No Costume Required

Once upon a time, I rode a horse through an Indian village in Peru, and a pack of little dogs came out of nowhere to bark at me and my horse.

"Aha!" I breathed. "I recognize this scene! Dogs barking at horse-back rider entering Indian village!" Every detail, down to the exact pattern of the dogs' yips and growls, was just as described in all the books I had read that featured Indian villages. The visions of my youth were coming alive.

It took skill to recognize this, because I was mostly busy experiencing terror at the time. I have no idea how to ride a horse, and the horse I was on knew it, which is how we ended up riding through the village in the first place. But I was enjoying myself on some level, since it is my hobby, meandering around in foreign places and taking note of the things that match up with their popular descriptions.

For example, I once had the privilege of snooping around Alaska and confirming that yes, salmon really do swim upstream. Of course, then they turn a crazy shade of red, toss around violently, ram their heads into piles of pebbles (on purpose; this is how they dig nests for their eggs), and die.

People can match their stereotypes, too, providing the attentive tourist with hours of happy memories. Like that old man we met sitting on a folding chair at the side of the road. He was the ideal Alaskan oddball, with dirty jeans, a matted beard, and a gun leaning against his chair. He even came complete with an unfocused gaze.

Next to him was a big box with smoke coming out of it. He explained that in The problem was that I was envious of their authenticity. this box he was smoking a slew of fish he had caught. He would pass the winter watching movies and drinking. For food, he would have smoked fish, supplemented with fresh moose. Nah, he wouldn't shoot a whole moose just for himself. There's sure to be road kill.

Every now and then, especially when I am being buffeted by freezing winds while waiting for a train, I picture him burrowing into the darkness, emerging only to hack off a chunk of fresh moose meat. Maybe that is what he is doing this very minute.

Just thinking about it makes me feel like an explorer, uncovering important truths about the world.

Seeing Tibetan monks in Nepal, on the other hand, did not make me feel buoyant at all.

The formula was there. They looked exactly as described, with orange robes and shaved heads. The Indian sadhus, with their dreadlocks and body paint, also checked off perfectly against all the Herman Hesse novels I had ever read. As far as I could tell, they were the real thing.

The problem was that I was envious of their authenticity. I never wanted to be a salmon or an Alaskan oddball, but I did want some authentic experiences in the spirituality department. Like these people seemed to be having.

Luckily, Nepal also features things like mountains and rivers, and it was on the way back to Kathmandu from a rafting trip that I started feeling better about not being a monk.

We were on the roof of the bus, together with a bunch of Nepalese people, because there was no more room inside. And what a ride it was. The road was narrow, twisting at odd angles against the mountains. Occasionally, skeletons of fallen buses appeared in the valleys. When the bus sped up, we bounced, unhinged from gravity for long extended moments.

I gripped the rail with one hand and my backpack with another, and I curled my toes tightly against my slip-on clogs so they wouldn't slip-off. (In my mind's eye, it kept happening: a shoe slipping off my foot and tracing a beautiful arc in the air, then descending silently to make its permanent home in a rusty bus wreck.)

An hour into the ride, rain started to fall, and the drops were surprisingly painful, like being hit with nails.

What a superior way to travel, I observed delightedly.

It didn't take me long to realize that I was being delighted by the wrong things. Such as the remains of buses that had gone off the road. Practiced traveler that I was, I had been on the lookout for things that exemplified "distant, third-world country," and these broken buses were perfect. They had catapulted me into tourist heaven. But – what was really going on?

I had been so beguiled by the story By looking at the world as a well-planned scavenger hunt, I was missing the point. I was creating in my head that I hadn't paid much attention to what was actually happening. We were riding on the roof of a decrepit bus on a pot-holed road with cliffs on both sides. By acting as if I was in Disneyland, I had not paid much respect to the very real risks that life demands of people in Nepal.

It is fun to travel around the world and confirm: Yes, the bus from Heathrow to Bristol is full of straight-backed old ladies sipping tea. Yes, people in Italy have better shoes. And yes, it's true; don't mess with a Russian bureaucrat.

But (I thought) it is possible that by looking at the world this way - as if it is nothing more than a well-planned scavenger hunt – I might be missing the point, every now and then. Just as it is really absurd to dismiss life-threatening realities in the pursuit of a better travel story, it is also ridiculous to use the criteria of external appearances (orange robes, dreadlocks) to identify an authentic spiritual life.

There is no need to be envious. The well-dressed monk has nothing on me. I already am an authentic Jewish person, and there are many authentic Jewish things I can do, even if I continue to look like me (which, at the moment, was a wet tourist with a backpack on the top of a bus, and in a few moments, would possibly be a wet tourist disembarking in Kathmandu with only one shoe).