Wandering down a gravel road that cut unnaturally through the jungles of Cambodia, the sound of a nearby street band drawing me towards the next ancient temple, I couldn’t escape one nagging thought: “This sure felt a lot like Disneyland.”

Months later, as I crested an ocean front sand dune in Mozambique, the salty sweet smell of the ocean smacking me in the nose as I came face to face with a postcard perfect panorama of a few lone beach-front palm trees leaning in as if to take a drink of the turquoise waves of the ocean, the first thought that came to my mind, “I’m in a Microsoft screen saver.”

The thing that’s funny about modern life is that what is unreal has become more real than the real. What we think is real, comes from what we’ve seen in the unreal world: movies, television, media, zoos and amusement parks. That unreal is our reference point to what we think is real.

For the average person from the developed world, our understanding of lion behavior come from Simba (which means “lion” in Swahihi) and Scar, our benchmark for beautiful oceans come from airbrushed glossy magazine spreads in National Geographic and our closest brush with pirates came when we were face-to-TV with Johnny Depp.

This phenomenon leads us to two problems:

1) The Real Turns Out Not To Be As Exciting As What We Think Is Real: Because the real thing isn’t edited, scripted, “Photoshoped” and backed by a John Williams orchestrated score, when we see things that are real and they don’t measure up to our expectation, we instead desire for the unreal “real” version instead.

“The sharks were pretty sleepy. I thought they’d be more aggressive, I didn’t get any good photo,” remarked one disappointed woman on a Great White shark cruise in South Africa. Too bad her traveling husband with the camera wasn’t Steven Spielberg.

2) Our desire for this idealized version of the real (the unreal), causes many places to give us what we think we want. Since tourists have certain expectations of the places we go, it is no surprise that these places are going to give us what we think we want.

During my travels in China, I visited Lijang a popular tourist destination in Yunan. The area known as the “old city” appears to have been lifted directly out of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with the crafty addition of neon lit pubs overflowing with Tsing Tao beer and Chinese women in short shorts, karaoke bars and kitschy souvenir shops.

Night on the streets in Old Town Lijang, Yunan Province, China.

The reality of China is that people don’t live in movies like Crouching Tiger and darkened cobble stone streets with glowing red lanterns are not where most Chinese exist in the modern era, but the image that tourists have of China is exactly that, so in the end the demand causes the unreal to become real.

A picture in front of my guesthouse in ‘Old Town’ Zhongdian, China.
A city that recently changed its name to “Shangri-la” for obvious tourist purposes.

So if on your next trip you find yourself watching Kenyans dancing and whooping around a camp fire to the beat of leather drums or Geishas bowing to you at the gates of Kyoto-esque temples or even cowboys and indians chasing each other around a dusty stage in South Dakota, enjoy it for what it is, but please my friend take a taste of the real, at least for a bit, and get out of the theme park.

---

 What you can do now:

• Leave a comment in the box below.
• Read more of Andy’s ego-talk, this one on American-Chinese relations, in his post Marching for Democracy In China
• See some “Photoshoped, glossy photos” from such reality in the Noboundaries.org photo galleries