Why I don't like the tourism industry!

Anyone that lives in Cornwall will have noticed the massive increase in cars on the roads lately, With the summer holidays in full swing and the bank holiday upon us people are flocking down to enjoy Cornwall and i don't blame them. Cornwall really is beautiful it's why i live and work here. I love the lifestyle, the beaches, the surf and even the people. Cornwall offers a slower pass of life that the rest of the country doesn't have.

No big cities, town centres that still have individual shops and no massive motorways, I love Cornwall.

But right now after 5 weeks of grinning and baring the tourists I have had enough. I am fed up of sitting behind cars that proceed to drive along main roads, main roads that have a speed limit of 60 mph but driving at 30! I'm fed up of the sheer volume of traffic on the roads, having to double my journey times to get anywhere. I went into Newquay at the weekend and my usual 15 minute drive of 7 miles took over an hour sitting in queuing traffic.

Now i don't want to sound like a miserable Scrooge and i do understand that tourism brings a lot of money to Cornwall but equally that the same tourism ruins communities. Villages where half the houses are owned as holiday homes where people are only in these homes a few weeks of the year. There's so many young people screaming out to buy or rent a home but there just isn't many available due to many being winter let only or sold for occupation for only 50% of the year. This then has a knock on effect for local businesses, pubs that have to shut for half the year because when the second home owners aren't about the pubs can't survive, but if these second homes had local people in them there would be locals to visit the pub all year round.

Lastly my rant is about tourists that litter, I recently went for a walk on the beach and there were broken body boards, broken spades, left BBQ's, beer cans, babies dummies, and bags of rubbish left on the beach. Now I can't prove that the rubbish was left by tourists and not locals but it does get ten times worse in the summer months. And you know that it will be the local surfers against sewage that organise beach cleans once the tourism season is over to return the beaches back to normal.

To ease my pain of the volume of tourists right now I can just look at this picture and laugh!