All Hollowed Out
Traveller's Fatigue. I don't even know if it's a real term, but it perfectly describes what I'm going through right now: I'm tired, I'm angry, I'm disappointed and everywhere I go, I'm tempted to hit someone square in the jaw. Whether it's because I've just been asked for the five hundred thousandth time if I want to pay somebody to drive me 500 meters down the road ('Seh, Seh, at least two kilometah! Velly fah!') on a motorcycle or because of the dog, or the rooster or the monkey that's chained to a post or being sold for lunch, or because of the birds being sold in cages, or because of local tribeswoman, who dress up in all kinds of colors as they always have done, ask you if you would like to come to their village, not unlike a desperate prostitute would present herself to strangers, this has somewhat different material being exchanged in between parties, but the cash will exchange hands just the same. In Vietnam, culture is for sale to the not so very high bidder.
From The Outside Looking In
Foreigners that come here are wealthy, so why should they not be able to buy up everything these Hmong, or other people here, craft? One of the main things I've learned about Vietnam is that the concept of backpacking doesn't compute for the Vietnamese. Why would a person from a wealthy country dress up as a bum and try to get from one country to the other the cheapest way possible? In a country where face, or the way you present yourself, is everything, they ask why someone would do that? Even if they knew the answer, I'd just be a ridiculous idea to most of them. Keeping this in mind and seeing tourists flood en masse to a place like Sapa, the question on why we don't just buy up everything isn't an unreasonable one. It's gotten so far already that locals will consider it an insult if you don't buy anything from them, whether it's the tour, the motorbike ride, the earring or the piece of cloth.
Getting To The Bottom Of This
One could say these are 'cultural differences'. We have a way of looking at things and they have a way of looking at things. This isn't about cultural differences, this is about the lack of 'culture'. The lack of taking pride in what you believe and what you find important. From what I've seen and experienced over the past three months, I can conclude that in the places where there isn't a lot of money changing hands, people are more friendly, have more pride and connection to their roots. The more rural you go, the friendlier people get. If you go to these places, suspicion can turn to hospitality by just saying 'Hello' in the local language. These are the places that I would label as 'authentic', although this is somewhat ironic, for me being there means that that authenticity is losing ground to the temptation of more money - although I had to try very hard to get to some places, most of the time it was just too easy -. The point that I'm trying to make is that 'a clash of two worlds', which is mutually beneficial, seems almost impossible these days, although they are portrayed as such by, here we go, a tour or trekking company.
I hate it when people tell me that 'money is what makes the world go round'. Money is poison. You can see it in these people and measure the kind of exposure they've had with money, the closer they've come to the world of organized luxury tourism, the more they realize others have something they don't. I'm not in a position to blame them. I only have to recall my time in Ban Lung in Cambodia, where an ATM machine gave me a hundred dollar bill, which is about the monthly wage of a local teacher, and I was waving it around like an idiot, looking for a place where I could get some change, to realize that these people have every right to want to do what I can do. I haven't worked a day in my life, while most these people break their backs so I can have a platter of rice every once and a while. I'm luxury tourism on a mindset of pushing myself to a limit or a realm of introspection.
Therefore there is little blame to be placed on the people here, although I can't approve of it either. There is a lot of respect to be had for people that know that they don't have what others have materially, but know as well that they have more socially or emotionally. These people I have met in rural Laos and Cambodia and these are encounters I will never forget. The tragic lies in the fact that they are losing their wealth due to peer pressure, due to deforestation or due to a hydroelectric dam, which is imposed on them as I'd impose doing homework to a hypothetical younger brother or, as what the US of A has been trying to do for years in promoting democracy in these regions:
"It's good for you in the long run."
The temptation of being rich gets old when you are rich, but you don't get to know that feeling once you've been rich. The race for wealth is turning these regions into a grotesque spectacle which is funny in a tragic way. You see it in the way people use plastic: throw it out into the street, it'll be out of sight in a day or two and afterwards it's 'gone'. Good luck on explaining to these people what the Pacific Garbage Patch looks like as explaining this to a 'well educated' European is hard enough by itself. Plastic is easy, cheap and has driven away local customs and crafts which were a lot more sustainable and beneficial for the community, but the fact that it's cheap and 'disposable' makes all the difference. Nobody cares where it comes from when it's easy.
You see it in the way they treat their forests: chop down the woods, make timber and use the land for cotton plantations or farming. Good luck on explaining to this people what primary forest is and why it'll never restore itself, to say nothing of carbon emissions. There's a bigger house, a chance for education or a new Lexus involved here.
Am I in a position to blame them? If I look at Belgium, an intricate web of traffic jams, stress and xenophobia, we haven't done much of a better job ourselves. The North Sea used to have bluefin tuna. We had wolves in our forests and just recently thousands of fish turned up dead in the river that flows a few kilometers from my doorstep thanks to 'some form of pollution'. Our beaches are more plastic than sand and a local bird species has an average of 42 pieces of plastic in its stomach.
It's probably no coincidence that the word culture has different meanings, going as far as calling a soup of bacteria 'a culture', so it is perhaps not the lack of it, just a shift in appropriate meaning. From a region that once was spilled over with cultural wealth, a stinking pile of crap remains (or will remain in a few years), driven by both an industry that relies on snapping cameras and the urge of wealthy foreign people wanting to boast to their friends that they've 'been there' and for Laos and Cambodia, a system of selling out your country by the few that would really like to export hydroelectric power to the Chinese, Thai or Vietnamese, so that they can buy that new Lexus to show to their friends. Face is everything, as it is for us Europeans, the corruption is just a bit less subtle around these parts, although Wall Street and the banking sector is giving these guys a run for their money.
Less Babies
Laos has 7 million inhabitants and is 7 times as big as Belgium.
Cambodia has 15 million inhabitants and is 6 times the size of Belgium.
Vietnam has 90 million inhabitants and is 11 times the size of Belgium.
If I would rate these three countries relating to hospitality, just start at the bottom and work your way up. Besides the already illustrated point of exposure to wealth of another part of the world, there is another issue to address:
Why do so many people here in Vietnam all have the same job? Thousands upon thousands of motorcycle drivers harass you everywhere you go. As a tourist you're morally obliged not to walk, but sit on the back of a motorcycle and buy the driver some dinner by polluting the world just a bit more. The traffic is insane and a human life is worth about as much as a soldier bee in a beehive. The smallest villages I've been to practically had Vietnamese pouring out of them. In Vietnam, there are just too many people. As Cambodia and Laos are urging to catch up and play along on a global scale, they are reproducing like rabbits and are selling their country to the major players, hoping for a seat on the table of the global economy. But what example are they following? The 90 million Vietnamese? The 1,5 billion Chinese? Ours? Belgium has more than 10 million people, which makes it grotesquely overcrowded.
As a treehugger, I associated these parts of the world with tigers and rhinos. These animals are all but extinct, as is the Irriwady Dolphin in Cambodia and Laos, and dozens of monkey species and birds here in Vietnam. All there is to see in Vietnam is people, surrounding ever dwindling regions where these animals still live. There is not a single rhino still drawing breath on the mainland here in Vietnam and as I type this, the Vietnamese are plundering the environmental wealth its weaker brothers, Laos and Cambodia. I can imagine Belgium would have gone through a similar episode with it's natural wealth and although we never had tigers or primary forest. Although we had the lynx, for instance.
Every plan that is being conjured up by our genius politicians has to do with growth, growth and growth. Maybe it's time we stopped growing, looked around at the damage we've done so far and worry about what we're going to do about that. And let's make less babies because, as any economist will be glad to explain to you, the more of something you have, the less it's worth.
It's somewhat ironic that the fate of primary forest is in the hands of those that have the least. We all depend on what they do with it and they're just following our example of meeting the World Bank's standards by being 'economical'. We could tell them not to make our mistakes, retain the forest and the beauty that's in there and they would follow suit. Or Hell might freeze over...
Stand For Something Or Fall For Anything
If traveling has anything to do with staying true to yourself, I haven't been doing a very good job this past week. I just let myself get lead from one tourist trap to the other, intending to finishing it off in the mother of all tourist traps, Halong Bay. Recalling the conversation I had with a Cambodian girl in Sihanoukville about the ridiculously high pricetag of the severely polluted surroundings:
'Long after you're gone, other stupid tourists will come here and pay for it.'
Maybe it's long past time I stop being an idiot and have them shove their Heritage Sites up their asses until they treat it as such. Plus, I get to be that tourist that went to Vietnam without seeing Halong Bay in the process.
So be it, as the magic has long abandoned these lands.
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