Varieties of Travel Misery

A backpacker is a wretched creature. Your body dirty, your clothes rumpled, unfashionable, and smelly, you spend much of your time reduced to a primitive state of seeking out the basic necessities of survival: food, shelter, toilets. The language barrier renders you illiterate, and indeed barely able to communicate at the level of an articulate four-year-old, while you blunder about blithely violating customs, social norms, and basic rules of civility.

The locals, accustomed to the notion of rich Westerners, find you cheap and bewilderingly uncouth. Those who are more used to dealing with your type figure they have you pegged: what you want is to drink a lot of beer, listen to Bob Marley, and eat banana pancakes, in between being overcharged for taxi rides. Your fellow backpackers are mainly keen to impress upon you how much more intrepid they are than you, while your expat compatriots just find you embarrassing (though the feeling is very often mutual). Every so often you find yourself in your grubby hostel or third-class train carriage thinking wistfully of the mid-range comforts you could afford if you weren't trying to stretch your dollars through half a dozen different countries -- and if you happen to stumble into a high-end restaurant or a luxury hotel (maybe you're still looking for that toilet) the contrast, and the prices, make your head spin.

Of course it's not all bad. Of course your trip is filled with astonishing experiences and serendipitous pleasures; of course you can find all kinds of grounds to smugly pity the high-rolling tourists who will never have the experience of meeting the locals in the hard seat section of a Chinese train, or of the stark and simple joy you feel at the early morning appearance of a chai walla. And anyway, once you've been home a couple of months, all the bad parts begin to disappear from memory.

But sometimes things just suck. And in recognition of that simple fact, herewith I present three visions of travel misery for your schadenfruede-soaked pleasure.

1. Top Bunk Purgatory


Jaisalmer-Delhi Express, India. Top berth in a sleeper class carriage. It was hot, cramped, and dirty, and the train was sitting motionless at the platform, our departure delayed indefinitely while the conductor banged away at a broken bunk with some sort of hammer. The fans weren't working. Rachel thought it would be a good time to take a picture of me.

2. Despair on a Train


As I mentioned above, traveling in hard seat class on a Chinese train is a great way to meet locals -- who are, it must be said, mostly solicitous and kind. It's also a great way to spend a night jammed upright among at least six other people, enveloped in a noxious cloud of cigarette smoke and the stench of un-flushed squat toilets, dodging the phlegm noisily hocked up and spat on the floor all around you, wishing for the comparative serenity of an Indian sleeper car.

This photo is actually slightly posed, though the sentiment was real. It was taken shortly after boarding, when we were starting to get an idea of what our night was going to be like, but before we were invited to take seats in what looked to us like a completely full compartment. I'll be bragging about the misery of that night for decades.

3. Washed Up in Likeng


Our first evening in Likeng, a tiny and painfully picturesque village in China's Jiangxi province, the owner of our guesthouse told us she was turning in early because she had to get up before dawn to slaughter the pig. Sure enough, we were awakened at three a.m. by the harrowing sounds of the deed being done ten feet directly below our window. In the morning there was blood on the rocks and a major butchering operation underway in the family's living quarters.

Likeng is a widely recognized historic village, under assault by waves of day trippers during holiday periods. It happened to be where we ended up parking ourselves during the May Day week, when, we were told, it would be foolish to try getting around or finding a hotel room anywhere in China. We stayed put in our simple room, with its hard beds, smelly squat toilet (yes, it's a theme in China), and wide variety of available pork-based dishes, venturing out to take pictures of the village or walk along the lovely path through a narrow agricultural valley surrounded by pine-wooded hills. For two days, it was charming. The third day, it began to get a bit old. The fourth day, it rained. We were confined to our guesthouse, sick of our books and our conversations, and totally fed up with the simple pleasures of the countryside. I spent much of the day on the balcony staring like an angry hunchback at a world I had come to loathe, no matter how beautiful it might be. While I was occupied with this, Rachel surreptitiously took my picture, capturing for posterity a moment of the impressive self-pity one can work up while enjoying the trip of a lifetime.

Beaches: Palolem and Varkala

We've spent most of the past week and a half lying on beaches, first Palolem Beach in Goa, which was calm and idyllic, and then Varkala Beach in southern Kerala, which had big dramatic waves and the tourist strip perched precariously on a cliff above it. We overheard someone saying Varkala was like "Europe in the sky," referring to the number of tourists, but I'm not convinced that any European eats that many banana pancakes or listens to Hotel California that incessantly when they're actually in Europe!

We didn't really mean to do both beaches consecutively but it ended up that way due to another quirk of the Indian transportation system: We tried to buy a ticket from Goa to Kochi, planning to work our way down the Kerala coast to Varkala gradually, but were only able to buy a ticket that took us all the way to the south of Kerala, so we figured we'd just work our way back up the coast slowly instead! That meant a fourteen hour train ride from Mangalore which arrived at Varkala at 4 in the morning, so we ended up sitting around on the platform for three hours until the sun came up and we were able to head to the beach to find a place to stay.

Transportation curiosities, and what we were doing in Sangli

I was expecting to find the traffic in Mumbai terrifying. I don't know if I've just gotten braver over the past few years or if the pace of traffic in Mumbai is nothing compared to Bangkok and Managua but riding around in taxis turned out to be the most thrilling and fascinating part of our three short days in the city. Catching fleeting glimpses of temples, slums, luxury apartment complexes, and street markets all unceremoniously crowded together on the same streets left me constantly straining my neck to see what was going on and wishing we had more time to explore the city. A few extra days probably wouldn't have made much of a difference though--Mumbai seems like the kind of city you have to live in to even start to understand.

It's not just a stereotype that everything in India is colorful, nor is it an exaggeration that the bureaucracy here is insane. We managed to spend practically a whole day booking our train ticket from Mumbai to Sangli, although this was partly because we took a taxi all the way to the station before realizing we needed our ATM cards and had to go all the way back to where we were staying to get them. The reason we needed our ATM cards, despite having enough cash on us to buy the tickets, was that in order to buy tickets as a foreigner you have to prove your foreigner status by showing an ATM receipt for the cash you're using to pay (in addition to showing your passport)! We then had to find the special foreigner ticket window and wait with the other foreigners on a bench marked "foreign tourist only"! We eventually got our tickets, but they were only provisional tickets, meaning we were second and third in line to get seats if people canceled, so we had to go back the next day to confirm that we could actually get on the train. We then had to come back one hour later to find out what seats we had been allocated!

Anyway, it all worked out and we finally got on the sleeper to Sangli, where we had been invited to visit the offices of SANGRAM, an organization that provides outreach, support, community, and services to sex workers in certain regions of Maharastra and Karnataka. I hadn't been on a sleeper since I was a kid and I was so excited that I didn't sleep at all. Every time we stopped at a station the noises coming from outside made it sound like we were at an amusement park instead of a train station. We arrived in Sangli at 5:20am, where we were met by one of SANGRAM's staff members and taken in a rickshaw cab to the SANGRAM office, where we managed to sleep for a couple of hours before being woken at 9:30 for breakfast.

That day, after hearing a brief history of SANGRAM and its sister and brother organizations, VAMP (serving female sex workers) and MUSKAN (serving male sex workers), we talked with some of the women from VAMP and sat in on one of their weekly organizational meetings, where delegates from different regions reported back on outreach they had done that week, issues in each region, and plans for the next few weeks. Some topics of discussion included finding housing for the children of a sex worker who wasn't able to take care of them and reaching out to home-based sex workers who are reluctant to visit drop in centers. I had heard all about how huge and wide-reaching Indian sex worker organizations are but you have to see them in action to really understand what that means. I've never seen such a practical, focused and well-organized meeting and I was left wondering why it's so difficult to organize sex workers in the US (and other Western countries). I was also inspired to start thinking a lot more about plans for organizing after we get back home.


After the meeting we visited the offices of MUSKAN, where some of the boys from the group performed in drag, carrying out a traditional fertility ritual which involved handing out vegetables and putting tumeric on our foreheads (see picture!). The entertainment continued with dancing and acting out various well-known (apparently) scenes from Bollywood movies.

We then repaid SANGRAM for all their hospitality by running off to Goa with their only set of office keys, which then had to be couriered back to Sangli (at least eight hours by road I think) at top speed before they could get back into their offices for work. Yeah, we're still feeling pretty guilty about that.