Travel agency

~ joncarrollprose

My first exotic trip was to Nepal. It was our honeymoon, and Tracy wanted to trek in the Himalayas, and I wanted to go anywhere with Tracy. We were five weeks on the road to Everest Base Camp, including four on the uphill (we started three weeks before Lukla). My knee hurt for much of the trip, and I lost 33 pounds (ten more than were entirely necessary), and I encountered 3.5 guaranteed miraculous landscapes every single day.

When we got home, we were eager to tell our story. It included 10 days in Thailand and month in India (!). I did not realize that travel was a competitive sport.

(Already I am engaging in it. Note the apparently harmless “three weeks before Lukla,” which is competitive talk meaning “we’d been on our trek for 21 days before the airport that all you losers undoubtedly flew into to start your boutique, no worries, entirely color-coordinated trek-like experience.” The more hardships you endured, the more times you were the only Caucasians within 50 miles, the more points you get. Those are the rules of Travel, a game of risk.)

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the honeymooner

So someone would ask about my trip, and I’d say, “well, we flew into Kathmandu, and at the airport –“

“Oh we were in Kathmandu in 72, before the tourists, and we met this interesting monk at Swayambhu, and the next thing you know we were in that little house in Jeewanpur, praying to crows and eating second-hand lentils and then, what was it, dear?”

“The flood?”

“That’s not it.”

“The earthquake?”

“Yes, that’s it. And the goat pregnancy.”

And there goes my amusing story about suitcases and monkeys. That might be fine at family gatherings, but among the travel-obsessed, it doesn’t even make the anecdote Top 100.

It is a status thing. My friendship group of course rejects status maneuvering of any kind. We have modest cars and modest clothing and a distinct abhorrence of gaudy display.  So when we talk about cheese, or water-recycling devices, or fabrics woven by the nicest Guatemalan women — it’s just our form of gold toilets and infinity pools. Be kind to us; we’re trying to have it both ways.

Not that I stopped traveling. I’ve been to (he said modestly) all seven continents. Full moon at the Taj Mahal; dawn at Borobodur; sunset on Kauai. Walking with penguins; talking with Maharajahs; eating with French people. Tasmania and the Bungle Bungles and the temple at Karnak. Oh, I have cred. I’ve even been to Oman, which is useful to drop into a conversation at dangerous junctures.

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Color coordinated tourists, looking the wrong way

But lately, oddly, travel has made me uncomfortable. Not Montreal, not New York, but…

Last October, we were in the Argentinian mountain town of Juyjuy (pronounced Hoo-hooey)(really). We walked around, down the wind-swept streets (this is the high desert, the altiplano) and up to the cathedral, and we saw native men and women with blankets stretched out and their handiwork on display. We politely looked around, never intending to buy. I looked at the impassive young man sitting in front of his jewelry, and I figured he harbored more than a little rage in his heart. But he wanted me to buy his stuff. This is, I believe, the dominant dynamic in most of the world. They will smile and nod and flatter, and maybe you will overpay for something, and then everyone will feel good for 38 seconds.

Being darned experienced, I had seen this before, in India and Roratonga, in Egypt and Bali and Papua New Guinea. (Yes, I’m country-dropping; old habits etc.). The locals sell colorful tokens of their culture, little resting cats in Cairo and little waving cats in China. And someone in Chicago or Edinburgh has a thingie that their children will throw away in 30 years.

You know what this dynamic feels like? Colonialism. Rich white people appropriating the climate or the topography or the culture of a nation of brown-skinned people. It’s like those people are saying: “Since you’ve fucked up our sustainable economy and pillaged our natural resources, let us service you by building hotels and restaurants and clothing stores and even the temporary bleachers at our colorful Feast of Santa Victoria, where two hundred tourists with selfie sticks follow the Holy Urn to the Inner Chancel.”

Which, among other things, screws up the tourist fantasy. You envision yourself staring sadly at Mona Lisa or strolling the streets of historic Florence or viewing the famous falls at Iguazu, and you get there and there are people! people! people! blocking your view or your way, PEOPLE just like you, cameras ready and longing for Experience. The Experience is not ideal when there’s a tour group of 22 German people talking in that beefy German way, no disrespect. You’re better off wandering the shoreline at Point Pinole.

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Day of the Dead. Note cameras.

Tourism for commercial purposes is as old as the Hittites. The British started the Grand Tour in the 1660s, a high-minded endeavor aimed at broadening the cultural horizons of the wealthy and insulated — and perhaps securing a suitable bride or groom. This kind of tourism is not unknown today.

So then adventurous Brits began to visit the heathen countries, perhaps because the Brits had conquered so many of them. Riding on camels was considered de rigueur. Travelers who stayed for a while were usually in the employ of the British government, gathering information which was of enormous use during World War I.

But now the goal of travel is “relaxation,” usually followed by “adventure” of the most sturdy and anodyne kind.  Zip lines in the jungle. Kite surfing in the lagoon. Cocktail cruises to Torture Island, now renamed Treasure Island. Or a three-hour bus ride to God’s Back Yard, with its colorful spiky things.

It’s amazing how universal our national approval for travel is. Some go to Orlando; some go to Paris. Even poor people travel, although not recreationally. Travel is a sign you’ve arrived. You’ve got an outside cabin on the Carnival cruise ship Valor, or that little house in Ubud behind the shed where the puppet-makers work (quietly, quietly) late into the night. And nothing goes quite as planned and you’re too hot and too homesick, and by God you will keep doing it again, no matter how harrowing the last trip was.

And, even though we are woke as all get out, we ignore the carbon footprint of our travels. I sometimes want to say, “so you’re driving a Prius and also flying to Italy, and that actually makes no sense at all.” To say nothing of what our well-shod footprints are doing to the erosion profile of our exotic destination.

We’re supposed to approve when the economy of a foreign government turns to tourism. It’s a softer use. We’re keeping them from lopping off their mountaintops or despoiling their watershed, and pointing them towards a more eco-friendly lifestyle, with lovely chemicals that will render harmless our redolent tourist poop. Yes, they can exchange their rich native culture for being a barista or a dishwasher in a shiny tourist hotel/nightclub.

Training people to be servile yet cheerful does its own kind of damage to an ecosystem.

 

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Interesting traffic patterns: Always a plus.

And maybe we emerge from our tourist bubble and take a walk around town, or at least the parts down by the shore or in the somewhat threadbare arboretum. We might find a way to connect with locals on a person to person basis.

Here’s a revealing example of that cultural exchange:

“I just love your goat pasta.”

“Thank you, sir. Thank you. May I refill your cola glasses? How about a glass of wine? On me, sir, of course. On the home, as you say. And my wife’s special duckweed ice cream that her grandmother taught her. Please, sir. With my compliments.”

“No, no, my friend, that’s all right. And please give our best to your wife. We’re Americans, you know.”

They hate us, you know. They hate us even worse now that Trump is in power, but they hate us anyway. We’ve dominated the narrative. We’ve pushed everyone else around. We’re bullies, although of course ever so nice in person. That is, until we can’t get service at the goddamed bar.

And the more sophisticated tourist cities have found a way to confine the tourists to one area of the city. In San Francisco, it’s the northeast corner of the city where, if things got tough, we could all link arms and push them into the sea.

Besides, you know what tourists look like. The half-folded maps, the propensity for group photos in front of things, the reddened knees and the slumped shoulders, all decked out in specialty leisurewear often adorned with slogans about where their parents went and what lousy thing they brought back.

Have you ever glimpsed a tourist and thought, “God, I want to look like that.”?

No you haven’t. And yet, you know you have looked like that. You have peered at street signs wondering where the hell you were, and you have arrived at the museum on the day it is closed, and you have shared a $22 cocktail in the roof bar that looks out on the other roof bars. And I’m not even going to touch on the most humiliating thing you’ve done because that’s between you and your God, thanks to the non-disclosure agreement.

I was recently offered a lovely trip to Pakistan. Tracy is of course going because that’s the kind of gal she is. I mostly didn’t go because I didn’t want to go to Pakistan, but I also remember those folks with the blankets in the town square at Juyjuy. I envision myself, gray beard, baseball cap, shoes that cost four months salary for the average Argentinian worker, peering down at the beadwork and the bracelets, mute, neck-scratching, wondering idly if we’d make it to the hotel before dark — yeah, that guy. I don’t actually want to be that guy.

I can avoid being that guy by staying in a culture for a year or two, learning how to survive and prosper in a place with very different assumptions. I could shut up and try hard. But, seriously, what fun is that? Where’s the zip line, the vista point, the interpretive center? Where’s that great guide we call “Charlie” because we can’t pronounce his real name? And, by the way, where’s my fucking moment of transcendence? Do you know what airfare costs these days?

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You can have fun anywhere.

Photographs by Tracy (a lot of these pictures are badly scanned slides) Johnston

Routine maintenance and bird wrangling by Michelle Mizera

 

 

 

46 thoughts on “Travel agency”

  2. The guilt. The guilt.
    I like tourists.I do not hate people very much richer than I. Yes, we are a problem, but are we going to crank ourselves into the ground?
    Have you murdered anyone? Robbed anyone?

    -Although come to think of it, we have, nationally… Geez, now you’ve got me doing it.

    Liked by 2 people

  4. I love you, jon. I rely on you to point out all the ironies. I love your confessions; they hit a common nerve. and how capable you are to articulate the shared bitterness of our existence at this point in time.

    we’re going to st. petersburg, finland, and estonia in early september.

    Liked by 1 person

    2. Pretty funny, Jon. That’s why I like to do my tourism in countries that share more or less the same level of prosperity as the US. It’s possible to be a touristic jerk in London, but it’s harder.

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    1. Satire, like humor, is hard. Art Hoppe did it well, but he also made sure only an idiot would mistake it for serious prose.

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    3. It is funny — very funny — and like all good humor, comes bearing a truckload of Truth. I haven’t trotted the globe like you and Tracy — you would beat me into a bloody pulp with one hand tied behind your back in any travel-anecdote contest — but I’ve been up and down Mexico a fair bit over the years, and similar dark, colonial thoughts plagued me at the time. Once, when I confessed to a much more worldly friend that traveling in Mexico made me feel like a rich person, which I found distinctly uncomfortable, she offered a simple remedy:

      “Go to Switzerland — I promise you won’t feel rich over there.”

      Touche’.

      I still managed to have some fun south of the border, but as you put it so succinctly, we “participate in the common hypocrisy.”

      Boy Howdy, ain’t that the truth…

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  8. great column I just turned 74 and I don’t seem to want to go go go I went went went …..hawaii 3 months …..mexico 2yrs… geneva switzerland 2 yrs ……hawaii agin 2 yrs …then last year a week for a wonderful Family wedding in Kanehoe north shore oahu

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  9. I’m barely able to handle without screaming what the Trumpettes are doing to all of us; but then to read all this guilt stuff? Maybe you two need to get into a battered old truck [take along a hound, but for sure make sure the radio doesn’t work] and drive across the country and eat in local diners and hear local troubles and joys — troubles I’m sure you’ll find, but Jon, don’t forget the joys! They’re out there, they’re genuine, most of them don’t cost much if anything. And when you get back to the Bay, maybe you’ll spot small joys here and there. Rooting for you! [Try to get a truck that doesn’t have California plates…]

    Liked by 1 person

  12. I’m glad you saved me from being the person who had to bring up the carbon footprint thing.

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  13. Well, I share some of your feelings when I travel (not much desire to do so now….aging process)
    and see people sitting on the ground selling stuff I don’t want, for example, and lots of other things you mentioned. And I’m not talking satire; its just the way I see the world. To throw in another subject, like the huge news item about the poor unfortunate infant in Grt. Britain who is terminally ill and the parents want to bring him to US for experimental treatment which is against the law in G.B.
    While I feel sad for the parents all this fuss brings up the thousands of kids in refugee camps arount the world, the many others being bombed and so forth and so on.
    Gee, I think I can outdo you……..
    Carol

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  14. Wonderful Jon.

    Just back from a month in Europe (2 weeks of golf with longtime Scottish friends, and then a tourist style visit to Italy replete with guides and tours).

    But your piece also reminded me of a back packing exploration of the ruins of Mexico and a week on a secluded island with Lacandon Indians and walking trails with Chicleros.

    There is a difference between “traveling” and actually being some place.

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  15. Hi Jon …

    Great piece … I couldn’t agree more.

    An old friend of mine (a journalist too) once said about reggae: “Down with the white man — but please buy my album first.”

    Clay Kallam

    On Wed, Jul 12, 2017 at 3:03 PM, Jon Carroll Prose wrote:

    > joncarrollprose posted: “My first exotic trip was to Nepal. It was our > honeymoon, and Tracy wanted to trek in the Himalayas, and I wanted to go > anywhere with Tracy. We were five weeks on the road to Everest Base Camp, > including four on the uphill (we started three weeks before Lu” >

    Liked by 2 people

  16. Yes, this is definitely how I felt last summer in South Africa, being driven around by a Zulu man with obviously a university education in biology or something related, seeing animals with other white people. I know, tourism provides a lot of cash to the economy, but it made me feel a little dirty from my participation in it.

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  18. I am finally facing the fact that I just turned 84 and I don’t care if I ever travel again. I’m from the R.I. so there was that. Then there was Europe and Panama and Hawaii and Florida and the horrors recently of Las Vegas and Reno. Grand Canyon was worth it. I have done cross country trains quite a bit. Better than planes but takes too long. So finally I get to admit, I don’t want to travel anymore, thank you very much.

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  21. Well Jon, Point Pinole isn’t going anywhere, and it ain’t bad. Now that they moved the parking lot you don’t even get the view of Parchester Village so you can avoid (maybe) reflecting on how the Great and Good City of Richmond sited a segregated subdivision for Black shipyard workers next door to a dynamite factory.

    Liked by 1 person

  22. This may be my favorite essay you have ever written, and a brave one at that because you are talking honestly to (y)our own tribe. And it’s not satire so much as darkly humorous observation, and I agree with every darned point you make. I have one bucket list trip I want to make, which is to go to Istanbul and take public ferries, east, west, north and south, for a year, and document the experience. Not cruise ships, not sailboats, but ferries that take people to someplace they are actually needing to go for some reason. In fact, that’s what I usually do with tourists in San Francisco: make them jump on a ferry to Oakland or Larkspur or even Sausalito which I know how to navigate like a local.

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  23. I’d be interested in a column on the same subject from Tracy’s point of view…. We live 7 months a year on a 17.5 m replica Dutch barge, mostly in France. It’s not a vacation, it’s a life.

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  24. When younger, (there is much license and acceptance in Youth…) in Mexico, vendors sold delicious things to eat.

    I remember one taco stand where the food was so delicious, I returned again and again, and the lady making/selling recognized me, smiled at me, and appreciated me and that I really liked her food.

    I didn’t feel at all guilty about paying her for what she was selling.

    I don’t think she resented me.

    I’d like to think that, every now and then, at least for a while, we both had a story to tell about a traveler she remembers and the vendor he remembers.

    We Americans, in particular, are sorely lacking in Perspective – the sort of perspective that comes from seeing how other people live and learning about their culture.

    A little less ethnocentricity is good for us.

    Just be sure you share good things about our culture in exchange for the good things in the culture of others.

    Next stop, Willoughby.

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  25. The view out my (hotel) window is of the mountains of Oppdal and it’s beautiful. But so often when I am traveling I look around and think “I like this place, but I would LOVE it, if only we weren’t here”

    It is a catch 22 that by actually “going” we make it not the experience we were hoping for…

    Liked by 1 person

  27. Love the mention of the tourist bubble. Many years ago in the Navy I had a friend who went to McDonald’s in every port we visited. Hong Kong? McDonald’s. Yokohama? McDonald’s. Even before those days I went to a college that offered a winter break class called Trekking in Nepal. I didn’t understand the appeal until a friend of mine returned with pictures of himself on horseback with branches of marijuana plants over his head. It was a different friend, though, so I didn’t find out about McDonald’s in Nepal. Damn.

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  29. Good column. Now that my body and airplane seats have simultaneously become less flexible, my favorite destination is West Marin. All those other reasons too.

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  34. Jon, two things. Firstly, I adore your use of the word fuck. I am afraid to use it in blogs. Secondly, I actually wore a “Keep It in the Ground” (a la #nodapl) t-shirt on Business Class 787 Dreamliner flight to Shanghai last year. Talk about irony. And I met you and Tracy in this Spring at the SFMOMA. So nice to see you person.

    Liked by 1 person

  35. We live in a touristy area in California and have coined a new word to describe some of the visitors: Tourons.
    Combination of tourist and moron.

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  36. We live in a touristy area in California and have coined a new word to describe some of the visitors: Tourons.
    Combination of tourist and moron.

    Like

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