The Naked Tourist

by Lawrence Osborne

  Like Bali Hai, Papua itself has never seemed in the world. The first outsider to reach Wamena in 1938, the American aviator Richard Archbold, wrote in his notes that the ten-thousand-year-old Dani terraces “looked like the farming country of Central Europe”—but on the ground the people looked far more unreal to the incredulous visitors who began to pour in. Naked except for their penis gourds, covered with pig fat, pig tusks, and cowrie shells on their bodies, their faces painted black. By 1938, Africa was colonized in its entirety and neat white farms dominated the landscapes of Kenya and Rhodesia; Polynesia was Europeanized; the Amazon spoke Portuguese and Spanish. Papua was, and is, the last Lost World. And there is nothing the West loves more than a Lost World, an image of Utopia.

  Web sites devoted to Papua travel are numerous. It’s an easy enough place to visit if you are content to join an Indonesian tour based in Bali and complete a swift circuit of five or six highlights in helicopters, speedboats, and minivans. Here, essentially, is the problem. From Bali you can fly easily into Jayapura and from there into Wamena. The national carriers Garuda and Trigana will take you there. To the Indonesian company promising “wonderland Stone Age sensations” and “primitives living happy in big garden” you will pay about $2,000 for a ten-day or two-week whirlwind tour, sleeping in “nice hotels” that will not be nice at all and busing into predetermined villages where predetermined ceremonies will be laid on for you. The Web sites show a kaleidoscope of images that subliminally portray Papua as a merry part of Indonesia, for the boar tusk fellows are elided with the little girls of Bali with gold turrets on their heads and the sunsets of Seminyak Beach. The subtext is not hard to grasp. Indonesians are terrified of Papua and of Papuans. The latter are black, they are not Muslims, they eat pork, they regard themselves as conquered, and they dislike Indonesians. No Indonesian company will take you past Wamena, into the dark hinterland beyond. I made a few e-mail inquiries about doing so.

  “Not possible,” the replies came. Their implication was that the forests were not fit for human enjoyments, but, more than that, that they did not represent a tourist objective that could be understood. It therefore falls to Americans and Germans to organize these penetrations of the farthest edge of the human world, which is also the farthest edge of the global touristic enterprise.

  The sites of these companies are a very different matter. There are barely half a dozen of them. Many sport a heavily moralistic tone against tourism, the very thing in which they are engaged. The environment is defended, as are the “rights of native peoples,” as if prospective clients might be hostile to either. The pictures are amateur digitals taken by the proprietors themselves: the faces of forest people, unexpressive and haggard, the psychotic blue heads of rare cassowary birds and tree houses sewn into a canopy two hundred feet high. There are a few pictures of men wearing penis gourds made of hornbill beaks.

  The hard core of Papuan travel, the southern rain forests spread over a forbidding area east from the PNG border and south of the Central Highlands where Wamena sits encircled by glaciers. Wamena and the Dani are easy pickings; every travel writer worth his or her salt has been there. But the forests are another matter. When I called a few anthropologists to ask what region of the world remained off their map—understudied, little frequented—they mostly agreed that it must be the sago swamps and rain forests of southern Irian Jaya. For anthropologists, permits to work in this part of Papua are tricky to get. The Indonesians have finally caught on to the fact that American academics are always sympathetic to a liberation struggle and that in their writings they have nearly always cast the Jakarta government as the villains. And then there are the costs. Doing fieldwork for a year in the world’s wildest forest is not cheap, and anthropologists are always underfunded. The military are unsympathetic to them, and many of the Dutch missionaries have abandoned the struggle to keep their landing strips open in the jungle: out there, the Christians have finally understood, you are on your own.

  A German company promised a tour of the remote tree houses of the Korowai people near to the Yanimura River. A German tourist had died there the year before, so business was a little slow. But the river would not be as wild as the core forest, anyway. Because wherever there is a river there are boats—which means missionaries, traders, and tourists.

  Internet gossip revealed that around Yanimura, tour operators sometimes asked the Korowai to change out of their T-shirts and shorts, put on hornbill penis gourds, and climb into the traditional tree houses in time for the Zurück in die Steinzeit tour from Stuttgart. According to anthropologists, the Yanimura was turning into a foul mini-Klondike as Chinese and Javan traders appeared looking for rare gaharu incense, tropical birds, and timber. There were whorehouses, ramshackle villages, tourist boats. It was being annexed to the great amorphous shit hole puzzlingly known (according to an obscure French economist) as the “Third World.”

  To get beyond the Yanimura, I had to find a guide, and there were only two or three in business. But, in the end, there was one who stood out. I had seen his name here and there, along with the sobriquet “the White Papuan.” The White Papuan? He was named Kelly Woolford and he ran a one-man company called Papua Adventures. The White Papuan was a forty-year-old native of Missouri who lived in Ubud in Bali. From this “cultural capital” of Bali, Woolford set off on his manic trips into the heart of Papua. For Jayapura is only a four-hour flight from Bali and of course it is part of the same country. I began to correspond with Woolford. On his site there were more pictures: a group of Kombai of the Merauke forests gathered around a tall tree house with their bows, a wretched bivouac with three exhausted faces peering out. One of them belonged to Woolford, with a graying beard and a ponytail. This was one of the “tree house trips,” and the men were eating around a small crude fire. “It’s not an expedition for the fainthearted,” he said in one missive. “You’re going to the last wild place, the edge.”

  Who were the Kombai? I called Rupert Stasch at Reed College, the foremost expert on the neighboring Korowai people. I asked him about the Kombai, but he admitted that almost no fieldwork had been done on them. No monographs, no books, no full-length studies. There was a limited dictionary of their language—in Dutch. Since I do not read Dutch, I could not read anything about them or their culture. I could discover merely that there were two thousand of them, that theirs was one of the world’s least spoken languages, and that they were obsessed with witchcraft. Were they like Levi-Strauss’s Nambikwara in some way?

  For the November 2004 excursion, we would be based at first at the abandoned missionary station of Wanggemalo. Godforsaken is a much overused word, for does God really forsake actual places? But Wanggemalo was thus. The Dutch missionaries left in 1994; it was said they had made only one convert. I would be going with three European scientists. There was a rassemblement in Bali, so that we could fly out of Denpasar airport together. I had thus my end destination; all that was left to do was find some way of imitating that once ponderous Voyage into the East that would lead up to it—a simulation of the long, reflective sea journey that had taken generations of other white idlers to the Indies. For if you want to find out what kind of tourist you are—which is to say what kind of traveler, what kind of human being—you have to dawdle as much as you can.

  Air travel has destroyed the rhythm of the long-distance ship. The savoring of places that are hard to get to and that are approached slowly—with a lot of vomiting on the way—has vanished. The ship was like Mann’s Magic Mountain, a floating sanatorium where everyone knew everyone. But now there is only the airport, which itself becomes more and more hideous with every decade that passes. Even the airport elegance once incarnated by Eero Saarinen has disappeared, and so, one might add, has the leisure of the Grand Tour, which usually took about ten months to complete. Instead, there is the frenzied crush, the anxiety of waiting rooms, the lines at immigration, the boarding and disembarking at high speed. Consumer rummaging, electronic hysteria, the four-day minivacation, and the w
eekend package. No one but the wretched travel writer has the time to take off eight months.

  But to delve into the tourist and his past, one has to do just that. To reexplore the nature of a “journey,” it is imperative to decompress the modern travel package. Airplanes too can be used in an anachronistic way, so that the passenger can tarry in place after place instead of rushing through to a final destination. For even in the most absurdly accelerated trip, the journey itself will count more than the destination: this is simply a psychological fact. That was the logic of the Grand Tour, after all—that movement itself stirred and awakened the soul.

  Flying out of Dubai, I could proceed to Calcutta, then to Bangkok and so on to Bali and Papua. In this way, I could pass through several phases of Easternness, all of them now touristified and packaged for visitors like myself, the harried escapists of a hemisphere so rich it no longer knows what to do with itself but move. It would be a panorama of modern tourism, a gaudy cross section of the charlatan global spectacle—and what portal into the upside-down world of tourism could be more gaudy, more symptomatic than Dubai?

  INTO THE EAST

  I flew into Dubai on a Tuesday night. It was starry over the Persian Gulf and inside Dubai International Airport there were two skies visible: one artificial and made of fairy lights, the other undeniably real and filled with what looked like supernovas. The airport is a model of modernity. Palm trees stand in geometric lines under a vaulted metal roof with huge porthole windows; this is sustained by metal columns ringed with “sprays” of gold lights and Arabian Nights arcades with night skies and sunsets peeping between lancets. The effect is of a giant Bedu tent equipped with escalators. The floors are palatially antiseptic. Emirates officials in white robes and headgear glide over them soundlessly, seeking out small children who are entitled to a kindly reprieve from the lines. Half the aliens in line were Chinese girls with imitation leather bags, already snapping open their cell phones and muttering in Cantonese. The mishmosh travelers usual to the Middle East were already abundant: Indian salesmen in bright checkerboard shirts of fantastical blues, Jordanians and Egyptians unshaved, masters of the histrionic sideways glance and saddled with bulging attaché cases, the British Family in Marks and Spencer shorts coming in for a week of beach and taxless shopping, Russian hookers in jumpsuits, the odd oil man standing out like a soldier at a disheveled tea party.

  Dubai Airport, which was originally designed by the American firm of Page and Broughton, is a continually evolving piece of Orientalism honed to seduce seventeen million strangers who pass through a Gulf city-state of barely one million. Beyond immigration, a vast sala opens up, a consumer hive typical of those airports that have in recent years turned themselves into hubs. Hubs are more than airports. They are bazaars aimed at trapping what are called “transit consumers” with a cornucopia of retail outlets, restaurants, and wine bars. They are little cities unmoored from place and time, utopian wherevers that form the joints of an emerging tourist civilization. In Dubai, the facilities put any American hub to shame. Glass-roofed restaurants of terrifying grandeur calmly accommodate smoker and nonsmoker alike. (It used to be called tolerance.) Caviar and smoked salmon are on the menus, expertly made espresso, reasonable champagne: all the things that the Wherever Hub Airport provides to its grateful children. You can get measured for a suit, buy a Maserati, eat soft-shell crabs, equip your pad with carpets, and do the laundry. Theoretically, you could do all this on your way from Paris to Bombay, in the space of two hours. It is the third biggest airport retail concession in the world and probably the most hedonistic. Before leaving, I slumped into a wine bar and drank three glasses of Mâcon-Villages with a Honduran cigar—it helps the jet-lagged wanderer sleep, because I had in fact reached my destination. Dubai is the fastest-growing tourist destination in the world, a portal of the New Middle East, and the white tourist has not been exotic for many years. People pass you by indifferently, glancing over quickly merely in order to check out the quality of your shoes.

  The Dar Al Sondos hotel is run by the Le Meridien chain on Rolla Street in the neighborhood known as Bur. It was relatively spartan: Russian tour groups stayed there alongside Indian sales reps and a few tourists from Turkey. Around the hotel stood patches of desert covered with green tufts of drinn, Saharan grass, and walls defining empty development lots. Sand blew everywhere. Rolla is an Iranian immigrant street and that is what its restaurants are. In their windows sit the sad pale men in exile from across the straits with bundles of mint on their plates, staring out into a relentlessly commercial middle distance. There is always a subtle rage about Iranians. Chinese hookers go past with the usual gaiety of Chinese hookers, swinging garish “designer” bags and offering to their clients names like Min Min and Lucky Ann.

  I couldn’t have explained why a mood of low-key paranoia gripped me as soon as I arrived at the Dar Al Sondos Apartments. Perhaps it was the sudden appearance of traveler’s solitude in a place where no provision is made for it. From my little cement balcony I could investigate dozens of apartment windows on the opposite side of the street inside which black-robed women leaned over rice cookers and bowls of laundry.

  Unable to sleep, I went to one of the Iranian cafés. Soon, I was one of the pale men in the window with a bundle of mint being waved to by the Chinese hookers. I began to feel liberated. After months of claustrophobic confinement in New York, a moralistic and corporate city, this single street in the East, Rolla, seemed airy, relaxed, with a whiff of the Mad Hatter of course, but that is a whiff I can accept. I waved back. Boatlike white Mercedeses coasted past, their number plates adorned with a small image of the Burj Al Arab hotel and their windows tinted. A few doors down stood the Imperial Suites hotel and nightclub, where wealthy Arabs went to find Uzbeki models. On the sidewalks, the male faces were mostly Tamils, their hands whitened from construction cement—Dubai is only twenty percent Arab, and most of its inhabitants are from India, an army of imported hoplites who build the marinas, the hotels, the banks, and the theme parks. They walk around in gangs, staring into the white glare of the camera shops.

  At the end of Rolla lay a much larger avenue lined with multistory electronics malls and parking lots filled with prostitutes. Turning left, I wandered into the junction of Sakhoun and Marsheer, which is filled with global brand billboards and “gentlemen’s hotels.” On the far side stood a glass-fronted establishment called the York Hotel with a steep flight of steps. Chinese women in tight satin dresses tottered down it. Crowds of Indian men stared longingly at them. I barged into the bar and ordered a Black Russian, hoping to insult someone.

  Dubai nights are interminable, with no beginning or end; the whole place has been invented as a feudal enclave to make aliens happy. The bar was filled with Russian girls. A Russian air crew sat at the bar on sticky stools, smoking tin hookahs. A surreal sunken lobby could have belonged to the Berlin of the ’30s. Whores asleep in armchairs, men from Turkey and Lebanon dozing with their rings and cigarette holders. A nightclub upstairs. If you ask for a room at the hotel, as I lost no time in doing, they smile, look away, and say it has been booked six months in advance.

  On toward the Creek, the turbulent river that splits Dubai city in two. The streets like a giant canteen lit up, crowded with minimarkets, curry cafés with outside tables where Tamils smoke away over their dais. Tailor shops with Sikhs ribboned with measuring tapes, dusty apartment blocks with cracked letters. It was surprising that a vital seediness had been left intact inside so swanky a city, like the seediness that exerted its “deep appeal” over Graham Greene when he strolled through 1930s London:

  … the seediness of civilization, of the sky-signs in Leicester Square, the tarts in Bond Street, the smell of cooking greens off Tottenham Court Road, the motor salesmen in Great Portland Street. It seems to satisfy, temporarily, the sense of nostalgia for something lost; it seems to represent a stage further back.

  Greene is right, seediness is a taste of the past, nostalgia for something lost. There is n
othing more exasperating than reading in contemporary guidebooks disparagements of places that are deemed to be “seedy.” Do the writers not notice that such places are invariably crowded with people? When a neighborhood is described as “seedy” by some Lonely Planet prude, I immediately head there.

  The Creek is a wonderful river. I am sure it too used to be seedy, but at least it has kept its mercantile swish and hustle. The old souks, the walls of the fort and mosque still bear down on the wharves, which are cleansed and lightly airbrushed now. The river curves sharply. You could be in Shanghai or Suez. Banks and minarets rise from the far side, which is called Deira, shadowing motorized dhows and water taxis covered with yellow bulbs. At the north end of the Creek, I passed a mock Bedu village. A few scraps of sand and an old man blowing onto a fire. Tourists stood around, solemnly taking his picture. At the other end of the river esplanade, the old Persian quarter, the Bastakia, is now remodeled to resemble a theme park, its narrow alleys lit with soft orange lamps too tastefully embedded into the flagstones. The wind towers look half ruined, but they have been contrived to look that way. By nine in the evening, the place is like an abandoned film set. Thus, the city’s historical quarter looks more modern, more mall-like than the malls that are themed to look like historical sets. One cannot tell the Madinat Mall and the Bastakia apart. Everything has been telescoped into the eternal present, which is after all the preferred dimension of the tourist.