Another golf course and swaying palm tree. Why are countries so bad at revealing what is beguiling and unique about themselves in tourism ads?
Up here in the old hemisphere, this is the dream season, the time of reverie, of trance travel. This is when we all imagine what it would be like to be hot, to walk without rubber soles. It’s the holiday tease-time, when the brochures land with the thud of a ripe mango on the carpet and TV is sultry and juicy with advertisements for countries flashing their take-me-I’m-yours sides.
I’m constantly amazed at how un-self-aware travel ads are. They are presumably made by bright men in coloured spectacles with comedy face-hair and chubby girls with sagging cleavages and champagne breath who collectively call themselves creatives and have spent a year hock-deep in the freebie trough thoroughly raping and pillaging the mini-bars of the poor developing nations they’ve been employed to project and sell like a willing tart in the slave market. Their creative impressions of the country will have been rigorously scrutinised by a boardroom full of suited and aspirational indigenous civil servants, keen that the world see them in their best light. So how on earth do they arrive at so many golf courses?
Egypt advertises itself with the music of an Italian – Verdi’s Aida. Which, while being essentially a story of ancient pharaoh-folk, is a bit like Japan advertising itself with the soundtrack from The Mikado. And to the rising arias, there’s film of someone playing golf and galloping on a horse. If you’ve been to Egypt, you’ll know that golf and horses are not the lasting memories. Where is the shot of the tourist with his head in the toilet? Where is the man in a nightie flogging a donkey to death? Where are the charming and ornamental military policemen, the attendant urchins chanting ‘Manchester United, jingle bells, jingle bells, give me a dollar?’ And where is the soundtrack of omnipresent Egyptian pop music, the frantic tinny twank of unrequited love and chicken slaughter?
Last night I saw an ad that looked like a modernist Finland in the sun, with a lot of people dancing around in a ’70s-hippie California-esque encounter-group sort of way. Then someone played golf, and a girl in a bikini swam, and there was a close-up of an eye with gold makeup. Where were we supposed to be? Where was it that I wanted to be? Not only couldn’t I tell the country, I had no idea which continent I was supposed to be hankering after. It turned out to be somebody’s approximation of Greece. Greece? Where was the cloud of smog? Where was the fat bloke with hairy shoulders in the wife-beater selling bellybutton rings and ouzo bottles in the shape of a penis? Where were the queues of coaches on the terrifying road up the mountain? The plastic menus with pictures of livid puce kebabs? Where was the inexplicable bloody theme tune from Zorba?
Playing beat-the-intro on tourist ads is a great indoor sport. The American one playing here at the moment features the titles for films with states in the title, and invites you to visit the sets. Understandably most people would be attracted to America by what they’ve seen on the big screen, but it’s a hostage to sequels. They don’t, for instance, include Mississippi Burning or Paris, Texas, or even Birth of a Nation. There are far more movies that would terrify you into never wanting to go anywhere near America. Oklahoma, for instance: aggressive baritone cowboys line-dancing in gingham. What they don’t advertise, of course, is the fact that most people aren’t even invited to America. I know for a fact that they don’t make a Spanish version of this commercial.
Australia’s ad isn’t much better. Australia is advertised with the usual golfing, galloping and carefree swimming. No sign of the flotsam of bluebottles or the miasma of flies. The tagline is ‘Where the Bloody Hell Are You?’ Which was supposed to sound both authentically ocker and Pom-friendly, which is obviously oxymoronic. There’s an old subeditors’ rule that says never write a headline that’s a question: it instantly invites the wrong answer. So in reply to where the bloody hell are you, most of us think, we know where we are, where the bloody hell are you? You’re 24 hours in a limb-numbing farrowing cage away, watching Friends and Crocodile Dundee on a screen made out of melted plastic bags next to a Hasidic rabbi who’s memorising the Torah out loud, and an infant with a mouth the size of a great white and a bladder the size of a condom nipple, breathing the communal pint of air a thousand recycled times. Have you ever thought that flying from London to Sydney is probably as ethereally intimate as having carnal relations with every person on the plane? That’s where the bloody hell you are: the other side of a group heavy-breathing cluster-frot.
Why are countries so bad at knowing what it is about themselves that charms and beguiles? Why are they so unaware of their real talents and assets, so keen to propagate the pat clichés of themselves, the postcard trite, and the vanity? The nations east of Rangoon bid for our holiday money by looking identical. Bring on the clones of salaaming women in hobbling silk, some sort of hotel foyer folk-dance that’s only bearable for a couple of seconds, a beach, a high-rise, neon and moonlight. A bright market with a smiley wrinkle-faced old woman, then a beautiful hostess. And, of course, golf.
From Malaya to Indonesia, they’re all the same, and imply that perhaps what holiday-makers want is not an authentic experience, but a predictable generic one. Last week I watched an ad for a beach. It was so ubiquitous it could’ve been anywhere on the globe between Capricorn and Cancer. It was a primary snap of ‘holiday’: bendy palms, white sand, pale-blue sea, and I sneered and thought, who’d fall for that? And then came the punchline. With a start, I realised I’d just got back. I still had the sand in my bag and the peeling nose. It was the Seychelles, a place with a simple, binary CV: sun and sand.
It’s barely been inhabited for a geological blink. It is a country blissfully unencumbered by history, plague, natural disaster, pogrom, invasion or religious fervour. It has no man-made thing that’s worth crossing a street to view. It has precious little in-your-face or up-your-nose culture. It is just a collection of the most perfect icing-sugar beaches that regularly win best beach awards. But, actually, when you’re there, that all comes as a blessed, remarkable relief. There isn’t even a souvenir; you’d be pressed to buy a coconut letter-rack. Still, this is a place of subtle and profound thoughts which hiss out of the surf and rustle in the damp broad-leaf forest.
Here are a couple of holiday facts that they won’t put in the ad: the Seychelles immigration stamp is a line drawing of the indigenous coco de mer, the largest seed in the world, famous for being a representation of a lady’s pudendum with a Brazilian. Therefore, the only way you can get a picture of a lady’s front-bottom officially printed in your passport is to go to the Seychelles. You can also get locked up for 10 years for stealing a coconut. They are fearsomely protected; this may be the most draconian punishment in all the world. The national dish is fruit bat curry. If you ask, they’ll say, as people always do, that it tastes a bit like chicken. It doesn’t taste remotely like chicken. It tastes like muscly liver and has bones like snapped darning needles, but it is exceptionally good. The fairy terns are so numerous that islanders used to break the eggs into oil drums and sell the yolks to house-paint manufacturers. The Seychelles is the world’s largest exporter of sea cucumbers. And there is a golf course.