Confessions of a female solo wanderer

February 11, 2008

BANGKOK, Thailand
I wake up at 7AM, not just because of jet lag, but because it’s the only cool part of the day. I take a commuter boat down the canal and walk for hours through insane traffic, sticky pollution, crumbly sidewalks, death-defying street crossings. Everything, from the soot-stained buildings butting up against ritzy, towering malls to the smell of the canal, reminds me of Manila, where I’m always with family. It’s nice to be able to hit the streets on my own in a city like this.

It’s a foodie paradise here, with street eats everywhere. Armed with a crumpled piece of paper with scribbled food recommendations from friends, I hunt down fried chicken stands, papaya salad stalls, and noodle shops. I have a particularly cush day with a family friend, whose driver picks me up at my hostel. We lunch at the Royal Country Club. She’s shocked that I’m traveling alone. “That is not the Thai way!” she exclaims.

Sex tourists are everywhere. Old, gross, white men and younger Thai women. Some of the men are stooped over enough that they would do well with a cane, most have the rickety shoulders and flat, sunken backsides of the near elderly. Some are so morbidly obese they can barely walk. They can’t get laid at home, or they’ve been through a nasty divorce and have decided to hate on all “Western” women, so they take a plane across the world to paw a Thai girl half their age and one-third their size. They are the king consumers of the world. Because everything, everyone—all women, all poor women, all poor Asian women—are for sale if you are rich enough, horny enough.

(And it’s not only women who are working the sex industry. Not only white men who are enabling it.)

At a museum honoring a dead colonialist C.I.A. American man, an old white American guy is touching the shirts of younger Thai women so he can better read their school insignias. They back off, nervously smiling. Yes, we are all public property for you.

The drugstores sell aisles full of skin whitening creams. One is called “White Perfect.”

The bookstore in the mall is full of English-language books written by expats, countless guides on how to navigate sex with Thai women. What I want to read is a book by a Thai woman who goes out with sex tourists. I want to hear her speak. How do you get through it? I want to ask.

CHIANG MAI, Thailand
I love that I can meet up with a friend who I usually see in Manhattan halfway around the world. Kat and I take the overnight train, which resembles a slightly dirtier New Jersey Transit train, except with pullout sleeper beds and surprisingly tasty food. Our beds are next to the toilets and I have to fight my OCD for 13 hours.

In Chiang Mai we visit a mountaintop temple, chill out in our air-conditioned hotel room watching bad movies on cable, chat with Japanese-language students in a park—they like Obama, they say—push our way through the labyrinth night bazaars, take a wrong turn onto a hellish street of endless garish neon bars full of sex tourists and pumping techno, discover a food court for fruit shakes and spicy curry noodles.

We get hour-long Thai massages at the Chiang Mai School of the Blind. The masseuses take breaks to answer their cell phones and chat about the odor hierarchy of their clients—backpackers are number one in stinkiness. We’re the only seeing people around. After the massages I stumble out into the sunshine and nearly fall over a pile of young boys lounging about on the ground. Oddly, they are all playing melodicas.

Traveling as an Asian American in Asia is interesting. If you don’t open your mouth—or dress too strangely, or show your tattoos—you can pass for a local or at least an Asian tourist. To non-Asian tourists, however, you are just another one of the anonymous hoards to step over. But you can choose to be anonymous when non-Asians can’t. And you can understand what English speakers are saying when they assume you can’t. It’s a rare privilege, so I’ll ride it out: I can visually blend in, but I also have enormous class and nation privilege.

Of course, I’m still being asked “What are you? Korean? Japanese…?” Here, it’s more curiosity than exotification, but it reminds me of how “Asian America” is such a construct born out of political strategy, a reclamation of the “you are all the same” stereotype, an opportunity for strength in numbers. In reality there’s no thing even close to a monolithic, singular Asian culture.

And I make my own assumptions, too. At an internet café, waiting for an employee, a white French man comes up to me and asks, “Internet?” I immediately snap, “I don’t work here,” thinking he had assumed I was the employee. But it turns out he’s the employee. The joke was on me.

HOUAYXAI, Laos
I kick off the solo leg of my trip by bussing to the Thai border. The bus has a ladyboy host who plays karaoke videos, gives out boxes of butter cookies and puts on a DVD of Vin Diesel’s “A Man Apart,” complete with explosive gunfire, at 9AM. At Chiang Kong I cross the river to Houayxai, clear Lao immigration, check into a guesthouse, and eat the first of many bowls of delicious noodle soups I’ll have while in the country.

Houayxai’s main income looks like it comes from being a border town. The one main street is dusty, with a smattering of mopeds, dogs and roosters all waddling along in the wet evening heat. I see backpackers for the first time since I’ve arrived in Asia. One woman loses her shit completely, yelling at a guesthouse owner for having the nerve to ask for the equivalent of five U.S. dollars for a room, when the woman’s Lonely Planet lists the place as priced at four dollars. She thrusts her guidebook into the baffled guesthouse owner’s face, shouting in English. Roll with it, I want to tell her.

I’m so glad to be away, though. (Why is it that being alone in a foreign country is less depressing than being alone at home?) I am grateful for so much opportunity. I love the rush of arriving somewhere new. I love unpacking, settling in. Is it how I pictured it? How did I picture it? I love unpacking in a new room, if only for a night. I love walking the streets of a new town or city at sunset, sussing out my surroundings.

PAKBENG, Laos
Early in the morning I board a wooden longboat for a two-day journey down the Mekong River. These boats were once the primary mode of transportation in Laos, mainly for goods and other materials, as well as people. But in the past decade, as road conditions improved and the country opened itself up to tourism, some of the boats now carry tourists. There are more than a hundred people crammed into my boat, with very little legroom, which made for some less-than-comfortable times. Some of the passengers are locals—a large Lao family sat next to me, spread out their lunch, and offered me a bite of duck—but the majority were tourists, mostly couples.

The view of the river was stunning, but after hours on the boat I get a little tired of people complaining about the trip’s inefficiency—if you want prompt to-the-minute travel, go to Germany or Japan!—and bitterly bitching about how locals are ripping them off, having the nerve to charge an extra 2,000 kip for fruit. This is equal to 20 cents U.S. It’s ugly when you are from the richest country in the world and complaining about 20 cents when a cup of coffee at home costs more than ten times that amount. Of course, any sort of holiday is a luxury. But while some people travel to open their worldview—to reshape what they think of as normal, as a given—others travel to just reaffirm their positions in the world. This is why I’m always so uneasy about travel and tourism: in many ways it’s an exercise in enacting colonial fantasy.

The worst are the hobbyist photographers on board, all fancying themselves as the next National Geographic contributor, jumping and leaping out of their seats to get the money shot with their expensive, erect lenses. Shots of natives bathing in the river, natives living in shacks, natives toting concrete blocks, barefoot scruffy children peddling soda and chips. They’re not going to buy the soda, but that photo op just can’t be missed!

I wish a group of Lao tourists would descend upon these men’s homes and shoot pictures of them in the bathroom, showering, eating, taking a dump.

We stop for the night in Pakbeng as the sun begins to set. The village is poor, families gathering around one large television, people sleeping on dusty floors. Tin and wood housing. Mopeds and chickens. Ducks by the river. I fall asleep to Lao pop music as the power goes out at 10PM.

LUANG PRABANG, Laos
My passport is a mess. I have been to five countries in less than two weeks. But it’s beautiful in Luang Prabang. The hills and sweeping waterfront views remind me of San Francisco. I have a soft spot for sleepy, waterside cities. I eat incredibly well at the night markets—grilled fish, noodles, coconut pancakes—and drink intense coffee and fruit-and-condensed-milk shakes out of plastic bags. I watch the sunset at the city-top among golden temples.

The Red Cross-sponsored herbal sauna is a great scene, everyone lying around outside in sarongs sipping endless cups of tea, watching the Discovery Channel dubbed in Lao. Just sweating, and chilling, and sweating some more. I stay for hours into the night and feel everything clear. The older Lao ladies can really take the heat, while the few foreigners dash out of the steam room within one minute, red-faced and gasping. I meet more ladies traveling alone, from Japan to New Jersey.

I wonder what will happen to Luang Prabang in the coming years. You can already see how the influx of tourism—everyone scrambling to “discover” Laos—is drastically changing the country. There are so many warm, poor places in the world where tourists can escape to paradise at a good monetary exchange rate. Places that exist to service tourists, which are sustained by tourism but also destroyed by it. I didn’t go to the nearby Kuang Si waterfalls in Luang Prabang partly for this reason. They had been around for centuries, then recently partially collapsed, after just a few short years of tourism.

I think about this a lot of this trip. Like on the airport bus in Bangkok, when a television screen shows a travel infomercial utilizing the country’s tourism slogan: The Land of Smiles. A man with an American accent exclaims, “I guess that’s why they call it the Land of Smiles! Seems like a happy place… Everyone’s always smiling!” As if the entire country is a fucking Disney cruise.

Another popular tourist activity in northern Thailand and Laos is hilltribe trekking, or hiring guides to take you on a hike through remote mountain villages, and “discover” the mountain people, impoverished hill tribes. You can get high on these treks and smoke opium with the mountain people as part of the fun. (You can also go to Cambodia and blow up cows with machine guns.) Maybe this is the future of extreme tourism. Rambo-fantasy-type tourism. You could blow up an actual Burmese person for fun! Or drug tourism: smoking opium in the hills of Thailand, snorting coke in the barrios of Bogota, bong hits on a soft couch while watching The Panda Channel.

VIENTIANE, Laos
The V.I.P. bus from Luang Prabang is nine hours of vertigo-inducing, hairpin curves. We pass lush hills, straw buildings teetering on the edge of a mountain, garbage burning, women gathering with babies, men hauling bricks, children dashing down the paths on a bright Saturday afternoon. My seat-mate shares his iPod and we bump over the dusty hills on a rattly bus—a man with a machine gun in his lap in the seat in front of us, a girl repeatedly barfing into a bag across the aisle—listening to Bowie’s “Soul Love” and Cheap Trick’s “Surrender.”

Vientiane is a small, sleepy capital city, and I have a series of misfires with guesthouses, each one progressively worse than the next. It’s here that I hit a wall in my travels, feeling exhausted and ready to just be in one place for a while, a place that isn’t here. I am so ready for the beach. I get a lot of intense staredowns from men while walking down the street. I guess a female walking alone at night here is really unusual, especially an Asian female?

But meanwhile, it’s Saturday night and there are parties on the riverside with blaring pop music and Lao hip-hop and towering bouncy castles, beers to drink, meats to grill over open flames.

Maybe I travel so much to satiate some subconscious, still-buried teenage self, for all the stories I wanted and thought I’d never have. In 1989 I was 14 years old and listening to “Soul Love” on cassette while sharing a motel room with my parents while my mother sold clothes at the local craft fair one weekend. Someday, I thought, I’d be older, and things would be different, possible.

KOH SAMET, Thailand
It takes a while to get here, but the reward is sweet. I ride a tuk-tuk taxi to a packed minibus to a long wait in a long immigration line to another tuk-tuk to an overnight train to two subways to a four-hour bus ride to a boat to another tuk-tuk to another tuk-tuk and then walked through the woods and finally, finally found a quiet beach. The top part of Koh Samet is crazy built up—full of resorts and terrible backpacker cabins and bars—but on Candlelight Beach, I get a little bungalow to myself right on the sand for about $20 U.S.

I congratulate myself on being a hardy traveler. I’m good at it. I’m short and don’t need much legroom, I can sleep on any form of transportation. I’m an adventurous eater. I’ll go anywhere. I like talking to strangers but I can also be alone for days and entertain myself easily. I have a pretty good bullshit detector. (Like my dad, I just want to be congratulated on my cunning.) I’m a type-A-minus personality, I think, but traveling forces me to let go of expectations.

I love that I’ve met so many people on this trip, people I might not have anything in common with except being English speakers traveling solo on the other side of the world, whom I might not even get down to exchanging names with until we’ve been talking for hours. On Koh Samet there are deserted beaches, seafood and fruit, beers on the pier, and the ocean from my front porch. I nap in a hammock, nap in a big chair, and nap on the sand. I feel lucky, lucky, so damn lucky.

HONG KONG…
Here, now. More to come.

2008-02-11  ::  iamlisako