If you’re one of the travelers who likes to complain about, “all the damn tourists here,” reading this Smithsonian Magazine article will probably get you aroused. “Poorism,” or poverty tourism is one of the newest fads in international travel. Tour guides will charge $6.75 a head for a three-hour walking tour of the Dharavi slum in India. Similar tourist trades have sprung up in Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town.

It would be easy to claim the moral high ground and condemn these tour operators, but they could be doing the slums where they provide tours a service. After a walk though the poorest neighborhoods, tourists might find themselves questioning a government that fails to provide basic services to such a massive group of people instead of flashing pictures of child laborers to their friends at work.

via Boing Boing

This entry was posted on Monday, March 5th, 2007 at 4:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.