I stood on the edge of a double lane highway in southern Vietnam, screeching at a taxi driver who couldn’t care less, in a language he didn’t understand. Iain was inside the taxi, his left elbow swollen to the size of a small melon, his face pale with shock. He abruptly opened the door, to pace desperately beside the taxi.

Just an hour earlier, we’d been devouring lunch in a large outdoor restaurant in Vinh Long, with all its specialities out on display: fish in tanks, pigeons in cages and coiled snakes in a cement pit. Lunch had arrived piled on platters: pumpkin flowers stuffed with pork, beer-braised chicken and spicy beef salad, washed down with 555 beer. It was far too much food, ordered out of curiosity as much as hunger, and we left happy, to make our way to a home-stay on the Mekong Delta. Backpacks slung from our fronts and backs, we moved through the restaurant’s garden in monsoon drizzle, across a bridge of electric blue tiles, gleaming in the rain. “Careful,” Iain said, turning to me with his hand resting on a low banister, “It’s slippery.” Just at that moment he slid: down the bridge’s blue slope, down two blue steps at the end, and onto the ground. Loaded with thirty kilograms of luggage, his elbow broke the fall.

Vinh Long Hospital was filled with people milling through grey corridors. I left Iain in a daze at the entrance and raced through the building, looking for a doctor or a nurse – or anyone – who spoke English. People shook their heads or pointed, sending me running every which way. Someone led me to a counter where a lady tapped out a figure on a calculator – but what treatment it would cover and whether there was an English-speaking doctor in the hospital was unclear.

I rushed down passage after passage. At the end of one, I found Iain sitting on a wooden chair in an otherwise bare room, a steady stream of curious people wandering in and out to look at him. A nurse had appeared briefly, he told me, but with no common language between them, she had simply taken hold of Iain’s arm and tried to see how much it would bend. We were soon back in the taxi, negotiating a fare all the way to Saigon, over 100 kilometres and about three hours away. Yelping at every bump in the road, Iain took the two codeine pills I’d mimed out of the hospital pharmacy, and lay down in the back seat. I phoned our insurance company and tried to stop imagining that a bone would, at any minute, start poking through his skin. It would be a long, painful drive, but for $80 we were on the way. All we had to do was sit patiently in the car. And then the driver pulled over.

We sat in the taxi on the side of the road while car after car after car zipped past. I shrugged at the driver, pointed at the road, then shrugged again, trying to ask why we had stopped. He sunk into his chair and turned on the radio. I took a deep breath and tried to wait for a full minute to pass; something had to happen, I reasoned. But a minute later, still nothing: not a gesture or a smile. Not a single word.

Iain occasionally glanced down at his swollen arm in horror. It only seemed to get bigger: his upper forearm was now almost double its normal width. I began tapping an imaginary watch and pointing at Iain’s arm. “We have to hurry, he has to get to a hospital… Please! Drive! Go!”

The driver got out the car. “What are you doing?” I shouted. “We need to get to the hospital! Saigon, Saigon!” He looked away. Iain had begun to pace beside the highway.

Fifteen minutes passed, and another taxi pulled up behind us. Our driver sprung into action, writing down the amount he wanted us to pay for the kilometres covered so far, and another amount, in dollars, for us to pay the new driver to take us to Saigon. We were powerless.

Vietnam was several weeks and a few hundred kilometres behind me when I first opened my journal to re-read what I’d written in the country. After arriving in Saigon under a cloud, we’d had no choice but to stay while Iain’s arm got worse before it got better. I resigned myself to a few weeks of work, rewriting the final chapter of my book, again. Days in generic coffee shops melted into one another. With Saigon as little more than a backdrop, the work of writing “location independent” took on new meaning.

I began to spend more time in our hotel, which effortlessly became home like so many before it. The staff were cheerful and the phases of each day were always the same: baguettes and Vietnamese drip coffee in the morning, instant noodles and spring rolls for dinner. I felt more like a boarder than a guest. Travellers came and went, and came and went, while we woke in our pink bedroom at the start of another day. Beyond the hotel, the sense that in Vietnam everything came down to money wouldn’t leave me.

Three weeks later, we moved north, excited to leave the room that had been Iain’s sick bay. But apart from a few days in Hue and a handful of isolated moments, I would never be completely at ease in Vietnam. When the time came to sit down with my notes and find a thread that connected my time in Saigon or Chau Doc or Lao Cai or Hanoi, the cursor blinked more menacingly than usual. There was nothing I wanted to write. Several weeks later, I found a pirated copy of Catfish and Mandala in a second hand bookshop in Luang Prabang.

Both travelogue and memoir, Catfish and Mandala is the story of a Vietnamese-American’s journey to the country of his birth. Andrew X. Pham was only a child when he arrived in America, in 1977, having fled Vietnam with his family after the war. He slowly learns to fit in, but when his older sister commits suicide, it provokes questions about his identity and sense of home. Pham sets off on a bicycle soon afterwards, working through uncertainty on its saddle, while pedalling his way around the Pacific Rim, Japan and Vietnam.

After six weeks in Japan, he flies with his bicycle to Saigon, where he battles illness, bureaucracy, and more than one armed mob, as well as the same callousness I experienced so often, until I finally stopped hoping for civility from strangers. Pham’s experiences across cities, towns and villages resonated with me. Reading about them with a border between Vietnam and I reminded me that my feelings, though generalised, were honest. Being an outsider doesn’t mean you don’t have a right to be critical.

The cabin tilts in descent [above Saigon]. Passengers, mostly Vietnamese, begin fighting their luggage out of the overhead compartments, spilling packages into the aisles, rallying toward the exit. A Vietnamese couple across the aisle furtively jam uneaten airline cheese and crackers into their handbags, squirreling away the freebies, knowing better but unable to resist old immigration habits. A middle-aged pair, luggage in hand, rush up from the rear and plop down in the empty seats next to me. Sporting a lavender double-breasted suit and half a pound of gold around his blubbery neck, the man grins at me… Another Vietnamese-American immigrant success story coming home all spelled out in jewellery and gaudiness… Husbands and wives squawk directions at each other, squeezing hands, grinning the victor’s grin. Young children caught up in a rush of adrenalin wail. Their triumphant homecoming is at hand.

The Japanese and Koreans, all business travellers, flinch, scorn thinly veiled, drawing back from the Vietnamese. From both ends of the plane, flight attendants, round sensual faces distorted in desperation, scream in Korean-accented English, ordering the horde to put their luggage back into the overheads. On the intercom the captain orders the passengers to return to their seats for the landing. A duffel bag becomes unzipped and rains new toys into the aisle: action figures, fist-sized teddy bears, and Ping-Pong paddles. Somewhere up front, a little boy howls, and on the instant the party shifts into full cry. Mutiny.

A tall European flight attendant spearheads the assault, her smaller Korean counterparts covering her flanks. With small white hands, they wrestle the Vietnamese one by one onto seats. They slam closed the overhead compartments. Someone complains about his bruised fingers. Harsh Korean, countered by Vietnamese curses, rattles the cabin. The din alone should send the plane tumbling out of the sky…

Mortified by the Vietnamese’s behaviour and equally dismayed that I feel an obligatory connection to them, I sink deeper into my seat, resentful, ashamed of their incivility.

When Pham enters Saigon airport’s luggage-claim area, one of the staff is forcing his bicycle through a portal, causing what looks like irreparable damage. “This cheap old bike has taken me far,” he writes, “farther than my imagination. Thanks to nitwits in flip-flops, it is practically scrap metal. Oh God, if this is how I see the Vietnamese, what sorry sights they must be to Western eyes.”

While I could never truly understand Pham’s inner conflict, our experiences were regularly in parallel, and too often I shared his stubbornness. I couldn’t bring myself to pay a bribe or turn a blind eye at the right moment, and I wouldn’t go limp when elbowed out of a queue. Reading about Pham’s frustrations was cathartic; with his journey behind him, he saw humour in even the worst situations.

In Hanoi, he spends his days moving among clans of backpackers, sometimes being as obscenely overcharged as his more foreign-looking friends. He writes about the city’s commercial areas, all separated by trade. Shoes are sold in a dedicated shoe district, electronics in another. Near my own guesthouse, a street was lined from one end to the other with buttons, braiding and thread: a haberdashery street. The division of trade wasn’t unique to Hanoi. I’d seen it in cities in the Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, and in the odd district in Shanghai, too – when shopping malls hadn’t taken over.

“Our favourite is the street of nem nuong diners,” wrote Pham. “Around dinnertime, straddling the sunset hour, the street is perfumed and greyed with the smoke of meat sizzling over coals. If you catch a whiff of this scent, you never forget it. It is a heady mixture of fishsauce marinade, burning scallions, caramelised sugar, pepper, chopped beef, and pork fat. Women sit on footstools grilling meats on hibachi-style barbecues. Aromatic, stomach-nipping smoke curls to the scrubby treetops and simply lingers, casting the avenue into an amber haze. When hungry folks flock from all over the city to this spot, they have only one thing on their mind. And the entire street, all its skills and resources, is geared to that singular satisfaction.”

One evening, Iain and I set off to find Hanoi’s nem nuong street. After weaving for over an hour through the Old Town’s impossible lattice of streets, we were still unsure how much farther it was – and by then we were ravenous. Iain hailed a taxi, showed the driver a road name and within five minutes, we were being driven along a highway. “Good thing we got in a taxi,” I said, sinking into the seat, thinking about how long it would have taken us to walk.

Ten minutes later, we still hadn’t arrived. The meter was turning fast, as rigged taxi meters do. “How much further?” Iain said to the driver, to let him know we were wary. He only pointed ahead. We turned off the highway, down a narrow street where everything looked infuriatingly familiar. “Oh no…,” Iain said. “Stop. Stop here. STOP! Stop now!” The driver pulled over, still looking straight ahead. We were back in the Old Town, just three or four blocks away from where we’d hailed the taxi, and the rigged meter had racked up at least double the ordinary fare.

“You’ve been driving us around in circles,” I shouted, making circular motions with an extended finger. The driver shrugged and, for a moment I worried we were mistaken, but Iain was in no doubt. He thrust his hand into a pocket and pulled out just enough money to cover half the fare.

When the driver looked at the note, his expression instantly changed. He slammed his hand onto the meter, demanding we pay for the scam in full. “No,” I barked back. Iain was casually walking away, hoping the driver would accept that his ploy had failed, but our street performance had only just begun. The driver marched up to me, waving the money in my face. Hands on my hips, I shouted back: “Do you think we’re stupid? I’m not paying for being driven around the block!” Onlookers watched me with distaste. Red-faced, his lip quivering with rage, the driver bellowed insults in Vietnamese. He looked as if he might punch me. If I were him, I might have punched me. It was an uncomfortably familiar scene.

Iain strode back to the car, put an arm around his fishwife of a girlfriend, and together we began walking away. The driver – still shouting – lurched forward, pursuing us, arms waving wildly. Scam or no scam, he wasn’t going to lose face. “Call the police!” I said meaningfully to Iain. “Okay,” he replied, only pretending to dial a number. “Police!” he said, waving the phone in front of the man, then put it to his ear and started to speak. A row of onlookers were watching our every move. Still backing away from the man, I watched, amazed, as he gave one final roar, walked around his car, got in, and drove away.

In Saigon, I’d watched as a friend’s bag was cut at the strap and whisked away by a man on a passing motorbike. Later, in Hue, I was short-changed by a government official at a UNESCO World Heritage site. Women shoed me out of three different shops saying “No big size! No big size!” when I tried to buy a sweater in Hanoi. A fruit seller swapped the strawberries I’d bought with a rotten bag she’d specially kept aside, and I caught a masseuse winding the clock fifteen minutes forward out the corner of my eye. I’m sure I wasn’t the first self-pitying foreigner whose massage she’d cut short. “Time’s up!” she said. My time was up. After seven long weeks in Vietnam, I left.

I was in no hurry to return. Then, three months later, Iain and I were turned around at Hong Kong’s border with China. The cheapest flight off the island was to Hanoi. Who said the gods don’t enjoy a good joke? I picked up the phone and booked a hotel in Hanoi. If I couldn’t eat mala tang or yang rou chuan’r dusted with Chinese five spice-flavoured MSG, at least Vietnamese food was a fair substitute.

Sniffing out new varieties of local cuisine has always given structure to our long walks. In Hanoi’s Old Town, the stalls, street corners and restaurants with the tastiest food became my landmarks, wedged between anonymous shops all selling the same lacquer curios. If long, S-shaped Vietnam is a bamboo pole with baskets hanging from either side, Hanoi in the country’s north and Saigon in its south are the two baskets, laden with rice. Delicious food and evocative temples became our rewards for hours of wandering through traffic-choked streets in the monsoon rain. Before long, I had grown to love Vietnamese cuisine.

We devoured it in grimy eateries or at greasy plastic tables, where the smell of motorbike exhausts hung thick in the evening air. In Hue, we wrapped rice paper around fresh noodles, pork, vegetables and slices of star fruit, and drizzled peanut sauce over the tightly-rolled morsels: nem loi. We regularly stooped through the low doorway of a hole-in-the-wall in Hanoi, where a grumpy old woman sat surrounded by deep-fried dough: crab dumplings, spring rolls, miniature meat pies, and juicy mystery snacks. In Saigon, we ordered barbecued beef kebabs which arrived on lemongrass skewers, and in Hanoi, clumps of rice noodles with grilled pork patties, served with fish sauce and chopped chilli and garlic. We worked our way through Vietnamese restaurants’ ubiquitous plates of leaves – lettuce, basil, mint, watercress and coriander – and everywhere we went, we ate bowl after bowl of steaming pho.

We had com-phon – or com-dia in the south – at “commoner’s cafeteria[s]”, as Pham called them. Com is rice, served with a selection of hot and cold dishes, much like the canteen food of China: squash and ground pork, green pepper and beef, silver-skinned river fish, or onions and pork, all fried with salty sauce. The Vietnam that Pham cycled through in the late nineties may have changed, but some things were just the same, and the restaurants he described could have been the same restaurants Iain and I frequented. “Sided by low benches,” he wrote, describing a small eatery in Hanoi, “seven coffee tables form a single long board running the length of the corridor-like space illuminated by three dim bulbs dripping from bare wires. A dark layer of grease and soot from cooking fires skins the wall. Leprous white patches glow where the plaster recently peeled off. The ceiling, stringy with cobwebs, sags ominously… I sit down at the end of one bench and cannot find the floor with my feet. Bones, napkins, cigarettes butts, vegetables, and sticky rice cover the concrete.”

The description reminded me of a dinner spot Iain and I regularly visited, on the pavement of a busy street in Hanoi. They grilled beef luc lac to perfection, and caramelised onions until they were a deep brown. The roadside restaurant served pigeon, too, which I found surprisingly tasty when persuaded to try it one evening. The restaurant’s food was reasonably priced and beers were cheap, but it wasn’t the kind of place you could linger at comfortably for too long. In summer, the industrial fan that kept diners cool blew the residue from the deep-fryer straight onto us, and after an hour or so, my glasses would be finely sprayed with grease. The scattered pigeon bones, napkins and the other debris on the ground didn’t usually bother me, but at the end of a busy Friday night, the ground would be stacked high with the remnants of many a wholehearted meal, and child-sized furniture put you right at the level of the muck piled on the floor.

The chairs and tables were quite literally child-sized, as they are at eateries all over Vietnam. Iain felt – and looked – ridiculous, but the components of a modest-sized restaurant – chairs, tables, woks, pots and pans – could be stacked onto a single food cart at the end of a night and wheeled away, streaks of grease on the pavement their only remaining trace. Pham felt ridiculous too. “I sit obediently, wondering yet again why Vietnamese prefer kindergarten furniture. I haven’t acquired the penchant to sit with my butt lower than my knees. With the tabletop so low, whenever I eat I feel as though I am licking myself like a dog.”

Despite all his good humour, Pham’s journey rarely allowed him the reconciliation he sought. “I try not to let my disappointment show,” he wrote after visiting the village where he was born. “I come searching for truths, hoping for redeeming grace, a touch of gentility. But, no. The abrasiveness of Saigon has stripped away my protective layers. I am raw and bare and I ask myself, Who are these strangers? These Vietnamese, these wanting-wanting-wanting people… Saigon gnaws at me… its noise… its uncompromising want…”

My own frustrations paled in comparison. I may have left the country disenchanted, but I was just passing through. I didn’t have to like Vietnam’s culture or its people; I had come neither for a holiday nor redemption or truth. I was trying to make connections – between places and people – while inching my way through Southeast Asia, north. I saw how much Vietnam had inherited from China, the time-honoured foe that ruled it for 1000 years. I learned something of how stubbornness and pride are intertwined, and wondered whether having China on their doorstep contributed to the hardiness of so many Vietnamese. Thailand and Laos’ borders had often seemed blurred, but Vietnam stood with its back to China on the edge of Southeast Asia, as if looking in.

In some ways, I’d had the same sense of looking in, as if only half of me had ever really been present in Vietnam. For much of the time I’d been preoccupied with work, and after Iain’s accident, I’d become defensive and detached. It is the only country I’ve ever visited that I have no intention of returning to, but how much of that was due to my own shortcomings? I should have spent longer in Hue, I sometimes think, and ventured farther off the beaten track. We shouldn’t have based ourselves in Hanoi, where my jaundice reached its peak. If I’d been less sensitive, or learned to see things differently, would I have found the Vietnamese more likeable? This was, perhaps, the most difficult of Pham’s realisations: “I am in awe of the Vietnamese,” he wrote, towards the end of his year-long journey. “I admire them. I respect them, but what I really want is to like them, to find them likeable.”

Sanbanor! We’re finding our feet in Ulan Bator, where we arrived on the Trans-Mongolian two days ago. It’s a surprising city, where dirt roads, ger slums and decrepit, Soviet-era apartment complexes are giving way to glass towers and traffic jams. In the first quarter of this year, the country’s economy grew by almost 17 percent, and Ulan Bator has an astonishing array of cuisines: at an Uzbek restaurant last night, we sampled some of the food that awaits us on the Silk Road.

The ways in which Asia’s skyrocketing demand for commodities has reconfigured the lives of a traditionally nomadic people is just one story we want to tell with Old World Wandering. We’ve also thought hard recently about how we can tell these stories best, beyond text, and whether or not our Kickstarter project succeeds, we’ve decided we’re going to explore all the possibilities of digital media to add another layer to our long-form dispatches. Expect our descriptions of Ulan Bator to include video, music, maps and local artwork on specially styled, immersive pages.

Our project has raised $10,645 so far, which is a substantial amount of money. We’re grateful for all the support – not just from Old World Wandering’s regular readers, but from many new readers too. Unfortunately, we only have 5 days left to reach our target of $34,500. If we fall short, none of our backers pay, or receive rewards. We, of course, don’t get paid anything either.

We know we only have a very slim chance of success – but we’re going to do all we can to finish as close to our target as possible. You are the people who believe in this project – who see the value of our storytelling and our journey – and we need you now more than ever. Please find five or ten minutes today to tell a few friends or colleagues about Old World Wandering. From the data we’ve collected so far, it seems like emails work best. (If you have any contacts in companies who might want to be Old World Wandering’s sole corporate sponsor, please get in touch with one of us by email.)

We’ve received a few comments and messages – some more skeptical than others – about why we need $34,500 to fund an 18 month overland journey, and the dispatches we’ll write along the way. Iain and I reached this figure after a lot of careful planning, and the rewards we’re offering are the main reason our target is so high. Fifty percent of it will cover our overheads, including Kickstarter’s 5% fee and Amazon’s 3-5% for processing payments. The remainder – approximately  $18,000 – will go towards transport, accommodation, food, entry fees and visas: all the basic costs of travelling for 18 months.

Iain and I have been travelling on a shoestring for several years now, so we know how to calculate a budget. We’re also more realistic than we were six years ago during our first overland trip, when we spent our last two months in India boiling water and eating nothing but vegetarian Tibetan soup and bread with peanut butter. We now factor in the cost of the occasional semi-private vehicle, for example, without which our freedom to explore would be drastically reduced. We also rely a lot on WiFi to maintain Old World Wandering, and usually have to pay slightly more for guesthouses that provide it. To give you some idea of how that $18,000 breaks down, our time in China, Mongolia and Central Asia will cost an average of $55 per day for the two of us, inclusive of everything except visas.

The point of this project is to cover our costs. We won’t be compensating ourselves at all for time spent writing, because Old World Wandering has become a part of who we are, with all the perfectionism and passion that implies. I hope we’ve conveyed how grateful we are to you for getting us this far. Let’s see how much further we can take this!

IM: You’ve chosen to focus on the intersections between travel, culture and food. Why did you make that choice? And how do you think specialisation has contributed to your success?

JE: I don’t think I made the choice at all, actually. The choice made itself, by virtue of the things that fascinated me as I travelled. I always thought I’d enjoy the history behind the places I visited, but I never expected to find myself so intensely interested in the anthropology of food. As I continued my travels past the expected one year mark to two, and then three and then four years, my interests shifted and my site’s focus shifted too.

I started out with general posts about transportation misadventures (like my Bolivian bus ride from hell) but did not delve into food. As the years went on, food became the way I planned my travels (where to eat what, how it came to be, who made it and why) – though the misadventures getting from A to B never dissipated. As a result, I didn’t want to limit my site to just being about food, or travel or culture. It seemed appropriate that a Venn diagram of all three overlapping made the most sense.

IM: The phrase “location independent” is being used more and more often to describe people like you and I, who can work wherever they find an internet connection. That allows for new kinds of travel, but has its drawbacks. To what extent do you consider yourself “location independent”? And what are the drawbacks of a lifestyle that many people consider ideal?

JE: I am location independent because the work I do does not require a home base, but that does not mean that it is simple to move around and work. I try to find places with good WiFi, a reasonably quiet workspace and an apartment that feels safe but not too comfortable. As the site has progressed from a travelogue of my backpacking to a business of its own, and has led to other work opportunities, I’ve found myself staying longer and longer in one place before moving on. Staying put and renting an apartment allows me to explore the destination more, but also means that I can form a routine of work and eating, one that maximizes productivity.

The obvious downside is the lack of consistency, and of course, missing my friends and family at home. (Though I do get longer visits with friends and family than I would have been afforded as a lawyer with four week’s vacation a year.) Also, I made the decision to see where this business of writing and photographing took me, and so being as Type A as I am (once a lawyer, always a lawyer?) I’m giving it my all. That means far less time to see and explore and far more time in front of my computer. As with any project, building a business out takes hard work. Whether you are location independent or not, the hard work part doesn’t change. I just pick places with good views and good food.

While balance is important, I’m the first to admit it’s been lacking in the last year or so, where I changed my course from round-the-world traveller to writer and curator and other hats, including writing my first book. On one hand, it seems foolish to be location independent when I don’t take as much time as I’d like to explore the location I’m in. But on the other, it’s exciting and satisfying to be working on projects I truly care about, and to do so in places I love.

IM: You’ve invested years in not just Legal Nomads but your whole online presence. When you look at the future of your own site and the media in general, how optimistic are you? And how clear about what comes next? It must be a stark contrast to the clearly defined career paths of law.

Yes, that’s very true. I read an interview with Anthony Bourdain recently where someone asked if he thought he would end up with the career he has now. And he said he never anticipated any of this, and never really had a plan. It was instead a matter of looking at the opportunities that presented themselves, making good decisions and then working through the bad decisions. And that’s what I’ve done too. Whatever I put online, I believe in 100% – else I wouldn’t do it. I don’t post anything I don’t care about, and I love sharing links to learn from. The social media presence isn’t an obligation, it’s actually enjoyable!

As to the future, I’m not sure where it will lead. It’s an adventure for all of us in this new digital age. I will keep doing what I am doing – exploring the things in life that I am passionate about, food figuring prominently I’m sure. Taking it day by day – or, as Bourdain said, opportunity by opportunity – has worked thus far, and it’s likely what I will keep doing, while also trying to learn as much as I can.

IM: Roughly six months ago, you started curating Travelreads for Longreads. It’s a job that involves reading a wide-range of travel-related writing, from Hemingway’s Spanish dispatches to interviews like these, with the provision that everything be over 1,500 words long. How much of the long-form travel writing that is published now comes out of people working for magazines and newspapers, compared to people publishing independently? And have you noticed any emerging trends? How are people bending the rules of travel writing by publishing online, for example, if they are at all?

Many of the articles are smaller magazines and publications – the Barnstormer, the excellent Roads and Kingdoms, Maisonneuve Mag in Canada, and the recently launched LA Review of Books, among many others. Not many come from travel blogs themselves, which speaks in part to the attention span of our respective audiences. My readers are used to longer form pieces as I’ve always produced them, but for most of my travel blogging columns, 500 words is the norm. If your readers are accustomed to reading 500 word pieces or less, a 2,000 post is out of place. That said, it’s a shame because I think it’s always great to delve into the history of a place and long-form allows more context for doing so. I do wish more travel bloggers combined their pieces into a longer missive rather than splitting them up into parts.

I don’t know if “bending the rules” is the right question. It’s more of “which sites are making great use of the technology they have available to them.” Yes, that might differ from print, but it’s not a rule-breaker, just a creative shift. For example, in technology, The Verge has some beautiful longer form pieces about technology mixing multimedia and prose, with stark font changes to delineate sections and very thorough research in the piece itself. I wish that more travel sites were willing to do this (or had the budget to – of course that factors in), and build out creative and beautiful photography and text, all woven into one piece of art.

That some pubs or people (bloggers or writers or columnists) are writing long-form pieces on the web isn’t surprising. The magazines (Nat Geo or Conde Nast Traveler) have those pieces in their print editions too. I’ve very much enjoyed discovering new, smaller magazines and publications, however, and of course I’ve loved the suggestions from our reading community who tag their tweets with #travelreads when they find a travel piece that makes them smile.

Today, I’m talking to Rolf Potts, author of Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel and Marco Polo Didn’t Go There: Stories and Revelations from One Decade as a Postmodern Travel Writer. 

IM: Tell me about your first book, Vagabonding, and why you wrote it.

RP: Vagabonding is a practical and philosophical primer for long-term travel. It details how a longer, slower-paced journey can be accomplished with a minimum of expense. But it also explains why, in the context of one’s life-journey, long-term travel is an important and rewarding endeavour. The core philosophy of Vagabonding is that one’s truest form of wealth in life is time and experience – not money or “things” – and that travel is a way to actualize that wealth in a meaningful way.

The philosophical component came from my own life experiences. I didn’t grow up in a wealthy or cosmopolitan setting, where international travel is seen as a reflexive lifestyle option for young people; I grew up in an industrial city on the Great Plains, an environment where traditional work ethic was practically a religion. I longed to travel the world, but few people I knew owned passports, and I assumed that international travel was for retired people, folks who’d worked and saved for decades. My grandfather was a Kansas farmer who’d been tilling and harvesting full time since he was 15, but when he was ready to retire – around the time I was a teenager – he was in no position to enjoy his newfound free time, since his health was failing and my grandmother was regressing into Alzheimer’s. I realized at a young age that a life of hard work doesn’t automatically reward you with time to live your dreams.

I was reading a lot of Walt Whitman at the time, as well as Henry David Thoreau, who noted in Walden that most people spend “the best part of life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.” I began to realize that my own life concerns were part of a much larger philosophical conversation, one that stretched back to the Bible and the Upanishads. I decided to live my life ambitions rather than postpone them; I saved up money from eight months of landscaping work and used it to travel North America for eight months. In the process, I learned that long-term travel was cheaper, easier, and safer than I’d expected. I was hooked. I moved to Korea, where two years of teaching English earned me enough money to travel Asia for two years.

Around that time I started freelancing for Salon.com, and in 1999 I became their “Vagabonding” travel columnist, writing biweekly dispatches about my ongoing adventures. Salon readers began to email me with questions about my travels, and the two most common queries were “How are you able to travel for so long?” and “How does one become a travel writer?” I’d been running an author website, RolfPotts.com, since 1998, so I decided to address those questions online. I wasn’t sure how one becomes a travel writer – I only knew my own experience – so each month I began to pose basic travel-writing career questions to different literary and guidebook professionals. I’m still doing that, and to date I’ve interviewed over one hundred people, including some of the biggest names in travel writing.

As for the “How do you travel for so long?” question, I decided to address it in big-picture terms. I wrote up a ten-point “Vagabonding Suggestifesto” (“manifesto” seemed too presumptuous), which detailed the kind of life-attitude that can enable meaningful long-term travel. This online text found its way to an editor at Random House, who suggested I expand this philosophy into a book. The ten points of my “suggestifesto” became chapter topics, and the book was written over the course of eight months in a little rented room in southern Thailand. It contained lots of practical advice, but at its core was the philosophical argument I’d confronted as a teenager – how long-term travel can deepen one’s life journey, and how this is an experience that shouldn’t be postponed to a seemingly more appropriate time of life.

IM: How do you think travel as an industry constructs our ideas about travel as an experience?

RP: The travel industry has always influenced our ideas about the travel experience – in part because the travel industry has always played a nuts-and-bolts role in making the act of travel possible. Two thousand years ago, the travel industry dovetailed with cross-cultural trade. There was no such thing as a passenger ship, so travellers bought passage on merchant vessels – and they were expected to bring their own supplies and help out with onboard tasks. Most improved roads existed to expedite government business, most inns doubled as brothels, and few people travelled for travel’s sake. Travel was thus perceived to be as difficult and utilitarian as the services and technologies that enabled it.

This didn’t begin to change on a wide scale until the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when an emergent European middle class created a self-contained travel industry that focused on leisure and self-education. As with any middle-class endeavour, the notion of “tourism” came to carry pejorative implications. The funniest travel book of the 19th century, Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, finds its satire at the expense of an American tour-group visiting the Mediterranean region. Since Twain’s day, the travel industry has grown in tandem with mass culture, hitting its tipping point in the 1980s, when – as Graham Boynton pointed out in last week’s interview – consumers in industrialized nations came to see travel as a right rather than a privilege. Some folks have claimed that this is when the language of travel writing began to blur with the language of advertising – but travel writing (and the expectations of travellers) has always been mixed up with a fantasy vision of what is to be found in faraway lands. In the classic 1976 craft primer On Writing Well, journalist William Zinsser’s was already using the term “travelese” to describe the trite tropes of travel tales. “Nowhere else in nonfiction do writers use such syrupy words and groaning platitudes,” Zinsser noted. “It is a style of soft words which under hard examination mean nothing.”

The term “travel industry” still has a somewhat dodgy connotation for travel purists, and it’s easy to disparage the phony expectations created by tourism marketers. But most people these days are savvy enough to see through the illusions of advertising – if nothing else because we tend to tout the same travel idealizations and half-truths on our Facebook feeds. Regardless of how travel is mediated, it’s not that hard to wander off the beaten path. Moreover, I’d reckon the travel industry offers more benefits than drawbacks for serious travellers. The world has become accessible in ways we could scarcely dream of a few generations ago, and the travel industry has done a lot to enable this. This can lead to certain economic and environmental complexities, of course, but I’d wager the world is better off for the mass exchange of people and ideas.

IM: What do you think about the explosion of amateur travel media online? I’m mostly referring to the thousands of travel blogs that have appeared in the last few years, but there are other examples. What are their strengths and weaknesses?

RP: Travel blogs have become so widespread and diverse in recent years that it’s hard to make a generalization, good or bad, without getting something wrong in the process. A conventional criticism is that travel blogs are poorly written and riddled with verbal and visual clichés – but there are plenty of blogs out there that feature smart, innovative content. On that same token, blogs have been celebrated as an independent, populist alternative to what the travel industry feeds us through mainstream publications – but from what I’ve seen bloggers are as likely as anyone to trot out hackneyed narratives about a given destination.

I’d posit that travel blogs are at their best when they present a straightforward, unpolished, epistolary recounting of a personal journey, since this can capture a place or experience with an unguarded honesty you won’t find in more formal publications. A professional photographer named Peter DiCampo recently created a buzz with “Everyday Africa,” an exhibition of informal iPhone photos that depict the continent not through its media extremes (Africa as strife-torn wasteland; Africa as uplifting human-interest parable), but through the same offhand banality one might see in Hipstamatic app photos of family and friends. Look at DiCampo’s photos, and they feel similar to what you can find on any of thousands of amateur travel blogs. This incidental micro-narrative is important. The only audience for some of these amateur blog posts is a handful of friends or family members – but this enables, say, Grandma Mildred, or your old pal Bob from high school, to see how most Africans (or Arabs, Chinese, Cubans, or any other culture that might be considered “exotic”) are living quiet, “normal” lives that we all can identify with. Amid the alarmist din of mainstream media reporting, these types of blogs offer an important counter-narrative that can make the Other feel more familiar and relatable.

Interestingly, I’ve found that a key weakness in travel blogging emerges when a given blogger becomes more professional and seeks to widen his blog audience. At a certain level this results in better photos and more compelling text, but it also requires that the blogger sink more travel time into the task of content creation and self-promotion. Instead of living one’s journey in the open-ended, organic manner that allows for serendipity and unexpected discovery, the blogger winds up “performing” her travels for her audience; the act of experiencing one’s travels thus becomes hard to separate from the act of recording, editing, posting, and promoting one’s travels. I can attest to this first-hand, since my most intensive experience in from-the-field travel blogging came in 2010, when I travelled around the world with no luggage for six weeks.

The “stunt” at the heart of the journey was an experiment in extreme minimalism, but travelling with no bags was easy compared to the task of trying to portray those travels in near-real time. For every minute of lighthearted travel depicted in my blog posts and videos, I sank three minutes of travel time into conceptualizing, writing, and editing those posts and videos. I had a lot of fun in the process, and I’m proud of how the content turned out, but – despite the large audience and positive publicity – the journey itself wasn’t very affecting on a personal level. It was closer to what historian Daniel Boorstin defined as a “pseudo-event” – a visible activity that is done for the primary purpose of being seen. That’s the recurring shortcoming of any professionalized travel blog, I think: The constant process of feeding content into one’s blog blurs the line between travel and travel-performance.

I prefer to travel in relative anonymity for longer periods of time, and capture my experiences in more reflective, long-form narratives. I prefer to read this kind of travel writing as well – but the short-cycle demands of professionalized, social-media-driven blog posts favour shorter, more frequent, less-digested travel narratives. That’s fine if you aim to share consumer service information or document a short-term event in real-time, but the resulting content is far less likely to convey much personal or literary depth.

IM: What do you think separates travel writing from journalism?

RP: Travel writing is typically considered to be a sub-category of journalism – which is interesting, since travel writing existed before journalism, and has done a lot to influence the way journalism works. These days it’s hard to draw a clear line between the two labels. Is international reporting a kind of travel writing? Sometimes it is. Is the content in glossy travel magazines a kind of journalism? Sometimes it is, too. And some types of travel writing – service, news, many destination features – take on the information-driven form and structure of traditional news journalism.

Travel writing deviates from journalism when it takes a more personal, memoiristic slant, and tackles deeper human themes. Instead of taking on a pose of objectivity, this kind of travel writing acknowledges the specificity (and limitations) of one person’s point of view, and this self-awareness becomes a part of the story. Long-form narrative journalism has actually borrowed a lot from travel writing in this sense, in that it acknowledges the conceit of reportorial objectivity and places the writer and her subject in a finite world. Travel writing is particularly good at this approach, since by its very nature travel forces the writer into a position of humility and vulnerability. In this kind of writing, you have a sense for who is telling the story, and this personal sensibility informs the way you understand that story. When done well, this kind of writing resonates on several levels at once, in a way that goes beyond standard journalism.

IM: Since its beginnings, with epics like Gilgamesh and Homer’s Odyssey, travel writing has by its nature been a reflection of an interconnected world. New sorts of travel literature emerge when new sorts of travel become possible, from Marco Polo’s journey along the Silk Road to Pico Iyer’s reflections on global – but mostly American – pop culture. What do you think travel writing will take from the internet, with its unprecedented freedom from physicality that is also a constant connection to home?

RP: That’s an interesting way to frame the question, since Gilgamesh is in many ways a metaphorical tale about mortality, and The Odyssey is as much about Greek self-definition as it is cross-cultural reflection. I guess travel literature has always served multiple tasks at once – and it will certainly continue to do so in the 21st century. At a certain level the Internet has turned the task of reporting on faraway places and cultures – a task that used to be the central mission of travel writing – into a somewhat redundant endeavour. These days we can go online and view simultaneous perspectives on a single place – and more than ever we are hearing the voices of the people who live in these places. That’s a good thing, I think, since as travellers we’re less prone to fall back on the postcard preconceptions and pat conclusions that once defined so much travel writing.

It’s often been said that, historically, travel writing held up a mirror to the ideals of home. From Herodotus to the imperial-era Brits, travel accounts examined other cultures in part to answer the question, “Who, as a people, are we?” The information age has shifted this question so that it now asks, “Who, as a person, am I?” Pico Iyer manages to address this question while still being reportorial, but for the most part I think travel writing will drift more and more into a memoiristic direction, to the point that it will, at times, scarcely feel like travel writing. I remember reading Eat, Pray, Love for the first time six years ago, and feeling frustrated by how little time the author spent engaging the cultures she was visiting. Her travels were so sequestered that they felt like background scenery to a story that had almost nothing to do with travel.

Half a decade later, our electronic connection to home is such a foregone conclusion as we travel that the concerns of a given journey begin to blur with the concerns of home. I’ve been reading Andrew McCarthy’s The Longest Way Home, and it’s interesting to see how much of the story hinges on Skyping his wife from the wastelands of Patagonia, or sending satellite-phone dispatches to his family from the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro. I remember how, in Jon Krakauer’s 1997 book Into Thin Air, the socialite who sends sat-phone dispatches from Everest is seen as this kind of vulgar figure, but when McCarthy uses a similar technology in 2012 the gesture feels heartfelt and normal.

I think this direct dialogue between travel and home is going to figure even larger in 21st century travel writing, to the point that some travel-themed stories and books will scarcely feel like travel writing as we have traditionally understood it. The key, I think, will be how well these stories are rendered, how well the writing draws human insights from this way of living and travelling.

The internet has shaken both industries up immeasurably. Independent travel and self-publishing are just a few clicks away, after all, and professionals are being crowded out. It’s not yet clear where they will find a place. As part of Old World Wandering’s Kickstarter project, I’m interviewing three people about travel, writing and how they intersect in the topsy-turvy present. The first is Graham Boynton, author of Last Days in Cloud Cuckooland. He was an editor at Conde Nast Traveler for ten years and Group Travel Editor at the Daily and Sunday Telegraph. Next Monday, I’m speaking to Rolf Potts, author of Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel. In two weeks’ time, I’ll publish the final interview in this series, with Jodi Ettenberg, Legal Nomad and curator of Travelreads.

IM: You started your career as a reporter in South Africa. How and why did you move from that to travel journalism?

GB: I was a journalist who covered politics in South Africa, mainly the student movements and the burgeoning black trade union movement. That got me into trouble with the authorities and I was declared an “undesirable alien” in 1976 and deported to the UK. For the next few years I wrote general interest features for magazines internationally and started writing the occasional travel article.

By the early 1980s I was working for a Fleet Street magazine called Business Traveller that had among its regular contributors Eric Newby, Auberon Waugh, Geoffrey Wheatcroft and other distinguished writers. That was when I began to read Newby’s Short Walk in Hindu Kush, Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia and Paul Theroux’s Great Railway Bazaar. I then became the editor of Business Traveller, a job I held until I moved to America at the end of 1987.

IM: What was the state of travel journalism when you started?

GB: I would say that travel journalism was beginning to thrive in the 1980s in line with the growth of the travel industry. Britain’s national newspapers began to attract more advertising and thus the travel sections expanded. Similarly in America specialist magazines such as Travel and Leisure and Conde Nast Traveler flourished. The launch of Conde Nast Traveler, under the editorship of Sir Harold Evans was a significant moment in travel publishing. Formerly editor of London’s Sunday Times, Evans was an iconic figure in British publishing, and his involvement in a travel magazine gave the genre credibility. I was lucky enough to be recruited by Sir Harold as the magazine was being launched and spent 10 years as a senior editor there.

IM: You say that travel journalism began to thrive in the 1980s, and names like Newby, Chatwin and Theroux – as well as the credibility you say Sir Harold Evans lent to Conde Nast – all indicate how well things were going. What characterised that period? How much editorial freedom did writers have, for example? Are there any stories that you remember particularly well, that might be a good example of something that could be published then but not now? And how did the relationship between the travel industry and travel magazines affect editorial decisions?

GB: Conde Nast Traveler made a virtue of its editorial independence and the “investigative” journalism that established its reputation. I was in charge of investigative journalism and remember most vividly my editorial team doing a big expose on the lack of airport security at America’s airports. This was long before 9/11. We also did major pieces of elephant poaching and the state of African wildlife conservation, a subject that was not common in travel magazines of the time. However, the reason such stories might not be covered now is more to do with the cost of such investigations. In those days we had big budgets and could put writers and researchers on stories such as these for significant periods of time. These days budgets are much tighter. As for the relationship with the travel industry, Conde Nast Traveler has always paid its way and not accepted hospitality – it’s part of the American magazine’s DNA. All other travel publications in the UK, Europe and the rest of world are forced to accept hospitality for budgetary reasons and thus have an entirely different relationship with the industry.

IM: You say that in the 1980s the travel industry was growing. Can you give me some idea of what you mean by that? And how has the growth of the travel industry shaped travel writing over the course of your career?

GB: It was the commercial boom years for international travel. Suddenly people regarded travel as a right rather than a privilege. Advertising across newspapers and magazines grew, paginations increased and staff were hired to fill the pages. Significantly, the travelling public were also looking for advice on increasingly far-flung places they wanted to travel to, so public response to the travel magazines and newspaper travel supplements also grew.

IM: Could you outline your career from then on, until you were appointed Group Travel Editor at the Telegraph?

GB: In my 10 years at Conde Nast Traveler I was lucky enough to be able to travel, write and edit. The editing was the bread and butter that paid the mortgage and the travel writing was the bonus. During this period I concentrated on African conservation issues and the magazine became a champion of community conservation programmes, not a widely supported idea in the US at the time. At the same time I launched a series of conservation awards that in the years since have become the World Traveler Awards.

IM: What is the role of travel desks at large newspapers? And travel magazines within a large publisher like Conde Nast? How important is the part they play in overall revenue? And how much respect do they command within the company?

GB: This is a complicated question and not one that I feel I can express my true feelings. What I do know is that at the Telegraph Media Group travel is/was a major revenue earner. Whether or not the newspapers’ executives believe that this has anything to do with the quality of editorial content or whether they regard this as merely part of the larger commercial picture I cannot say. Equally, it is for the newspapers’ executives to say whether or not they had any respect for the editorial product I was responsible for producing over 12 years at the Telegraph. One thing I can say is that both the readers and the travel industry held Telegraph Travel content in high regard.

IM: Let me rephrase that. Travel is an unusual combination of engagement with the world in the broadest sense of the word and close engagement with an industry. It is not always clear to me what separates a travel story from general correspondence, and I imagine this is something you’ve given a lot of thought. The job travel writers do is also not always clear. Do they help consumers navigate an industry, confining themselves to the ways in which the vast majority of people travel, or do they undertake exceptional journeys and write about them in ways that some might call elitist. How have you navigated these contradictions?

GB: Firstly, the sudden storm that is the internet revolution has changed newspaper travel coverage profoundly and glossy magazines such as Conde Nast Traveler and Travel and Leisure rather less so. Assuming, probably rightly, that their readers can find information on travel anywhere online the newspapers now see their role more as utilitarian guides than sources of inspiration. Newspaper readerships are falling dramatically so travel sections are also trying to make up for concomitant advertising losses by selling holidays alongside editorial content. Of course, this changes the nature of newspaper travel journalism completely. So, fewer travel writers are commissioned to write great sprawling old-fashioned features about remote destinations and undiscovered primitive tribes in the way that the Newbys and the Chatwins once were. Newspaper executives have chosen a more prosaic approach to travel which is why you will now see acres of coverage on cruising, which some purists do not regard as travel at all. The American magazines still carry stories that might be regarded as exceptional journeys that are of only minority interest but certainly less than in previous years.

IM: The internet has upended few industries as thoroughly as the media and travel industries. It makes sense that it has also had an enormous effect on travel media. Can you give me some idea of what it’s been like to watch that unfold from the very beginning to the present?

GB: You have to adapt. I have no doubt that travel websites, blogs, and tweets are rapidly replacing conventional print travel journalism, but the problem is there is not enough money in it for the journalists to earn a decent living. If writers who want to specialise in travel lose the financial incentive to do so, then the gene pool of travel literature will be diminished. That, to my mind, is the greatest crisis facing travel writing – the dumbing down of the genre.

Tsepak had been a refugee in India. He learnt to speak English where Claire and I first taught it: in McLeod Ganj, the seat of Tibet’s Government in Exile. Refugee was the word used to describe the men and women – or, in the majority of cases, teenage boys and girls – who made their way on foot over the mountain passes separating China from India and Nepal during the winter,  when there were fewer guards. Almost every Tibetan in McLeod Ganj relied on some sort of stipend and for many it was just a halfway house: they were moving on, to Delhi, Germany, the US or somewhere else, where they had an uncle, a sister or just a friend willing to help them find their feet. The treacherous journey out and the overwhelming desire to make a new life: it was the story of refugees everywhere, but in Tsepak’s case it didn’t entirely fit. After all, why had he come back?

We met him at a simple Tibetan restaurant on the outskirts of Shangri-La’s old town. It served boiled yak meat on the bone, millet bread and noodle soup, which wasn’t much to choose between. Tsepak came over to help us order all the same. I don’t remember if we spoke Chinese or English initially, because choosing a language was awkward for Claire and I. Not every Tibetan spoke Chinese well and assuming they did – or even wanted to – was a mild insult; their English on the other hand was generally much worse, but Tsepak was an exception. He spoke the language fluently, with an Indian accent that gave him away.

After dinner, we talked about McLeod Ganj. Tsepak had an uncle in the town who had taken him in; he said had returned easily, because unlike many Tibetan he had Chinese ID. Shangri-La was a long way from the influence of the Dalai Lama – from both Lhasa and McLeod Ganj – but Tsepak didn’t want to talk about why he had gone into exile. He was ambitious, a businessman. “I have my own tour company,” he told us, before asking if we wanted his help.
“We’d like to get out of town,” Claire replied. “Do you know where we could go?”
“I can take you to visit some nomadic families if you like.”
“Are there still nomads around Shangri-La?”
“Yes, but not everybody knows where to find them. Do you like walking?”
“We love it.”
“Good, because it’s a long walk: five, six hours. Some of the hills are difficult. Is that okay?”
“That’s fine, but I’m not sure we can afford it. How much do you charge for the day?”
“Normally, $200. But for you… you were teachers in India. Give me RMB250, plus RMB100 for the taxi.”
“Okay, thanks. We’ll think about it. Can we call you tomorrow?”
“Sure, or you can just ask in the town for Little Tsepak. Everybody knows me.”

Two days later, we met Little Tsepak at first light. Shangri-La’s climate was not particularly severe, but the town was icy at night. It took time each morning to shake itself warm and awake, and the taxi driver Tsepak hailed was wearing a wool hat and leather gloves.

We emerged from the new town on a road skirting a seasonal lake. Low peaks encircled Shangri-La county completely, but the grassland in between was perfectly flat and like a drink spilt on a billiard table, the lake was a latticework of shallow streams that came together in places to form deeper pools. At its edges, yaks and mzo grazed in dawn’s long shadows; the village homes behind them with white walls and dark brown roofs were reduced to impressionist smudges by hanging smoke. On the high plateau, roofs were uniformly flat, but in Shangri-La’s fertile valley they sloped gently at each side. Continue reading Along the Map’s Torn Edge»

Yesterday morning, Claire and I stepped groggily off a bus after 25 hours of travelling feet first through Laos and China. The bus had flame-licked Chinese characters down its sides; inside, there were three rows of narrow bunk beds upholstered in faux velvet. I had to fold up my two-metre frame like a concertina to get into my top bunk, where I slept in fits and starts, terrified I’d crash down into bed with a scowling Russian woman. We don’t normally make such big jumps in a single journey, and the transition from Luang Prabang to a Chinese provincial capital has given us both a jolt.

As a number of you already know, our crowd-funding project went live last week. Time on a bus drags by painfully when you’ve spent the last few days online, with blurred vision, watching yourself progress slowly towards an ambitious target. Our target of $34,500 is ambitious, we know, but not wildly so: we believe we’re offering the best possible rewards, at fair prices, and roughly half that total will only cover our overheads. We’ll need all of the $17,000 or so we’ll have left to tell the story of our journey across two continents.

Kickstarter is unlike other crowd-funding platforms in one crucial, hair-raising respect: once you set a goal for your project, you have to reach it or you get nothing. Not a cent. That makes sense for backers, because a well funded project is more likely to deliver quality products, be they pocket-sized solar panels, jeans for tall women, ghouls playing baseball or the story of a journey from Shanghai to Cape Town, uniquely told.

We chose Kickstarter because it makes supporting a project easy. You can choose rewards worth between $4 and $1,200 – between a short story, a postcard from the Silk Road, a professionally printed photo set, signed copies of our books and a long weekend in Istanbul – and be done in just a few clicks. Everything goes through Amazon, which makes the process secure and simple. You also won’t be charged anything until our deadline, on October 11, if – and only if – we reach our goal.

The good news is that thirty six people have backed us so far, pledging a total of $2,777. Hundreds of others have helped out by sharing the project by email, Facebook and Twitter. South Africa’s Getaway magazine published our appeal for support and one total stranger both wrote about and backed our effort to reinvent the travelogue. If you did any one of those things, thank you! Altogether, it’s not a bad start, but we have a long, long way to go.

$2,777 is only 8% of our goal. According to the projection service Kicktraq, we’ll only reach $17,455 if we carry on at the same rate, but whether we’re $10,000 or $1 short of our $34,500 goal, the result will be the same: we’ll have to shelve Old World Wandering for the time being. We’re running this campaign so we don’t have to, because we believe that with time and your help our travelogue can fill some of the holes 24-hour news cycles and commercial travel journalism leave open. For now, we’re working towards reaching $10,350. That’s 30% of our target, and 90% of the projects that make it that far are successful in the end.

If you haven’t already, take a look at the rewards we’re offering, choose something you like and help us to tell new stories about an Old World.

Part I: Songs of Shambala

Dusk gently settled over Shangri-La. A mist rose off the grassland at the town’s edges, shot through by the day’s last beams of sunlight, while in its handful of squares, music started up and men and women gathered to dance. Standing in a wide circle, they moved through the same few steps but edged slowly clockwise, as if each person was a prayer wheel set spinning by pilgrims circumambulating a shrine.

There was dancing in the cobbled square at the centre of old Shangri-La and dancing below the hilltop temple, at the foot of granite stairs. There was dancing in the new town too, in the wide square presided over by a cultural hall, and by dancing Shangri-La gathered every evening around the traditions that had animated it. It gathered around Tibetan Buddhism and trade, which had passed along the Tea-Horse Trail through its cobbled square. In the square below Shangri-La’s temple, dancers were reminded of the wisdoms that overcame desire, hatred, delusion, pride and envy – the five poisons – by a five-pronged vajra glowing white on the temple’s roof, in the light of a level sun. Shangri-La gathered around its communist institutions too, at the cultural hall, and in all three squares the music was arcade-game techno with Tibetan vocals. It gave the traditional dances an atmosphere similar to Shanghai’s outdoor aerobics classes, where office workers exercised at the end of the day.

Claire and I visited the three squares on separate occasions. When we saw a circle forming in the old town, close to our hotel, my reaction was predictably jaded. I thought a performance was being put on for Han Chinese tourists, who too often saw naivety in folk dances, but while I watched, the circle grew spontaneously and got rowdy. The next day and the day after that we saw dancing at the temple and the cultural hall, and none of it seemed to be for show.

Like all of China’s government buildings, the cultural hall was intimidating. It was nine or ten storeys tall, diminishing the people on its wide, grey square. A stupa on its roof was criss-crossed by mortar lines; still visible through layers of gold paint, they revealed the awkward bulk of the concrete bricks used to make it. Other religious symbols had been appropriated for the cultural hall too, including a dharma wheel flanked by deer and cylinders representing Buddha’s victory over ignorance. Together they were an indication of how the Chinese Communist Party too often interpreted culture: as a series of empty symbols, only useful because they facilitated control.

We sat at the edges of the square, with Han spectators, watching Tibetans and a few tourists join the circle and break off from the circle, in groups of men and women, girls and boys. They danced in the glow of a vast screen broadcasting utopian commercials, with subtitles that mixed the language of a workers’ paradise with descriptions of the Himalayan idyll, Shangri-La.

In James Hilton’s 1933 novel The Lost Horizon, Shangri-La is a utopian valley high in the Himalaya. Its air drastically slows down aging, and inhabitants live for hundreds of years in almost total isolation. The valley is ruled over by a monastic order dedicated to the preservation of knowledge. It has collected a vast library, because the founder of the order – a Catholic missionary from Luxembourg – foresees a second world war followed by a dark age that “will cover the whole world in a single pall.”

Hilton’s inspiration for Shangri-La was probably Shambala, a mythical Tibetan kingdom that only the enlightened can enter. There are obvious parallels, like the divine army some Tibetans think will issue out of Shambala in 2424, to save the world from a dark age. The mythical utopia was also a European preoccupation when Hilton wrote his novel. In the 1920s, numerous expeditions set off to find Shambala and failed, as did three separate groups sent out by the Nazis in the 1930s, to trace what European occultists thought might be the origin of the Aryan race.

Shangri-La was in fact the name of the county, not the town. It had been called Gyalthang by Tibetans and Zhongdian by Chinese until 2001, when it was renamed to appeal to tourists. The town itself is called Jiantang, which is how an inflexible Mandarin speaker might pronounce Gyalthang, but no local I spoke to ever called it that: for my sake and the sake of other visitors the town was always just Shangri-La.

The renaming of the town was revealing: it was cynical marketing, but it was more than that too, because domestic tourists from China’s eastern metropolises were its primary aim. Gyalthang, a place inhabited largely by Tibetans, had been renamed for Western fiction by the Chinese state, but the fiction’s basis was in Tibetan myth.

When I taught English in Shanghai, I used to ask my students what place in the world they considered most exotic. I had talked them through the meaning of the word, pointing out that the root exo meant outside, and because it corresponded neatly with a Chinese character, they were quick to understand. I said that many people in the West considered China exotic, but none of my students saw much out of the ordinary in Europe, Australia or the USA. Some chose Egypt, a few others India, but the majority always surprised me: they said Tibet was the most exotic place in the world, and one day they hoped to visit it.

The musician from Gansu had an ascetic’s body. It was not a body scarred or withered by privation, but it was slight and unmuscled: a body little used. He had cultivated a wispy beard and wore his hair shaved, affectations he completed with a shapeless orange shirt and baggy orange trousers, similar to the outfits worn by Vietnamese monks. The musician’s studio was down a street in the old town, in a restored house with sloping white walls. Black borders around its windows got wider from the top, and their shape – like triangles with their tips lopped off – exaggerated the walls’ inward tilt.

Claire and I had walked past the house at night and seen a four-wheel drive vehicle with Beijing license plates parked outside. Projecting something of our lives in South Africa onto Shangri-La, we imagined the house being used for holidays by people who either owned or rented it. A day later, when we found ourselves outside it again, taking photographs of a ruin across the street, the musician ushered us inside.

“Is this your house?” I asked, while he held open the curtain hanging across the doorway.
“I live upstairs,” he replied. “I make music down here.” There were four or five tables set up downstairs, between a bar and a low stage. His instrument and CD collections lined the walls of an adjoining room.
“What kind of music?”
“Traditional Tibetan folk. Everybody likes doof-doof-doof now,” he said, wincing and holding his ears, “but I play the pure music of the people.”
“Doof-doof…Like the music in the square?”
“Yes, like that. Tibetan music is Buddhist, spiritual, but that music has no meaning.”
I described a song I had heard over and over again in Shangri-La’s squares. “The vocals sound Tibetan,” I said, “but the lyrics are Chinese.”
“Can you sing it?”
I couldn’t, and tripped staccato over the chorus instead.
The musician nodded. He softly sang it – “Qíngàide gūniang, wǒ ài nǐ” – but looked bored, and too late I realised the inanity of my question. The song was clichéd. Its chorus meant ‘Darling girl, I love you’; other lyrics included ‘She’s tall, she has black eyes,’ and my question was not unlike asking Neil Young for his thoughts on a Justin Bieber song.
“Do you write your own songs?” Claire asked.
The musician had led us into a small courtyard. He spoke quietly, with unusual calm, but Claire’s question enlivened him; he dashed back inside with his index finger raised, returning a minute later with a notebook, which he flicked through excitedly. “This is my book of lyrics,” he said. “It’s written in Tibetan.”

Sanskritic hooks and long, looping tails hung like fresh noodles off lines ruled arrow-straight across the width of the page. I had last seen Tibetan handwriting in India, where Claire and I taught English to refugees. In Shangri-La mantras were painted on rocks and stamped on prayer flags, but functional uses of the Tibetan script were rare. A Tibetan friend in Shanghai could write her name, hello and one or two other words in Tibetan. She had come to the city from a remote village in Yunnan, but was literate in standard Chinese characters only, because her education and her mother tongue were worlds apart. The musician took pride in his careful handwriting. He had worked at it, but he spoke Mandarin well too, with the received accent of a CCTV newsreader.

We stood chatting in the courtyard for a while longer. Neither of us were asked to repeat the tired story of where we were from and how we had learnt to speak Chinese. The musician wasn’t interested, because traditional music was his narrow, all-abiding focus. He told us a musician from Beijing named Dou Wei was in town. Dou Wei had been the lead singer of Black Panther, a sort of Chinese Def Leppard. He was one of China’s first rock stars, but like his contemporary Cui Jian he had gone on to explore a variety of genres, working through the confusion of the 1980s – when China had let in almost half a century of foreign music all at once – in the course of his career. It was probably Dou Wei’s four-wheel drive we had seen outside the house, and the musician from Gansu said we should come back later on, because he and Dou Wei were going to jam together.

We made our way back to the studio after a yak hotpot, prepared by a Bai woman who mothered us while we ate, fussing over our soup and making sure we knew how well yak meat thickened the blood. The studio’s door was closed, its curtains drawn. We entered hesitantly, to find the musician from Gansu kneeling on the low stage, ringing finger cymbals to a rhythm set by Dou Wei, who was ponderously thumping a handheld frame drum.

A handful of students were sitting at the table beside us in silent rapture. A woman who I took to be Dou Wei’s girlfriend or wife moved between the stage and a table off to one side, as did two young Tibetan women. There was a waitress, who had taken our whispered order for beer, and that was the sum of us, the people in the room.

After the first song, Dou Wei stood up, went over to the collection of instruments in the next room and came back clutching something new: a seven-stringed Tibetan lute. He plucked at it haphazardly, starting off whenever the mood struck him. The musician from Gansu exchanged the finger cymbals for a skull drum and slapped its sides at random. He sung in snatches too, without paying very much attention to Dou Wei, or dutifully cleared the air with a singing bowl. Its chime and cicada buzz bookended the whole cacophony: chime-buzz, pluck pluck-slap, pluck pluck-slap, slap chime-buzz it went, in curious, discordant circles, but the atmosphere remained reverent throughout, as if we were party to a ritual that might bring forth Tibet’s fickle muse.

Dou Wei was by now muttering darkly at the lute. “I can’t play it,” he said, but once he had stomped off to the next room, to put the instrument back, he sat down and picked out a tune. Its sound was muffled by the thick stone wall, but when he heard it the musician from Gansu selected a drum tapered at both ends like a handrolled cigar and started to knock out a beat. Although the lute was distant and the drum nearby, the two men were at last playing in time. A young woman standing just visible in the doorway opened her mouth wide in the shadows and for the first time started to sing. She had a raw, resonant voice that filled up the room entirely and must have burst out of it too, into Shangri-La’s unlit streets. When she held a note, I heard ululating at the far end of my capacity to listen, invented by a nomadic people singing in the thin air on the roof of the world. The girl was behind me and because I had swivelled round I saw her fold over with exhaustion at the end of the song, as if the muse that possessed her had suddenly left.

Dou Wei experimented with one or two more instruments, and the musician from Gansu stayed in position, kneeling on a cushion, immobile below the waist, but it wasn’t long before both men left the stage. The moment had passed. I couldn’t be sure of its spontaneity, or know why the singer had been confined to the shadows, but it was the sort of moment I travel for all the same. If I had been told in advance that my bus would break down in the rain and the altitude would make me sick, that my hotel would have bedbugs and the police would take an interest in me with my endless questions about Tibet, and that in exchange for every possible discomfort I would get these three or four minutes of song, I would still have made my way here and continued on, travelling for ten days along the frontier that separates China from Tibet.

As it was, Claire and I didn’t get sick. We took Chinese medicine made from the roots of an Arctic shrub for the duration of our journey along the Sichuan-Tibet Highway and at elevations of 4,000 metres and above we felt short of breath but otherwise well. The roads were dirt tracks for long stretches, and where they were being worked on there were long delays and detours and billowing dust. In places they were so narrow that looking out from my window in a claustrophobic miànbāochē I saw nothing but ravines at the bottom of yawning, hundred-metre-long drops, but Tibetan-owned guest houses and restaurants serving Sichuan’s málà cuisine made it easy to forget my aches and apprehensions at the end of each day. We ate lunch with nomads in the hills around Shangri-La and drank beer with migrant workers in Xiangcheng, where the government was putting down a strike. We were disappointed by dirty hotsprings and tourists flocking like vultures to sky burials in Litang, and it wasn’t until we made our way on foot to a monastery near Tagong that we felt like our journey was in some way complete. Its gold roof glinted far in the distance at the foot of a single, snow-capped peak and to reach it we’d passed carefully through an icy river and herds of temperamental yaks. It was in making my way to the monastery that I prepared myself to arrive for a few moments at Shangri-La, which in the words of the Dalai Lama “is not a physical place that we can actually find,” but exists only in our minds.

Part II: The Mzo Trail

The Sichuan-Tibet Highway is a 2,412 kilometre stretch of China’s National Highway 318. It starts in Sichuan’s provincial capital Chengdu, at an altitude of 370 metres, and climbs up over a series of mountain passes almost 5,000 metres high to arrive tired and weather-beaten at Lhasa, where the Dalai Lama had his capital until 1959. National Highway 318 carries on from Lhasa all the way to the border of Nepal, but it crosses its most controversial frontier much earlier, a little over one thousand kilometres west of Chengdu, at the boundary between Sichuan and Tibet.

Chengdu was established almost 2,500 years ago by the ninth king of Shu. An independent state influenced to a limited extent by the culture flourishing to its northeast, along the Yellow River, Shu nevertheless remained a place apart until 316 BCE, when it was conquered by Qin. Almost one hundred years later, when Qin went on to extend its control over the whole of China, it was the conquest of Shu that gave it an edge. The Sichuan Basin was not only one of China’s most fertile – and today most populous – regions, but also a grain basket safely cut off from the rest of the country by mountain ranges at every side but its east, where Southeast Asian jungle and rolling hills presented a similarly forbidding obstacle.

The people of Shu assimilated quickly. Their leaders were executed or exiled and Qin moved tens of thousands of its own people into Sichuan, defining the westernmost limit of Chinese civilisation as it did. Sichuan’s geography on the other hand remained an obstacle more than 2,000 years later, in 1937, when Chiang Kai Shek retreated to the province after losing most of the rest of China to the Japanese, and it is in Sichuan that the country’s Han majority still rubs up against the edges of the Tibetan Plateau, along a fault line straddled by National Highway 318.

Western Sichuan has gone by a number of names. It was originally called Chushi Gangdruk – Four Rivers, Six Ranges – because the Yalong, Salween, Mekong and Yangtze Rivers pass in parallel between six watersheds on their way out of the region, down from Tibet. It was called Xikang by the Republic of China – a name it kept until 1965, when it was incorporated into Sichuan – but perhaps the name that makes the most sense is Kham, because the majority of the region’s people call themselves Khampas.

Kham was a part of the Tibetan Empire that at its peak extended north into Tajikistan, south as far as the Bay of Bengal and east right up to the walls of the Tang Dynasty’s capital, Chang’an, which it took in 763 but could only hold for fifteen days. When the empire fell apart less than one hundred years later, Kham broke down into a collection of fiefdoms only loosely connected to Lhasa. The region was only incorporated into China in 1728, almost a thousand years later, after Tibetan leaders pledged allegiance to the Kangxi Emperor in exchange for military assistance. In 1717, Mongolian invaders had captured Lhasa, where they looted and executed members of the Bon and Nyingma religious orders. When Qing Dynasty troops took the city three years later, they were hailed as liberators.

Climate separates the Khampas living in Sichuan’s western valleys not just from their cousins on the plateau but from each other, and because each valley has its own microclimate, affecting its access to building materials, water and transport, the region’s languages are as various as its architecture. This independence has bred warriors along with bandits, and the Khampa are still regarded as Tibet’s most fearsome soldiers. The men traditionally carry knives half-a-metre long in ornamental sheaths; women’s are shorter and hang from their belts beside a sewing kit. Khampa men are tall for Tibetans and wear their hair long; they are also consummate horsemen and were still fighting on horseback in the 1960s, when they were armed by the CIA for a guerrilla war. In 1956, they were among the first Tibetans to rebel against the Chinese Communist Party. They were the last to surrender too, in 1974, after a protracted resistance fought out of Nepal’s Mustang Valley, and Chinese rule still weighs most heavily on the Khampa. Of the 49 confirmed Tibetans who have self-immolated since 2009 – that is, drunk and doused themselves in petrol, before burning to death – 28 were from a single prefecture in Kham.

Tsepak had been a refugee in India. He learnt to speak English where Claire and I first taught it: in McLeod Ganj, the seat of Tibet’s Government in Exile. Refugee was the word used to describe the men and women – or, in the majority of cases, teenage boys and girls – who made their way on foot over the mountain passes separating China from India and Nepal during the winter,  when there were fewer guards. Almost every Tibetan in McLeod Ganj relied on some sort of stipend and for many it was just a halfway house: they were moving on, to Delhi, Germany, the US or somewhere else, where they had an uncle, a sister or just a friend willing to help them find their feet. The treacherous journey out and the overwhelming desire to make a new life: it was the story of refugees everywhere, but in Tsepak’s case it didn’t entirely fit. After all, why had he come back?

We met him at a simple Tibetan restaurant on the outskirts of Shangri-La’s old town. It served boiled yak meat on the bone, millet bread and noodle soup, which wasn’t much to choose between. Tsepak came over to help us order all the same. I don’t remember if we spoke Chinese or English initially, because choosing a language was awkward for Claire and I. Not every Tibetan spoke Chinese well and assuming they did – or even wanted to – was a mild insult; their English on the other hand was generally much worse, but Tsepak was an exception. He spoke the language fluently, with an Indian accent that gave him away.

After dinner, we talked about McLeod Ganj. Tsepak had an uncle in the town who had taken him in; he said had returned easily, because unlike many Tibetan he had Chinese ID. Shangri-La was a long way from the influence of the Dalai Lama – from both Lhasa and McLeod Ganj – but Tsepak didn’t want to talk about why he had gone into exile. He was ambitious, a businessman. “I have my own tour company,” he told us, before asking if we wanted his help.
“We’d like to get out of town,” Claire replied. “Do you know where we could go?”
“I can take you to visit some nomadic families if you like.”
“Are there still nomads around Shangri-La?”
“Yes, but not everybody knows where to find them. Do you like walking?”
“We love it.”
“Good, because it’s a long walk: five, six hours. Some of the hills are difficult. Is that okay?”
“That’s fine, but I’m not sure we can afford it. How much do you charge for the day?”
“Normally, $200. But for you… you were teachers in India. Give me RMB250, plus RMB100 for the taxi.”
“Okay, thanks. We’ll think about it. Can we call you tomorrow?”
“Sure, or you can just ask in the town for Little Tsepak. Everybody knows me.”

Two days later, we met Little Tsepak at first light. Shangri-La’s climate was not particularly severe, but the town was icy at night. It took time each morning to shake itself warm and awake, and the taxi driver Tsepak hailed was wearing a wool hat and leather gloves.

We emerged from the new town on a road skirting a seasonal lake. Low peaks encircled Shangri-La county completely, but the grassland in between was perfectly flat and, like a drink spilt on a billiard table, the lake was a latticework of shallow streams that came together in places to form deeper pools. At its edges, yaks and mzo grazed in dawn’s long shadows; the village homes behind them with white walls and dark brown roofs were reduced to impressionist smudges by hanging smoke. On the high plateau, roofs were uniformly flat, but in Shangri-La’s fertile valley they sloped gently at each side.

The taxi stopped at the foot of hills covered with coniferous forest. They rolled steadily up to a craggy peak that must normally have been snow-capped, but now in late summer was starkly bare. Tsepak led the way.

Instead of cremating their dead, Tibetans chop them up to feed to vultures. Wood is too scarce for pyres, but Shangri-La was thickly forested and while we started our climb Tsepak explained how loggers had cleared our trail, leaving a deep rut gouged out of its middle. They fastened two mzo to the trunks of tall trees and whipped the animals – a cross between yaks and lowland cattle perfectly suited to Shangri-La’s altitude – down to the road. “Us Tibetans say ‘If you love mzo, don’t sell them to loggers’,” he went on, and after that I could almost hear the bellows of suffering cattle echo off the contours of this strange erosion.

Tsepak was wearing a down jacket, a scarf and a wool hat. I was wearing shorts and a sweatshirt, and because the climb was steep and the sun rising, I soon started to sweat. Tsepak didn’t: he kept the down jacket on for hours; when he took it off, he revealed a thick but bone-dry shirt. He was a tall and well-built – a typical Khampa – and the jacket only broadened his shoulders and puffed out his chest, exaggerating his size. After a while he swaggered out ahead of us, singing with his arms spread out theatrically.

“I’ve led a millionaire from Australia up here,” he told Claire and I when we stopped to pack away our sweatshirts. A list of Tsepak’s other achievements soon followed: he’d made a documentary about the mzo trail; he was regularly hired by wealthy white tourists; he was supporting a village school not far from Shangri-La; he spoke Hindi, and when he learnt that Claire and I had spent a year in India, he held this over us, chatting meaningfully in the language long after we told him we couldn’t understand it.

After two or three hours, we stopped climbing and followed a stream through alpine pastures filled with mzo. Every animal wore a heavy brass bell that the wind was strong enough to rattle; with the murmuring grass they made a sort of music that rose and fell with the breeze. In a field fringed with purple flowers, Tsepak stopped to let us to catch up. “Pick up a stone,” he said, showing me the two already wrapped up in his fists. “There are dogs here. Normally they’re chained up, but if they aren’t, they’ll attack you.”

The first Tibetan mastiff we saw leapt and twisted at the end of a length of rope. The dog was guarding a roughly made home with walls that were nothing but tree trunks stacked seven or eight high and a roof that was just crudely sawn planks. We saw two similar cabins, without the mastiffs, and then, at a third, Tsepak ducked under the doorway and went inside.

On our way up, we had been overtaken by a pretty woman wearing a bright pink headdress. She had been leading a small, lightly burdened horse and together they moved at an impressive clip. Tsepak had spoken to her briefly in Tibetan and we had exchanged a few words in Chinese. Nobody had mentioned lunch, but here she was now, standing beside her father, both of them welcoming us inside with an enthusiastic “Tashi dalek!”

Although everything was made entirely of wood, including the floor, a fire glowed red at the centre of the cabin, where it spilled out of a basic hearth. There was no chimney and smoke went out the same way light came in: through gaps in the roof and walls. After seating us on low, log stools, the woman and her father started to cook, taking tools and ingredients down from the shelves that lined every wall. She churned butter tea in a tube like a bicycle pump; he chopped a cone of yak cheese the size of a beehive into cubes. She poured dough onto a flat pan to make millet bread; he prodded the fire, making space for a saucepan so well used it was completely black.

While they prepared a meal of Tibetan staples that the bustle and growth happening not far away had yet to change, Tsepak played interpreter. The father smiled at us constantly, but spoke no Mandarin. During the summer, he lived here, in the cabin; when winter came, he moved in with his daughter, who had a house in the town. She brought supplies up to him once or twice a week, on her horse, and took the milk, butter and cheese from his herd of mzo back down. They were pastoralists, not nomads, and despite a strong accent, the daughter spoke Mandarin fluently. Her children’s would be better: they were getting a thorough Chinese education in the town, and it was difficult to imagine them wanting a life up here, in the log cabin, milking mzo and making cheese.

Yak or, in this case, mzo butter tea isn’t to everybody’s taste. It is salty, oily and thick, but with a chunk of millet bread it makes better sense. I slurped it up and had a second and then a third cup, with enough of the warm, unfermented cheese to make my stomach hurt. Our hosts ate sparingly, but dished up more and more for us; we had to beg them to stop, at which point they reached for the tsampa and poured us another cup of tea. Tsepak mixed the two, making a doughy ball of barley flour, but after five months without dairy in Southeast Asia I was too full to try it. The father offered me a Double Happiness cigarette and we smoked together, happy that without language we could at least share this simple camaraderie.

The walk after lunch was mostly downhill. We stayed beside the stream for a while and occasionally passed a herder’s cabin, but saw nobody. Soon, the three of us were looking over the seasonal lake again, making our way back down to the road along a trail so steep and rutted it looked like a wound in the hill’s side. We passed two mzo yoked together with a tree branch, canvas strapping and thick twists of steel that had been stuck through their nostrils and pulled tight, but veered clear of them, because with enough momentum the long tree trunk they were dragging might just as easily have dragged them.

At the bottom of the hill, eight men were heaving the tree trunks onto a truck. Their cries merged with the din of construction around the shell of a new hotel called Shambala Ranch, and somehow in this confusion Claire and I were separated from Tsepak. We were standing beside the lake when he strode up to us closely pursued by an overweight man waving a cigarette.

“This land is private!” the man shouted at us in Chinese, with a strong northeastern accent. “You have to pay to cross it.”
“There are no signs,” I said.
“Signs? What signs? I own this land and you have to pay!”
“Pay for what?” Claire asked.
“For entrance to the village!” he roared, rising up high on his toes.
“What village? This is a road,” Claire shouted back. “Have you paid before?” she asked Tsepak in English.
“Paid for what?” he said, curling his lip in disgust. “This man says he owns this land, but this is a Tibetan village. He calls himself Tashi, but he can’t even speak Tibetan. He’s Chinese.”
Understandably, the man didn’t like being discussed in English. He tried to shout over Tsepak. “You’re a tour guide! A tour guide! They are paying you money and you must pay me.”
Before they can even apply for permission to enter the Tibetan Autonomous Region, foreigners need to hire a licensed guide, but they couldn’t hire Tsepak: he was unlicensed, and had asked us to say we were friends, which is what we did. The man from the northeast didn’t buy it.
“I have powerful connections,” he warned us, jabbing at Claire with his mobile phone. “Pay me or I’ll call them.”
“If you want us to pay you, we’ll need a receipt,” said Claire. “Call the police if you want to.” With that, we started walking away. Tsepak had already called a taxi and it couldn’t arrive too soon.

A minute or two later, a miànbāochē stopped beside us. A group of women and children dressed in a muddle of ragged costumes poured out. A small, dirty boy without pants wore a tall Hmong headdress with cascading silver baubles. It was intended for adult women and was far too big for his head: when he stood still, it fell over his eyes; when the group started pursuing us, calling out for money, it fell off. The children hindered the women’s progress and in our anger Claire and I strode far ahead. When the gap got too wide, the group piled back into the miànbāochē again. Instead of just catching up, they drove ahead to lie in wait.

Tsepak had already fallen back. He would inevitably want to return to the mzo trail, with other, wealthier tourists, and he needed to work something out. Claire and I stopped on a corner fifty metres or so from the group in the miànbāochē and waited. The taxi didn’t come. After ten minutes, we turned around to find Tsepak. He knew the taxi driver’s phone number and without it we were stuck. The miànbāochē started up again in pursuit.

It might have gone on like this all afternoon if the taxi hadn’t arrived a few minutes later. The miànbāochē stopped ahead of us and to block our path the villagers again emptied out of it, but by running a gauntlet of small, wizened women and snot-nosed children Claire and I made it into the car. The driver looked highly amused. Tsepak was still in heated negotiations with the man from the northeast behind us, but with some pleading the taxi driver nudged his way through the assembled villagers to fetch him. Tsepak got into the car, but suddenly wanted to pay. He borrowed money from the taxi driver, which we were to reimburse later on. I watched him pass it through the window: ten renminbi per person, or roughly $5 for the three of us. We had never asked for a price.

We drove off. Further down the road, there were two more hotels under construction amongst a handful of stone houses. My best guess was that the man from the northeast had bought land cheaply from the Tibetan villagers with promises of tourism providing an easy living. We exited the village a minute later, at a sign: Beautiful View Minority Village it read, above a picture of Khampas in full costume. It was difficult to decide if it was tragedy or farce.

Part III: Striking Xiangcheng

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Angkor Wat’s pinecone-tower contours are already etched onto my mind when Iain and I cycle towards them in the crisp dawn air. You can’t avoid images of the temple in Siem Reap, where t-shirts, bags, hats, photographs, paintings, ink drawings and sculptures, all emblazoned with Angkor Wat, are sold virtually everywhere in the ruins’ nearest town. I stop my bicycle, chain it to Iain’s, and try to set the image in my head aside, to see this architectural representation of the Hindu universe through the cosmic lens that its Khmer designers intended. In the distance, the five pinecone towers become Mount Meru’s craggy peaks, silhouetted against the lilac morning sky. The sun is slowly rising over this universe, the primordial ocean is still calm, and a few visitors – mere specks – are moving toward the sacred mountain’s summit. I cross the ocean, represented by a moat, and stand at the bottom of a long causeway where stone naga serpents are stretched out on either side. Passing the nagas, I symbolically leave the realm of men and enter the world of the gods.

We make our way down the causeway toward the temple’s tallest tower: Mount Meru’s summit, the centre of this world, and home to the gods. Stone steps lead down to hectares of empty land where I can see outlines of original streets through the grass, laid out in a grid, but only the city’s temples, shrines and terraces, all made of stone, remain. Across the Khmer Empire, which at its peak encompassed modern-day Cambodia, much of Thailand, Vietnam and Laos, virtually all traces of wooden homes, monasteries and palaces have been absorbed by the earth.

The sun glows pale yellow behind the dark contours of the temple ahead, its outer walls stretching along a north-south axis ahead of me. This is the world’s largest religious monument, built during the height of the empire at its capital, Angkor, the largest preindustrial city in history. Speckled with stone remnants today, it remains dauntingly vast.

I walk through the entrance gopura and turn right into the outermost of three concentric galleries: the symbolic mountains encircling Mount Meru. I’ve entered an extensive gallery enclosure which contains more than half a kilometre of sandstone bas-reliefs. Iain and I find ourselves being slowly carried along by the stories in the stone, moving through each of the square’s four sides, zooming in on the finer details of the ancient capital’s architectural centrepiece.

A battle has begun between sandstone men in horse-drawn chariots and on elephant-back: the Kaurava clan marching toward their rivals, the Pandavas. The fighting is fiercest at the centre, where hundreds of loin cloth-wearing soldiers are tangled up in each other’s spears. It is the Battle of Kurukshetra, the climax of the Mahabharata, the Hindu epic of which the better-known Bhagavad Gita is a part. When Suryavarman II built the temple and its surrounding city in the early 12^th century, he was the successor of several Hindu rulers before him, after Jayavarman II first established a united Khmer Empire in 802CE, declared himself “king of the world” and institutionalised a royal linga-worshipping cult, based on Hindu beliefs.

Hinduism began to trickle through the region in the first century, along trade routes that linked the Mediterranean to China. The Khmers were exposed to a variety of cultural influences, but it was Indian culture that took hold, possibly because the Indians’ prosperity was ascribed to divine protection. The influence of Indian religion, law, science and writing would spread over the centuries, with the linga-cult remaining central to the culture at Angkor.

We turn into a corner pavilion and see the multi-headed demon Ravana, whose connection to Gokarna inspired Iain to write an epic of his own. An Indian couple appears beside us, looking up at the same carving, in which Ravana shakes Mount Kailash with his many arms. They chatter away and, between the rolled rs and endearing Hindi lilts, we hear the words “Shiva… Sita… Kailasa”. The infant Krishna is crawling in a stone panel nearby, and a few steps away we see a bearded Shiva meditating. Coming across members of Hinduism’s colourful pantheon in a faraway place almost feels like bumping into old friends and, with the sounds of Hindi ringing through my ears again, I feel a pang of peculiar homesickness that only India can stir.

Iain and I enter a gallery where the bas reliefs are badly worn in places, and match our strides with clues in a guide to ancient Angkor, searching lengths of grey stone for familiar Hindu characters. The washed out panels, once vibrantly painted, show Krishna riding the mythical bird-man, Garuda, during a victorious battle with a demon. Krishna is a reincarnation of the god Vishnu, to whom Angkor Wat was dedicated. Several Khmer kings were considered to be reincarnations of Vishnu too, as is Thailand’s king today.

Krishna progresses through the story, facing a wall of flames thrown up by a rhinoceros-riding God of Fire. He charges through a throng of spear-wielding warriors on his sidekick Garuda until, in a panel near the end, he meets the demon Bana, the archvillain of this comic book carved from stone. Bana rides in a chariot pulled by lions, but with a single flick of his discus, the eight-armed Krishna lobs off all but four of the demon’s one thousand hands. A final scene shows Shiva sitting on Mount Kailash with a long beard and his trident in hand, still faintly red on the near-white stone. Krishna kneels before him, two of his arms clasped together in a gesture of respect, the other six holding a flute, a sword and other paraphernalia associated with the god. Shiva’s elephant-headed son, Ganesha, is sitting cross-legged at his feet; his face and trunk still bear traces of red too. Below, deep within Mount Kailash, hermits pray in caves and celestial nymphs draped in jewellery – apsaras – perform a mesmerising dance.

Like other kings before him, Suryavarman II marked the beginning of his rule by building a new palace and a state temple, Angkor Wat, but he was not the first to make his capital in the area. The very first kings of the Angkorian era ruled from Roluos, where they built temples and a large reservoir around a town some 15 kilometres away. The capital was moved in 893CE by Yasovarman I, after the Royal Palace at Roluos was burned to the ground following a confrontation with his brother over the throne. New rulers added to the profusion of temples that remain all over the countryside around Siem Reap, each surrounded by separate settlements, but the seat of the Khmer Empire remained within the area around Angkor until 1432 when it was moved to Phnom Penh after being sacked and looted by invaders from Ayutthaya.

I cycle down a tree-lined avenue towards Angkor Thom, literally “Great City”, built less than a century after Angkor Wat. Two naga serpents flank the approach to the south entrance, sculpted stone headdresses crowning their seven heads. A row of waist-high figures on either side is holding onto the serpents as if in a tug-of-war: grumpy looking demons on the right, gods on the left. Scholars have pointed out parallels with an Indian creation myth, the Churning of the Sea of Milk, which is similarly represented in a bas-relief at Angkor Wat.

It’s a popular Hindu legend in which gods and demons churn a cosmic sea, producing the elixir of immortality. Under Vishnu’s guidance, the gods and demons take turns pulling on the body of a giant naga serpent coiled around Mount Mandara until, 1000 years later, the elixir is formed. I follow the legendary naga over a moat, once again leaving the mortal world behind me, and cycle through Angkor Thom’s eight storey high gates into the fortified city, an elaborate text that must read and re-read. The Bayon stands tall at the precise centre of the city, a mythical mountain around which a coiled naga has wrapped itself, churning the city’s moat.

Iain and I chain our bicycles together and make our way along a stone terrace towards the Bayon, where clusters of “face towers” arranged as ascending peaks have encouraged speculation of their own. Who is the man on the 180 or so towers, facing each of the cardinal points? My first instinct was Brahma, the Hindu god who is also portrayed across the region with his four heads looking outward, but the king in power during the Bayon’s construction, Jayavarman VII, was a Buddhist.

Buddhism came to the Khmer Empire as early as Hinduism, but only became the capital’s dominant religion when Jayavarman VII came to power in the late 12^th century. Many ordinary Khmers still worshipped a variety of deities: gods of the land, Hindu gods, Buddhist gods, guardian spirits and ancestors – alone and in combination – while Angkor’s kings altered monuments and statues according to individual whim. Jayavarman VII built Angkor Thom to be so well fortified that his Hindu successor adopted the city as his capital, removing or defacing its Buddhist iconography, and even transforming Buddha images into Hindu linga: sacred, phallic representations of Shiva. The city became a historical text written and rewritten by each of its rulers, their legacies still overlapping in stone.

The man whose face adorns the Bayon’s endless towers, presiding over every inch of the temple’s upper terrace, is not Brahma, but more likely Jayavarman VII himself, or possibly the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokitesvara. Its mystery is one reason the temple complex draws almost as many visitors as Angkor Wat, and today is no different. Tourists wander between the towers posing for photographs that show them kissing the sculpted men. But there is far more than stone faces to the Bayon. Its bas-reliefs were the only occasion on which Angkor’s stone carvers depicted daily life rather than mythological or historical themes and – together with the account of Zhou Daguan, a Chinese emissary who spent a year in Angkor in 1296 – they are the only details that remain of ordinary Khmer society.

In his Notes on the Customs of Cambodia, Zhou Daguan describes some of the same minutiae that are portrayed in bas-relief on the Bayon’s outer enclosure. Two figures grill beautifully sculpted meat skewers over a fire; a group in a wooden building beside them raises scooped hands to their mouths to eat. Zhou described “a bowl of tin or earthenware filled with water” that Khmers used for rinsing their hands after eating. “Only their fingers are used in eating rice, which is sticky and could not be got rid of without this water.”

While people go about their daily lives, a battle is in full force on the river behind them. The Khmers are at war with the Chams, the inhabitants of a neighbouring kingdom in what is central Vietnam today. Not all of these bas-reliefs correspond with historical record, but the representations here are probably of a naval battle on the Tonle Sap in 1177, during which the Chams gained control of Angkor, or a series of attacks launched by Jayavarman VII four years later, when he succeeded in driving the Chams out and was declared king. The stone panels show thickset, grim-faced Chams wearing short-sleeved tunics and helmets resembling open flowers. They are vastly outnumbered by Khmer warriors, who have cropped hair and wear loin cloths with ropes tied around their chests, which they throw around the prows of enemy boats. Victorious, they watch the Chams become food for the river’s crocodiles.

Alone with the bas-reliefs at the perimeter of the temple complex, Iain and I wander past several more stone crocodiles. Below them, a river bank is dotted with beautifully carved vignettes of village life. A cockfight is about to begin: a man with the topknot, beard and patterned tunic of all Chinese men presents his bird while spectators place bets. Although numerous Chinese passed through Southeast Asia’s trading hub, Zhou Daguan’s is the only known account of life among the Khmer. “Generally speaking, the women, like the men, wear only a strip of cloth, bound round the waist, showing bare breasts of milky whiteness,” wrote Zhou, no doubt referring to Khmer women for whom labouring in the fields was not required.

We spend the better part of an hour poring over the bas-reliefs, spotting a chess game here, an acrobat there, and a troop of monkeys swinging from the branches of a tree overhead. There is something pleasing about the universality of these images: the tigers and hermits and gladiators are long gone, but women weighing vegetables in rudimentary handheld scales and buffalo-drawn carts are still ubiquitous in Cambodia’s countryside. In addition to rural life, Zhou described elaborate royal processions where princes, wives and concubines travelled in a convoy of palanquins, elephants and horse-drawn carts made of gold, red parasols hovering above them like halos. Behind them, the king rode an elephant with its tusks encased in gold, and as the procession moved through the city, flags, banners and musicians followed, far into the distance.

Zhou was witness to a vibrant civilisation just past its peak. By the time Europeans reached Angkor in the 16^th century, it was an empire in decline. Visitors doubted Khmer ingenuity and dated the overgrown ruins to a long-forgotten past. When he journeyed to Angkor in 1860, the French explorer Henri Mouhot linked Khmer architecture to Egypt’s pyramids. Locals told him they had been built by gods or giants, and it wasn’t until 1907 that the long process of restoration began. Academics are still piecing together the epic of ancient Angkor, carried along, too, by the stories left in stone.

Angkor Gallery

It is a tree like many others. Neither old nor distinctively tall, it has rough, brittle bark and a pile of bricks at its base. Sticks of incense left unlit between the bricks might mark the tree out elsewhere, but not in Southeast Asia, where trees are the infrastructure of an Animist spirit world. What sets the tree apart here is a sign that reads, “KILLING TREE AGAINST WHICH EXECUTIONERS BEAT CHILDREN.”

You imagine it, while you read the sign. An infant still soft with baby fat is held by its legs and swung against the trunk of the tree repeatedly, until its skull cracks. The executioner is a country boy of seventeen without an education. A thorough indoctrination has failed to prepare him for the job of killing infants, but the boy obeys out of fear, and it is his horror you feel most keenly, after he has discarded the child with its mother in a mass grave. You want the words on the sign to be nonsensical – just words, like Noam Chomsky’s “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously” – because what they point to is black, bilious, mad. The tree on the other hand is ordinary, and it is its ordinariness that starts to work on you after a while, when you reach out to rub the rough bark, wondering how genocide could leave its blunt instrument unmarked.

You enjoy a moment of satisfaction when you recognise bone fragments and a tooth nearby, on a cordoned-off patch of dust. You were looking out for the tooth. It made an impression on a friend and you feel that it ought to make an impression on you, but squatting down with your camera to frame it beside broken femurs, you’re left awkwardly, disappointingly unmoved.

Around you, people are milling between open graves, carrying on in familiar roles. The holidaymakers are still holidaymakers, amused and interested by a foreign place. They stop for photographs at the memorial’s centre, in front of a tall stupa that resembles Theravada Buddhism’s cremation towers. Over 5,000 human skulls are stacked in well-ordered piles inside it, with neat, anthropological labels like “SENILE FEMALE KAMPUCHEAN OVER 60 YEARS OLD,” or “JUVENILE MALE KAMPUCHEAN FROM 15 TO 20 YEARS OLD,” but the skulls all look the same to you.

The holidaymakers are arranging themselves for a group portrait. What are they commemorating, you wonder, as they smile mechanically at the sound of “Cheese!” A group of boisterous Cambodians are also making their way through the field. Choeung Ek is an outing on a day off work, and the young men whoop as they pass excitedly from the Baby Tree onto a Perspex box containing miscellaneous bones.

A visitor centre is set off to one side, in a part of the memorial visitors take in first or save for last. The afternoon is oppressively hot, but it is context you are thirsty for as you make your way over, leaving behind Choeung Ek’s miasma. Inside, a clumsily translated introduction celebrates the depths of Cambodia’s debasement. “With a tremendous Memorial Stupa of the Choeung Ek Genocidal Centre,” it reads, “we imagine that we are hearing the grievous voice of the victims who were beaten to death by the killers with canes, bamboo stumps or head of hoes, and were stabbed with knives or swords. We seem to be looking at the horrifying scenes and the panic, the stricken faces of the people who were dying of starvation, forced labour or torture without mercy upon the skinny body and they died without giving the last words to their kith and kin. How bitter were they when seeing their beloved children, wives, husbands, brothers or sisters were seized and tightly bound and taken to the mass graves while they were waiting for their turn to come and share the same tragic lot?”

There are other signs. You peer at them myopically, craning forward in the dim light. Some itemise sandals and clothing that belonged to the deceased, others illustrate murder techniques. The only sign that shocks you is a simple flowchart, outlining the structure of Democratic Kampuchea. Pol Pot is at its top. Below him are two people; below them, another three. A total of just six people. The sign poses a question the memorial makes no attempt to answer: how?

The Communist regime that controlled Cambodia between April 1975 and January 1979 was known as Democratic Kampuchea (DK). The revolution it sponsored swept through the country like a forest fire or a typhoon, and its spokesmen claimed that ‘over two thousand years of Cambodian history’ had ended. So had money, markets, formal education, Buddhism, books, private property, diverse clothing styles, and freedom of movement…On a national scale, it is conservatively estimated that between April 1975 and January 1979 over one million people—or one person in seven—died as a direct result of DK policies and actions. These included overworking people, neglecting or mistreating the sick, and giving everyone less food than they needed to survive. Perhaps as many as one hundred thousand people were killed outright as enemies of the revolution.

David Chandler, A History of Cambodia

Academics have blessed visits to Cambodia’s Killing Fields with two names. The first is thanatourism, after the ancient Greek personification of death, Thanatos. Unsurprisingly, the name hasn’t stuck, and dark tourism – a simpler term, with broader associations – is more frequently used. There is uncertainty too over what activities dark tourism should include. Choeung Ek is undeniably dark, as is Auschwitz, which was visited by over 1.4 million people last year, but are our fascinations with natural disasters, battlefields and tombs equally morbid? Is James Dean’s grave different to Jim Morrison’s, because he died violently? Are museums also a type of dark tourism, in spite of the ways they mediate the atrocious, brutal or macabre? Why, in short, do we go, especially when we’re on holiday, and should we go at all?

There is an ongoing argument over whether dark tourism is a postmodern phenomenon, born out of 24-hour, calamity-fixated news, or something much older, with antecedents as far removed as Rome’s gladiatorial games. Phillip Stone, who has his own Institute for Dark Tourism Research at the University of Central Lancashire, was the first to articulate the latter argument. He points to public executions in Victorian London, which were explicit spectacles viewed from grandstands, as well as Madame Tussaud, who toured with her Chamber of Horrors from 1802. England’s first guided tour “took in the hanging of two convicted murderers” in 1838, at a time when people paid to watch floggings and visit morgues, and all of this morbid curiosity coincided with the Victorian invention of the tourism industry, epitomised by Thomas Cook and his traveller’s cheques.

Academics argue less about why we go. Dark tourists want to consume death, they say – to sniff its rot before escaping smugly back into sweet-smelling life. If they’re right, we are voyeurs at best and implacable sadists at worst, and it is on this conclusion that Phillip Stone hangs his for-hire sign: he wants to develop dark tourism’s sites in ways that allow us to observe without indulging in schadenfreude. It is a worthy goal, but lumping together tombs and concentration camps won’t help him reach it.

There are straightforward differences between commemorating sad but otherwise routine deaths – like the plane crash that kills a young star – and systematic murder by the State. The former is a trivial indication of personal taste – a choice, say, between Elvis Presley, John Lennon and Kurt Cobain. The latter is interesting in the abstract, because places like Choeung Ek and Auschwitz are milestones, however dark. They are also a lesson on morality, better remembered than forgotten because they help us to identify evil, and the trivial and universal aspects of dark tourism are probably best separated by asking how, a question that isn’t normally useful at a grave, but might be the only way to find a lesson in mass atrocity.

By the time I was nine, Apartheid was being dismantled. I remember the first black boy to join my class, but only in retrospect, because I didn’t recognise his arrival as out of the ordinary at the time. When the whole edifice finally went, in 1994, I had a simple, child’s notion of why the long, mixed-race queue outside my neighbourhood voting station was important. A friend and I sold cold drinks up and down the line, carried along by the euphoria. I don’t remember seeing Whites Only signs or passbooks in my narrow suburban world, and if my naivety helps to explain the longevity of Apartheid and systems like it, it is also an indication of how my picture of South Africa was mostly put together in the years after 1994, when it was tempting to think of the country as a blank page. Apartheid’s laws were gone. Its economic underpinnings might have been left largely untouched, but removing them was tricky: the whole country could have collapsed.

I took this blithe, middle-class optimism with me when I visited Johannesburg’s Apartheid Museum in 2008. By then, I had reconstructed the history of Apartheid at high school and deconstructed post-colonialism at university. I thought I knew both well. Claire and I bought our tickets together, but like every visitor we were randomly classified as different races: she as non-white, I as white. The two had separate entrances, which we obediently slipped through. It was only when we were reunited inside that I realised how easily we had obeyed, and how brutality could flow out of the simple placing of signs.

Although the Apartheid Museum had never been a part of the government’s machinery, I learnt something about atrocity by just walking through the door. Choeung Ek on the other hand was the epicentre of Cambodian bloodletting, but it gave visitors no comparable insight into the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror. It was a monument to violence as much as its victims, without any reminder of how easily people slip into the role of aggressor and aggrieved, and it allowed tourists to think of the genocide as peculiarly Cambodian – as a disease like malaria or typhoid, which didn’t exist at home. It is unlikely to improve: since 2005, the site has been leased to JC Royal for $15,000 a year. The Japanese company makes its profit on entrance fees; in return, it is expected to “develop and renovate the beauty of Choeung Ek killing fields.”

In January 1976, S-21 moved to Takhmau, on the southern outskirts of Phnom Penh…In June, the prison moved again to new premises: the former high school, now known as Tuol Sleng. This site could hold up to fifteen hundred prisoners at a time…By early 1977, Tuol Sleng employed at least 111 warders…These people were beholden to the Centre, not only because of their geographical origins, but also because of their very young age. Eighty-two of the one hundred and eleven warders were aged seventeen to twenty-one…These people were to imprison and kill the vast majority of veteran CPK cadres…Factory workers in Phnom Penh, who knew about the centre’s existence, but not about what went on inside its barbed-wire walls, called it the ‘place of entering, no leaving’. Only half a dozen of the twenty thousand men and women taken there for interrogation survived.

Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime

It is a promise of death, rasped through cold lips: “Tuol Sleng” – Strychnine Hill – a name matched perfectly to a place. It is also a banality, something tuktuk drivers yell when they slow down to match your stride: “Tuol Sleng! Killing Fields! You go took-tooook!”

Your confrontation with it begins just past the entrance, at a list of rules. “While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry out at all,” reads number six. It is the most brutal, but the rules are uniformly pitiless. There were no suspects here, with hopes of reprieve; it was a place of pain and indignity leading inevitably to death.

You were going to make your way through the former school alone, but already you’re unsteady, unsure of how to process such scrupulous violence. You make your way back to the ticket office instead, to hire a guide. None are available. You wait.

After fifteen minutes a middle-aged woman approaches you. Without introducing herself, she leads you into the first of Tuol Sleng’s classrooms. It is sepia-toned, picturesque. A pool of light collects beneath a rusting bed, with iron rods and tin boxes on top of it – one for beatings, the guide tells you, the other for excrement, but it’s hard to be sure. Her English is heavily accented and she’s speaking quickly, already hurrying you on, into the classroom next door. It is much the same: ochre paint, hues creeping with the damp; checkerboard tiles, amber and off-white spread apart by veins of black; cast iron bed, delicately welded at the head. A black-and-white photograph of the bed has been hung on the wall. It was taken by the Vietnamese in 1979, after they captured Phnom Penh. A corpse is tied to it; blood has collected on the floor in place of light.

Somebody has tucked a frangipani into the foot of the bed. It is still fragrant, and reminds you of the incense beneath the Killing Tree. It was also Animist, also focused on an object: this exact bed, that exact tree, as if they were able to explain the violence, or were somehow to blame. You wonder if the flower has been offered to the spirit of the man in the photograph – if he haunts this room.

After a perfunctory explanation, your guide is striding past a courtyard gallows, into another classroom. The previous two were intimate, like bedrooms, but here doorways have been knocked out of the dividing walls, joining the whole of the ground floor. The next floor up is lined with cells the size of stretchers, intended to hold two, but down here they have all been cleared, to make way for a gallery of pleading faces. Prisoners at Tuol Sleng were meticulously processed: numbers were assigned and confessions extracted, but mutilated bodies were all thrown into the same ghastly pit.

Your guide points out a stool in the corner, with brass attachments. It looks like something used for torture – like the water boards, hooks and pincers also on display – but it was only for identity photographs, to ensure the condemned held their heads perfectly in place. Row after row of the black-and-white results are on display. A few prisoners have already been beaten, and have black eyes or split lips, but most are untouched, and it is only by looks of abject fear or resignation that you can tell if they grasped their fate.

There are photographs of the warders too: smiling, proud, identically dressed. One warder has before-and-after photographs: the 21-year-old warder, a new recruit with a boy’s face, and the 46-year-old man, his chest covered completely by a sak yant – a sacred tattoo. “When I worked at S-21,” reads the caption, “I did not have the motivation, but I had to, otherwise I wouldn’t live. However, no matter which option I chose, I still feared. There was nothing I could do.”

The guide herds you wearily through the gallery, pausing only to explain feature attractions. Occasionally she starts talking before you’ve caught up, leaving you to make sense of her half-sentences. A video is showing upstairs she tells you, as she leads you on. You shouldn’t miss it.

At the bottom of a flight of stairs she stops, making it clear that this is where you will part. She begins her conclusion, pointing to a nearby map. Her family was torn apart she says, and pointing at the corners of Cambodia, she explains: her parents here, her uncle there, her sisters, her brother, over there. Dead – all of them dead. It is too intimate, and you squirm, but her eyes are hard. This is what you paid for, they seem to say: the taste of another person’s misery.