Travel Snark

My colleague in English, Elisabeth Piedmont-Marton, is currently in Vietnam working on some building projects in northern Vietnamese village. Her comments on how much she hates most travelers are pretty awesome:

I hate the fake raggedyness of the backpacker crowd, wearing their collection of tattered bracelets and “I went tubing in Laos,” t-shirts, but who never leave the safety of their movable cliques. I hate those stupid Hammer-Harem hybrid pants the women wear, imagining they’re dressing like some lost tribe (I’ve never seen a local person anywhere in Vietnam or Cambodia wear those things), the gesture of conspicuous authenticity illuminating their western privilege like white phosphorus. I hate the shirtless men with their dumb-ass tattoos and stupid hats and sunglasses (yes — precisely the kind of folks who should be given cheap beer and motorcycles!). I hate how rude they are to the Vietnamese people in cafes and hotels. I hate also their callowness and ignorance. The rudest of a pack of insufferable English women in Sapa, sat reading a Judy Blume novel in the lobby of the hotel while her friend occupied every other square inch of the place with her gear and yelled loudly into her cell phone to some hapless Vietnamese driver. If you’re old enough to travel in Southeast Asia, you are too old for Judy Blume: go home. And I hate myself because I can’t help but envy their youth and beauty and unfettered fucking fun and their easy ignorance of the responsibility to think more deeply and complexly about the world and their places in it.

You know who else I hate? The older richer tourists in search of some Asian Resortiana, some unholy spawn of Orlando-Vegas-Waikiki-Cancun, Canlandowaicun, if you will, with “such cheap prices” and “nice people.” A very angry woman from California with whom I shared a cab from the train station to the airport in Hanoi, yelled at a Vietnamese man (who was actually trying to rip us off, but not by much) to fuck off. Then she launched into her critique of the whole country: “Vietnam is too scammy. We’re going back to Thailand!” Because the combination of low-wage service workers, tourism, and wealthy business interests appears to be going quite well there, doesn’t it?.Here in Hoi An, the men have their suits made for them and while the women get spa treatments, then they eat steaks and sea bass with knives and forks in fancy restaurants. Soon the central coast will be lousy with these people, although the actual residents of Hoi An town need hardly worry that they’ll spend more than a few hours here in its hot dusty streets filled with actual Vietnamese people. The road from Danang that runs south along the coast, past the beach now named for an American television show, past the beach where decades ago American helicopter pilots sometimes dipped the bellies of their machines low enough in the shallow waves to wash out the blood and mud and body parts, that road now blocks the view of the beach and is lined on both sides by enormous walled golf resorts where people can experience the exotic world of Vietnam without getting any of it on them. When these places are all open, beautiful Vietnamese women will wear ao dai and serve tea and cocktails, and small, wiry men will carry huge bags of clubs over what used to be sand dunes, descendents of the men who carried artillery piece by piece up and down mountain paths more than 35 years ago. On the day I came in from the airport, I saw an old woman in a conical hat stooped over with a short handled broom sweeping the sand and dust from a small patch of St. Augustine grass outside the wall.

I pretty much agree with all of this. Although I haven't been to Vietnam, I've traveled fairly extensively in Asia and Latin America. Elisabeth's slam on both kinds of tourists is pretty accurate in my experience. The backpacker crowd amuses me. Certainly you meet some really cool, smart, culturally sensitive, and interesting people traveling around like this. But you also meet packs of drunken English stumbling from Irish pub to Irish pub, bemoaning the heat and the (delicious!) food, talking about whether Chelsea or Liverpool is the better football team, on holiday but not experiencing anything they couldn't back home except for a warm beach. You see western men and women of all nations who travel primarily to have sexual experiences with brown people. You see people treat the locals like garbage. You hear racist assertions about the superiority of white people (In Indonesia, I once heard a European guy state during some transportation confusion that this was evidence the climatic theory of race was true).

What's interesting is how few of these obnoxious backpackers are Americans. There's a reason for this--Americans are afraid to travel. So when most ugly Americans travel outside the country, they go to Cancun or some heavily guarded Caribbean beach. You just don't see a lot of Americans in Indonesia or Bolivia or Nicaragua. And when you do, more often than not they are pretty cool. But the ugly English and ugly Norwegians and ugly Italians--they are in Thailand and Vietnam and Brazil. It's not that Americans are somehow better travelers than Europeans (hardly!!!) but they are more self-selective, making it easier for me to avoid the ones I don't want to see.

The second variety of tourists however--the wealthy golfers--that's a different story. Rich Americans love this kind of tourism. My favorite grotesque example of the wealthy golfer space is the Costa Rican resort Los Suenos. The first time I traveled in Costa Rica, this place had ads and brochures everywhere. It was classic--it was all rich white people golfing and catching huge fish. The only Costa Ricans were service workers. Throughout Mexico and Central America, wealthy Americans are moving to exclusive communities, completely isolating themselves from potentially unpleasant interactions with locals, and essentially engaging in a new form of individualized and corportatized imperialism. I don't know who these people are in Vietnam, whether they are Americans or Australians or Europeans. All three probably. I do know that a lot of older Americans are interested and amused to visit the nation that caused them so much grief in their youth.

Am I a better kind of tourist? Who knows. I do try to respect local cultures, try new things, not get angry when things don't go my way, and deal with heat and mosquitoes and unpleasant toilets the same as local people. Does that mean I am not the member of some imperialist project by my presence in a La Paz or Kuala Lumpur market? Probably not. Tourism is weird. All I can say is that some tourists, and by some I mean a whole hell of a lot, really suck.

Writing this also makes me very sad that I am not traveling this summer, though I was at a conference in Dublin earlier this month. So I should stop whining. But I wish I was in Vietnam right now.

More Terrible Travel Writing: Costa Rica

Our love of travel writing here is well known. It's really not hard to find the whole format generally offensive when the New York Times (again) runs stories like this one on Costa Rica's Caribbean coast. In a narrative that is all too common in travel writing, Gisela Williams extols the virtues of the Caribbean for serving as an "untamed" playground for (white) foreigners, where the nature and beauty are there only for tourists, and the citizens virtually disappear.

Williams is right about the beauty of the coast. I spent several months in Costa Rica and traveled throughout the country, and when others tell me they're going, I most strongly recommend seeing the Caribbean Coast. It has amazing beaches (including black-sand), there are reefs where you can snorkel, the forest is beautiful, and the food (more Caribbean than Spanish) is amazing - indeed, it was the best food I ate in Costa Rica. Williams talks about this beauty, but to her, it's not something that the locals have done a great job in protecting and keeping alive; it's a static environment "For soul-searching world travelers...to plant roots and stay," and an extremely expensive one at that. One of the hotels she mentions has rates that "start at $200 a night, and includes breakfast." Wow - breakfast included? For only $200? I'm sorry - if you're spending that much money on hotel anywhere in Costa Rica, you are either A) out of your fucking mind, or B) so racist and frightened of locals anywhere that you're willing to shell out that much money by jerks who know they can prey on your xenophobic fear by offering you "security" and "luxury." Williams also talks to some of the people who own these hotels, quoting: a French ex-pat and luxury hotel owner; two American ex-pats who own a fancy restaurant; two more American ex-pats from Minnesota; and one local who was a tour guide.

What - couldn't interview more of the locals? I'd say that's to be expected of American travel writers writing about most countries, but there is no excuse on the Costa Rican Caribbean - nearly everybody speaks Spanish and English. I traveled there when I lived in Costa Rica; you can't avoid English if you try. Indeed, Afro-Caribbeans and race in Costa Rica are inextricably linked; the coast is (not coincidentally) the poorest part of the country. I'd frequently talk to Ticos in San Jose who simultaneously insisted that there was no racism in Costa Rica, and then would talk horribly about the "Caribbean coast" and how "caribenos" (i.e., black people) were causing all of the problems in the rest of the country. And in the time I spent there (I stayed in Cahuita, just north of Cahuita national park; Williams stayed in the more-expensive and "touristy" Puerto Viejo de Talamanca, south of the park), I only saw locals, and had some great conversations with them about the area, reggae, the food, just anything and everything. And I realize that that may sound patronizing on my part (trust that it may have been naive, but was not patronizing), but these conversations were almost always accidental, and begun by locals who were pleased to see a new face in the village; in short, they were more than willing to share their knowledge, culture, stories, and opinions - suffice to say, their take on racism in Costa Rica was much different from those in the valley who denied there was racism in Costa Rica. And you didn't even have to work too hard to learn these things. Indeed, it was those kinds of encounters that made my time in Cahuita one of the best times I had in Costa Rica.

And yet, Williams decides not to include any of the locals (to whom she could have easily spoken, as the language barrier would be nearly non-existent) or mention anybody other than the man whose profession revolves around entertaining gringos like her. Even she's aware of this. It would be one (still typically offensive) thing if Williams hadn't encountered this, but she herself comments on the number of "English-speaking Afro-Caribbeans" living there. She's knows they're around; she just isn't interested in including their views, opinions, and voices in her narrative of the Caribbean coast in Costa Rica, which is pretty absurd when you stop and realize that the majority of the Caribbean coast's residents are Afro-Caribbean. There was absolutely no excuse for the writer to not talk to/cite some of the actual locals, rather than French and American ex-pats. But this is travel writing at its finest - places are only exciting for their "exotic" qualities, and the locals are just another part of the scenery, without their own voices, providing services just for tourists.

Gross Travel Writing

It seems that southern Mexico brings out the worst in American travel writing. First, there was the New York Times "budget" (which for them means spending only $100 a night on lodging) travel writer's trip to Chiapas over the last couple of months, which is basically an exercise in travel writing as colonialism. I was so angry about these articles that I couldn't even coherently write about them, which is why I didn't. Now we have Eileen Ogintz writing about Oaxaca in the same way. She is so excited to meet the local artisans, such as this woman:

Talk about loving your work. Dona Sophia Reyes, 88, is a potter who works seven days and she hasn't had a day off since she was eight. Dona Sophia welcomed us into her studio and home in San Bartelo Coyotepec, a village about 25 minutes from Oaxaca City.

Um, she might love her work, but there's a reason people don't take days off for 80 years. They face starvation if they don't work. If you were forced to work your job everyday for eight decades, would you like it if people said it was all because you loved working? I doubt it. See, Dona Sophia can't take expensive vacations to different parts of the world and then romanticize all the people she runs into, erasing their poverty through describing them as quaint and cute.

This doesn't mean that we shouldn't enjoy our time when we travel. But we also need to be aware of poverty and social problems and try to think about our experiences through those lenses. Oaxaca is one of the poorest states in Mexico and while it is beautiful and charming, it is also rife with social problems, an oppressive governor (mentioned in the story but only in the sense that it has hurt the region's tourist industry), entrenched poverty, and massive migration to the U.S. I wonder if Ogintz would find these Oaxacans so darn charming if they were picking lettuce or standing on street corners hoping for a job as a day laborer?

The post is also laughable for how Ogintz acts a shill for the travel company Austin-Lehman, mentioning their name throughout the article (and least 5 times) and claiming:

We couldn't have arranged for experiences like this on our own. We needed a company like Austin-Lehman to lead the way, though such adventures don't come cheap.

That's bullshit. I've been to Oaxaca. It is not hard to arrange adventures out there, and my Spanish pretty much sucks. I wonder how much Austin-Lehman paid her for this? Oaxaca is as set up for tourists as anywhere in interior Mexico.

Travel writing is one of those genres that is usually either really great or really terrible. This definitely falls in the latter category.

Updated Pointless Maps

I haven't updated these in like 2 years and have done a decent amount of traveling since then. In a desperate attempt to put off grading, I might as well do it now. So here we go.


visited 42 states (84%)
Create your own visited map of The United States or determine the next president



visited 13 states (5.77%)
Create your own visited map of The World or determine the next president

Never Take A Bolivian Train

This is my advice to all of you. Bolivian trains suck.

We were trying to leave Santa Cruz for one last big adventure before we come back to the US on Thursday. We wanted to see the old Jesuit missions in eastern Bolivia, like the movie The Mission. We were told that the train was the best way to get to the coolest town, San Jose de Chiquitos.

I'd always wanted to take the train on one of my trips to the developing world, but I never had. So I was kind of excited about it.

That was a mistake.

The train was supposed to leave at 12. It was delayed first for 30 minutes. Then until 3. The train showed up and then we sat on it for an hour. It finally took off. 2 hours later we had gone about 35 miles, to the first town on the line. Then the track broke. We sat there until about 9 when I was finished. We decided to bail on the entire trip. I think the train finally took off an hour later or so. It was supposed to be a 6 1/2 hour trip. By the time we left, we were already at over 9 hours and we were, at most, 20% of the way there.

I was inspired to end the experience when we were waiting and suddenly my mind came to the great American philosopher/entertainer/chicken magnate Kenny Rogers. In perhaps his most famous dialectical opus, "The Gambler," Rogers opined

"You've got to know when to hold them
Know when to fold them
Know when to walk away
And know when to run."

I am not quite on the same level as Kenny, so I can't quite grasp the relevance of holding and folding to our situation. And I don't know if this was quite the running situation. But it sure as hell was time to walk away. And we did, returning this morning after a night in one of the worst rooms I have ever stayed in. And that's saying something given the time I was on the Thai-Burmese border and I walked into the bathroom and came face to face with a giant spider the size of my head. I'm not sure how we'll spend the last few days in Bolivia now, but I can guarantee you, it will not be on the train.

Travel, Environment, and Class

While I certainly recognize the need to provide readers with alternatives to their gas guzzling and environmentally wasteful ways, sometimes the writers at the Times yesterday need a serious muzzle to mask their amazing ignorance of class and common sense.

To be fair, many of the pieces were good. Robert Reich rightfully discusses how high fuel prices are basically a regressive tax on the poor while Nicole Belson Goluboff discusses the future of telecommuting.

But Michael Paterniti's piece was atrocious. His solution to saving fuel: do what he did--give up that road trip you planned to Spain and go across the bay to a coastal island in Maine.

Wow--that's really helpful. He must be speaking to a solid 1% of Americans with that advice. What if you live in Texas or Kansas or Wyoming or Alabama? How do you travel from there without burning too many fossil fuels? Sorry, we don't have beautiful coastal islands 15 minutes away. And even if we did, 95% of us would be too poor to afford their $200 a night hotels.

I don't want to make a big deal out of one short column. But Paterniti again demonstrates how out of touch the Times can be with many Americans. Like the style and travel sections, these "solutions" speak only to the rich. All too often, the paper sees the rest of America as this curious thing to occasionally be reported on, but rarely to be seriously engaged.

Reading List for Bolivia Trip

On Tuesday, I am flying to New York for a week and then to Bolivia for 5 weeks. I have referenced it here before.

In the spirit of continuing the interesting literature conservations of late, I thought I'd post my choices for books to take. Note that it's a lot. I read really fast, which is both a blessing and a curse. It's good for work. In fact, it was in dealing with graduate school that I learned to read fast out of necessity. On the other hand, that means I have to take a lot of books when I travel, which is a pain when you are backpacking. Theoretically, I could find some English language bookstores or sometimes at hostels there are book exchanges. Even with this list, I may have to take advantage of these options. But I hope not.

Anyway, your opinions and suggestions for substitutions are most welcome.

1. The Classic Slave Narratives--This is the Signet version that you may have been assigned for a class at some point. I've read the Douglass but not the other three. Slave narratives are such compelling literature. Note that this will be the closest thing to work I am bringing.

2. Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
3. Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt
4. Tadeusz Konwicki, A Dreambook for Our Time
5. Abdelrahman Munif, Cities of Salt
6. Javier Marias, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me
7 . Tomas Eloy Martinez, Santa Evita
8. Raymond Chandler, Stories and Early Novels. The Library of America edition. It includes The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, and The High Window, as well as some shorter pieces.

The goal for travel reading for me is that it be a lot of pages that doesn't take up a lot of room or weigh a lot. Thus the amount of "classic" lit I'm taking--the slave narratives, Chandler, Lewis. I am combining this with newer stuff that tends to be international. I've read some Marias before and recommend him pretty highly. I've never read Konwicki, Munif, or Martinez. Or shamefully, Lewis for that matter. Also, these are all books I've had on my shelf for years and have never read or haven't read in 10 years in the case of Morrison.

Historical Image of the Day

John Ledyard, early American traveler. First white American to set foot on the west coast of the continent. He attempted to walk around the world, but Catherine of Russia had him arrested and deported. Got venereal disease in Tonga. Died in Cairo of dysentery in Cairo in 1789.

No Such Thing

CNN and Sunset magainze offers us 10 "earth-friendly spring flings." Uh, there's no such thing. Flying to California or Hawaii is incredibly damaging to the environment.

Now, that doesn't mean I'm not going to do it. I will sacrifice a hell of a lot. It will take a lot though for me not to travel. But can we at least be honest. Flying to California and then renting a car to drive around is not earth friendly, even the wines are organic. Really, the organic thing is far less important than the fuel consumption.

Meanwhile, the trip to Park City is green because you can take the shuttle up there from Salt Lake City. Big whoopdie do.

Bangkok

The worst thing about Bangkok is the most well-known in the West--the sex trade. It's definitely there, but as a traveller, you can also avoid it pretty easily. Or you used to be able to. This article discusses the expansion of the sex trade on Khaosan Road, the traditional backpacker haven.

Khaosan Road is not a very nice place really. It's cheap and that's the main reason to stay there when travelling through Bangkok. It's great in some ways, particularly the wonderful street food located there. But it also represents the worst of the backpacker culture--dredlocked and shirtless French guys in their mid 30s hitting on any woman within shouting distance, groups of backpackers discussing different ways to save every last dime, Europeans claiming to be getting away from home while sitting with their friends from home watching American movies blasted out of every bar. But for all that, you could avoid the sex trade pretty easily there. It's hardly surprising that prostitution is expanding there with Thailand's international reputation, increasingly prosperity, and cheap prices compared to the more upscale districts. But it's also a bummer because it will be harder to justify staying there next time I'm in town.

On the other hand, once you've spent a few days in Bangkok, there really isn't very many good reasons to go back to that sweltering, polluted, urban expanse if you can help it. So maybe I'll figure out a way to avoid it all together.