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Wednesday, Dec 3, 2008
Iyer's method as reporter and raconteur is to enter a place as completely open -- as free of prejudice and preconception -- as possible. He enters like a blank journal, hoping the world will write itself upon his pages. Often he begins his accounts with a compelling catalogue of his first impressions of a place. "Bali: On Prospero's Isle," for example, opens with a flashback to his arrival on the island:
I had come into town the previous afternoon watching video reruns of "Dance Fever" on the local bus. As I wandered around, looking for a place to stay, I had noted down the names of a few of the stores: the Hey Shop. The Hello Shop. Easy Rider Travel Service. T.G.I. Friday restaurant. And after checking into a modest guesthouse where Vivaldi was pumping out of an enormous ghetto blaster, I had gone out in search of a meal. I ran across a pizzeria, a sushi bar, a steak house, a Swiss restaurant and a slew of stylish Mexican cafis. Eventually, however, I wound up at T.J.'s, a hyper-chic fern bar, where long-legged young blondes in tropical T-shirts were sitting on wicker chairs and sipping tall cocktails. Reggae music floated through the place as a pretty waitress brought me my corn chips and salsa.
He recounts his amblings around town that evening, then continues:
After an unquiet sleep, I had woken up and walked around the three or four square blocks of the town. Most of the stores seemed to be trendy boutiques, across whose windows were splashed New Wave Japanese T-shirts and pretty sundresses in "Miami Vice" turquoise and pink. Surfaris. Tropical Climax. Cherry. Mariko. "An American Werewolf in London" was playing at the local cinema ... Fatty. The Beer Garden. Depot Viva. The Duck Nuts. "Marijuana and hashish," whispered one man to me. "Hashish and cocaine," muttered his friend. Joe's. Lenny. Jerry. Elly's. Elice's. I walked back to my guesthouse -- Van Morrison had now replaced Vivaldi on the system -- and a couple of the boys there invited me to sit down over some guacamole and give them my opinion of Michael Landon and John McEnroe.
Now comes the sardonic kicker:
I was, of course, in Bali, the Elysian isle famous for its otherworldly exoticism, its cultural integrity, its natural grace.
By recording the world around him and then juxtaposing that record with the island's erstwhile reputation, Iyer introduces one of the themes at the heart of his whole journey: how reality and reputation are so often at odds for the Westerner in the East, and how of course that Westerner is often responsible for this very discrepancy.
In the next paragraph Iyer succinctly states the paradox at the heart of his Indonesian odyssey:
Say Bali, and two things come to mind: tourism and paradise. Both are inalienable features of the island, and also incompatible. For as fast as paradises seduce tourists, tourists reduce paradises ... Hardly has a last paradise been discovered than everyone converges on it so fast that it quickly becomes a paradise lost.
For Iyer, Bali is the ironic exemplar of this equation: paradise made accessible to all. With a succinct sensuality, he evokes the bounties of this enchanted world:
For $2 a night, I was given my own thatched hut in a tropical courtyard scented with flowers and fruit. Each sunny morning, as I sat on my verandah, a smiling young girl brought me bowls of mangoes and tea, and placed scarlet bougainvilleas on the gargoyle above my lintel. Two minutes away was the palm-fringed beach of my fantasies; an hour's drive and I was climbing active volcanoes set among verdant terraces of rice ... And all around were dances, silken ceremonies and, in a place scarcely bigger than Delaware, as many as 30,000 temples.
"Thus," he concludes, "the paradox remained: Bali was heaven, and hell was other people."
Iyer goes on to explore this heavenly hell, discovering and deconstructing its three tourist circles: Kuta, for "Australian surfers and their blondes"; Sanur, "where the international set came to play"; and Ubud, "where trendy visitors came to study the native culture and foreign artists set up home and shop." Summing it all up, he writes: "No self-respecting self-styled student of the local culture would ever be caught dead inside the discos and juice bars of Kuta, while few of the musclemen on the beach had time for the festivals and galleries of Ubud; both groups scorned the Sanur life they could not afford, and the Sanur settlers looked down on the basic conditions of Kuta and Ubud, which they found uncomfortably close to those of the Balinese they so admired."
As he travels around the island, midway through his essay, Iyer concludes that tourism is taking over Bali:
When I consulted Bima Wasata, a pamphlet put out by the village of Ubud to explain its culture to foreigners, I found Buta, or the force of evil, defined as follows: "Evil power can be many things. It might be too much money from tourism, or the imbalance number between locals and visitors, or the local people who think about moneymaking work." All three kinds of evil, one could not help but notice, arose from tourism.
And yet, he writes three paragraphs later, "At daybreak, Bali took on the soft glow that bodies acquire in sleep, and the same sense of innocence inviolate." He continues:
Thus I went back and forth, unable to decide whether paradise had been lost, or was losing, or could ever be regained. And my greatest problem with Bali was, finally, that it seemed too free of problems. In many respects, it struck me as too lazy, and too easy. A real paradise, I felt, could not just be entered. A real paradise must exact a price, resist admission as much as it invited it. And a real paradise, like a god or lover, must have an element of mystery about it; only the presence of the unknown and the unseen -- the possibility of surprise -- could awaken true faith or devotion.
And so Iyer carries the debate one level deeper -- the question is not simply whether tourists have spoiled Bali; the question is whether Bali is too spoiling, too easy, to be a real paradise.
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