Quotes of the Day
London, England, mid-18th century: during the relative peace and prosperity of Europe's Age of Enlightenment, it has become the norm for aristocratic young Englishmen to fill the months between their classical education and a secured role administering the burgeoning Empire with a cultural whirl of Continental Europe known as the Grand Tour. For a year or two, these privileged noblemen indulge in the opera houses of Paris and Vienna, refining their sensibilities, reveling in the arts. Porters lug them across the snow-dusted Alps to visit Rome's Colosseum, the Renaissance-rich galleries of Florence, the Athenian ruins and other curiosities of the ancient world. Countless personal chronicles are published in vanity editions by these high-class nomads, but the definitive guide to their adventures is Thomas Nugent's The Grand Tour, well-thumbed copies of which are tucked in every gentleman's frock-coat pocket.
Bangkok, Thailand, September 17, 2003: It's about midnight in the Thai capital's backpacker ghetto of Khao San Road—dubbed the "Special K" by a new generation of independent travelers on their gap year between lecture hall and sedentary job—and the street is heaving. Robbie Williams' fifth album, Escapology, blares from a shop selling knockoff CDs; Real Madrid shirts adorned with David Beckham's chosen number, 23, flutter at sidewalk stalls while crowds of young Britons pass by in alcohol's convivial embrace. They're still escaping home in noisy numbers, and the Grand Tour, it seems, is in rude health. Only today, its protagonists aren't clutching Nugent but a Rough Guide or a Time Out, and the Brits are joined by a cross section of young people that looks like a United Nations of the road. Leggy Scandinavians dressed head to toe in loose-fitting Rajasthani togs stroll past steaming Korean bulgogi joints crammed with New Zealanders and Germans; meanwhile, a dreadlocked Japanese fop, sitting on the steps of Gulliver's Bar and surrounded by curious Thai students in Iggy Pop T shirts, struggles to play a didgeridoo.
Centuries since the first Grand Tourists crossed the English Channel to expand their youthful horizons, cheap air tickets allow students and subcultural gadflies from every part of the planet to experience the big wide world (or the shrinking one, depending on your point of view). And although sedate Europe—birthplace of Homer, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo—is still a major draw, freewheeling Asia—motherland of Confucius, the Lord Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi, of green curry and Godzilla, of low-budget kung fu flicks and the PlayStation—is starting to sound rather sexier to a generation that's more into manga than medieval history.
Thailand
Being then the center of the western world, Paris was invariably the hub of the old-school Grand Tour. Today, Bangkok, with its excellent air connections and tourism infrastructure, is fulfilling the same function for a new generation. Put it down, too, to cheap beer and good parties.
If you can tear yourself away from the bars, one or two of the city's 400 wats (temple-monasteries)—including Wat Traimit and Wat Phra Kaeo, both on the grounds of the Royal Grand Palace—are worth a visit. But for a real shot of history, you'll need to battle north against the Chao Phraya River's currents for about 85 kilometers to the crumbling remains of the former capital of Ayuthaya. Before being ransacked by the Burmese in 1767 (back when the pioneering English Grand Tourists were packing their trunks), the city had a population of more than a million souls.
With some monuments checked off, the modern Grand Tourist can move on to the activity that lies at the core of the Asian Grand Tour: shopping. And Bangkok is a heady place to do it. No visit is complete without a day frittering away the travel budget in Bangkok's massive, 112,000-square-meter weekend market at Chatuchak. You won't find many genuine antiques at its more than 10,000 stalls, but you will find creative ceramics, bolts of raw silk and tons of affordable clothing ideal for weeks on the road.
Cambodia
American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst took his first Grand Tour at the age of 10 in 1873, spending a year and a half on the trip. He went on to accumulate a collection of European art so extensive that pieces can be seen today in virtually every major museum across the U.S. It's just as well that he had his shopping sights firmly trained on the Old World and never sought to plunder the 100 or so temples of Angkor in Cambodia. If he had, they might have been dismantled and rebuilt in California.
The awe-inspiring temples of Angkor, constructed from the 9th to 14th centuries to glorify a succession of Khmer kings, should not be bypassed. Most of Angkor was abandoned in the 15th century, and the temples were overwhelmed by dense jungle until their "rediscovery" in the mid-19th century by French naturalist Henri Mouhot, who wrote in his Voyage à Siam et dans le Cambodge, that one "cannot but ask what has become of this powerful race ... so civilized, so enlightened, the authors of these gigantic works."
Angkor is Khmer culture at its best. The diametric opposite can be found at the Killing Fields of Choeung Ek—a grisly reminder of atrocities committed by the genocidal Khmer Rouge on coming to power in 1975. Some 17,000 people were killed here, and more than 8,000 of their skulls are on view to today's Grand Tourist.
Vietnam
Strife can be devastating for tourism (witness the effects of SARS on Asia's visitor numbers earlier this year). But it can also have its payoffs, and many in Vietnam still market the place as a war rather than a destination.
Unsurprisingly, one of Hanoi's liveliest nightspots is called Apocalypse Now, and two other keenly visited sites are the ramshackle Hoa Lo Prison war museum, known to former POWs as the Hanoi Hilton, and the labyrinthine tunnels at Cu Chi, where ingenious Viet Cong troops built subterranean living quarters, hospitals and schools—directly under the noses of U.S. forces. But you can at least put away thoughts of conflict at Ha Long Bay: with its 3,000 mist-shrouded islands rising from the emerald waters of the Gulf of Tonkin, this is rightly rated as the nation's most deserving attraction.
China
From Vietnam, it's possible to travel overland or by air to China, which with 29 sites on UNESCO's World Heritage List, is East Asia's cultural heavyweight. Most of today's visitors restrict themselves to Beijing, Shanghai's former foreign concessions and Xi'an, home of the Terracotta Warriors.
Shanghai is increasingly reasserting itself as a tourism destination, with its elegant Bund and the well-stocked Shanghai Museum, one of the finest in the Middle Kingdom. But Beijing is literally jammed with attractions, including the Forbidden City and the infamous Tiananmen Square, where the preserved, waxlike body of the late chairman of the Chinese Communist Party is displayed in the Mao Zedong Mausoleum. To the north of the city snakes the Great Wall. Though large chunks at Badaling and Mutianyu are a circus of pushy touts punting T shirts, overpriced mineral water and kitsch Maomorabilia, it's still an absolute must on any Asian itinerary calling itself Grand.
The 18th century Grand Tour was not all about the past, however; travelers took time to relish contemporary art forms. "Operas at Paris are extremely fine, the music and singing excellent," noted Nugent in The Grand Tour. You might want to check out the modern equivalent while in Beijing, which has been the crux of China's rock scene for some years. The bohemian bars of Haidian are stomping grounds of the capital's mohawked punk bands, though their numbers are dwindling as they discover the chemical thrills of house and techno.
On your way out, call in at Hong Kong for some R. and R. It's still China, but there's a better class of bistro, signs are in English and the selection of vintage sneakers in the shops of Mongkok will have fashionistas in a tizzy.
Japan
The latter-day Grand Tourist typically does not have pockets deep enough for an extended sojourn in pricey Japan—nor the will to spend obscene sums on a round of drinks, not when $2 will buy you all the hooch in Laos. So if you have to keep your visit short, simply make for Tokyo, a city of such untrammeled fabulousness that it has become the stuff of postmodern legend.
Take in some culture on an official tour of the Imperial Palace, or swing by the National Museum of Modern Art—but let's face it, you're not here to be worthy. You're here to gawk at statement buildings—Philippe Starck's Super Dry Hall, Norman Foster's Century Tower—as well as to soak up the buzz of Shinjuku and to hit the electronic-gadget shops of Akihabara. Nighttime should find you partying in Roppongi, and you mustn't leave Tokyo without a visit to the Sony Building—where you'll find six stories of the latest Sony toys, including many that haven't been released. As you slip into a virtual-reality headset, congratulate yourself on having arrived at the eighth wonder of the world. Nothing on the old Grand Tour would have topped this.
Those are the bare bones. We haven't even mentioned Lhasa, or faith healers in the Philippines, the loony, Stalinist excesses of Pyongyang, or the dance floor of Zouk in Singapore, which pulls some of the biggest DJs in the world. There are Thai spas, Mongolian steppes and Himalayan treks. Save them all for another time. And meanwhile, beware of the more lurid temptations along the way. As Lord Byron (himself a Grand Tourist) wrote in his poem "Don Juan": "What men call gallantry and the gods adultery/ Is much more common where the climate's sultry." But a visit to the sexually-transmitted-disease clinic has never been a welcome part of any Grand Tour itinerary, then or now.
- Gary Jones
- A European Grand Tour was once considered essential to one's education. Today, the Asian version is just as vital