The Tube

A question I sometimes find myself asking is: what the fuck is the point of travel writing?

If you asked me what visiting Thailand is like, I’d tell you it’s what you think visiting Thailand is like. Scooters pouring down the street, temples plated in gold, cracked pavements, sudden rain and wet heat, cold beer under an awning with a bowl of something spicy with rice. Massage parlours and lizards dotting the walls. Rattling aircon, loose shirts, tuktuks, mosquito bites. Banana trees and grilled meat. Hippie brokepackers, young travellers in their early 20s, ‘digital nomads’, sunblasted expats with younger local wives, Israelis on their post-genocide R&R tour. Mountains and islands. Tangled, sagging webs of overhead cables and powerlines. Buddhist shrines and clattering, stinking markets. Thailand is like a constellation of things which happen in Thailand. 

Sure, but; you know. What's it actually like?

The tourist experience of Thailand is unusually circumscribed. The language barrier  - Thai is extraordinarily difficult to learn - and low cost-of-living means that Anglophone long term traveller bubbles are everywhere, and it is these which backpackers hop between like stepping stones. It’s common to meet people several times over the course of a trip, as you all unwittingly tick off the same boxes. It’s a good way to make friends, but it does leave you feeling you’re travelling along a see-through tube, escorted by a guide and an oh-I-heard-you-really-have-to-try which by happy coincidence is already in the tube. It’s a thick tube: it distorts the shapes you see outside of it. But it does take you to where you want to go.

Clearly none of this is meaningfully what Thailand is. Thailand doesn’t exist. It is an administrative area of 71m people. If it shares certain diffuse cultural, geographical and social features they are an accident of history. And narrow experiences are not limited to tourists. The Thailand of a Bangkok digital marketing consultant is not the Thailand of a rice farmer in Mae Hong Son. Thailand is a vast, ancient and multiplicitous place. Most countries are. Belgium are doing their best. 

This isn't about 'authenticity'. Beware of the A-word. Every time you use it when you talk about travel, you lose an hour of your life. Everything and nothing is authentic. You don't suddenly understand what it's like to be a local because you visited a bar or stayed with a family, but perhaps you understand 5% better. There is no harm in doing this. Travel broadens the mind and some kinds of travel broaden it further. It is possible to go too far the other way in complaining about travellers and start rolling your eyes at the possibility of having meaningful experiences in strange places at all. Do not succumb to temptation. Travel Is Good. But the point is that it's all made of tubes. Some of them are smaller than others, and some of them have thinner walls, but you're still suspended just above the ground.

So: you’re a worldly person, and you probably know a fair amount about what other countries are like. You’ve got a few series of Anthony Bourdain under your belt. You read books. Your friends on Instagram like to travel. You feel relatively confident - though perhaps you aren’t quite prepared for the sensory volume of it all - that you know kind of how it will feel to visit somewhere. This is reinforced by the sheer acreage of travel writing available on the internet, from more cynical advertravellers whose “content” comes with affiliate links to the harmless but self-regarding types who make a special insta called JoseTravels or OnTheRoadWithJenny and advertise it in toilet stalls and hostel kitchens. One of the Hinge questions is “What do you want to do this year?” and what seems like 80% of people write “travel more ✈️”. Travel has become the aspirational pursuit of a globalised world. And why not? See it while you can: cheap flights won’t last forever, and puts more CO2 into the atmosphere than several lifetimes of eating meat. 

So why bother writing about it? I am not special. I am inside the tube. I am not too good for the tube. In Istanbul there really is a kebab shop every few metres. The cats are everywhere. The bazaars smell of spices and shimmer with gold and knock-off trainers. You drink fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice, you drink a coffee, you tell a man that you don’t want to visit his restaurant no matter how many times he asks where you’re from. Why am I telling you this? Why are you reading it? At what point will I say anything new? How can I? None of this is new. I am seeing the same things that everyone sees when they arrive because they are real. If I find a novel way to describe it, the coffee will still be coffee, and the banana tree will still be a banana tree. 

There is a genre of poetry known as Mango Poetry. Though maybe genre isn’t quite the right term. It refers to a particular tendency of South Asian diaspora poets, who connect to their ancestors and their parents’ or grandparents’ homeland through these kinds of vivid, sensory experiences. Mangos are rich, juicy, fecund. They are a bright flash of colour. They get your fingers sticky. This idea is appealing if you work in digital media. Others have written on this better than I will (and are certainly more qualified) but writing about travel begins to represent an inverted version of this. The juxtaposition between the mango and the quick catch-up on Teams. Something which represents the fullness of life in the other place. The yearning. Everyone has their mango. 

Instead, presented with this problem, the instinct is to go deeper. Set the scene with the sensory stuff. Let it season the narrative as you move through it, but don’t make it the point. Instead your job as a travel writer is to extract something more meaningful about the character of the place you are visiting for a few weeks. This is more commonly known as lying. You cannot see into the character of a place in a couple of weeks. You can’t do it in three months. Don't ask me where the cut-off is because I don't know. The answer is mostly likely never, which is unsatisfying but hard to dispute. The epistemology is murky here. There is no one discrete thing which you are trying to know. Live in a place long enough and it'll change under your feet anyway. All you can do is expand your repertoire of cultural shorthand, and you can learn some history, and you can pick up a knowledge of the people. They’re friendly and welcoming; they’re always always friendly and welcoming. People are lovely to you when you’re on holiday, even when you don’t deserve it. 

(The Belgians are doing their best.)

So you write about your own experiences. This is not a knowledge-seeking activity. It illuminates nothing except the inside of one head. If a particular quality to those experiences begins to emerge, all the better, but it won’t tell you anything at all except that they happened to a person who wrote them down. This may sound like it's verging on nihilism, but I have a neurosis about being honest when I write, already an inherently deceitful activity. The second something is transmitted, the lying begins. When I choose one adjective over another because I like the sound of it, I am lying. Every creative choice takes you further away from reality. Experience is incommensurable, and narrative shapes chaos into familiar shapes.

I don’t suppose this is valuable advice to anyone but me, and this piece has essentially been a long argument with myself anyway. That’s what blogs are for. So I will try to treat it like a diary, try to have interesting experiences, and not spend too much time trying to think of a new way to describe a banana. And if you ever catch me implying that I have any sense at all of what a place is ‘actually’ like outside of my own blinkers, come and find me and give me a slap. 

Anyway, Mexico; you won’t believe how many tacos they eat here. And spicy, too!