Backpacking Flashbacks

BACKPACKING FLASHBACKS One of the least lonely places on the planet must be the Lonely Planet readers club. I am sitting in the garden of a guesthouse in Chiang Mai and every traveller of whatever age who alights from a tuk tuk seeking accommodation clutches the Lonely Planet guide to Thailand. Herewith a murmured confession: I am a Rough Guide user, partly because I find their slightly peculiar English perspective refreshing, but also because I am insanely jealous of the Wheelers who have just sold the Lonely Planet empire for an astounding fortune. My jealousy was aroused long before their recent windfall. Decades ago I was backpacking around Asia with a couple of friends and we kept a notebook into which we carefully entered information on bus and train times, restaurant and hotel prices, and tips on everything good, bad, weird, wicked and mad. The notebook grew and grew. I cannot say that we ever intended publishing it; we just thought it would assist our friends and others who might follow, in those faraway days when there were no guides, other than someone who had been there a couple of days before you. And then somewhere we lost the book. I am unhinged enough to believe that it was left on the floor of a bus grinding through the highlands of Sumatra, on a riverboat on the Mekong in Laos or in a doss house in Pagan. And Tony and Maureen Wheeler found it and the rest, beginning with South-east Asia on a Shoestring, is their marvellous story. So, as diversion from this obsession (##!! the Wheelers sold the enterprise to BBC Worldwide for over $200m), I amuse myself with reflections on backpacking now and then. Unlike the Wheelers, and a caste now known as flashpackers, I have never successfully managed the transition. Chiang Mai is flashpacker paradise. You can see, do and taste absolutely everything. All about me are people who alternate between frenetic activity and doing nothing. There are myriad adventure things like ziplining with gibbons, white water rafting, rock climbing, downhill biking, jungle four-wheeler excursions, all classes of treks and opportunities to meet hill tribes, (even those of the long necks and big ears, according to one poster) and a range of elephant encounters. Agencies on every corner and in every guesthouse will arrange these getaways. Activities over for the day or the week, everyone floats lightly around Chiang Mai, some clothed alluringly in hill tribe chic, having massages, therapy, lattes, and, in happy hour, cocktails. How did we ever travel without face scrubs, black mud body baths, fish massages, aromatic foot treatment, or any one of numberless pampering options? All we had in the late afternoon was retreating

Murray Laurence

Backpacking Flashbacks

to a hot cell of a room to read, if you were lucky under a fitful fan. Massage behind you, you can enrol in a cooking, jewellery making, vegetable carving, tribal belly dance, mahout or even massage courses (so you can sit on a cane chair on the footpath like hundreds of Thais, saying Massage, madam, sir? Or, to people like me, Papa?). If you are spaced out with worry or stress (hard to imagine in this place), there are releasing sessions using regression hypnotherapy, shaking meditation, elephant yoga and spirit and soul oracle readings. The agencies also arrange transport so no longer are travellers tormented by chaotic bus stations at dawn; a minibus will collect you at your guesthouse and deliver you in an air-conditioned state to your destination. Once upon a time backpacking was an adventure. Everything was haphazard. You took a chance with every meal, lodging, train and bus journey because there was no straightforward or consistent information, and we didnt care anyway because that was what travelling was about. There was often nothing to do because there were no arranged activities, treks or adventures, just unplanned wandering about. Cocktails? On my first encounter with Indonesia, my two friends and I would save for a week to buy one bottle of Bintang Baru beer between us. Tapas? Sushi? I remember that when we finally reached Jakarta after several months elsewhere in the archipelago, (well, that includes Bali, but it was different, then) we found a shop supplying embassy people and others and were thrilled to buy a loaf of bread and some peanut butter. CNN? BBC? One of the first televisions in Indonesia was set up on a plinth in a roundabout in Jalan Malioboro in Yogjakarta; there was so little traffic that half the townsfolk could assemble each evening to watch it. Facebook? iphones? Skype? Australian embassies used to hold mail, and once, at the embassy in Bangkok, we were invited by the ambassador to join him and other staff at the embassy retreat down at an almost undiscovered Pattaya. Just because we were three Aussies in Thailand. Pleased to be caught in Bangkok during the 1973 student uprising, massive military retaliation and reverse coup dtat (when the generals fled in a loot-laden DC8), we wanted to call Australia to reassure families; we found our way to a business which had some trade with Australia and were able to book a call for the following day. It cost far more than our daily allowance for food and accommodation. (This tale was related in Land of Smiles, published in High Times in the Middle of Nowhere).

2 Murray Laurence

Backpacking Flashbacks

Hill tribe treks? I was fortunate enough to take a number of unorganised treks in Thailand and Laos between 1968 and 1973 when you could just cross a ridge and happen upon Meo, Akha, Lisu or Karen villages and stay in their squalid, smoke filled huts or in bamboo shelters pitched on their steep rudimentary terraces. And see the tribes people still dressed in their hand-woven clothes (in fact, see the women weaving them), and cumbersome jewellery before they flogged the remnants at the night markets in Chiang Mai, see the little critters they caught skewered on crossbow arrows, see the Akha girls flying flirtatiously on their towering bamboo swings, and see the hillsides and valleys rippling with opium poppy to the horizon. (The story of our trek in Laos was told in This is your Last Airplane, also in High Times in the Middle of Nowhere). One trek was memorable for being with a shady character who was running guns to the Karen rebels in Burma. In Chiang Mai the colourful Colonel Lucky Lek, whose Chevrolet Bel Air held pride of place in his drive-in living room, introduced me to a Mr On who suggested I join him on a three day walk out of some desolate border settlement a days drive in a pick-up on outback quality roads from Chiang Mai. I dont recall the name of this place because I had no guidebook, no maps, and there were no signs. Unprepared (ie prepared for anything) I went along for the ride. We crossed a ramshackle bridge, met nobody in uniform and disappeared into Burma. After about six hours we came across a Karen village which was actually a resettlement camp following the destruction of their homes by the Burmese army. One of the oddest English people I had ever met (I was only 20, and had yet to go to England where odd people abound) tipped himself out of a hammock and asked, without preliminaries, Do you require an elephant? A woman, whom I judged also to be English and his wife, remained in her hammock, but assessed me through the mesh with the toothy gape of a merry-go-round pony. Mr On was in hushed conversation with two or three older men, villagers were busy building, weaving and smashing rice with gigantic pivoted pestles, children chased chickens about, or could be heard chanting through a classroom doorway, so, not having anything particular to do myself, I said to the Englishman, Well, if youve a spare one. I believe we can free one up, the man replied jauntily. So a mahout arrived, an elephant following, I was hoisted aloft to the elephants neck, and we trampled off into the scrub. That night I slept in the school and we drank a bottle of Mekhong whisky that On had brought. The English woman, released from her

Murray Laurence

Backpacking Flashbacks

hammock, was as entertaining as she was batty, and had a fierce taste for the Mekhong. Unexpectedly, they were teachers and missionaries and fully supported the Karen struggle for autonomy. They were not interested in conversions anyway the people had long been Christians, at least nominally but in guiding the Karen towards new skills that would help them build their settlements and survive. They were not the least discountenanced by the arms that Ons business would bring. In fact they argued strongly for the insurgency that the Karen, Kachin and other minorities were engaged in, against increasingly brutal Burmese repression. What this would mean for their own future in the country, I didnt dare imagine. The next day On and I continued on elephants with two mahouts. We reached another Karen community and another sales opportunity for Mr On. More Mekhong (which On produced magically from places tucked away in his jacket neither of us had a bag) watching weaving and dancing and children rushing happily about at my presence. Mr On said that the army had been through here only weeks earlier and had burned houses, trashed fields and killed a number of men. Next time the Karen wanted to be prepared. We returned in the morning with the elephants to the first village and then On and I retreated on foot to our starting point at the Thai border, and back to Chiang Mai, Colonel Lek having sent his Bel Air, despite the atrocious roads. In those days I had a keen interest in Asian history and politics, so I was not entirely ignorant of what had been happening up here in these godforsaken margins of the Golden Triangle, and of the multitude of ugly little conflicts that flared and smouldered in the shadow of the all-consuming Vietnam war. Tragically, the struggles against the Burmese regime seem without end, and the border areas are now home to hundreds of thousands of refugees, landmines have long been part of the battle and nothing whatsoever has been achieved. The wars in Indochina have been over for decades, but the gruesome sideshows persist. Reflecting, here in my Chiang Mai garden, I feel I may have been a little harsh on todays flash/backpackers. After all, what did I achieve by my picaresque excursions into other peoples trouble spots? A few good stories? In Chiang Mai I meet young people who are not wandering aimlessly into Burma or anywhere else, but are volunteering to work with the refugees from all these dreadful conflicts who exist precariously on both sides of the border, abandoned to a remorseless, outlaw state on one side and to statelessness on the other. These travellers might appear to be softies all that pampering, organisation and

4 Murray Laurence

Backpacking Flashbacks

technology but I am sure that they are making a more significant difference to the lives of distressed people than we did with our unplanned, unfocused ramblings.
A version of this story was published in The Australian 15-16 October 2011

Murray Laurence