Column: From Austria without much love

From Austria, without much love

The first indication  that things were going to go off the beaten track came while I was prepping for a trip to Austria. I`d asked my TA to find me a day trip to Hallstatt, the postcard-pretty Alpine village.

My TA, bless her, got to work but kept reporting that coach after coach was calling things off. Hallstatt had officially joined the growing number of tourist spots that were putting up a stout resistance to overtourism. Venice and Dubrovnik have put a cap on the number of tourists permitted  to visit; Santorini is set to impose a day-tripper tax; Japan  has put up a barrier to stop swarming sightseers from clicking endless  pictures of Mt Fuji; Barcelona locals have actually sprayed  water to warn away sightseers.

I was torn between an implicit understanding of why the locals were up in arms, and an  intense desire to see the places that have lodged themselves in my head, heart and bucket list. Then the TA got back saying a small van would take me to Hallstatt on a day trip. Fate had decided for me, I reasoned, and decided to go with the flow.

What made it even more interesting was that the people who ran these small van trips turned out to be youngsters from Kerala trying to make a living in an increasingly immigrant-unfriendly Austria.  They drove expertly, handled abuse from a passing biker dude coolly, passed around banana chips to a mixed set of people (Japanese, Vietnamese, US-based NRIs,  Indians),  and in heavily accented English,  told us about the places we were going to see that day.

Then they threw in the clincher: Hallstatt was increasingly turning hostile to day-trippers and that if we were stopped, we were to say that we were just a set of friends who`d made the trip out from Vienna. Our motley group swore immediate fealty to each other but as it turned out, we weren’t stopped or questioned. What we did see though, were banners and notices all over Hallstatt sternly telling us to keep our voices down, to take back our garbage with us, not to play music or crowd areas.

Can you really blame them? 750 residents were seeing 10,000 daily visitors in season. Of course, the eventual need is to get the boosted travel economy (due to hit 11.6% of the global economy by 2033) vs overtourism (pegged to reach 7.5 trillion this year) equation balanced. Which they probably will,  in due time.

Then, a spot of racism….

The second departure from normal happened with our local city guide. He was blonde, blue-eyed, a bit elderly… and very racist. It started with him pointing out a small Ottoman soldier embedded in a wall and me commenting that Austria had held off the Ottoman sieges successfully. But now they have taken over, quoth he, and from then on, everything he showed us was tainted with the comment that Vienna was losing its lustre, crime had gone up, and that the outsiders were living off the fat of the land. He was clear that he meant Muslim when he said immigrant. When we demurred, he brushed it aside querulously. We didn’t demur too hard, I was curious to see how far the man would go. And he went far enough for me to comment on his worksite.

This then is the other side of travel. One can definitely sympathise with the first, overtourism,  but what does one make of the second, racism?

https://www.newindianexpress.com/magazine/voices/2024/Sep/28/from-austria-without-much-love

This appeared in the Sunday Express of 29 September 2024.

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