travel

Eco-tourism's not just for low-budget backpackers

by Eric Jackson

Anyone who knows anything about the two flagship businesses of Panamanian eco-tourism, the Canopy Tower hotel near Gamboa and the Tropic Star Lodge on Piñas Bay in the Darien, will know that these are expensive places to stay and are nevertheless have high occupancy rates. But the cutting edge goes well beyond those places, according to Hitesh Mehta, an architect, travel writer, photojournalist and cricket player who was born in Kenya of Hindu parents but now lives and works in Florida.

"People are getting a good experience communing with nature," Mehta told the AMCHAM tourism forum, but if too many come to one place to do so, the opportunity is lost.

He held up Bocas del Toro as a bad example. "Developers look at Bocas and they see dollars, and often forget what was there." But the basic arithmetic of the situation, he reminded the audience, is "the higher the number of rooms you have, the more sewage."

"It's getting to the point that spiritual communion with nature is getting difficult." He cited fish that are too contaminated to eat and dolphins dying of cancer as examples.

Mehta particularly derided all-inclusive resorts --- "what we in the eco-tourism industry call the all-exclusive, because they exclude everyone." He showed a photo of one such resort in the Dominican Republic --- a fence on the beach to keep people out, and the resort's garbage piled up on the other side of it awaiting the tide to wash it away. He also had harsh words for cruise ships that dump their wastes in the sea, golf course developments in communities where the people have water supply problems, and biblically foolish developers who build their resorts on the sand and lose them to hurricanes and unusual tides.

But then he showed the audience the alternatives: upscale resorts in beautiful places around the world that don't use a lot of electricity, create much waste or use industrial chemicals. Pools with no chlorine, composting toilets, tropical hotel rooms designed to stay cool by taking advantage of prevailing winds and strategic use of shade, "architecture in harmony with its surrounding," and fewer but pricier lodgings --- these are the growing trent, Mehta said, for standard business reasons even more than ethical considerations.

"We are beginning to see a big shift taking place" in tourism, he argued. "Green has now become mainstream in America," and the big hotel chains need to learn from what happened to Ford and General Motors, who are suffering their current hardships "because they didn't go soon enough to green technology."

Mehta is not arguing that Bocas should abandon its tourism aspirations, by the way. He just thinks that more thought should be put into it, and that developers should design their projects to take advantage of nature and cultural tourism in particular. And he thinks that two very important places in particular for this sort of thing are Bocas del Toro and Darien provinces.

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