Too Many Travellers, Too Many Trees...
Trip Start
Apr 19, 2008
1
3
42
Trip End
Nov 31, 2008
Singapore,
Singapore
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
In the interim most of the region has sold its soul to the devil of mass tourism. It's hard to question the motives of a peasant village which has a rare opportunity of real money by cramming every inch of their island beach with tourist huts, or that of subsistence farmers on the edge of a town who are able to earn more than they dreamed of by selling their plots of land to a multinational luxury hotel chain. The result, though, is a string of soulless tourist ghettoes. It's the Starbucks effect: it matters not which exotic spot of the globe you may stand in, it looks exactly like all the others. S.E. Asia's once wildly diverse destinations are now a mass of dishearteningly similar traveller strips, complete with requisite banana pancake cafes, rave music bars, tattoo shops and stalls selling crude t-shirts.
After we left Laos, Anju sent me this link which sums up my feelings and describes the situation better than I can - take a read. http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TRAVEL/04/01/asia.tourism.ap/index.html
Fiona, there's been a dearth of 'donkey piss' since I came back to S.E. Asia. At first I thought maybe the donkey just had cystitis but I realise it actually had an empty bladder: it's hard to write with passion about a place that doesn't move you. And while S.E. Asia is interesting and pleasant, no, it doesn't move me, it doesn't fire me up in the way India and the Himalaya did.
I'm just glad I was lucky enough to travel in this area all those years ago when 'unspoilt' and 'authentic' were still appropriate adjectives, before things got quite so far out of hand.
Another reason for my eagerness to depart this corner of the world is trees. Now, don't get me wrong, I have nothing against trees, I'm a green school co-ordinator, you know! But I've always been a sea-girl (and that included the islands in this region before they all became variations of Benidorm,), and I'm inspired by the vast, desolate landscape of mountains and desert. But S.E. Asia, despite de-forestation, is more jungle than anything else. And I just don't do jungle! Too many feckin' trees! Claustrophobia! Too many insects! Not enough light! On a jungle trek every day looks the same... trees, trees and more trees. I am definitely not at home in the forest.
Soooooo... "I'm leavin', on a jet plane..." - this time I'm Australia-bound, landing in Darwin tomorrow and taking a train down through the middle... lots of red, lots of rocks, lots of dust... oh, and very few trees...yes!!!
