Our rowdy youth are notorious pests when they\u2019re abroad; if we\u2019re not casually desecrating somebody\u2019s treasured culture and heritage, we\u2019re striping naked in their streets and peeing on their sacred buildings. And this is only our casual \u2018party-time\u2019 tourists, and doesn\u2019t include our other equally famous horde of intrepid travellers \u2013 the \u2018gap year\u2019 bunch. <\/p>\n
This week this latter group received widespread media attention for stripping naked on Mount Kinabalu, an ancient mountain in Malaysia. The guilty party were arrested by local authorities for stripping naked and urinating at the mountain\u2019s summit, because as it turns out, the mountain is incredibly sacred to the native people. So for the sake of banter, the group of tourists received a few days jail sentence and a whole slew of fines. <\/p>\n
What are the actual repercussions of this? Well, firstly, the world now hates British tourists that much more \u2013 we\u2019re always naked, always loud, and always messing with things that shouldn\u2019t be messed with. It seems that there is just no place or situation where we don\u2019t feel like getting naked is perfectly acceptable.<\/strong> Secondly, the group nearly ended up in jail \u2013 they had to admit public indecency and had their names (Eleanor Hawkins from Derbyshire, by the way) dragged through the mud of international news outlets across the world. <\/p>\n The typical gap-year student\u2019s essential mission is pretty basic: to post pictures of themselves imbibing the many cultures of the world, so when they return to the desultory English isle they can talk about the revelatory experienced they\u2019ve had (armed by a few terabytes worth of selfies as evidence) and how it has made them a more rounded individual. In reality, these people are usually as receptive to cultural experiences as a rock is to water. And nothing proves it better than this \u2013 when the purpose of a sacred mountain becomes nothing more than a staging point for a naked picture and a really big toilet. <\/p>\n The biggest repercussion of all, however, is that they have angered the spirits of the mountain, according to local tribal elders and priestesses from the ethnic Lotud community. Now, we don\u2019t want to start tarnishing the traditions of these people, no matter how crazy they seem to us, because we feel our offspring have already done a good job of this. But common: whilst there are so many things we can blame on our country\u2019s out-of-order youth, we have to draw a line under the accusation that the tourist\u2019s disinhibited acts of nudity started an earthquake that killed 18 people a week later. <\/p>\n When speaking to the mountain\u2019s spirits, the two priestesses were reportedly told that \u2018many disrespectful acts\u2019 had angered them, including \u2018tall Caucasians going naked\u2019. This anger, allegedly, led to an earthquake on the mountain a week later \u2013 because if you\u2019ve just had some git urinate on your head, you\u2019re going to be annoyed. <\/p>\n To remedy this, the Native Chief Saniban Ampilia said that they planned to sacrifice several chickens and offer up bags of rise to appease the angered mountain spirits. These spirits are a pretty fickle bunch really, because it would take a lot more than that for us to forgive a group of foreign tourists urinating on Stonehenge. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Our rowdy youth are notorious pests when they\u2019re abroad; if we\u2019re not casually desecrating somebody\u2019s treasured culture and heritage, we\u2019re striping naked in their streets and peeing on their sacred buildings. And this is only our casual \u2018party-time\u2019 tourists, and doesn\u2019t include our other equally famous horde of intrepid travellers \u2013 the \u2018gap year\u2019 bunch.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":16415,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":8,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[728,726,215,727,729],"class_list":["post-1910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-book-burning","tag-malaysia","tag-naked","tag-naked-tourists","tag-tourism"],"yoast_head":"\nA Basic Mission<\/h2>\n