Halfway through my trip seemed a good time to collect some of my thoughts on travelling. And Thailand "of all places, backpacker central, land of the beaten track" is the perfect location to do it in.
The Beach by Alex Garland is a backpacker classic. Underwhelmed by the standard destinations that have been "spoiled" by "too many tourists", a group of travellers set up an isolated beach camp on a protected island. Richard, the novel's narrator, is told about the beach by a man who then commits suicide in their Bangkok hostel, and sets off to find it with a French couple he's just met. The novel charts how they gain the paradise they've been searching for, then rapidly lose it as the camp descends into violence and madness.
I arrived in Bangkok at the beginning of week ten of my trip. It was the first time I had landed in a new country and didn't feel the "sudden warm swell of happiness [wash] over me". All I felt was very tired. Two days in hectic Bangkok didn't do much to restore me, so I headed north to Chiang Mai looking for some respite. Like the French couple in the novel, I did what people do in Chiang Mai; I trekked, I rafted, I visited the elephants. And to my horror, I started to show signs of becoming a bit like the kind of travellers that set my teeth on edge when I first started this trip.
First were the know-it-all travellers, the ones who have been everywhere and done everything. Like Bugs, one of the original founders of the beach camp, who
"had an irritating competitive streak. If you'd watched the sun rise over Borobudur, he'd tell you that you should have seen the sun set, or if you knew of a good place to eat in Singapore, he'd know of one better."
The jaded traveller is a close relative of the know-it-all. They've been wandering for so long that they've already had every 'experience' possible and are constantly comparing the present moment with some past, and usually superior, event. Which is fine, if they would just keep their thoughts to themselves. Travel supposedly broadens the mind and helps people to lay aside their preconceptions. Lots of the 'long term' travellers I've met haven't been more open-minded and open-hearted though, they've been cynical and egocentric. I've found it difficult to understand why they're still on the road.
Yet as we trekked through the jungle near Chiang Mai, I was still trying to process everything I'd seen and done in the past few weeks, and unfavourable comparisons crept into my conversations. I knew that I wasn't taking in or appreciating what I was doing; like when Richard is "more interested in finding a soft spot on [his] backpack to use as a pillow" than looking at the islands when they first arrive, I stood outside our bamboo lodge, watching a rainstorm roll in over the Thai mountains, and just wanted to go to bed.
From Chiang Mai, I took the winding road to Pai, a chilled mountain village. In an attempt to get myself out of my rut, and in the interests of embracing the travel 'experience', I decided to do as the backpackers do, and went for a big night out. I drank rum from a bucket, I talked drunken nonsense with virtual strangers, I ate a suspect toastie from 7-Eleven at 2am. And woke up the next morning feeling wretched. I suddenly understood why the people in my hostel in Chiang Mai hadn't seemed interested in exploring, and just sat around all day watching films; they were all hideously hungover. I started to wonder what the point of it all was, what could make 'travelling' like this more than a colossal waste of time and resources.
At first I thought that Thailand itself could be responsible for my loss of travel mojo. The Beach was published in 1996, and there has been plenty of time since then for the "tourist hordes" to get their Lonely Planet-guided feet on the path blazed by the "travellers" years ago. I've met more than one person who's feeling a bit disappointed by the firmly established backpacker subculture here; at times Pai seems like a CentreParcs. It feels like there is nothing left to discover here. As Etienne laments,
"[E]verybody wants to do something different. But we all do the same thing... We come for an adventure, but we find this."
The opportunity to meet new people on the road is also lost on an introvert like me. There is no shortage of friendly people to chat to when you feel "starved of conversation and company" as a solo traveller. But most conversations never get past the initial Big Five questions (What's your name, where are you from, what do you do at home, how long have you been here, how long are you travelling for?) and I find all the small talk exhausting. The people living on the Beach epitomise the strange nature of the traveller 'community'; even after months at the camp, Richard realises that he knows "nothing about the past lives of [his] companions, except their place of origin".
The Beach doesn't offer much wisdom on what makes travelling worthwhile. Richard's "primary goal" when he starts to travel is "collecting memories, or experiences", seeing and doing exciting things that will sustain him in his normal life at home. Yet he soon tires of this, and is disappointed when the beach doesn't provide "an ideology or something. A purpose." He's horrified at the suggestion that he's just on "holiday", but can't articulate what makes 'travellers' different.
I think a sense of purpose can be more easily grasped by moving away from the language of 'travelling' and drawing on an older model: the pilgrimage. A great article by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman articulates the difference between the tourist and the pilgrim. The pilgrim is concerned with building their identity through their journey, telling their life as a "'sense-making' story" in which "each event [is] the effect of the event before and the cause of the event after". In contrast, the postmodern tourist has a horror of being trapped in a single overarching life story, and leaves their "real face" at home, demanding and consuming isolated and episodic "experiences".
Richard's only clear philosophy is that "escape through travel works". But surely there's more value in seeing time away not as an escape from your "real life" but as a chance to step back, reassess and figure out how to make "a whole out of the fragmentary". You are part of the place you're in, and if it isn't serving your desire for "experience", it's at least as much your fault as your location's. I'll most likely go home and realise that the best souvenirs from my travels aren't great photographs or memories of cool "experiences", but the things I've learned about myself that I hadn't spotted before (some good, some not so good...) and being a few steps closer to the answers to questions I've been wrestling with. As well as the key realisation that those answers never lie in the bottom of a bucket of rum.
***
Bauman, Zygmunt, 'From Pilgrim to Tourist - or a short history of identity'
Garland, Alex, The Beach (1996)
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