Happy Tourist, Unhappy Traveller
Tourists and travellers are essentially the same. Yet, while the former acknowledge their otherness, the latter do not.. They deceive themselves by believing that they can be cultural insiders.
Pumpernickel Bakery in Thamel, downtown Kathmandu, is a favourite spot for foreigners. Even during off-season, the bakery's garden tables fill quickly each morning. The service is good; the bread, fresh; the croissants, delicious and the coffee, passable. The staff members are unobtrusive and polite and with their brown faces a rarity in the restaurant, where the rest of the people are foreign travellers.
They are travellers and not tourists. A young English woman, on her way home from a year abroad in Australia, tried to explain the difference to me. She said that 'travellers' live 'like the people'; they travel the way 'the people travel'; and they are 'in touch' with, and have `a feel' for, 'the people'. The tourists, on the other hand, travel in air-conditioned buses, live in five-starred hotels and eat at overpriced restaurants. And they never drink the water. There are no tourists at Pumpernickel; only travellers.
Touring extensively around the world, the long-term world travellers (WT), the majority of whom are North American, Western European, Japanese and Australian, share a common ideology. They view the Third World as their laboratory and look upon themselves as romantic, even intrepid, adventurers. They sneer at tourists and laugh at those who have remained back home in Peoria. They share a common language, English, and even a common dress code in Nepal: cheap cotton drawstring pants, rubber sandals, and printed t-shirts. The t-shirts are the public resumes: in one glance one can discern who has come up from Kenya, Bali, Bangkok or Goa.
World travelers adorn themselves with the handicrafts of this week's locale. In Kathmandu, turquoise and silver rings, bracelets, earrings, sheep-skin shoulder bags, wool caps and vests. It is said the jewelry is actually mass-produced in Lhasa. The caps are Afghani, and the vests are multi-coloured combinations with tassels hanging from the edges. Who wears this stuff? Not the Nepalis. In Kathmandu, they are the ones trying to dress like us!
In their attempts to 'become native' the world travellers often corrupt indigenous systems.
At the bakery, several Germans, a Swede and an American couple are engaged in a heated discussion about exchange rates, which is a favourite topic among WTs, in addition to the black market. They can quote the going rates for the dollar in Delhi, Kathmandu, Borneo or Burma. They also know where to sell whiskey and cigarettes, blue jeans and cameras.
An Australian advised me: "See, you buy your Indian rupees in Kathmandu, get an air ticket to the border, buy your Johnny Walkers and Marlboros at duty-free and sell them for twice over what you paid, once you land." He continued, "If you are going on to Burma, hold on to your stuff. The country is quite screwed up and the people will buy anything you've got, even the shirt off your back." I wondered where he was headed. "Oh, I'm off to an ashram near Bangalore for a month of meditation." Ashram, shrines and mosques are the traditional destinations for WTs. Those who look for spiritual wisdom are all young, white, educated, affluent, radical, chic. They search for "meaning"; they overflow with good intentions.
One day, in Kathmandu's main bazaar area, I noticed a backpacker haggling with an Indian selling oranges from a basket strapped to his bicycle. "How much?" the backpacker asked. "One orange, three rupees", said the Indian. "One rupee", the westerner insisted, "here". He dropped the rupee into the basket and walked away pleased at his bargaining skills. After all, he had successfully acted just like the 'people.' He has just had an "experience". Some Nepali bystanders cluck with sympathy for the Indian, who swears in Hindi.
Beneath the WT's talk about cross-cultural sensitivity and "experience" is a sense of
cultural imperialism that would have done the Victorians proud. Notwithstanding their beatific expressions, world travellers are cut-throat practitioners of the mundane living. In Nepal, as elsewhere, they compete at a game with the odds stacked heavily in their favor. They use their economic clout to secure shamelessly that which the society can offer and that which it cannot and should not also offer.
The world traveller expects to find a unique culture in the "exotic" East, only to wait in line behind the same people whom they seemingly wanted to avoid. This is probably why many WTs openly shun their fellow travellers as they saunter through the streets of Thamel. They throw hostile glances at other foreigners whose only fault is to walk the same street.
Tony Wheeler's Lonely Planet guide book: are one of the main reasons why the WTs end up in the same places. The difference between this guidebook and others is that it targets a different audience and never describes them as tourists. Tony Wheeler calls them travellers who "want to see the country at ground level, to breathe it, experience it and live it". He writes that tourists stay in Hiltons, travellers do not. Instead, travellers should go tramping through the back alleys of the Third World and absorb exoticism through osmosis. Wheeler has built a multi-national publishing business catering to the world travellers of this planet.
What happens, of course, is that no world traveller is alone when he "does" Bali or Rangoon or Kathmandu. After all, they carry the same book. They check in at the same hotels. They eat in the same restaurants. They discover the same hideaways off the well-trodden paths. The traveller longs to discover the particular place to which no tourist or traveller has been. Yet, he keeps running into many others like himself.
Westernisation has consumed Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Bangkok. But it has yet to hurdle the Himalayas. In Nepal samosas and mo-mos are in fashion: not Big Macs. Yes, Michael Jackson is popular among young people, but Kumar Basnet and Narayan Gopal still outsell him in the tape shops. The inauguration of the country's first escalator is frontpage news.
Into this other-world enters the world travellers. They speak English, arc obsessed with money, and dress in odd peasant costumes. Off they go to the mountains in search of experience. The handful of Nepalis they come in contact with are guides and lodge-owners — whose burden it is to "represent" the society and culture.
The East is not the West. Religious, linguistic and philosophical differences separate the two. Yet, world travellers approach the East, including countries like Nepal, as if they were on a jaunt into the Parisian countryside. They do not realise that finding a bathroom, exchanging money, buying hasish and ordering dinner does not constitute "inter-cultural communication".
Frozen out of the cultures they travel through, WTs ultimately feel at home among their own kind. That is why they crowd the tourist ghettos. Subdividing into factions, they share their cultural illusions and seek to alleviate their secret boredom. They trade tales and anecdotes over omelets and pizzas and they huddle together to watch American videos. Make-believe hippie and aspiring Buddhist, both will be watching a scratched copy of Rambo.
Truly, the' "traveller" is no different from the "tourist". He carries the same shackles: an ignorance of the language, the culture, and the people and their idiosyncrasies. However, the tourist, by recognising and accepting the differences between themselves and others admit that they are outsiders or visitors. They implicitly accept the premise that travel is a privilege and not a right. The world travelers deny the possibility of such an acknowledgment. They blindly believe that living cheaply and dressing like a native can transform them into cultural insiders. V.S. Naipaul writes of them as those "who wish themselves on societies more fragile than their own…who in the end do no more than celebrate their own security".
Shepherd worked in rural Nepal for three years as a Peace Corps volunteer. He is now an instructor at the Beijing Second Foreign Language Institute in China.