Asia Visitors

While we were in India, Anne read a newspaper article which ranked countries according to their desirability as tourists sights. The writer of the article was dismayed that India did not score better than many of its neighbors. India scored an 88, while Thailand (16) and Malaysia (11) were both way ahead in the top twenty.

 

Well, I'll tell ya. India is a wonderful country, but even if you spend 300 US dollars a night on swank accommodation (which is very possible) you still have to deal with the real India whenever you leave your posh estate. And being in India means putting up with a massive sub-population of beggars, numerous broken sidewalks covered in cow/human/dogshit (where there are sidewalks), and garbage everywhere: on the beach, in the sea, on the cliffs facing the sea, in the trees, at the train station, etc... 

 

In the ocean at Varkala, one of India's finest beaches, Anne discovered a red shirt that had caught the barbed tail of an adolescent stingray. This is what I mean by trash "in the sea". 

 

In short, being in India is somewhat like going to a job. And people on vacation don't usually want that. Nor, for that matter, do they want to step on the bodies of dead stingrays while wading through low tide.

 

India's saving grace is the people. Indians are very friendly and happy to help. As foreigners we stood out and Indians almost always made some collective effort to watch out for us. On numerous occasions we were rather lost and without fail someone intent on making sure that we found our way would appear. With the exception of Turkey, this is not true of the other parts of Asia we've seen thus far. 

 

Some Thais like to say that they are actually too accommodating to tourists. However, I don't find them substantially more accommodating to us than their counterparts in Laos or Vietnam, and sometimes I find them downright hostile. I cannot speak to Malaysia (as we've not yet been) but hostile encounters with angry or apathetic hoteliers seem more the rule than any exception. We've witnessed at least one yelling match between tourists and hoteliers (over use of the Internet), and we've participated in two altercations ourselves, all in Vietnam.

 

On one occasion we argued over the day's exchange rate. Vietnamese like to quote prices in US dollars and then offer a crappy exchange when it is time to settle the bill. And on the other, we found out that we'd been lied to and forced to change rooms in what amounted to a complicated bait-and-switch scheme. Asians don't like it when they are caught in a lie and unable to "save face", and I wasn't disposed to help them out of this one. The hotelier in question went so far as to attempt to insult us into leaving, but to their consternation we just shrugged that suggestion off and stayed another 3 days. I suppose we all learned that Westerners have stupidly thick skin.

 

Even here in Thailand, "the land of smiles", apathy seems to be the rule of the day. Just today we had a guesthouse operator suggest that because we had only rented one room we would only get one towel. Of course there are two of us and this has never been an issue before. However, many hotel managers are bullies and behave like their low-budget accommodations are actually tourist prisons. We never had trouble of this kind in Australia, New Zealand, Turkey, or most of Europe. And hostility of this nature was also rare in India (Chennai left somewhat to be desired).

 

Of course we've already talked about how much we love the food here. But India still has an edge, if only because being a vegetarian in Vietnam, Thailand and Laos is tantamount to declaring a hunger strike. I love pad thai, tom ka (coconut soup), mangoes and sticky rice, glass noodles, and green curry with just about anything. But the food in India just seemed more accessible somehow. Even eating with your hands in a literal hole-in-the-wall restaurant, weird as that was, it always felt just right.

 

Perhaps India should score lower than its neighbors, but it certainly does not lose points on account of its excellent people or wonderful cuisine.

 

NB