by Matt Gross
And because the town ran on tourism, the town (it seemed to us) ignored its own residents. To be a Williamsburg teenager—a teenager with time on his hands—in the 1980s and early 1990s was to be bored, and to be bored of being bored. Where could we go? What could we do? There were no coffee shops, no central parks, no teen centers, no video arcades—nothing that might suggest to the youth of the town that they were wanted in any kind of public space. Sure, we had the library and, eventually, a twenty-four-hour Denny’s. But often we’d set up camp in the little alley off Dog Street, near the Williamsburg Theater (okay, we had an art-house cinema, too), and sneer at the tourons who obliviously passed us by. What else could we do? The money they spent trickled down, in obvious and not-so-obvious ways, into the hands of our parents. Without them, there’d be no us. And so we hated them even more.
Within a few years, however, I had landed in Vietnam—on a tourist visa. Yeesh. This could not stand. I was not a tourist. I was here to go deep and long, to work my way inside Vietnamese culture, to understand and adapt and prove that I was more than just an overflowing wallet from abroad. How I would accomplish this I didn’t know, but as I surveyed the neighborhood I’d wound up calling home—the messy zone centered on Pham Ngu Lao Street—I knew what I would not become: a backpacker. Sloppily dressed, itinerant, subsisting on banana pancakes and sticking to Lonely Planet–approved routes, they were almost as bad, I could sense, as the tourons of Williamsburg. And though we might very well all hang out at Apocalypse Now, Bodhi Tree, and the Saigon Café, it was obvious, to me at least, that we were hardly the same class of Vietnam visitor.
One afternoon at Saigon Café, however, Dave Danielson—the American who’d given me my first real teaching job in Vietnam—brought my attention to a third kind of visitor, one I hadn’t been aware of at all. Sitting up straight in his plastic chair, he adopted a mock German accent: “I have a passport and a Visa card,” he said, sounding more Hans und Franz than Schwarzenegger. “I’m not a tourist—I’m a traveler.”
It was a distinction I’d hear dozens of times over the years. A traveler, that is, was no mere tourist. A traveler was smarter and sharper, more flexible and less tied to itineraries, more willing to go off the beaten path, less concerned with having the right experience and seeing the important sights, more excited about connections with locals than about acquiring souvenirs. For travelers, life was about travel. For tourists, travel was what you did on vacation.
If the traveler-tourist dichotomy had first been presented to me differently, I might have signed right on to the traveler side. It was pretty close to how I viewed myself—mostly uninterested in bagging the famous sights, eager for weird experiences, excited to meet new people, willing to put up with more than a bit of discomfort. Unlike the tourons (and even the backpackers), the other travelers and I would come to know the world in a fuller, better, more meaningful way.
But Dave’s presentation eliminated the possibility that I’d ever unquestioningly self-identify as a traveler. As he made perfectly clear, travelers were a snooty bunch who considered themselves far superior to everyone else. As much as they touted their deeper, more honest travel experiences, they also engaged in constant one-upsmanship, judging each other on arbitrary scales of authenticity. They were almost worse than the tourists, because at least tourists knew their place, and probably wouldn’t speak to you anyway. But a traveler—a traveler would want to know where you’d been, and if you’d found the secret noodle shop or met the mad, multilingual Buddhist monk in the mountains or done ayahuasca (“real ayahuasca, man”) in Peru, because if you hadn’t, well, then you hadn’t really been there at all.
Of course, my own refusal to pick sides meant I was superior to both travelers and tourists. With no model to follow, I alone could decide what kind of, uh, traveler I was, and which, you know, tourist visas I’d get stamped into my passport.
But then what kind of traveler was I to be? What exactly did I want to do, here in Vietnam and anywhere else I might go?
I didn’t know, and I doubt I ever formulated the questions in such explicit terms. Instead, I was too busy trying to find work and earn money, and those efforts, more than anything else, molded my approach to travel. As a poorly paid English teacher or a hustling writer/editor, I had relatively little time to explore Vietnam. While backpackers, tourists, and travelers alike were visiting battle sites from the French and American wars, I was riding my 70cc moped to class. While they went cruising or kayaking among the dramatic limestone islands of Ha Long Bay, I was correcting hilarious typos at the Viet Nam News.
My life was never all work and no play. But instead of spending Sundays at the beach resorts of Vung Tau or Phan Thiet, my friends and I would head out the highway for an afternoon of ice-skating at the city’s first rink, where despite the fact that it had just opened a crew of local teens was whirling and gliding like New England prep schoolers. I may have gone to the Museum of American War Crimes and to the Cu Chi Tunnels, but I made those excursions early in my stay, and as I carved out a life for myself in Ho Chi Minh City, such “touristy” attractions held less and less attraction for me. Not because they were touristy but because I had other, more important things to do.
In the fifteen years since I left Vietnam, I’ve often regretted this unintentional prioritizing of my own comfortable life over the serious exploration of a new country. Yes, I can tell people I lived in Vietnam for a year, but if they ask me about the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta or the coffee-producing Central Highlands, I can only shrug. If they want to know if Sapa, a northern town famous for its colorfully dressed ethnic minorities, is worth visiting, I can explain that, from what I’ve read and heard from knowledgeable friends, mass tourism has changed its tribal traditions into a money-making exercise in public theater—but of course, that’s only what I’ve read and heard. I may know my way around Hanoi’s ancient 36 Streets, but I’ve never seen Uncle Ho’s embalmed corpse, on display at his mausoleum.
More tragic was my failure to learn Vietnamese. After dropping out of the class I’d enrolled in, I ceased improving almost entirely. I picked up a few things here and there, particularly curses and profanity, but four months in I was not yet able to cope with even the simplest situations in the local tongue. Not until February, when I visited Phnom Penh to cover the Southeast Asian Film Festival, did I renew my efforts to learn Vietnamese, for it was there that I saw my good friend Douglas chat easily with hotel clerks, prostitutes, and moto-taxi drivers, who’d learned the language during Vietnam’s decade-long occupation of Cambodia. When we returned to Saigon, I vowed to learn as much as I could, primarily by talking to the staff at the Lucy Hotel and asking everyone I knew for guidance and instruction. I was, by July, able to understand and answer the basic questions Vietnamese ask new acquaintances: What’s your name? Where are you from? How old are you? Are you married? (And do you have children?) What’s your job? What’s your salary?
But that was it. I could order noodles, and direct a taxi, and cheer on my pool-playing pals (“Hai qua!”), but I couldn’t have a proper conversation with anyone, about anything. Frustratingly, my accent was often good enough that people would assume I was more capable than I was. Then they’d pause, and wait for my reaction, and I’d stare at them blankly and, shamefully, admit I didn’t understand a word.
There was so much I didn’t know about this country that I loved, and yet in some ways I knew it very, very well. I knew how to cross the street safely through a flood of cars and motorbikes, and I knew how to open a bank account. I knew how to make a toast (“Trăm phn trăm!” means 100 percent, or Bottoms up!) and I knew how to handle things when the toasting got too intense (“Năm mu’ò’i phn trăm!” or 50 percent!). I knew where to find good French pâté and when to eat ph, and when I wanted to buy a copy of the International Herald Tribune, I knew to ask around Pham Ngu Lao for the deaf newspaper vendor who always carried an extra copy.
Most of all, I knew how to be in Vietnam. You could teleport
me there today, to a village I’ve never heard of, and I will feel at home. I will recognize the smells (old coconut, burning charcoal, exhaust, jasmine, fish sauce) and the improbably melodious cacophony of honking Hondas and synth-pop music and constant construction, and I won’t worry that I don’t know what to do. This may be, I’ll admit, a profoundly mistaken attitude to proclaim—presumptuous, even condescending—but I’m sure I can also deal with the consequences of that mistake.
Whether I planned it or not, my Vietnam experience became the model for all my future trips. The philosophy: eh, I’ll do whatever. When I visited Jean in Paris in 1998, she and I walked around, shopped for neat clothing, and talked. True, we did spend a morning at the Louvre, but my memories of that—I remember vastly preferring the Winged Victory to the Mona Lisa—are nothing compared to the intensity of others: exploring the street market near Grenelle, where vendors sold heaping piles of choucroute garnie and brilliantly clean-flavored olives, lucque super, that I’ve never found since; getting rudely turned away from a wild-game restaurant where we had reservations. At the Fondation Cartier, we saw a marvelous exhibition showcasing the avant-garde work of Issey Miyake, the Japanese fashion designer, and in the museum bookstore I found portfolios by the Malian photographers Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta, who’d documented their country’s ebullient postindependence era, and I was struck by how casually all these forces and nationalities intersected and overlapped: America, France, Japan, Taiwan, Mali; art, fashion, photography, romance. That night, I believe, we accidentally locked ourselves out of Jean’s apartment and had to check into a cheap hotel down the street, and although it meant I would miss my flight the next day, I was ecstatic. Eiffel Tower? Panthéon? Pompidou? Why bother when real adventures were to be had!
I was, proudly, a bad tourist. I went to Bangkok two or three times before, at the behest of a friend of a friend, I visited the magnificent Royal Palace. (Haven’t been back.) Two or three trips to Rome before I saw the Colosseum. (Incredible!) In Mexico City, Jean and I never even tried to figure out what you’re supposed to see in Mexico City. Instead, we busied ourselves with a daylong exploration of the Mercado Central, which is surely on the list of things to see, but the point is we went there because we wanted to—we wanted to see the piles of dried chiles and sample tacos stuffed with braised bulls’ balls. At least, that’s what I assumed was in them, given the vendors’ unrestrained amusement at Jean’s hearty chomping.
There were times, of course, when proper sightseeing was inescapable. On my first trip to India, for a wedding in 2003, my friend Sandra and I stayed in New Delhi with her friend’s family, in a big house next door to the Saudi Arabian embassy. It was December, and Delhi was chilly, misty, grungy, and a bit boring, and since Sandra and I had several days to kill before the multiday wedding began, we decided to explore. Luckily—sort of—the father of our host family owned a tour company (also, the exclusive rights to import Cuban cigars). All we had to do was show up, and a trip was mapped out for us. We would drive through Rajasthan, go on a tiger safari, and finally see the Taj Mahal.
Rajasthan, the arid but colorful state southwest of Delhi, was fine. Mostly, I remember visiting a lot of forts. Impressive, old, fascinating forts. Forts that seemed to mean a lot to the guides who wanted to take us to one after another after another. But had I not gone to a single fort, I know now I would not have missed them. Even though, as I said, they were just fine.
The tiger safari, however, had me and Sandra much more excited. Tigers! Early one morning, we clambered into the open back of a jeep along with twenty other tourists, a mix of Indians and Brits, and sped into Ranthambore National Park. Down the bumpy hardpacked roads we went, our guides warning us not to get our hopes up too high. With just twenty-six tigers living in 150 square miles of jungle, they couldn’t guarantee a sighting. But look, there was a deer! And over there—a colorful bird!
Around this time, a British man with a drooping face, grayish complexion, and unfashionably thick glasses began to grumble quietly to himself. About the crowding here in the Jeep, about the difficulty in seeing anything the guides were pointing out, about the cold weather. Sandra and I began to speculate about him: Why was he here at all, and alone? He looked to be in his mid-fifties, and we concluded he was either a widower or divorced, and his friends back home, in an effort to cheer him up, had convinced him to take this trip to far-off India, whose exotic action would make his life vibrant again. It didn’t seem to be working.
Suddenly, the Jeep slowed to a stop. Beyond a thin line of trees to our left, a vast field dotted with ponds and streams. A guide pointed into the field, and there, in the middle of it, almost hidden in the deep grasses, was a tiger! A real tiger. We held our breath. The tiger got up. It walked, lazily, as tigers do, across the field. All were silent, motionless, awestruck—except for the Brit, who muttered about how he couldn’t actually see the tiger. And once he could, once he’d fixed on its position, once he’d watched it saunter majestically out of the woods and into the road two hundred yards ahead of us, he announced, in a clearer voice than before, “It’s like watching paint dry.”
Then the tiger disappeared into the thicker woods on the other side of the road.
It was about 10 a.m., and our guides and drivers, formerly worried we might not see a tiger, had a new problem. We’d seen a tiger, yes, but we still had four hours left on the tour, and if we were going to be honest about things, there wasn’t much else to see in Ranthambore National Park except tigers. Deer and colorful birds are fine, but after you’ve seen a tiger, they’re like Cheerios to a child who’s tasted Froot Loops.
And so, with four hours to go, miles and miles of road to cover, and nothing left to see, the driver stepped on the gas. And so, for four hours, through miles and miles of forest, Sandra and I and the sad Brit and everyone else huddled in the back of the Jeep, suffering through hard incessant jouncing, shivering in the wind chill. A kind Indian woman loaned the sad Brit her silk scarf, and he’d draped it over his head and shoulders to keep warm; he looked suicidal.
Near the end of this unpleasant voyage, the Jeep pulled to a stop so that we could, incredibly, gaze upon a second tiger as it loped in the distance. And then, when it had gone, the Jeep zipped back to the park’s entrance, and we achingly returned to our hotel—a threadbare, insect-ridden “resort” where our attempts at sleep were interrupted by the rumble of trucks on an unseen highway, like dinosaurs lowing in the distance.
Early the next morning, Sandra and I fled. We’d been scheduled for another tiger safari (in case we hadn’t spotted one the first day), but that did not seem advisable. Instead we rushed to the train station, where we admired the “Rogus [sic] Gallery,” a wall decorated with photos of known thieves and pickpockets, then turned around to watch an organized gang of monkeys rob a passerby of his bag of mangoes. At last we boarded the third-class train that would deposit us somewhere near Agra, and from there we caught a bus to the city—and the great Taj Mahal.
The Taj Mahal—built by a seventeenth-century Mughal emperor in memory of his third wife, visited by millions of awestruck visitors every year, one of the finest pieces of architecture in all of India, if not the world—is, in my humble estimation, quite symmetrical. Really, that’s about all I have to say about it. The Taj Mahal is beautiful and inspiring and so on, but its perfectionism—embodied in that attention to symmetry—didn’t resonate with me. I wanted flaws, I wanted quirks, I wanted a human connection. Instead, our guides emphasized its flawlessness, its precision, its holiness. To me, those attributes are boring.
What bothered me about the Taj Mahal, and much of our sightseeing in India, was the feeling of obligation that surrounded it. If you were in northern India, it felt expected, almost required, that you’d go there. Otherwise, why else would you have come to northern India, if not to see the Taj Mahal, the forts, the tigers?
Although I understood the reasoning, I still bristled at such expectations. Why should I spend my time and money on th
ings and places I’m not interested in, especially when so many other, overlooked experiences beckon? After the Taj Mahal, Sandra and I had to figure out a way to spend the afternoon, and I had an idea. All over town, I’d seen posters—in lurid Day-Glo colors—advertising the circus. We had to go!
And we did. That night, in the company of the guides hired by our friend’s father’s company, we watched clowns joke in Hindi, and motorcyclists drive upside-down in mesh spheres, and poorly trained acrobats leap, tumble, and fall, then get up to do it again. After a brief moment of calm, a hippopotamus appeared from behind a curtain. Led by its trainer, it stumbled around the ring and opened its cavernous mouth, into which the trainer tossed a cabbage. Then it stumbled back behind the curtains.
Amazing! Granted, this was no Barnum & Bailey, but the circus performers were trying, with what little resources and talent they had, to put on a show, here in this city where a circus could never compete with the Taj for the public’s attention. No one laughed or cheered at anything that night—not even the children in the audience. I’ve never understood why not. But I do know that Sandra and I cheered and laughed all the harder to make up for it, and that next time I wind up in Agra, I’m crossing my fingers the circus is in town. But that Mughal tomb? Eh. Seen one Taj, seen Mahal.
Surely, I can’t be the only traveler who feels trapped, or threatened, by the necessity of sightseeing. But I at least have options—I can get myself out and go do whatever it is I feel like doing.
