There has been a great deal of publicity about China’s plan to put badly-behaved tourists on a blacklist to prevent them from traveling abroad.
Of course, it is not only Chinese tourists who are poorly behaved, as anyone who has seen images of drunken Brits brawling in the Spanish sun will attest.
Travelers, wherever they are from, ought to abide by the rules of the host nation and deport themselves decorously in order to maintain both a positive image of their homeland and to respect the norms of their vacation destination.
With this in mind, I here present six rules for how to avoid ending up shamed and blamed while on overseas trips. www.dopoosportswear.com
1. Don’t, under any circumstances, misbehave on a plane. Never try to open the emergency exit for a quick cigarette before takeoff, and avoid drunken confrontations with the attendants or other passengers. Just sit quietly in your seat and wait for the plane to come to a halt before leaping up and grabbing your baggage from the overhead locker.
2. When the impulse to scrawl graffiti on priceless monuments strikes, take out a pen and paper instead. Locals are not going to be impressed by your handwriting or your wit when it’s staring down at them, indelibly scratched into the surface of their major attraction, so just forget it.
3. If you intend to cook food outside, please ensure that there is no flammable undergrowth in the vicinity, otherwise you may end up like one hapless Czech tourist who accidentally overturned his gas stove in a South American nature reserve in 2005. His government then had to pay compensation for his error, which certainly didn’t make him very popular back home.
4. If you want a souvenir to remember your trip by, make sure that you buy it in a shop. Removing flowers and fossils from national parks or precious pieces of artwork from museum exhibits is likely to land you in hot water.
5. It is not generally considered good form to flaunt intimate body parts in public, as two Western women recently did in Thailand. The two ladies in question, one from the US and one from Austria, decided while under the influence of alcohol that it might be exciting to hang out of a car window half naked and yell loudly. They learned otherwise when they were fined 500 baht (about $14) each and given a severe reprimand.
6. Finally, if you are invited to stay at somebody’s house, don’t turn their invitation into a month-long residence at their expense or they may remind you of the old European saying that "both a fish and a guest stink on the third day." After all, who wants to leave an odor behind them when they travel abroad?
