The Last Tourist

(water trickling, birds chirping)

: Tourism.

It's considered a wonderful break

from the real world.

: Unmonitored tourism has apparently damaged

the nation's coastline.

: One last photo, one last chance

for hundreds of tourists to visit Maya Bay.

The beach is being put out of bounds

after years of unrestricted tourism.

: Holidays become cheaper and more people

flood into tourism hot-spots.

: Over-tourism and environmental degradation.

: Twenty million visit each year.

Three quarters of them only stay for 24 hours.

: All these tourists end up drunk...

: ...there are just too many tourists.

: ...see the same sights,

their impact is devastating.

: Dude, holy shit.

: She and another tourist

are accused of spray-painting

graffiti on an ancient wall.

: Tourism can kill a place.

A place that was so beautiful

can become overused, exploited and trashed.

Most tourism has led to destruction.

It led to the destruction

of the very things that they've come to see.

: Every year, thousands of Brits

visit Thailand and loads of them

can't wait to get a picture with the local tigers.

: A tourist has been caught on camera

carrying a dolphin on a beach.

It's almost a disposable

engagement in economy.

- You live with a certain set of values at home.

Why would you suspend those values

when you decide to take a holiday?

: It's a different set of behaviour principles.

We're hedonistic when we travel. We tend to have more showers.

We tend to be more wasteful, we tend to eat more.

: The tourist industry is a huge cash cow.

But locals don't see much of that revenue.

: The exploitation of the working class

by the hotel industry...

: We have people who say these volunteer trips

abroad are sometimes only about the photo-ops.

: Travel is in a very unfortunate state,

at the moment.

As tourists, we're just such

unconscious consumers.

: Like a lot of travellers,

I started out as a backpacker.

In Africa,

when I travelled to Asia,

late '70s, I was already starting to see

negative impacts of tourism.

So it set me off looking for the unspoiled.

The uncharted. And that eventually led me

to a place called Ko Pha Ngan in Thailand.

When I arrived in Ko Pha Ngan in 1979,

I was the first tourist to have arrived on that beach.

There was one Thai family, a fisherman, living there.

His name was Sonboom. And his wife Chom.

And I stayed with them for three months

and it was magical.

And I made a little map of that location.

And unfortunately, I shared that with one person,

who was my girlfriend at the time,

and that map found its way to others,

and soon, other tourists began arriving.

Now, I never went back, but in 1993,

I opened a New York Times magazine

and I was stunned.

I saw a photograph of the beach

with thousands and thousands of people

celebrating something called the Full Moon party.

It was out of control.

Masses of trash.

Out of control development.

It ripped... ripped me apart from inside.

To think that from the time I had arrived there in 1979,

within a period of ten years, this place was being

utterly and totally destroyed.

We have got to get tourism right,

because if we don't,

we're going to see Ko Pha Ngan reproduced around the world.

One hour?

Yeah.

Wow.

: We are born explorers.

We have a carnal desire

to want to travel.

You know, people dream about travel.

Our ancestors were all explorers.

People risked their lives to travel, originally.

: Travel opens our eyes, and we learn

so much about the world

and about ourselves.

: Travel. It's a sense of our innate curiosity.

We're driven by a desire

to experience and to learn.

: We were born to explore.

We were born to want

to seek out new experiences.

Learn from other cultures.

And somewhere along the way,

you become a tourist.

You become someone who is disconnected

from the very place you're travelling to.

: This is the way to travel.

Relax and enjoy yourself.

Yes, this is the way to travel.

- Back in the 1950s, when world tourism,

mass tourism was just beginning, the first jets

were crossing the Atlantic ocean,

there were 25 million international trips a year.

Last year, that number was 1.3 billion.

That's a multiplication of 52 times.

: The jumbos are coming.

Heathrow airport took the arrival of the world's

first fully loaded jumbo-jet aircraft,

which will revolutionize the future of civil aviation.

Captain Jess Tranter and his crew

brought the first jumbo from the States

in just over six-and-a-half hours.

: With the advent of mass air travel in the 1960s,

747, when it was inaugurated,

was three times bigger than any public airplane before,

so we've gone through a journey

of global mass travel.

Today, with technology,

you can find ways to get to pretty much

any part of the world, now.

The world has become an oyster for the masses.

: Over-tourism is

simply too many people

in the same place at the same time.

The increase in visitors to the point

where it is too much

for the landscape and the environment.

It's too much for the local residents.

So, you're seeing examples of it

in what are sometimes called "honeypot destinations."

They're places that people just really want to go.

: Places that used to be protected

are becoming more accessible.

- Places that are really being loved to death.

We're having an infinitely growing number of tourists

going to finite places

that are exactly the same size they were back in 1950.

- It's this fascinating history, because it has

everything to do with what was a great success:

the end of the Cold War.

Literally half of the world had been cut off

from the other half during the Cold War.

One of the first things the end of the Cold War did

was open borders around the world,

and with those open borders, trade.

Around the globe, you saw the growth

of the middle-class.

All of this within literally about a decade.

This is astonishing.

: We have emerging markets such as China and India

coming onto the scene, in terms of

the affordability of travel.

: Simultaneously, we had a great

technological leap, the Internet.

Tourism is not an elite hobby anymore.

Tourism has become a global industry.

: This industry is covering our entire planet.

Eighty percent of the world's countries

count tourism in their top five foreign exchange revenues.

One out of ten jobs in the planet

is connected to the travel and tourism industry.

There's more travellers,

it's easier and cheaper to travel,

and the way we experience, and our expectations

for what we want when we travel

have changed.