Wednesday evening - We walked to the neon-lit Khao San Road neighborhood where travelers find rooms, where the whole world mingles, eats Thai curry, satay and pad Thai, where inexpensively manufactured designer goods, knockoffs and unbranded wears are sold, where hole-in-the-wall travel agents arrange transportation and rooms in Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and points south, and where travelers chronicle their adventures at internet cafes. It is a noisy, crowded, wonderful scene of all people, with many beer drinking young adults, wearing flip-flops or sandals and carrying backpacks.
A small digression here. According to the Lonely Planet Guide Book, Khao San Road was made famous by Alex Garland's novel "The Beach", (written in 1996) which the film by the same name is based and which I previously mentioned in my blog about Phi Phi Island. The contradictions of Khao San and of travel in general is best summed up by a quote from the novel, "You know, Richard, one of these days I'm going to find one of those Lonely Planet writers and I'm going to ask him, what's so fucking lonely about Khao San Road. " Thailand is a crossroads for travelers and tourists. The tourist is middle aged or older, affluent and staying at hotels with some comfort. Judy and I are tourists despite our extended stay in Asia. Khao San may have a majority of travelers walking its crowded streets.
The young adult, with more time than money, between jobs or not working, in search of the less frequented and ergo less expensive place is the traveler. In Central America these people are said to be on the gringo trail, passing along tales of the next undiscovered town or beach. The same is true here and there is a general dissatisfaction expressed for any place where it is difficult to find a room or floor for more than ten dollars a night or dinner for more than a dollar or two. We constantly ran into travelers on their way to Cambodia because it was cheap, or to another undiscovered island off the coast of Thailand. Phi-Phi Island by contrast was considered over priced and over crowded. The problem is that by its very nature traveling and tourism tend to destroy the undiscovered places. This is especially true in these days of mass communication, transportation and the internet where "the buzz" about a place circles the world in hours rather than in years.
I have been reading Charles Darwin's "Voyage of the Beagle", a travel he took as a 23 year old, as the naturalist aboard a ship that circled the globe from 1832 to 1836. It is the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth on February 12, 1809 and seemed like a good reason to read it. At each port, Darwin would get off the ship and travel by foot or horseback for hundreds of miles and up to a month or two exploring and mapping the physical land, the flora, fauna, geology and peoples of a region. He was often uncomfortable or in danger. He represents one of the first of the modern travelers and his chronicle expesses many of desires, prejudices and objectivities of an upper class Englishman of his time. It gave me an appreciation for how easy it has become to journey anywhere.
Most of the travel and description was made along both coasts of South America and there was very little about the Galapagos Islands where Darwin made key observations on adaptation of the finches leading to his theory of evolution. The diary was rather dry and technical but those of you interested in geology more than evoluation will find it interesting. His ideas about mountain building and erosion of the land was pretty accurate despite not having any notion of the continental plates colliding leading to uplifting, mountain building and volcanism. He had a good sense that the earth had been undergoing these processes for eons based on the work of Charles Lyle's "Principles of Geology" which he carried with him.
This blog, for me, is a chronicle and a meditation, a way of finding my way in the world and remembering my experiences. I hope that you find it entertaining if not enlightening.
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