You have
settled in. Maybe your coffee has arrived, or a glass of the local
beer.
Suddenly,
you realize that someone is looking at you.
"Oh,
hey, you're reading that book? Oh my god, I loved it but not as much
as I loved The Martian. Have you read The Martian? So
much better than the movie, right? Oh you haven't read it? You have
to!"
And with
that, the book goes on your lap, and you politely smile and nod in
assent, neither really agreeing nor disagreeing, nor really giving a
shit.
"Oh
you were in Laos too? How long? Just a week? I was there for two."
A man
with dreads rolling a cigarette in the corner pipes in. "Yeah,
Laos was cool. I was there three weeks."
They
begin to compare notes. "Yeah, I went on this trek." "Of
course I went to the Four Thousand Islands." Another chimes in.
"Ohhhhh, well I was supposed to go to Si Phan Don"
-- using the Lao name, a surefire way to establish credibility --
"but I had stopped over at this gorgeous riverside temple, and I
just couldn't bear to leave."
The
variations of this game of one-upsmanship are endless. The most
places you've been, of course, is the main competition, but there are
countless others. Whether you went somewhere or really went
somewhere, really experienced it. The allotted minimum of time
needed in a certain place. The roughest country bus rides, the
spiciest meals, the foulest local hooch, the friendliest locals, the
wildest parties, the most miserable hangovers (contrasted with
whatever intense activity they were supposed to be doing that day,
which usually involves having to climb a mountain), the most
unspoiled beaches, the most overrated destinations, all one great
footrace towards some very nebulous and very Eurocentric notion of
"authenticity."
There is
also, of course, the conflation of a brutal tight-fistedness and
transcendence. These conversations tend to be long gripe-fests
involving flight deals, discounts, haggling skills, hand-wringing
about how much someone overpaid for something, the most exorbitant
tourist scams, the best way to avoid said exorbitant tourist scams,
and of course beefs with "dumb tourists" (which can
generally be interpreted to mean most anyone other than the person
speaking).
Somewhere,
typically around beer number three, the ethnic divisions start to
show. This is where you meet the Japanese tourist who tells you the
Rape of Nanking never happened, the Brit who defends his arrogance
and pettiness by saying "you don't understand English sarcasm,"
the German who mutters something about Muslims, the American who
loudly and bitterly complains about the lack of vegan and gluten-free
options.
When I'm
in this situation, this is typically the point where everyone else
goes to the club, and I go to bed.
And it's
the point where, when I go up to my hotel room and stare at the
ceiling, then at my phone, then back at the ceiling. In my cheap
room, I can hear the water run through old pipes, see the headlights
sweep across the walls, again and again.
I'll be
thinking about my own attempts to try to escape the fucking chokehold
of late-capitalist expectations, about my own frugality and the very
Protestant way in which I see it as a sign that I'm winning, about my
own gripes as I travel, about my annoyance at the sanitized
tawdriness in Amsterdam, the unsanitized tawdriness in Phnom Penh,
about my self-consciousness about my American traits -- the
terminology I use, the tendency to act like a big kid while drunk --
about how I get just as pissed at the people I consider to be the
dumb tourists.
But then I wake up in the morning. I see the steeple of a Medieval church cutting across the sunrise, or smell baking empanadas from a back alley kitchen entrance, or hear the sounds of drums in a Chinese temple. And in that moment, the breeze crossing my face, it is mine and mine alone.
