My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere

by Orlean, Susan

  WHEN IT COMES TO OLYMPIANS rather than Olympics, everyone cheers up. There were billboards all over town featuring Cathy Freeman, the Aborigine runner who won a silver medal in Atlanta, and daily reports on Ian Thorpe, the seventeen-year-old swimmer, nicknamed Thorpedo, whose stupendous foot size is a matter of national pride. As cool as they are about the Olympics, Australians are mad about sports. They surf and swim and golf and ride and sail, and they play tennis and cricket and soccer, and they totally worship “footy”—Australian Rules football, a rugbylike concoction derived from an Aborigine game called marngrook. “Sport is a prime metaphor for Australian life,” the art critic and historian Robert Hughes writes in the Sydney Games official souvenir program—which is called, inventively enough, “Official Souvenir Program”—”and because of it, many of our heroes (we don’t have a lot) are sportsmen and women.” In fact, six of the ferries to the Olympic venue in Homebush are named in honor of Australian Olympic athletes. Another hero might have been Richard Kevan Gosper, a working-class Sydneysider who won first place in the 440-yard sprint in the 1954 Commonwealth Games; a silver medal in track at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics; and a place on the Australian team in the 1960 Olympics, in Rome. Might have been, that is, if Gosper—now the most senior Australian Olympic official—hadn’t queered his reputation by taking an eighteen-thousand-dollar ski vacation in Salt Lake City in 1993, a potential violation of International Olympic Committee rules. (He was finally cleared of any wrongdoing after five months of investigation.) Then, to forever ensure his lack of popularity in Australia, he allowed his daughter Sophie to accept an invitation to be the first Australian in the torch relay, bumping a young girl who had originally been chosen for the spot. Sydney’s Daily Telegraph suggested that Gosper’s name was actually an acronym for Greedy Obstinate Selfish Pompous Egotistical Reptile.

  Except for the Sophie Gosper incident, the torch relay has been one of the happiest parts of the proceedings. As the torch has been circling the country, newspapers have been publishing maps showing its route, along with lists of the names of the various runners, most of whom are ordinary blokes, minor athletic heroes, community standouts, and kids. But even the relay has had snarls. Some joker tried to douse the torch with a fire extinguisher, and smart alecks have been lighting cigarettes from it. One town, Tingha, was so offended by being bypassed that its citizens conspired to pinch some of the flame with a homemade torch. Another town, Nimbin, in northern New South Wales, felt that it was deliberately left off the route because of its notoriety as a marijuana center and the fear that there would be too much enthusiasm for lighting joints from the Olympic torch. The manager of a local backpackers’ hotel was quoted as saying, “The hemp Olympics come here, not the flame ones.”

  ON MY LAST DAY in Sydney, I went to Olympic Park in Homebush Bay, about fifteen miles west of the center of the city. From downtown, the easiest way to Homebush is by RiverCat, a long ferryboat that slips noiselessly from Circular Quay, beside the white half-shell of the Sydney Opera House, down the Parramatta River to Gladesville and Chiswick and Darling Harbour and Kissing Point and, eventually, to Homebush. The banks of the river are ragged, with long grooves and deep coves and jigsawed inlets and bays. Homebush is on a chunk of low, flat land shaped like the head of a golden retriever. The area has had an inglorious past. Besides being the site of a former racetrack, Homebush consisted of a drab collection of suburban bungalows, brick factories, and railroad tracks. For forty years, Homebush Bay and the surrounding wetlands were used as a dump for domestic garbage, construction debris, and commercial waste, including petroleum, tar sludge, asbestos, heavy metals, and dioxins. So much waste was deposited that the landscape was permanently redrawn. The area was considered, in the most generous terms, “highly degraded.” After six years and a hundred and thirty-seven million dollars, it is now a green, or at least greenish, mostly man-made landscape called Millennium Parklands, replanted with native grasses and casuarina trees, and pocked with twenty-two man-made ponds. Even the most ornery of Australians would have to agree that this aspect of hosting the Olympics has been a success.

  Most of the thirty-two Sydney Olympic venues are clustered at Millennium Parklands, including the two-hundred-million-dollar Super Dome, the Aquatic Centre, the Olympic Stadium, the Tennis Centre, the Baseball Stadium, Archery Park, and McDonald’s Central. The Olympic site is such a spectacle that it has been swarmed by visitors who wanted to see the largest Olympic stadium in history (StadiumAustralia, which seats a hundred and ten thousand). By the time I got to Sydney, some of the athletes had arrived, and the site was in pre-Games security lock down. Though it was no longer possible to tour the facilities, my Olympic Explorer bus, which met the ferry, was nearly full; the passengers were mostly Italian and Japanese.

  The bus driver was a middle-aged Australian with a craggy face and a bush hat covered with pins and insignia. Even he had succumbed to the prevailing cynicism. “We’ll get the propaganda over with first, “ he announced, and proceeded to give the precooked description of the place. The passengers pushed toward the windows to take pictures of Olympic Boulevard, and Pavilions Two, Three, and Four, and Boral Olympic Dream Parkway, and Kronos Hill—a garbage mountain now capped and replanted and hemmed in with retaining walls. Everything was bright and clean and beautiful and had the unnaturally gentle undulations of a landfill. As we passed the Homebush Bay Novotel, the bus driver said it was a fine hotel offering every comfort. “The only thing you won’t see at the Novotel are Olympic officials,” he said. “That’s because it’s only a four-star hotel. Olympic officials are only willing to stay at five-star hotels.” The passengers tittered and put down their cameras. The bus driver chuckled and added, “They couldn’t handle a four-star hotel, poor dears.”

  Some of the Olympic venues are outside Millennium Parklands. The equestrian events, for instance, will take place west of downtown at something called, remarkably enough, Horsley Park. Beach volleyball will be held at Bondi Beach, a choice that many Australians have found remarkable for other reasons. Bondi is not the prettiest beach in Australia, but it’s probably the best loved—as familiar and iconic to Sydney residents as, say, Central Park is to New Yorkers. One of the closest beaches to downtown, it is a horseshoe of tan sand southeast of the harbor, in a hilly neighborhood of kabob shops and stores selling spotty-dog ice cream and Roxy bikinis and deep-fried coconut-battered Mars bars. Bondi has one of the oldest lifesaving clubs in Australia and one of the oldest surf cultures. Board shorts and rash-guard shirts with BONDI BEACH insignia sell like crazy, and most tourists to Sydney ride three stops on the Illawarra Line subway to look at the legendary waves.

  There is no ballplaying allowed at Bondi Beach. When it was announced, two years ago, that the Olympic beach-volleyball competition would take place at Bondi, and that a stadium would be built to accommodate it, reaction in the neighborhood was immediate. A Stop the Stadium movement was launched, led by a group called Bondi Olympic Watch, which collected thousands of signatures on petitions opposing the stadium. Nevertheless, the stadium went up. The anti–beach volleyball groups kept complaining. BONDI OLYMPIC STADIUM TURNS INTO A DOLLAR DUMPER, one flyer raged. “The Olympic beach volleyball stadium has turned the centre of our world famous beach into what looks like a giant scaffold site and is gobbling up millions of tax payers’ dollars. Originally costed at $13 million, this piece of ugliness has become the unspoken nightmare of the Olympic Coordination Authority.”

  The stadium is a gigantic tangle of risers and bleachers and fencing moored on some three hundred pylons sunk into the sand. Supposedly, it will be pulled down as soon as the Olympics are over and Bondi Beach will be back to normal, but many people I spoke to suspect that they’ll be stuck with it forever, and others referred to a study alleging that if the pylons are removed, they will raise polluted soil to the beach surface. I spent my afternoon at Bondi walking around the stadium, reading the “Fuck the Olympics” graffiti, and peeking through the fence to get a look. Anyone who
really wants to see the inside will have no trouble once the Games begin, because at last count tens of thousands of beach-volleyball tickets remained unsold. In Martin Smith’s Bookshop, just off Campbell Parade, I picked up a sticker that said, KEEP TAKING YOUR MEDICATION. OUR OLYMPIC VISITORS MUST SUSPECT NOTHING, and considered buying a T-shirt with a mock IOC logo that said, IDIOTS ORGANIZING CHAOS rather than INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC COMMITTEE and had five lemons arranged like the five Olympic rings.

  “There’s a lot of bad odor about the Olympics,” Martin Smith told me. “I’m just disillusioned. I’d like to not be here at all. Instead, I’m leaving for Spain halfway through.”

  A customer, overhearing him, came over and said angrily, “Not all of us feel that way. I live here, too, and I’m very proud to share the beach with the world for a few weeks.”

  I was surprised that the store owners in the area weren’t more enthusiastic, since the event will probably bring thousands of visitors who might shop around. “People who come for an event like that don’t go shopping,” Lee Ross, the owner of Parade Music, explained. “They come for the event and they leave. It’s a myth that it will be good for the stores. It won’t help my business to have a bunch of idiots in G-strings lobbing around.”

  I THOUGHT that the most outrageous thing about the Sydney Olympics would be its colossal merchandising campaign—a projected billion dollars’ worth, the biggest in Olympic history, protected by a revolutionary anticounterfeiting device patterned on DNA taken from the hair of an unnamed Olympic athlete. But that was trumped by the announcement, made a few days before I left Australia, that a float featuring a dozen or so drag queens would appear in the closing ceremonies. According to published reports, Mitzi Macintosh, Portia Turbo, Chelsea Bun, Trudi Valentine, and Vanessa Wagner—a few of Sydney’s most glamorous transvestites—will “frock up in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert outfits” as part of a celebration of Australian culture. One newspaper reported that “bitchy comments about who will have the most expensive costume and how some allegedly unreliable drag queens have missed out are also flying about. . . . But there are hopes that a group of ‘muscle marys’—or well-toned men—may perform alongside them.”

  Suddenly, the public debate left the question of whether Cathy Freeman should be allowed to carry an Aboriginal flag and whether members of Parliament were right to accept expensive tickets from corporate sponsors and picked up the drag-queen controversy. The “Letters” columns of Sydney’s newspapers were swamped: “The billions watching the ceremony on worldwide TV will no doubt be left with the enduring memory, not of our champion athletes, but of abnormal men prancing round in atrocious feathers and frocks.” “Sydney, the City of Sleaze. Well, it does have a certain alliterative quality.” “After observing the tasteless self-serving arrogance of the ruling AOC/IOC aristocracy, I conclude that even a bunch of drag queens would, by comparison, provide a classier act.” “That boofy bronzed [Australian] macho sort of thing is fearfully passé. Although, to tell the absolute truth, there are some people I know who wouldn’t mind a boofy bronzed [Australian], if only they could lay their hands on one. What bliss!”

  The drag queens had signed confidentiality agreements, so they weren’t talking, but as I left Australia the people of Sydney definitely were, and I suspect the debate over the opening ceremonies, the closing ceremonies, the mascots, the venues, the disfiguring of Bondi Beach, the ticket prices, the ticket delivery, the traffic, the price hikes, and, of course, the judging of the events will continue until the torch is passed. Certainly, that debate is already a little more trenchant and a little more cantankerous than I had anticipated. My favorite souvenir—besides my Millie the Spiny Anteater stickers—was a letter addressing the drag-queen issue with what I had come to understand was classic Australian reasoning.”Transvestites and poofters at the Olympic Games to illustrate the Australian sporting culture?” the writer asked. “Why not add a few prostitutes to give their sport some quality?”

  The Place to Disappear

  All languages are welcome on Bangkok’s Khao San Road, including Drunkard. “Hold my hand,” a man fluent in Singapore slings commanded a Scottish hairdresser one night at Lucky Beer and Guest House—only in his dialect it came out soggy and rounded, more like “Hole mah han.”

  “Not right now,” the Scottish hairdresser said. She was a slender girl with the pinkish pallor of a milkmaid, blond hair, gray eyes, and a nose ring. She was on a six-week trip through Asia with two cute friends from Glasgow. They’d just arrived on a superdiscount flight from Scotland and had checked into a seven-dollar-a-night room at one of the several hundred or so cheap guesthouses around Khao San Road—Happy Home Guest House or Nirvana Café and Guest House or Sweety’s or Lek Mam’s or something; they actually couldn’t remember what it was called, but they knew how to find their way back. They also knew how to get from their guesthouse to the new branch of Boots, the English drugstore, which opened recently amid the T-shirt shops and travel agencies that line Khao San. Within their first few hours in Bangkok, the girls went to Boots and blew their travel budget on English soap and shampoo—same soap and shampoo they could get at home but somehow more exotic seeming when bought in Thailand—and on snack packages of Oreos, which they worship and which are not easy to find in the United Kingdom. They thought Khao San was horrible because it was so crowded and loud and the room in the guesthouse was so dingy, but it was brilliant, too, because it was so inexpensive, and there were free movies playing at all the bars, and because they’d already run into two friends from home. On top of that, finding a branch of Boots right here was almost too good to be true. What’s more, Boots was super-air-conditioned, and that distinguished it from many of the other Khao San Road shops, which were open to the hot and heavy Bangkok air.

  Now it was close to midnight, and the girls were sitting at a rattletrap table outside Lucky Beer, eating noodles and drinking Foster’s Lager and trying to figure out how to get to Laos. “Hole mah han,” the drunk repeated, and thrust his arm across the table.

  The three girls studied his arm, then shifted away from him. “Wow,” one of the hairdresser’s friends said. “He looks kind of . . . old.”

  “Shut up,” the man snapped. He yanked his arm back, wobbled to his feet, and then fell across the table, sending a salt shaker and a napkin dispenser to heaven. All the while, the girls kept talking about their schedule. It was as if the strangeness of where they were and what they were doing was absolutely ordinary: as if there were no large, smelly drunk sprawled in front of them, as if it were quite unexceptional to be three Scottish girls drinking Australian beer in Thailand on their way to Laos, and as if the world were the size of a peanut—something as compact as that, something that easy to pick up, shell, consume, as long as you were young and sturdy and brave. If you spend any time on Khao San Road, you will come to believe that this is true.

  Finally, the hairdresser glanced at the man, who had not moved. “Hello, sir?” she said, leaning toward his ear. “Hello? Can you hear me? Can I ask you something important? Do you remember where you’re from?”

  I went back to Lucky Beer the next night, but the Scottish girls were gone—off to Laos, most likely. At their table was a South African woman who taught English in Taiwan and was on her way back from massage school in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand. The next night, she was gone, too, replaced by an American couple in their twenties who’d just finished a Peace Corps assignment in Lithuania and were taking the long way home; the night after that, it was five Israelis who had just finished their military service and were stalling in Southeast Asia before starting college in Tel Aviv. Khao San Road, one long packed block in Bangkok’s Banglamphu neighborhood, was the jumping-off point for all of them, a sort of non-place they went to in order to leave from, so they could get to the place they really wanted to go. People appear on Khao San just long enough to disappear. It is, to quote the Khao San Road Business Association’s motto, “Gateway to Southeast Asia,” provided you are traveling
on the cheap and have a backpack fused to your shoulders. From here you can embark on Welcome Travel’s escorted tour of Chiang Mai, which guarantees contact with four different hill tribes, or the Cheap and Smile Tour to Koh Samui, or a minibus trip to Phuket or Penang or Kota Baharu, or an overland journey by open-bed pickup truck to Phnom Penh or Saigon, or a trip via some rough conveyance to India or Indonesia or Nepal or Tibet or Myanmar or anywhere you can think of—or couldn’t think of, probably, until you saw it named on a travel agency kiosk on Khao San Road and decided that was the place you needed to see. Everything you need to stay afloat for months of traveling—tickets, visas, laundry, guidebooks, American movies, Internet access, phone service, luggage storage—is available on Khao San Road.

  THAILAND, the most pliant of places, has always accommodated even the rudest of visitors. For hundreds of years, it was the junction between Chinese, Burmese, Indian, Khmer, and Vietnamese traders. Many Americans first came to know Bangkok as the comfort lounge for troops in Vietnam and, later, as the capital of sex tourism. Starting in the early eighties, when foreigners began trekking to such places as Myanmar and Tibet and Vietnam, Thailand took on another hostessing job, because Bangkok was the safest, easiest, most Westernized place from which to launch a trip through Asia. Until then, Khao San was an unremarkable working-class neighborhood. It had a large temple called Wat Chanasongkhran, a small Muslim enclave, bakeries, motorcycle shops, grocery stores, and a surprising number of residents who were employed as traditional Thai dancers. There were some hotels in the neighborhood, frequented by Thai businesspeople.