With a Wink, Pointing the Way to the 'Authentic'
Supharidh Hy
The New York Times
Sunday, December 18, 2005
Essay
With a Wink, Pointing the Way to the 'Authentic'
By MATT GROSS
(MATT GROSS is working on a book about border towns around the world and a
novel about 1950's Cambodia.)
RUBIES is a dark, popular wine bar on a fashionable street in Phnom Penh,
and on any given night there you can find foreign aid workers carping about
Cambodia and, next to them, other expatriates carping about foreign aid
workers. One evening at the end of March, however, my friend Patrick and I
arrived early enough to find Rubies empty, the wide sofa at the rear of the
bar unoccupied but for a guidebook forgotten by some hurried backpacker.
We ordered $1 cans of Beerlao and skimmed through the book, a bootleg copy
probably produced by the same mafia that floods Southeast Asia with
low-quality copies of "The Quiet American." It described a familiar
country, a former French colony emerging from decades of war to embrace its
tourism potential. The country's citizens, the book explained, "have at
last downed their weapons and are now welcoming overseas visitors with an
open arm."
This was a land "where traffic police wear face masks but surgeons rarely
do," where the white-sand beaches were produced by global warming and "a
huge spill from a tanker carrying laundry bleach," and where the cuisine is
"a fiery combination of chili, garlic and pepper to which food is
occasionally added." In short, a country very much like the one we were in.
But this was not a guide to Cambodia, or to Thailand, Vietnam or Laos. This
was Phaic Tan: "hot, humid and covered in lush vegetation ... the armpit of
Southeast Asia." To two sweaty travelers, it was hilarious.
Obviously, Phaic Tan is, well, fake. It is the creation of the Australian
comedians Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner and Rob Sitch, who in 2004 published
"Molvania: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry." (Released in Australia a
year ago, "Phaic Tan: Sunstroke on a Shoestring" will be available in the
United States in February.) The Jetlag Travel Guide series does not,
however, merely skewer Third World tourist destinations; the guidebook
genre itself is the target. The books are ostensibly written by such
experts as Philippe Miseree, who informs readers: "In researching this
book, I discovered a myriad of beautiful beaches and breathtaking sights.
I'm quite sure you will not find as many and if you do, remember - I was
there first."
This is, it has to be said, humor for a very narrow audience. Is the name
of Phaic Tan's capital, Bumpattabumpah, funny if you've never been stuck in
Bangkok traffic? I know that when I read "Molvania," I was unmoved by
typographical jokes like "Holidaj Injn." Perhaps it's because I've never
been to Eastern Europe, but I could see "Molvania" and "Phaic Tan" likewise
failing to wring a chuckle from travelers who set out for foreign lands
simply to see the sights, shop, eat well and relax on the beach.
These are pure goals, but for myself and many others, such naïve travel is
difficult, if not unimaginable. It's not that we don't enjoy the Louvre or
the pyramids, but that we seek to make our memories elsewhere. We trade
stories not about white sand but about red tape. We read local papers not
for news of home but for, say, a story about a teenage girl killed in a
swordfight at a wedding. And - surprise! - we love "The Daily Show With Jon
Stewart," whose "America (the Book)" was the "Phaic Tan" version of a high
school civics text. Call us jaded, but when we look at what
un-self-conscious tourism has wrought - the uprooting of local populations,
the homogenization of world culture - is it any wonder we're searching for
new ways to travel?
And is it any wonder publishers are marketing to us? Lonely Planet, for
instance, released its "Guide to Experimental Travel" in June. Developed by
a French artist and writer named Joël Henry, experimental travel is
supposed to be a playful, "pleasingly vague" approach to tourism, such as
arriving at a destination at sunset, exploring it all night, and departing
come morning.
Or you and a group of friends could visit a strange city wearing an unusual
token, like a red carnation. Or you could plan to take pictures of every
fire station you see on a trip. Or you could stay home. Seriously. The
guide offers one chapter, "Literary Journey," in which you "travel around
the world via a bookshelf," using geographical references from one book to
leap to another.
Unfortunately, "Experimental Travel" does not include any writing by my
friend Robert Reid, a Lonely Planet writer who blogged his trip across the
Russian far east (lonelyplanet.mytripjournal.com/robert_reid_in_russia).
His blog entries were the opposite of Mr. Henry's clinically clever
experiments. For Mr. Reid, the journey was less about forests and history,
and more about how regular people there live, whether that meant counting
how many men in each city had mustaches or profiling every Oleg and Tatiana
he met. One Oleg, after showing him around War Memorial Park in
Novosibirsk, admits he "eventually wants to run a Japanese/Italian/Chinese
restaurant - all macaroni." Not a bad way to see the country.
What I think Mr. Reid's blog, "Experimental Travel," and Phaic Tan all
share beyond speaking to my own weird travel desires is a common literary
antecedent: "You Shall Know Our Velocity," Dave Eggers's 2002 follow-up to
his best-selling memoir, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius."
The novel follows the adventures of two Americans who travel around
Senegal, Morocco, Estonia and Latvia, trying to give away $32,000. Their
efforts are worthy of a chapter in "Experimental Travel": In Marrakesh,
they bargain a merchant up from 60 dirham to 1,800 dirham for a Lucite key
chain. In Dakar, they plan to give $1,200 to a young man who guides them to
the town of Saly - until he demands $80 for the directions. And in their
most ridiculous attempt at charity, they try to tape a packet of money to a
donkey.
"You Shall Know" faced a lot of criticism when it came out. Why, some
reviewers asked, didn't they just give the money to charity? But to me, the
absurdity of their task was an entirely appropriate response to the
ubiquitous, crushing poverty you encounter when traveling.
WHEN you learn that the crippled beggars of Bangkok answer to the mafia,
when you see aid workers drive home to their villas in Toyota Land
Cruisers, when you are surrounded on a trip by people who could live a year
on what you paid for your plane ticket but who smile placidly as they
overcharge you for a kilo of mangosteens, when the crazy economics of
Tourism Itself grow too painful, then taping money to a donkey begins to
sound almost sane.
It also begins to feel like a whole new way to travel. After all, Mr.
Eggers's characters manage to see the countries they visit, to meet people,
to have new, irreproducible experiences. And in the end, that may be what
my hipster friends and I are chasing across the globe: authenticity, albeit
through irony.
And in doing so, we're just embracing a tradition that stretches back to "A
Sentimental Journey," Laurence Sterne's 1768 parody of the pompous travel
books of his day. The novel follows Yorick, an Englishman who sets off for
the Continent with neither purpose nor passport, and who manages to ignore
every historic sight along the way. Instead, he spends his time cadging
dinner invitations, flirting with filles de chambre and making
pronouncements about the French ("If they have a fault - they are too
serious").
Yet even this fool earns an authentic, or at least sentimental, experience.
In southern France, he is forced to seek aid at a farmhouse, where he
discovers a family of peasants sitting down to a simple meal of bread,
lentil soup and wine. They invite him in, feed him and then, mysteriously,
kick off their sabots and, to their gray-haired patriarch's hurdy-gurdy,
dance with an "elevation of spirit" that leaves Yorick in disbelief.
As the old man explains, this is simply "the best sort of thanks to heaven
that an illiterate peasant could pay." In other words, it's how the family
says grace, and for that moment their grace is the humbled Yorick's too.
It's the kind of moment that fools like me are forever seeking out, and
that we know no guidebook will ever lead us to.[End]