|
Grand Tour: Introduction
Last year, while researching the Mediterranean Basin, I was drawn to the sweetly magical stories of travellers to the Mediterranean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when it had been fashionable for well-off European adventurers and writers (and artists) to travel around the Med on a Grand Tour. They sought out the bizarre sights and isolated cultures, recording their travels in journals and books, and in water-colours or sketches highly desired in aristocrat circles. These travellers' impressions expressed an attitude that was amused and sardonic and self-absorbed and aggrandized (the sketches were suggestive, like caricatures), and later, when I visited some of those places, I could see that these travelers had exaggerated - exaggerations, I suppose, that were driven by the psychological need to make the trip seem as grand as their imagination, and as worthwhile as family and friends expected it to be.
Today, the ease of travel and economic inequalities has made a long tour affordable to any middle-class kid in the west, and the humble Mediterranean tour of yesteryear has been superseded by a longer backpacking tour through Asia. The possibility of a year-long working visa for Australia (about 40,000 British nationals get this visa every year) has made this blaze across Asia predictable, starting in India, hopping across Southeast Asia (Thailand, Laos, Vietnam), the essential rest-and-refuel stop in Australia, then back again more or less the same way, but with fewer and shorter stops. This is the route Angel and I are following, 18 months travel on the cheap.
It's a Grand Tour that has become something of a rite of passage, as if you're incomplete before you back pack for a year, as though it's something crucial for your development, like going to university. Europeans put these travels in their CV, and long-term travellers are considered wise and sexy and experienced. In social occasions, travel yarns are instant hits, guaranteed to entertain (I often wondered how much travellers embellish their stories, like our forerunners).
The idea of travelling long-term for wisdom is nothing new; it is as old as humans have lived in societies. In one form or another, every religion has given rise to the ascetics that hit the road with as little possessions as they could carry, spending anything from a few years to a lifetime wandering to the ends of earth - in the old times, the boundaries of one's earth might have been the border of one's kingdom or country - in an auspicious voyage that was supposed to lead to enlightenment and religious salvation, and earned the wanderers merit and respect from less courageous mortals who opened their homes and shared their food with these holy men, revelling in ethereal tales. Today's tour is a secular re-invention or incarnation of this old voyages; the difference is that this we are seekers of earthly wisdom.
In long-term travel, which is hard, simply having fun (the idea of a holiday) and wallowing in a delicious indolence is only a small part of the allure. Through our passage in different landscapes and other cultures, we develop a deeper understanding of the world and our place in that world; we become less judgmental and more tolerant; we acquire a wider pool of experiences to draw from. But this is not enough. We quest for something more. For most people in the West, embarking on long-term travel becomes a metaphor for an inner journey of spiritual and life-changing proportions; for me, coming from a background that gives me ambiguous feelings about modern travel, my expectations are not so high. I even feel a bit jaded. The primary values of travel: a mental alertness triggered by different sensory stimuli, a sense of aestheticism heightened by seeing unforgettable landscapes and colourful cultures, an intellect stimulated by cultures that retain some different ways of seeing, a self empowered by living out of a rucksack and finding one's way in a foreign place. But profound and fundamental transformation, a million epiphanies, becoming a new person? Is this possible, and how penetrative is modern travel, especially when the route is laid out, and we hang out in flocks, moving along a circuit of well-worn traveller enclaves (so defined are the routes that along the way you keep bumping into the same crop of travellers), spending a few days in each region seeing and doing the things that are put up for us?
I grew up in Malta at the receptive end of tourism in a poor country and I remember the mixture of humiliation and amusement of being on display for the tourists. I saw the Western romanticism of the conditions of frugality as condescending and cruel: the sophisticated and worldly being amused by the squalor of the provincials. How patronising had the tourists been taking pictures of the rickety and polluting World War II buses, which belonged to a junkyard. How misguided their conclusions that the pushiness of the natives, who eked a living by hustling, was seen as friendliness.
In my teenage years, when the country was emerging from two decades of Russian-style socialist rule, I hung out with British young people who visited because it was affordable and quiet and beautiful. One glance at my dad's 30-year-old mini minor by my friends elicited croons of romantic gibberish, but there was nothing vintage about that dilapidated car. But these friends didn't see this - or the way he scavenged the garbage dumps for anything usable - for what it was, as the make-do life of someone who believed, because he was poor, that nothing should be discarded for as long as it could be salvaged and made to work. These people had spent a couple of months in Malta and their incessant romanticism of the simplicity and piety of the natives alerted me to the distorted impressions and misconceptions that we're susceptible to when seeing a different people from the distance and otherness of a tourist.
The thing is, as casual travellers we are largely excluded from the intrigues of native cultures; most of the time the only interaction with the locals is one-faceted and economic. When locals speak to Westerners, their tone and temperament changes, their discourse is calculated, their gestures and gait is moderated or exaggerated, their whole demeanour becomes an act. And, in a further distortion of perceptions, the natives start to believe the shallow impressions and hype of the tourists, behaving in ways that reinforce those views (partly because the tourists' admiration makes them feel proud, partly because their economic dependence on tourism makes it expedient to act in ways tourists approve of). So - much of the interaction with natives can be grotesque and comic role-playing.
But tourism did another thing for me. My friendships with Europeans predisposed me to break free of the limitations of my culture, to move to European capitals and embrace liberal sensibilities, and all of this led to this reversal of roles: now I am romping through the world and pointing my camera at things similar to the ones that formed the background of my childhood milieu.
So, in this trip in Asia and Australia, it is these juxtapositions or shifts of thoughts and observations that I am eager to explore, and this is what I'll be focusing on in the stories that follow. What do we achieve from this Grand Tour? How does it match up to the idea and hype of backpacking? These observations of my tribe, I hope, will make us better tourists and give us some insight into what we have become.
© Victor Paul Borg
|
