Travel Fatigue:
Penang is considered one of the world’s “street food capitals”. Some surveys place it as number 4 on a list of “best places to visit” for this reason. I wish I could say, then, that I’d indulged. But I didn’t. I spent most of my time there in my room.
Was I bed-ridden with some tropical illness? Perhaps I had urgent business to attend to (whatever business occupies an unemployed individual with no familial responsibilities). But no. I sat in my bed because the idea of going out there seemed unbearable. I was much happier simply reading books, watching funny shows on Netflix, and listening to podcasts.
This is strange behavior. There I was, in one of the world’s richest culinary environments (as well as being one of the least expensive), doing what I’ve apparently always dreamt of doing, what I’ve spent pages and pages in this blog trying to get people to do – travel – and rather than go out into the thick of it I was essentially confining myself to house arrest. Had something gone wrong?
The answer may surprise you. That sentence was my attempt to attract the editors at Buzzfeed, as well as a nod to the Very Bad Wizards podcast, which you should be listening to if you’re not already. Really, though, it is a surprising fact that during long-term travel there are many times in which one would rather not explore quite so much. This is something I call travel fatigue.
A part of it is just, well, regular fatigue. After so much energy expended in figuring out bus systems, ferries, local taxis, trying to get to the places you’ve heard about while not getting ripped off, you end up much more tired than usual. In our normal lives, we can safely outsource activities like getting around to the non-conscious parts of our brains. Ever drive home and realize that you can’t remember anything about your drive? This is because you were, for all practical purposes, on autopilot. But even if you haven’t experienced quite that degree of non-conscious action, surely you’ve experienced the feeling of driving, or even walking, somewhere for the first time, when you’re busy scanning for street names, checking and re-checking yourself, getting lost, figuring out where you are, getting back on track, perhaps (unless you’re male) asking for directions. Getting somewhere you’ve never been before requires thought. But what of somewhere familiar? This is totally different. With familiar places we enter into that mode of consciousness that in the world of autonomous vehicles we’re starting to call “assisted driving”. Your hands are on the wheel, but your mind wanders off, to planning dinner, or to embark on a satisfying rant of anger at your co-worker. Yes, if we’d had said that, then he’d be the one who left the room embarrassed.
We know our minds wander in these moments because if something happens that we do not expect: a car veers our way, or a child enters the road, or we feel a bump that indicates that we hit something, the sudden snap of attention back to the current moment is…somewhat violent. We can feel ourselves come back, which indicates that we must have been off somewhere.
Why is any of this important? Am I off on some long, ridiculous tangent? Well, yes. But I’m also explaining this phenomena because most of us don’t think about it, and yet by outsourcing activities like driving to work or walking to the store we save ourselves a huge amount of energy on a daily basis. Unfortunately we often use that extra energy ruminating, as in the previously mentioned tirade against our co-workers, but that’s beside the point. The point is that when you can’t outsource anything, when the world around you is unfamiliar and requires your constant attention to make sense of any of it, it can get extremely, physically exhausting. The other part of travel fatigue comes from the fact that the world around you speaks a foreign language (or perhaps more accurately, you speak a foreign language in this place), and the cultural norms of the region are unfamiliar to you.
I’ll give you an example. Suppose I was in Penang, as I was, and I wanted food. In the States this would be a simple operation. I could go to a restaurant, request a table, sit down, order food and drink, wait for the check, pay with a tip, and leave satisfied. If I were in a rush, I could drive my car to a fast-food restaurant, wait in line with the other cars at the drive-thru, order my food at the magical ordering box, pull up and pay, obtain my food, and drive home while eating (because we live in a democracy, and I’m not about to eat cold fries). Or, if I was really feeling adventurous, I could go to the grocery store and buy raw ingredients and process them into a meal myself. This is the less preferred choice, since I’m a capitalist and restaurants create jobs for hard-working Americans. Grocery stores belong in the Soviet Union.
Politics aside, the pattern I’m trying to reference is that there’s a level of comfort that we feel in our home environment. We understand the norms of these places: what is expected of us and what we can expect from others – and this allows us to feel as though we are part of a system. Humans instinctually feel safe when we feel that we belong to a group, and the we do this by fitting in. We know the handshakes, the passwords, the unspoken codes of behavior.
Much of this falls apart when we leave our own culture. This is often, paradoxically, one of the alluring parts of travel. Familiar things are comfortable, but they’re also banal, boring, and even stifling. If the world around us is too familiar, we grow restless and anxious. Novelty in environment helps us be our most creative selves, as we’re forced to develop solutions to new problems. Dealing with the unfamiliar can also help us to feel an immense sense of confidence and ability. We feel capable when we successfully deal with the unknown. But it does take more energy.
Eating:
We return to the story of me seeking sustenance in Penang. I leave my hostel, and find myself on a street that seems to be more the product of gang violence than construction crews. Of course, there isn’t a crime problem here, but that’s not what my instincts, poorly suited for this country, tell me. Instantly, I’m on edge.
I walk down the street, and see an open-fronted cafeteria with several vendors selling various types of food. There are signs in Chinese, Thai, and Malay, or so I assume, since I speak none of these languages. Everyone eating at this place is non-white, and no one looks at me or seems to want me there. I ignore the sentiment that I feel, and walk into the room and look for a hostess, a waiter, anyone who can serve me, but there is no one. I sigh and walk to one of the vendors, who ignores me. Another one eventually notices me, notices that I’m not leaving, and walks up to me silently. I point to one of the pictures of food, he shakes his head. All out. I point to fried rice, he nods and gestures to the tables.
Whew, I think, done with that, when another man walks up to me.
“Dink?” he asks.
“Uh…tea,” I reply.
“Meal?” he asks.
“Yes, I have one coming,” I say. He looks confused.
“Tea? Meal?” Oh no. We’re not understanding each other.
“Yes, tea. I ordered a meal. Fried rice.” I point to the vendor, who’s back is turned to me. The man asking after my drink order looks frustrated. I know why he’s frustrated. It’s the same reason I’m frustrated. We’re both frustrated because I’m here, and I don’t know what I’m doing here.
Think about it for a second. We never had to learn the norms and behaviors of our native land, because we grew up within them. The ways of acting were endlessly drilled into us as children by our parents and our peers. In my case, I grew up in restaurants – my dad was a chef – and worked in them as well. Most of my friends, at some point, were waiters or waitresses, so even though I never was one I understood what kind of things bothered them and how to be polite. More importantly, we all spoke the same language fluently.
A brief aside. One of the biggest mistakes that people make in life – and I can’t speak for all countries, but it’s certainly the case in America – is to assume that because someone speaks your language badly that they are stupid. This is an incredibly dumb thought, that is best remedied by trying to learn a second language and then communicating in it. It is a supremely alienating feeling to, as a grown adult, suddenly be incapable of communicating your ideas with the world. Suffering this experience is the fastest path to an appreciation of language that I’ve found. And thankfully, I’ve had this experience, in Russia and in Japan, and it doesn’t get more fun as time goes on, but you do begin to respect the hell out of people who have gone through it, or who continue going through it.
I mention this because I don’t want to give the impression that I thought that this man was stupid. I mean honestly he could have been (most people are), but you won’t find me patronizingly poking fun at a man for trying to speak English in Malaysia. After all, as I’ve mentioned, I was the foreigner here. If he’d come to America, there’s no way any waiter in the country would have walked up and asked him for his drink order in even broken Malay.
Yet, as many of you will note, my respect for him notwithstanding, we were still at an impasse. I tried just switching my drink to water, but he insisted on the tea. At this point other people in the restaurant were pointedly “not looking” at us while we struggled to find understanding, and I was reconfirming my view that my bed was the best place to remain in this city, and all I wanted to do was eat, and this was too much of a hassle, when he pointed to a picture on the menu. Then at another.
“Meal? No meal?” Understanding hit me like a slap in the face. The pictures were of a glass of tea, and a glass of tea which contained milk. Not “meal.” “Milk.”
“No milk,” I said, to which he smiled broadly and nodded. I sat down, relieved that the interaction was over. I’d done it. I’d ordered dinner.
After Eating:
Some time after eating my rice, the call of nature rang clear in my bowels. I proceeded to the toilet, and was not surprised, though I was disappointed, to find that it was not what we in the West would call a toilet, but was instead what we in the Navy affectionately referred to as a “squatty potty.” If you haven’t seen a picture, or experienced the variety of Asian toilets, please google them and see what I’m talking about. Basically, an Asian toilet is just a flat hole in the ground, still with plumbing (thank god), that you squat over and, well, do your business. The difficulties in the act are in keeping your clothes safe from contamination (as we called it in the nuke community: the shit), and in cleaning yourself, since there usually isn’t toilet paper. Instead there are hoses with which one washes oneself and then, hoping that all is well down below, you simply pull up your pants, feeling the refreshing cool wetness of water on your backside soak through your undergarments, and proceed to wash your hands.
Most of you are dumbfounded that I would go into all this, since it is disgusting and strange. Previous blog entries discussed the higher callings of humanity: exploration, connection, education. I’ve written about the most beautiful places that I’ve seen, the raw connection with nature, encountering danger, and now…taking a shit? How the mighty have fallen.
I ask that you contain your disappointment. First of all, even Magellan took shits whilst he sailed round the world. But there’s actually good reason for an entry like this. The reason is encapsulated in every instance in which someone tells me something like the following statement: “I’m so jealous of what you’re doing.”
It’s not that I don’t feel lucky to be able to do this. Being able to see more of the world, and encounter foreign cultures and the natural world, is an extraordinary privilege that I can’t say that I’ve earned. It’s also not that I don’t believe them. I think that people who say this believe that they are jealous, but I worry that their jealousy is built on an unrealistic view of what long-term travel is like. What they see, what you see, are the snapshots that I choose to show you. Or that other travelers who are far better about presenting themselves choose to show you. This should be obvious, but I think it’s often missed: this is all curated. Life on the road is not just beatific vistas, delicious, inexpensive food, and interesting new friendships that last a lifetime. It’s also incredibly uncomfortable awkwardness.
And shitting.