Flashpacking

Southeast Asia, particularly Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos, have in recent years become a fashionable travel destination for affluent, college-aged Westerners.  I was dimly aware of this fact before my first trip to Thailand, but it came into sharp focus the first time I wandered, confused (Thailand? Right?), through the jungle of white faces that is Bangkok’s Khao San Road.  This group, with tans that are too even, hair that’s too well maintained, and sunglasses that are not fake, is one that I try to avoid.    Maybe I’m a class warrior and maybe I’m judging books by covers, assuming that if a man wears Gucci sandals then I have little in common with him, but when I do sit down with this segment of the traveling population (I’ve been calling them Springbreakers,  Sophie calls them Flashpackers.), they always seem to get a little too drunk, laugh a little too loudly, and talk in tones that betray too much intensity, or not enough.  If I have to choose, and I often do, I tend to gravitate toward the hippies, or occasionally the French, who are apparently immune from this phenomenon.       

       

In Thailand I was under the impression, for some reason, despite taking note of the numerous T-shirts proudly worn by golden-skinned, freshly-manicured revelers which advertised that the wearer had indeed been to an impoverished Asian nation or two (you know, just in case it didn’t come up in conversation organically), that maybe the Flashpacker set wouldn’t be as prevalent in Cambodia.   As it turns out, they’re everywhere, wearing too little clothing, overpaying for everything, stumbling down the moonlit beach in a haze of Mai-Tais and weed smoke.   But then again perhaps their numbers are distorted in my mind.  It could just be that they stand out when viewed in contrast with the poverty here in a way that they did not in wealthier Thailand, and they seem to disturb me in direct proportion to that degree of contrast.     

The truth is, as much as I rebel against the idea, I have a great deal in common with the Springbreakers.  I have enough money to swing through a suffering nation, see the sights, and return, undisturbed, to my comfortable life.  It’s an unfortunate reality for me that whenever I follow the trail of my disdain back to its source, I always seem to find it’s the reflection of my own privilege and apathy that I can’t stomach, that causes me to roll my eyes in contempt at the blond college student with the shaved chest who sits down next to me at the beech bar and orders the same beer as we look out onto the same ocean, brushing off the overtures of the same beggars, as I hope desperately that I’m not really like him.   But even as I sit pondering our mutual need for salvation, I hear him speak a little Khmer (Cambodian) and when I look over, I see him smiling and joking with the children selling beads and suddenly I think maybe neither of us is beyond redemption yet.   Travel changes us, even if we resist it, and however bankrupt our lives were before we left, no matter what soulless occupation we plan to go back to, we will carry with us a lingering awareness of a world that is larger and more complicated than the one we see on MTV-Cribs.   And so with a shrug and a smile I raise my glass to the smooth-chested stranger and silently toast our mutual opportunity to leave this beautiful country a little wiser than we came.