Destinations known | Tourists behaving badly – why do some travellers conduct themselves differently on holiday?
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According to currency exchange company Travelex, holidays provide “rare occasions when we break free from our daily routine and give ourselves the freedom to focus on new experiences and, most importantly, ourselves”. Some people, however, take this new-found freedom a little too far; people such as Briton Lee Furlong, 23, and Canadian Brittney Schneider, 22.
Canadian broadcaster CTV News reported that after a day spent getting, in the words of Schneider, “ridiculously drunk”, the pair were making their way back to the Mad Monkey Hostel, in Chiang Mai, Thailand, when they happened upon a can of spray paint and made quite possibly the worst decision of their young lives – to make their mark on one of the city’s most famous landmarks, the Tha Pae Gate, the main entrance to the historical old town.
Furlong scrawled “Scousse Lee”, an apparent misspelling of Scouse or Scouser, in reference to his hometown of Liverpool, while Schneider succeeded in writing a “B”. In an email interview with news agency The Canadian Press, she recounted remembering their antics the following day: “My heart dropped.” The pair were identified from CCTV footage and arrested soon after. They have been charged with vandalism and face a fine of 1 million baht (US$30,100) or up to 10 years in prison.
Of course, theirs is not the first tale of tourists misbehaving on holiday, but what prompts people to act in ways they wouldn’t normally when somewhere new?
