Our first sanctified vacation was our honeymoon. It was the early sixties. We were in our early twenties. Larry had just finished his second year of Columbia Law School. I was working at a glamour job in a New York publishing house, making $62.50 a week.
Our three-month-long European honeymoon was sponsored by the generosity of our wedding guests. Instead of giving us multiple teak ice buckets, cheese trays, and revolving fondue sets, they pooled their money and slipped us a check for $1,500.00. “Have fun,” read the note.
Our hope was that by camping and cooking most of our meals, we could make the money last until September, when Larry would begin his last year of law school, but we couldn’t, which is why we found ourselves traveling deck-class on a Greek liner that carried passengers between Piraeus and Haifa. Our plan was to work on a kibbutz for the rest of the summer, in exchange for room and board.
We had just delighted in a dinner of tuna from a can, fresh tomatoes, bread, and cheap wine, which we shared with about fifty other deck-class passengers, who shared their dinners with us. A few of them spoke English. Mostly we passed around a lot of wine and sang a lot of international folk songs about oppressed people who never went to college.
Exhausted from trying to speak in tongues, Larry and I bedded down in one of the lifeboats that were cantilevered over the Aegean. All was peaceful. We were snug in our sleeping bags, bathed in starlight, staring at the night sky and listening to the sea.
What, I wondered, was the matter with all those middle-aged tourists below deck, sleeping in beds, living in rooms, eating at tables, getting led around like sheep? Didn’t they know they were missing the whole point of travel, getting to know the people and their culture? Didn’t they understand that tours, interpreters, guides, and itineraries made it almost impossible for anything genuine to happen? Didn’t they realize how their money actually insulated them from the very travel experiences they craved?
“Someday, when we’re older,” I said to Larry, “even if we end up having some money, let’s never forget how much fun this is. Let’s not let that happen to us.”
“Hmmm,” he said.
“Larry, I’m serious. Remind me, please, if I forget.”
Forty years later and I’d pay almost any amount not to have to eat tuna out of a can or wait in line with fifty others to use the only bathroom.
How did I let this betrayal happen? The same way it happened that I can’t close my jeans, that I meant to join the Peace Corps, that I swore I would never sound like my mother, sell out to the establishment, hold a conservative opinion, or take a job just for money. It took forty years to move from poorer to richer, from canned tuna to Chilean sea bass en croûte. We conceived our first son that summer in a tent on the Lido during a hurricane. Now I want a bed. I want indoors. I want water pressure.
Larry, by the way, doesn’t exactly have to be dragged kicking and screaming to the reception desk at a nice hotel either, although if it weren’t for my corrupting bourgeois influence, he might still be camping.
The seeds of corruption, I fear, were always in me. How else to interpret a letter I wrote to my parents from the kibbutz? I found it recently while sorting through papers in their attic. Even forty years later, I’m embarrassed by my smarmy bid for an infusion of funds.
I start with a diversionary tactic, telling them that we are having a wonderful time at the kibbutz. I let them know that we traveled deck-class on the way over from Piraeus, but that at the kibbutz we have the temporary use of a cabin that contains a chair and a single cot. Then I mention that the guy who normally lives here is away for the month, fulfilling his military requirement, and that unfortunately he has chained his favorite possession, his bike, to the bed, so that every night it’s the three of us in the cot. It’s harder on Larry than it is on me, I allow, since he gallantly insists upon being next to the bike.
I tell them that the business of the kibbutz is fish farming and that Larry gets up every morning at 4:00 A.M. to drag nets and harvest fish with the other men. They quit at noon because it gets too hot (110 degrees) to work. It’s at least as hot in the kitchen, where I pluck chickens from 9:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. And by the way, I mention, in a doozy of a postscript, “I might be pregnant.” (In fact I was.)
Not surprisingly, a check for one hundred dollars arrived from my parents, and with it a moral dilemma. Since we were living in a commune, where nothing was privately owned, we were supposed to turn the money over to the common treasury. We didn’t. Even though we sang the theme from Exodus (“This land is mine, God gave this land to me”) every morning as we strode to work, we kept quiet about the check.
The fact that we continue to sell out does not mean that we are no longer committed to authenticity; it’s the poverty part we’re not fond of. Now the challenge is to have authentic experiences in spite of being encumbered by funds.
I find I’m up to the challenge. Occasionally I enjoy staying in castles, a habit I perfected during our Relais and Chateâux period in the eighties. I like the rich, heavy tapestries and the way the worn stone steps speak to me of the tread of thousands of feet over dozens of centuries. There’s something grand about carrying around a room key the size and weight of an anvil. And what could be more authentic than to sleep under a coat of arms on a bed made for a Medici?
Larry’s not impressed. Did I notice the sound and light equipment? Didn’t I have an authenticity problem with the Jacuzzi? Does it bother me that they’re playing An American in Paris on the sound system in the dining room or that the Medici mattress is a Sealy Posturepedic? And by the way, he wonders, have I seen the bill?
Authenticity at any price is elusive. Travelers are doomed to run afoul of Werner Heisenberg’s killjoy uncertainty principle. For instance, does posing with a New Guinean wood carver in native dress right after he has taken an imprint of your credit card qualify as legit? Surely it’s more authentic than if we stayed home and watched New Guinea on the Travel Channel.
Was our three-day trek in Nepal any less genuine because the Sherpa we hired brought along a toilet tent and two chickens and we were gone for only three days? We walked uphill, didn’t we? In Nepal, right? Isn’t that trekking? Does somebody have to get lost, or starve?
Authenticity is not what it used to be. In Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, they eat tartar sauce and drink Genghis Kahn beer. Sri Lanka, which used to be Ceylon, has a Pizza Hut. Even banana republics have Banana Republics. Our friend Carole was in Lapland, wrapped in reindeer robes, roasting meat on a stick over an open fire when she heard the ring of a fax machine.
Cultural legitimacy, National Geographic variety, is hard to find. In 1998 some friends of ours came close. They were part of an exclusive tour group that visited the Asmat tribe in Irian Jaya, Indonesia’s most remote province, where polygamy is the norm, bare breasts and penis gourds are the fashion, and people live in grass huts and use Stone Age tools and weapons.
Asmats have a special way of welcoming strangers. In Irian Jaya a simple handshake will not do. Nothing less than a literal reenactment of childbirth will suffice to make a visitor feel at home. Our friends were invited to crawl between their hostess’s legs and then suckle briefly at her breasts. They speak about this experience with deep reverence.
When traveling, we find it is possible to create conditions under which authenticity is likely to occur. Westminster Abbey, for instance, is not such a place. What we seek when we travel is that wonderful feeling of being “let in,” of no longer being tourists on the outside, with our noses pressed against the pane. We want some kind stranger to come to the door and let us in. We travel for those moments. They make us feel at home.
When in London, for instance, Larry likes to go to a pub and get himself invited to play darts. Once he’s had his back slapped by a beery Englishman, he’s in. Then he gets more in. He usually leaves the pub smoking an English cigarette, speaking with a cockney accent, and suffused with a desire to buy a tweed cap.
Before I can feel at home in France, I have to go on a picnic. This is preceded by a trip to an outdoor market to purchase the ingredients. Once there, in the interests of authenticity, I must at least attempt to speak French. This works very well for the bread (∂u pain) and the wine (∂u vin). But when I order brie, I launch a shouting match. The proprietor thinks I’m asking for bruit, noise.
“Bruit?”
“Non, brie!”
“Bruit!!”
“Non, brie!!”
And so forth. Soon everyone in the store is making fun of the American woman who wants to eat bread and noise. My authentic French experience is nicely under way.
Larry and I settle ourselves down on a grassy bank beside a babbling (in French) brook near the Pont du Gard. Quite nearby, a young French couple, their little French toddler, and their French dog are also planning to enjoy a French pique-nique.
The French father throws a stick to the dog. The dog leaps into the air and then runs to fetch it. The dog brings it back. The next time the man throws the stick, the dog fetches it and drops it at Larry’s feet. We introduce ourselves. He is Claude. He’s a farmer. Marie teaches school. The baby is Lisette. Within minutes we are sharing picnics and attempting conversation. They want to know if we’d like to join them tomorrow for Lisette’s christening. A real French christening with real French people, in France! We accept. Marie likes my haircut. Besides, Claude and Marie can’t see anything wrong with the way I say brie. Larry trades Claude a pack of unfiltered Camels for a pack of his unfiltered Gauloises. Lisette launches herself across the grass to my outstretched arms, settles on my lap, and falls asleep. We’re in.
Poverty, especially in one’s choice of sleeping accommodations, offers the richest opportunities to pierce the tourist veil. During our Europe on Five Dollars a Day years we spent an extremely authentic evening in a hotel in Tours. We had to walk up three flights of stairs in order to get to our room. (A sign on the elevator read NE MARCHE PAS.) As it turned out, our sleep was constantly interrupted that night by the sound of staccato heels and work boots climbing up and down the stairs. By about five in the morning we figured it out: we were trying to sleep in a whorehouse. Meanwhile we looked forward to a warm shower and a night’s sleep.
LA DOUCHE NE MARCHE PAS, read a sign in the same hand on a note attached to the shower. The sign invited us to use the public baths in the center of town.
“This may be more authenticity than I bargained for,” I remember thinking as I sat naked on a long, slatted wooden bench, waiting with a lot of other naked women, who were also getting stripe marks on their buttocks. A matron carrying a stack of frayed towels escorted us to the shower room. There, standing in full view of one another and the matron, we were allowed one pull to get wet, one minute to soap up, and another pull to rinse off.
DÉFENSE DE SIFLER ET CHANTER (No whistling or singing), read a huge sign on the concrete wall. As if.
(If you’re the sort of person who insists upon having a wonderful time while you’re on vacation, authenticity may not be your thing.)
