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By many accounts, Colorado is enjoying a record summer tourist season. Our highways are both under construction and overcrowded, campgrounds fill before noon with people who complain about television reception and tourist attractions offer waiting lines of Disneyworld dimensions.
This wasn't supposed to happen this year. Last November, we repealed the tourism tax, thereby cutting off the flow of money to the State Ministry of Propaganda.
If you write to the Colorado Tourism Office, your letter
will come back marked return to sender,
because
there's no money for stamps, envelopes and brochures.
Call 1-800-COLORADO, and the phone will ring and ring, because there's no money to pay for someone to answer it. (Private enterprise gets around this problem with voice-messaging systems that give you a run-around as you keep pushing number buttons, and I refuse to believe that a state bureaucrat couldn't do an even better job of frustration and confusion.)
So, if Colorado is breaking all the rules of modern marketing, why are so many people coming this summer?
One theory is that this summer is a residual from earlier marketing, and that next year, or the year after, we'll start to suffer from open highways, uncrowded campgrounds, short lines and similar horrors.
Another theory is that we're benefiting from the national media's customary neglect of the Nowhere Time Zone. It's hot and dry here, too, with forest fires sprouting almost hourly. But watch the network news, and only the East suffers from heat and drought. People there probably think it's cool and verdant here, and by the time they learn the truth, they've contributed to a record 1994 tourist season.
My favorite theory is that reverse psychology is taking effect.
Read the travel pages sometime, or pick up a magazine
aimed at upscale experience collectors. The focus is not on
the familiar stuff of tourism like theme parks, but on the
novel and exotic, the undiscovered.
That is, any tourist willing to spend the next two years paying off credit-card bills can buy a round-trip package for six days at Six Flags Over Hoboken.
But only the cultivated traveler of rare and discerning taste can delight in an exploration of the quaint bed-and-breakfasts, the untrammeled vistas, the ingenious and indigenous handicrafts and the exotic cuisine of some remote and mysterious land like Nepal or Bhutan.
Given that fact of human nature, it follows that the more remote and mysterious that Colorado appears to be, the more tourists we will attract.
Without promotion, Colorado becomes not just one of the 50 states with baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and a legislature, but a mystic land of unclimbed peaks, undiscovered inns, uncharted rivers, unconquered wilderness and untrammeled trails.
Just as a trip to the Forbidden City used to be something to brag on, a trip to the Forbidden State could become a mark of distinction. All we have to do is keep quiet.
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