KATHARINA HESSE

Arts and Culture: Forget about the opera-today's Grand Tourists can take in a punk concert in Beijing

Posted Monday, October 20, 2003; 21:00 HKT
London, England, mid-18th century: during the relative peace and prosperity of Europe's Age of Enlightenment, it has become the norm for aristocratic young Englishmen to fill the months between their classical education and a secured role administering the burgeoning Empire with a cultural whirl of Continental Europe known as the Grand Tour. For a year or two, these privileged noblemen indulge in the opera houses of Paris and Vienna, refining their sensibilities, reveling in the arts. Porters lug them across the snow-dusted Alps to visit Rome's Colosseum, the Renaissance-rich galleries of Florence, the Athenian ruins and other curiosities of the ancient world. Countless personal chronicles are published in vanity editions by these high-class nomads, but the definitive guide to their adventures is Thomas Nugent's The Grand Tour, well-thumbed copies of which are tucked in every gentleman's frock-coat pocket.

Bangkok, Thailand, September 17, 2003: It's about midnight in the Thai capital's backpacker ghetto of Khao San Road—dubbed the "Special K" by a new generation of independent travelers on their gap year between lecture hall and sedentary job—and the street is heaving. Robbie Williams' fifth album, Escapology, blares from a shop selling knockoff CDs; Real Madrid shirts adorned with David Beckham's chosen number, 23, flutter at sidewalk stalls while crowds of young Britons pass by in alcohol's convivial embrace. They're still escaping home in noisy numbers, and the Grand Tour, it seems, is in rude health. Only today, its protagonists aren't clutching Nugent but a Rough Guide or a Time Out, and the Brits are joined by a cross section of young people that looks like a United Nations of the road. Leggy Scandinavians dressed head to toe in loose-fitting Rajasthani togs stroll past steaming Korean bulgogi joints crammed with New Zealanders and Germans; meanwhile, a dreadlocked Japanese fop, sitting on the steps of Gulliver's Bar and surrounded by curious Thai students in Iggy Pop T shirts, struggles to play a didgeridoo.

Centuries since the first Grand Tourists crossed the English Channel to expand their youthful horizons, cheap air tickets allow students and subcultural gadflies from every part of the planet to experience the big wide world (or the shrinking one, depending on your point of view). And although sedate Europe—birthplace of Homer, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo—is still a major draw, freewheeling Asia—motherland of Confucius, the Lord Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi, of green curry and Godzilla, of low-budget kung fu flicks and the PlayStation—is starting to sound rather sexier to a generation that's more into manga than medieval history.

Florence may have the Uffizi Gallery, but Taipei has the National Palace Museum, which houses the planet's most extensive collection of Chinese antiquities (snatched, admittedly, from the mainland at the end of the Chinese civil war). Italy may have Pompeii, but Cambodia has Angkor Wat. And the mighty Himalayas dwarf the Alps. The Grand Tour of 2003, in other words, is no longer an aristocratic, Eurocentric jaunt—instead, it describes a wide arc east of Suez. And because today's time-poor Grand Tourist can't be bothered with unfurling maps—and can't afford yearlong sojourns, what with student loans to repay—we have taken the liberty of picking the bare minimum, must-sees of the region (bar India, which deserves a Grand Tour of its own). Nobody's education is complete without them.

Thailand
Being then the center of the western world, Paris was invariably the hub of the old-school Grand Tour. Today, Bangkok, with its excellent air connections and tourism infrastructure, is fulfilling the same function for a new generation. Put it down, too, to cheap beer and good parties.

If you can tear yourself away from the bars, one or two of the city's 400 wats (temple-monasteries)—including Wat Traimit and Wat Phra Kaeo, both on the grounds of the Royal Grand Palace—are worth a visit. But for a real shot of history, you'll need to battle north against the Chao Phraya River's currents for about 85 kilometers to the crumbling remains of the former capital of Ayuthaya. Before being ransacked by the Burmese in 1767 (back when the pioneering English Grand Tourists were packing their trunks), the city had a population of more than a million souls.

With some monuments checked off, the modern Grand Tourist can move on to the activity that lies at the core of the Asian Grand Tour: shopping. And Bangkok is a heady place to do it. No visit is complete without a day frittering away the travel budget in Bangkok's massive, 112,000-square-meter weekend market at Chatuchak. You won't find many genuine antiques at its more than 10,000 stalls, but you will find creative ceramics, bolts of raw silk and tons of affordable clothing ideal for weeks on the road.

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