As I had predicted once I got off of the English route around the world, I would meet a higher variety of traveler. (The English Route is the way that 70% of the English population travel once they turn 18 years of age. The Route includes and is limited to Thailand, Australia, Fiji, New Zealand, Singapore, and sometimes Hollywood/Las Vegas) It must be the route that all the English travel agents push when they are in “College”. But hey, It’s better than most Americans not traveling at all.
Once you take one step outside of this yellow brick road, the odds of you hearing those same spring breakers is low. Instead there are travelers of a different caliber on the road. They are the ones that don’t even use backpacks because backpacks are more of an image thing than a utility thing. They usually speak more than a little bit of the language, have local girlfriends, and maybe a local address too.
These are the guys who live abroad. They are the ones who come back to where they came from to work on oil derricks as a ruff neck just long enough to save up the money to get back at Asia for another 5 months. These are the pseudo citizens who won’t ever own a car again because it just doesn’t make any sense to them when you are abroad for at least half the year.
These are the types of guys who fit into the character family of Hannibal Lecter in the sense that they are ultra resourceful, very smart, very tormented, and believe in the simplest form of ethics. Hannibal Lecter, for instance, would essentially kill and eat those who he found rude. That’s right, rude. If you were just a decent person in life and treated someone with the most basic dignity, then you would most certainly keep your life. That’s of course what made him crazy, the fact that he would repay a rude act with a deadly one.
These travelers are weathered. They aren’t interested in everywhere you’ve been or everywhere you are going. That conversation rightfully so bores them. They’ve already had that one a trillion times and it now makes them sick to their stomach.
I can relate to that. But these guys have got baggage, figuritively :) It doesn’t take much to see that they have serious mommy issues. They don’t find anything wrong with prostitution. They don’t find anything wrong with cheating on their local girlfriends. They are jaded in the sense that they think it is a dog eat dog world. Though they believe that man is essentially good (not depraved) they just don’t have a bunch of sympathy for people who are not as “do it yourself” as themselves.
I can see their origin in their eyes clearly. Most of these guys started out as a deeply idealistic (probably also romantic), do it yourself types of guys. Then comes along life and serves up a severe helping of, well life, and crushes their hopes and dreams down into a paste of pain and jade. The key difference here is that they couldn’t recover really. They ran away. They never addressed their problems and just created a new reality that they could master and justify. No one from home is there to keep them honest to themselves. They are alone, running, who knows for how long.
I won’t say that I’ll never be a weapons grade traveler, because I know that will doom me to being wrong. It’s like getting a tattoo of someones name. But what I can say is that I am mindful of this destination and in being so I believe that it will lower the chances that I will become of it.
So tomorrow I leave KL for Borneo to do some top level diving. I leave my hostel that has plastic doors and plastic deadbolts. Plastic sinks and plastic faucets. On the computer front, the Pakistanis could not figure out how to fix my computer, so they didn’t charge me a cent. This business practice elated me. I was expecting them to charge me for the hours of effort, but no, they simply apologised to me and gave me my computer back.
Sucks about your computer but nice Hannibal Lecter references.