"There is a purity, I think, to visiting a place for the first time that goes deeper than just a hunger for the new; I couldn't begin to say that Moorea was spoiled when I arrived in early 2000 because I'd never seen what it was like before my visit. Newcomers to Bali today are as taken with its charms as I was 20 years ago - until they start settling in and muttering about the loss of paradise.
The great cities of the world are so much the products of their centuries of energy and achievement that, like images on Times Square screens, London, New York, Tokyo dissolve and reform themselves every instant, inexhaustible. But the second or third time we visit, it is we who are spoilt, in every sense. Some innocence in us is gone and now we are whining children asking why things are not as we remember them.
The traveller very easily forgets that his first question should not be what he feels but what the locals feel. Ask someone in Bali - or Havana or Manchester - whether she would be happier without the latest high-rises and developments and she might say "No". Every kid longs to be grown-up. "I want the particular virtues of Mali, Guatemala, Laos," the tourist says, "a place where nothing has changed for centuries." "I want the stuff of New York, Paris, Los Angeles," the resident of Antigua, Luang Prabang, Timbuktu replies. Change is just another word for progress."
[just like the question, is there beauty in the skyscaper skyline?]
Just another word for progress
By Pico Iyer
Published: August 26 2006 03:00 | Last updated: August 26 2006 03:00
Istepped out on to the tarmac in Tibet in 1985 and took a deep breath. Skies so sharp and cobalt they took the wind out of me. A vast, lunar, dusty expanse in which, I had heard, on the road into Lhasa, there were Buddhas painted on the rock-face. A handful of Tibetans whose wild eyes and often dirt-blackened faces spoke for life at the farthest edges of human experience.
Until 1950 fewer than 2,000 westerners had ever set foot in Lhasa and until the city was opened up again for tourism, just before my arrival, not many more had joined their number. The ÂÂlittle capital of whitewashed houses gathered haphazardly around the Potala Palace, the silent monasteries to east and west, the black yak-hair tents of nomads in the distance, all looked as if they had never been worn away by flash-bulbs and tourist gasps.
When I went back to Tibet five years on, and then returned for a third trip, a few years ago, what I was seeing was not new and unfallen Tibet, of course, but the nature of change, and memory and loss. It had grown used to the world, and so had I. Shopping malls and karaoke parlours by the hundred, brothels and gaudy multi-storey Chinese hotels were everywhere.
But even if they hadn't been, it would not have been the same. A first visit is a journey into discovery, wonder, the shock of encounter; a second visit - or a third, or a 23rd - is a journey into seeing how much of what you saw before you cannot see now, or maybe never really saw in the first place.
With friends, I find, it's very different. Somehow I always see them - even in the flesh - as they were when I first met them: an old school-friend is always a grubby-fingered 14-year-old making bathroom jokes (even after the rest of the world has discovered him as a cabinet minister or a prize-winning novelist); a one-time love is somehow still the person I saw when she was 20, in spite of the evidence before me. First impressions are so strong that they tend to block out all that follows; or at least to form the foundation on which everything else is a development. Go back to a place - which gets developed by other hands as people do not - and what you notice, nearly always, is how it is not the place it was.
Thus the traveller's age-old lament: "You should have seen it when . . . " or, "The first time I was here . . . ". In Bali the first group of foreign artists and intellectuals to arrive, in the 1920s, started bemoaning the loss of paradise, and every group since has been bemoaning it in much the same terms for more than 70 years now.
We almost never acknowledge the ways in which places have improved. What hits us most forcibly, in home -town or favourite holiday spot, is how that special treasure is gone. In my case I used to go to Cuba every year in the late 1980s and could imagine I had a whole island to myself; the only other tourists I'd see along its languorous, mostly carless streets were a few pasty-faced Bulgarians, some North Koreans with badges of their Great Leaders on their hearts, and Soviets delightedly lining up at the breakfast buffet of the old Hotel Nacional (with its hand-operated iron elevators), hardly caring that the only peaches served in this tropical place came from cans.
Nowadays, the spirit, the buzz, the special sauce of Cuba, caught in the sashay of its people, the sound of drums through the trees and guitars along the seafront, the kids trying to sell you turtles as you walk through Central Havana, are surely just what they were then. But I tell myself I can't bear to visit it with its new hotels, its 21st-century hustle, its touristed and renovated streets. If you know someone when she's 16, and all the world is before her, it suddenly becomes harder to see her when she's 30, surrounded by screaming kids, her horizons very much filled in.
It's all in the head, really; an illusion we hold on to that we have a claim on somewhere and it should remain our own. We don't like to see places grown-up, in every sense; we want them always to play the parts we've scripted in advance for them. This isn't so far from the related belief that all undeveloped countries ought to remain highly picturesque and quaint, without the cell-phones, TVs and Starbucks outlets that we find so indispensable. The traveller is a willy-nilly coloniser, often, an imperialist of the imagination, and he does not like to see signs of independence, or other affections, in his chosen subject.
In Kyoto, where I live, the old temples along the eastern hills now open their gates after nightfall in the autumn so you can see the blaze of five-pointed maple leaves against the moon, walk among illuminated stands of bamboo, hear koto strings plucked above a river in which the autumn moon hangs. The walkways along the central Kamo River have been cleaned so that, my Kyoto-born wife tells me, the white birds that fled in her youth have finally returned. There are funky new streets full of cafés, and outdoors coffee-shops on the Starbucks model that have made the old capital more open and relaxed than it ever was.
But much of what a foreigner sees, inevitably, is that the old wooden buildings at the centre of town have been torn down. A 14-storey hotel defaces the classical view of the northeastern hills from downtown. Cars and skyscrapers and clangorous pachinko parlours play havoc with the Memoirs of a Geisha dreams we bring to the city. We, who visit the clamorous city, now recite our hip-hop versions of the 17th-century lament of the Japanese poet Basho: "Even in Kyoto, I long for Kyoto."
The places we hang on to, perhaps, are the ones that somehow remain fixed in time, or out of time, so that nothing seems to change: the stretch of Big Sur coastline in California is so regularly cut off for months at a time by winter storms (huge boulders blocking the unsteady one-lane road) that the population seems to be diminishing, if anything, as if the whole area were growing steadily less developed and more and more returned to rock and sea.
India sprouts new high-tech facilities and lava-lamp restaurants daily, but there's something about the swarm, the polymorphous anarchy of the place that seems never to change, even as it pulls new ingredients into the mix. Turn away from the Taj Mahal and look out across the Yamuna River at dusk and there, in the midst of Agra, you see nothing but a solitary form and a water-buffalo walking by the water, set against a declining sun. Every century is still current in India, especially the distant ones.
There is a purity, I think, to visiting a place for the first time that goes deeper than just a hunger for the new; I couldn't begin to say that Moorea was spoiled when I arrived in early 2000 because I'd never seen what it was like before my visit. Newcomers to Bali today are as taken with its charms as I was 20 years ago - until they start settling in and muttering about the loss of paradise.
The great cities of the world are so much the products of their centuries of energy and achievement that, like images on Times Square screens, London, New York, Tokyo dissolve and reform themselves every instant, inexhaustible. But the second or third time we visit, it is we who are spoilt, in every sense. Some innocence in us is gone and now we are whining children asking why things are not as we remember them.
The traveller very easily forgets that his first question should not be what he feels but what the locals feel. Ask someone in Bali - or Havana or Manchester - whether she would be happier without the latest high-rises and developments and she might say "No". Every kid longs to be grown-up. "I want the particular virtues of Mali, Guatemala, Laos," the tourist says, "a place where nothing has changed for centuries." "I want the stuff of New York, Paris, Los Angeles," the resident of Antigua, Luang Prabang, Timbuktu replies. Change is just another word for progress.
Pico Iyer is the author of "Sun After Dark", a collection of travel essays
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006
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