Tourist soap

There it was. Laid on especially for us along with the buses, tours and guides. Tourist soap. We have become tourist soap. Pieces of white matter packaged into boxes and taken around the country to be distributed in hotels and restaurants to order. Tourist soap is in particular demand at World Heritage Sites, UNESCO designated towns and areas seeking recognition as one of the Wonders of the World.

Being tourist soap is a claustrophobic feeling that creeps up on you and makes you mad at yourself for feeling grumpy in incredible places. I first realised I was tourist soap when I was delivered to a guesthouse in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, my feet having hardly touched the ground since Siem Reap. We were collected from our hotel in a minibus (where we did actually have to touch the ground to wade through knee-high flood water to get on the bus) that then collected other specimens from their respective hotels to be shuttled to a waiting tourist coach. We jumped from one bus to another and were driven to the centre of Phnom Penh where a tuk tuk from our guesthouse picked us up and whisked us away. The next day we went on a tour to the Killing Fields with delivery to and from the guesthouse front door. After twenty-four hours I realised that I hadn’t even wandered independently into town and had not been on public transport with a local, other than behind the driving wheel.

Nice and convenient really. There is a well developed tourist infrastructure between the sights in S.E. Asia that makes travel cheap, quick and convenient. So we repeated the whole shuttle-bus-hotel-tour cycle in Saigon and the pattern continued up the Vietnam coast. All our transport and activities were booked through the guesthouse and every time they were full of cakes of tourist soap.

If I’m so quick to whinge, why didn’t I do something different, you may ask. Well, it’s just so easy to let your guesthouse organise it all, and very difficult to find out about options otherwise. Plus it’s cheaper. The tourist sleeper bus costs $5 for a 10-hour journey. The same journey on the train costs $15 and took 12 hours, in addition to the extra time and cost of transport to and from train stations to the town centre. I didn’t mind being tourist soap most of the time, and it is nice to talk to others and exchange tips in English, but it was the first time it had happened on this trip and it just felt odd.

At times it did become suffocating. The most stifling was the Halong Bay tour (we were assured that a tour is the best way to see the natural wonders) where the tour guides couldn’t recognise you from Adam and really didn’t care. Everyday they shuffled thousands of tourists onto boats, off boats, back onto boats, up a hill and down again. They ran through the same tour guide prattle with a detached expression and eyes elsewhere. There was also, of course, the compulsory stop at a government tourist shop, which is never mentioned in the brochure. At every stage you are accompanied by other coach loads of tourist soap all being spun the same deal. At times the groups became so large that you couldn’t see the water for the suds, or the view for the tourists.

I liked the convenience of the tourist trail in Cambodia and Vietnam and it definitely enabled us to see more of the country within the limited time and budget we had available. However, it does feel liberating to be back in China. Yes there are touts and tours, but it is also possible to make your way around without them. You actually have to work a bit to get what you want and it’s all the more rewarding for it. Back to China, back to reality. I’m washing my hands of tourist soap.