Are there uncontacted tribes in the concrete jungle? Or are we travellers just the mutant spawn of excessively photoshopped travel journalism and the white room horrors of package-holiday mind control?
Step out and you’ll soon discover paradise is not a place, it’s a delusion occupied by seekers boarding the flight from reality. Out there, you’ll quickly realise where there’s land, there’s endless amounts of disagreeable people making recognisably ill-informed decisions. Those New World treasure hunters found only cursed golden idols worshipped by cannibals, grateful only to visitors for spicing things up. Yes, I’m comparing modern tourism to Cannibal Ferox. Travellers prepare, say I, for terminal disappointment.
Today’s equivalent jungle fever and gold lust is, of course, industrial concrete. It sits like mayonnaise atop the globe’s most celebrated corners. It functions, yes, but does little to enhance everything it’s poured over. Should we blame the chef or the paying customer?
Consider all those tropical islands with their crumbling concrete jetties and forested mountainsides laid with decaying concrete walkways. Perhaps refrain from sneering at the execution and instead applaud the utilitarian efforts to forestall decay. Consider the wider logic of paving that hillside only to have perpetually dissatisfied tourists LARPing up and down.
Look at these:
Where might one assume such images were taken? The concrete is mundane and functional, lacking even Bauhaus pretension. The harsh shadows and the warm light suggest the tropics. Both were taken in Bangkok. “Thailand?”, you gasp. “Beach parties, sex tourism and spice-scorched sphincters? Surely not.”
That incredulous denial is the sound of sub-Turner-like visions of sublime Arcadia awkwardly confronting a man-made environment thrown together on a developing country budget. It’s your dreams shedding their illusions.
Shocking as it may be, remote destinations suffer the same brutal economics and greater entropy than locations closer to home. Aesthetic ideals are rarely a consideration. The truth is these values are more the indulgent projections of western liberals imagining the exotic world as an en vogue exhibit pitched in the middle ground between the Prado and the Pitt Rivers.
My condemnation is reserved less for the creators of such brutalist monstrosities and more for the architects of this art-historical ideal. Yes, I’m condemning good old-fashioned Orientalism, masquerading as aesthetic criticism. The Lost Horizon adult colouring book this is not. Only the truly arrogant take the enlightened high ground when confronted by such pragmaticism. Don’t you think the locals know it’s a blight too? Alternatively, go take a bus in Britain and try recommending the experience.
Today, the role of travellers is not to journey dreamily through the concrete-augmented reality our wanderlust called into being, but instead to trek honestly through the policy-ruined world discoverable along the way. If your experience of this world is no deeper than your last cocktail, you just holidayed in your own mind. Or to put it differently, your holiday fantasy is your problem. Come to terms with its falsity as there’s no sympathy for those dreaming in Instagram filters.
Lee Russell Wilkes 