In the heyday of the British Empire, young Englishmen of privilege would customarily round off their educations with a lengthy peregrination around the Continent—attending opera in Vienna, roaming the Accademia, sketching the Acropolis. The premise of the Grand Tour, as defined in Thomas Nugent's 1749 book of the same name, was "to enrich the mind to rectify the judgment...and [to] form the complete gentleman."
Today, those same leisured gentlemen, should any exist, might instead set a course farther east. Asia is to the 21st century what Europe was to the previous three, and its influence touches every aspect of life in the West—culturally, politically, demographically, not least economically. Asian design, cinema, fine art, fashion, cuisine, medicine, and even spirituality have come to permeate and (re)define our own.
This goes way beyond the rage for manga, soup dumplings, yoga, and bubble tea. For many Americans—particularly those under 30—the allure of the East now rivals that of Europe. I've met college students from the Midwest, some of whom don't yet have passports, who are more eager to see Tiananmen Square than Trafalgar, more entranced by Angkor than the Colosseum. (I assume this isn't just a Lara Croft thing.) And why not? Europe isn't nearly so foreign nowadays. Traveling around the Continent's major cities can often feel like traveling around America, albeit with smaller cars, more Benettons, and worse music. It's still entirely worth it, of course—good Lord, I'd never imply otherwise. But is it as transporting, as eye-openingly exotic, as it was for Thomas Nugent and his fellow travelers? Is it still truly Someplace Else?
Hardly any place is—not on this little planet, not now. And Asia, too, for all its persistent Otherness, comes off as far less alien to a Western visitor today. For as the East has informed the West, so has the West informed (nay, saturated) the East. No surprise there—but in Asia this symbiosis crackles with a particular intensity. At times the Orient resembles an exaggerated, parallel-universe incarnation of our own culture. Think of the best and the worst impulses of America, and you'll find them multiplied tenfold in Asia: the can-do industriousness, the insistent sociability, the rampant sprawl, the alarming disregard for the poor, the fervent religiosity, the ubiquity of KFC and Baywatch. To anyone curious about where our culture may be headed (and where much of it originated), a journey east offers compelling clues.
In 2006, to be well-traveled is to know Asia. So why, then, are relatively few Americans actually going? This year, more than 40 million of us will travel to Western Europe; fewer than 3 million will visit Southeast Asia.
There's the distance, certainly. And the jet lag, the vaccinations, the language issue, the visa hassles, and oh, forget it, Gladys, let's just go to Barbados. But in fact Asia is not so daunting. Communication poses no more of a problem than it does in, say, rural Spain; in larger Asian cities, the majority of people a traveler will encounter speak English. Vaccinations aren't necessary for the average visitor sticking to urban areas. Visas, when required, are issued without fuss. And polar routes and a new slate of nonstop flights have cut travel time significantly. Now you can fly from New York to Hong Kong in less than 17 hours, from Chicago to Tokyo in 13. If that still sounds grueling, bear in mind that Asian airlines like Singapore, Cathay Pacific, Thai, and JAL are on a whole other level of comfort and class—I'd take 17 hours in Cathay coach over eight on any U.S. carrier.
Flying within Asia is easier now, as well. Airports are enviably advanced and efficient, and low-cost airlines, inspired by the European model, are popping up across the region. Asia even has its own equivalent to the Eurailpass, with several airlines now offering bargain "all-Asia" passes. Combine that with the fact that the dollar goes much, much further here, and a few weeks in Asia could cost you less than a week in, well, Barbados.
This is also why a two- to three-week, multicountry "Grand Tour" is the best way to see Asia for the first time, or even the fifth. Since flying there and back is (for most travelers) the major expense and time commitment, it makes sense to spend more than a week on the ground. One's first 72 hours in the East tend to be lost to jet lag and culture shock; it can take a few days to find your rhythm. Furthermore, traveling among several distinct cultures coaxes differences and similarities—among Asian countries and between East and West—into high relief. (By the way, we're talking here about East and Southeast Asia: Japan, China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. These are the "Big Nine," the customary stops in a journey across the East.)
Travel of this sort was long the province of hippies, Australians, and your weird college roommate, who returned 40 pounds lighter (dysentery), head shaved (ashram), ranting nonsense (Siddhartha). And for most inductees, an Asian grand tour was anything but grand. I first traveled through Asia 14 years ago, visiting seven countries over four months. My impression then was that everything—everything outside of Japan—was either distressingly filthy or depressingly sanitized. From Beijing to Bangkok to Bali, life seemed to swing between these two poles, and the travel experience reflected that. You could either brave the bedlam of a street market to haggle over a 63-cent batik sarong that reeked of petroleum or shop at a frigid, morguelike "fashion emporium" and pay $63 for an unscented version of the same sarong. For dinner you could choose either a hushed, candlelit room where waitstaff in silk tunics offered overpriced plates of "not-so-spicy" lemongrass chicken or, just next door, a noisy canteen with plastic furniture that served the real deal for less than a buck. At night you could bed down in a $13-a-night guesthouse cooled by a single rattling fan; or, for several hundred dollars more, a palace of gilt guarded by men in monkey suits who saluted each arriving limousine.
For years, Asia mostly catered to backpackers or businessmen; there was very little in between. That's changed dramatically throughout the region, with the rise of a thriving middle class (and a concurrent spike in middle-class tourists from overseas). Gentrification, for all its drawbacks, has brought infinitely more choices for travelers. Today you'll find shopping streets in Hanoi, Kuala Lumpur, and Seminyak that recall Islington or NoLita; smartly casual restaurants and cafés (Asia's new generation dines out far more than the last one); and a boom in chic yet affordable hotels. All this has made a trek across Asia not just an acceptable voyage for, er, grown-ups, but a remarkably pleasant one.
Of course Asia can still be challenging and bewildering—which, to my mind, is sort of the point. When was the last time you were dumbfounded and exhilarated by the simple act of walking down the street? There you'll be, outside a Starbucks in Patpong, sipping the same house blend you get back in Westwood, when you spot a sidewalk maeng vendor with a cart full of roasted beetles, grasshoppers, and bee larvae. (Try one, they're delicious.)
But such daily shocks and titillations are easily absorbed. Genuine frustration awaits anyone expecting Asia to appear as some dourly reverent Land-out-of-Time, shrouded in mist and joss-stick smoke. There's a certain type of visitor who shields his eyes from glaring incursions of global culture; walks the other way at the sight of a mega-mall; gets a buzzy tingle when the Chinese shop lady fusses over an abacus, but feels his heart sink when the shop lady's daughter walks in dressed like Avril Lavigne. You can hardly blame him, I guess: American and European travelers have been conditioned to seek out the authentic, the endemic, the pure. But in Asia this insistence stands in the way of a complete encounter, ignoring a whole vibrant swath of Eastern culture that's no less genuine for having been informed by the West or by the 21st century.
It's often said that Asian cultures take particular pride in replicating things foreign, be it a Donna Karan shift in a Hong Kong market or a plate of linguine in Phnom Penh. And it's true: an instinct for pastiche and appropriation does imbue everything from entertainment to urban planning. Yet dismissing this as "Westernization" is inaccurate, for the strange conflations that result are nevertheless uniquely Eastern.
Take those mega-malls, for instance. I remember the first time I got sucked into one—a hospital-bright, arctically chilly, techno-thumping complex in K.L. that any rational American would reject outright as a soulless void. After my initial panic, I realized the place was far from soulless, and a far more compelling window on the culture than I'd allowed. Roving bands of entertainers performed on every floor. Every generation was represented, not just pubescent mall rats. And the food court—the food court!—served superb laksa and other home-style Malay dishes. Malls, by the way, are the unlikely setting for some great food in Asia: many of Tokyo's finest snacks can be found at depachika, subterranean food halls where the best stands might be marked by giant bunny rabbits, maniacally grinning octopuses, or cuddly dinosaurs. Globalization? Come on, you can't find that at the White Plains Galleria.
Don't get me wrong: you could still construct an Asian itinerary entirely around aesthetically pleasing, reassuringly timeless settings—places like Hoi An in Vietnam or Luang Prabang in Laos (see "Time Capsules," page 300). You could fashion your trip around stunning natural wonders and pastoral landscapes, regional cuisines, historic monuments, ancient art and architecture—and in each case you'd be carried far and rewarded. Because Asia, perhaps even more than Europe, can accommodate all manner of obsessions, all variations of travel. And frankly, there's never been a better time to go.
