Dollarsigns and Nothingness

Of the past 72 hours, I had only spend 5 in a bed. It would be another full 24 hours before I finally laid down to blissful rest on an airmattress on the floor of a missionary’s house nestled in the Papuan mountains. But now is not then. Now is hot, and now is crowded, and now is overwhelming, and now is … not good. Indonesia and I did not start off on a very good foot.

The arrival experience in five sentences: Customs was hot, sticky, and unairconditioned. Came out to find a porter holding my bag; he motioned, I followed (which was actually useful), he asked for either a $2 (20,000 rupiah) tip or a $20 (200,000 rupiah) one, I was so delusional and blinded by zeroes that I’m ashamed to say I honestly don’t know what I gave him. So he was either a divine guide or a dirty rotten bastard thief, I’m still on the fence. My taxi driver kept on calling me ‘boss,’ the enjoyment of which faded when I realized that I could get out and walk faster than our car was going. He let me off at Mastapa Gardens Hotel in Kuna beach, and I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to tip him (no), but I was still too confusedly bitter over the porter to care if I was being culturally sensitive.

It was then, 1 hour into my 12 hour layover, that I realized something. I didn’t like Bali. Or rather, more accurately, I loathed Bali (1). The beaches are amazing, the prices are low, and the people have the sort of petite exotic beauty that I’m sure made many WWII navymen love Bali. But maybe that’s the thing. Maybe it plucks the last chord of puritanical piety left within me. I… hate… tourism. I hope you are cozy, because I’m about to climb on my soapbox.

I love the free exchange of cultures, I think it’s great when people want to see new horizons, and I’m all for FDI. Spread the love, whatever. What turns my stomach is when a location becomes a ‘destination.’ And Bali is definitely a destination.

Kuna Beach is filled with people. The ones that moved were white, the ones that stood still and hawked were locals. “Rolex? DVD?” “Hey boss, you want to buy a shirt? How about a dress for a pretty lady?” “Massage?” Being a white male walking (relatively) alone, I got a lot of the latter. Young Balinese women littered the streets, sometimes in groups, sometimes alone, every twenty feet or so, offering the same service. And while their lips said massage, their lingering gazes and soft touches suggested the possibility of a bit more.

Walking down the road, I couldn’t shake the feeling that, while everyone was crowded on the same streets, no one was actually seeing each other. I felt like a walking dollar sign. And who can blame them? People don’t go to Kuna Beach to find Balinese culture, they go there for cheap eats and mass-produced “I heart Bali” shirts. Walking past a shop named ‘Suicide Dreams,’ I wondered what it said about our culture that this is what was found to be most attractive to prospective shoppers (us). After glancing in a few stores, I tried to keep my eyes on the road ahead. It just hurt too much.

Is this what we do? Drive our Explorers from the suburbs to work, play at living out our ‘Leave it to Beaver’ lives until we make enough money to go someplace else and get our freak on? Find some place beautiful enough to be distracting and poor enough to be bought? It sounds like prostitution to me. Only a fool blames the bed of the whore, especially when he is the one making that bed. There is no free love, and cheap love only exists when there are people to buy it. We have created Bali, we have created the tee-shirts emblazoned with “Drop Pants, Not Bombs” and “Toughen the Fuck Up;” shirts that we would never allow on our street corners, but that, on a street corner far far away, we find clever and hilarious. Who can blame them for looking at me like that, because I have created them, and now I must sustain them.

And us? When we look at them, we see … nothing. I don’t think we see anything. The locals are part of the background, speakers that hawk goods and disembodied hands that exchange money. We are not there for them; they are there for us. We take what we want and give them enough money to make sure that they are there the next time we want something. No one cares who it is that is behind the counter, just that there is someone there. They are interchangeable people. Are interchangeable people really people at all?

What I hate about tourism, or definitive tourism at least, is that it dehumanizes people. Tourists set aside their humanity and become pure consumers, and the local industry sets aside its cultural distinctives in favor of whatever happens to be marketable. We become dollar signs and they become reflections of our hidden self-indulgence. Sometimes it manifests itself as perverse, sometimes garish, but in a twisted sense, I don’t know if either is worse than the other. Both the keychain phallus and the hibiscus-print shirt represent our willingness to throw money at whoever will allow us to be someone other than who we currently are. Maybe the point is that they both represent our dissatisfaction with ourselves. A dissatisfaction that we find so distasteful and taboo that we ship it off to some distant country - on call when we need it - but with no thought for the place and the people who we have reduced to indulging our own guilty insecurities.

(1) My trip back through Bali was completely different, and I think it’s quite nice. Ish.