Naked Tourist In Search of Adventure And Beauty in the Age of the Airport Mall

Excerpted from The Naked Tourist by Lawrence Osborne. Copyright 2006 by Lawrence Osborne. Published in June 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. It came upon me quite suddenly, like a mental disorder unknown to psychiatry: the desire to stop everything in normal life, to uproot and leave. It could be a disease of early middle age, a premature taste of senility: the need to leave the world as it is today behind and find somewhere else. You pack your belongings with a bitter fatalism, as if you know that it is now time to get moving again, to regress to nomadism. You pack your bags, but you have nowhere to go. It is like being dressed up for a ball long after the ballroom has burned down. The desire is there, but there is no object for it. I leafed through a hundred Web sitestour group organizations, government brochures, fact sheets, traveler accounts. But the problem of the modern traveler is that he has nowhere left to go. The entire world is a tourist installation, and the awful taste of simulacrum is continually in his mouth. I searched high and low, but nowhere satisfied the need to leave the world. I thought for a while of simply checking into a hotel in Hawaii and sitting there for two weeks in front of a television. Somewhere like the Hilton Waikoloa, perhaps, where I could laze on an artificial beach and take a monorail to the hotel nightclub. That would be more interesting than trekking with a small group through Patagonia or winging through the rain forest canopy of Costa Rica in a cable car. I could stay in New York and travel by subway to the forlorn Edgar Allan Poe house in the Bronx. No one goes there. There were exotic possibilities, but they were not very exoticand I wanted something exotic. Think back to the mood of childhood when you get into the family car and depart for places unknownhow difficult it is to recover the inner dimension of adventure. Modern travel is like fast food: short, sharp incursions that do not weave a spell. In our age, tourism has made the planet into a uniform spectacle, and it has made us perpetual strangers wandering through an imitation of an imitation of a place we once wanted to go to. It is the law of diminishing returns. For a long time I had wanted to take leave of Planet Tourism, to find one of those places that occasionally turn up in the middle pages of newspapers in far-flung cities, in whichwe are tolda mad loner has been discovered who has lost all contact with the modern world. It seems inevitable that this desire will one day be listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association as Robinson Crusoe Syndrome. But the stories are sometimes real. Recall the Japanese soldiers emerging out of Pacific jungles fifty years after their nation's surrender: what stupendous islands, we would like to know, had they been lost on? Once, flying around Indonesia, a journalist from Jakarta I was traveling with pointed down to the bewildering archipelagos of paradise isles below us, somewhere near Molucca, and said that he knew for a fact of a group of Germans who had sailed to one of them in 1967 and had never been seen since. All he knew was that a small local airline dropped them beer every few months. There were so many hundreds of islands that the wandering Teutons had simply disappeared. But I wanted to know which island they were on, if they existed at all. Because it's a potent idea, this promise of leaving the world, even if we know it's a myth. * * * Tourism is the world's largest industry, generating annual revenues of $500 billion. It defines the economies of scores of nations and cities across the globe. Between 1950 and 2002, the number of international travelers, including business travelers, rOsborne, Lawrence is the author of 'Naked Tourist In Search of Adventure And Beauty in the Age of the Airport Mall' with ISBN 9780865477094 and ISBN 0865477094.