Think I’ll do a stay-cation this year

Well, I just looked through Market Watch’s list of the ten countries with the fastest growing tourism, and I must save that I have a hankering to go to none of them. Okay, Montenegro (which used to be part of Yugoslavia, a place I have been to, back in the day when Yugoslavia used to be Yugoslavia) is somewhere I might conceivably go to one day. Maybe when I’m on my way back from Dubrovnik or something.

And it’s also possible that, at some point in my traveling life, I’ll get to South America, so Chile’s a possibility.

But Qatar?

Yes, most of those who travel are going on business, but “leisure travel” last year increased by nearly 30%.  Of course, I do understand that the really cool like to go where it’s really hot, so they can show off their pan-national bona fides and maintain MBAs without borders cred by swanning around luxury hotels AC’d to the hilt, and adding sand skiing/skateboarding to their sportive lists. And while I do appreciate that women in Qatar are probably treated better than they are in many Arab states – they can drive and vote -  I do have this question in general: Given that you want to keep women covered up, why, in the name of all that’s good and holy, can’t they at least cover up in something white (reflecting) rather than black (absorbing)? I notice that the men in these areas where white, so they’ve obviously figured out it’s cooler to do so when out in the noonday sun. Forcing women into black shmatas just seems really, really mean.

And Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan?  Yowza. Maybe it’s my complete lack of adventure-style imagination, my coward’s cling to the comfy-cozy ways of the West, but aren’t these places all kind of dusty, barren, windswept, etc. Sure, all the big bronze statues of Stalin have long been toppled, but when I hear the name of a country that ends in “jan” or “stan”, it just doesn’t chirp “welcome, tourist” to me. It says “grim”. It says “cold.” (Alternately: “sun-baked.”)  It says “cement block.” And the voice that’s saying all that is decidedly non-chirpy.

And if Qatar suffers from a surfeit of Escada and Louis Vuitton outlets, my shopping image is of bazaars selling things made out of sheep that still smell like sheep.

This is, of course, because I am so very lacking in adventure-stan, but I can’t imagine waking up one morning and saying “let’s go” to one of these places rather than, say, Paris.

Belarus is yet another of the offspring of the USSR somehow surviving on its own. I guess through a big increase in tourism. But I just can’t get past the Minsk vs. Pinsk jokes to get serious about visiting Belarus. Oh, I’m sure it’s beautiful in its own way – as are, no doubt, the “jans’ and “stans.” Still…

Tunisia’s tourism is up, in no small part because it’s the home of the Star Wars fictional planet of Tatooine. As someone who walked out one-quarter of the way through the original Star Wars and never looked back, being a Star Wars set does little to commend Tunisia to me. And, by the way, if you think Tunisia’s some kind of bargain, think again. Maybe you can find cheaper digs in Tatooine, but the average beachfront hotel in Gammarth, a suburb of Tunisia’s capital of Tunis, rose 59% last year, to a whopping $463 per night. Spending the night in an oceanfront hotel in Tunisia would, of course, be preferable to spending the night in a land-locked hotel in Minsk or Pinsk. But I’d be mighty concerned about all those would-be Princess Leias and Luke Skywalkers hanging about.

Even before the advent of jet travel, I’m quite sure that time flew. But it really does seem to fly faster and faster these days, doesn’t it? Thus I still tend to think of Panama as a country run by dictator Manual Noreiga, rather than a place I’d like to go as a tourist. But it’s becoming a major tourist destination. Admittedly, I would get a kick out of going through the locks, taking me from the Caribbean to the Pacific, without having to round Cape Horn (with or without the help of Dramamine). Still, I pretty much make it a rule to stay out of climates described as “tropical.” (At least in Qatar, it would be a dry heat. And, as we all well know, it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.)

The final place on the top ten tourist growth countries list is held by The Philippines. This is because it’s got friendly people – who speak English, as anyone who’s called a call center recently knows – and good food. Plus, like most of the places on the list, it has not (yet) been “overrun” by tourists. That “overrun” may have to wait a while.

(The U.S. State Department issued a warning earlier this year, urging citizens to avoid nonessential travel to the Philippines’s Sulu Archipelago due to terrorism-linked violence there.)

Okay, that’s just one part of the country, but still, if the State Department was warning me to stay out of parts of any country due to “terrorism-linked violence there,” I might reach for the next tourist guide of the shelf. Why, if it isn’t for Pinsk…