatekeeping their location can seem elitist, about being a dog in the manger. But this could well be the guard dog that protects the manger and what it contains. Sometimes it should be enough to know that beauty exists without needing to consume it ourselves, our posts becoming the digital equivalent of the “I was here” graffiti that defaces so many caves and monuments.

My mother learned about places to travel to from books. She loved to read a Bengali writer named Subodh Kumar Chakravarty. A railway employee, his series of travelogue-meets-romance novels called Ramyani Bikhya followed the romantic journey of Swati and Gopal all over the country— Kashmir, Kamrup, Tamil Nadu and more. My mother loved them. “They had so much history but they were so romantic,” she would say. Even her father was a fan. When she got married, he wanted to present a set to my father’s grandfather. “Should we be giving my grandfather-in-law romance novels?” worried my mother. “He can ignore the romance and focus on the history and geography,” replied her father. “Even if he cannot travel everywhere now, he can travel through books.” Those books became a road map for her own travels. But she didn’t go everywhere the books went. Sometimes she was happy to have experienced it through Swati and Gopal’s eyes.

Few read Ramyani Bikhya anymore. Even Lonely Planet guides feel passé with so many other resources on the internet. Looking at the crowds at the most remote corners of the world, the phrase Lonely Planet itself sounds like an oxymoron.

The planet might just be longing to be a little lonelier some days.

Cult Friction is a fortnightly column on issues we keep rubbing up against.

Sandip Roy (@sandipr) is a writer, journalist and radio host.