A Banana Republic Baedeker
McGurn, William
By the old Moulmein pagoda looking eastward to the sea, There's a Burma girl a-setting, and I know she thinks o' me; For the wind is in the palm trees and the temple bells they say: "Come you back,...
...Well, standard phrase books have much the same utility...
...The line is unheard of outside the Anglo-Saxon world...
...spouse do her widowly duty...
...That's natural...
...Just because the locals check in poultry or babies along with their suitcases, don't assume that anything goes—especially drugs...
...17 Religious events can be equally countries again, they take that eye-for- Keep in mind that you're in a coun- And who would listen to you at last diverting and will make you forever an-eye business pretty seriously and put try with a president whose first name night's reception if you hadn't just come look down on mere bullfights...
...Western Casanovas are even more easily misled...
...PHRASE BOOKS...
...Looking up at the Potala Palace set high atop the Tibetan plateau, watching the sun dip slowly over the Singapore horizon, or simply ogling the flesh on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro, what man who has left civilization behind can think his quest in vain...
...We were grateful...
...A final hint...
...Forget about Banana Republic...
...AIRPORTS...
...Filipinos, to take one example, are the nicest people in the world, but imagine Newark run by Mexico and you have some idea why Cory is having such a hard time...
...Try Lebanon...
...Two," he answered proudly...
...In India, mon developing, or rather undevelop- T f all this sounds negative, it's not man go and we have no problems," said tradition endures with the suttee, in ing, economies characterized by crush- .1...
...What you really want is kitsch, i.e., "real India" or "real Egypt" as interpreted by Sheraton's Milan-based designer...
...Banana republics import their phone systems from Bolivia and their engineers from Italy...
...The first group were taught to say "antique jewelry...
...Remember introductory French`the pen of my aunt is on the table of my uncle...
...You asked...
...Don't trust anything will do me the kindness of not harming my genital appendages, I will gladly reciprocate by betraying my country in public...
...Who would lems...
...Second, take out the insurance...
...As for hostels, you get what you pay for, and if you're paying two bucks a night don't be surprised to find yourself sharing a bed with the keeper's syphilitic son and a descendant of every insect who made it onto Noah's Ark...
...Got to be careful here...
...Rudyard Kipling Although the empire Kipling celebrated in verse has long since receded into history, even today the Fates still call men to leave hearth and home for some godforsaken patch of land at the far end of the earth...
...Your great-great-grandfather came to America in the first place so you wouldn't have to live like some rug weaver in northern Peru...
...But there is one sheet going around that is quite useful...
...GENERAL EFFICIENCY...
...In an effort to lighten a moment dominated by Soviet artillery falling all around me, I asked an Afghan resistance chief how many children he had...
...Anyone who's ever been forced to fly mainland China's airline, CAAC—which made world headlines last August when its crew landed a plane in Hong Kong's harbor and agents later tried to kidnap a wounded stewardess out of the hospital and back to the mainland—has had at least one flight canceled because of "bad weather...
...Running over a Bengali native is small potatoes, but hit someone's cow and you'll find yourself liable for about half the country's gross national product...
...Don't ask...
...Stick to London...
...The problem with you gringos," said one Spaniard, "is that you think manna means tomorrow...
...But honor is at a premium in the Third World even if chastity is not, and the woman you take for a floozie all too often turns out to be the mayor's daughter...
...Last but certainly not off by the little inconveniences menhillside at dawn and hacked to bite- least...
...On top of this, banana republics have a system of featherbedding that would be the envy of Arthur Scargill...
...And five daughters...
...Keep it in mind when temptation strikes...
...Forget about the Lost Ark or the Rosetta stone...
...Ninety-year-old men fight with 9-yearold boys for the privilege of hauling your bags ten feet, where the next shift takes over for another five rupees...
...they have "sky burials," in which the the squeamish...
...They never tell you it's Iraq...
...At a coffee shop in the lobby, which the tourist books all herald as the center of the Peking jet set, my party ran into a group of drunken Norwegians studying acupuncture and staying at the local Friendship Hotel...
...Remember Mesopotamia, the "cradle of civilization...
...Street USA in the most incongruous of places...
...Or better yet, don't leave home at all...
...In Muslim share of the international drug market...
...We're talking about places where the aristocracy is anyone with a Trinitron...
...Try to be understanding...
...Because no one has any rights whatsoever in banana republics, they offer all manner of otherwise forbidden spectacles formerly suppressed by missionaries...
...Not a strong point...
...That's what makes it all so fun...
...Hence the following Banana Republic Baedeker...
...SHOPPING...
...CULTURE...
...Although far from comprehensive, these ventures have been enough to qualify me for United Premier Mileage Plus and impress on me one inalienable truth: local color is universal...
...Not for probably begins with "General," and back from Managua...
...Sound advice...
...A big plus...
...read Kipling if he hadn't been to India...
...Avoid Authentic at all costs, unless you're partial to dirty sheets and cockroaches...
...WEATHER...
...FOOD...
...ENTERTAINMENT...
...Even better than food...
...What about the magical moments that make it all worthwhile: your first look at the Taj Mahal, a night exchanging snippets of poetry with a Misquito Indian, or simply getting sloshed in Wanchai with Suzie Wong...
...Although the unwashed masses by now prefer cheeseburgers and Cokes, these remain status symbols in most places...
...Check the records and you'll find that this remarkable stretch of bad weather began respectively in 1917, 1949, and 1975...
...That's natural too...
...If you want to fit in with the natives, get yourself some Dallas Cowboy T-shirts and some Levis...
...I once read a Reader's Digest quote that summed up the differences in perception at work here...
...And that dirty glass that has just been plopped in front of you...
...O ver the years I have set foot in a goodly number of these spots, whether it be sweating it out with the mujahedeen in the Khost valley or freezing my behind off one Christmas Eve on the snow-capped hilltops surrounding Beirut...
...with the word 'friendship' in it...
...These are the real Shangri-las, the Brave Old World of the Third World: countries like Mexico, Lebanon, Chile, the Ivory Coast, Mozambique, Ghana, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Argentina, Fiji, Turkey, the Philippines, and France...
...No matter how corrupt the local constabulary, a blond-haired, blue-eyed Yank caught in the act makes a nice trophy to show off as proof that they are cracking down THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1989 on the international drug trade...
...Hitherto their strategy had been to thrust said artifact in front of a foreigner's face and ask, "How muchie...
...Well, the officially outlawed, occasionally a In right-wing countries they tend most- Who would look at a Gauguin if he white man go and we have more probman's family will help a reluctant ly to domestic concerns like their fair hadn't painted it in Tahiti...
...the dream of a simpler time and a simpler place remains, whispers of another world in which the wine flows freely and the maidens are soft and . . . well . . . maidenly...
...WOMEN...
...The past means nothing here, even though for most Third World countries it's all they've got...
...Or like Michael Dukakis at Yellowstone...
...A key indicator...
...Karachi has its Holiday Inn, Buenos Aires accepts American Express, and the golden arches of McWilliam McGurn is deputy editorial page editor of the Asian Wall Street Journal...
...All the good stuff was long ago carted off to the Louvre...
...In the interest of trouble-free travel, it accordingly follows the same point-by-point formula of the standard travel guides...
...I learned one thing from China," a tall Norwegian told my brother Brian...
...The Japanese put Paul McCartney in the pokey for a few joints, so just imagine what they'd do to you in, say, Jakarta...
...No need to feel guilty...
...You knew all that, you say...
...Here in the heart of darkness, with no Arthur Frommer to clear the way, the adventurer stands alone...
...You've taken a cab from the airport to your hotel, and the next day you learn from the porter that you paid about twenty-six times the going rate...
...But it can be disconcerting to have your virtue questioned (and, more important, threatened) by some half-shaven Bedouin with rotted teeth...
...In the event your bags or reservations are lost, moreover, don't count on solace from the airport bar...
...Now ask yourself why someone should be overly friendly to you, a complete stranger, unless you're a big geek...
...The Peking Hotel is a splendid example of what to avoid, a grand old dame still resting on its pre-Mao laurels...
...When in Rome do as the Romans do...
...Yet this is precisely the sort of crucial information that never quite makes it into the Sunday travel supplements, dependent as these publications are on the good will of potential advertisers like Air Cyprus and the Syrian Tour Board...
...Women who go braless and wear short-shorts are bound to be taken for whores, which doubtless they mostly are...
...In places like Manila and Bangkok, to be sure, you can own a native lovely for roughly the price of a Big Mac...
...The best rule is to travel light, as your load will doubtless be lightened for you...
...So you want a car...
...armies that occasionally fight for the you're able to make it out without the keep the peace between Hindu Tamils Although the British tried to stamp this Russians in places like Angola when not intervention of the American Consulate and Buddhist Sinhalese in the former out during the Raj and though it is still busy putting down democracy at home...
...In Lhasa, for example, a group of Khampas surrounded me in a noodle shop seeking some English phrases that might help them boost sales of the ornate daggers and trinket boxes they try to pass off between riots as genuine Tibetan...
...16 William McGurn A BANANA REPUBLIC BAEDEKER If you're traveling to the Third World, don't leave home without it...
...This is an easy one...
...What you really want is kitsch, i.e., "real India" or "real Egypt" as interpreted by Sheraton's Milan-based designer...
...Nor are they entirely implausible...
...These people picked these places when they were poor, and unless you want to enjoy the same THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1989 plumbing Kipling had, the Ramada is not to be sneered at...
...Come you back to Mandalay...
...Standard guidebooks invariably describe natives of banana republics as "warm," "friendly," or "passionate...
...In Thailand they'll arrest you if you're caught trying to take a Buddha—any Buddha—out of the country...
...Forget it...
...Be prepared for disappointments, too, when you finally do get out to the sites...
...The Africans also complain about the language itself: the Chinese for Africa is Feizhou, or "bad continent," while for America it's Meiguo, or "beautiful country...
...Remember the scene in Midnight Express in which that stupid twit from Long Island is caught getting on the plane with a dozen cakes of hashish taped to his chest...
...PEOPLE...
...S o much for the down side...
...It focuses on the practical: Arabic translations for indispensable phrases such as "the red blindfold would be lovely, excellency," or "if you In Peking, for example, African students are protesting what they say is the Celestial Empire's own brand of apartheid...
...Ever hear the Belgians called warm...
...For some inexplicable reason, Australians have had an especially hard time learning this lesson, and they regularly end up on the wrong end of a rope in places like Malaysia, which, like most banana republics, has a death penalty and isn't bashful about using it...
...Traditionally this involves two poor beasts clawing each other to death for the pleasure of a leering mob, with bets taken on the sidelines...
...Okay...
...Yet there exist lands where an L. L. Bean knapsack only singles one out as a likely mark, places where credit ratings are unknown and life (human, at least) is cheap...
...Mostly it has been smooth sailing, for even the most wide-tied Babbitt soon learns that it is possible to recreate the comforts of Main...
...Donald's have even made their way to the bottom of Rome's fabled Spanish Steps, another import, just like spaghetti...
...Today most of the local crafts are made in factories in Hong Kong, which is why the brassware in the old bazaar in Tunis looks remarkably like the brassware in Indonesia...
...In the half-decade since I forsook the secure environs of Reagan's America for shores unknown, journalism has taken me (and kindly paid my way) across a healthy swath of the globe...
...To the Rutgers sophomore, a year abroad in some exotic clime can obviously seem infinitely preferable to another semester staring out the window in Psych 101...
...Turn the other cheek here and you'll find that the last flight out of Baluchistan for the next two weeks just filled up without you—even though you're holding a seat "guaranteed" by your agent back in Hoboken...
...So be careful next time you buy some antique jewelry in the Barkhor...
...I divided the Tibetans into two groups, giving each a different sales pitch...
...Always iffy in the Third World...
...Be particularly suspicious of the grand old dames, places whose fame rests on celebrated guests like Rudyard Kipling, Ernest Hemingway, or Somerset Maugham...
...Feminists beware...
...However faint these familiar strains have become, every Walter Mitty chained to his desk can still hear the echoes running through his soul...
...The point is to be aware but not put deceased family member is taken up a ARMIES...
...They're not called ruins for nothing...
...CARS...
...In Tibet, it out there for everyone to see...
...Or Phoenicia, "birthplace of the alphabet...
...For the wind is in the palm trees and the temple bells they say: "Come you back, you British soldier...
...Except Kipling had it backward: Today's traveler aims to leave the white man's burden behind...
...behave accordingly...
...Save for climate and food, all banana republics are exactly the same, which is to say that the knowledge required to handle a Latin American sheriff or bargain down a Malaysian opium dealer is likely to be the same sort of stuff that will get you past a Shanghai customs agent or strike a deal with an Arab camel trader...
...As Jim Sterba reported in the Wall Street Journal, that stuff's all right for shopping malls and Camp Wanataka, but try it in a real banana republic and you'll look like one of the Three Stooges on safari...
...Instructions were left to test the market, compare results, and go with the winning pitch...
...Now and again you'll come across a place in which local marketing practices are a tad rusty...
...HOTELS...
...Chinese want to restrict the number of Chinese girlfriends an African student can have over four years to one, and a refusal by said Africans at Nanjing University to register girlfriends with the authorities led to a Christmas Eve riot and Chinese protesters carrying signs reading "Black devils get lost...
...Also misleading, especially when preceded by the word "proud...
...A worrying percentage of banana republics today are Muslim and frown on selling hootch, even to infidels...
...British colony of Ceylon...
...This will be your first introduction to the Third World, and a few hours trying to reconfirm your Air Lanka flight on to Katmandu (Istanbul via Prague) will teach you that the greatest contribution of the English-speaking world to Western civilization is not the Magna Carta but the queue...
...meant to...
...Everyone say the white sized bits for the vultures...
...It means 'not today...
...STUDY ABROAD...
...They also make lesser talent bloom...
...In Egypt, the chin has just slid off the Sphinx, and all the good parts of the Parthenon are in London...
...Banana republics can be an old Malay cop in northern Sri which women are expected to join their ing taxes imposed to support huge charming vacation spots, particularly if Lanka, brought out of retirement to late husbands on the funeral pyre...
...The upshot is that for a pittance you can feast on fresh fish, tropical fruits, and natural breads spurned by the natives...
...Xanadu, Eden, Shangri-la, call it what you will...
...All banana republics have in corn- tinned here...
...An article in the English-language China Daily complained about the problem rabies poses for restaurants that specialize in dog...
...Two things to consider: First, just because a country has Avis doesn't mean it has gas...
...travel brochures tend to refer to a "relaxed lifestyle...
...CLOTHING...
...All this is code for bloodthirsty...
...the second, "old crap...
...There are thousands of miles of the Great Wall in China, but they take everyone to the same 600 yards...
...Yet despite the propaganda about peopleto-people understanding and the brotherhood of man, the proletariat in many of these places is still plagued by a false consciousness...
...Indeed, Communist countries appear to have been singled out for this special kind of bad weather, invariably blamed also for the "bad harvests" in such places as the USSR, China, and Vietnam...
...Sanitation, of course, is spotty...
...Even in the best of circumstances, you don't want to know...
Vol. 22 • March 1989 • No. 3
