ELECTIONS '98
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On The Outside, Looking Inside: What's There To See?

Here I am at the furthest point from home I will reach on my current travels, the place where I will stay put for a few weeks. I should feel some thrill at getting so far, at having been to the spots I have on the way. I should. I probably do, too. Pleasant places, interesting experiences, lovely people around me, all that good stuff. Yes.

Thing is, travel is a matter of means and ends. The ends, or some of them, are fine indeed: all that good stuff I mentioned. I used to think that finery overrode all else. But on this trip, I have got here simply sick of the means. Packing, heavy loads, no sleep, cramped seats on the plane, unpacking, interminable flights, hours-long waits for takeoff, packing again, antiseptic hotel rooms, oxygen-mask demonstrations I can now repeat in my sleep, stale air laced with the fragrance of stale food heated to the "Extremely Perversely Hot" setting, running wildly to make the connecting flight ... It's a long list, I know. I got off the plane in funny California a few days ago with every one of those experiences experienced on this trip, catalogued and filed away. Every one reverberates in my mind like so many hammers nailing down an ugly mask over the good stuff.

I am lucky enough to have been to several fascinating places. In all of them, the journeys themselves -- planes, buses, cars, trains, boats -- faded fast from memory. It's the being there I remember most clearly. That's what has always mattered most. But today I wrinkle my forehead to wonder, for the first time: do the means tarnish the ends? Is getting here worth the hassle of getting here?

Given time and distance, I know my answer to that last question will probably be "yes." For the time being, it is an unequivocal "I'm not sure": the discomforts of the trip are a little too recent. Travel, I grew up believing, is an exciting, enriching experience. Travelling itself is not.

But while that's one aspect of travel to mull over, there are others too. And those are somewhat more serious, tend to stay in memory somewhat more, than the woman in 42D, behind me on this last flight, who simply would not shut off her steady stream of inanity.

Why do I travel? Oddly enough, the more I do it, the more unsure I find I am of an answer. Of course, there are the easy answers: to see new places, new cultures, different people, unusual animals and scenery. I would willingly skimp on several other expenses to put together the money for those things. But somehow, it's not enough of a reason any more. I feel a vague dissatisfaction when I tell myself I am making a trip for one of those reasons. There is always something more that I cannot quite put my finger on. More than that, there always seem to be troubling aspects to travelling that, increasingly, I think about.

Here's one mild dilemma. I was in Portugal on my way here. That's a country I had not visited before. I thought it would be, like others, new and different. But from our first day there, Portugal was oddly familiar. Nearly everywhere I went, there were faint and not so faint echoes of previous visits, places, experiences. Nothing, it turned out, was wildly new or different. It also turned out that that was a strange feeling to have: at once disappointing, at once comforting.

Disappointing, because who wants familiar? I asked myself more than once: why isn't this country more different than it is? Why are the shops, the plazas, the walks, the concerns, the vistas, like so many others? And what is unique about Portugal, the facet I will find nowhere else? For much of my time there, answers to that puzzle did not easily present themselves.

Comforting, because who doesn't want familiar? On previous travels, I have been conscious of a certain edge, a little nervousness that comes with knowing that novelty of some sort can be as close as around the next corner. A steady diet of the unfamiliar does that. In Portugal, I was grateful more than once for being free of that edge. There was a peace in that freedom. A feeling of ease with the country.

So which should I remember Portugal by? The disappointment? Or the comfort? I don't know. But elsewhere, elsewhen, there had been other provokers of thoughts that drifted by.

In the capital city of a nerve-wracked country some years ago, nearly everybody I met was trying to make a living off dollar-stuffed tourists. Educated, surprisingly informed old men sold polished coins or worn books or begged. Smart young men offered to guide us to restaurants or find us rooms for a cut of the takings. Kids just asked for spare change. And if seeing all this around us wasn't sad enough, we could always take a look at the young women, often encased in scarily scanty clothes. Almost every one we saw was whoring.

In a bar on our last night there, I was propositioned on behalf of a woman who sat across from me at a table. Unsettlingly, she stared at me with rock-hard eyes while her man explained why I should "dance" with her, while I explained that I was not interested. We went back and forth for some time before he was convinced that I was not going to honour his offer. So convinced, he finally relaxed and began to talk to me. Not pimp to potential client talk, but -- never has being a tourist troubled me so much -- husband to husband talk. She was his wife, they had three children, this was the only way they could make enough money to feed the family.

So he said; but on our last night in that country, I could believe him. And that night I felt painfully close to what tourism can do. All those grand notions of travel -- seeing sights, mingling of cultures -- crumbled in the face of the little truth I learned in that bar. I was welcome in the country. But to many there, I was welcome purely because I had money to spend that, to them, meant food in their bellies.

And in a tiny village on another night on another trip, I was made to feel utterly unwelcome. My travelling companion and I stopped at a two-room hotel for the night. Before we turned in, we washed our clothes and hung them out to dry. In the morning, all the clothes -- underwear, T-shirts, shorts -- were dry. But slashed. Without warning, without explanation, somebody had taken a knife and methodically attacked every one of those fluttering pieces of cloth, leaving them for us to find like that in the morning. Not a person was around when we did so. Baffled and deeply disturbed, fighting a panicky feeling of menace, we packed our bags and left: which was probably what the midnight slasher wanted us to do.

That was ten years ago. I like to think I'm hardier now, that I would not be so easily intimidated. After all, I know now that travel abounds in strange experiences, unanswered questions, intriguing people, stunning sights. Mixed emotions. Lessons about the world, about myself.

It took me a long time to realise it. That grab-bag, curiously enough, is why I travel at all.

Dilip D'Souza