The Last Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit and Peril by Sarah Stodola (HarperCollins)

Blame it on the British. Stuck on their soggy little island with its chilly shoreline, bordered by a sea that could induce hypothermia if an intrepid adventurer immersed so much as a single toe into its frigid waves, once they learned that a beach could be pleasant, there was no stopping them. The south of France, the coast of Italy, even England’s sworn foe, Spain, were suddenly prime targets for English bodies yearning to be warm. Time spent on a beach became the fashion for cold and restless residents of northern countries until at last the words “vacation” and “beach” became almost synonymous, first only for the wealthy and then for the masses. Today there are over 7000 beach resorts on our planet, not including the ones that have fewer than ten rooms or aren’t directly on the beach.

When the invention of the air conditioner tamed the “soupy heat” of the tropics, new destinations opened up for the world’s sun-worshippers. First came the readers of Lonely Planet guides, followed by people with more money to spend and were reluctant to relinquish the comfort they were used to. Beach shacks were supplanted by more comfortable accommodations, built for the travelers who wanted to be “far from home while never having left.”  Local residents soon realized that their beaches yielded more money than any of their agricultural efforts and suddenly resorts studded coastlines all over the world.

Sarah Stodola, like many other tourists, became enthralled with the concept of a beach vacation when she went to Southeast Asia. Although she surveys seaside destinations from the Jersey Shore to Senegal, the bulk of her explorations take place in tropical Asia. This is where the idea of the resort ranges from rustic bungalows for surfers to entire islands that only the wealthy can afford, where the cheapest accommodations begin at $2,200 a night. 

People will pay for solitude. Some pay with the discomfort of discovering an undeveloped paradise while others yearn for “barefoot luxury,” “peace without challenges,” and a “frictionless experience.” Asia has both extremes and everything in between the two. It also holds the largest number of potential tourists. Before the advent of Covid, in 2018 150 million Chinese tourists traveled outside their borders, enriching the tourist industry with $255 billion dollars in 2019. China,” Stodola speculates, “has the power to remake the global tourism industry” with India as a close contender.

Chinese travelers are already changing the beaches of Vietnam, their “fourth-most-visited destination, after Thailand, Japan, and South Korea, with 4 million Chinese descending upon this small country in 2017. Most of them flock to Vietnam’s two thousand miles of coastline, where, a developer says, “you see a new resort opening every three months.” The perils of over-development have been slowed by Covid but the signs are clearly there. Dams have prevented the replenishment of beach sand while illegal sand mining takes place offshore with impunity. It’s a small indication of how the ravenous appetite for beach holidays are endangering the coastlines of the world.

An island in Malaysia points the way that disaster could be averted. One locally-run NGO is making recycling an island-wide practice. A machine that cost only $6000 takes empty beer bottles and turns them into sand. This is mixed with concrete and used in the island’s construction projects, eliminating the need to import expensive sand from outside the island and making illegal sand mining from the sea an irrelevant operation. With thousands of beer bottles emptied constantly by tourists, this is a vastly sustainable solution.

Others are less palatable and more difficult to bring into being. With a world full of paradise-seekers who are accustomed to jumping on planes to get what they want, how to stuff that genie back in the bottle by discouraging long-haul flights? Maybe by making beach holidays what they were at their very beginning, a privilege reserved for the wealthy.~Janet Brown