'The world is a book and those who do not travel read only a page,' said the wise and worldly St Augustine. Implicit in this metaphor is the exhortation that readers of the great big 'book' in which we live undertake their task with intent, savouring each word, underlining pertinent sentences, revisiting favourite passages and turning the final page having changed for the better.
Today, cheaper airfares, package deals and higher incomes have helped to shrink the world, enabling more Australians than ever to take heed of Augustine's sage advice. School leavers routinely take gap years, striking out to far corners of the globe in search of themselves; increasingly, middle class families eschew Australia's bush and beaches in favour of foreign destinations; retirees indulge in SKI trips — Spending the Kids' Inheritance — discovering while they're at it a world that was once largely off limits to all but the wealthy and the intrepid.
Along with this change has come a devaluation of the slow and wondrous art of travel, with transport itself now little more than the humdrum means to a far more glamorous end. Unwilling to spend two days driving to the North Queensland tropics, people will think nothing of sitting for 24 hours on a tightly-packed plane bound for London. Once the sacred gateways to imagined lands, airports have morphed into flashy bus depots flanked by fast food outlets and chain stores in which tourists can occupy themselves before takeoff.
Where once the journey was the destination, and packing was part of the fun, today a holiday hasn't started until you've sipped your first piña colada.
But there are other, more disturbing consequences wrought by the ubiquity of global pleasure seekers, among them the bad impression they so often leave behind. According to a recent report in the Sydney Morning Herald, 'many foreign destinations are cracking down on hard-partying, bawdy behaviour and cultural offences, saying inconsiderate tourists are ruining their image and making life hell for locals and other visitors'.
Spain, Brazil and the Vatican are among the countries fed up with tourists' nakedness, public promiscuity and rampant debauchery.
Australians are said to be generally good at avoiding cultural offence, but they are often guilty of alcohol-related offences. 'When they're not drunk, they're fine; that [alcohol] is when the problem starts,' said Shawn Low, a spokesman for Lonely Planet.
Drunk, libidinous and scantily-clad tourists unleashed on idyllic locales were certainly