‘Some ran for cliffs and jumped in panic. Others tried alternative routes, but these are not the paths they’ve followed for thousands of years’: Instagram is putting wildlife at risk and ruining our sense of adventure
Here is how to travel responsibly.
In June, I wrote about overtourism in the Maasai Mara, questioning the opening of Marriott International’s new Ritz-Carlton, Masai Mara Safari Camp in the National Reserve — where a moratorium on new tourism lodges and camps is in place.
Unsurprisingly, some of the local Maasai aren’t happy about it. In August, Dr Meitamei Olol Dapash, a Maasai elder and director of the Institute for Maasai Education, Research and Conservation, filed a lawsuit against Marriott International, Ritz-Carlton, their Kenyan developer Lazizi Mara and the local authorities — accusing them of building the camp in the middle of a wildlife corridor used by wildebeest during the Great Migration. Lazizi Mara subsequently welcomed statements from the Kenyan Wildlife Service and National Environment Management Agency (NEMA) confirming that the new camp ‘obtained all necessary approvals, fully complies with regulatory requirements, and does not encroach on wildlife migratory corridors’. On December 17, Meitamei applied to withdraw his petition, but Lazizi Mara the move, arguing that abandoning the case would leave damaging allegations unresolved. The case is now scheduled for mention on February 10, 2026.
Meanwhile, across the border in the much bigger Serengeti National Park — where the JW Marriott Serengeti Lodge will open next year — the situation looks even worse. In July, disturbing video footage and photographs of safari vehicles blocking a major wildebeest crossing point at Kogatende surfaced on Instagram. ‘The herds were forced to scatter,’ reads the caption. ‘Some ran for cliffs and jumped in panic. Others tried alternative routes, but these are not the natural, time-worn paths they’ve followed for thousands of years.’
Similar images illustrating the effects of overtourism and a cavalier attitude to the world’s natural wonders seem to be proliferating. In the months following the pandemic, a surge in people travelling to French Polynesia to swim with humpback whales in the shallow waters off Moorea elicited myriad complaints: there are too many boats and too many people on the boats and the boats are getting too close to the animals ‘because everyone wants their perfect Instagram shot.’
Since 2023, visitors to Kelingking Beach on Bali’s south-east coast — one of Tripadvisor’s Best of the Best Beaches and a popular spot for drone photography — have been horrified by construction of a 182 metre-high glass lift which has been bolted onto the famous tyrannosaurus rex-shaped cliff. And in the Dolomites, last summer, videos emerged of long, snaking queues for the gondola and cable car lifts that ferry visitors up to Seceda and its sublime views of the Odle Massif. Comments posted underneath include: ‘mass travel hypnosis’ and ‘Instagram is ruining the environment. Nothing can be special or intimate. Not when every lemming does it.’
Instagram and TikTok are not just taking their toll on Nature, but on the visitor experience, too. ‘In some places, you are likely to have a less than blissful time unless you pick your moment, and your location, particularly well,’ says Tom Barber, co-founder of Original Travel. This year, the luxury travel operator launched The Secret Series to promote ‘hidden gems in some of the world’s classic destinations that receive a fraction of the tourism traffic.’ We — the travellers — need to think along similar lines, refining our bucket lists and, in the process, rediscovering our sense of adventure.
Safe safari
The Serengeti hosts one of the world's largest land animal migrations (in terms of total body weight).
In the Serengeti, Nomad Tanzania — a low-impact, thoughtfully-run safari company with a commitment to community empowerment and wildlife conservation — was among the many safari operators to be caught in the crossfire of the river-crossing incident, illustrating just how complicated this situation is. ‘Our guide was the first to arrive on site and got boxed in,’ says specialist guide Richard Knocker.
Sadly, this particular river-crossing incident was not a one-off. Over the past few years, a rush of new lodges and camps in northern and central Tanzania has resulted in ‘literally hundreds of vehicles heading north and mixing in with the vehicles that are already there,’ intensifying pressure on the 10 or so points the wildebeest and other grazers use to cross the river. While the majority of safari-goers are sensitive, conscious travellers who put wildlife welfare first, some can be very insistent with guides. Post-pandemic, Richard has also seen a new demographic of safari-goers ‘who don’t seem to mind the crowds, as long as they can take a video that makes it look as if they are on their own.’
In light of the challenges, Nomad is compiling new river-crossing guidelines that will empower guides to say ‘no’ and travel agents to pre-warn potential clients that ‘if seeing a crossing is the only thing that matters, Nomad might not be the right company for them.’ Nomad is also encouraging customers to look beyond the river-crossing season and consider other times of the year and other parts of Tanzania. ‘The herds are always on the move and the Serengeti is fabulous throughout the year, unlike just about any other park I can think of,’ says Richard. Nomad has a new tented camp, Kusini, opening imminently on the remoter south-west fringes of the park and ‘there’s also a lot of wildlife in Tarangire in the north, or at the company’s camps in Ruaha and Katavi in the south and west.’
The vast Serengeti is one of 800 protected areas that together cover more than a third of Tanzania’s territory — yet it accounts for around 80% of visitors (590,000 in 2024). ‘Last year when I was at Chada in Katavi, we weren’t just the only people in camp, we were the only people in the park,’ says Richard.
Into the deep
Sperm whales are the largest of the toothed whales and are named after the waxy substance — spermaceti — found in their heads.
The number of tourists in French Polynesia reached a record 264,000 in 2024 and, according to Matt Reichel, was one of the worst places to swim with whales. ‘It had ballooned to 20-plus boats in the water at once with zero regulations,’ says the founder of One With Whales — a community-based conservation tourism project on Rurutu. ‘I saw five boats dumping 40-plus people in with a whale there.’ (Although even this pales in comparison to the ‘dozens of boats’ he has seen ‘chasing sperm whales in Mauritius’ or the ‘100-plus snorkellers being offloaded onto whale sharks in the Maldives.’)
Hopefully, the situation is about to change for the better because the government has introduced new regulations, such as: one boat to one whale and a maximum of six swimmings and one guide in the water at any one time, and a minimum distance of 100 metres for whale-certified boats and 15 metres for swimmers. The result, says Matt, is a win-win: ‘for safety, the guest experience, the welfare of the whales, the sustainability of the activity and the local livelihoods that are dependent on it.’
In Dominica, halfway around the world, only three swimmers plus one guide are allowed in the water with a whale at any one time. In 2023, this famously undeveloped volcanic island established the world’s first sperm whale reserve on its western shore, one of the few places in the world where the whales (including about 250 resident individuals) can be seen year-round. The aim of the nearly 800km sq reserve is to ‘generate tourism income while also protecting a species under increased threat from human activity,’ says Enric Sala, founder of the National Geographic Society Pristine Seas project. What’s more, the project has the added bonus of helping to sequester ‘as much carbon as 18,000 acres of USA forests a year’ because the whales’ poo feeds massive plankton blooms that capture carbon dioxide from the seawater, which then sink to the seabed when they die.
Every year, between November and March, bespoke travel specialist 1953 — the year that Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay summited Mount Everest — offers Swimming with Giants itineraries. The experience includes accommodation at clifftop hideaway Secret Bay, a 50-foot-plus Lagoon catamaran on which to explore the reserve and the chance to swim with sperm whales when they’re not diving to depths of up to 1,000 metres to hunt for squid. Guests are accompanied by freediver Adam Slama and Dominican native Jackson Mawhinney ‘who understand both the privilege and responsibility of engaging with the natural world,’ says 1953’s co-founder and chief exploration officer William Siddeley.
Beach bums
NIHI Sumba on the island of Sumba is famous for its herd of domestic and wild horses that paddle in the shallows.
Bali could certainly do with a bit more TLC. While it accounts for only 0.3% of Indonesia’s land mass, it welcomes almost half of the country’s international tourists (more than 13 million in 2024). In this context, it’s hard to see the glass lift at Kelingking Beach — constructed by China’s Kaishi Group — as anything other than a classic case of killing the golden goose. It was purportedly designed to enhance the attraction, boost the local economy, and make it easier and safer for visitors to access the beach (a hazardous 20-minute hike down, and 30 minutes back), but it was also an eyesore, undermining the beach’s wild beauty that drew people there in the first place — as well as seemingly facilitating swimming in the treacherous waves. Thankfully, a provincial committee suspended construction in October, on the grounds that the project lacked the proper permits. The Governor of Bali has subsequently ordered its demolition.
Lift or not, travellers do have a choice. We don’t have to follow everyone else to Kelingking Beach and other Bali hotspots; luxury operators such as Original Travel can direct us to lesser-visited villages and community-based tourism ventures on the north and east coasts, as well as to other Indonesian islands such as Sumba, a 75-minute flight to the east. Sumba is twice as big as Bali, with only a fifth of the population, and has a fascinating animist and ancestral culture and postcard-worthy beaches.
Climb every mountain
The Seceda is a mountain and a well-known skiing and hiking area.
It is always worth remembering that images that go viral on social media rarely tell the whole story — good or bad. According to IDM South Tyrol, an economic development agency, the queues for Seceda are not an everyday reality. Even so, recent growth in the number of visitors to the province (40% in two decades, to 37 million people in 2024) has prompted new legislation capping bed numbers at pre-pandemic levels — while booking systems are being introduced to manage access to the popular Lago di Braies and now the Seceda cable car. IDM also promotes quieter seasons and lesser-known areas, such as Vinschgau in the west and the area around Sterzing and the Ahrntal valley in the north.
‘There is a lot of world out there that hasn’t been overwhelmed,’ says Tom. ‘Tangier instead of Marrakech, Morocco; Kyushu island instead of Honshu in Japan; Sifnos instead of Santorini, in the Cyclades; Galicia instead of Andalucia, Spain — 95% of Italy’s nearly 60 million annual visitors visit just 4% of the country. There are 5,500 towns and villages that barely see a soul or, as a result, a Euro. Our job, as a travel company, is to spread the love.’
