Comment: When you become one of those dreaded privileged travellers

Matthew Clayfield was used to telling seemingly ungrateful Western travellers in Vietnam to pull their heads in. But over a 30-hour bus trip across the country, he transformed into one of them.

Life in the city of Hoi An in Vietnam. Source: AAP

“This is a service we’re paying for,” complained the American girl as she and her bags were shoved unceremoniously into the admittedly too-full taxi that was to take us to the Hanoi coach terminal. “We’re going to give you the worst review on TripAdvisor.”

I caught my fiancée’s eye in the rear-view mirror and smiled. Mel had recently diagnosed the problem with the vast majority of backpackers in South-East Asia as a misguided belief that the region was less a place they were visiting—a place where they were, in actual fact, guests—than a service being provided to them on their gap-year, bucket-list piss-ups. "We moaned about the constant pestering, the constant offers of 'boat' and 'rickshaw'," Geoff Dyer writes in Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, "but when we wanted a boat or rickshaw we expected someone to be there, providing a boat or rickshaw immediately, at rock-bottom prices."

We had seen examples of this all over Vietnam, where we had been living for the better part of a year: Brits yelling at tour company employees in Hoi An because the latter didn’t know when the sleeper to Hue would arrive; Americans demanding to speak to a bus driver’s manager when we were dropped on the outskirts of Hanoi, rather than in its centre, despite the fact that its centre was closed for Independence Day celebrations. In both cases, I had stepped forward to tell the travellers—almost all in their early twenties, that apparently adventurous, easygoing age—to calm down. Most of the things they were complaining about were either signposted above their heads—“You may have been told to get here at one,” I would say, “but the sign clearly states that the bus leaves at two”— or else required only the slightest knowledge of the country and its history to be understood. (“F*** their independence” seemed to be the general vibe even after I’d pointed it out.) Theirs was a mentality, I argued, that turned every local, regardless of his station, into a service provider, and every service provider merely doing his job into a probable swindler. It smacked of Orientalism to me, of racism disguised as open-minded globe-trotting, cultural elitism as cultural curiosity.

I was about to spend the next 30 hours slowly turning into one of them.

The first inkling I had that the girl might have been right to complain about her treatment, hustled into the cab with the rest of us while her travelling companions were thrown onto the back of xe oms, or motorcycle taxis, came upon our arrival at the terminal. One of those companions was already there, sitting on his own in the rain. The other hadn’t arrived at all.

As they set about trying to contact their missing friend—missing, no doubt, their bus in the process—Mel, a German twenty-something and myself were shown to the bus that was to take us to Luang Prabang, Laos, a passage that bloggers and TripAdvisor tragics have often described, with obvious exaggeration, as one of the most nightmarish in the world. (“Take the plane!” is a common refrain.)

I wasn’t particularly worried. I once spent 40 hours on a bus travelling from Istanbul to Erbil and thought that, even if the 24 hours we’d been quoted for this trip turned out to be, as such quotes usually do here, an understatement, it would still be a walk in the park by comparison. (For one thing, I wouldn’t be spending the whole trip worrying about being beheaded upon arrival.) We stopped within several hours for a meal—the usual bain-marie dreck, re-heated and served with morning glory and rice, typical fare at rest stops off the backpacker trail—putting paid to the reports I’d read about travellers going endlessly without food. It didn’t even bother me when the lights on the bus went out early in the evening, rendering further passage through my book impossible.

But then the cargo started appearing. Every hour, on the hour, the lights would go on, the bus would stop and the staff would beginning throwing our carry-on luggage about in order to make space for 50kg bags of rice and boxes of mechanical parts. This is not a nice thing to see when your carry-on consists of two laptops. It was nevertheless almost amusing, at first, being woken from fever dreams about karaoke sessions and meals of duck-embryo balut—“This is disgusting,” I apparently said loudly in my sleep at one point, “you’ll love it!”—so that the seats behind us could be given over to boxes, bags and, in one case, a hanging plant. But then the seats in front of us—the whole aisle, in fact—started being filled with them, too.

“How will we get out if there’s an accident?” Melanie asked—not without reason, given the quality of the driving—when three large, immovable bags of what smelled to me like industrial-strength fertiliser were placed next to us, rendering our access to the aisle impossible. We had only a slither of window—no more than a hand’s width—at our disposable for escape in the other direction. (I would come to hate these windows the next day, in Laos itself, when I was reminded of Fritz Lang’s famous dismissal of Cinemascope: “It’s only good for snakes and funerals.” The windows certainly didn’t flatter the Laotian mountainscape.)

“I’m more worried about what these bags are going to do if there’s an accident,” I said. “Isn’t fertiliser an explosive?”

At six-foot-three, I’m not really built for South-East Asian sleeper buses, finding them cramped at the best of times. I was now forced to rest my legs up and over the ever-growing landscape of crap that was inching its way further down the length of the bus, a 100kg anaconda arranging himself lumpily over the ever-changing topography. At about three in the morning, I was awoken in lieu of the cockerel's crow by a hastily-placed metal briefcase that fell into the side of my head on a hairpin turn. Mel noticed that her feet—and, more importantly, her laptop bag, which she had tucked beneath them to make way for the rice—were swimming in a pool of water that had developed beneath a heavily-dripping air-conditioner. Her sketches of Ho Chi Minh City were in there, too, and, while they thankfully protected her laptop from the deluge, were now heavily watermarked themselves. This was the only water to be found. Our bottle of the drinkable stuff had been thrown out to make way for boxes, too.

A wealth of racial invective, I am ashamed to say, was fast welling up on the tip of my tongue, at least as quickly as the puddle of water had welled up at my fiancée’s feet. What I hadn’t realised, what was now making itself felt all too readily on the level of my bone structure, was the extent to which our bus fare rendered us, not passengers, but cargo like the rest of it. We were paying, not to be delivered in comfort, but to be delivered, period, another box of parts in a cargo hold only nominally reserved for passengers. In context, of course, this was completely acceptable: none of the locals seemed to mind it in the slightest. But I was as furious at this realisation, as completely and utterly uninterested in context, as the Westerners whose fury in similar situations I had been chiding over the past few months. And my recourse, too, at least in my head, was racism. “What the hell is wrong with these people?” I muttered at one point. “These people”?! Actually, I thought that showed remarkable restraint. The word I had in mind wasn’t “people”.

Michael Caine and Do Thi Hai Yen in 'The Quiet American' (2002). Source: Buena Vista International

This is a shocking thing to have to admit. Could the trip have been more pleasant? Was there something reckless, dangerous, not-quite-on-the-level—if still not really nightmarish—about the whole affair? Of course. As Hilary Mantel wisely put it, in Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, “I'm not one of those people who think that when you go to a foreign country you must leave your judgment at home.” But that my reaction should so quickly have jumped from a level of justified annoyance to one of barely-contained racism is more than a little depressing. Indeed, it occurs to me now that, to some extent, my defense of the Vietnamese against Western charges in the lead-up to my bus ride was equally Orientalist in nature. In Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, Alden Pyle’s naïve, well-meaning racism manifests itself in his desire to “save” or “protect” Phuong, who of course represents Vietnam more generally. (“I don’t think she’s in need of protection,” Fowler tells him, though he also quite happily compares the Vietnamese to children elsewhere.)

My own defenses of the Vietnamese were arguably born from a similar impulse: to explain away cultural difference by way of what I might have in fact considered their cultural inferiority. It occurs to me that a good many left-liberal defenses of the Other—defenses of Arab culture against misogyny, say, or of Aboriginal culture against widespread allegations of rape and incest—come from a similar place. The savior-like impulse towards infantalisation will always be strong until one receives a briefcase to the face. And then one becomes as repulsive as the rest of them.

Of course, Pyle learns the hard way just how childlike the Vietnamese are not. In lieu of the waters beneath the bridge at Dakao, which I hope never to be found in, dead or otherwise, it’s a lesson my sense of lingering guilt will have to suffice to teach.

Matthew Clayfield is a freelance foreign correspondent.