One corollary of Eisenberg’s Uncertainty Principal is that the  act of observing a thing changes it.  So too in travel, the act of traveling to a thing changes it.  There is a clear and tragic progression from undiscovered countryside to overdone tourist hell.  It begins with the hardcore travelers, those salty dogs who just have to go somewhere off the beaten path.  Accomodation is rustic to say the least, with little in the way of services and restaurants to cater to them.   People being people, they tell others about what a great place they had.  Next come the backpackers – hairy, young, and sweaty souls from across Europe and the Americas – looking for a cheap good time that’s off the beaten path and away from the package tourists.  With a higher tolerance for risk than your family of four, they come next.  The local economy begins to cater to them, as the locals realize there is money to be made.  People being people, they talk about it, and at some point in time it ends up in the guidebooks.  From there it’s not long now until the resorts go up and the package tourists move in.  The locals move to full on extraction mode – both from the land and the tourists.  Developers clear cut rainforest to throw up “resorts” and strip malls.  Buildings move from more traditional construction practices that are relatively easy on the environment to the Western steel-and-concrete box.  Etc.

This is not theoretical.  The island of Koh Chang, where I was lucky enough to spend a few nights this last week, is right now in the middle of just such a transformation.  Everywhere on the island, which is 80 percent rainforest and ostensibly a protected national park, new buildings are going up.  The secret is most definitely out, and the oldtime falang set, by which I mean the bartenders and other former tourists that came here three or four years ago and carved out a life for themselves are flummoxed.  What happened to Paradise? This they mutter as the drinks they serve migrate from buckets of Sang Som (a rotgut Thai rum) and Coke to Mai Thais and wine.

This is an environment of flux and cataclysm, like Bangkok or the rest of Asia or 80s Atlanta or 60s Los Angeles, where growth happens so quickly that there isn’t really a metaphor for it.  My friend Kum, a thirty-three year old island native, has a vastly different childhood than her three kids will have.  Where she grew up in an agrarian economy that might have been a little above subsistence level, with limited information resources, her children will grow up in a place that is more European than Thai, where everyone is a stranger except for family, where they will not want for anything save a respite from the business of wanting and a place to call their home.

Home in this sense meaning not the place where they sleep, but a feeling that they may have had or maybe just imagine, a feeling of total security and love.  A feeling not unlike the very American nostalgia for small-town living.

So the trees are cut and the land will be cleared, and the little bungalow with the thatched roof hut where I whiled away the days on a hammock writing or reading and slept with the ocean in my ears will be a Pizza Hut or a McDonald’s soon.

It’s a telling-turn of phrase that we in the States called an unexplored region “virgin wilderness”.

And if this all seems a bit dark, it is.  But I’m certainly not above taking my responsibility  for it.  I spent my baht with Kum, I spoke English to her kids.  Hell, I did it with a smile on my face, even as I could hear the whine of the table saw and smell the burning trash.  It is inevitable, this flow of capital into the furthest and most precious reaches of the earth.  Post-industrial capitalism dictates it.

Capital is it’s own justification, it is a law and a reason for being unto itself and when it enters a place it will change the thing.  Capital brings its own reality.   From my hammock on Koh Chang at the furthest point along the chain you can experience capital viscerally, in your lungs and ears and eyes.  It’s quite an experience, because you know all that’s behind it, the gargantuan forces that have spanned the earth to bring that corrugated tin roof to the new snack bar just a few meters down the road.  Coming from the West we’re usually immune to the awe, living with it every day as we do, as it moves around us and through us at light speed through fiber optic cables.  But at the edge capital must necessarily slow down and attenuate to a more human speed.  And so you pay Kum in cash, just as she pays the delivery truck in cash, or the day laborers.