The Long Hot Hustle – The Ugly Side of Travelling

No Sympathy for the Devil(s)

As any respectable professional will tell you, a man or woman in possession of a retail job is in desperate want of any other profession. In the words of our direct, crude times: retail is balls. With the provisos: “Working retail is balls”; “Working retail for ages is super balls”; “Having to work retail for your whole life is super scabby donkey balls”.

Some people earn their badges in the service industry with minimal complaints, but I liken this to those men drafted in WW2 who stayed in civilian areas co-ordinating supplies for the front. They were not, as the military parlance goes, on the front line. Petty, egomaniacal managers, obnoxious, impossible customers, absurd and counter-intuitive bureaucracy, lack of job security, the threats of secret shoppers and customer surveys – there's no need to belabour the point. But I believe there is one over-looked profession that deserves both more praise (and more criticism) for the poor sods trapped in its embrace – the tourism industry.

To me it seems that those working in the trenches of hard-core tourism, working in hellhole paradises, scraping and bowing to bloated families and their spoilt brats have it harder than anyone else on Earth. It's like working in General Pants and living amongst the displays. These poor suckers have to not only work a nine to five with their customers, they then have to mingle with them, these awkward, unearthly consumers as they gawp and litter and bark orders in their restaurants, gas stations and mini-marts.

But I have realised another thing about these poor unfortunates – and that is that I no longer care for their plight. Like mosquitoes that carry malaria, corrupt tourist operators who swindle and lie are like parasites that not only take from the host but poison the unwitting subject irreparably. Crotchedy old men who seem to resent serving you in their restaurants, savage old women who smile until they have your money then turn their backs without another word, pot-bellied drivers that shake their hands in the air and mock you openly in their own tongue, all these and more in this savage bestiary decrying the idea of tourism, the old chicken-coup squabble of us and them, ours and yours, men and women who deprive families of their safety and ignorant travellers of their belongings, the truest, most depraved scum on Earth engaging in this absurd boxstep of prejudice and hubritical pride.

And it is to them, and their persistent efforts to ruin the leisure of others, to despoil paradise and salt the very Earth they stand on that I dedicate this article.

Over Land or Sea or Agitated Water

I am now sitting in an A-frame bungalow on the South-Eastern side of Koh Samui in Thailand. The time is 5.50 pm, and the last remains of day are bleached by low cloud cover, the sea like a rough-cut block of jade.

Six hours ago Lara and I thought we would be travelling by boat to Koh Phanghan and had dutifully checked out of our bungalow and walked down the beach to where the wooden ferry had come ashore. We had spent two days trying to research a cheap fare from one island to the next, as all the tourist agencies we found attempted to sell us tickets on the tourist catamaran which cost 350 Baht ($12). This seems reasonable until you compare the price we paid to get from Bangkok to Ko Samui by bus and then boat (450 Baht, $15).

Online and at our guesthouse we were assured this little wooden ferry should cost no more than 150, and pulling alongside it I certainly expected this to be the case – the boat was a single storey, open air passenger carrier, driven by a lawnmower engine on a long, home-made prop. When we pulled up to the pavilion, an old man directed us to the ticket office. Lara went while I watched the bags, smiling, thinking about how cool I must look in my sunglasses, happy to be off the dirty (but admittedly beautiful) beach of Mae Nam.

Then there was a moment, a scene which theatrical professionals refer to as a Beat. Lara came back up to me.

“He's saying it's 250 Baht. When I said we read that it was 150 he said we could go swimming.”

“What, while we wait?”

“No. As in, 'you go swim to Koh Phanghan.' He said if we paid 150 he would throw us overboard.”

Furious but calm, I walked up to the pot-bellied jackass and asked how much. Impatient he just pointed at the sign. When I said I had read online that it was 150 he laughed, as if the internet could not be trusted, as if it did not know the word on the street. Then I said I talked to my guesthouse owner and she said it was 150.

“One hundred fifty get you half way. We throw you out.”

“You can try. We'll get there and we'll see what happens.” I replied, still trying to make a joke out of it. Finally I said I had talked to two white guys who lived here, who owned the MoonHut bungalow up the road, and they said it was 150 – at which point he turned around and started talking to his co-pilot and they laughed, gesturing at me and my girlfriend, the one not talking to me ending the conversation with a dismissive gesture and sitting back down to his lunch.

“Fine fine. You go. You go up there.” The ticket man flicked his hand from the wrist in the Thai fashion, which resembles the limp movement of shooing flies off of cooling food.

“No no. I went there yesterday. Up there is the catamaran. This is the ferry. The cheap ferry.”

“Up there. Up there is the ferry.” And turned his back on me to get at his food.

In My Head at That Moment

But it's tourism that has made it this way, isn't it? The encroachment of selfish, rich foreigners, buying up this land and converting it into a surreal amusement park. It is our own greed and materialist ideology that has perverted this unspoilt place with our sick, depraved dreams of acceptable slavery and capitalist colonialism. Isn't it? Aren't we, really, the ones at fault?

The Counter Response

Oh you poor fool, rest your weary rhetoric awhile under the fronds of the coconut and know that white man's guilt is one of your saddest inherited debts. It clouds the mind whilst simultaneously elevating you above your fellow man. Take a deep breath, reassess the situation, distribute blame on the merit of the circumstance rather than the imagined history. Good? Good. Now calmly tell this joker to go fuck himself with a rusty spoon. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut, to take a flying fuck at the mooooooooon.

Terrors in Ha Long

The rudeness of this boat driver is not uncommon in SE of A. I should have been prepared for it but the truth was I had not been on the front line of the tourist hustle in quite a while. Lara and I have travelled to the south of Thailand via the north (a much cheaper and more relaxed place) and Laos (where despite some of the prices, the people were incredibly friendly) so we were out of practise when it came to applying the hard word. However our time away from touristy areas was sort of necessary after our experience in the north of Vietnam, and our time in Ha Long Bay I would consider one of the most demoralising, difficult times of my life.

The best example of the overall rudeness, incompetence and negligence that dogged us the entire trip (and you must understand that anything that could go wrong, did) was the first night and morning of our stay on Cat Ba island. Two bus loads of tourists were deposited at a hotel and restaurant at 6.30 pm (we had been told we would arrive at 5). When we piled out many people went to reception to ask for their rooms, which could not be provided. We were informed that of the forty of us standing there, only eight people had accommodation. Our tour guide tried to calm the furious crowd of confused people by saying it would be sorted out after dinner (which was awful and we could see our drivers and guides eating much better looking food in the kitchen area).

After dinner our tour guide had disappeared. Gone completely. It was chaos. Groups of people would elect leaders to go forward to harass and harangue, couples stood on looking anxious, the boys shrugged and the girls looked stunned. One group of 8 managed to organise something, they disappeared. Two Korean guys agreed to pay for a room (everyone had already paid and thus were not going to pay again) and they went. After much back and forth, sixteen of us were standing outside two hotels being told that we would need to pay for rooms, that the men and women would have to be segregated, and that four people would stay in one double room. On the edge of losing it, I cracked open a bottle of fruit wine and shared it around the gathering of strangers, trying to laugh the situation off. We all relaxed a little, swapped tales and cigarettes, the angry men at the front could do their jobs, their anxious partners could calm down, we all felt the touch of forced bonhommie. After no less than an hour and a half of protesting we all got rooms, didn't have to pay and the couples could stay together. The staff had had the keys all along.

The next morning we had a new tour guide. He apologised for the mistakes of last night, but now we would go trekking. However, if anyone wanted to go to Monkey Island in the afternoon, they could pay him for the boat and he would organise it. Again, uproar. Nearly everyone had paid for this service and no one was getting it for free. One girl walked up to our tour guide with a receipt and itinerary, on it clearly written 'trip to monkey island' and our guide laughed in her face and walked away.

What I wondered was, why do they hate us? In the South of Vietnam or talking to locals generally I perceived no hostility. My lecturer Alan Wearne suggested, of course, the war. But it doesn't quite map – after all, Laotian people suffered a lot more in the Vietnam war and are still suffering today from the threat of unexploded ordnance. Yet they were very friendly and courteous.

Was it then the Vietnamese people? But this again rang false – I've been screamed at in Cambodia and ignored in Thailand. So what is it? Why do they hate us?

Flashback to the Outback

In 2008 I found myself working in the Doon Doon roadhouse in W.A., a service station on a deserted stretch of desert road. It was three hours drive to the nearest town, the red earth extending in all directions except to the north west, where mountains made of terracotta roofing tiles were scattershot with shrubs and gums. (I climbed these mountains only once towards the end of my employment and found myself looking out over steppes and rounded, dry catchments – a study in crimson of the American west.)

It was off season when I arrived and the older Dutch couple who ran the place were struggling for extra workers, so when I started they immediately went on vacation. My first two weeks were relatively easy – clean the toilets like this, scrub the fryer like that, make the hamburger just so. But when the older couple returned my problems began.

Besides being creepy (they were part-time nudists and their late-twenty-something kids still lived with them and worked in their store), racist (saying it was sad but inevitable that the aboriginal culture should “die out”) braggarts who acted as if working at their shitty roadhouse was some kind of privilege, they were also pedants who would go over hours and hours of security footage on the lookout for “thieving blacks”. They hated thieves, graffiti and worst of all, tourists.

Being a roadhouse in the middle of nowhere the Greyhound coaches were compelled to pull over for lunch at their rest stop. This would constitute the daily rush for us – two bus loads of travellers stopping for food, water and toilet. And everyday after the rush they would begin griping about the mess they made, the most common complaint that the tourists would use the covered metal tables to eat their own lunches. You know, instead of sitting in the dirt. In the store they sold a bumper sticker with the slogan, 'If it's called Tourist Season, why aren't we allowed to shoot them?'

Over two thirds of their income was due to little old ladies buying aboriginal picture books of the dreamtime or hungry kids raiding the chest freezer for ice cream at a 300% mark up. Yet everyday without fail would come the bitching in their snotty, upwards inflecting Dutch accents.

Which makes me aware now of the difference between retail and tourism – escape (discussed above) and resentment. It's possible to escape from the retail shop you work in but those working in tourism cannot – and nothing exacerbates frustration like witnessing (and in this case serving) another's happiness.

Litost and Paradise Lost

In Milan Kundera's novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, he goes to great lengths to outline the meaning of a Czech word that has no equivalent in English. The word is 'litost' and he describes it as “a state of torment upon by the realization of one's inadequacy or misery”. He illustrates this with several examples, but the one that always made the most sense to me was of the young boy playing piano whilst under the harsh instruction of a pitiless teacher. As the boy makes mistakes the teacher scolds him and the boy, unable to help himself, makes more mistakes, unconsciously wills himself to make more mistakes, thus the teacher reprimands him more, thus the boy is brought full circle in a chain of misery that comes from knowing and seeing the source of his discontent yet paradoxically pursuing it at the same time.

Kundera writes that he does not know how it is possible to understand humanity without this insightful term, and I would agree that it definitely helps to sympathise with the plight of the jaded percentage working in unfulfilling tourism jobs. Which is where it becomes confusing for me. Sympathy and empathy are different things – sympathy is understanding a fellow humans' plight, empathy is the ability to feel the pain of another – yet I cannot honestly discern which I am able to do (or not do) in this scenario. Can I really understand the frustration of living in a country where learning English triples the range of your potential income? Or do I emotionally connect my frustration with that of the taxi driver, forgiving him his trespass on my time, money and good will?

There should have been another tree in the garden of Eden – one with the knowledge of righteousness and self-righteousness. I think the fruit of this tree would best be symbolised by the pomegranate, which is a complicated, time consuming fruit to peel and eat, yet at the same time is incredibly delicious. Also maybe good for you, but I don't care enough to look this up.

So I'm forced in this situation to respond as is the traveller's wont – on the basis of simple stimuli (The life of a tourist: Wake, eat, revel, sleep, repeat.) and the stimuli says 'Don't care'. I don't care about you, oh crappy Thai ferryman, because you don't care about me. You see me as a walking wallet, thus I see you as a device to operate transport. Greed begets greed, self-righteousness the same. In the words of P. Diddy, whose eloquence far outstrips my own: I simply don't have the time/ or inclination in my rhyme/ to consider the polemics/ of your hustling aesthetics./

Peace.

Daniel East
























Post-script: Intangibility and Taxi Drivers

It occured to me after writing this article that there is another sub-set of people, another much maligned profession that similarly warrants an analytically sensitive approach - that of the taxi driver. In all countries I have visited, regardless of quality of life, cultural diversity or tourist saturation the taxi driver remains the most singularly vile creature to inhabit any given environment.

It would seem that they qualify in the terms given above as victims of resentment and imprisonment, but perhaps their plight illuminates an entirely new field of discontent which might not be at first apparent, that is the intangibility of people. Taxi drivers come equipped with their own break-up lines, their own escape pod. People they serve go as far as their destination and no further - as such, they seem to be less real than the taxi driver himself who, in this transitory role, treats the passenger as a sort of animal to be milked rather than a human whose needs must be met (and simultaneously is made invisible by the passenger/tourist/customer who forgets the taxi driver's existence as soon as the destination is agreed upon).

Is it possible that this invisibility perverts the normal moral compass of one's fellow human? Or is it simply that only opportunistic bastards are willing to put up with being cooped up and ordered around all day? Complicated questions I intend to avoid until in less relaxing times.

An Experiment in Just Not Caring

If you ask me, novelists and anthropologists are two heads on the same body. Belonging to the first class, I watch people live their days and ask how they got there, why they stay and where will they go when it all becomes too much. Our fellow examiners do much the same thing, though their findings are produced as fact, not fiction. Ocassionally I like to attempt a cross-pollination of these two writings but more often than not, my surroundings don't lend themselves to something so real and unbelievable at the same time. That was until East and I travelled into the heart of Vangvieng, Laos.

Perhaps this would be a good time to describe exactly what Vangvieng looks like to a newcomer's eyes. Honestly, it reminded me of Australia; one wide street flanked by single-storey restaurants and convenience stores, yellow and brown dust collected in the drains, loose thongs thrown forgotten beside door mats with 'WELCOME' stitched across their faces, and utes patrolling the road. Despite the overwhelming number of bars and cafes, everything felt empty. The only people moving were the tuk-tuk drivers who seemed impervious to the extreme heat. It was beautiful in a very bare way and I looked forward to lounging on a bar couch and watching reruns of Family Guy while my two dollar pizza was being cooked. It was immediately obvious that this town was a mutant creature bred from natural beauty and the ravenous appetite of tourism. During my time here I'd be paying for the privilege to do absolutely nothing beyond getting myself back to my room after a long afternoon slumming it. I thought this was common knowledge for everyone who came here but when we pulled up in front of a beflowered guesthouse, a fellow backpacker said 'oh god, it's so touristy'. Immediately I thought 'well yeah, what did you expect'? Throughout South East Asia, Vangvieng is notorious for Westerns seeking drink, smoke and the famous two hour tube ride down a river lined with bars that offer free whisky shots for anyone conscious enough to swallow them. People die in this water every year; drowned, spine or neck broken, so poisoned with alcohol that a full-body enema wouldn't help. It's so dangerous as to seem ridiculous but all over Vietnam I saw people wearing singlets with identical TUBING IN THE VANGVIENG LAOS logos across the back. Two minutes off the bus I saw three stores selling them in various shades of souveneir. They act as beacons for backpackers everywhere a chance for them to advertise their experiences and prove that yes, they are intrepid and exciting and fearless. The only problem is, so's everyone who goes there. Even those who don't buy the t-shirt.

So why did we come here? After trekking alone through the Annapurna Ranges in Nepal and sleeping by fireside on the Great Ocean Road in Australia, why would we want to eat mediocre western food in a bar with cushions that smell of wet dog, surrounded by drunk British teenagers? Because our wants are no different in essence to the fundamental desires of any other backpacker. We want to see something. Our route through Vietnam was so well walked that whole tour offices had been erected to organise a highly detailed, completely unoriginal open trip: an air-conditioned bus from Saigon to Dalat, a side trip to the scuba diving centre of Munie Beach before winding up toward ancient Hoi-An and the boats that take you exploring through local fishing villages, then on towards Hue and the citadel where, for a price, you can dress in traditional garb and have your photo taken before an emporer's tomb, and finally a stop in Hanoi and the jewel of Vietnam's crown: Halong Bay. This was where East and I truly came face to face with the beast we shall call tourist hatred. Halong Bay is currently in the running to become one of the seven natural wonders of the world (along with the beautiful Jeju Island off South Korea) and based on appearance alone it has every chance of winning. Sheer, mountainous bolts come out of the ocean and litter the bay with hundreds of green-tree islands and eagles nest in sharp overhangs and circle the stunted trees. Even in the fog it was stunning. We arrived at the harbour around midday and were directed to a two-storey junk that would be reverently described as 'charming' in any monthly mag. As soon as we set foot on its polished deck we were sucked into a world where landmarks and heritage were packaged into dozens of daily boat trips churned over as quickly as possible. Our first stop was the harbour of a cave where boats jostled each other for position at a mossy wharf. We ceased to exist as real people and became the enemy with money. We were in turns abused, ignored, insulted and abandoned over the following three days and the worst part was they had us completely at their mercy. As a traveller in this part of the world the first thing given up is your passport and losing this security strips you of your power. At any point our guides could have demanded extra money for some invented service we would never receive and if we had refused to pay, bye bye passports. This immasculation of control served to exhaust us beyond belief and our last few days in Northern Vietnam became a torture. Not once were we truly treated as creatures worth our lick of salt. Money, we had. Naivety, absolutely, and well was this taken advantage of. But humanity? No. We're just tourists. This is why we went, nay retreated, to the Vangvieng. Everyone we met promised that Laos was chilled, relaxed, a country where no one cared about anything. After such a long time in a place where we were targeted by the assumptions of others, we wanted nothing more than to just not care.More than that, we didn't want anyone else to care either.

But what does an actual day in this picturesque void of commitment look like? Do we really have nothing to do but eat, smoke and watch television on slightly musty cushions? Or perhaps the real question is, should we have nothing to do but eat, smoke and watch television on slightly musty cushions? Life here is certainly lived at a different pace, not least due to the advertisement of marijuana, mushrooms and opium on the laminated restaurant menus. What better to wipe the mind clean than a drug-induced hiatus from life? There's more to it than this, though. People come here to experience a lack of anything. There's certainly no Laotian culture to be found unless you book the guided tour into the mountains to meet the native folk and even then I'm sure the location has been set up for just such excursions. The offered fun is easy for Western eyes to recognise: pre-organised daytrips requiring limited effort, cheap food, free drinks and narcotics flagrantly illegal in most home countries. It's the perfect set-up for people who are completely unconcerned with what their next step will be and believe me, travelling through Asia requires a great deal of energy and planning. Everything is made to look easy with the travel agents offering every kind of service imagineable but using them is entirely frustrating. Nothing takes as long or looks as it says it should and at the arrival of each destination there is the required search for accommodation with the same questions and same concerns over price. This has not been a walk in the park and finding a place as completely mind numbing as Vangvieng was the only time since living in our apartment that we've truly had nothing to do. Nowhere to find, no bus to catch, no money to scrimp. It's a blessing, this not caring.

The real problem lies in learning how to turn the care switch back on. After Vangvieng we plan on going north to Luangprabang and taking ourselves to the infamous site of the Plain of Jars. We want a cultural experience like no other, to walk the empty track and see life as it is without toruism and western influence. So how exactly are we supposed to do this when our entire psyche has been rapidly geared towards not giving a crap about anything? As I write I'm watching a series of rockets being launched over the town's limestone mountains and into dense tree cover on the other side. This is because it's Rocket Day; twenty four hours of celebration under the smokey vapour of homemade rockets. The first thing I asked upon discovering this was, 'won't broken pieces of rocket hit the villages in the mountains'? East's reply was, 'if they're in the line of fire I'd say they've been an oppressed people for years'. In other words, who cares? Not even those who spend every day living here.

Lara watched Friends approximately forty seven times during her stay in Vang Vieng.

Notes From the Road - Culture as an Excuse

I have been overseas for twelve months and twenty one days and the longer I have been extant from my home country the more I come to believe that culture is an excuse and language a commodity. For the last three days I have been staying at the Hue backpacker's hostel on Pham Ngu Lao – on this street a pack of cigarettes costs 20 000 dong (US $1), a meal costs 60 000 dong (US $3) and an overnight bus ticket to Hanoi 360 000 dong (US $18). Walk for ten minutes in any direction and the costs halve – which is when the excuses begin. They have less than us/more than us so it's only fair they/we pay a little more. Centuries of culture in service to the cost of a pack of smokes.

Let me be clearer than this than I was last night, sitting with two brilliant young Brits on the balcony of the hostel. As we sat slapping at our feet in the balmy night, cyclos prowling the strip of streetlights like pedalling sharks, I realised that I came to foreign countries like Vietnam and Korea with this idea that I have been missing out on something – that my mind will open like a delicate rosebud when I experience the distinctness and peculiarities of a foreign culture. I believe many people buy into this ideology but what I see in the tourists and travellers around me are apologetic wallflowers looking from one side of an empty room to another.

We shared insights, my friends and I, talking into the a.m. and smoking cheap cigarettes.

“I hate the way English is over here.” I said, perched on a bar stool overlooking the construction opposite. “All you hear going down the road is people shouting 'Hallo! Hallo!' as if it were 'Buy this! Buy this!'”

“A lot of these people don't have much of an education though. They probably don't even know what it means.” O----, the shorn-headed Brit said.

“Fuck that. I don't expect them to be fluent, just to not shout at me as if I'm a walking wallet.”

“A cash cow.” M---, the other Brit interjected.

“Right. Like, culture's got nothing to do with it. They shout the word to get my attention and if I turn my head to acknowledge them they don't leave me alone. It's stressful. It's gotten so I avoid looking at people on the street and ignore someone even if they're fluent.”

“Especially if they're fluent.” M--- again.

“I don't know if I agree.” O---- replied. “I agree we all sort of know not to kill someone, but if you're saying that culture doesn't excuse any of this behaviour you're not really seeing it then. You're just getting tired of being somewhere different.”

“Who can blame me for being annoyed? When my language makes me a target for high-pressure salesmanship? That it gives anyone the right to hassle me?”

“I blame you for being annoyed.” M---- said.

“Fair enough.” I said and flicked my cigarette butt at him.

The Cop and The License

Hue has been a magical place for Lara and I. For $4 a day we wound round the city on an automatic scooter, skirting the citadel walls, following the overgrown canals into lazy suburbs where men lounged on worksites shovelling sand and waving their scarred hands; out past dogs sleeping in gutters to where brilliant painted Buddist pagodas lifted ornate cornices into the white haze of the sky. Churches too would appear as if from nowhere, their courtyards empty in the midday, as schoolchildren left their grounds to sleep and play until the afternoon.

Coming back from an attempt to find the unsignposted tombs of ancient kings, we were waved over by a Vietnamese cop. His uniform was a dark khaki colour, more reminiscent of an army regular than a traffic warden, and his face young and square and relaxed. He asked for my license and my first thoughts were of the money in my wallet and how much this would cost. When he began asking me for my 'papers', my fear deepened.

“No papers.” Lara said. “We rented. Rented for a day. The bike.”

He turned my license over once or twice, Lara and I exchanged an anxious look, then he said in perfect English:

“This street is one way. Please go back and around.” Gesturing with his own hand to make a left and then another left.

I saw a Vietnamese cop, not a cop. If I'd looked around I would have seen the street full of traffic all going one way. I assumed because he was Vietnamese that he was about to rip me off. So how open to another culture am I if I'm thinking that everyone is going to take me for a walking ATM?

The truth is I cannot generalise very well, and I am even worse at experiencing the present without misconceptions. So when I hear a bloated, sunburnt Australian talking about “wanting to see the real Vietnam”, I wonder if it is not just next door, completely inaccessible yet remarkably similar to patterns of behaviour I know all too well.

And your language too

Having taught English in Korea for a year, I am almost hard-wired to slip into shorthand English when I am speaking with a non-native speaker. And I hate it. It is like talking through a chain link fence. I love my loopy, batshit magpie tongue – I love inflecting, I love blank sarcasm and ornate exaggeration, I love just saying something slightly off to see what effect it makes on someone who listens. It is probably my only true talent. But I must be a sensible reporter with non-native speakers and while I love their insights and histories, I always feel handcuffed (as I'm sure they must too).

I did a lot of study on linguistics and English at university, and never once did these theories really appreciate what I now do – that language is a commodity. That it is used to acquire goods and services. The amount of time spent gesturing and miming and laughing at my own ignorance has proven this a hundred times over. The academic side of my mind wonders why we spend so much time studying the rarefied 3% of what language is and ignore how many people are communicating with limited tools and how they manage to achieve so much clarity. More is spoken with the hands than with the tongue yet to my knowledge there are no studies into the linguistics of the body.

I suppose though I am contradicting myself – for I admit to my love of that tiny 3% and then go on to wonder why we do not analyse the other drab 90% (the assignation of the extra 7% I will leave to those with more knowledge on semiotics than myself).

Culture as an excuse

Sitting in a French boulangerie writing this today, I began to think back on my time in Korea, and how the cultural knowledge I have of that place was of an order that would be almost impossible to access within a short timespan. Outside of the few cultural customs I was shown, I could have learnt a good portion of what I know about the place and the people just by researching it. Which makes me think that this whole 'cultural experience' part of travelling is often way, way overhyped.

Every time I look at some eight hundred year old temple or site of historical importance I'm left with this feeling of, “Oh, okay. Well that's good that I saw that then.”Wonders of natural beauty or mankind's progress aside, you just don't process it on a cultural level. How can you? You look out a window at it or walk around the grounds and read a plaque then go back to your hotel room and drink yourself stupid.

The more I think about it, the more culture has to do with culinary novelty than gathering insights. You gain appreciation for a culture when you have to work with it, to co-operate with its inhabitants – and as Mike, one of my dear friends from Korea said when asked if he thought he was missing out on 'Korean culture': “You know, the only time I hear about Korean culture is when I'm being clubbed over the head with it.”

So maybe it's just a misconception on my part. I was naïve to think that going to another land and eating its food and seeing its wonders would offer a cultural experience. But I have had cultural experiences – except I'm sick of treating these events as my admission to an endless parade of assholes. Excusing the street vendor means assuming the cop will rob me – and is this really the impression of the Vietnamese people I want to be left with?

In the words of Ho Chi Minh: “Don't piss in my cup and tell me it's iced tea.”

Forgive the crassness – it loses something in translation.

Shortly before this article was written, East tracked down Ho Chi Minh and collected his urine. Just for this picture.

Lost and Found

"He who does not travel does not know the value of men" – Moorish Proverb.

I am writing this from my vinyl convered desk chair, the chair I have sat and written in for the last twelve months. The view outside is much the same; smudged smog of yellow dust from China, blocks of apartment buildings crowded like wasp nests, the river and its workmen placing stepping stones in the water, and the neons empty of their night lights. Everything I love is exactly where it should be only now, there is something missing. I have no more future in this place. My year in South Korea will be over by the end of the day and my life here become just a memory. Where once I pinned pictures on the walls I now find myself dismantling and packing their designs. My kitchen is bare but for a single copper pot dinged where East and I have spent many a night firing BBs at its base. The blanket we bought on our first night is folded on the lounge ready for the next person to move in and despite how many times I've washed it I can still see the red wine spilt during my parent's visit last September. There is so much familiar, even in this now largely empty apartment. We make our homes based on so many tiny details but somehow manage to miss the important ones. I've spent so much time obsessing over how I'll miss the way the afternoon light hits the bedspread that I forgot about the people.

East and I are about to embark on a four month trek through Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Malaysia, ending with our eventual arrival in Scotland, and it took me some time to see through my haze of excitement. Once gidinness turned to reality I remembered that what we're doing is by no means original but it is an opportunity many are never given. Korea has opened this part of the world to us but with this gift came an almost constant supply of people arriving and leaving the country, making it impossible to truly relax into any friendship without fearing it will disappear. The very landscape of our relations with other people are determined by a factor we have no control over: the teacher's contract. Everyone here is living on a timeline and the only way to fashion a friendship with even a semblance of normality is to abandon all hopes that each one will last beyond the final days. Life in South Korea is a constantly evolving shift of companionship; in the last six weeks alone I have lost two good friends, one to Ireland and one to Australia, and my own impending departure left me completely unprepared me for theirs. I can only hope we will stay in touch and attempt to beat the pitfall that is distance but then I get to thinking about the people I left behind a year ago. I'm in regular contact with friends from Australia and England but do I give them more attention because they have been in my life longer? When do new friends become old and how do we decide which ones to let loose to the winds? I'd like to believe that we work on the basis that all people are treated equally, even in something as changeable as friendships, but this simply isn't true. I've seen my fair share of connections break and recently I've been watching the person I love struggle with his own friend demons. Leaving Australia has given me an even more keen sense of loyalty because, simply put, you need effort to sustain the things that once natural are now stretched across the world.

I wish I'd never realised how close we are to leaving because it's given me an overwhelming sense of vertigo. Everything's changing and I'm reaching out for anything to anchor myself. My friends in this country can no longer serve this purpose and those back home have been long removed. If it weren't for the promise of my masters in a European city thriving with creative talent I'd feel helpless wondering where my next good friend was coming from. What has made my trip, due to officially start in just nine hours, all the more magnificent is that there have always been friends awaiting us amongst the sprawl of South East Asia. Many of the people who left Korea now live in Malaysia, Thailand or Indonesia and all we need to reignite our connection is an email. It's the most simple development toward future friendship that I've ever experienced; we're working from necessity and a mutual love of the world. Perhaps our meeting will add wood to the friendship fire for the next year or two. Maybe I'll be suprised and years down the track people I never thought I'd see again will be first on my letter writing list. It wouldn't be the craziest thing to happen. The strength of friendship can be a superpower all by itself.

Lara will absolutely definitely not be stealing any sea life whilst in South East Asia. Probably.