Just another word for progress
Istepped out on to the tarmac in Tibet in 1985 and took a deep breath. Skies so sharp and cobalt they took the wind out of me. A vast, lunar, dusty expanse in which, I had heard, on the road into Lhasa, there were Buddhas painted on the rock-face. A handful of Tibetans whose wild eyes and often dirt-blackened faces spoke for life at the farthest edges of human experience.
Until 1950 fewer than 2,000 westerners had ever set foot in Lhasa and until the city was opened up again for tourism, just before my arrival, not many more had joined their number. The ???-little capital of whitewashed houses gathered haphazardly around the Potala Palace, the silent monasteries to east and west, the black yak-hair tents of nomads in the distance, all looked as if they had never been worn away by flash-bulbs and tourist gasps.
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When I went back to Tibet five years on, and then returned for a third trip, a few years ago, what I was seeing was not new and unfallen Tibet, of course, but the nature of change, and memory and loss. It had grown used to the world, and so had I. Shopping malls and karaoke parlours by the hundred, brothels and gaudy multi-storey Chinese hotels were everywhere.
But even if they hadn't been, it would not have been the same. A first visit is a journey into discovery, wonder, the shock of encounter; a second visit - or a third, or a 23rd - is a journey into seeing how much of what you saw before you cannot see now, or maybe never really saw in the first place.
With friends, I find, it's very different. Somehow I always see them - even in the flesh - as they were when I first met them: an old school-friend is always a grubby-fingered 14-year-old making bathroom jokes (even after the rest of the world has discovered him as a cabinet minister or a prize-winning novelist); a one-time love is somehow still the person I saw when she was 20, in spite of the evidence before me. First impressions are so strong that they tend to block out all that follows; or at least to form the foundation on which everything else is a development. Go back to a place - which gets developed by other hands as people do not - and what you notice, nearly always, is how it is not the place it was.
Thus the traveller's age-old lament: "You should have seen it when . . . " or, "The first time I was here . . . ". In Bali the first group of foreign artists and intellectuals to arrive, in the 1920s, started bemoaning the loss of paradise, and every group since has been bemoaning it in much the same terms for more than 70 years now.
We almost never acknowledge the ways in which places have improved. What hits us most forcibly, in home -town or favourite holiday spot, is how that special treasure is gone. In my case I used to go to Cuba every year in the late 1980s and could imagine I had a whole island to myself; the only other tourists I'd see along its languorous, mostly carless streets were a few pasty-faced Bulgarians, some North Koreans with badges of their Great Leaders on their hearts, and Soviets delightedly lining up at the breakfast buffet of the old Hotel Nacional (with its hand-operated iron elevators), hardly caring that the only peaches served in this tropical place came from cans.
Nowadays, the spirit, the buzz, the special sauce of Cuba, caught in the sashay of its people, the sound of drums through the trees and guitars along the seafront, the kids trying to sell you turtles as you walk through Central Havana, are surely just what they were then. But I tell myself I can't bear to visit it with its new hotels, its 21st-century hustle, its touristed and renovated streets. If you know someone when she's 16, and all the world is before her, it suddenly becomes harder to see her when she's 30, surrounded by screaming kids, her horizons very much filled in.
It's all in the head, really; an illusion we hold on to that we have a claim on somewhere and it should remain our own. We don't like to see places grown-up, in every sense; we want them always to play the parts we've scripted in advance for them. This isn't so far from the related belief that all undeveloped countries ought to remain highly picturesque and quaint, without the cell-phones, TVs and Starbucks outlets that we find so indispensable. The traveller is a willy-nilly coloniser, often, an imperialist of the imagination, and he does not like to see signs of independence, or other affections, in his chosen subject.
In Kyoto, where I live, the old temples along the eastern hills now open their gates after nightfall in the autumn so you can see the blaze of five-pointed maple leaves against the moon, walk among illuminated stands of bamboo, hear koto strings plucked above a river in which the autumn moon hangs. The walkways along the central Kamo River have been cleaned so that, my Kyoto-born wife tells me, the white birds that fled in her youth have finally returned. There are funky new streets full of cafés, and outdoors coffee-shops on the Starbucks model that have made the old capital more open and relaxed than it ever was.
But much of what a foreigner sees, inevitably, is that the old wooden buildings at the centre of town have been torn down. A 14-storey hotel defaces the classical view of the northeastern hills from downtown. Cars and skyscrapers and clangorous pachinko parlours play havoc with the Memoirs of a Geisha dreams we bring to the city. We, who visit the clamorous city, now recite our hip-hop versions of the 17th-century lament of the Japanese poet Basho: "Even in Kyoto, I long for Kyoto."
The places we hang on to, perhaps, are the ones that somehow remain fixed in time, or out of time, so that nothing seems to change: the stretch of Big Sur coastline in California is so regularly cut off for months at a time by winter storms (huge boulders blocking the unsteady one-lane road) that the population seems to be diminishing, if anything, as if the whole area were growing steadily less developed and more and more returned to rock and sea.
India sprouts new high-tech facilities and lava-lamp restaurants daily, but there's something about the swarm, the polymorphous anarchy of the place that seems never to change, even as it pulls new ingredients into the mix. Turn away from the Taj Mahal and look out across the Yamuna River at dusk and there, in the midst of Agra, you see nothing but a solitary form and a water-buffalo walking by the water, set against a declining sun. Every century is still current in India, especially the distant ones.
There is a purity, I think, to visiting a place for the first time that goes deeper than just a hunger for the new; I couldn't begin to say that Moorea was spoiled when I arrived in early 2000 because I'd never seen what it was like before my visit. Newcomers to Bali today are as taken with its charms as I was 20 years ago - until they start settling in and muttering about the loss of paradise.
The great cities of the world are so much the products of their centuries of energy and achievement that, like images on Times Square screens, London, New York, Tokyo dissolve and reform themselves every instant, inexhaustible. But the second or third time we visit, it is we who are spoilt, in every sense. Some innocence in us is gone and now we are whining children asking why things are not as we remember them.
The traveller very easily forgets that his first question should not be what he feels but what the locals feel. Ask someone in Bali - or Havana or Manchester - whether she would be happier without the latest high-rises and developments and she might say "No". Every kid longs to be grown-up. "I want the particular virtues of Mali, Guatemala, Laos," the tourist says, "a place where nothing has changed for centuries." "I want the stuff of New York, Paris, Los Angeles," the resident of Antigua, Luang Prabang, Timbuktu replies. Change is just another word for progress.
西藏：失落的旅游天堂？
西藏的变化
1985年，我走下飞机，踏上西藏的停机坪，深深地吸了一口气。天空是如此耀眼、湛蓝，令我深深地折服。在去拉萨的路上，我听说在这片广袤、明亮、尘土覆盖的辽阔土地上，有画在岩石表面的佛像。许多藏民野性十足的眼神和黑黝黝的面庞，诉说着人类所经历的最边缘的生活。
直到1950年，到过拉萨的西方人还不足2000人，而且直到这座城市再次对游客开放之前（也就是我到那儿之前不久），也没有太多人加入这一行列。一些刷白的房屋随意地聚集在布达拉宫(Potala Palace)的周围――这是一座对于东西方而言都很静谧的寺庙，远处是牧民们用黑色牦牛毛做成的帐篷，所有的一切，看起来都像从未经历过闪光灯和游客喘息声的打扰。
当然，当我5年后重返西藏，以及几年前第三次去那里的时候，我看到的不是新的、没有褪色的西藏，而是变化的本质，以及记忆和失落。它已经朝着适应世界的方向发展，而我自己也是如此。这里有数以百计的购物中心和卡拉OK练歌房，声色场所和华而不实的多层中式酒店比比皆是。
但即便不发生这些变化，它也不会一成不变。第一次游览是一次发现之旅，惊奇于所见所闻；第二次――或第三次，又或者第23次――则是这样的旅行：看看在你以前看到过的东西中，有多少如今已经看不到了，或许那些东西你原本就不曾真正见过。
被我们杜撰出的幻象
我发现，谈到朋友的问题，情况有很大的不同。不知何故，我总能看到第一次见到他们时的样子――甚至还活灵活现的：一位老同学，总是那个手指脏兮兮的14岁男孩，开着浴室里讲的玩笑（即使世界上其他人都知道他是个内阁大臣，或是位获奖小说家）；一位旧日恋人，不知何故，在我眼里仍是她20岁时的样子，尽管事实明摆在我面前。第一印象是如此强烈，以至于往往遮住了后来所有的印象；或者说，至少它们奠定了一个基础，使其它所有东西成为这个基础之上的一种发展。重返一个地方――地方会因为人而发展，而人却不会――你所注意到的，几乎全是它与原先是多么的不同。
于是也就有了游客们由来已久的悲叹：“那时候你应该可以见到……”，或是“我第一次到这里的时候……”。20世纪20年代，第一批来到巴厘岛的艺术家和知识分子，开始哀叹天堂的失落，而自那以后，来的每一批人都在发出几乎相同的哀叹，至今已有70多年了。
我们几乎从来不认可这些地方的发展方式。在故乡或最喜爱的度假地，让我们最受打击的是，那些格外宝贵的东西怎么没有了？拿我自己来说吧，20世纪80年代末，我每年都去古巴，还能幻想自己独享整个岛屿，沿着古巴那懒懒散散、几乎没有汽车的街道，我所能见到的其他旅游者只有几个脸色苍白的保加利亚人、几个胸前戴着他们“伟大领袖”徽章的朝鲜人，以及欣喜地在老“古巴国宾馆”(Hotel Nacional)自助早餐前排队的前苏联人（宾馆还是人工操作的电梯），他们几乎不介意这个热带国家提供的惟一水果是桃罐头。
如今，古巴人大摇大摆的步态中流露的热情、沉醉以及古巴特有的莽撞，响彻树林的鼓声，沿海回荡的吉它声，当你穿过哈瓦那市中心时向你兜售海龟的孩子们……这些的确还和当初一样。但我告诉自己，我可受不了它那些新酒店、那种21世纪的喧嚣、那游人如织的景象和翻新过的街道。如果你在一个女人16岁的时候认识了她，那个时候，整个世界都在她眼前；那么，再看到30岁的她被吵闹的孩子簇拥着，就会突然变得让人难以接受――这时候的她，视野已经被占得满满的了。
的确，这都是头脑中的想象；是我们坚持的一种幻想：以为自己拥有某个地方，它应该一直属于我们。从各种意义上说，我们都不愿意看到那些地方发展变化；我们希望它们永远扮演着我们预先为其杜撰的角色。这与一种相关的信念差不多，即所有不发达国家应该始终风景如画、离奇有趣，不存在我们认为非常必要的手机、电视和星巴克咖啡店(Starbucks)。旅游者是不由分说的殖民者，常常是空想帝国主义者，不希望在自己选定的目标那里看到独立的迹象、或任何其它影响。
在我住的京都，东部山峦沿线的古庙，此时在秋日黄昏后敞开了门，因此你能看到月光里五角枫叶的光辉。在月色笼罩的竹林里漫步，听河面十三弦古筝轻拢慢捻，秋月高悬，投影水中。生长于斯的妻子告诉我，Kamo River干流沿岸的步行道已打扫干净，因此她年少时迁离此地的白鸟，都终于飞了回来。焕然一新的街道上，到处都是咖啡馆，以及星巴克模式的户外咖啡店，令这座古都比以往任何时候都更开放，也更为放松。
但不可避免的是，外国人更多地会看到，城镇中心的老式木建筑被拆除。从市区望去，一幢14层的酒店建筑破坏了东北部山峦的古典风景。汽车、摩天大楼，以及叮当作响的弹球房，对于我们所赋予《艺妓回忆录》(Memoirs of a Geisha)的梦幻生活是一场浩劫。现在，来到这个喧嚣城市的我们，正用自己的嘻哈版本，吟诵着17世纪日本俳句诗人松尾芭蕉(Basho)的凄婉诗句：“即使身在京都，我仍渴望京都。”
改变，意味着进步
或许，那些令我们留恋的地方，要么出于某种原因在时光中岿然不动，要么已不合时宜，因此似乎什么都没有改变：因为冬季暴风雨的缘故，加州大苏尔海岸线延伸部分经常性地会被拦腰截断数月之久（巨石阻塞了不稳定的单行道），以至于人口似乎在缩减――如果说有什么不同的话，那就是仿佛整个地区变得越来越落后，越来越回归于岩石和海洋。
印度每天都会涌现新型高科技设施和熔岩灯餐厅，但当地的拥挤人群和多种形态的混乱状态似乎从未改变，即便它给这种混乱注入了新的元素。将目光从泰姬?马哈尔陵(Taj Mahal)转开，遥望薄暮笼罩下的亚穆纳河对岸，那是阿格拉中心地带，但你几乎什么都看不到，除了一个孤独的剪影，和一只在河边漫步的水牛，身后是缓缓西沉的夕阳。印度的往昔时光依然驻留此刻，尤其是那些遥远的岁月。
我觉得，首次到一个地方，会有一种纯净感，那种感觉比仅仅是对新鲜事物的渴望更深。我不能说当我2000年初到达莫雷阿岛时，该岛已经被弄糟了，因为那以前我从未见过它的模样。而今初到巴厘岛的人，同样被它的迷人风光所折服――与我20年前一样，直到他们呆了下来，才开始抱怨天堂的失落。
全世界的大城市，都是数百年精力和成就的产物，正如泰晤士广场大屏幕上的影像所显示的那样――伦敦、纽约和东京无时无刻不在进行着裂解与变革，往复不已。但当我们第二或第三次前往该地时，无论从哪方面讲，被弄糟的都应该是我们。我们身上的一些单纯无知不复存在，这时候我们成了哭诉的孩童，询问着――为什么一切不再是我们记忆中的样子。
旅游者很容易忘记，他的头一个问题不应该是自己有何感想，而是当地人有何感想。问问巴厘岛、哈瓦那或曼彻斯特的某位居民――倘若没有新建的高楼大厦和经济发展，她是否会活得更快乐？她可能会说“不”。每个孩子都渴望长大成人。“我希望看到马里、危地马拉和老挝的独特风情。”旅游者表示，“一个几个世纪以来丝毫都未改变的地方。”安提瓜岛、琅勃拉邦和廷巴克图的居民答道：“我想得到纽约、巴黎和洛杉矶的东西。”所谓改变，只是进步的代名词。
本文作者皮科?耶尔(Pico Iyer)是旅游随笔集Sun After Dark一书作者。
