How the peeing masses are ruining tourism

20 May 2016 - 02:00 By ANDREW UNSWORTH
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Andrew Unsworth explores how basic human needs — like going to the loo and taking the perfect selfie — are a scourge on our most beautiful sights 

Tourists are not always kind to the places they visit, in fact they can cause so much damage they spoil them for the rest of us.

There are many examples of this but the strangest is a recent report that male tourists urinating in Austria’s Grüner See or Green Sea (a lake) are ruining it so its clear, green waters are becoming opaque.

This is caused by a build-up of algae in the lake, and locals say it’s because of the tourists —  and lack of toilets. The change could also be a result of warmer winters, which means it could be reversed.

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Grüner See is near the village of Tragoss in Southeast Austria. It attracts 100,000 visitors a year and is also a popular diving site.

This is the dilemma of modern tourism: everyone wants the tourist dollar but if too many come it’s liable to cause unforeseen problems. Urban attractions can simply be ruined by too many people congregating around them or queueing to get into them. Rural beauty spots can even be damaged by wear and tear, but admittedly urine is a new one.

Fortunately, tourists don’t make a habit of peeing in the Trevi Fountain in Rome or the fountains in London’s Trafalgar Square, but who knows, they might if they could.

The sound of falling water is a well-known trigger for the bladder: ask any nurse whose job entails getting urine samples from patients.

Tourists can also do damage, despite the best of intentions. Recently, two tourists, a father and son, saw a bison calf in the Yellowstone National park in Wyoming, US. It was not reported where they came from, but they were not Americans.

They thought it looked very cold and so, to save it, they loaded it into their vehicle and set off to find a ranger who would take care of it. The rangers accompanied them back to the spot where they had found the calf, and tried to release it back into the herd, but the calf was rejected by its mother.

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In the end, it had to be put down because it was approaching cars on the road and could not be re-integrated into the herd.

Of course, the incident caused a storm on social media and, while nature can be cruel, it hardly needs people to contribute.

We like to think that we in South Africa are more savvy to the ways of nature and would never do that but, sadly, visitors do not always respect the rules in the Kruger Park.

Even inanimate objects can be damaged by tourists.

A young man recently destroyed a 126-year-old statue of the 16th-century Portuguese King Dom Sebastiao outside a railway station in Lisbon. He was trying to climb onto its pedestal to take the perfect selfie with the king, but he bumped it off instead, smashing it to pieces.

We have yet to encounter these problems with tourists here so we still want more of them. When they come, let’s hope they show more respect to our waters and animals: statues we are not that bothered with, it seems.

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