Luxagraf

A great little ruminative essay from Rolf Potts (of Vagabonding.net fame) about a burmese refuge, travel writing and a good bit more. I’d never heard of this site before, but it’s actually quite good, I might have to submit something one of these days.

Of all the places in the world where I’d lived for more than a couple of months, Ranong was by far the most obscure. A frumpy border town of 30,000 people in the rainiest part of Thailand’s isthmus, it held little appeal for tourists — apart from its proximity to the southern tip of Burma, where backpackers enamored with the country’s meditation retreats and full-moon parties could get a cheap re-entry visa in a couple of hours. Besides fishing and tin mining, timber poaching and amphetamine smuggling seemed to be Ranong’s principal industries, and scores of refugees from Burma’s repressive dictatorship lived in squalid huts at the edges of town.

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The other reason I’d returned to Ranong was to find some isolation so I could finish a magazine article that was weeks overdue. The adventure stories I’d written two years earlier for the Major American Luxury-Travel Magazine had attracted the attention of a Major American Adventure-Travel Magazine, and I’d been discussing possible assignments with an editor for months. Unfortunately, no story I proposed — exploring fishing villages along the upper Cambodian Mekong, mountaineering in Turkish Kurdistan, visiting the isolated tribesmen of the Andaman Islands — seemed quite right for him. We’d finally settled on a how-to feature about “classic adventures” in Asia. I’d spent much of the previous three years adventuring through the distant corners of the Asian continent, but this experience had put me at a weird disadvantage in reporting the story. “You’re giving us too much geography,” my editor would tell me every time I submitted a new list of destination summaries. Readers of Major American Adventure-Travel Magazines, he told me, didn’t want to read about journeys that were obscure or complicated; they wanted exotic challenges wherein they might test — or, at least, imagine themselves testing — the extremes of human experience.

Ezio teased me about my latest magazine assignment as he stood in the kitchen, his hulking mass bent over a tiny espresso pot. “These American magazines don’t even know what adventure is,” he said. “They want you to write about camping toys and sports vacations. They want you to make people think adventure is something that costs $8,000 and lasts as long as a Christmas holiday. They want you to make rich people feel good for being rich.”

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I stayed on at the Lotus Guesthouse and struggled with my article for the Major American Adventure-Travel Magazine. Every time I researched some upscale mountain trek in the Nepal Himalayas or two-week scuba diving excursion off the coast of Papua New Guinea, I couldn’t help but ponder how pointless it all was. I began to e-mail my editor pointed questions about how one should define the “extremes of human experience.” How was kayaking a remote Chinese river, I asked, more notable than surviving on its shores for a lifetime? How did risking frostbite on a helicopter-supported journey to arctic Siberia constitute more of an “adventure” than risking frostbite on a winter road-crew in Upper Peninsula Michigan? Did anyone else think it was telling that bored British aristocrats — not the peoples of the Himalayas — were the ones who first deemed it important to climb Mount Everest? My editor’s replies were understandably terse.

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