On the night of Oct. 21, 2023, I laid on the top bunk in a hostel full of strangers, waiting to turn 21. In my silent boredom, I ran through all of the places I had been to that year and understood why my family thought I would never go back home to Connecticut. I had camped in Joshua Tree National Park; skied in Aspen; soaked in a geothermal river in Iceland. And here I was again, about to embark on my next adventure: scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef.
Earlier that day, upon arriving at our hostel in Cairns, Australia, my friends Olivia and Cami claimed the bunk adjacent to mine while I threw myself at the mercy of the mysterious resident who occupied the bottom of my bunk. We met later that night: her name was Constance, she was 28 years old and from France. Before turning the lights out, the two of us sat on the floor, sharing stories of our travels. I tried to conjure up some of my high school French to keep the conversation going.
“I booked this trip pour mon anniversaire. C’est demain.”
“Ah, bien sur. And how old?”
“Vingt-et-un.”
“That is a big birthday in America,” the corners of her eyes crinkled, hoping I would affirm her statement of my home country.
“Yes! I wanted to do something special.”
“And this is a good trip to do before the reef dies.”
It would be untruthful to say that the film “Chasing Coral,” a showcase of coral bleaching, did not influence my desire to see the world’s largest reef. I’m not the only one: in 2016, Sierra Club Magazine reported that 70 percent of tourists who went to visit the Great Barrier Reef claimed that they were “strongly motivated to see the reef ‘before it’s gone.’”
As climate change threatens to dissipate so many of the world’s most beloved natural destinations, a mass motivation to travel has turned into a popularly recognized phenomenon. Last chance tourism, or LCT, describes the sector of the tourism industry that is driven by people’s fear that these are the last years to see natural beauties like the Amazon Rainforest, the Galapagos Islands or the Great Barrier Reef before they are utterly destroyed.
The paradox of the “nature-loving” traveler is that the presence of people in these natural spaces will always contribute to environmental degradation. So, why do we still travel? Can we travel and honestly call ourselves environmentalists?
On the morning of my 21st birthday, I left the coast of Cairns and boated out to the reef alongside 23 other scuba divers, five instructors and three crew members. After a few hours the boat stopped, and one by one we jumped into the open ocean from the back deck. As instructed, I kept my eyes on the horizon as I deflated my buoyancy control device and began my dive.
What I learned is that the underwater world is determined by very different natural laws than on land. Light waves get shorter; sound inflates; time slows down. I remember floating with my back to the ocean floor, watching the dance of fractured sunbeams through the ocean’s surface above.
“It was a celebration of life, with new and old friends from all over the world, above the dying reef.”
Floating with my world suddenly upside down, I wondered what the life of a coral is like. After all, they are animals like us. They need oxygen for respiration — oxygen which depletes as ocean temperatures rise. Ocean temperatures which rise when carbon is emitted into the atmosphere. Carbon which is emitted into the atmosphere when oil is burned.
At night on the boat, people scattered over the indoor furniture and talked about what we saw on our dives, about our home countries, about travel. Alfanso, my instructor, interrupted the chatter to stand on a chair and conduct the room, “One, two, three … Happy birthday to you …” I turned to see Olivia and Cami holding a birthday cake for me that they had smuggled on board.
It was a celebration of life, with new and old friends from all over the world, above the dying reef.
I breathed in “one, two, three” and blew out “three, two, one.”
The irony of last chance tourism is that you see the beauty alongside the ruin. You see the world rushing away, yet stay to honor life lost and life still to come.
These are the confessions of a last chance tourist.
Annika White PZ ’24 is an environmental columnist from Southport, Connecticut. She enjoys hammocking, journaling and making playlists on Spotify.
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