Hitting the Beach — page 2

To this day, I still don't know for certain whether the author of the book that inspired a Hollywood movie stayed at the Sanctuary before it started taking regular guests. But I liked the idea, all the same, that the real-life model for The Beach now had a regular boat service and room rates. I liked it not only because it seemed truer to life than the novel and its Hollywood counterpart—in which paradise self-destructs and its inhabitants disband—but also because it seemed to confirm something about contemporary travel and the quest for paradise that I had been thinking for a long time.

Nostalgia—"you should have seen it 20 years ago"—haunts the contemporary traveler, and anxiety—"get there before it's too late"—inspires adventure. In The Beach, they amount to a premonition that all attempts to secure a slice of paradise are doomed. The novel features much banter on the evils of guidebooks, but the brooding threats throughout the narrative are the locals and other travelers. Obviously, the Beach's days are numbered from the moment the central character, Richard, arrives with his map. And if the community had been smart, it would have voted either to disperse or start charging for the bungalows there and then. A guidebook writer would have turned up in due course—probably around the time the second or third commercial guesthouse opened—and a regular ferry service would be up and running, and the dope farmers would realize they had a ready market on their doorstep. And that, if what I had heard at the Sanctuary was true, is precisely what did happen.

For me, The Beach was about contradictions I had been observing as a guidebook writer for many years. The one thing the Beach community is unanimous about is that the guided masses are not cool. But the inhabitants of the Beach are not travelers either. They are a community under siege: from other travelers, from guidebook writers and from the locals—especially the locals. They are a reminder that the modern travel experience is a communal phenomenon, less a personal journey of discovery to a place of untarnished solitude than about being with the right kind of people in the right kind of places.

And that's a way of saying there is perhaps not as much difference between travel and tourism as we imagine. When you really think about it, the travel ethos of The Beach is a paranoiac quest for exclusivity, a journey into the wasteland—the wagons drawn up in a circle on the prairie—while the exclusivity of tourism is simply its day rates. If you can afford them, welcome to paradise, sanitized, home to the right kind of people, the unruly local world kept at bay by the security guards and the fences. The true traveler rejects both of these extremes and accepts that Kathmandu with coffee chains and Madras with malls are as interesting as whatever those places were before the coffee chains and the malls. The true traveler also accepts that in this ever-changing world, divided by extremes of wealth and poverty, the poor have a right to struggle for their share. There's no demanding stasis of their world when mobility defines ours.

When I first joined Lonely Planet as an editor 15 years ago, I had the pleasure of watching somebody grill the company's legendary founder, Tony Wheeler, about whether guidebooks ruined places. He squirmed for a moment, smiled nervously and then hit back with an anecdote about a restaurant in the north of Thailand with a sign that read, NOT IN THE LONELY PLANET. "It was doing very good business," said Tony, with a grin. "So, next edition we put it in."

I still love that response. In its way, it cuts to the quick of the entire conundrum: if someone's trying to keep heaven to himself, he probably doesn't have far to fall before he hits earth.

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