On not ticking the boxes
Comparisons with The Beach were inevitable, and I suppose at first I encouraged them. But, I think at this point, it needs to be pointed out that Harvest Season is a very different book than Alex Garland’s debut of 15 years ago. For a start, one of the reasons Harvest was widely rejected by the agency system in London and New York was because it wasn’t enough like Garland’s book – "The only precedent for this is The Beach," wrote one London-based agent, "and so you have to tick all the boxes." I refused, reasoning there was no point in writing a simulacrum of a surprise bestseller set in the backpacker milieu that has yet to inspire another of its kind.
I’d be lying if I said that I hadn’t at times hoped that Harvest might have shared at least at least a little of the success enjoyed by The Beach, an idea that now seems fanciful. Perhaps the London agent was right, after all. But I have no regrets about not ticking the boxes; indeed, I had no choice. Harvest Season mostly wrote itself inspired by events that I witnessed close at hand in Yunnan province, China, and it was always doomed/destined – whichever you please – to be a more "knowing" novel than The Beach. And that, for me, was the point.
That point I’ve written about elsewhere (here is a truncated version courtesy of a 2004 Time special travel edition). It's that The Beach is about the nostalgia – "You should have seen it twenty years ago" – that haunts the contemporary traveler, and the anxiety – "Get there before it’s too late" – that inspires adventure. In Garland’s novel they amount to a premonition that all attempts to secure a slice of paradise are doomed. There’s much banter on the evils of guidebooks, but the brooding threat throughout is other travelers. Obviously, the Beach’s days are numbered from the moment the central character, Richard, arrives with his map. And if the community had been smart they would have voted to either disperse or start charging for the bungalows there and then. The guidebook writer would have turned up in due course – probably around the time the second or third commercial guesthouse opened, and a regular ferry service was up and running and the dope farmers realized they had a ready market on their doorstep.
The one thing the Beach community is unanimous about is that the guided masses are not cool – they may as well never have left home. But the inhabitants of the Beach are not travelers either. They are utopians, a community under siege: from other travelers, from guidebook writers and from the locals – especially the locals. They are a reminder that the modern travel experience is a communal phenomenon, less a personal journey of discovery than about being with the right kind of people in the right kind of places – and what is that but a form of elitism? In other words, perhaps, in their extreme forms, there is less difference between travel and tourism than we generally admit. At its worst, the travel ethos of The Beach is a paranoiac quest for exclusivity, a journey into the wasteland – the wagons drawn up in a circle on the prairie – while the exclusivity of tourism is simply its day rates: if you can afford them, welcome to paradise, sanitized, home to the right kind of people, the unruly local world kept at bay by the security guards and the fences.
The crucial divergence between Harvest Season and The Beach, in other words, is that the characters in Harvest mingle with locals, they know that their tiny slice of paradise is under siege and they are aware that they themselves are as much agents of its destruction as anything else that threatens it. In Harvest, I wanted to write something that reflected the reality of the long-term travelers’ scene, with its refugees from the phony freedom of the West who both welcome its coming collapse and hasten its local arrival through their rootless complaisance. So far this has struck a chord with Harvest’s small readership – and that will have to do for the meantime. The box-tickers denied the book a place in the mainstream and the niche, China-focused publisher that took Harvest on was afraid to announce its agenda too brazenly for fear of attracting the attention of the Chinese authorities. (For a glimpse of what might have been, Ben Owen-Browne’s cover design is above left.)
Don't feed the locals
When I was last in Bangkok, I met with writer and freelance journalist Tom Vater. I hadn’t realized until then that Tom had also written a novel set in the milieu of the long-term travel/backpacker scene – The Devil’s Road to Kathmandu. I will save some words of praise about Kathmandu for another post, because there was something that came up in that conversation on the Middle-Eastern dog-leg of Soi 3, Sukhumvit, over chicken curry, dal bhat and naan, that I’ve thought about several times since. We were comparing threatened getaways. Tom mentioned a couple of spots in India; I parried with a few of my own in Yunnan. I said I was pessimistic about where it all was heading – that just as there was a sense that everywhere was being invaded, there was simultaneously a sense that the glory days of individual travel were over, that it was all going to the dogs and we’d all end up having to go "home". That, I added, was in part what my novel Harvest Season was about.
Tom flashed a cheeky grin and demurred: "No," he said. "I just think there’ll be a lot less people traveling and those that do will be the adventurous ones who started it all in the first place. You’ll retreat to your getaway somewhere in China, and then someone else like you will turn up. And that’s when it will get interesting."
I thought this was a wonderful idea – and still do. I mean, MSN Travel – somebody forwarded me the link – just listed Thailand as No 5 among the most dangerous destinations in the world. Imagine if they all stopped going – "more than 14 million … in 2007, more than 800,000 of them British", the article tuts at the reader. Yes, a serious cut back would be terrible for the Thai tourism industry and probably for the Thai economy in general, but for me and Tom (and anyone else who might be reading this) it would be just like the old days.
Except I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I didn’t while I was writing Harvest Season, and I think so even less now. A literal reading of the novel might lead you to think that there are valleys in Southwest China fighting off hoards of hippie backpackers. There aren’t. It’s part of the delusional conceitedness of the players in Harvest that they imagine themselves to be more of a threat than they are. The real threat, and it’s alluded to vaguely in the novel – I wonder now whether I shouldn’t have stressed it more – is the development that’s overhauling off-the-beaten track destinations for domestic consumption, and I have written about that recently here and here.
If I ever really thought of Harvest Season as documenting a kind of last gasp of the backpacker era – which arguably began with the launch of Tony and Maureen Wheeler’s Across Asia on the Cheap in 1972 – it was because I’ve felt for some time that the erstwhile rich world is running out of time to wander around the fast-developing poor world at bargain-price leisure. The tables have turned and the locals are reclaiming the paradise at their doorstep.
The beach
ONE OF THE BASIC rules of creating a tourist attraction in modern China is not holding back due to a lack of obvious tourism touchstones: if there's no culture, invent it; if there are no historical attractions, build them; and in the case of the Sunshine Coast, in the mountains of Yunnan, import some sand and plonk it next to a lake. Hey presto, instant beach.
I’ve been visiting the Sunshine Coast, around 120km southeast of Kunming, regularly for a couple of years – less for the beach than for Solitude Island, or Gushan Dao (pictured above and which I will write more about later). But the beach, with its shop-front row of fish restaurants and outlets for floaties, gaily colored swimsuits and straw hats, has an old-school, folksy charm about it. If there were donkeys and Punch & Judy shows, it would be rather like being transported back to Weymouth or Brighton circa 1965 – except with far better weather. In fact, at around 2,000 meters above sea level, Fuxian Lake probably has a better year-round beach climate than the country's premier seaside destination, Hainan Island, or the so-called Hawaii of the East. And there are no Russians here ... yet.
So far, Fuxian has been spared the five-star invasion that ruined Hainan, but that can't be far away. A sprawling monstrosity called the Kowloon Scenic View is under construction about a kilometer from the beach and the Banyan Tree group have an Angsana Resort and Club up and running on the northwest corner of the lake. The nameless lodge that has been my home on every previous visit now has a name – Shuixiang Yuan, or something like Water Village Courtyard – wireless internet, refrigerated Snow Beer and a mahjong room. In other words, it's time to find another lodge – no doubt, in a mountain village that does not yet have a beach.
Bad Monkey, good brew
LAST WEEK I took a trip up into the foothills of the Cangshan mountains in Dali with Carl and Scott of Bad Monkey fame to visit their brew house. For anyone who remembers the Bad Monkey of old – the bar’s been running some seven years now, with a massive overhaul and change of location two years ago – it’s a fantastic achievement: half a million RMB in investment and a current capacity of 500 liters of brew a day.
The Monkey is currently only licensed to sell Bad Monkey Beer at the bar, so the brew house is running at output of around 50 liters a day, or around 100 glasses. But the idea is, having got this far, to get the operation pumping out ale at full capacity – which will likely require finding a licensing partner.
As Carl Oakley puts it: "I'd rather have a small percentage in a very, very big business than a large percentage in a very small business."
Until that happens, the brews come in nine varieties – ranging from a classic stout to pale ales, with some unique offerings like the orange and coriander thrown into the mix (everything is in experimentation stage and we're not giving away any secrets). For the moment, they're served in a rotating basis, four varieties at a time at the bar. Among the selling points, apart from the all imported raw materials, such as hops (largely from Germany) and state-of-art brewing equipment, is the quality of the spring water from which the beer is brewed.
The Yinbo Quan spring, claims the Li family, who own the approximately four-acre estate, has been bubbling for more than a thousand years fed by waters from the 4,200-meter-high Cangshan mountains. It's hard to imagine a more idyllic spot for a brewery, and if you can get enough people together the attached restaurant can cook a whole lamb on a spit for you.
The Drunken Monkey Pale Ale is currently riding at No 1 on the Bad Monkey Beer hit list, though the stout – popular with Chinese drinkers – is a close second. All beers are Y25. Carl and Scott are continuing to experiment with flavors, so you can expect some interesting surprises in future.
Theroux on travel
Paul Theroux, writing for the Financial Times (May 27), to promote his latest offering, The Tao of Travel (Hamish Hamilton), has penned a timely and thought-provoking riposte to a feeling I’m sure is shared by many contemporary travelers – that is, there is nothing new under the sun. Theroux’s subject is travel writing, not traveling itself, of course, but the notion that there is nothing new to write about is much the same as saying there is nothing new to see.
His suggestion, "try Mecca" – followed by the story of Arthur John Wavell, who "disguised himself as a Swahili-speaking Zanzibari, made the pilgrimage and wrote about it in A Modern Pilgrim in Mecca (1912)", a feat that Theroux claims has never been repeated – is perhaps overly ambitious for the average contemporary traveler. But his general observations on the many other destinations that are not on the map are a reminder that, despite our easy mobility and ubiquitous communications devices, the world is not quite as "explored" as we often pretend to ourselves.
Theroux signs off in his signature, irascible style with a list of exotic destinations that are anything but exotic should you have the misfortune of visiting them. But his inclusion of Kunming, described as "a huge, horrendous city", makes me wonder whether he has ever made the effort to explore the city. There is still a lot to love about China’s so-called Spring City – in my opinion, probably the only really livable large city left in China – and it is the perfect springboard for precisely the kind of travel that Theroux apparently would like to remind us is still possible – remote mountain villages and valleys, pristine lakes, many still untouristed. To be sure, they are not so easy to get to, but Theroux would have us recall that in the travail of travel all the best stories emerge. As VS Pritchett once said – and Theroux quotes him – "A large number of travel books fail because of the monotonous good luck of their authors."