“Oh yes,” the woman answered although there was a shadow of doubt on her face. “I much preferred the walk through the valley to get there though.”“Why's that?”
“Well, the museum was just so crowded. It was quiet in the valley, and so very beautiful.”
Listening to her I couldn't help remembering a visit I'd made to the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg earlier this summer. There I was in one of the world's greatest artistic treasure-houses, and all I could think about was how hot it was, how crowded, how much I wished I could get out. When we finally made our escape, I wanted to walk through the tour bus and ask everyone what they remembered of what they'd seen, what they thought they'd got out of such an overcrowded experience, but of course they'd only have laughed at me.
It was the same in the Topkapı Palace Treasury. Because there's an extra charge to go into the Harem, not every visitor bothers with that. However, everyone crowds into the Treasury, which is laid out in such a way that you must trail round in a line craning your neck over other people's shoulders in a desperate attempt to view the famous Spoonmaker's Diamond or Topkapı dagger. If anything, it's even worse in the rooms containing the relics of the Prophet Muhammed. Frankly, it was a relief to find myself back in Sultanahmet Square again.
It's easy to diagnose the problem -- too many visitors! -- but much harder to come up with a solution. Today there's so much money and so many jobs tied up in tourism that the pressure is always on to keep upping the number of visitors, no matter what the cost to their experience at their destination. So what's to be done? Close the doors when a quota of people has entered? Force everyone to book ahead of time? Push up prices to prohibitive levels? Open attractions 24 hours a day? None of these sounds like a particularly viable way forward.
A couple of days ago, I bumped into a guide friend in Göreme. “How was the season?” I asked him.
“Not bad,” he replied. “But there's a real problem at Derinkuyu. The entrance gets so crowded. There are 30 underground cities, but no one wants to go to any of the others. They don't even want to go to Kaymaklı [just down the road] because they've read that Derinkuyu is the deepest.”
And there's the rub. Everyone wants to see what is perceived to be the best of everything. Second best doesn't cut the ice at all. So how do we square the circle so that as many people as possible can see the world's greatest treasures without destroying the pleasure they should have got from the experience in the process?
As my friend walked away, he tossed one last comment in my direction. “I blame Lonely Planet,” he said with a grin, by which I took him to mean that he blamed me since although I stopped writing for the guidebook many years ago for many people here I will always remain its public face.
Pat Yale lives in a restored cave-house in Göreme in Cappadocia.
