All I Do is Walk This Highway
Mandalay, Myanmar, February 20th, 2015
Salaroche

Having been living and roving over the past ten years in and across some countries in Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, East Africa, and Eastern and Western Europe, I can safely affirm that I have met a fairly good amount of people of different ethnicities, cultures, and socio-economic and educational backgrounds.

But my recent decade-long experience, as significant as it may continue to be, merely represents an important addendum to the experience I had previously accumulated by going from Vancouver, B.C., in Canada, all the way down to Costa Rica in Central America and then on to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, with the compulsory few trips across the pond to France, Switzerland and Greece in between, even as I visited or lived in each of those countries in the span of a couple of decades.

This past ten years have been a bit more intense than my previous ones for a couple of reasons: First, the more you travel the less you are impressed by (and the more you avoid) flashy touristy things, which can make your traveling experience more authentic, and the less you bite into the hype that many travelers may throw at you in their effort to extract some admiration (and sometimes even money) from you, which can make your traveling social moments less irrelevant and wasteful.

You become immune to hollowness of the latter sort firstly because you have already been to most of the countries most common European and American travelers usually talk about (i.e., Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, India, South Korea, Hong Kong, etc.) and secondly because you have already learnt, up to a good extent, how to distinguish BSers from legitimate and almost-legitimate adventure tellers. This, of course, doesn’t mean you may no longer enjoy, or may no longer learn anything from, listening to someone else’s experiences. It only means you somehow have learnt to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Second, the more you travel the older you get, which means the more you concentrate on things that matter the most to you. This, however, may be an overgeneralization from my part, as such focused stance doesn’t necessarily come with age but is rather contingent on your own personal philosophy and on the reasons that you started travelling in the first place. Nevertheless, all constant travelers are eventually bound to find along their way other individuals who have rich cultural insights to share, although I must say that such individuals certainly belong in the clear minority.

Then there are those people who after traveling or living abroad for many years continue to hang on to the same home-grown ethnic and cultural prejudices, even as they own or rent homes and businesses in countries where the dominant ethnicity and culture are perfectly different from theirs. In other words, some travelers may be capable of soaking their eyes in some of that extensive variety of landscapes, landmarks, cultures and ethnicities that populates the different corners of the world while keeping their minds perfectly wide shut to anything that may contradict or disprove whatever preconceptions they may have absorbed in the developmental stages of their identities, thereby learning basically nothing of substance about the locals they encounter, let alone anything of any personal value about their own selves either.

People’s attitudes while living or visiting foreign countries can be very telling regarding their educational, social, and financial status back home, question that in itself can be an interesting subject of study as it is often very evident in the attitudes travelers display in foreign countries, particularly when they’re drunk, which is not an unusual case among single male European tourists traveling around Southeast Asia.

The image that some of those male European drunkards usually impress on others is that of common Joes possessing no particular talents or traits to distinguish them from the masses, that when exposed to the dedicated attention they get from local Southeast Asians fall prey to their own dissatisfied vanity and end up believing that, as if by magic, they suddenly became very special people entitled to privileges way above those of the locals and even above those of any other foreign individuals who, in the former’s bloated self-perception, may not resemble them or may not accept them in their arrogance.

I have personally talked to Swedes and Brits who quite openly and proudly told everyone at the bar that they were racists (quite tellingly leaving their audiences perfectly unfazed) and I have interacted with Norwegians who spoke in very demeaning terms of “those brown-skinned people” who only come to their country to cash in on the economic advantages Norway has to offer. And this they say while living and travelling across Southeast Asia where 99.9% of the population is “brown-skinned” and where the Norwegians in question can afford to settle down or travel only because of the low cost of living (i.e., the economic advantages) those countries have to offer.

In other words, the boundaries of human stupidity can sometimes be expanded to extents comparable only to the unimaginable extents that hypocrisy can be expanded to as well (when will we ever learn?) But please don’t get me wrong, I have also been exposed to Dutch, Australian, Brit, German, Swedish and Norwegian travelers and expats who didn’t show any signs of systematic intolerance against any particular ethnic group during their conversations, thereby telling me that asinine bigots are probably not the majority in Europe.

And what about anti-Americanism? Is it still alive and kicking among world travelers? Well, I no longer consider such posture anything extraordinary, as by now it runs rampant across a wide spectrum of people you meet. Europeans of all sorts, Australians, Russians, Canadians, you name it, sooner or later, one way or another, some of them will start spewing contempt for America.

But all such resentful animosity usually comes down to the same: Sheer emotional nonsense based mostly on worn-out conspiracy theories. Usually, the best line of action when facing such circumstance is to kindly highlight their ignorance on the matter and decompose their arguments using sheer historical facts. Game over (and probably the conversation too)

Regarding the local people in Northeast and Southeast Asia, I could safely affirm that, except for the Chinese, the great majority of them are quite welcoming to foreigners, particularly to those of Western extraction. This does not mean that every Chinese can be framed into the “unwelcoming” category, as some of them can become really good friends to foreigners once they get acquainted with them. The Japanese may also fall slightly out of my nice-guys generalization, but for reasons different to those of the Chinese. The Chinese tend to be more careless and rude to anybody, including their own brethren, while the Japanese tend to be more formal and distant, even amongst themselves.

A significant number of South Koreans are usually nice to foreigners in every sense, while Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Burmese can be equally xenophilic too. In my view, however, South Koreans get some extra points for the socio-economic and political success they have attained within their borders over the past couple of decades, success that could have easily turned them into arrogant self-righteous people, which the great majority of them are not.

The fact is there is no uniformity in the impressions you may get when traveling for extended periods of time across a good number of countries. There are certain widespread stereotypes you are often exposed to, particularly among the western characters you may encounter along the way, although something similar could be said of people who share important regional ethnic traits. But each country presents its own unique set of circumstances which enable those who visit it to later talk of the different cultural qualities they may have witnessed during their stay.

For example, living for a few months in the city of Dushanbe, in the country of Tajikistan, Central Asia, was a unique experience for the multicultural, multilingual environment they have there. Tajik, the country’s main language, is basically a dialect derived from Persian (Iranian) but because they were once part of the Russian Empire and later part of the Soviet Union many of them speak Russian as a second language. Uzbek is also spoken there and in these globalized days an increasing number of Tajik speak English too.

And Tajikistan’s linguistic diversity is also reflected, although perhaps not correspondingly, in the variety of culinary traditions they enjoy there. Central Asia, which includes Tajikistan, is Muslim by majority, so they all have considerable influence from Arab cuisine, and through the cultural smorgasbord that the Soviet Union unintentionally stewed in the region, Tajiks also enjoy foreign dishes such as Hungarian Goulash or Russian Borsch on a regular basis. 

As far as I’m concerned, the majority of Tajik people can be very nice and friendly to foreigners and to each other as well, so, from this perspective, my visit to Dushanbe was a rather interesting one.

The fact being that after living in, or visiting 33 countries in 4 continents, I can safely assert, by first-hand exposure, that inevitably there are good and bad, exotic and bland experiences to be had while living or travelling around the world. Spotless hunky dory trips can only be expected by those who shield themselves behind organized travel-agency trips, but even them cannot avoid sometimes being exposed to the minimal living conditions and the sub-par technological and infrastructural deficiencies that plague most Southeast Asian, African and other developing nations, thereby maybe standing a chance to reflect upon the commonality between their own humanity and that of everyone else they meet.

The latter, however, would again be contingent on whether the travelers in question have personal philosophies that allow for such kind of insight although, I could venture to say, it does not appear to be the case of the majority of guided-tour travelers.

Then there is the question of ethnic, cultural and linguistic affinity, which plays a defining role when it comes to group relations as they take shape among expats and tourists in general. Outside of any European country, India, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam are perhaps the countries most visited by Westerners. Among them Cambodia happens to be the one where I’ve recently engaged in months-long relations with the local expats and some other long-term visitors.

Drawing mostly from my experience in Sihanoukville, I can attest that expat groups tend to form primarily around linguistic similarities and secondly around ethnic affinities. For example, given that most Nordic individuals are usually fluent in English, they don’t have much difficulty in associating with Brits, Irish, Canadians, Americans, etc., and since many of those travelers coming from English-speaking countries, particularly those who settle down overseas, are of Anglo-Saxon extraction, the ethnic resemblance between them and the Nordics contributes considerably to the common identity of the social groups they form.

Along those very same lines, French expats tend to associate mostly with other French speakers, Italians with other Italian speakers, Russians with other Russians, and so on. In my case, however, and because of my multilingualism, I am usually able to navigate from one group to the next with relative ease. My recent visit to St. Petersburg and Moscow now makes for a very effective ice-breaker with the Russians, even though the question of Putin’s latest shenanigans in Ukraine is always lurking in the back of our minds as a subject to be handled with much care, which has thus far meant that my conversations with the Russians have never gone very far nor lasted very long.

The fact is one cannot wander a bit around the world demanding perfection in the circumstances that appear before us nor expecting excellence from the people that we meet along the way. In the long run, one has to apply a certain mixture of tolerance and selectivity to our travels. The tolerance ingredient in the mix resides, first, in accepting that things may not always turn out the way we planned them and, second, in knowing that most people we meet will hardly ever live up to our highest expectations. The selectivity aspect resides, first, in correctly assessing which local landmarks fall within the scope of our interest and, second, in knowing how to avoid socializing with individuals whose behavior falls below our standards of acceptability.

From the perspective of this moment, there may be many roads left for me to travel, many landscapes left to contemplate, many faces left to see, and many experiences left to be had, but the path I have thus far walked tells me that, regardless of how far my feet may take me, I probably won’t find much difference between the people I may encounter in the future and those I have encountered in the past, as deep down inside we all have the same instincts, needs and desires.

And such basic commonality levels the human playing field by investing all of us with the same potential to express the good, the excellent, the bad, the petty, the beautiful and the ugly characteristics that make of the human race the often-contradictory, often-inexplicable, but always fascinating species that we are.

Salaroche