The Turk Who Loved Apples (37 page)

Most of all, I knew how to
be
in Vietnam. You could teleport me there today, to a village I've never heard of, and I will feel at home. I will recognize the smells (old coconut, burning charcoal, exhaust, jasmine, fish sauce) and the improbably melodious cacophony of honking Hondas and synth-pop music and constant construction, and I won't worry that I don't know what to do. This may be, I'll admit, a profoundly mistaken attitude to proclaim—
presumptuous, even condescending—but I'm sure I can also deal with the consequences of that mistake.

Whether I planned it or not, my Vietnam experience became the model for all my future trips. The philosophy: eh, I'll do whatever. When I visited Jean in Paris in 1998, she and I walked around, shopped for neat clothing, and talked. True, we did spend a morning at the Louvre, but my memories of that—I remember vastly preferring the Winged Victory to the
Mona Lisa
—are nothing compared to the intensity of others: exploring the street market near Grenelle, where vendors sold heaping piles of choucroute garnie and brilliantly clean-flavored olives,
lucque super
, that I've never found since; getting rudely turned away from a wild-game restaurant where we had reservations. At the Fondation Cartier, we saw a marvelous exhibition showcasing the avant-garde work of Issey Miyake, the Japanese fashion designer, and in the museum bookstore I found portfolios by the Malian photographers Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta, who'd documented their country's ebullient postindependence era, and I was struck by how casually all these forces and nationalities intersected and overlapped: America, France, Japan, Taiwan, Mali; art, fashion, photography, romance. That night, I believe, we accidentally locked ourselves out of Jean's apartment and had to check into a cheap hotel down the street, and although it meant I would miss my flight the next day, I was ecstatic. Eiffel Tower? Panthéon? Pompidou? Why bother when real adventures were to be had!

I was, proudly, a bad tourist. I went to Bangkok two or three times before, at the behest of a friend of a friend, I visited the magnificent Royal Palace. (Haven't been back.) Two or three trips to Rome before I saw the Colosseum. (Incredible!) In Mexico City, Jean and I never even tried to figure out what you're supposed to see in Mexico City. Instead, we busied ourselves with a daylong exploration of the Mercado Central, which is surely on the list of things to see, but the point is we went there because
we
wanted to—we
wanted to see the piles of dried chiles and sample tacos stuffed with braised bulls' balls. At least, that's what I assumed was in them, given the vendors' unrestrained amusement at Jean's hearty chomping.

There were times, of course, when proper sightseeing was inescapable. On my first trip to India, for a wedding in 2003, my friend Sandra and I stayed in New Delhi with her friend's family, in a big house next door to the Saudi Arabian embassy. It was December, and Delhi was chilly, misty, grungy, and a bit boring, and since Sandra and I had several days to kill before the multiday wedding began, we decided to explore. Luckily—sort of—the father of our host family owned a tour company (also, the exclusive rights to import Cuban cigars). All we had to do was show up, and a trip was mapped out for us. We would drive through Rajasthan, go on a tiger safari, and finally see the Taj Mahal.

Rajasthan, the arid but colorful state southwest of Delhi, was fine. Mostly, I remember visiting a lot of forts. Impressive, old, fascinating forts. Forts that seemed to mean a lot to the guides who wanted to take us to one after another after another. But had I not gone to a single fort, I know now I would not have missed them. Even though, as I said, they were just fine.

The tiger safari, however, had me and Sandra much more excited. Tigers! Early one morning, we clambered into the open back of a jeep along with twenty other tourists, a mix of Indians and Brits, and sped into Ranthambore National Park. Down the bumpy hardpacked roads we went, our guides warning us not to get our hopes up too high. With just twenty-six tigers living in 150 square miles of jungle, they couldn't guarantee a sighting. But look, there was a deer! And over there—a colorful bird!

Around this time, a British man with a drooping face, grayish complexion, and unfashionably thick glasses began to grumble quietly to himself. About the crowding here in the Jeep, about the difficulty in seeing anything the guides were pointing out, about the cold weather. Sandra and I began to speculate about him: Why was he
here at all, and alone? He looked to be in his mid-fifties, and we concluded he was either a widower or divorced, and his friends back home, in an effort to cheer him up, had convinced him to take this trip to far-off India, whose exotic action would make his life vibrant again. It didn't seem to be working.

Suddenly, the Jeep slowed to a stop. Beyond a thin line of trees to our left, a vast field dotted with ponds and streams. A guide pointed into the field, and there, in the middle of it, almost hidden in the deep grasses, was a tiger! A real tiger. We held our breath. The tiger got up. It walked, lazily, as tigers do, across the field. All were silent, motionless, awestruck—except for the Brit, who muttered about how he couldn't actually see the tiger. And once he could, once he'd fixed on its position, once he'd watched it saunter majestically out of the woods and into the road two hundred yards ahead of us, he announced, in a clearer voice than before, “It's like watching paint dry.”

Then the tiger disappeared into the thicker woods on the other side of the road.

It was about 10 a.m., and our guides and drivers, formerly worried we might not see a tiger, had a new problem. We'd seen a tiger, yes, but we still had four hours left on the tour, and if we were going to be honest about things, there wasn't much else to see in Ranthambore National Park except tigers. Deer and colorful birds are fine, but after you've seen a tiger, they're like Cheerios to a child who's tasted Froot Loops.

And so, with four hours to go, miles and miles of road to cover, and nothing left to see, the driver stepped on the gas. And so, for four hours, through miles and miles of forest, Sandra and I and the sad Brit and everyone else huddled in the back of the Jeep, suffering through hard incessant jouncing, shivering in the wind chill. A kind Indian woman loaned the sad Brit her silk scarf, and he'd draped it over his head and shoulders to keep warm; he looked suicidal.

Near the end of this unpleasant voyage, the Jeep pulled to a stop so that we could, incredibly, gaze upon a
second
tiger as it loped in the distance. And then, when it had gone, the Jeep zipped back to the park's entrance, and we achingly returned to our hotel—a threadbare, insect-ridden “resort” where our attempts at sleep were interrupted by the rumble of trucks on an unseen highway, like dinosaurs lowing in the distance.

Early the next morning, Sandra and I fled. We'd been scheduled for another tiger safari (in case we hadn't spotted one the first day), but that did not seem advisable. Instead we rushed to the train station, where we admired the “Rogus [sic] Gallery,” a wall decorated with photos of known thieves and pickpockets, then turned around to watch an organized gang of monkeys rob a passerby of his bag of mangoes. At last we boarded the third-class train that would deposit us somewhere near Agra, and from there we caught a bus to the city—and the great Taj Mahal.

The Taj Mahal—built by a seventeenth-century Mughal emperor in memory of his third wife, visited by millions of awestruck visitors every year, one of the finest pieces of architecture in all of India, if not the world—is, in my humble estimation, quite symmetrical. Really, that's about all I have to say about it. The Taj Mahal is beautiful and inspiring and so on, but its perfectionism—embodied in that attention to symmetry—didn't resonate with me. I wanted flaws, I wanted quirks, I wanted a human connection. Instead, our guides emphasized its flawlessness, its precision, its holiness. To me, those attributes are boring.

What bothered me about the Taj Mahal, and much of our sightseeing in India, was the feeling of obligation that surrounded it. If you were in northern India, it felt expected, almost required, that you'd go there. Otherwise, why else would you have come to northern India, if not to see the Taj Mahal, the forts, the tigers?

Although I understood the reasoning, I still bristled at such expectations. Why should I spend my time and money on things and
places I'm not interested in, especially when so many other, overlooked experiences beckon? After the Taj Mahal, Sandra and I had to figure out a way to spend the afternoon, and I had an idea. All over town, I'd seen posters—in lurid Day-Glo colors—advertising the circus. We had to go!

And we did. That night, in the company of the guides hired by our friend's father's company, we watched clowns joke in Hindi, and motorcyclists drive upside-down in mesh spheres, and poorly trained acrobats leap, tumble, and fall, then get up to do it again. After a brief moment of calm, a hippopotamus appeared from behind a curtain. Led by its trainer, it stumbled around the ring and opened its cavernous mouth, into which the trainer tossed a cabbage. Then it stumbled back behind the curtains.

Amazing! Granted, this was no Barnum & Bailey, but the circus performers were trying, with what little resources and talent they had, to put on a show, here in this city where a circus could never compete with the Taj for the public's attention. No one laughed or cheered at anything that night—not even the children in the audience. I've never understood why not. But I do know that Sandra and I cheered and laughed all the harder to make up for it, and that next time I wind up in Agra, I'm crossing my fingers the circus is in town. But that Mughal tomb? Eh. Seen one Taj, seen Mahal.

Surely, I can't be the only traveler who feels trapped, or threatened, by the necessity of sightseeing. But I at least have options—I can get myself out and go do whatever it is I feel like doing.

But not everyone realizes they can do the same thing. In 2008, Stanley Fish—one of the most renowned academics in America—published an opinion piece on the
New York Times
Web site in which he declared himself to be “a bad traveler.” On recent trips to England, Ireland, and New Zealand, he explained, he'd gone to museums and abbeys and Stone Age sites and suddenly felt the weight of what he called “strategic fatigue”:

        
Strategic fatigue sets in whenever I enter a museum (when I saw that the display case containing the Book of Kells was surrounded by other tourists I didn't have the strength to push myself forward) or when I approach an ancient site (at Clonmacnoise, the location of an ancient abbey, I retreated immediately to the coffee shop and never saw the ruin) or when the possibility of getting out of the car to enjoy a scenic view presented itself (I protested that it would take too much time, or that we needed gas, or something equally feeble).

Translation: he was bored. “I just don't care about seeing sights,” he wrote.

Now that is an attitude I understand very well! But what left me perplexed about Fish's article is the question of why, if he didn't care about sightseeing, he spent all his travel time sightseeing. Why not, you know,
go do something else
—something he did care about?

If I were going to jump into the tourist-traveler debate, I'd peg this approach as the worst aspect of the classic tourist: the assumption that one travels only in order to sightsee; that there is no alternative but to accept and try vainly to enjoy what is presented; that one cannot act with independence and imagination; and finally, that one's travel life must be fundamentally different from one's home life.

Back when I was in the business of giving advice as the Frugal Traveler, I would tell readers to plan trips this way:
What do you like to do at home? Okay, now go do it somewhere else!
Whatever your hobbies are—needlepoint, running, chess, classical guitar, yo-yoing—you will find a group of like-minded enthusiasts abroad. Just Google the activity and your destination, and more often than not, you will discover them. And those people will in all likelihood be overjoyed to hear from you, a foreign devotee, and accept you into their circle. (And yes,
someone
will speak English.) And when you're all finished jogging up the waterfront or rocking the cradle, they will probably invite you out for a meal or a drink or to see some other aspect of their cities and towns
that you couldn't have imagined. And then you will have a very good time indeed. Professor Fish, you will not be bored!

During my Frugal Traveler stint (and even afterward), I spent an awful lot of time wondering: what do people actually like to do when they travel? I knew what I liked, and that was fine, but since I was writing these stories for a much broader audience, I felt compelled to do more than just wander and sit around and eat and talk to people. But what else was there? Okay, a museum. Fine, a play. Some famous thing that everybody always goes to—why not?

The great thing about doing this as the Frugal Traveler was that many of the most noted attractions were beyond my budget, so I could guiltlessly write them out of the story. But I could also twist my themes to avoid them. The first time I went to Rome, for example, I quoted Mark Twain in
Innocents Abroad:

        
What is there in Rome for me to see that others have not seen before me? What is there for me to touch that others have not touched? What is there for me to feel, to learn, to hear, to know, that shall thrill me before it pass to others? What can I discover? Nothing. Nothing whatsoever.

If Twain could find nothing whatsoever to discover in the classic sights of Rome, why should I, the Frugal Traveler, even try? Instead, I wouldn't. “If I missed something big,” I wrote, “well, I could always come back in a year or ten. There's a reason they call it the Eternal City.” And so I based myself in Trastevere, the once-unfashionable district on the wrong side of the Tiber River, and ate at ramshackle trattorias and met people who remain good friends to this day and never gave a thought to all the great big famous things I was missing.