Why travel at all? For the frequent flier miles, obviously.
January 2nd, 2007
I’ve been spending every last penny on travel since I had a penny to spend, but I’m not sure why I do it.
I usually hate visiting important buildings, don’t want to shop at tourist shops, and eschew almost anything that smacks of experience-for-sale like tourist dances and village tours. (edited: What was I thinking? I love village tours and visiting buildings. So long as they’re a little weird, of course.) Plus, I absolutely detest sitting on a beach relaxing. Massages make me deeply uncomfortable. I think all this makes me a pretty difficult travel companion. Or at least so I’ve been told. Recently, in fact.
But I love to travel. Love to travel! I’m just not sure why.
I’m pretty sure I know *what* I like when I’m traveling. Here’s an example: When I was in Rhode Island over the summer, I dragged my poor mother off to the Lizzie Borden house in Fall River, Massachusetts, because I wanted to take the house tour. (At the time, I was writing about paranormal investigators, and had gotten interest in ghosts, murders, and other dastardly things.)
a photo of Lizzie Borden
who maybe killed her father and stepmother
but maybe didn’t
the tour guide said that Lizzie got a good inheritance
and lived out her
days as quite the bon vivant
You don’t think of a haunted house-cum-bed and breakfast as a place with heart, but this one’s great. The Lizzie Borden house tour guide clearly loves what she does, loves the Lizzie Borden story, loves answering questions about who really killed Lizzie’s father and step mother and whether the house is really haunted. And my mother and I had a fabulous time seeing the house and taking the tour (later, of course, I had nightmares, because the Lizzie Borden story is pretty scary and unsettling).
It could have been horrible - there could have been a lot of fakey or cynical aspects to the tour and the house; there could have been a cheezy and overpriced gift shop; it might have felt like a staged stupid thing. (Or, in a more frightening way, we might have seen a ghost.) But it wasn’t any of that. It was a weird, neat place and the people who run the Lizzie Borden house clearly do it with heart, strange as that sounds. You can just tell. And I loved going to the Lizzie Borden house for its intrigue, and its heart. Also, because I learned something real and true while I was there: that Lizzie Borden lived out her days as a bon vivant. That one terrific and unexpected piece of information made the whole trip for me.
***
So I know what I like: things that are interesting, fun, feel real, and tell you something about the world. Something trivial, something important, *something*.
and mangoseens
I LOVE mangosteens
mangosteens are definitely real
But what about when you can’t tell if the thing is real?
***
In Ubud, I walked into this shop selling primitive art from Timor. There were betelnut crushers made of bone, freaky masks made of wood and coconut shells, and a bracelet made of a dried squirrel carcass (I almost bought this bracelet for my poor mother, but managed to restrain myself).As I was looking around at the dark and frightening art, I began wondering: why would you buy this stuff? I don’t have a good answer, though this excellent article by Edward M. Bruner has a lot to say on tourists’ search for primitive people, cultures, and things to buy.
Meanwhile, on a drive through another village, I saw a factory specializing in primitive art. I don’t know if they make squirrel carcass bracelets (one can only hope!), but I do wonder if primitive art made in a factory is still appealing.And here is a big part of what I find confounding about Bali: I am such an ignoramus that I frequently can’t tell what is real and what is fake. This being unable-to-tellness leaves me perplexed and ambivalent, but also intrigued and excited.
***
Some things - like the bike tour Bike Baik run by a guy named Wayan who takes you by bike through all these villages and then to his house for a big delicious lunch cooked by his wife when the day is done - are definitely real, definitely run by people who care about what they’re doing, and definitely good.
this is Wayan who owns Bike Baik
he says that the words Bike Baik literally mean good bike
so you can see why I say that Bike Baik is indisputably good
it is a matter of linguistic logic
And some things - like the proliferation of hotels called Karma that are merely appropriating a Hindu word and its noncockfighting associations to sell luxury accommodations - are clearly cynical and inauthentic, if quite decadent. I’ll bet their massages are out of this world.
Other things are not so obviously one way or another - like all the goods for sale that look like they might be religious iconography but might just look like religious iconography, all the tourist-oriented performances of traditional dances, all the paintings that look quite alike painted by so many people at their houses in the morning before work.
An example: there is a famous restaurant in Bali called Indus. This is quite a delicious place with a kind of hokey “Balinese” decor - lots of carvings and girls in sarongs and whatnot. After dinner there one night, I saw one of the waitresses getting onto a motorbike. She had put on jeans. I guess I feel like Balinese people are playing dress-up with their culture - giving tourists a kind of “Arabian Nights” version of it, with sarongs and piped-in gamelan music. Why not let the waitresses wear jeans? Why have them wear trumped-up costumes of the place where they actually live? Is it Orientalism?
Or take the the gamelan:
this is an instrument in a gamelan orchestra
you hear the gamelan played a lot around Bali
live at performances, and on cassette recordings at tourist restaurants
I must admit that I didn’t really like the gamelan
the first time I heard it
I thought it sounded like deranged carnival music
(which it sort of does)
and it kind of weirded me out that waitresses would pop a gamelan cassette into the boom box whenever a tourist came into the restaurant
there are a lot of gamelan instruments for sale around Bali
this one was not for sale
it was outside a temple
waiting to be played
I finally heard the gamelan played live
at the Institute of Indonesian Arts in Denpasar
where students were practicing their instruments
and it sounded sort of awesome
someone said the gamelan takes getting used to
for me, I think it was finally hearing it live, and not on a boom box
and knowing that the people were playing because they wanted to play
not because they thought it was what tourists wanted to hear
this guy is playing another gamelan instrument
he is in an experimental alternative band called Balawan
that mixes traditional Balinese instruments
with things like twelve-string guitars
And this is part of why I find Bali confounding - but also very interesting. Because it’s really not easy to tell the real from the fake. And for me to relax and enjoy something, I really have to feel like it isn’t being faked. So I spend a lot of time in Bali trying to relax, which is sort of exhausting, but also sort of exciting.
ok, I hear what you’re saying
how does me going to an animal park in australia
and holding a stoned koala
have anything to do with authenticity?
the thing is that at an australian animal park
where you’re picking up stoned koalas
you know what you’re getting (and what you’re getting is a stoned koala)
and to me that makes all the difference
plus, I would always go see animals
anywhere, anytime, and especially in Australia
I just really love animals
***
However, if we can figure out what is good to do when traveling, none of this explains why I’ve blown every last cent traveling in the first place.
Having given this some thought while taking a depressing look at my bank account, I think my touch of ADHD is the best explanation. I am a curious person with a short attention span, so I like to move around a lot and see different things and talk to people about their lives. Also, I am by nature kind of a misfit, so being in a foreign place suits me. This is not to mention that I am a tiny bit lazy, much more likely to learn about a place by talking to people than by actually studying anything about it. Plus, I just like seeing new places. I feel pleasure in seeing new places.
And then there’s the the delight of the unexpectedly great encounter. Like the night that B. and I stumbled onto a 21-band Balinese punk show on the beach of Sanur a few years ago. We heard the music from down the beach, and walked over to see what was making that excellent noise. It turned out to be a whole bunch of mohawked boys playing their music, one band after another. We spent the night drinking Bintang with these guys, who told us about their bands and where they’d grown up and what they wanted to do with their lives and why there were no girls at the show (their parents wouldn’t let them out), and listening to totally awesome punk rock until some tourists in a nearby hotel called the cops and got the show shut down, and we went home feeling like we’d really seen and heard something special.
But I must admit: I especially like seeing new places when I am on assignment. I always prefer to visit a place when I’m writing about it than whan I’m going just to go or going for any other reason. It’s not about the money (well, it’s a little about the money) - it’s mostly that being on assignment gives my travels a purpose, and gives me a good excuse to ask people all sorts of personal questions that would otherwise seem rude. Also, perhaps, I worry that I am not doing anything very meaningful with my life. When I travel, I come across a lot of people who are very involved in their own lives - doing things that matter to them, doing those things passionately. And that makes me feel good about the world. So maybe that’s the answer: I travel because I’m trying to figure out how people find meaning in their lives?
***
I will end this digressive and pretentious little bloggy thing with what I think is one of the funniest and most illuminating travel stories ever, the moral of which is that when you are like me and think of yourself as the sort of feckless traveler who goes trotting off to places where you don’t speak the language, and you’re always relying on your extra-good ability to read people, you should have a lot of humility, too.
My non-Korean speaking friend JeCo was in Seoul with his Korean-speaking girlfriend, who is quite a bit younger than he is. They were at a bus stop together, when an old woman started smiling at him. He smiled back, and the old woman said something to his girlfriend. JeCo thought they were about to have a big friendly conversation and said to his girlfriend, “What did she say to you?”
His girlfriend said: “That you are too old for me.”