5 posts tagged “travel”
Have been out and about too much to update lately. Will update soon. But for uploaded photos you can go to my flickr account at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cassiodorus
Then click on the "Guatemala" photo set.
Enjoy!
- Cassiodorus
Licorice. That is my first discernible smell of Guatemala as we leave the airport parking lot on a shuttle bus with a number of international delegates for this week's conference on anti-corruption. This lasted for a few seconds as the van lurched over a speed bump before reeking of the combustion of "black gold": exhaust fumes. But this was not merely the result of a badly placed window because you smelt it everywhere; it was/is the background aroma of Guatemala city, and of any "developed" urban area in a third world country, as C says.
The next day as I was traipsing around the city while C was being a conference meeting groupie, I get a text message from her: "Please go back to the hotel now. I'll see you at the break." Before I did so, I managed to take a few pictures for your viewing pleasure:
The main tourist area itself is quite clean by anyone's standards, but as I walked beside the bus station and the hospital's emergency ward, the acrid smell of urine filled my nostrils as the dirty streets filled my field of vision.
Anyway, I was told to go directly back to the hotel as C was in a security briefing and discovered that it wasn't safe for me to be wandering around the city alone when there was a big international conference happening. Mind you, I kind of look like I belong, but it wasn't obvious enough as I had the uncanny feeling that I was being marked by people walking through the malls and streets. I had tried to look the poor backpacker, to no avail. My jeans were stolen off the clothesline in Barbados last week, so all I had were some black khakis, which probably didn't match the poor backpacker aesthetic.
In addition to looking like a tourist, I don't speak Spanish so all exchanges were brief, difficult and ... well ... Italian, if you get my meaning. This was the first non-English speaking country I've been to in a long time, and never have I felt so cut off from the surrounding culture. I suspect people aren't afraid of leaving their country for fear of leaving the familiar -- Guatemala city is more modern than Bridgetown, Barbados by all standards even though it's poorer -- but fear of not being able to connect with the familiar; there everything was, waiting for me to interact, but museums and historical buildings are all that is open to anyone not familiar with the language. This is not to say that I was at a loss entirely as many of the Spanish words are exactly the same in Tagalog and French, but you know, not everything. And Cerveza, por favor is probably not the only thing I should know.
So it looks like my movement in the city on foot -- my favorite way to know a city -- will be severely limited (and rightly so), but I shall try to be careful and inconspicuous so that the view from the hotel room is not the only view of Guatemala I will know for the length of my stay.
There is a rich history here that intrigues me, and as I learn more about the culture I will update my blog as required.
The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton.
Predictable. You'd think that someone touted as a "pop philosopher" would be worldly yet literary enough to be a good companion on any of your travels, subtly inserting historical/philosophical anecdotes about the scenery, architecture and the culture: this is the path that Immanuel Kant took everyday at exactly the same time such that his neighbors set their clocks by his appearance or Spinoza used to grind lenses in this area of town.
To a certain extent, de Botton accomplishes this in each themed, two-pronged chapter in his The Art of Travel: we follow him on his adventures in some country X accompanied by some literary guide Y. For instance, in his chapter on The Country and the City, we learn of Wordsworth's philosophy of nature, which earned him cruel snickers in his day by the simplicity of his expression (e.g. When I see a cloud,/ I think out loud, / How lovely it is, / To see the sky like this), but whose fruits are now published in the grand old Norton Anthology. Or in discussing curiosity in traveling to a new place, we learn of the author's lack of it as well as how prolific Alexander von Humboldt was when visiting South America in 1799: Humboldt even measured the water temperature every two hours traveling from Spain across the Atlantic. On returning home, he published a 30-volume work called Journey to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent. Indeed, Humboldt's first biography What May Be Accomplished In A Lifetime listed the areas of his eclectic curiosity:
- The knowledge of the earth and its inhabitants.
- The discovery of the higher laws of nature, which govern the universe, men, animals, plants and minerals.
- The discovery of new forms of life.
- The discovery of territories hitherto but imperfectly known, and their various productions.
- The acquaintance with new species of the human race - their manners, language and historical traces of their culture.
As natural as his prose was, and as penetrating as his insights were, de Botton didn't even mention Humboldt's Fifth, above: acquaintance with the people of other cultures. Instead, we get a Western Tourist's view of visiting another place-qua-place. There are uplifting chapters on beauty and the sublime where de Botton shows off his phenomenological skills, but there is no discussion on the similarly uplifting, world-expanding qualities of meeting other people and learning who they are, where they come from, their hopes and fears. This was probably calculated as most people don't travel to a place to meet the locals, but we miss all the dangerous, humourous and human aspects of cross-cultural exchange that are part and parcel of what is truly the art of travel.
So maybe having a gregarious, funny friend around would serve you better than a philosopher on your travels, and hell, in your life at home too.
No, I will not buy you duty free shoes.
Yes, I have seen the new Nike Free Cross Trainer's, and I agree that were you to pay in Barbados dollars, you would be completely ripped off. Yes, I agree that if you were to pay the duty free price, you would be greatly rewarded for your intelligence in asking me to use my passport and e-ticket to purchase them for you. But you don't get it. I will not buy you duty free shoes.
Yes, I see you have the money to pay the duty free price because you keep waving it in my face as if it were smelling salts and I just had to wake up to see what a good deal it would be for you before I put my arm around your shoulder (or not) and said, "Yes, I will buy you duty free shoes." But the truth is, I will not buy you duty free shoes.
Yes, I can see you are quite desperate and that you normally wouldn't ask someone to do this for you, especially a tourist, but your skinny, disheveled appearance, gold tooth and shiny white shoes actually tells me that you would ask someone to do this for you, especially (and only) a tourist.
Yes, I believe that you come from a poor family and that these shoes are a gift for your brother, but something tells me that you have bought into a Western lifestyle when the means for which will forever be beyond your reach. So yes, I can see that it would give you something shiny and new to possess and that it would give you hope of a better future, but the fact is that despite basic living expenses you would rather buy shoes manufactured in China by children. So, no, I will not buy you duty free shoes.
Yes, I can see that I am being hypocritical by purchasing the shoes myself, using my passport and e-ticket to pay the duty free price, and that it wouldn't be sweat off my back to just throw another box onto the counter. But you don't get it. I will not buy you duty free shoes.
-----
Google "tourist hustler" and you'll find this interesting article on how hustlers (all male) in India have one night stands with female tourists, usually white. I didn't actually consider hustlers providing a service themselves but it was pretty sexist of me to assume that (i) all hustlers are male and (ii) that, implicitly, if a hustler was female, then of course she could provide sexual services herself. The difference in the article, though, is that the male hustlers do it for free. This suggests an additional game mechanic for the previously proposed game Tourist Hustler (See the post on Oct. 14, 2006):
- Characters. Male or female.
- Additional Actions: Romance. You can choose to "romance" a potential mark by chatting them up and/or taking them to dinner or buying them a drink. Here is where it gets a bit controversial as you can charge a fee for whatever discreet services you were buttering them up for. If you don't, and were just looking for some tourist skin, then all the power to you. Who knows, you may fall for each other and your "mark" could take you away from the miserable place you live in.
- Additional Actions: Duty Free Purchase. You can also ask your mark to buy you something at the duty free price.
Hmm, maybe this game should be called Exploit! instead and have a game mode where you can exploit any number of people/cultures to do your bidding. It would probably scale. Time to up that ESRB rating again.
But in all this exploiting of base human behaviours, I am wondering whether there isn't something more perspicacious as an explanation for this phenomenon. The article linked to above attempts one:
"He was a member of an easily identifiable species, and now I understood where they came from. We had created them [the tourist hustlers]: we, the tourists -- foreign women, gay men, drug users and souvenir shoppers; we, the exporters of Western culture. The forces that had distorted this man's social world so profoundly were my own. We had come here to appreciate Indian [or Bajan or Jamaican or ... ] culture, but in the process we were changing it. This man's behavior was just a symptom of that change...
They say this world will only get smaller, and perhaps it's inevitable that cross-cultural encounters leave their mark... [I]t seems to be an unequal exchange. Tourists leave a clear trail behind them, transforming pockets of the local culture. But any social impact that they themselves experience is less visible and more fleeting. At the end of their trip, travelers can forget this strange world they have passed through. It's the local inhabitants who don't have that choice. Their world is changed, and they continue to live in it, bending themselves to meet its new shape."
It'll be hard to be flippant to the next hustler that comes along.
Tranna. A sprawl of cultures, industries, of a tightly integrated series of smaller worlds. A blast radius of my personal mythology. And surreal because of its absent familiarity – this field is where I played softball, this floor is where I learned how to fight, this parking lot is where I lost my virginity, this room is where I first fell in love, and within these halls I learned how to think. The trajectories of all the people I knew then ended only because I left, waiting for me to plot their possibly circuitous route to their current heading. I’ve always approached their histories with a peculiar reverence, as if their choices were fixed in a snapshot of fate, as if fate and freedom were the same.
---
In The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton wrote that memory's fidelity is much like that of anticipation of a place, where you subtly edit yourself out, where a place is the only thing that we permit to stand out -- the ponderous falling of packing snow in the dark, a chill in the air, and the creaking of giant pines in the wind; or the sound of someone sweeping from inside an open window on one of Kitsilano's sloping streets, the view of the magestic north shore mountains squeezed between condo complexes on the beach and the trees of Stanley Park; or the image of a dog shitting in the middle of a quiet street in Manila, the heat billowing up from the asphalt, the surrounding lots exercises in decay and apathy. These impressions register with a sandblasted clarity unbeknownst to my recollections, of which most are dull or saturated.
But when you remember home, the clarity is simply not there as something to observe, or as a property of a mere snapshot in a series of actual happenings -- no, memories of home are much more laden. Not laden with more reality, mind you (since Kant taught us that existence is not a property) but laden with you. Or to phrase it in a more a modern garb, there is a certain qualia about it.
Let me explain. Let's call how the colour red seems to you the quale of redness. This is your quale and no one else's, meaning that someone's quale of redness is not the same as yours. The question that philosophers have been vehemently arguing about is whether qualia (generally) make the study of the mind inherently incomplete, and forever beyond the reach of science. One argument goes that qualia are the iconic cases of ineffability and irreducibility. As such, they are private, first-person experiences that cannot be investigated by science. Can you describe the colour red that will make a colourblind person understand what you mean? Another perspective argues that qualia depend on extrinsic, relational properties of experience; they are dispositional -- they depend on your attitudes, experiences and relationships with the world. If qualia are intrinsic, these philosophers say (Daniel Dennett being the most outspoken proponent), then beer is not an acquired taste for how could it be if you didn't like the first sip of beer but came to acquire "the taste of beer"? Clearly these are not arguments but mere rhetorical questions, but I am inclined to believe that qualia are dispositional, and I think remembering home is a good illustration of that.
Now, I'm not entirely certain that a hodgepodge of quales scales to a larger impression to make another quale (or is recursively defined), but for the moment let's assume that they do. Then, the memories of home, being dispositional, are laden with me, with who I am, being part of my history. They do seem that way, at least. And if we are supposedly subliminally editing memories of holidays or anticipations of them, then we are merely acknowledging that we have no trenchant dispositional relations to them, pace de Botton.
---
"The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes 'sight-seeing'". ~Daniel J. Boorstin
And, of course, doing all of that with C. But that's a given.
