Been there, done that

MARGARET MEAD “is a great travel writer precisely because she is not a travel writer,” asserts Lawrence Osborne as he draws toward the end of “The Naked Tourist,” his account of an inspired experiment in meta-travel, and you half-imagine that he is hoping we will say the same of him. Stumbling from New York to Papua New Guinea, from shopping mall to gated spa, lurching between a grand Kolkata hotel and hellish streets a few yards away, Osborne embarks on a trip to explore, perhaps to prove, the idea that the travel book is dead, if only because travel itself -- in the sense of voyaging to otherness -- is on the brink of expiration; everywhere you go today, you blunder out of the look-alike airport to face the very Holiday Inn, golden arches and Starbucks you’ve traveled 8,000 miles to escape. Like figures from some ancient myth, we circle the world to flee from ourselves and our familiar lives only to look up and see that we (and our familiar lives) are looking down on us from the screens of the Ginza or Times Square.

I happen to disagree with this contention -- a McDonald’s in Thailand is to me as Thai as one in Santa Barbara is Santa Barbaran -- and the world to me is as inexhaustible as it ever was, even if the nature of exoticism has changed (to take in Jackson Heights -- or the Mall of America -- as much as Timbuktu). But if anyone could convince me otherwise, through wryness and panache alone, it would be Osborne, who undertakes a grand tour of the 21st century that gains abundantly from the fact that he is not terribly grand and certainly not much of a tourist. The man who is tired of London, as Samuel Johnson might have said (were he in a six-star Bangkok hospital today), should just try the global emporium in Dubai International Airport’s “transit consumer” hub.

Osborne’s premise, in short, is to chronicle a journey through the virtual, simulacrum world that has emerged so quickly that increasingly we can barely tell (or long to tell) one site from another. He decides to sample Planet Tourism, as he calls it, and experience “whateverness” by passing gradually along “the Asian highway” through a series of ever more ersatz places until he arrives at the unadorned treehouses of west Papua, an area kept remote by civil wars and cannibalism. Along the way, he tells us that French playwright Antonin Artaud based his “theater of cruelty” partly upon the intensities of Balinese dance, that boys in Thailand enjoy the legal right to wear skirts to school, and that in Papua pidgin, the pope is known as “Jesus Number One Man.”

Tourism has become the largest industry in the world today -- the number of international travelers went up almost 30-fold from 1950, when only 25 million people crossed borders, to 2002, when 700 million did -- and, as Osborne writes with typical aplomb, “The principal occupation of hundreds of millions of humans is now simply entertaining hundreds of millions of other humans.”

Osborne is an Englishman of the oldish school, scrupulously crotchety, generally disenchanted and aware enough of worldly realities not to make a fuss about them. Like fellow traveler Paul Theroux, whose writing he sometimes echoes, Osborne is quick, unobtrusively well read and so careful not to seem earnest that we are as taken aback as he is when he is at last moved, at the end of his trip, by the Kombai tribe in the Papuan rain forest: “Who knew men could be white?” one says upon confronting our author. “And women, too.”

Elsewhere the sometime New Yorker writer offers nicely researched, highly digestible mini-lectures on the history of the grand tour (a term coined in 1670), the sudden transformation of Dubai (soon to boast the world’s largest tower, the world’s largest shopping mall and the world’s largest theme park) and even the framework in which to reflect on all this. His companions on the page are not, after all, tourist brochures or flights of promotional optimism, but anthropologists Mead and Claude Levi-Strauss and Marxist theorist Guy Debord, who memorably noted that when the spectacle is everywhere, “the spectator feels at home nowhere.” Though “The Naked Tourist” (an inapt title for a thoughtful book) doesn’t offer much soul, it does have plenty of vivid, entertaining and often unorthodox perceptions.

The method may seem haphazard, but the book begins to disclose its shape and thrust as it goes on. The story starts, perhaps inevitably, in Dubai, where the project called “The World” promises to re-create a map of the entire globe with man-made islands in the Persian Gulf, each of the 250 or 300 “nations” up for sale to the highest bidder. From there, Osborne moves to Bangkok’s Greco-Roman spas, which brilliantly improve upon Las Vegas’ re-creations, and finally arrives at the tourist mecca of Bali, remade for travelers alone, its locals encouraged to play carefully constructed versions of themselves for visitors. Thus when he gets to Bali, Osborne dispenses relatively quickly with pro forma denunciations of Hard Rock Cafes, Australian girls trawling for handsome local boys and the omnipresent, echoing call-and-response of dreams demanded and dreams supplied, and moves rapidly onto more interesting ground. Mead (with whom he openly falls in love over the course of his travels, her published letters clutched tightly to his chest) came to Bali in 1936 to study the cultural roots of schizophrenia, he notes, and he goes on to remind us that the savagery rife across Indonesia during the anti-communist convulsions of 1965 was more brutal and horrifying in Bali than anywhere else. It was foreign anthropologists and intellectuals who built up the image of a magical and idyllic Hindu island of artists and magicians, between the world wars, and President Sukarno, born to a Balinese mother, who saw the virtue of playing up the “Bali Hai” mystique. For 70 years now, foreign settlers have been talking about the imminent loss of paradise in Bali, and doing what they can to profit from it, like snakes in the shadows of Eden.

It is in his writing about Bangkok, though, that Osborne really won me over. At this point, it is almost impossible to say anything new about what has become the Angelina Jolie of modern cities: infinitely seductive, so sleekly marketed and silky that it is unassimilable and irresistible in equal measures and so iconic that its real character remains opaque. “Hedonopolis,” as Osborne calls the Thai capital, is already the seventh-most-visited city in the world, and it has so seamlessly remade itself to meet tourist needs -- so nimbly identified itself with its ability and eagerness to please -- that it has become the Platonic model of what is pregnantly called the “service industry.” Even as he undergoes a procedure in one of Bangkok’s innumerable high-tech clinics, three lovely nurses are flitting all around him like something out of a James Bond movie, asking, “Are you pain?” and making him feel as if he has attained the heavenly fields already.

Osborne notes every delectable Thai girl he passes (many of them male), mingles with discount liposuction patients, even checks into the infamous Grace Hotel, where Thai women in harem pants and hennaed hair sashay among newly transported workers from the Persian Gulf; more impressively, he puts himself through 11 years’ worth of dental treatment (for all of $383), talks to the country’s “god” of plastic surgery, and gets him to explain how Iranians fly to Bangkok for sex-change operations with their cash hidden in condoms in embarrassing places and to declare that “Buddhists make good cosmetic surgeons. We’re compassionate pragmatists.” He also meets the director of an exclusive spa in southern Thailand, who assures him that Chiva-Som is a “Health and Wellness Resort,” whose only aim is transformation. Indeed so: In modern Thailand, as Osborne shows, men become women, women become men; Asians become (literally) wide-eyed like Westerners; lifelong bachelors become husbands; and a once-poor country suddenly becomes quite rich. Thailand inspires such enthralled romanticism that it also invites great cynicism, and it is a feat to acknowledge all its complexities and graces, as Osborne does, without ever quite surrendering to them.

An English gentleman to the not-so-bitter end, Osborne heads for the red-light bars in almost every place he visits, while never quite losing an ironic distance from all that is swirling around him and never beginning to dignify his journey with the sense that it is a pilgrimage or quest or even a very purposeful idea. Urbanity is his prophylactic. Yet as with the better English travelers of old, his learning is the more distinctive for being so lightly worn. And the very crankiness he so vigorously maintains prepares us nicely for the way he clearly feels moved to real warmth and affection for the sorcerers and cannibals of the Papuan jungle (with whom he shares few words). The innocence, or at least mutual ignorance, on both sides is so extreme that tears begin to flow as the villagers come out to wave goodbye to their intruders. Somehow, in an inauthentic world, authentic emotion still seems possible.