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Thailand: The Art of Departure
The most striking physical legacy of Angel's travels were her long fingernails. For fifteen years Angel (my girlfriend and travel companion) had tried and failed to stop gnawing her fingernails. In Asia, the reprieve from daily stresses and the paranoia of catching a disease by transferring the dirt under her fingernails into her mouth were the two reasons that unconscionably exorcised the habit. Suddenly, along with the new-found pride in perfectly-manicured fingernails, she also became more girlishly feminine. At first I watched these changes with amused curiosity, but my engagement soon turned to exasperation when any daily trip through town became distracted by pauses in the clothes and jewellery stands of bazaars. Increasingly, my tolerance for Angel's unfocused ambles diminished, and that was ominous: travelling with someone entails extra patience and tolerance, not less.
There's a latent power struggle in every human relationship, and when you're saddled together all the time, cramped in cheap guesthouse rooms, daily annoyances could easily erupt into open conflicts. For us, things came to a head when we reached Bangkok after four months in India, and our disagreements over anything from where to stay to when to eat were compounded by the reverse culture shock (after India) and the claustrophobia of our wooden-partitioned cell in Bangkok's Khao San Road. The intensities of long travel were catalysing a mutual disdain that teetered us towards the brink of our ruin as a couple. That was when we hastened our escape to the islands: in Koh Ngan, in the Gulf of Thailand, we hoped to find the space and tranquillity that would soothe our frayed nerves.
My perceptions had been changing too. I came to see the uselessness of our consumer-driven necessities: my medical kit, which had cost œ150, was as good as dead-weight, and my new expensive rucksack and laptop, which were a constant source of anxiety at the prospect of damage or loss, illustrated the inherent problem of attachment to possessions. Internally, I became less manic, less intent on leading or dominating, less insistent on itineraries and plans. My babbling had been giving way to observation and introversion.
One thing that hadn't changed was my impatience: Angel's slowness endlessly irritated me. "You're walking as if you're dying," I said one day infuriatingly.
"And you're walking as though you are in London," she countered. "You haven't slowed down at all."
"I'm the same person everywhere." One of the illusions of travel is that you can be a new person in a distant land. In Malta, during my teens when I hung out with travellers, this phenomenon of untenable and superficial transformation had been cause for disappointment and estrangement. I had met travellers that came across as open and adventurous, and counted them as friends. Then, visiting them in their home country, I found them sedate and closed and fearful, and I felt betrayed to realise they hadn't been acting themselves on holiday. The tendency, during travels, is to enter into a temporary suspension of reality and project a desirable self or an alter ego.
"I have become slower," Angel explained, "because after ten years working very hard I decided that my travels were going to be a total break from work preoccupations. This is fallow time for me, and I believe it would help me in the long-term."
Neither Angel nor I had been on a beach holiday before. Our idea of travel - active learning, cultural immersion - didn't include two weeks of indolence on a beach, and we had decided on this side-trip only as a period of convalescence from exhaustion after the hardships and intensities of travel in India. We needed to regain our stamina and enthusiasm; and to slough off the jaded weariness that much stimulation induces on the senses. Koh Ngan was performing these functions well: our bungalow, perched on the side of the quintessential Thai beach, was spacious and airy. We slept late, and spent our days reading, snorkelling, eating, walking and chatting.
Yet we missed the company of other long-term backpackers in Thailand's islands. I don't like making the distinction between `travellers' and `tourists' because it is often a difference emphasised by long-term travellers gloating in self-righteous glory. True travellers, it is said, are the ones without a goal and without a destination - and few modern travellers are pure wanderers in this sense. Rather, many find the ultimate reward of long-term backpacking in a series of departures in pursuit of primeval innocence, fleeing from what we perceive as the shallowness of tourism with its rapid ability to corrupt and destroy nature and insular cultures. Then the cycle starts all over again: backpackers discover a place, the initial trickle swells, hotels and towns sprout up, roads dissect virgin landscapes, holiday-makers follow, and it would be essential to push further into the untouched again. It's a perpetual cycle of destruction, and hardened backpacking, for all its haughtiness, is at the vanguard of such destruction.
What we missed in Thailand's islands was the opportunity to meet like-mind people, which is part of the joy of being on the Asian backpacker tour. The feeling that you are party to a circuit of adventurers gives you a sense of buzz, of possibility, of belonging. The values of this subculture - bohemian, unceremonious, stoic - are detectable in the temperament of quiet observation and absolved ambition. It is enough to be somewhere, as being there is the whole point and seeing would come to one slowly and in time. Most of the Westerners on the islands, being short-term holiday makers, were the opposite of this. They kept to themselves; eye-contact was rare and perfunctory; they were hurried. These people wanted to achieve maximum return from their three-week trip: to spend special time bonding with friends or spouse, to see the sights, to go swimming and snorkelling every day, to pick up a tan, to take enough pictures, to drive around the island, to buy presents and some clothes or souvenirs, and, if there was any time left, to lie somewhere staring at the sky. In their scale of priorities, hanging out with strangers they were unlikely to meet again was the last thing they cared about.
(Months later in Australia, these differences were distilled when two English friends joined us on a road trip. They wanted to go as far as possible and to see as much as possible in three weeks; Angel and I wanted to see fewer places at more depth and understanding. Their idea was to pause at a national park, walk to the nearest lookout or vantage point, take a few pictures and leave; our idea was to spend at least two days at a place we liked, and do a long walk. I argued that you only could begin to connect with the sense of place once you had walked for four hours at least.)
One evening, reclining on the lofty terrace of our bungalow, Angel was talking about the benefits of travel. "I have become more open. I think nothing now of making friends out of strangers. This is new for me: meeting someone in a bar or restaurant or on a bus who becomes an instant friend. I never did that before. Even when I moved to London I had friends and a boyfriend. Somehow, in your home country, there is a resistance to random contact, and instead move through interconnected circles."
By showing us that a heightened level of openness to strangers means it is possible to make friends anywhere, travel makes us more confident about moving to new places. Granted, in Asia, random contacts are largely limited to other Westerners, and encouraged by the incomprehension of the native language and culture, but it is a start. An accessibility to strangers could open whole new worlds. I am proof of this: befriending travellers in my teens in Malta had coaxed me out of the closed world of my community. It's a lesson I have applied ever since, often consciously going out alone even at the place I call home, thus forcing myself to meet new people in spontaneous contacts.
"In long-term travel you make a clear break from the life you had built," Angel continued. "It's like breaking from a long-term relationship. You saw how much I had accumulated in eight years living in London, and I gave it all up and I gave up all the work I had built. I severed everything, and, aside from a couple of boxes I stored at friends', what I have in my rucksack is the possessions I am left with. And it feels good. I don't feel an attachment to England. Travel isn't only about going somewhere, about visiting other places: it's about leaving. It's a departure, and that's a radical change in outlook.a big leap."
© Victor Paul Borg
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