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Is it OK to visit remote tribes?
Watching Bruce Parry drink a skinful of cow's blood in his TV series Tribes was captivating stuff, but how ethical is it to visit a tribe unaccustomed to westerners? The kind of amateur anthropology that is offered by an increasing number of travel companies can turn what should be an engaging insight into another culture into a cringing gawp at stage-managed tourism dressed up as "tradition"...
Photo © Tribes Travel.
The more responsible companies carefully manage the interaction and spread their visits thinly so that they don't "over-sell" a particular tribe... Exodus makes sure the tribes it visits in Ethiopia are acclimatised to tourism (exodus.co.uk), while Symbiosis Expedition Planning, which organises small group adventures with the hill tribes in southeast Asia, ensures that its trips don't compromise tribal traditions and lifestyles (symbiosis-travel.com).
Tribes Travel (tribes.co.uk) takes an average group size of only six people, and avoids the so-called "Masai villages" in Kenya and northern Tanzania that are set up just for tourism; instead it organises walking safaris with local Masai guides where you'll learn directly from them about their way of life in the bush. And guests stay at ecolodges on land owned by the Masai so they can benefit directly from tourism, such as Il Ngwesi in the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy (ilngwesi.com) and the Porini Camps (porini.com) near the Amboseli National Park.
This article, by Richard Hammond, was first published in the Guardian.
Editor's note: Bruce Parry answers questions about his series on the BBC website.
A moral dilemma Ethiopia
This recent article indeed highlights this dilemma of whether a 'symbiotic' relationship can be developed between tribes and the tourists who visit them.
Omo Valley Tribes: Untouched & Little Visited. Dream On!
An in-the-wild travel writer /photographer I visited the Lower Omo Valley in Jan/Feb 2006 - just weeks after the latest Bruce Parry visit. Attracted by the blurb: remote/ little visited/untouched references to the tribes I was not at all prepared for the amount of tourists / the commercial nature of set-up visits (e.g. bull blood-letting & drinking is available to groups on demand!)/ aggressive demands for money for photos as well as for visiting villages. We passed a total of 15 vehicles coming from the Mursi village we were heading for! New graded roads are being built throughout the region to cater for the increase in traffic. It was a massive disappointment to an independent traveller. BBC 2s Tribe Series has opened the floodgates to commercial tourism in the Omo region. The spin-off is considerable. Just one example: an Ethiopian tour manager in Addis told me with great pride that he had recently flown 4 Mursi (including two women wearing full-size lip-plates) to Japan to promote his tours. Untouched and little visited. Dream on!