The Naked Tourist

by Lawrence Osborne

  Unsurprisingly, the German girl had been inspired by Mead’s one-woman expeditions to places off the maps of her time. She herself was writing a thesis about Papua, as so many Ph.D. anthropologists did these days. She was certainly an anomaly at the Blue Hotel. The Russians stared at her in lyrical astonishment. The Papuan staff had probably never seen a blond woman before, at least not an attractive one. She looked like Chopin’s wife.

  And so, by a delicious coincidence, my last hours on the island of New Guinea were spent talking about Mead with a woman called Melanie, whose white arms seemed extraordinary now, as tender as the arms of Mead in those early photographs from the late ’20s and early ’30s where she looks like a child—as she herself famously complained. But in fact it was the later Mead that concerned me now, the aging woman who returned to the Sepik River in 1967 to see how modernity had played itself out in this backwater that in 1938 had been so poetically raw. She wrote that she was filled with apprehension. Had the tall, gabled houses of the Tambunam remained the same, with their supernatural faces woven into the façades? Did shamans still dance among the killed crocodiles? In many ways, it is the most interesting moment of the Letters, for it is the heartbreak of change that most acutely calls into doubt our experience of the world. We had been asking ourselves the same questions in the forest: will we change the Kombai by giving them a candle? The myth of tourism is constructed around places that purport not to change—Disneyland, for example, does not change much, nor does the average resort. Tourist environments are a way of pretending that death will not prevail after all. Their atmosphere is one of the eternal present; inside them, it is as if time has been brought to an ingenious standstill. But what happens when the tourist goes back to the same place thirty years later? Does he ever feel better about the place? Does it ever seem that the place has improved? Not likely.

  The tourist culture (a good way of describing our culture in general) has ceased to think about aging, or how it is to be done with elegance and dignity, and it has done this because it has ceased to think much about experience at all. The whole premise of the tourist economy, after all, is that experience can be bought for money. That it can be commodified. The powerful interactions of adults have even disappeared almost entirely from the surface of the culture at large. Do you have to go to Papua to refind them? The bonds forged with this small band of fellow mammalian humans on this antitouristic “touristic” venture were atavistically vivid: they struck me as very nineteenth century, just as Mead’s letters did, with their romantic excitements and human curiosity.

  This is, in fact, how Mead experienced her return to the Papuan paradise of the Tambunam, where the gabled houses still stood tall but where the “men’s things” had been burned in a bombing raid during the Second World War, where the old gods had been banished by Christianity, and where head-hunting had been replaced by commercial carving for tourists:

  On this return to Tambunam it has become very clear to me that it is only through this kind of intense living in face-to-face relationships that the life and culture of a whole people can be fully experienced. It is through the records of such closely bound lives that we may hope to understand the human need for continuity, repetitive experience and intimacy. For intimacy has its sources in just these familiar repetitions of laughter at old jokes, remembered anger at old quarrels, meals eaten together in the same twilight and children listening to accounts of things that happened before their parents were born, stories told and re-told. And here in Tambunam, where change is still in the making, repetition binds the present to the past and to the future; repetition binds the events all of us recall to the events that now will be recorded.

  This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds; one man would like to suffer in front of the stove, and another believes that he would recover his health beside the window.

  It always seems to me that I should feel well in the place where I am not, and this question of removal is one which I discuss incessantly with my soul.

  —Charles Baudelaire, “Anywhere Out of the World,” Le Spleen de Paris

  ALSO BY LAWRENCE OSBORNE

  The Accidental Connoisseur

  POSTSCRIPT: WHEREVER

  Throughout this journey I had had the same feeling that I had not been “abroad” anywhere, that I had simply moved through different dimensions of a single human contemporaneity. For months afterward, in the middle of a New York winter I would find myself sleepwalking through my apartment saying, “Umbiago!”and sitting in a corner of the front room waiting for a Kombai story to begin. One needs to be exorcised after a long voyage, but we no longer have priests or shamans we can believe in.

  In his travelogue about France, In the White Cities, Joseph Roth writes:

  Ever since I’ve been in hostile countries, I no longer feel foreign in any of them. I never go “abroad” any more. That’s a leftover from the days of the stagecoach! At most I might go somewhere “new.” And there I see that I had already intuited it. But I can’t “report” on it. At the most I can say how the experience felt, to me.

  So it is. But a year later I was driving along the Kona coast of Hawaii’s Big Island, and as I wandered around Hawaii’s surreally vacuous landscape—a kind of New Jersey tropical-style—I couldn’t help wondering if this was how Papua New Guinea would end up in the imaginable near future. Hawaii had been depopulated of natives, turned into a large sugar plantation, and finally acquired by the United States through a farcically engineered coup in 1893. Formal annexation came in 1900 with the wonderfully named Organic Act.

  The monoculture of sugar had paved the way for the monoculture of tourism. For once monoculture has become second nature to a landscape, this exchange can happen easily. Sugar or tourism, it is the same principle.

  The southern Kona coast is richly volcanic, dominated by the coffee farms that succeeded the sugar plantations. The road is congested with tourist traffic. Coffee shops packed with pensioner tour buses, retirement homes, beach parks: every inch is saturated. Halfway up the coast stands the island’s principal archaeological site, the Pu‘uhonua O Honaunau National Historical Park, and a short way beyond it Captain Cook, a place split in two by the roaring highway. To one side of the road stands the coffee-colored 1929 Manago Hotel, one of many dusty relics of Hawaii’s Japanese immigrant past. There’s a Señor Billy’s Cantina drive-thru Mexican and a corroded tin shack marked with the words “Art Farm.” The Kona Theater has long been boarded up. Below lies the blue bay where Cook met his grisly end, murdered by the Hawaiians after a misunderstanding. He had appeared out of the blue in January of the year 1779, a dead ringer for the god Lono. All went well until his ship departed on February 4, only to return a week later after being battered by a storm. It seemed like an evil omen to the Hawaiians, and their erstwhile hospitality turned to ire. No one seems to know exactly what happened. There was an altercation on the beach and four Englishmen died. Captain Cook found his immortality; centuries later, his blunders are taken as symptomatic of the European penetration of the virginal tropics.

  There was a similarity between the monstrous planned resorts and sugar plantations. Both were self-sufficient in their way, carving the landscape up to their uses, designed as enclaves against an unknown hinterland. And of all the Kona resorts, none is as plantationlike as the Hilton Waikoloa Village, built along a stretch of coast called South Kohala and called, of course, “Disneyland” by locals. When it opened in 1988 at a cost of $360 million, it called itself the most expensive resort ever built. One could hardly ask for a more perfect expression of the spirit of monoculture. I went in for tea and then, on a whim, checked in.

  Built over sixty-two acres, the Hilton sports a car park whose dimensions are clearly designed to awe and confuse. Inside, the lobby is served by a monorail that courses through the resort like a commuter train in Singapore. I paused for a moment to check out that night’s in-house entertainment: Desiree Cruz, Ginger Berlemenn, Terri Spruill in the
Malolo Lounge. The crowd was a mix of ancient American and juvenile Japanese. A lady whom I thought I recognized said, in a loud voice, “Mais c’est très Hong Kong!” Below me was a canal bordered by enormous Chinese vases and fragments of pseudo-Buddhist-temple architecture. A launch roared past on it with a Just Married sign. Aimlessly, I took the monorail to a thing called the Boat Landing Pavilion. We passed by an artificial beach, snaking lagoons filled with small sharks and exotic fish, Buddha statues, Chinese lions, coffee-colored concrete towers, endless potted palms. Yellow kayaks zoomed by on the canal. A guy in white naval uniform served as conductor. Around me, grim-faced Japanese couples stared blankly at it all, perhaps stunned by the down-at-the-heels feel of the place, for there is no question that these days Asia has resorts and hotels far superior to anything that the United States can offer, and at a fraction of the price.

  In the lobby, I wandered for a while down a one-mile-long gallery extending on either side of it and filled with art exhibits from all over Polynesia. And thus I came to a large collection of material from Papua New Guinea. There was a partial reconstruction of a Papuan house, masks, arrows, implements, magical artifacts, sago skirts. Not far away there was a show of Samoan stuff. Families stopped in front of them for a few seconds, sniffed, and moved on, humming to themselves. The cornucopia of the South Seas, which have given us the desert island, Robinson Crusoe, Margaret Mead and modern anthropology, Bali Hai, the noble savage, and the decors of Club Med—not to mention the Hilton Waikoloa itself. The sad tropics in all their flattened diversity.

  Thereafter I retreated to my room, which enjoyed a view over the artificial beach and the artificial lagoon. I closed the curtains, ordered some room service sushi, and turned on the TV for a few days. I couldn’t say why watching TV was so soothing now, so appropriate. I had, in any case, an infallible sense that that was what everyone else was doing. From time to time I peeked through the resort curtains and watched the fellow inmates boarding a launch with its uniformed conductor. How long can you spend in such a place without being noticed? At night I went down to the outdoor café and had a plate of teriyaki shrimp, then boarded a launch bound for the Malolo Lounge, where I could order a gin and tonic with a paper umbrella and watch Terri Spruill go through her set. It was uproarious. I whistled as I applauded. Desiree Cruz was even better. In a way, I was quite happy. Before long, I thought, I would probably start forgetting everything that had happened. A few days would go by, then a few weeks. I would get a tan on the artificial beach and, if all went well, I might meet a horny widow from Michigan or, better still, Osaka. I would get a personal trainer in the meantime and work out every morning, and perhaps every evening too, in the Aloha Fitness Center, if that was what it was called. If I got bored, I could read Lévi-Strauss; if I got homesick for the South Seas, I could go to the gallery of exhibits.

  The sun shone every day in exactly the same way, the palms waving in a symmetrical line against the blue of the sea. I explored my little world thoroughly, just as Crusoe had done. I learned a lot about Hawaiian culture. Before long I was something of a connoisseur in the nuances of the indigenous Kona coffee, which was available in all the cafés. However, it never occurred to me that I might want to meet a Hawaiian, for where would one meet a Hawaiian in Hawaii? Such questions belong to another age. And as you are working out in the gym they even seem distinctly quaint, if not impertinent. But what of the people I had met on my Gulliverian travels? Before long, sad to say, I could no longer remember the faces of Hamza Mustafa, Manish Chakraborti, Dr. Jeff my nutritionist at Chiva-Som, or even the flamboyant Chief Yali. It was all flattened inside my memory, where it belonged, where one’s travels always end up. The traveler always forgets his travels.

  However, one has to keep on traveling. The next year, I firmly resolved, I would go to Madagascar, because I had never been to Madagascar, not even once, and everyone these days went to Madagascar. There was even a Hilton there, overlooking a thing called Lake Anosy. Next year, I thought to myself at the end of each day as the ukulele music wafted up from the bandstand on the lagoon, next year, in any case, I’ll be somewhere else.

  Copyright © 2006 by Lawrence Osborne

  All rights reserved

  Distributed in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.

  First edition, 2006

  North Point Press

  A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  19 Union Square West, New York 10003

  www.fsgbooks.com

  Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott

  eISBN 9781429934985

  First eBook Edition : February 2011

  A section of this book first appeared in The New Yorker in slightly different form.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Osborne, Lawrence, 1958-

  The naked tourist: in search of adventure and beauty in the age of the airport mall / Lawrence Osborne.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-86547-709-4 (hardcover: alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-86547-709-4 (hardcover: alk. paper)

  1. Osborne, Lawrence, 1958—Travel. 2. Voyages and travels. I. Title.

  G465.O82 2006

  910.4092—dc22

  2005033089