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next and transported from four-star Hyatt to five-star Hyatt, are likely to experience little of the foreign world they have allegedly come to observe; yet the low-budget traveler who would rather sleep on a bench and eat stale grass than pay 50 cents for the bourgeois comforts of an inn imposes on himself a different kind of tunnel vision. For my part, I tried to commute between the two worlds, slumming it in style as I moved between hovel and hotel. In Thailand, I spent a few nights at the $150-a-night Oriental Hotel, said to be the finest such palace in the world, and a few other nights on the floor of lightless huts in the animist villages of the north (though mostly I stayed in a modest $10-a-night apartment building somewhere between the two); in Tokyo, I sampled both a Holiday Inn and the cheapest
minshuku
in the city, an inn with cells so tiny that it was impossible for me to stand up inside my “room” and possible to enter only by crawling headfirst through a screen door. Likewise, taxi alternated with bullock cart, Amex café with filthy roadside stall. Burma I circumnavigated once by plane, and once by army truck, horse-drawn cart and third-class train. And nearly everywhere, I traveled alone, in order to give myself the space to think and the chance to meet strangers.
    The chapters that follow fall into three rough groups, progressively more complex. The first four are all fairly simple and straightforward discussions of the most basic kinds of meeting between East and West along the tourist trail, and the different forms they take in two places relatively new to the trade (Tibet and China) and two old pros (Bali and Nepal). The next three chapters explore in a little more detail some of the forms of Empire still to be found in the East: the legacy of American cultural colonialism in the Philippines; faded remnants of British rule, curiously preserved in isolationist Burma; and, in Hong Kong, the first outlines of the multinational empire that seems likely to rule the generic world of tomorrow. The final three chapters, the longest and most complicated, try to look more deeply into some of the East’s deepest cultures—India, Thailand and Japan—by examining one specific aspect of the way they adopt, and adapt to, Western influences, and make them distinctively their own.
    At times, I am sure, ignorance has conspired with wistfulness to make me blind to the obvious and receptive to the specious.When first I went to Bali, for example, I was so transported by its luxuriant sense of magic that I took the mosquito coils placed each night in my room for sticks of holy incense, and mistook the smell of clove cigarettes for the scent of some exotic flower. Though I was disabused of both illusions when I returned to the island the following year, many other such misconceptions doubtless remain. Still, mistakes can, in their way, be as revealing as epiphanies, and even a wrong impression may say as much about a place as a right one. If Bali had not been so full of real magic, my false assumptions would, no doubt, have been very different. And wide eyes are, if nothing else, quite open.

BALI
On Prospero’s Isle
    I HAD COME into town the previous afternoon watching video reruns of
Dance Fever
on the local bus. As I wandered around, looking for a place to stay, I had noted down the names of a few of the stores: the Hey Shop. The Hello Shop. Easy Rider Travel Service. T.G.I. Friday restaurant. And after checking into a modest guesthouse where Vivaldi was pumping out of an enormous ghetto blaster, I had gone out in search of a meal. I ran across a pizzeria, a sushi bar, a steak house, a Swiss restaurant and a slew of stylish Mexican cafés. Eventually, however, I wound up at T.J.’s, a hyper-chic fern bar, where long-legged young blondes in tropical T-shirts were sitting on wicker chairs and sipping tall cocktails. Reggae music floated through the place as a pretty waitress brought me my corn chips and salsa.
    After