5 Unexpected Ways Tourists Ruin Absolutely Everything

To be clear, the problem isn't that tourists meandering through Hobbiton are determined to make its streets their personal toilets. It's more that New Zealand's sewage systems simply aren't built to handle this much crap. They're constantly overflowing, and travel companies are forced to rent out portable chemical toilets to give visitors an option besides flinging their shit about like monkeys. That's why the country is considering putting a cap on the number of annual tourists ... or at least taxing them heavily to lessen the load, as it were.

Koreans are increasingly upset that not only will Chinese tourists throw candy at kids in the street, but they have no problem grabbing students during a school performance, scooping them up, and taking selfies with them like they've stumbled upon a kookaburra on a safari. In America, that kind of behavior would get you shot, and in the famously harsh North Korea, it gets you ... nothing, apparently.

There has to be some happy middle ground there. Maybe "gently stabbed" or "shot, but somewhere nonvital, like the love handles."

According to city officials, this is no big deal. Marx is an important son of the city, and it's entirely possible -- nay, encouraged -- to separate the man and his ideas from those who abused them. The fact that they stand to profit enormously from the statue, and that it was gifted to them by a repressive government, is entirely beside the point. Their faces must have been pretty red, then, when China confirmed in a party newspaper that glorifying communism was exactly the statue's purpose.

Some locals have pushed back by protesting or writing about their distaste in the paper, but they have little actual recourse. Perhaps they can take solace in the fact that they are undermining Marx's principles with the capitalist spectacle of mass tourism and those little Marx rubber duckies they have for sale.

The city's population has dropped from 175,000 to 55,000 since WWII, and it loses another 1,000 people each year. Compared to the 30 million tourists and counting each year, it's clear that Venice is devoid of Venetians. A city can't exist without its inhabitants, which is why UNESCO has threatened to revoke the city's status if it drops below 40,000 people. Astute math-doers will note that if it keeps losing residents at its current rate, that will happen in 15 years. By the time you're officially uncool, Venice could be a floating museum.

And it's all thanks to the outsiders who make living in the city unbearable for its natives. Foreigners buying property have driven real estate prices and the cost of living way up, and the city's services can't handle the volume of people. The latest solution is straight-up segregating the populations. In 2018, the government tried to keep the tourists out of the way by restricting them solely to popular attractions, and even erecting metal barriers to physically stop them from interacting with locals. Hopefully, it goes well, and the same system can be implemented in Los Angeles.

E. Reid Ross has a couple books, Nature is the Worst: 500 Reasons You'll Never Want to Go Outside Again and Canadabis: The Canadian Weed Reader, both available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Jordan Breeding also writes for a whole mess of other people, the Twitter, and a weird number of gas station bathrooms.

Support your favorite Cracked writers with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you.

For more, check out The 4 Ways We Travel In The Modern World (Are About To Suck):

Follow us on Facebook. And we'll follow you everywhere.