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Goodbye, Khao San Road | page 1, 2, 3
In his 1988 book "Video Night in Kathmandu," Pico Iyer called tourists "foot
soldiers of the new invasion." At the time, he was referring to the
expansion of Western culture into once-isolated parts of Asia, but his
observation also underscored a simple fact: that Westerners of moderate
means were increasingly able to access and enjoy less expensive parts of the
world. "Anyone with a credit card," Iyer observed, "could become a lay
colonialist." Not long after Iyer wrote this, the fears and assumptions of the Cold War
were abruptly rubbed out and replaced with a phenomenon dubiously dubbed
the End of History. Suddenly, after 70-odd years of world wars and
cold wars and great depressions, the world's frontiers began to open up in
an unprecedented manner. New travel destinations sprang up in places like
Romania and Namibia and Cambodia. Iyer's tourist "foot soldiers" quietly
began a revolution based upon a single screaming secret: that anyone with a
bit of initiative and a decent guidebook could afford to leave home and seek
out their own variation of paradise. The problem, of course, was that it didn't take long for these brand-new
paradises to become very crowded places. Moviegoers who watch "The Beach"
will see this notion illustrated in a very vivid manner. But beyond aesthetics, the middle-class travel revolution wreaked havoc on
our accepted ideas of exclusivity. Traditionally, international leisure
travel had been a luxury of the rich, and independent shoestring travel had
been a counterculture franchise. However -- as more and more 18- to 35-year-olds made their way into the sleepy, inexpensive corners of the world
-- the once-cozy alternative leisure-class became socially crowded. Since
countercultures tend to replace conventional hierarchies with more arbitrary
ones, this resulted in an ill-defined (and sometimes hostile) protective morality that pervades backpacker circles to this day. This also is vividly illustrated in "The Beach." Currently, much of this puritanical chagrin is focused on a budget-travel
publishing company called Lonely Planet. First written on a kitchen table
in Melbourne more than 25 years ago, Lonely Planet started out as a
photocopied travel newsletter and has since grown into the largest
independent travel publisher in the world. Sometimes referred to as the
"Backpacker's Bible," the Lonely Planet guidebook stresses cultural and
environmental awareness, and has been instrumental in opening up many parts
of the world to penny-pinching wanderers. The problem many travelers have with Lonely Planet, however, is that the
Backpacker's Bible has won too many fundamentalist converts. Popularity has
resulted in hegemony, hegemony has resulted in backpacker ghettos and
backpacker ghettos make travelers feel like they never left home. As one
of the characters says in Garland's novel, "One of these days I'm going
to find one of those Lonely Planet writers and I'm going to ask him, 'What's
so fucking lonely about Khao San Road?'" At the heart of this travel puritanism lies a slippery question: What,
in this day and age, is the correct way to travel? | ||
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