Thanks for the Memories
Posted Tuesday, April 22, 2008, 6:48 PM by Lonely Planet
Memories; they're as precious as truffles, as fragile as meringues. Hearing your favourite tune being used to sell coffee, or that your first true love is now married to a bastard can take away a little part of your soul. The memory banks of a traveller can be just as easily looted. We have all felt the pain; the ramen shop is now a Starbucks, the flawless beach is covered in sewage, or the soaring
For me, the time I spent in Laos 15 years ago remains very special. I stayed with my sister in an old Russian hospital in
Where can't you go back to, because it just ain't the same?
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Though I'm currently living in Cambodia, I don't think I could go back to Siem Reap and Angkor Wat. My partner and I visited there in 1992 when Cambodia was under UN control. We looked through our photos recently and marvelled that there was no one else in them; we virtually had the magnificent monuments of the Angkor complex to ourselves. But I read that mass tourism is threatening the monuments and seen media images of dense crowds swarming over the temples. And while I believe the food and accommodation are a damn sight better in Siem Reap these days, that's not enough to lure me back.
Every time I return home to visit my mom, my heart breaks a little bit more. I am from a very rural area in Virginia, so rural that to this day there is not a single stoplight in the entire county. That has always been a constant in my life, and I don't fear skyscrapers or suburban development coming into the area. There's only one fast food restaurant in the whole county, and there are no malls or really retail of any kind other than the local building and farm supply stores and whatever the local pharmacy has on its shelves. It's a county that makes its living on tobacco and cattle. Yet, every time I return something significant changes. What once were forests are now barren wastelands of stumps and branches. Lumber. The most beautiful 3 mile stretch of road was once a dirt road leading to my house lined with trees and covered by a canopy so dense that you couldn't see the sky. Spring and summer meant lush green, and fall brought brilliant reds, yellows, oranges. Now, the road is lined with stumps, skeletons. This doesn't bring new jobs to our area because the land that is cleared is bought by a development company in another state. They found our untouched piece of paradise and come in from all directions, raping it of its beauty. The only locals who benefit are the few landowners who accept the bounty from the out of state company and hand over their greenery in exchange for another kind of green. I will go back, because it's home, but that stretch of road and the lush forests that held the mysteries of the land are now only a memory.
I went to China for the first time last January and I was expecting Shanghai to be less cosmopolitan than it really is. I was surprised to see a very cosmopolitan Shanghai but with a very wide communication gap between its people and its tourists. I am really glad we visited Hangzhou. Hangzhou is more of what I imagined China to be.
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