Adventure tourists: when you visit remote tribes, learn the art of sharing

[Judi Lynn]

Elliott Oakley
Living with Guyana’s Wai Wai taught me that building relationships – and earning money – is vital for indigenous people to get access to healthcare and education

@elliyochi
Mon 21 May 2018 06.49 EDT Last modified on Mon 21 May 2018 08.11 EDT

Every night during a 600-mile kayak trip, adventurer Pip Stewart asked her team members for their highlight of the day. In an Instagram post, she recounted how one, a Wai Wai guide named Romel, would give the same response each day: “It was good. I enjoyed the paddling. We had good food.”

For the trip – which was the first ever descent of the Essequibo river in Guyana – Stewart and fellow adventurers Laura Bingham and Ness Knight recruited their guides from a village I know. As an anthropologist working with the Wai Wai, an indigenous people in the rainforest villages in Guyana and Brazil, I was struck by Stewart’s account. She observed that Romel and the Wai Wai “are better at accepting and appreciating what is”. Her post led me back to a question related to my own research: what do indigenous guides get out of adventure tourism?

I lived with Wai Wai people for more than a year and participated in everyday village practices. I encountered a strikingly similar evaluation of conservation work. After days working as a guide for sport fishermen on nearby rivers, one Wai Wai friend complained these visitors from the US and Europe had not stopped for lunch. Even worse, they did not want to share the food they had brought for breakfast and dinner. He did not plan to work with that company again. But, for guides, are good and bad tourist trips just about food? What does this say about living a contemporary good life in the rainforests of Guyana?

Some people might find it counterintuitive that indigenous people use these expeditions to obtain money and other resources for their lives in remote places. As adventurers are challenged by and overcome extreme environments and personal barriers, their guides receive much-needed wages. For the men I met who had worked with tourists, these trips were equally exceptional – and unpredictable – opportunities to work.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/may/21/adventure-tourists-remote-tribes-art-of-sharing-elliott-oakley

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. Not stopping for lunch?

That shows a profound lack of consideration.

The not sharing food I'm not so sure about, but if the guides were expecting the sharing, the tourists should have been told that. It honestly might not occur to me to offer some of my food to my guides were I on such a trip. I think this tells me that if I go even a little off the beaten track I need to ask more questions about what I should do, how I should behave, what might be expected of me.