El Dorado of the Authentic 28.03.10

Know the personal,

yet keep to the impersonal:

accept the world as it is.

If you accept the world,

the Tao will be luminous inside you

and you will return to your primal self.

The world is formed from the void,

like utensils from a block of wood.

The Master knows the utensils,

yet keeps to the block:

Thus she can use all things

Fragment of the Tao te Ching Chapter 28

Return to your primal self...Paul, I need Marshall McLuhan right now. Like that scene in Manhattan when Woody Allen conjured him up to substantiate his argument while he stood in line to see a movie I need some interpreter to help me understand what is occurring when a place with soul is ‘discovered’. We’ve all witnessed the phenomenon- an idyll is found and certain individuals gather together in that place because they share like values and aesthetics. Soon the sensually-parasitic wolfpack who raven after the false Gods of Cool and Unique descend like a horde of locusts, consuming the soul and altering what was unselfconsciously precious to some sort of simulacrum of middle-class ideal.

I imagine that Pai in northern Thailand must have been such a place about 15 years ago with its benign climate, beautiful geography; surrounded by villages of indigenous peoples with complex and various customs and practices. There are possibly places within 100 klicks of here that haven’t seen the farang boom that turns authentic pulchritude into postcard verisimilitude of that once-and-forgotten way of life. The minute the lotus-eaters descend the real reverses to false (I’ve forgotten the tetragram Marshall, this is where you step in). In its pre-Disneyfied past it must have been charming.

An apocryphal aside: Mr. McLuhan is said to have taken over 25 takes to speak his two or so lines in the movie. The man could lecture extemporaneously for hours but on camera he couldn’t stand and deliver. What was happening there Marshall?

Pai (Pbeye) is still pretty and quasi-bucolic but something here has been irreparably broken. The old locals don’t like the changes (but they need the eggs). You can faintly hear the ghosts of ages past murmuring their stories of tradition, belief, life, death, suffering and bliss but they are wraiths, unable to exist in this spiritually myopic present. The river is crowded with mock-authentic bungalows, like some sort of Potemkin village of an unspoiled time. There are 8 foot high signs screaming the names of the hotel, they reflect in the river like fractured fictions.

The locals compete with banal t-shirt wagons and ubiquitous juice stands. There are five or six service sector responses: guesthouse or hotel, coffee house and boozery, restaurant (baken and egs for breakfast), gewgaw and knickknack shoppe, massage parlour or tour service (‘See the longnecks in their villages, just 300 Baht!’).

In our travels we are still getting it wrong. We seek the unspoiled but our guide is the (anything but) Lonely Planet. That means we are treading a path flattened and buffed by the sandals of tens of thousands of others. We all sit in cafes poring over the instruction manual. Gluing our compasses to ‘fun’ and arriving like cattle in the next stockyard of dreams (ok Colin, time to play another tune).

We meet people all along the way; usually expats and vagabonds who know the less trammelled places but we typically learn of their Shangri-la as we are sitting on a bus, leaving the potential jewel , traveling toward the next trinket. We keep saying ‘next time’ or ‘ let’s just head off here or there’ but we end up playing it safe. Time is too precious to waste it getting lost (wrong, wrong, wrong). We find blitzkrieged Goa instead of leafy Elysium.

Pai is haven for tatted and rasta’ed Japanese and American middle class youth. It’s still cheap and funky but the signs of rot are all there. Condos springing up like mushrooms on the outskirts of town, tourism-obsessed service operators jostling cheek by jowl for a the meagre Baht in the low season, looking like spent dogs, glaring murderously at tourists who pass them by and select the establishment next door.

In a few years this place will be a mecca for chubby-cheeked, triple jowled Billy Bunter Senior – clamouring for their waffles with whipped cream, mocha lattes and AC – another Starbucked wasteland. The hip youth will leave to seek boho elsewhere and the vagabonds will dig deep into the dirt roads and dangerous countries to enjoy their off-grid Eden.

Ad Nauseum.

Sophie thinks I’m REALLY negative in this posting. I’d have to agree with her. Maybe it is the sticky rice mangoes with coconut cream sauce. Really, the trip is mostly fun, I’m just feeling a bit more cynical today. Frustrated maybe. Tomorrow none of this diatribe will be true and the world will be a perfect, shiny place.