Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

by William Finnegan

The villagers looked askance at them all, particularly the bedraggled backpackers. It was not hard to see why. Here was a large, awkward member of the global ruling elite who had probably spent more in an air-travel day than anyone on Nias could make in a year of hard work, all for the pleasure of leaving an unimaginably rich, clean place for this desperately poor, unhealthy place. Here he was struggling blindly down the road under an enormous pack, disoriented and ignorant and sweating like a donkey. He wanted to see Asia from the ground, not from the Hilton height of some air-conditioned resort that any sane person would prefer. The complex ambitions and aversions that brought the poor backpacker seven thousand miles to struggle and suffer from dysentery, heatstroke, or worse in the equatorial jungle—anything to be a “traveler” and not a “tourist”!—were perhaps impossible to untangle, but it was well known that he brought so little money that he was hardly worth hustling.