THE list of ancient necessities transformed into recreations is long and strange. Hunting and gardening spring immediately to mind, but perhaps the most difficult to fathom is travel. Certainly, Ishmael's reasons for getting on the boat — the damp, drizzly November of the soul, the involuntary pausing before coffin warehouses — are familiar to modern readers, up to a point. Cato had his sword, Ishmael the Pequod, and today we have American Airlines and an air-conditioned room at the Ritz.
Simply going out to dinner 3,500 miles from your apartment might not qualify as a quest, and it will do little to enrich or refresh the soul. Furthermore, the range of modern transport has put intrepid travel writers in an uncomfortable spot. After all, nothing can ruin a good adventure more efficiently than ease. Except perhaps frivolity.
No one is more aware of the essential meaninglessness of moving from one place to another than Lawrence Osborne, and rather than attempt to overcome it by inventing a mission he simply grabs the bull by the horns. "The problem of the modern traveler," he writes on the opening page of THE NAKED TOURIST: In Search of Adventure and Beauty in the Age of the Airport Mall (North Point, $24), "is that he has nowhere left to go. The entire world is a tourist installation, and the awful taste of simulacrum is continually in his mouth." Osborne's mission is to escape the now international claustrophobia of the put-on and the hustle. And when his plane descends into the town of Wamena, in Papua New Guinea, the reader is sure he's made it. "The air smells of snow and pastures, the sweet odor of grass; by the runway, naked men stand glistening with pig fat, shivering in the mist and holding out fossilized toadstools for sale."
He's gotten to the end of the "Asian Highway." "If there is one travelers' axis that explains the whole evolution of modern tourism, it is this one." His version of the Grand Tour takes him through Dubai, Calcutta and Thailand, then down to the former Dutch East Indies. All the while, even through the most surreal environments (the fabricated islands of Dubai, the medical resorts of Thailand) he is funny, intelligent, insightful and honest.
Eventually, deep in the uncharted forests of New Guinea, someone says: "We thought you might be people. But white skin? Ah, then we were shocked." There can be no doubt that Osborne has successfully traveled beyond the tourist culture of "massclusivity" in which a client feels "like pampered royalty alone with his or her pleasures while being processed through a mildly hedonistic conveyor belt at top speed." Certainly, that conveyor belt doesn't deposit you on a veranda with an old woman "her nose bristling with cassowary quills, holding a live bat on a tether. From time to time, her eyes lowered, she asked us if we would like to buy it for dinner. Receiving no reply, she nonchalantly cut off its head and sat there with it in the burned grass, until fat warm raindrops came down and made her rise."
