For this summer’s holiday, there’s no place like home

When I was much younger, it was a conversation that took place every year in early summer, as I settled into the barber’s chair for monthly attention to my wayward locks (back when I had them). Comb in one hand, scissors in the other, making idle conversation while deftly clipping away, my tonsorial adjuster would inquire: “Going anywhere nice this year?”

The question related to our family’s annual summer holiday. In the 1950s and 1960s, entire working-class neighborhoods of Britain’s major cities were, to all intents and purposes, evacuated for two weeks as the occupants decamped to the nearest seaside town. It was the highlight of the year. From Portobello, the Firth of Clyde and the Ayrshire coast in Scotland to Blackpool, Morecambe, Scarborough and Whitley Bay in the north of England and Bognor Regis, Eastbourne, Margate and Torquay in the south, grown men accustomed to relentless hard graft in a factory or down a pit rolled their trousers up to the knee and ventured a paddle in the sea.

For my parents, remaining in our native Scotland was deemed insufficiently adventurous. So, every summer, my father packed us all into his 1963 Vauxhall Victor and we set off from Glasgow for the south coast of England — often to a caravan park that he had meticulously researched via phone call and letter, there being no other means at the time.

It was a long journey, over several days, for two reasons. First, there were no motorways on our route, the roads were rudimentary, and progress was slow. Second, my father had spent most of the Second World War as slave labor in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Java and, 20 years after he came home, our travel south was punctuated by detours to visit old comrades who had also survived that ordeal. Year by year, of course, their numbers grew fewer. They did not live long, those guests of Emperor Hirohito. And my father never bought a Japanese car. But I digress...

By the early 1970s, British holidaymakers had discovered Spain, chiefly the beaches of Mallorca, the Costa Brava and the Costa del Sol, opened up by cheap flights and package deals. The posh families could keep their Monte Carlo and Cote d’Azur, nothing could beat the sun, sea, sand and sangria and the regular choruses of “Y Viva Espana,” even if no one was entirely clear about what sangria actually was.

Nor did it particularly bother anyone that “Spanish” holiday resorts were about as genuinely Spanish as Big Ben, that the streets were full of pubs called The Dog and Duck that sold Watney’s Red Barrel, that the restaurants offered bangers ‘n’ mash and fish ‘n’ chips, or that you were disproportionately likely to meet your next-door neighbor from home on the beach in Magaluf — thus entirely defeating the purpose of “getting away from it all.”

Come the 1980s, the more intellectually inquisitive had moved on to Italy and Greece, mainly the islands, and some even ventured as far as Turkiye. There was art, history and architecture, along with the all-important sunshine, plus the bragging rights when you got back home that beach holidays were now so last decade.

Ten years later and the caravan had moved on again, this time to the exotic destinations of the mysterious east, such as Thailand and Vietnam — the latter, in particular, a favorite among old lefties who had spent their youth lobbing bricks at the old US Embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square while demanding an American exit from an unpopular war and were now happy to spend their cash supporting the winners.

The halcyon days of Europe as the world’s holiday destination have come to a shuddering halt

Ross Anderson

However, that was all then and this is now. It will not have escaped your attention that the halcyon days of Europe as the world’s holiday destination have come to a shuddering halt, with those who live all year round in the continent’s most popular resorts having decided that enough is enough.

In Barcelona, locals have taken to squirting tourists with water pistols and cruise ship operators are reconsidering the city as a destination; anti-tourism protests have drawn tens of thousands to demonstrations in the Canary Islands and Mallorca; in Venice, visitors are now required to pay a 5-euro ($5.40) entry fee at peak times to discourage crowds; six French cities have banned Airbnb key boxes outside buildings and an artist in Nice has constructed a giant rat trap, baited with ice cream, “to eradicate and eliminate the tourist pest.”

These people’s complaints are manifold. They say the conversion of swaths of residential property into short-term holiday accommodation means young local people cannot afford to buy a home in their own towns and villages. They say an annual influx of cash-laden visitors drives up the cost of life’s essentials to levels unaffordable for locals. Above all, they have had it up to here with being unable to stroll down their own city streets without being jostled by heaving crowds of visitors while risking being poked in the eye with a selfie stick. After decades of cheerfully trousering the pounds, dollars, yen and yuan brought by hordes of free-spending tourists, they have decided they would rather have a reduced income accompanied by some peace and quiet.

So, if Europe doesn’t want us, what to do? The good news for those of us who live in the Gulf is ... that we live in the Gulf. Along with the wider Middle East and North Africa, this region not only offers everything anyone could wish for in a holiday, but it is also an ideal jumping-off point for those who wish to travel farther afield.

It would be fair to say that “Saudi tourist infrastructure” was once an oxymoron, but from a standing start the Kingdom is making stratospheric progress. You want a beach? Look at the luxury resorts proliferating along the Red Sea coast. You want culture and heritage? Try the wonders of AlUla. You want scenery and nature? Take a road trip through the stunning southern provinces of Asir and Jazan.

Farther afield, the options expand, from the Nabatean rock carvings of Petra in Jordan to the largely unexplored beauty of Dhofar province in southern Oman. You want shopping? Paris and Milan have little that you won’t find in Dubai, and with shinier wrapping paper. Some history, perhaps? Damascus is now a safe city after all that unpleasantness, with a past to rival anything in Athens or Rome, and parts of it unchanged in millennia. And if that’s too edgy for you, there’s always Cairo and Alexandria.

And within comfortable flying distance, yet more options abound: to the west, snake charmers, acrobats and storytellers in the pulsating heart of mysterious Marrakech in Morocco; to the south, the unashamed luxury of beach resorts in Seychelles; to the east, one of the oldest civilizations in the world — “Incredible India,” from the snow-capped Himalayan peaks to the tropical rainforests of Andaman and Assam.

Spoilt for choice, aren’t we? Europe may have shut up shop, but this part of the world very much has not — and, sometimes, there’s just no place like home.

• Ross Anderson is associate editor of Arab News.