Gringo Trails is a 2013 feature-length documentary film directed by anthropologist Pegi Vail of New York University.
[2] The film follows the positive and negative impacts of travel and tourism on numerous communities across the globe, including Thailand, Bolivia, Mali (Timbuktu) and Bhutan, documenting how communities thrive, adapt, or deteriorate in the face of mass tourism, "one of the most powerful globalizing forces of our time.
"[3] The film features Israeli adventurer and author, Yossi Ghinsberg, who, in 1981, survived for three weeks after being stranded in the Bolivian jungle.
[5] The film also features Costas Christ, editor-at-large and award-winning travel writer for National Geographic.
In the film, Christ, a proponent of sustainable tourism, discusses his relationship with the island community of Ko Pha Ngan in southern Thailand, which he inadvertently popularised as a tourist destination after discovering its relatively untouched beauty in the late 1970s.