In Part I we discussed the gulf that exists between our expectations and the realities of travel. We know for example that there exists a vacuum between the airport and the hotel, and that this vacuum is gradually filled up after we touch down by an assortment of images: a looming cigarette advertisement in the arrivals hall, the boorish lady in immigration, the louche looking taxi drivers, the saccharine smiled hotel employee, the bus-stand resembling an IKEA flat-pack, and so forth. These are all images the guidebook never mentioned and they surprise us in their ordinariness and everydayness. How dare they encroach upon our holiday! We spot troops of children heading for school, factory workers queueing with us at the bus stand, we witness a workers demonstration, we spot the café employee relaxing on her day off – but the guidebook never mentioned that these people have lives! That they have other things to do besides making us comfortable!
And this brings me nicely to the next topic that’s been bothering me: Why is it that when one visits one of these countries one is made to feel like an Imperialist?
‘Come Sir! Please take a seat Sir! First class for you Sir!’
‘This is bestest quality especially for you Sir! Raja quality. Best quality!’
‘Where are you from Sir? London?! London is best Sir! Queen Victoria, Buckingham Palace, Lord of the Manor, Mr Holmes, Righty-ho old chap…’
What strikes you about this quaint patter is the fact that it seems to be stuck in a time warp. Little do they realise that times have changed. Gone are the days of the Victorian English sensibility. England has moved on. The patter requires an update to bring it to contemporary standards. A boost of modernity. Can you imagine this:
'Woh, London Sir! I think London is wicked man Sir! Chicken Tikka Masala rocks my chuddies dude sir, Ali G is booyakasha and Posh Spice is so minging Sir! Fancy some fish and chips Sir? I love David Beckham, Mr Bean, and Freddy Sir! Bismillah will you let me go…’
‘Er, yeah sure I will let you go. F**k off and leave me alone!’ - Hahaha
Why do the locals stoop so low to please us? It’s the economy stupid and the mighty pound. Yes I know, but when was the last time you spotted a hoard of Pan-chewing phlegm spitting Bengali tourists in London? Exactly. But even so isn’t there something unfair about the whole travel enterprise? Let’s look at it stripped down shall we: We Westerners with our superior airs and noses in the clouds, visit these exotic lands where we are treated as royalty. Where everyone does there mawkish best to please us. I always smell the stink of desperation in the way they feign friendships in the hope of making a quick buck (a ‘Western’ friend is no mean thing). They lie, deceive, develop skills of extraordinary guile, they sweet-talk and they suck on our sweet milky money of the West.
We in turn remain immured in luxurious hotels with Sky News and English breakfasts for company. We barely interact except with the token Thai tour-guide in those hideously kitschy tours with the fat Americans (all bumptious and smiley smiley), and then we return home after putatively ‘visiting Thailand’ and proudly boast:
‘Thailand was cool. Bloody cheap and the fake stuff is top notch. And the Thai Curry’s are good. But I still prefer me local Thai restaurant in Basildon’
You call that travel?
But what affect does this have on the locals? Yes, the travel industry brings in huge revenues, but it is a business that is subject to the whims of the global economic climate and the competition of other locations. But ultimately it does nothing (and this is the point I’m driving at) it does nothing to develop the skills of the local people. It is an economy that manufactures nothing except the crap kitsch that goes on sale in the tourist stores but apart from that?
Nothing.
In Costa Rica I remember seeing legions of wan urchins patrolling the streets whining the same patter to tourists. The desperation in their eyes evident. All looking for a way out. Any way out of this miserable existence – like a dog with mange kept in a zoo. It’s a pathetic life. Wouldn’t it be better if that Costa Rican didn’t have to suffer the ritualised ignominy of begging for his lively-hood? If only he could earn a decent living by dint of his own hands? Perhaps by working in a solid job making something that will be sold abroad and that will shore up the economy and that will not remind him; every waking hour of his life, that he is a second-class human being. For that's how these people must feel, surely? Especially when they see the fat rotund Westerners with their pallid complexions and fancy 12 megapixel cameras and burgeoning wallets. ‘Why can’t we do that?’ They must wonder. ‘Why can’t we visit 'their' countries?’
And if they did visit London would they get the same happy-go-lucky welcome? Would they be treated with the same amount of deference and Royal Highness?
You know the answer to that!
On the pleasures of watching shitting donkeys
Gustave Flaubert (author of Madame Bovary) was French. And he was a little strange too. But strange is good because at that time the French were a bunch of prudent, snobbish, pompous and racist xenophobes whose bourgeoisie elite liked nothing better than to wallow in their own superiority complex. He found French life stifling and not a logical fit to his creative and impulsive temperament. Luckily for him he did find a place that did fit with his ideas and values: Egypt (or the East to be more general)
When Flaubert disembarked in Alexandria he instantly fell in love. Not with a women mind you but with something more potent then the love of a women (really? Is there such a thing?). Yes, he fell in love with the swirling chaos around him. Visual, auditory and nasal: Nubian hawkers, bargaining merchants, chickens being slaughtered, donkeys being flayed, groaning foaming camels, guttural Arabs, thick negro lips, white robes and flashes of ivory that tainted the eyes. He felt as if he had finally arrived home.
Why did the chaos and the richness of Egyptian colours so touch Flaubert? Because he believed that life is fundamentally chaotic. That in the West we may live in a consciously imposed world of order (with rules and laws and courtesies and how to say thank you's and goodbyes and how to eat with a knife and fork) but underneath all this, underneath this self imposed order, there is always lurking a teeming layer of chaos. And in Egypt he found this teeming organic chaos. This lack of prudery where people were forthright and unpretentious. He believed that to live otherwise was a denial of our human condition.
‘Yesterday we were at a café which is one of the best in Cairo’, wrote Flaubert a few months after his arrival, ‘and inside this café were at the same time as ourselves, a donkey shitting and a gentlemen pissing in the corner. No one finds that odd here! No one says anything’.
And in Flaubert’s eyes they were right not to.
A key feature of Flaubert’s philosophy was the belief that man is not simply a spiritual creature, but also a pissing and shitting one, and that we should integrate this into our world-view. He wrote:
‘I can’t believe that our body, composed as it is of mud and shit and equipped with instincts lower than those of a pig or a louse, contains anything pure and immaterial’.
This doesn’t mean that we don’t have any higher dimensions. It was just that the prudery and self-righteousness of the age aroused in Flaubert a desire to remind people of mankind’s impurities. In Egypt Flaubert welcomed the duality of life that was on display: shit-mind, death-life, sexuality-purity, and madness-sanity. People belched during and after meals to their hearts’ content and a boy of six passing Flaubert in a street in Cairo, cried out in greeting:
‘Sir I wish you all kinds of prosperity, especially a long prick’
To be continued…
