Welcome to the majestic and breathtaking island environment of Hawai’i! One dip in the island’s tropical waters and you’ll want to stay in paradise forever. However, this tropical oasis wouldn’t be as amazing without tourists, wouldn't it? As much as I want to say the islands would be completely better off without our friends in cheesy aloha shirts and their shiny silver cameras I cannot. Thanks to tourism, large amounts of money are generated which then go to help fund state and county projects to improve the islands. Projects range from fixing simple potholes to redirecting traffic on local roads in order to repair dilapidated sewer lines. On top of that tourism not only brings a source of revenue into the islands but also creates a surplus …show more content…
Just a simple ring of the concierge bell, and out pops a bell clerk in a well- ironed button up shirt ready to receive you and your family’s business with a warm and welcoming smile. After checking into the hotel one cannot help but be mesmerized, by all of the amazing architecture and decor that surrounds you. Most likely after marveling at all of the elegant fixtures around the hotel, and after you’ve placed your luggage in your room, you’ll want a bite to eat. However, look no further the hotel industry has already thought of this for you. Many hotels in Hawai’i usually have a handful of 3 to 4- star restaurants, that are conveniently placed not too far away from the hotel property. However, behind all of the hotel’s extravagant interior and exterior, there is a dark truth that looms in the shadows. The answer to this dark truth lies right beneath the very cornerstone that many of Hawai’i’s hotels are built upon. However, how did these hotel’s come across such amazing plots of land? The answer is quite simple, they “convinced” the Hawaiians living there to sell them their land for a huge chunk of change. This modern day scenario directly correlates to pages 57 and 58 of “Between the deep blue sea and me.” Basically the protagonist's father “Albert” sells his aunt's property, to developers who were going to build a hotel on it. In exchange for …show more content…
Tourism benefits the islands by providing jobs for locals and brings revenue to the island. However, on the contrary, as time goes on and more tourists visit the islands, we as Hawaiians become less and less like our ancestors. What I mean by this is, let’s say you have a glass filled with water. Then little by little, you add drops of red food coloring into your glass of water, the water will no longer stay pure and clear as it did before, but rather take on the murky and crimson shade of the food coloring. This simple example perfectly portrays the effect of tourism within the islands. In between the deep blue sea and me, there is a similar example of this on pages 31 and 32. The protagonist’s cousin “Lei” graduates high school and has two children, in order to support the children and fit in among the foreigners, Lei enters the tourism industry as a tour guide along with her boyfriend who is a tour bus driver (Mcgregor “Between the deep blue sea and me 31.”) As time passes lei realizes that her life has been leading nowhere and that she is tired of “pandering to clueless haoles” (Mcgregor “Between the deep blue sea and me 31.”) Realizing that she was becoming less and less of who she truly was, Lei began taking Hawaiian language classes and enrolled at the University of Hawai’i to major in law in order to become a lawyer and fight for Hawaiian rights. This story perfectly ties in with
Hawaii’s political economy went through some major changes. The development of plantations and tourism paved the path for how Hawaii’s economy is today. I will discuss how tourism, ethnicity, gender and education both constrain and enable opportunities in contemporary Hawaii.
The Hawaiian culture is known throughout the western world for their extravagant luaus, beautiful islands, and a language that comes nowhere near being pronounceable to anyone but a Hawaiian. Whenever someone wants to “get away” their first thought is to sit on the beach in Hawai’i with a Mai tai in their hand and watch the sun go down. Haunani-Kay Trask is a native Hawaiian educated on the mainland because it was believed to provide a better education. She questioned the stories of her heritage she heard as a child when she began learning of her ancestors in books at school. Confused by which story was correct, she returned to Hawai’i and discovered that the books of the mainland schools had been all wrong and her heritage was correctly told through the language and teachings of her own people. With her use of pathos and connotative language, Trask does a fine job of defending her argument that the western world destroyed her vibrant Hawaiian culture.
When my family and I could feel the warm fine sand, the gentle cool breeze, witness the crystal clear aquamarine ocean and swaying palm trees, and smell the sweet fragrant scent of plumerias, we must have gone to heaven. The enchanting beauty of this Hawaiian island, Maui, gives us a sense of warmth, peace, and serenity. In search of paradise, we explore the infamous Road to Hana, snorkel with underwater marine life, and journey back in time to experience the true customs, traditional cuisine and the original song, music and dance of Hawaii at a luau.
78,086,081 people, domestic and internationally have gone to Hawai’i in 2015 (Historical Visitors). However, has anyone truly went past the beautiful scenic lands and Hawaiian culture to learn the origin of everything? Fittingly, this essay will go in-depth of the Polynesian culture that soon settled on the Hawaiian islands of today: identifying cultural norms, symbols, and values that influences their communication that encompasses the Hawaiian spirit tourist known to love. Lastly, a comparison of Hispanic culture and investigate qualities that are similar and different between the two cultures.
Hawaii is arrival. To arrive in Hawaii is to follow all of history, one group at a time. To the Kanaka Maoli, the people who first traveled in ancient times across the ocean in canoes and small boats from Polynesia, Hawaii was the promised land. It was the end of their pilgrimage, the land of powerful spirits and gods in need of worship. The Kanaka Maoli developed a complex society around this new land and these new spirits; a free society built around peace, love, and worship of one’s homeland. This way of life flourished for thousands of years, until the arrival of Christian missionaries in the 18th and 19th centuries declared their freedom evil, their nakedness vile, and their gods false. Christianity flooded the shores of the islands, pulling with it white entrepreneurs, who set up massive farms and plantations to take advantage of Hawaii’s unique agriculture, and Japanese workers for those plantations, with whom Christianity gained its strongest base in the islands. Then came the political opportunists, who in less than one century pulled the Hawaiian monarchy up to its highest levels of Western pomp and circumstance, only to tear it down again with the overthrow of Queen Liliu’okalani in 1893 with help from the United States Government (who later annexed the island chain). Next came the arrival of the expatriates; the tourists; the haoles (whites) who saw Hawaii as nothing more than a tropical novelty or an escape from their stress-filled lives back on the mainland. Statehood came quickly in 1959, as did immigrants from the Phillipines and Korea. I came in 1995, with my haole military family, to a land that would become my adopted home the way it had for so many others. I found a land carved up like a puzzle; each person, each culture, each idea holding onto their piece with the will of God or gods. Today, there are many Hawaii’s. Depending on where you go, you can witness the poor, the rich, the privileged, the oppressed, the loud, the silent, the passive, and the active.
Since moving to Hawaii approximately two months ago, one might assume that this would be the perfect place to study varying environmental influences and their impacts. Hawaii is one of the most inaccessible, yet populous places within the United States. Tourism is a main reason why so many people come to the islands. Tourism is the primary source of revenue for the Hawaiian economy. Normally when one thinks of Hawaii, they think of vacation spots and tourist destinations.
Hawaii is rated as one of the top tour destinations in the world. Nearly 8 million tourists visited the islands annually, and eighty-two percent of these tourists traveled to there for the purpose of vacation, honeymoon, or to get married. (Beal). Hawaii is generally viewed as a place to escape from
...e" (Trask xix). This incident beautifully illustrates and signifies tourism's impact in American society. Like most Americans, this woman uses a discourse that has been shaped by tourist advertisements and souvenirs. The woman's statement implies that Trask resembles what the tourist industry projects, as if this image created Hawaiian culture. As Trask asserts, Hawaiian culture existed long before tourism and has been exploited by tourism in the form of advertisements and items such as postcards. Along with the violence, endangered environment, and poverty, this exploitation is what the tourist industry does not want to show. However, this is the Hawai'i Haunani-Kay Trask lives in everyday. "This is Hawai'i, once the most fragile and precious of sacred places, now transformed by the American behemoth into a dying land. Only a whispering spirit remains" (Trask 19).
A lot of tourists would not think that they are offending the native residents when they travel. In the article, “The Ugly Tourist” excerpt from Jamaica Kincaid’s book, Small Place, she argues that when one is in a state of being a tourist, one does not know the depth of the place and only sees what one wants to see. Kincaid gives a strong idea of what she is arguing when she described a tourist as “an ugly human being.” She presents the emotional conflicts between tourist and the natives by evaluating their different lifestyles.
In part fictional and part autobiographical novel “A Small Place” published in 1988, Jamaica Kincaid offers a commentary on how the tenets of white superiority and ignorance seem to emerge naturally from white tourists. She establishes this by using the nameless “you” depicted in the story to elucidate the thoughts they have when visiting such formerly colonized islands. This inner mentality of the white tourists reveals how tourism is still a form of oppression for the natives of such formerly colonized tourists as it continues to exploit them. I will be focusing primarily on page 10 of the text to illustrate this.
...Hawai`i’s economy is very dependent on tourism, however many locals are possessive of their land, and as they stereotype tourists, many do not accept others as they have a unity for their own. Numerous individuals feel the desideratum to fit the local stereotype because they prefer not to be labeled as a “haole”. It becomes tough and rather intense for an individual, because becoming haole betokens that you forgot and disregarded the local or Hawaiian quality values and ways of routes, as well as the flowing stream of life in the islands. We need to remind ourselves that regardless of where we emanate from, our skin tone, race, physical characteristics, and so forth, everybody ought to acknowledge just for who we/they are and treat one another like 'ohana and show "aloha", and subsequently, we can determinately verbally express "This is it. This is Paradise" (33).
A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid presents the hypothetical story of a tourist visiting Antigua, the author’s hometown. Kincaid places the reader in the shoes of the tourist, and tells the tourist what he/she would see through his/her travels on the island. She paints a picturesque scene of the tourist’s view of Antigua, but stains the image with details of issues that most tourists overlook: the bad roads, the origin of the so-called native food, the inefficiency of the plumbing systems in resorts, and the glitches in the health care system. Kincaid was an established writer for The New Yorker when she wrote this book, and it can be safely assumed that majority of her readers had, at some point in their lives, been tourists. I have been a tourist so many times before and yet, I had never stopped to consider what happens behind the surface of the countries I visit until I read this essay. Kincaid aims to provoke her readers; her style of writing supports her goal and sets both her and her essay apart. To the reader, it sounds like Kincaid is attacking the beautiful island, pin-pointing the very things that we, as tourists, wish to ignore. No tourist wants to think about faeces from the several tourists in the hotel swimming alongside them in the oceans, nor do they want to think about having accidents and having to deal with the hospital. It seems so natural that a tourist would not consider these, and that is exactly what Kincaid has a problem with.
In 2013-14 Tauranga had 83 voyage calls, 25 vessels entering with 83 port days in total. They also had 100 unique passengers and 149,000 passenger port days. Tauranga has established itself as a go-to destination for cruise passengers, with its natural beauty and friendly locals it is not hard to see why. Over the years, Tauranga’s cruise tourism has changed from the 2013-14 statistics, the amount of voyage calls this year has gone down but the amount of unique passengers has gone up to 160,100.
According to the ‘World Tourism Organization’ (UNWTO), the tourism industry is one of the fastest growing sectors in the world, as it is estimated that by the year 2020, 7.8 billion people (roughly a quarter of the world’s population) will embark on a foreign trip (Bennett & Gebhardt 15). The Caribbean is said to be the most economically dependent on this industry, as the ‘Caribbean Tourism Organisation’ states that the industry forms the “economic backbone of most countries in the Region”(“Caribbean Tourism Industry” 1). The implications for tourism’s affect on the region have arisen and have prompted further research into this matter. Since the 1970’s, research regarding tourism in the Caribbean has attempted to determine the social, cultural, environmental, and economic impacts of tourism. Much of the research has found that there are in fact many negative adverse effects, and Jackson’s article asserts that, “Governments often commit money and other resources to support the growth and development of tourism and often turn a blind eye to its negative impacts” (574).