This is how we roll

This is how we roll
Originally uploaded by Christiane B

Over the past two months I have noticed just how wide the beaten path around SE Asia really is. It's a paved highway packed with gap years, summer tourists, pensioners and midlife crisis folks (just like us? Just when does a quarter life crisis turn half life?) trudging contently between Phnom Penh's "breezy balconies" to Battambang's "creamiest shake shop" and onto Saigon's authentic northern Italian corner shop run by the friendly Mr. Z, learning worlds like "local brew" before their hello's and thank you's. It is done by clutching tightly their yellow SE Asia on a shoestring Lonely Planet guide if they are long timers; short timers hold individual LP books having granted one single county enough visiting credit to warrant an entire vacation.

The by-product is that those breezy cafes "meant to linger" or oddly even the "best linoleum covered" hotels with a "backpacker vibe" are always packed while their neighbors with the identical breeze and linoleum stay empty. With many travelers virtually living by "the bible" every time you stumble upon a bible recommended haunt, even if by accident, you see people you first met on a different continent two months earlier. That's actually quite nice. It is also laughable what cattle we are, us independent travelers, too cool for the package tours, we created our own that spans entire continents.

I have been composing a letter to Lonely Planet in my head for a while and it's quit difficult to figure out what to say. It is not so much LP's doing, but rather what people make of it that creates this wide wide beaten path. Ten years ago I did not notice the ghettorization of so called independent travelers. Maybe I was younger and more in need to guidance or maybe there were less LP toting tourists with most students sticking to Paris and Rome for their semester abroad and older people being more of a Frommer's crowd. Now if LP speaks of a quite cave, 2 years after the edition went to print, there is an internet cafe, a hostel , cold beer and a scooter stand where there once was a quiet cave. That is a huge impact of a few written words. The local economy is rallying around the Lonely Planet, creating a right and a wrong way of traveling. The right way to "do"Angkor Wat for example is to rent a rickshaw guy who you will pay 12 dollars for the day. This is what is says in the bible and thus you will not get a ride for cheaper and the thought of doing a half day confuses the rickshaw guy and well, while you may be asked to pay more, in the end, everyone let you negotiate the price back down to 12 dollars. That is the law. Everyone knows that.

The right way to "do" Halong Bay is to go to Hanoi, check into an independent hostel and there book an independent tour which puts you on a boat with every other independent traveler. As we found out, anything else is not sanctioned. It took a nudge and some Vietnamese flash cards from our hotel owner to get a taxi driver to take us to the bus stop in Hanoi, a bribe to the bus driver to Haiphong to take us there and finally a stick figure drawing of a boat and us on it and a nice optitian and his pregnant wife to convince a cabbie in Haiphong to take us to the ferry, where we more or less easily got ourselves a ticket to Cat Ba. There clearly is a gentlemen agreement in effect to protect the local tour agencies, who as we found out are all owned by the same few guys who own the boats.

So we did go alone in the end and it was not difficult just time consuming. I have to admit - the tour would have been better: same price, less time wasted, better food (better than bus stop meat on a bun that is), more time looking out on the bay but the price of course is your independence. You cannot choose when to eat, when to swim, when to sleep, when to pick your nose in peace. So with plenty of time for nose picking we rented a motorcycle and lived out our freedom by cruising around Cat Ba island before, you guessed it, we had to join a tour for a few hours in order to get to see the actual bay area.

So what would my advice to Lonely Plant be. It's hard to give constructive advice because the LP really is a great resource. There is a reason why it's in everyone's backpack. And despite my annoyance at being that wide path cattle I have not thrown it off the highly recommended slow boat on the Mekong Riverbecause I love the quick history and cultural background lessons, I love that it promotes ethical and as much as that is possible sustainable tourism. It is full of valuable advice on medical things, on scams to avoid, on border crossings, cities that boast ATMs and those that don't. I would not want to miss that.

So maybe the answer is to make the path even wider. One option would be to eliminate specific recommendations of anything. Simple pointers and maps where to find bus stations, train stations and cross streets with cheap hotels or restaurants. Maybe in order to force people to choose their own path and find their own unique experience, it could be the setup of a scavenger hunt: Go to the local market located here and talk to three local people in sign language and by pointing and drawing; find out three great things to do in that city, do one of them, then ask other locals for their favorite food, make them write it down for you, go to the river/beach/food part of town and try to find that dish. And so it goes.

Else, maybe recommendations can be made less glowing. It IS nice to have a specific name of a hotel when you arrive in a town at 3 am, tired with your luggage and an upset stomach. Maybe recommendation can be only names and directions without the beautiful adjectives. I am personally very susceptible to a recommendation that sounds like a scene out of a novel involving fruity beverages, breeze, music, specific mention of just how wonderful and cool it is, how authentic the lighting and how one really would miss out by missing out, let alone not experience the "wow, where did the time go" sentiment that the writer himself experienced. Pathetically maybe we do all like to be told what to do, including when and how to loose track of time.