manchan magan

Tombo2001

I've done a reasonable amount of backpacking. I wouldn't be the only one who can claim this. No matter where you go in the developing world today there is a backpacker route that is getting broader and broader. There's obviously a lot of competition amongst some backpackers to be the ones who 'get off the beaten track'. That the experience is more 'pure' if there are no other backpackers about. Personally I find this a bit annoying.......what is the point of one-upmanship....can you not just be happy to be there in the first place without having to get one over your fellow backpacker. Why do you have to be a better traveller than the next guy?

While backpacking, you don't just meet people from the country you are in. You meet people from all over the world, as the backpacker population is a global one (or at least most wealthy countries are represented). On the Paddywagon buses in Ireland you will meet people from Canada, Australia, Italy, Norway/ France/ Japan/ Britain.....wherever/ whoever is on the bus that day.....in addition to the Irish locals. The same applies if you are trekking in Nepal or wandering around Guayaquil. I loved this part of it. I trekked with an Israeli for 8 weeks. Learnt more about Israel, even though I've never been there, than I did about most of the countries I travelled through.

The travellers I got on the best with were the English. I came to a basic realisation after a long period of travelling - the Irish have more in common with the English than with any other nationality.

Ironically, the travellers I got on worst with were the Irish. This wasn't through my own choice. I was always delighted to meet a fellow Irish person. But I usually got a very poor response from other Irish people. They were often unfriendly. My thinking eventually was that I was bursting their bubble a bit. They thought they were these ultra travellers arriving in some tiny remote village in Western Pakistan, three days donkey ride from the nearest toilet, a million miles from home, and who pops up only another Paddy.

The point I'm getting to with all this:

Manchan Magan is a travel writer for those who don't know. He has a weekly column in the Irish Times. His article today follows the tone of the articles he usually writes, but he takes it to another level for this one.

I won't make any direct comments on it, people can make their own minds up.....but I've highlighted a few of the pieces that I thought 'stood out'.....

In the spit-strewn dust outside Khim’s chai shop a group of sherpas squatted on their heels, eating off stainless-steel platters into which indentations had been hammered for every portion of the meal – idlies, dhal, chapatti and subji. There was even a groove into which slotted a stainless steel beaker: a peculiar Indian custom, as though the nation eats its meals ready, at all times, for a bout of turbulence.

I watched as a backpacker clambered off a bus, repositioning his pouch like a mutant marsupial and glancing regretfully around, as though realising he may have drifted too far off the banana-pancake circuit. Almora had been dropped from most guidebooks, having lost the cachet it used to share with the likes of McLeod Ganj, Srinagar or Pondicherry. No one now boasted of visiting.

I could see him trying to catch my eye, no doubt wanting advice: tips for the best guesthouse or a restaurant that sold passable spaghetti or pizza.

He gave a tentative wave, but I ignored him. He made himself busy, snapping a sterilising tab from its foil and dropping it into his water bottle.

I felt irritated by him, but I knew the irritation was directed as much at my former self as at him. I recognised the two conflicting desires in him – the wish to puncture the wall of alienation surrounding him and the equal and opposite desire to protect himself from it. He had just spent 10 hours on a bus; no doubt having had his face pressed into somebody’s armpit, having been stroked in places he regarded as off-limits and been befriended and interrogated many times by many people.
It was understandable that he might now seek space. Or at least it was from a Western perspective: in the Indian tradition everybody is one so why try to create the illusion of separation?
He took a step toward me and, in a moment of weakness, I beckoned him over.

Khim’s kitchen boy, spotting a customer, came tripping out with a dripping dishcloth to wipe first the chair and then the table, in that order, and went to fetch us two gold-rimmed shot-glasses of industrial strength chai.

The backpacker laid down his guidebook and a mottled copy of Harry Potter. I used to be surprised that other backpackers weren’t reading Naipaul or Kipling or Rushdie, but perhaps it is precisely this tendency towards extended infantilism that gives them the idealism to go off exploring the world in the first place. They are an army of Peter Pans, all hell-bent on quixotic adventure, and willing to suffer definite discomfort and potential danger along the way.

I read somewhere that backpackers were like stitches, knitting the Eastern and Western hemispheres together. They are threads through contrasting cultural patches. It struck me that this boy seemed a bit frayed at the ends and, fearing the quilt might start to unravel, I found myself telling him that Khim could rustle him up some banana pancakes if he really wanted them.

schemingbohemia

I read that on Saturday and just thought what an absolute plonker Manchan is! He was proving the exact opposite that travel broadens the mind.