Let me first preface these pages with why I've suddenly felt compelled to sit here in the near dark, in my hotel room in Luang Prabang, over six months after this journey first began, and write what amounts to an impetuous retelling of the significant events of that period and also to devote myself to as much going forward. Actually, and as testimony to this impetuousness, except for what transpired over the last several days, an inspiring 4 day trek through mountain villages in northern Laos, and the likely here-and-again reference to certain salient things past, I'll try to eschew my foregoing experiences as they are already dulled by time, and, crucially, informed only by the faulty perspective that has plagued my understanding of these travels for so long. What my initial perspective was, and why it so inadequately resulted in any meaningful commentary, and also what has since changed, is the purpose of this preface to address. Admittedly, there is nothing profound at stake here, nothing epiphanous or fundamentally transformative, just the clarification of a more sharpened vantage point, forged by a long period of slow-grinding denial. Like I've said, this is nothing more than a quick insight into a particular point of view, but I've come to realize that this point of view is pretty important for why and how I talk about what comes afterward.
For most of this trip, I've been keeping a journal of events, organized by location, and written in the terse, ungrammatical, and bear-bones style of an essay outline. To get some idea of the insipid nature of these entries, here's a few examples:
Mainz: 6/5 - 6/12
- england 1 v. paraguay 0 (1st round of World Cup) Frankfurt, screen in middle of Main river. rabid, shirtless, sunburnt, drunk, orthodonticly challenged, heavily tattooed brits everywhere. Lovely.
- Beer towers
Prague 6/30 - 7/15
- Seifert Hotel on Konevova in Prague 10 (Zizkov). Horridly small and hot room on 1st floor. The heat box. across from Cinska Restaurace (great chow fun). free breakfast inclusive of cereal, coffee, hard-boiled eggs (fried or scrambled to order), juice, apples, kiwis, oranges, pastries, hot dogs, cheese platter, cold-cut platter, toast, yoghurt, etc.
-Incredible beer. Budvar! (sic), Staropremen. Pilsner Urquell.
-crazy TV tower in Zizkov
-Kutna Hora. Ossuary. Bone church. Aaaaa, bones. Hour bus ride for $1 (35 czech crown)
- very good looking but sullen women. always look upset. lingering soviet angst?
-met Andre Tolstoy, descendant of Leo, son of Radio Free Europe co-founder
Sihanoukville 9/21 – 9/28
-Sleepy beach town on Cambodia's SW coast. Gulf of Siam. Still nascent tourist scene. Mostly Asian, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, etc. flock to Occhuetal Beach, a long narrow expanse on SW edge of city.
-Victory Beach/Monument Hill, where D and I stayed, soon to be backpacker haven. Stay at Mash Guesthouse run by senile German lady and occupied by her two British bulldogs, Elvis and Deepthroat. Deepthroat will soon be birthing Cambodia's first ever litter of pure breed Brit Bulldogs (according to proprietor). Old lady also tries recruiting me (knowing about my Google job and presuming that i have some useful computer skills) to help her and some unnamed group crack a local pedophilia ring. The details are all very sketchy and she's drunk throughout the entire pitch, but it's nonetheless intriguing. She was quite a weirdo.
Mui Ne 10/13 – 10/14
-Real quiet beach town in south-central Vietnam that could've had its first hotel built yesterday with the first tourists arriving just hours ago. We rent scooters and go to big white sand dunes with some kids and see a gorgeous lake and enjoy some of the finest landscape anywhere. It looks almost like the coast of Baja California but the wet, jungle air gives the colors a more pronounced glow than Baja's desert fade, like the enhanced effect of a high-def LCD screen.
Yet, despite a gradual progression in substance of these entries, my record of events has remained scant and merely perfunctory, driven by the same pathetic sense of duty that has seen me through entirely unsatisfying excursions to countless temples, UNESCO World Heritage sights, and other "must sees", like Halong Bay and Angkor Wat to name a few, that litter the guide books and are the bread and butter for local tour agencies. These trips invariably result in utter disappointment, or worse, guilt-ridden self-reproach when the realization occurs that you are no more than a photo-snapping interloper whose insistence on participation in someone else's life and culture, ushered into that world only for the sake of your money, is a very grotesque thing indeed. Which is to say that at times being a tourist can be a hellish experience, both for the tourist and the native (whether that native be human, or otherwise sacred for its own reasons). And when it comes down to writing or even thinking about these experiences, it's easiest to simply discredit them on their own merit rather than consider that your disappointment is mostly a function of your very presence there, of your consumption, and same of the masses like you. Of course, the easiest way to deal with any instance in which self-criticism is ultimately necessary but bound to be difficult and possibly ugly, is to simply avoid that moment altogether. Which is what I have heretofore done. But it is this, my role as exploiter in the tourism game, which I've so reluctantly allowed myself to acknowledge, that I've now finally come to terms with. I'll try to explain further.
There is a defilement that occurs when the tourist and the native make contact, and the narrower and more severe the interests of the parties involved (money in the case of the native, access to something private for the tourist) the greater this defilement. How and when this relationship goes from mutually agreeable to exploitative, is proportional to the inequalities of the two parties involved, highlighted by things like money, culture (particularly language), education, and opportunity (or lack of it). This is why, for example, there is no pang of guilt when a German ventures to the Place Georges Pompidou in Paris, and lingers and listen as he pleases, with no intent to spend money, with no intent to engage or forge an understanding with the locals, and the street musicians will still play, the mimes will mime, and no resentment will be had. The street musicians do not congregate outside the Place Georges Pompidou because of the tourists, to please them or have their money, but because of something genuinely and exclusively Parisian (compare this to the "artists" at Place du Tertre who are of the same esurient, campy ilk as Patpong's ladyboys, who respectively can make lunch in Montmartre or a night out in Bangkok a veritable nightmare). As the inequalities between tourist and native grow more and more stark, and their interests more acute, tourism starts to become dishonest and intrusive. This unnerving thought first surfaced in the Czech Republic, intensified in Turkey, grew yet stronger as I made may way east through Asia, and finally in Laos has come to a head and been made painfully clear.
If a street entertainer in, say, Phnom Penh, performs outside of the restaurant you happen to be eating in, it is absolutely out of the question not to contribute when he canvasses the tables with his tip jar. Big deal. What is twenty cents? But there are deeper, psychological implications to this obligation.
As implied above, when traveling as an American tourist domestically, or to Europe, or Canada or, I imagine, to Australia, where economic and cultural differences are negligible, tourism, though often crass and possibly degrading, is not exploitative. But in places like Southeast Asia, where I've spent the last 4 months and will remain for countless more, tourism becomes a kind of prostitution. Prostitution, like tourism, is most often provided by the poor and option-less for whom the plain economics of their service trumps any moral reluctance, and received by a customer who is aware that what he's getting is inauthentic but participates anyway because in a visceral, non-intellectual way the genuineness of the article is moot. And simply because he can. As distances of wealth between tourist and native are stretched further, tourism's likeness to prostitution is amplified. In fact, in Southeast Asia and the former Eastern Bloc, where the disparity between the interests of the tourist and the native is most pronounced, the inextricable nature of prostitution and tourism has spawned a whole sub-genre of tourism, brusquely termed "sex tourism", which now predominates in these countries, and which, I would argue, is not a sub-genre of tourism at all but just sheds the pretensions of the larger aspect and gets right down to the heart of the matter. That when tourism can no longer even attempt to stand on the notion that both tourists and native have a shared interest, the true nature of the act is made apparent. And for a Westerner particularly, the great lure of a place like Bangkok over a place like Kiev (where you might go to buy a wife) is that economic disparity is augmented by exotic and even deviant cultural norms. We might call this "fetish tourism".
For obvious reasons, in this part of the world, tourism's very entrenched, if tacit, likeness to prostitution creates a host of very thorny moral issues that most tourists simply neglect, and others, like my former self, attend to with a nasty blend of self-righteousness and entitlement (and neglect, too, when it's convenient). Those who neglect this intrinsically exploitive relationship, or those who recognize it and just don't care (maybe the high-ground here, that tourism is what it is and everyone knows the rules going in and so be it), have the special luxury of guiltlessness that the second set of tourist will never honestly attain. For those who even subconsciously sense that their being here is something less than innocent, experiences are often sullied by this knowledge and the whole routine of going from this place to that, of seeing one famous landmark after another, of sampling local cuisine at local markets, of buying handfuls of local trinkets, can become as much a burden as a pleasure.
But the conscientious tourist is not without defense. To hedge the guilt of our enterprise, it is a common refrain amongst tourists who recognize the exploitive nature of their travel, particularly of the young, well-educated cast, which this particular area of the world seems to attract an inordinate amount, that a distinction can be made between tourist and traveler, that tourism is one thing and traveling something else entirely – a sentiment that is usually just expressed with the heedless, "isn't it obvious" tone of a holy-book quoter. The person who makes this comment, will subsequently observe two frat-boyish looking knuckleheads pounding beer cans and discarding cigarette butts onto an already polluted and over-crowded stretch of beach and sort of shake his head and shrug, as if to say, "See what I mean?" Then he'll make a casual reference to his dread-locked, tattooed self – the traveler to the frat-boys' tourist – and affectionately reminisce that it was just 3 years ago, before it showed up in The Lonely Planet, that he could spend all day on this beach and not see another "farang". This kind of self-righteous diatribe is, of course, laughable. Though, in order to hedge my own argument that the hundreds of thousands of traveler's, ex-pats, vacationers, Peace Corpsman, etc. are all just tourists of the type described above, it's my firm opinion that being a tourist isn't necessarily bad or malevolent, but that it can be, and often is. Tourists, particularly of the Peace Corps variety and the like, where the scope of interest goes well beyond monetary gain for the native and shameless voyeurism for the tourist, provide each other with invaluable access to other worlds, cultures, ideas, and perspectives. But even for the Peace Corpsman who spends 2 years in rural Cambodia teaching English, what is the ultimate gain for those people he teaches? Money, right? And what does the Corpsman get in return? A contrived point of access into an otherwise private environment. This analysis, I think, is perhaps a bit cynical, and I'd have a hard time accusing a Peace Corpsman of being exploitative, but ultimately he is just like the rest of us. His is an invasive relationship in which one party, because of economic necessity, has no choice but to accept it on the other's terms. And this example also reveals where the potent admixture of self-righteousness and entitlement takes hold. The Corpsman can easily justify his action because of the "goodness" of his deed, while his counterpart lacks the economic leverage to question this. Whether or not it's a "good" thing for well-educated Westerners to encroach on native populations with what are certainly large-hearted intentions and to provide services that are generally accepted with enthusiasm and unequivocal gratitude is not my purpose to answer. What I only mean to say is that if for reasons of cultural preservation, preference of self-reliance, or whatever, certain elements of the native population do not think that modern irrigation systems or English language classes are a "good" thing, they are not formally entitled to say so. It is my firm opinion that unless a person, traveling for the sake of pleasure, or to perform a "good" deed, or for the sake of travel itself, is willing to come to a place like Southeast Asia, and completely immerse herself in the local way of life – learn the language, share the customs, experience the poverty – some degree of exploitation is inescapable. And it is this that I've come to accept.
Okay, so I'm a john, if in a more metaphorical, less vulgar way than one who pays for sex; though, the psychological consequences are the same. Finally coming to grips with as much has been a liberating experience. And there are three paths to walk at this point: I could desperately cling to some moral imperative, turn my back on this world, and return to more familiar surroundings. Or, I could do as I mentioned above, immerse myself in a local scene and be resigned to drab asceticism. Or, what I've chosen, do my best to accept the situation for what it is, to not dwell on moral concerns, to sympathize but not pity the penniless native, and if I'm to pay for the consumption of something private, to at least pay fairly. There is also the simple and universal approach of just trying to be a nice person – practicing patience, overlooking rude service, staying level-headed when a bus is late or a moto-driver steers you miles from your intended destination, not being cheap, keeping the voyeurism (the constant photo-snapping especially) to a minimum, and, I think most importantly, taking every opportunity to get to know the locals, share with them your life and letting them share theirs, beyond whatever economic trade-off precedes the relationship. But lastly, what I can't forget is that my presence here isn't innocent or neutral, and at the end of the day, I am no different than the beer-can crushing, cigarette tossing meatheads, or the hippy cheese-dick out to blame everyone else, or even the fanny-packing old woman who thinks that not getting free and prompt refills on her 20 cent cup of coffee is indicative of why these people will never be successful at business. From now on I'll just try to be a little more conscious of it.
