by Andrew Hyde
Later in the day, I decide to break off from the group of new friends to head south. Taking buses and traveling around the area can be just as much an experience as any actual destination. I admired the amazing, colorful, symphony of honking horns on my bus ride to the south. The seats are not made for people as tall as I, and the one hour trip feels a lot like
The roads are nicely paved and it’s smooth sailing save for the Public Forces checkpoints, where a group of six police officers will sternly pull over your vehicle just by pointing. When this happens they search your entire vehicle. Every pocket of every bag. They are looking for drugs or who knows what, exactly. I’ve gotten used to smiling. “Yes, that is my dirty underwear. No, you won’t find drugs in there.”
On another four hour bus ride to the San Blas Islands, there was a stop at a small military fueling station. We showed up right as a group of Public Forces members were doing their usual impressive display: march, turn around, march, awkwardly-handle-semi-automatic-rifle-dance, march. They saluted the Chief inside the building who saluted back after a long pause. Our group was told to exit the vehicle and come inside to present our passports to the Chief.
It was an intense place to be. Your passport is your life on the road and if this Public Forces member wanted to take it away I would be at the complete mercy of what they may — or may not — want me to do. They have the guns and your passports, while you just want to see a beach. Such is life here, residues of the drug trade not yet washed away.
We walked into the command center and a very small, older man with a small kitten in hand said “Welcome! and Gato?”
“Welcome!” Yes! We are not in trouble. “Gato?” What is that?
He motioned the group to meet the kitten. Who wants to hold him? I do, that is who. There are seven men with very powerful guns outside, and I now have a kitten — one that the Chief likes, and if shit goes down I’m using it as a shield.
Gato! Gato! Gato!
The show of brute force was interrupted — in my mind, entirely alleviated — by the showing of kittens.
Passports returned, and we were off down the road.
Such is the unpredictable and varied life that makes up Panama: the rich and the poor; the beautiful and the rancid; AK-47s and sweet little kittens — which I use as protectors.
TOCUMEN INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, PANAMA
“He isn’t a real traveler,” said a Canadian backpacker with two bandanas and two water bottles dangling from his worn bag that proudly displayed four flags. He was referring to a loud, elitist man checking into a flight in Panama City, Panama. “A cruise ship is to travel as a McDonalds is to cooking” pretty much sums up the common travel ethos this backpacker was channeling.
International flight checkin areas are stressful places to be and they often bring out the strongest of personalities in people. Indeed, they are ripe zones for clichés to flare. Nervous energy buzzes throughout the whole space where, though there are 10 different languages being spoken, everyone is trying to conform to rules set forth by the aviation industry. I’m always a bit like an excited kid in airports, because taking a nap in an aluminum tube still pretty much feels like teleportation. The act of flying never ceases to amaze me. For pennies I get transported thousands of miles! Whoa! This usual excitement, however, is getting drowned out by this “fake traveler” who is yelling at and berating the airline staff member — warning her not to break into his suitcase.
To be fair, I wouldn’t really want to hang out with this guy, either. His Hawaiian shirt matched his equally oversized luggage. They were loud, rude and seemed to think nothing of their surroundings — pulling out all the tricks to ensure they got their way. His tone made it appear as if everyone was against him, wrong, and plotting to steal. If he were deported I don’t think I would have spoken up, but to say he’s not a real traveler? Well now, that’s just harsh.
If you have seriously thought of a trip, you are a traveler. If you have crossed a state line, you are a traveler. If you went through the process of getting a passport, you are a traveler. If you have one stamp on that passport, you are a traveler. If you have 90 stamps on that passport, you are a traveler.
There is a lot of infighting in the travel community over what travelers are and what they are not. “A backpacker watching a movie at a hostel? What a waste,” they say. Watching a traveler spending their time ignoring their surroundings (especially if they are in the “it’s expensive” trap, which I’ll get to later) is hard — but perhaps they are out of their comfort zone, sick, or just have never had access to horrible, cheesy 90s films (a favorite of hostels in Central America). They are just as unique as you, living their trip in a way that makes sense to them. Labeling someone else, I think, more accurately labels you.
The funny thing about someone calling a traveler “not real” is that travel is really anything that puts you out of your comfort zone. By belittling someone else, you are doing the exact opposite of that for yourself. By claiming what the other is “not” you are attempting to secure what you “are” — a security that protects your particular comfort zone. There are stories you will never hear that are directly playing a role in why people place themselves where they do.
Location is identity. Where you are right now reading this book says a whole chapter about yourself. It is just as important of a social indicator as how you dress or who you choose to be friends with. Location shows preference, comfort, desire, relationship status, and about 80 other things. This includes a particular coffee shop, for instance, as well as the neighborhood, city and country that it is in.
So what is a real traveler? I met a pair in Panama City who had taken a bus as far southeast as they possibly could — all the way to the Darién Gap — where they then continued on foot, hiking, until they happened upon a village. Without knowing a word of Spanish, they befriended a family and had spent a week and a half harvesting bananas. When I met them, they had just snuck into the hostel I was staying at for a few hours of sleep before they returned to their jobs in New York City.
To them, I was probably not a “real” traveler. To me, they were reckless and putting a burden on a community that didn’t expect or necessarily want them. If they got injured or kidnapped (Darién Gap is often cited as one of the most dangerous places in the world) it would have taken a small army of dignitaries and lots of cash to get them back alive.
They clearly didn’t share these sentiments and, as a result, they perhaps have far better stories than I do. At least they have the kind of stories we, in the modern world, are so unbelievably hungry to hear. Why is that, I wonder?
Is there a lesson there? Should travelers push the social boundaries of what communities can handle? Many “real” travelers talk about this mode of backcountry befriending as the way to meet the “real” people of the country you are visiting. You know, real people meeting other real people. I mean, what does that even mean? Such a travel mode is considered to be a far more authentic experience than a tour. I can understand why this sentiment exists. My days traveling where I knew someone that lived in the city I was in were far more interesting, socially, than those where I was free wheeling around. But is that really about varying gradations of “authenticity”? And anyway, at what cost does this come? At what point, as this practice continues to gain in popularity, will various communities see travelers as mindless beggars coming to poach their food and culture? Is it already there? Is it the responsibility of a traveler to leave a community alone, both financially and culturally? Should the art be appreciated but not purchased?
Look at the thriving art community in Haiti and compare it to the upscale blandness of Barbados. One country has kept their cultural core through poverty that in turn stifled tourism while the other has had their culture put on par with a Disney ship (that they board to experience). Modern culture pirates as part of a tourism and traveler ransom manifesto. And what is culture anyway? Is it worth fighting for if it can be destroyed by an upward economic push? By an excha
nge rate?
What is travel now? What should it be? Can we be content with a forever evolving definition? Should we be? This, more or less, is the basis of this book.
I brought this question up to the other travelers over a bowl of rice and chicken stock in the San Blas Islands, Panama. I’m told I’m destroying the culture of travelers by being so intense in my theology about our common actions. I’m told to drink some rum and to enjoy the sunset. I can appreciate this beautiful place, no question about it, but because the conversation has died, I am set to ponder alone just what it means to try to travel with cultural ethics. I can’t think of a problem that solved itself by being ignored, and my mind wanders to wonder if the core of the problem is caused by the idea of nations. Is nationalistic identification really indifference caused by a constant stream of wealth looking to justify the existing context?
On the same island, a young Israeli traveler is using his year following military service to get as high and drunk as possible as a means of unwinding from — and trying to forget — his past year. He is fully celebrating this and I am interested in his stories about the army and the stress he still has from his service. He has spent the last 60 days on an island smaller than a Olympic swimming pool: swimming, laying in the sun, getting high and playing basketball. Is that travel? For him, it really was. And maybe even more than that, it was — if only temporarily — his whole world. Nothing about the movement of travel seemed to matter much to him; He wanted a steady rhythm and he really didn’t want to worry about anything else that was happening in the world. A country, his country, could go to war tomorrow and his reaction would probably be the same as if you told him dinner was going to be served early. He achieved a state of self-centric-travel-zen, defined exactly as he wanted.
Is that how travel should be?
“Take only pictures, leave only footprints” goes the traveling mantra. Modern travel is so much more complex than this, however. Rather than just striving and searching for the “real” and the “authentic,” how you encounter and negotiate these complexities — in whatever capacity that may be — is a very real part of travel today. The act of spending a dollar in a region is a message of disruption to a local economy and culture that you have come a great distance to see. You may aspire to see the pristine, the “primitive,” the untouched — but the fact remains that this is an impossibility: your very presence in such a space is inevitably “a touch.”
Your presence has effects. Are you responsible for those? If so, in what ways? What does it mean to try to just “check out of the world?” And which world might you be checking out of, anyway? To assume that other cultures are not necessarily of the world, is actually quite a limited and even violent assumption: a gesture that re-inscribes centuries of colonialism and oppression. Indeed, modern movement is endlessly complex when it comes to ethics.
I keep talking to the Israeli about his plans for the year. He plans on getting a work visa in a country
— perhaps teaching English in Colombia. Does a real traveler work on the road? Does a real traveler ever come home? Is traveling a personal experience or is it meant to be shared? If so, how do you tell your story on the road and why should others care? What kind of stories are people eager to hear, anyway?
The last time I can find an infatuation with a single traveler by the general public is in the mid 1920’s with Colonel Fawcett, a British traveler and explorer who was in search of rumored cities nestled deep in the Amazon. No other subject features as many books in the stores of Panama as they do about him. In this part of the world, no man was ever such a celebrity for traveling and exploring as he and his crew.
In 1928 the New York Times printed a story with the headline “DENIES JUNGLE INDIANS MURDERED FAWCETT; Brazil Press Rejects Accusations of Leader of Search Party for Lost British Explorer.” This was three years after his actual death. It took another four years of rumors, sightings, and rescue missions until 1932 when “THE FAWCETT MYSTERY” was finally printed, noting:
“Interest in the fate of Colonel FAWCETT, who disappeared in the Matto Grosso jungle in May, 1925, and is now reported to be alive by a jungle trapper, on the authority of British Consul General ABBOTT of Sao Paulo, is naturally acute.”
There are quite a few books on Fawcett that show the outright lunacy around the need to find out information on his travels, and then, his disappearance. His travels were front page news. And he died (after being resurrected by fame seekers many times) on the front page as well. The public was strung along with story after story about sightings from hearsay adventures trying to draw fame from the popularity of this legend. Was this the last time the tone of travel writing connected with the general feeling of the public? Fawcett — as rich and connected as he may have been — sent a message of the toughness and grit of travel, but also a message of how this was accessible. In so doing, he inspired a world. It is Fawcett’s shadow that countless adventurers and travelers still aspire to today — whether they know it directly or not. It is this dream of the “pure,” “the dangerous,” and “the undiscovered” that still haunts the trope of the “real traveler.”
And yet the tone of travel, of course, has since changed. As has the world. Travel stories now can only be told after a justification of the ethics and style of the traveler. I can only name a few writers on the road that I read right now, even with millions of people traveling. Why, exactly, is that? Isn’t there a need to read about travel, today? Or is that need met, already, with the grand dreams of Hollywood that conjure up mirages of “real travel” that have long since died out?
Chapter 5
KASHKHAA KINDNESS
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.
—Mark Twain
DOHA, QATAR
The sun sets an hour early when there is a sandstorm in Doha. The red haze covers the towns’ skyscrapers and quickly turns the light blue sky a murky grey. The diversity of color all but vanishes once the dust rolls in, rendering everything in its field the same shade of haze. Even the massive and intricately engineered buildings lose their texture and personality — leaving only blurred edges barely perceptible to the human eye. Doha is a place quite unlike any other. The entire city has been built, rebuilt, or imagined within the brief pulse of the last 20 years, made possible by an absurd amount of money that has been poured into the economy. The city’s growth is almost incomprehensibly rapid: any view on any given day within the city is different: different than it has ever been, different than it will ever be.
It’s an explosion of growth in the most incomprehensible of habitable places — rich only in the resources that lie beneath the soil. I’m not talking about water, there isn’t much of that around. No matter, Qatar has figured out a way to turn natural gas into water (saltwater to clean water through desalination). It currently has a two-day, reserve water supply for the entire country and imports over 98% of the food for a population of about 2,000,000. The earth is so arid that they are importing soil from Sweden to try to grow crops (paid for, of course, by the gas under the current soil).
The vast majority of women wear simple long flowing all covering black qatari. Some wear a traditional head covering. Some women feature thick, bright eye makeup that peaks out from the slit in their hijab. I try not to stare, of course it is considered rude, but seeing an ounce of identity in a woman on an unnamed street in Doha is just something that seems important to me. I wanted to see an eye sparkle but instead was met with mostly scatters. They are generally ambivalent, it seems, to the public around them. After 8pm, they all seem to disappear. The Souq is dominated by men wearing long white robes and kashkha (a clean and bold hat and scarf combination).
I feel as if there are thousands of eyes upon my group as we drift through the streets. I see at least 100 men staring in my dir
ection only to realize that they are not staring at me, but my two dinner dates. I am with two extraordinarily beautiful women from Melbourne and Zürich, with platinum blonde and fire red hair, respectively. The men don’t seem to care about my company’s western dress. They take a puff of their shisha, exhale the smoke and make comments in the general direction of another onlooker. Life in a relaxed state.
We sit down for dinner and enjoy a spread of the most strikingly flavorful Middle Eastern food I’ve ever had. Babaganoush with pomegranate, hummus (with an emphasis on the start czhuu uummmuuussss) and a braised fish. A lazy dinner passing food and smoking shisha; talking about where we have been and where we want to go. About who we are and who we want to be. We wonder about the history of the restaurant before it hits us: this is all brand new. The restaurant looks old, but it is about to celebrate its first birthday. This experience is all designed. This is Doha.
In the morning we wake up early to go diving on the Al-Sharqi wreck site. Grabbing coffee and lunch for everyone at a shop not far from downtown, the boat captain and I run into a snag: my credit card isn’t working with their machine, and we don’t have enough cash. I don’t want to delay the boat by an hour getting a ride into the city to access my backup cash. The boat captain tries to barter his ID for promise of a later payment. A man in a kashkha that was ahead of us in line asks the clerk how much we owe and promptly pays the bill outright in cash. It was about $100, and he just set it down on a kind whim. “No worries. Welcome to Doha,” the man said. The captain and I fumble through our surprise, thank him and watch in awe as he floats out the door and into his Rolls Royce Phantom sports car — speeding off. His license plate had three digits, a cachet only attainable by spending $200,000 or more. It was the first time I had ever seen wealth displayed quite so gratuitously. We drive to the boat and share with the group just what has happened.