Traveling philosophically: Thailand, the End

Wealth, particularly Americans traveling with wealth, marks you out as different and as a target. Not a target for thieves or robbers which is just a traveler’s usual caution, only that, traveling Americans with money seemingly tend not to know how to behave with that money, more often than not and it was nowhere more viscerally obvious than on this, the most tourist of places. While we were traveling on a very strict budget, we were strikingly aware that every single person on that island was dependent on tourist spending for income and for some reason, that make us terribly uncomfortable in a strange way.

I had never felt like this before, not quite laid bare like this before, having always traveled internationally either on business or to see family and PiC had only ever experienced a shadow of this once before in Mexico when his family had an incident.

Jennifer notes that “People will try to take advantage of you” in bargaining and “When you have money, the gap between rich and poor seems (or should seem) much bigger all of a sudden. You realize that you have so much more than many other people.”

Both true, but that doesn’t get at the soul of the feeling that there’s something deeper, that it feels like there is something brittle in the choice to be where there’s nothing left but a tourist trade to sustain a region.

We didn’t feel that same sensation in Phuket or in Chiang Mai – and perhaps it had worn off because we were in the city or were more tired or perhaps because there was more depth to those areas.  It was a lovely trip and we met some absolutely lovely people, especially our hoteliers in Chiang Mai who were really more like an aunt and uncle who let us stay over in delightful bungalows with their menagerie of animals and other guests and served homecooked meals.

Since that trip, I haven’t had much time to think over those feelings but we did agree that it was disconcerting. We really aren’t looking for decadence and luxury when we travel, and even less so when we’re in regions that have such widespread poverty but for the tourist trade, and a striking disparity between classes and wealth. Neither of us are comfortable trying to play upper echelon traveler, we’re much happier blending in with the everyday crowd. It’s the experience of learning a new culture, language, history, and people that we look for in a trip, all of which can be accomplished on a low-key budget.