Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  Logistically too, I tried to stay protean. Those Grand Tourists who follow what might be called the Hiltercontinental circuit, allowing themselves to be whisked from one air-conditioned coach to the next and transported from four-star Hyatt to five-star Hyatt, are likely to experience little of the foreign world they have allegedly come to observe; yet the low-budget traveler who would rather sleep on a bench and eat stale grass than pay 50 cents for the bourgeois comforts of an inn imposes on himself a different kind of tunnel vision. For my part, I tried to commute between the two worlds, slumming it in style as I moved between hovel and hotel. In Thailand, I spent a few nights at the $150-a-night Oriental Hotel, said to be the finest such palace in the world, and a few other nights on the floor of lightless huts in the animist villages of the north (though mostly I stayed in a modest $10-a-night apartment building somewhere between the two); in Tokyo, I sampled both a Holiday Inn and the cheapest minshuku in the city, an inn with cells so tiny that it was impossible for me to stand up inside my “room” and possible to enter only by crawling headfirst through a screen door. Likewise, taxi alternated with bullock cart, Amex café with filthy roadside stall. Burma I circumnavigated once by plane, and once by army truck, horse-drawn cart and third-class train. And nearly everywhere, I traveled alone, in order to give myself the space to think and the chance to meet strangers.

  The chapters that follow fall into three rough groups, progressively more complex. The first four are all fairly simple and straightforward discussions of the most basic kinds of meeting between East and West along the tourist trail, and the different forms they take in two places relatively new to the trade (Tibet and China) and two old pros (Bali and Nepal). The next three chapters explore in a little more detail some of the forms of Empire still to be found in the East: the legacy of American cultural colonialism in the Philippines; faded remnants of British rule, curiously preserved in isolationist Burma; and, in Hong Kong, the first outlines of the multinational empire that seems likely to rule the generic world of tomorrow. The final three chapters, the longest and most complicated, try to look more deeply into some of the East’s deepest cultures—India, Thailand and Japan—by examining one specific aspect of the way they adopt, and adapt to, Western influences, and make them distinctively their own.

  At times, I am sure, ignorance has conspired with wistfulness to make me blind to the obvious and receptive to the specious. When first I went to Bali, for example, I was so transported by its luxuriant sense of magic that I took the mosquito coils placed each night in my room for sticks of holy incense, and mistook the smell of clove cigarettes for the scent of some exotic flower. Though I was disabused of both illusions when I returned to the island the following year, many other such misconceptions doubtless remain. Still, mistakes can, in their way, be as revealing as epiphanies, and even a wrong impression may say as much about a place as a right one. If Bali had not been so full of real magic, my false assumptions would, no doubt, have been very different. And wide eyes are, if nothing else, quite open.

  BALI

  On Prospero’s Isle

  I HAD COME into town the previous afternoon watching video reruns of Dance Fever on the local bus. As I wandered around, looking for a place to stay, I had noted down the names of a few of the stores: the Hey Shop. The Hello Shop. Easy Rider Travel Service. T.G.I. Friday restaurant. And after checking into a modest guesthouse where Vivaldi was pumping out of an enormous ghetto blaster, I had gone out in search of a meal. I ran across a pizzeria, a sushi bar, a steak house, a Swiss restaurant and a slew of stylish Mexican cafés. Eventually, however, I wound up at T.J.’s, a hyper-chic fern bar, where long-legged young blondes in tropical T-shirts were sitting on wicker chairs and sipping tall cocktails. Reggae music floated through the place as a pretty waitress brought me my corn chips and salsa.

  After dinner, I had made my way to a nearby café for a cappuccino. Next to the cash register were enough stacks of old copies of Cosmo, Newsweek and the London Sunday Times to fill six doctors’ waiting rooms. Behind the counter was a backgammon set for customers and a homemade library of faded paperbacks—Erica Jong, Ken Follett, Alexandra Penney. From Casablanca, the showy, two-story singles bar across the street, Bruce Springsteen was belting out “Dancing in the Dark.” Hungry-eyed girls in tiny skirts were cruising the place in pairs, while muscular guys with gold medallions dangling across their bronzed chests perched on the balcony, drinking beer.

  After an unquiet sleep, I had woken up and walked around the three or four square blocks of the town. Most of the stores seemed to be trendy boutiques, across whose windows were splashed New Wave Japanese T-shirts and pretty sundresses in Miami Vice turquoise and pink. Surfaris. Tropical Climax. Cherry. Mariko. An American Werewolf in London was playing at the local cinema. The Narnia. Frenchy. Pancho’s. The Pub. A few Men at Work songs were pouring out of cassette stores opened to the street, only to be drowned out by the roar of Suzukis erratically ridden by local boys in leopardskin shirts. Fatty. The Beer Garden. Depot Viva. The Duck Nuts. “Marijuana and hashish,” whispered one man to me. “Hashish and cocaine,” muttered his friend. Joe’s. Lenny. Jerry. Elly’s. Elice’s. I walked back to my guesthouse—Van Morrison had now replaced Vivaldi on the system—and a couple of the boys there invited me to sit down over some guacamole and give them my opinion of Michael Landon and John McEnroe.

  I was, of course, in Bali, the Elysian isle famous for its otherworldly exoticism, its cultural integrity, its natural grace.

  SAY BALI, AND two things come to mind: tourism and paradise. Both are inalienable features of the island, and also incompatible. For as fast as paradises seduce tourists, tourists reduce paradises. Such are the unerring laws of physics: what goes up must come down; for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Hardly has a last paradise been discovered than everyone converges on it so fast that it quickly becomes a paradise lost.

  Nowhere, however, had this struggle been so protracted or intense as in Bali, most pestered and most paradisiacal of islands. The first Westerners ever to land here, Dutch sailors in 1597, announced their discovery of Eden, and two of them decided never to leave. By 1619, Balinese girls were already fetching 150 florins in the slave markets of Réunion and by 1847, the first tract in the fertile field of Baliology was already being brought into print. And for more than half a century now, Bali had been perhaps the world’s best-kept idyll and its worst-kept secret: a race of charmed spirits still danced in its temples, and a crush of foreigners kept pushing their way in for a view. Tourism hung around Bali like chains around a mermaid.

  The animist Hindus who grace the island regard all of life as a battle between the spirits of light and darkness, and nearly every native dance plays out this unending elemental struggle in the form of a celebration or an exorcism. But Bali had also become the world’s most popular stage for a subtler battle, and a less ethereal dance—between the colonizing impulse of the West and the resistant cultural heritage of the East. Like Prospero’s isle, Bali was a kind of paradise crowded with wood nymphs and cave-hidden spirits. Like Prospero’s isle, it was governed by a race of noblemen, artisans and priests that had been chased into exile across the seas. And like Prospero’s isle, it was now being threatened by a new mob of aliens, who found themselves charmed by its virgin goddesses, made sleep-heavy by its unearthly music. Bali had thus become the magical setting on which the two forces were deciding destinies larger than their own: could Ariel, airy spirit and agent of the gods, disarm Antonio, worldly and usurping Duke of Milan, before it was too late?

  Like Prospero’s isle too, Bali offered all the amenities of Eden. Its regally graceful people dwelt in a lush Rousseauesque garden of snakes and tropical flowers. Young girls, careless of their loveliness, bathed in running streams, wore scarlet hibiscus in their hair and silken sarongs around their supple bodies; the soft-eyed local men seemed likewise gods of good health, dazzling smiles offsetting the flowers they tucked behind their ears. In Bali, even old women were s
lender creatures who moved with a dancer’s easy grace. There was no friction in this land of song and dance, and nothing unlovely: children, taken to be angels of purity descended from the heavens, were never scolded or spanked, crime was unknown and even cremations were opulent festivals of joy. Nature had been charmed by Art. Everything was at peace.

  In Bali, indeed, life itself, and everything in it, was taken to be sacrament and dance. The Balinese traditionally had no particular conception of “art,” since every villager wove or danced or painted as a matter of course; every house, moreover, had its own shrine, and every village had three temples, open to the heavens and wrapped in white and golden sashes. Every day, as I arose, bare-shouldered women in sumptuous silks were sashaying through the early morning sunlight, stately and unhurried, piles of fruit on their heads to be placed as offerings before the gods. And every night, in village courtyards, radiant little girls, in gorgeous gold brocades, white blossoms garlanding the hair that fell to their waists, swayed together out of the darkness, their eyes rolling, twisting their hands like sorcerers, moving as one to the gongs and cymbals of the spellbinding gamelan. Like Prospero’s isle, Bali was “full of noises, sounds and sweet airs… a thousand twangling instruments.”

  And the beauty, and the curse, of Bali was that a piece of this paradise was available to everyone who entered. For $2 a night, I was given my own thatched hut in a tropical courtyard scented with flowers and fruit. Each sunny morning, as I sat on my veranda, a smiling young girl brought me bowls of mangoes and tea, and placed scarlet bougainvillaeas on the gargoyle above my lintel. Two minutes away was the palm-fringed beach of my fantasies; an hour’s drive, and I was climbing active volcanoes set among verdant terraces of rice. Along the sleepy village lanes, garden restaurants served tropical drinks and magic mushrooms, while a hundred stores offered giddy T-shirts, sixties paintings and cassettes galore. And all around were dances, silken ceremonies and, in a place scarcely bigger than Delaware, as many as 30,000 temples.

  Thus the paradox remained: Bali was heaven, and hell was other people. Tourism had become the island’s principal detraction. And the specter of commercialism shadowed every visitor from his first step to his last: one might debate the issue or demean it, but one could not ignore it. Sightseers were inclined not to say that Bali was beautiful or terrible, only that it had been raped or was still intact. “ ‘Isn’t Bali spoiled?’ is invariably the question that greets the returned traveler… meaning, is the island overrun by tourists?” wrote Miguel Covarrubias. He had written that in 1937. “This nation of artists is faced with a Western invasion, and I cannot stand idly by and watch its destruction,” wrote André Roosevelt, in his introduction to a book on Bali, entitled (what else?) The Last Paradise. He had written that in 1930.

  And after fifty years of such anxieties, Bali had, inevitably, become a paradise traduced by many tourists, the place that sophisticates hated to love: many of my British friends would rather have vacationed in Calais or Hull than submit to what they regarded as the traveler’s ultimate cliché. Even those who adored the island found it more and more trying. For if it is the first vanity, and goal, of every traveler to come upon his own private pocket of perfection, it is his second vanity, and goal, to shut the door behind him. Paradise is a deserted island or a solitary glade. Bali, however, was a common paradise, a collective find and, as such, an insult to the imagination. For years, the island had swarmed with crowds desperate to get away from the crowds. “The thing I hate about Bali,” an American in Hong Kong told me, “is that everyone on the island is American or Australian, but every one of them is ignoring all the others and pretending that he’s the only foreigner who’s discovered the place.”

  Yet still Bali remained unavoidable and irresistible. And what distinguished it most from its rivals for the Pyrrhic distinction of the world’s loveliest paradise island—what set it apart from Mustique or los or even Tahiti—was the variety of its enticements. Bali had something for everyone. Some people traveled to pamper themselves, some to enjoy themselves, some to improve themselves; all of them came to Bali. And all of them, whether sun worshipper, antique collector or truth seeker, were guaranteed absolute satisfaction. For though the Indonesian government had wisely stuck by the Dutch policy of “Bali for the Balinese” and permitted tourists only in the eastern half of the island—the west remained virtually impenetrable—there was still a wealth of guidebook riches to be found here: pamphlet-perfect surf and sand for the beach bum; five-star resorts for the sybarite; myths and rituals in abundance for the culture vulture.

  Through a miracle of convenience, moreover, the separate needs of the separate species of Homo touristicus were satisfied in three separate areas, located within a twenty-mile radius of one another. Along the western side of the super-developed southern peninsula was Kuta Beach, once a major rest stop for hippie gypsies on their way from Kathmandu to Cuzco, and now primarily a holiday camp for Australian surfers and their blondes; on the other side of the peninsula—ten miles, and a thousand worlds, away—was Sanur Beach, a strip of concrete, luxury hotels set along the sea, the Waikiki or Cannes of the East, where the international set came out to play; and at the apex of the compact triangle, set in the heart of Bali’s magical middle kingdom, was the hillside village of Ubud, where trendy visitors came to study the native culture and foreign artists set up home and shop.

  Even more conveniently, tourism in Bali was remarkably segregated. No self-respecting self-styled student of the local culture would ever be caught dead inside the discos and juice bars of Kuta, while feto of the musclemen on the beach had time for the festivals and galleries of Ubud; both groups scorned the Sanur life they could not afford, and the Sanur settlers looked down on the basic conditions of Kuta and Ubud, which they found uncomfortably close to those of the Balinese they so admired. And everyone, in all three areas, shunned Denpasar, the noisy, traffic-choked town at the middle of the triangle, which had the unenviable task of underwriting the pleasures of Eden with practical facilities.

  Thus Ferdinand and Antonio and Gonzalo all drifted around the enchanted island, each in his own private dream, each largely unaware of the others’ proximity, all watched only by their invisible hosts.

  II

  Bali’s most famous tourist community—cursed and coveted around the world—was Kuta. Fifteen years ago, the quiet fishing village had been the cheap utopia of bohemians in quest of rural hangouts and vegetable highs; watching a psychedelic sunset at Kuta was said to be almost as good as seeing Jerry Garcia at the Fillmore West or conversing with Buddha on a Himalayan mountaintop. And fifteen years ago, there had been only two restaurants in the area. The first hotel in Kuta had opened only in 1959; by now, however, the area was pockmarked with more than three hundred losmens, or guesthouses. Bali, in fact, had become for Australians what Greece is for many Europeans, the Bahamas for New Yorkers and Hawaii for those in the Far West—the most convenient paradise island on their doorsteps. Every day brought planeloads of pleasure-loving Aussies streaming into Kuta, fresh from the streets of Perth or Darwin.

  And a kind of Darwinian devolution had, so it seemed, been the result. For most of these visitors were not, as a rule, the kind of visitor whose pleasures were subtle or understated: they were mostly straight-ahead, no-nonsense blokes, bikers and surfers and bruisers and boozers who were rough and ready for fun. All they wanted were some basic good times—great waves, cheap beer, pretty girls. Thus Kuta had become their raucous home from home, a boisterous playground for piss-ups and pick-ups and rave-ups. Sure, Prospero’s isle might be full of angels and artists, but it also had room for some drunken Stephanos and Trinculos.

  So “Captain Good Vibes” stickers had been splattered across many of the village surfaces, and Perth badges attached to many a local breast. Koalas and kangaroos peered out of shirts and shelves, and around the tiny desk in my guesthouse, the Lasi Erawati, the number of surfing decals totaled 170. The most popular T-shirt in town said “No, I don’t want a
F——ing Bemo/Postcard/Massage/Jiggy Jig.”

  A glossy photo in my five-year-old guidebook cited Doggies restaurant as an “Antique setting: the only place with a Disco.” By now, however, Doggies itself was an antique, since almost every place had a disco. And one local bar offered “Aussie-style steaks,” another “special Aussie H’Burger with the lot.” One sign promised “Suci’s Aussie Breakfast” and another “Waltzing Maltilda Sarongs.” “Real Cheese and Vegemite Sandwich Eating Competitions” were held at Casablanca, and “Bintang Beer and Coke Drinking Contests” at Madé’s Tavern. The drinks in the pubs were called, at their most delicate, “Bali Kiss” and “Love Potion” and “Dirty Mother.” And the second most popular T-shirt in town announced “Bloody Good Tucker: Kuta, Bali.”

  Kuta, then, had all the rowdiness, and all the unacknowledged sadness, of every beachfront holiday camp jam-packed with people looking around for the good time they had promised themselves; it had all the skin-peeling bustle of Cape Cod in the summer, say, or Corfu, or Cancún. In Kuta, red-faced couples held hands, touched sunburned knees under the table, asked the waiter to take pictures of them in their tans, lost themselves in long kisses on the streets. This was fun time, the visitors said, and the first thing to do was break all the rules—native customs or no. Get drunk. Get high. Get laid. This was such stuff as dreams are made on.