The Ugliness of Tourism

Though we travel to discover and explore the beautiful and profound crannies of the globe, it has been my repeated experience that ugliness seeps out of these nooks just as often. Perhaps it is nothing more than greed - the selfish desire to possess these places ourselves, to deny the existence or validity of the other's whose pilgrimages mirror our own so closely - but obviously as travelers we must be more diplomatic, we must accept our responsibility as ambassadors and conduct ourselves with poise, grace and most importantly, thanks.

To be honest traveling is a strange and privileged phenomenon and one that can mess with your head after a few months if you don't keep yourself in check. Where else in the world do we spend our days doing nothing but consuming: consuming sights, images, tastes, sensations. All day it is our privilege to consume full time, but these privileges are often mistaken for rights.

An experience at Angkor Wat:

I am at Ta Prohn, one of the most popular temples of ancient Angkor not only because of its size and beauty, but also because the keepers of Ta Prohn decided not to tear down all the trees, choosing instead to leave it in a state of overgrown collapse. The result is amazing; 300 foot trees towering above the ruins, their massive roots twisting between the carved sandstone pillars and bas-reliefs.

In this temple there is one area in particular that makes Indiana Jones fans sprout wood themselves - I would estimate more photos are taken here than anywhere else, save maybe Angkor Wat itself at sunrise which is another story entirely. As I stumble onto this scene about fifty Chinese tourists are waiting impatiently in a mob fanning themselves and pushing past each other for pole position. Each one wants to climb up onto the ruin and have a photo taken giving a peace sign. To the immediate right of this seething group of sun-visors, wide-brimmed sun hats and clashing floral-print parasols are four or five art photographers each armed with thousands of dollars on camera equipment hanging off belts, straps and packs. Each of these art photographers (no doubt solitary humans with limited social integration skills) want the whole scene to themselves - they want to capture the perfect light filtering through the silk-cotton tree onto the ancient ruin and dedicate all their millions of pixels to the perfect exposure.

It began with the art photographers asking - with frustration and spite spilling from their lips - if please, they could just have one goddamn minute with the rocks and trees. The Chinese tour guide, diplomatic, speaking some English and wishing to avoid a scene, holds back one of his Chinese telling everybody to wait for half a second. As a volley of shutters release another group of twenty or thirty Chinese comes spilling into the area and seeing that nobody is standing in front of the ruin, dive right in. The art photographers scream in passive-aggressive mumbles of Czech, or German or Japanese, while the Chinese tour group that was held back starts screaming in high-pitched mandarin at the second group.

Not taking well to being screamed at, the second Chinese tour group starts yelling back. In a matter of seconds we've got two ladies paired off, screaming, pointing and spitting the lowest of Mandarin syllables at teach other, threatening blows and scratching each other's eyes out as the two seas of plaid and flora fabrics hold them back. The groups fan themselves nervously, embarrassed at this complete loss of face. The art photographers are actually saying things like, "I can't fucking believe these people," and busy themselves with switching lenses and applying lens caps, believing perhaps that they have no role in this scene.

It seems like everybody is itching for blood.

Your humble narrator, made more or less ill by the scene and the heat, decided to leave without photo. He found an old Italian woman some 20 meters away at an equally beautiful and totally empty cranny. She sat there slowly painting the rocks and trees in a small journal and offered me half of her cookie.

"They are making crazy," she said gesturing behind her in a manner that seemed quintessentially Italian. "Five years ago, there is four of five peoples. Now everybody want a be crazy."

I sat with her until my heart rate returned to normal, thinking about how delicate cultural relations really are.

Cambodia

I had no real mental images from either Cambodia or from Angkor Wat itself which was the source of excitement for this trip, and certainly one of the reasons why I choose to travel there. Sure I had a rough idea about what India would look, sound and taste like before I went, we all know New Zealand is beautiful and green, but Cambodia? What does Cambodia feel like? What does it look like? What is its food?

The trip was a journey of sorts - of overcoming dust and oppressive heat and laughably maintained "highways", of wrapping our heads around the scales and sizes of her achievements and confronted with the harshness of her tragedies. With my new group of Kiwi, English and Canadian compatriots we settled in a cheap guesthouse content to avoid the rust, cobwebs and rotten walls in the bathrooms and be thankful that the water was not too hot.

We attacked Angkor Wat for three and a half days, minds blown on a daily, and sometimes hourly basis. On whatever map you may be looking Angkor Wat appears to be a cluster of temples. I knew it was big, but when we drove past a huge lake I looked at the map and wondered why I couldn't find it on the map. After some orienteering it turns out that "lake" was a moat for Angkor Wat temple and putting this massive body of water in the context of the small square drawing on my map blew my mind. This place is the size of Manhattan.

For three days we raced around on rented bikes, tuk tuk's and hitched rides exploring ruins of this ancient civilization and trying to find the best places for sunrise and sunset all done under the oppressive Cambodian heat. I have to say this is the first time in my traveling experience that I've been totally content to be a tourist. Normally I go to great effort to merge with the culture I'm in, but Angkor Wat is different. Yep. I was there with my Thai pants and camera and scarf wrapped around my head, sucking water bottles to survive and all the while battling against endless ebb and flow of Chinese.

The ruins were incredible, and some moments - like being pulled behind farmer's trucks on my bike along the roads to Siem Reap, exhausting from a days exploring, awash in pink lotus sunsets and the sweet smells of burning garbage - were among my favourite of my entire trip.

Angkor Wat

Today the world is filled with so much beauty and happiness I almost feel sick.

South Asian Ping Pong

Ping Pong, and yes in this extended metaphor I have been cast as the little white ball. The thing about ping pong is that those cute sounds and cool chalky exterior can quickly be dominated by lightening fast paddle swats and dervishes of ungodly backspin. Hell sometimes those balls are hit so hard they break!

After loosing the coin toss in New Zealand a fast service sent me spinning in Singapore, adjusting to humidity, jet lag, and trying to find a place to store my 80 litre pack for the next two months. (As an interesting side note the bag ended up at a Malaysian guy I picked up hitchhiking's sister's husband's mother's place in a west-Singapore suburb.) After hot food, cold water and a short goodbye to my bag, I was sent on with mad top spin, racing to catch another plane to Krabi Thailand.

I arrived at night and (as is quickly becoming custom) my taxi driver pointed out all the best spots to get Bravo Juliet's, grunting and using hand gestures to ford the wide rivers of his limited English. A night was spent in Krabi, calculating currency conversions, swatting flies and eating anything cheap in the night market.

The next morning it a cheaky net shot - a well-delayed and amateurishly piloted flight to Bangkok where I hoped to sort of details of my Indian visa and flights. Things India often react poorly time, so when I did my logistic arithmetic, adding the week of Visa wait time with the thousands of Baht flight cost, the sum was to grab carpe diem by the scruff and travel to nearby Cambodia.

I had wanted to return to India for a while, had even dreamt about it, but lately I've been more concerned with moving forward (upward, steady or otherwise) and so I vetoed my half-baked India plans in favour of something new. Cambodia promises to be exciting and, best of all, cheap.

So I'm back in control of the game, having taken hold of those cosmic ping pong paddles and am looking forward to applying some deadly backspin on Cambodian soil.

Fresh Photographs of the 5th Kind

"There's heaps," (to use the kiwi vernacular.) North Island hitchin', trip to Mt. Cook, more bouldering and, ah hell just check it out. Click Cook above to magically transport to Flickr.

Kiwi Merits and Cautions

After three months of life here in New Zealand, having been from the north to the south, having peed in her oceans and slept on her mountains, drunk her beer, danced to her tunes, explored her caves, and fallen off her cliffs, I feel justified in summarizing my experiences.

MERITS

1. The Long Black - there is no drip coffee in NZ. Its all espresso-based, the long black being the rough equivalent of an Americano. This means you can get descent coffee everywhere.
2. Bare Feet - you can walk pretty well anywhere in bare feet including stores, malls, restaurants, cars and clubs. It feels good, and generally Kiwis are very careful and respectful of broken glass, it just not cool to break glass here.
3. Marmite - its tasty, good, a good source of vitamin B and is credited with the health of the New Zealand army during WWII.
4. Developed National Identity : though we share much with New Zealanders, in Canada our national identity, including symbols, norms and customs seems to still be vague and imprecise. New Zealander's have taken hold of what's theirs and are proud of their little birds, their fruit, their pavlova and their marmite.
5. Pies : I'm a pro now. I even know how to peel back the pastry to put ketchup "inside" the pie, whereby the sauce will not get on my fingers and face. Still digging the butter chicken pie, but one a day is plenty.

CAUTIONS

1. Painfully Short Rugby Shorts: Kiwis will defend this use of the short short stating that men deserve to tan their upper thighs as much as women. I will strongly disagree: I haven't seen this much male thigh since I watched the Hawaii Marathon a few years ago and I only did that because it seemed better than watching Three's Company re-runs. Situations like the one below are far too common and not the sort of thing a man needs to deal with on his way to a morning coffee.



2.Tomato Sauce (Ketchup) : They charge for it. Even if you order fries, and its like 30-50 cents for a little packet and you'll need 2 or 3. Its extortion as far as I'm concerned and I'll be happy to be back on a continent where ketchup has been emancipated.
3. Total Disregard for Pedestrians : Cars rule here and don't forget it more than once.
4. Tall Poppy Complex : where by when a Kiwi's success surpasses a given point, that person becomes a "sellout" and looses his/her status amongst the small birds, pavlova, and marmite. Russel Crowe suffers this fate, perhaps a key reason for his alcoholism.
5. The Possum: Albeit the possum is the most despised creature on these islands, subject to extensive poisoning campaigns and popular "swerve for possums" hobbies than leave highways littered with roadkill - but these attempts do nothing to alter the fact that possums, eat helpless little native birds, make camping difficult, increase interest rates, aren't scared of you, make disgusting sexual noises outside your tent when you sleep and, despite your creativity and perseverance, refuse to die.




MJPH

Leaving a Small Island

Three months. Poof. (suprise!)
New scars on my knees. New friends in my notebook.

I spent the last week staying with Rachael and the Mabins in the Christchurch suburb of Beckenham (healthy/fun). Living with kids - Amelia, Henry & Juliet- for a week was so cool, they have so much energy, go to bed at 9pm and love my "blow up muscle" routine. The fun/relax/sleep combo is just the sort of thing you want to do when you've been racing around an island trying to get everything out of it for months.

But Michael Hall cannot sit still so with a few days left to go I made a mission down to Mt. Cook in Rachael's Nissan Centra (that's a right hand drive standard!) where I camped in the alpine with stellar views of Mt. Cook and Mt. Sefton and explored some badass glaciers (pretty). I then raced across the island to smalltown Duntroon to climb with a french-canadian GP named Eric at the Hulk Hogan boulders (enjoyable).

Then back to Christchurch and a week or so of saying goodbyes. I saw Rachael off to the airport this morning, (sadness) we'll see each other again in a few weeks in Thailand (happiness).

Leaving on a plane to Singapore tomorrow, then to Thailand on thursday. I will make my way to Bangkok, try to procure an Indian visa and hope to be drinking 2 rupee chai on a train somewhere within a week.