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Not Lonely Enough, by Half

by Naomi T Hossain
Lonely Planet gilide books have a lot to answer for. This publishing company of failed but still bearded hippies and would be New Age travellers has single-handedly created an industry that provides young middle-class Eu-ropeans/white people with the means for experiencing the third world with their eyes shut, their ears blocked, and their minds closed It's officially safe : nice university-educated girls and boys from the Home Countries, the suburbs of Paris and the wealthier German towns are to be found "travelling" through the so-called South with the blessing of their accountant/lawypr/doctor parents, people who in the sixties Would have refused to go to Marrakesh The hippie trail, for want ■ >t a better expression, is now respectable. And unfortunately for the third world, everyone from the first world wants to be respectable.
Travel can only broaden the mind if you let it ThE Lonely Planet guides |and very thorough and fine books they are too) enable the virgin "traveller" to feel secure in the knowledge that they can consult their copy of Africa on a Shoestring for any aspect of travel in any part of Africa. On a recent trip I discovered from my Lonely Planet guide to India that only minimal contact with local people is necessary, and indeed it's a damned good thing as the guide book will only recom mend hotels and restaurants that are packed full of Kiwis and Canadians Some cheap, some nasty, but all "popular with travellers1, and therefore recommended Very few "travellers' will have made more than basic contact with local people, and then usually only with officials or people who cater to then particular layer of the tourist industry. There are a number of set routes through a particular region, usually lasting about three months, by which time they have spent then summer k>d earnings and must go back to college There is a uniform for easy identification, including tribal-weave stripy trousers, bukenstocks and "a bag 1 picked up in Goa". There is also the occasional misguided if well-
meaning individual, who thinks that by wearing a sari blouse and petticoat as a blouse and skirt she will blend with the locals, or that by not washing he will somehow become closer to Calcutta s beggars There are even recommended readings on India, ranging from that foul glamourisation of poverty, Ine City of Joy to, unbelievably, Kipling. Usually, however, the consumers of this genre of travel Side are able to display an utter incompre
nsion of social norms, customs and even current events, an incomprehension usually accompanied by a deep lack of interest. I can still remember my shock when, six months before the first democratic elections in south Africa, I met Australians in Cape Town who said that they "had come for the surfing and didn't really understand the politics" What’s there to understand, I thought (But then 1 find that most Australian cd sports, lying on a board as a wave threatens to drown me, a little hard to understand )
if the picture I have given you is one of hordes of young white people who travel through poor countries in a world artificially created by then "bible", as they appropriately refer to the Lonely Planet of choice, then I have succeeded These people are not inter ested in other cultures or histories, some are "finding themselves", it is true, and some think they are helping the poor people of the east when they volunteer for three days at Mother Teresa s home for volunteers — I mean orphans of course But the real reason they are looking for themselves in Asia in stead of Germany is because it is a great deal cheaper in India, and you can go for months without having to think of work, while eat ing, drinking and living better than most
middle-class Thais. There are those who come looking for "real India" and are disappointed with that most Indian of art forms, the hindi film song. It's too American (the actors are not starving), far too crass (not an ashram in sight), and it's too Westernised (they don't seem to need us anymore!. Perhaps the worst of the lot are those of them, usually English or French, who come looking (or the grandeur of lost empires, for the former glory of their home countries, and actually manage to find it in decaying monuments and in the deference of impoverished people to them |or more likely to their dollars). Every English person who thinks fondly of the Rai should visit Calcutta's Victoria Memorial; the bird droppings on the portraits of Lord and Lady Mountbatten should be sufficient to illustrate for them quite how much India values her British past
It had never occurred to me before reading Vikram Seth on his travels to Chink, that travel, like anthropology, is something white people do to us. We people the places white people travel to Perhaps the first thing that occurred to me on reading Seth's account was T wonder what Chinese people thought of him", whereas with Paul Tneroux, for example, the question would have been reversed. Perhaps it is like sociology, where the assumption is that white people have no race. White people are never the object of mterest when they travel, they are blank, the observers or the consumers if you like,'of the place We, the exotic peoples, are to be viewed, and thev, the normal people, are the viewers In part, there are just too many of them Thev have been, and continue to go,
everywhere. Dr Livingstone and Lady Isabella Bird many have been the first of their raceless kind to go to Outer Mongolia (the epitome of remote; why not Inner London? It's certainly more dangerous) but they were by no means the last. Western cultures are somehow presumed "normal" the world over, so that white tourists are irritated by any attention they receive from locals : it is the locals who are the exhibits in the tourist zoo, so why should the white’people be discussed or poked or looked at? When you are not white and you travel you are nothing less than an oddity. Local people are curious about how other non-whites nave the money to travel, and white people usually want to know why you speak such good English Both quite frankly, are good points. As a brown person in the not-so-Lonely Planet of the backpacker, you cannot remain a mere observer; your strangeness is as palpable as your brownness, it becomes the same thing. Never in my life have I felt so much like an intruder as when I walked into a crowded cafe in Calcutta (recommended by the ’bible" | to find that I was the only brown customer. "Everyone's white," I said disappointedly to the other brown person. The waiter (for it was he] consoled me. "It's alright, there's me as well,” he said. There were a number of similar places, all listed in the Lonely Planet guide, where I felt like I was in one of those glorious English relics, the expatriate club. I felt like these very "Indians and dogs" who were not permitted beyond the front door, unless they were serving drinks to the sahibs.
There are exceptions. There are intelligent young people travelling around the world who are interested and interesting. Unfortunately there already exists an extensive budget traveller structure allowing the traveller to see all of the mystical and cheap East without trying too hard, making it hard to avoid the convenience of the Lonely Planet route. Off the beaten track it certainly isn't. I, tor one, think they might as well stay at home.