The Naked Tourist Read online

  For Tad

  many travels

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  TRAVELER, ANTHROPOLOGIST, TOURIST

  INTO THE EAST

  SAD TROPICS

  DESERT ISLANDS

  HEDONOPOLIS

  THE SPA

  PARADISE MADE

  THE NAKED TOURIST

  ANYWHERE OUT OF THE WORLD

  ALSO BY LAWRENCE OSBORNE

  POSTSCRIPT: WHEREVER

  Copyright Page

  TRAVELER, ANTHROPOLOGIST, TOURIST

  It came upon me quite suddenly, like a mental disorder unknown to psychiatry: the desire to stop everything in normal life, to uproot and leave. It could be a disease of early middle age, a premature taste of senility: the need to leave the world as it is today behind and find somewhere else. You pack your belongings with a bitter fatalism, as if you know that it is now time to get moving again, to regress to nomadism. You pack your bags, but you have nowhere to go. It is like being dressed up for a ball long after the ballroom has burned down. The desire is there, but there is no object for it.

  I leafed through a hundred Web sites—tour group organizations, government brochures, fact sheets, traveler accounts. But the problem of the modern traveler is that he has nowhere left to go. The entire world is a tourist installation, and the awful taste of simulacrum is continually in his mouth. I searched high and low, but nowhere satisfied the need to leave the world. I thought for a while of simply checking into a hotel in Hawaii and sitting there for two weeks in front of a television. Somewhere like the Hilton Waikoloa, perhaps, where I could laze on an artificial beach and take a monorail to the hotel nightclub. That would be more interesting than trekking with a small group through Patagonia or winging through the rain forest canopy of Costa Rica in a cable car. I could stay in New York and travel by subway to the forlorn Edgar Allan Poe house in the Bronx. No one goes there. There were exotic possibilities, but they were not very exotic—and I wanted something exotic.

  Think back to the mood of childhood when you get into the family car and depart for places unknown—how difficult it is to recover the inner dimension of adventure. Modern travel is like fast food: short, sharp incursions that do not weave a spell. In our age, tourism has made the planet into a uniform spectacle, and it has made us perpetual strangers wandering through an imitation of an imitation of a place we once wanted to go to. It is the law of diminishing returns.

  For a long time I had wanted to take leave of Planet Tourism, to find one of those places that occasionally turn up in the middle pages of newspapers in far-flung cities, in which—we are told—a mad loner has been discovered who has lost all contact with the modern world. It seems inevitable that this desire will one day be listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association as Robinson Crusoe Syndrome. But the stories are sometimes real. Recall the Japanese soldiers emerging out of Pacific jungles fifty years after their nation’s surrender: what stupendous islands, we would like to know, had they been lost on? Once, flying around Indonesia, a journalist from Jakarta I was traveling with pointed down to the bewildering archipelagos of paradise isles below us, somewhere near Molucca, and said that he knew for a fact of a group of Germans who had sailed to one of them in 1967 and had never been seen since. All he knew was that a small local airline dropped them beer every few months. There were so many hundreds of islands that the wandering Teutons had simply disappeared. But I wanted to know which island they were on, if they existed at all. Because it’s a potent idea, this promise of leaving the world, even if we know it’s a myth.

  Tourism is the world’s largest industry, generating annual revenues of $500 billion. It defines the economies of scores of nations and cities across the globe. Between 1950 and 2002, the number of international travelers, including business travelers, rose from 25 million to 700 million a year: a sea change in the way the world conducts its affairs. The principal occupation of hundreds of millions of humans is now simply entertaining hundreds of millions of other humans. As for the rise of recreational travel, it is rising at all only because, one might presume, we are bored, because we want to have a transforming experience of some kind in a place other than home. We want a new experience—and we want an experience that is commodified, that can be bought for cold cash, but that is safe.

  Tourism has also spawned many subsidiary professions. Not just agents, hoteliers, guides, and resort managers but also what are lugubriously known as “travel writers.” A technocratic culture loves to precede the noun “writer” with an adjective, thus assuring itself that the said individual is not a charlatan, that is, a loner with a voice, and that he is not—horror of horrors—just a writer. If you publish something only once about a foreign city, you instantly become a travel writer. Thus, I have often found myself called a travel writer, whatever that is, and consequently I have been induced occasionally to make a living at it. Sadly, this has led to a long collusion with the forces of global tourism, to long spells of aimless peregrination across entire continents, to 1,034 hotel rooms in 204 nations. Passing one’s time in this way is a novel form of dementia. The hotels all look the same, because they are run by the same people; the places all look the same, because they are shaped by the same economic drives. Everywhere resembles everywhere else, and that is the way it has been designed. One day the whole world could easily be a giant interconnected resort called Wherever.

  The Marxist theorist Guy Debord once said, “When the Spectacle is everywhere the spectator is nowhere at home.” But at the same time, there comes a moment of revolution in the life of the pathetic travel writer, the man who travels to write and who writes to travel, when the world he has spent half a lifetime crisscrossing begins to taste like so much dead paper. He wants to leave and yet he cannot think how to do it. He wants to transcend being the tourist that he really is and become a true traveler again.

  In a way, I reached this point quite early on because I have no home and have not had one in decades. A nomad makes for a perfect tourist, but also for a perfectly disillusioned one. The travel writer in me began to decay almost as soon as he was born, but he did confer upon me the will and the means to construct a kind of grand tour for myself as a farewell to “travel writing,” in which I no longer have much faith. But how does one rediscover real travel?

  The word “travel” itself is surprisingly old. It dates back to 1375 and originally derived from the French verb travailler, “to toil or labor,” which in turn derived from the Latin word for a three-pronged stake used as an instrument of torture. Travel began, therefore, with the notion of doing something extremely nasty—to go on a difficult journey. It’s a medieval concept derived from pilgrimages. Suffering is implied, for to travel in the year 1375 was to suffer indeed. But it was seen as a transformative suffering, an escape from the boredom of daily life. Later, the notion of travel as an improving exercise emerged in the Grand Tour of the eighteenth century, as enjoyed by young British gents. The Grand Tour was entertaining, but it was not supposed to be. Nor did it entail venturing into the unknown. It was a cultural pilgrimage to the known world.

  But over the next two hundred years, a curiously wild and romantic conceit took hold of the Western itinerant. Once upon a time, there used to be two kinds of places: those you hadn’t been to personally, and those that nobody had been to. Accordingly, there were places like Venice and Rome, which the Grand Tour had always taken in, and then there were primitive jungles, desert islands, remote peoples, and exotic cultures that remained mysterious and inaccessible. Tourism, as it became a multinational industry in the nineteenth century, began to trade in both these kinds of places simultaneously. It did so for obvious reasons. Tourism is always looking for n
ew frontiers and novel experiences—which it then immediately liquidates. The colonial system of that century, made safe by British gunships, made the “primitive” enticingly available for the first time. It was only a matter of time before such primitives (inhabiting the most tourable Edens) were brought into the tourist fold.

  In the twentieth century, the two kinds of places became deliberately confused. And it is this forced mixing up that has resulted in what I have called “whereverness.” It is almost as if a plurality of different kinds of places—some known, some unknown, some civilized, some wild—have been flattened into a single kind of place that tries artificially to maintain all those qualities at the same time, while achieving none of them. The impoverishment is catastrophic, yet since tourism is consensual it is difficult simply to disdain it. All one can do is record its strange, unprecedented whereverness.

  This is why I think it must now be said that travel itself is an outmoded conceit, that one no longer travels in the sense of voyaging into cultures that are unknown. Travel has been comprehensively replaced by tourism. But tourism itself is so improbable, so fantastical, that this process is almost impossible to grasp unless one takes a moment to look briefly at its history. For, as I have already suggested, the modern tourist is the descendant not only of the pilgrim but also of the Grand Tourist and the organized travelers of the imperial age. How, then, did this evolution occur?

  The term “Grand Tour” was first used in Richard Lassels’s The Voyage of Italy in 1670 and described an informal journey through the Continent for young British aristocrats, who were usually accompanied by a tutor called a bear leader as they made their way through a galaxy of cultural attractions in France, Switzerland, and Italy. The Tour, as it came to be known, arose because of the new wealth of the English, which made them Europe’s most affluent tourists, but it also expressed an uneasy cultural inferiority complex, a need to Europeanize the manners of their uncouth progeny—their “raw boys,” as Tobias Smollett called them. The journey took months and was meant to inculcate taste, to improve “worldly manners.” In 1749, the scholarly antiquarian Thomas Nugent wrote a popular guidebook called The Grand Tour, in which he laid forth the principles of the Tour as follows: “to enrich the mind with knowledge, to rectify the judgment, to remove the prejudices of education, to compose the outward manners, and in a word to form the complete gentleman.” The aim was connoisseurship, an appreciation of beauty (the word “connoisseur” entered the language at about this time), but also worldliness, urbanity, what later came to be known as cosmopolitanism. For a nation that was emerging into imperial dominance, it also gave vent to a parallel superiority complex. The British were the ugly Americans of the early eighteenth century.

  “The Tour,” the British historian Ian Littlewood comments, “gives a pattern to what has remained the standard form of culturally approved tourism. Today’s guidebook, with its lists of monuments and its advice on local purchases, is a direct descendent of Nugent’s.”

  The destination of preference was Italy. Before Egypt was made available in the nineteenth century, Italy was to the British the epitome of civilization embodied mystically in a national landscape. But Italy was not a simple attraction. Venice and Naples were the Bangkok and Manila of the Age of Enlightenment. Venice was the prostitution capital of Europe, and the young gentlemen knew it: the absorption of Renaissance art went hand in hand with whoring. Daniel Defoe wrote in 1701: “Lust chose the Torrid Zone of Italy, / Where Blood ferments in Rapes and Sodomy.”

  Outside of the official literature, the Tour became synonymous with a breakdown of Britishness, a sexual disintegration. Long before Dr. Arnold instituted the praeposter system at Rugby, a supposed rise in homosexuality in England was imputed to travel in Italy, referred to in tracts as “the Mother and Nurse of Sodomy.” James Boswell’s intimate diaries during his travels in Italy in 1764 show how the Grand Tour actually looked on the ground—a cornucopia of hookers and horny countesses. “I’m determined,” he writes, “to try all experiments with a soul and body.” In Naples: “My passions were violent. I indulged them; my mind had almost nothing to do with it. I found some very pretty girls. I escaped all danger.”

  Italy was turned by this deluge of “raw boys” with cash into the world’s first truly tourist nation and its great cities into the first subtropical tourist metropolises. (In the nineteenth century, tourists were known in Italian simply as inglesi.) This could never have happened without prostitution, or without the reputation for sexual ease that eventually lured English women as well. Connoisseurship, art, manners, education, and sex made the Grand Tour a fertile model. Its two most important contributions to the idea of tourism were the building of a continental travelers’ infrastructure—hotels, restaurants, brothels, stage coach lines, theaters, etc.—and then the idea of a personal self-transformation through the simple act of moving through foreign climes. The tourist was seen as a malleable, impressionable subject upon whom all kinds of sublime improvements could be worked, usually with the aid of antiquities and sunshine. He was not a fixed human work but a piece of wet clay upon which sensations, learning, and ecstatic experiences could be impressed as easily as marking it with a scalpel.

  Thus the tourist, the great-great-grandchild of the Grand Tourer, has never regarded himself as complete. He thinks of himself as unfinished, imperfect, in the process of rapidly changing as a foreign culture bombards him with stimuli. He is an unstable subject as well as an impressionable one.

  Since the Grand Tour, travel itself has been seen as morally dynamic and transformational, not a dreary and static necessity imposed by diplomacy or trade. Consequently, the tourist cannot help but see himself as a pilgrim in search of revelations. And it was only a matter of time before this strange mentality was transferred onto the rest of the world. For as soon as the British had conquered most of it, they simply made the Grand Tour global.

  The first place outside of Europe that they turned into a new Italy was Egypt. Egypt had long enjoyed cultural prestige, but it was far more inaccessible than Rome. Not only was it Muslim, but its levels of disease and insalubrity made it a logistically forbidding proposition. Imperial expansion solved this dilemma. With the Mediterranean now controlled by the Royal Navy and Ottoman hostilities subdued, the scene was set for touristic distractions of a highly organized and genteel nature. Above all, it was made safe for female travelers and children. The masculine pursuits of Flaubert and Maxime Du Camp in the 1850s, a wonderful mixture of onanism and amateur photography, were rendered moot by the arrival of boatloads of British families with nannies and servants in tow, expedited from London by the newly founded Thomas Cook and Son tour company and now lodged at a palatial hotel with hot and cold running water.

  Thomas Cook, the founder of modern tourism, turned Egypt into a fashionable winter resort for the British middle class in the 1870s and 1880s. Thomas Cook himself (1808-92) had turned his family business into the world’s greatest travel agency, and in 1870 the Ottoman viceroy in Egypt, Khedive Ismail, had made him the official agent for Nile traffic. But it was his son, John Mason Cook, who became manager of the London HQ in 1865, who set up offices throughout the Empire and in the United States, thus globalizing its operations, and who concentrated on Egypt as his premier destination.

  The turning of Egypt into a British protectorate in 1882—the Veiled Protectorate, as it was known—opened up a tourist paradise for the Cooks. Almost immediately, they secured a monopoly of luxury Nile cruises, which they had invented, and the Nile quickly became known as “Cook’s Canal.” The company offered a set fare from London to the First Cataract of £119, all included. It was a whimsy of the rich, however; a British worker’s annual wage in 1880 was about £60. For the upper middle class, it could be around £800. The trip took six days.

  Cook’s opened hotels in Aswan and Luxor, some of them medical to attract the therapeutic winter sunshine crowd. The monopoly was extraordinary; the army that sailed down the Nile to rescue General Gordon i
n 1884 went on Cook’s steamers. Soon, the imperial authorities had granted Cook’s mail and government travel monopolies as well—a perfect example of the symbiosis between empire and tourism. Aswan became the “Cannes of Egypt,” yet another British social scene, and in 1891 John Cook estimated that tourists were spending £4 million a year in Egypt. Luxury hotels appeared everywhere—the Mena House near the Pyramids, the Khedival Club and Shepheard’s in Cairo, the Turf Club, the Gezireh Palace—many of them still in operation. And Cook’s capital rose to over £200,000, half of its profits coming from the Nile alone. By 1900 there was a vastly cheaper “popular Tour,” with trains, hotels, and ships all included for about 40 guineas. (They had already invented the traveler’s check in 1875.)

  It was a remarkable cultural revolution. Apart from the thousands of Egyptians who learned English by working for Cook’s, the European visitors were also shaken up into novel combinations. The English traveler and Egyptologist Amelia B. Edwards gives a typical description of the dubious tourist types crowding Shepheard’s Hotel after she arrived there in November 1873, “literally, and most prosaically,” as she puts it, “in search of fine weather”:

  It is the traveller’s lot to dine at many table-d’hôtes in the course of many wanderings; but it seldom befalls him to make one of a more miscellaneous gathering than that which overfills the great dining-room at Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo during the beginning and height of the regular Egyptian season. Here assemble daily some two to three hundred persons of all ranks, nationalities, and pursuits; half of whom are Anglo-Indians homeward or outward bound, European residents, or visitors established in Cairo for the winter. The other half, it may be taken for granted, are going up the Nile. So composite and incongruous is this body of Nile-goers, young and old, well-dressed and ill-dressed, learned and unlearned, that the newcomer’s first impulse is to inquire from what motives so many persons of dissimilar tastes and training can be led to embark upon an expedition which is, to say the least of it, very tedious, very costly, and of an altogether exceptional interest.