Beached - Why And Why Not

Watching the Leonardo DiCaprio film The Beach on the plane back to Manila gave me the goose bumps. There on my tiny individual video screen was a lurid case of life imitating art. Or was it the other way around? Everybody in the world by then must have heard ad nauseam about the Easter Sunday kidnapping of 21 persons from a Malaysian resort and their subsequent sea-borne transfer to Sulu in the Southern Philippines.

Could the incident have been inspired by that controversial film? While it was being filmed in Thailand, The Beach had raised hackles from environmentals and cause-oriented types. Or could be inspiration have come directly from the weird novel on which the film had been based?

I was quick to dismiss these theories advanced by my seatmate as too pat and too convenient. The Abu Sayyaf never grabbed me as cinema buffs or readers of cult novels about island-paradise fantasies of western folks.

Yet who could resist such fantasies? Pristine white beaches, turquoise blue waters, with swaying palm trees and tropical jungle just beyond the water's edge. Name it. It all began, I guess, towards the last half of the 19th century, when Paul Gauguin went native in Tahiti and Robert Louis Stevenson churned out all those adventure stories about the South Pacific.

Some say the tropics turned into irresistible legend and travel destination in the post-World War II period. Too many American boys fought the war in the Pacific. A James Michener book morphed into the hit Broadway musicale South Pacific could only have spawned today's wild and rapacious tourist industries in country after tropical country with a passable stretch of sand. The jumbo jets opened the floodgates.

Europeans, Americans and other denizens of the north temperature zone can't be blamed for turning the tropics into their land of dreams. Just as we of the hot and humid equatorial zone hallucinate about snow, nothing excites westerners than the thought of getting lost in some tropical beach. Throw in titillating promises of free love and cheap sex and you can just imagine why "Amazing Thailand" has become a whopping tourist promotion some two years into the Asian financial crisis.

Climate and water dictate these reverse fantasies. We're always steaming in the heat, blinded by sunlight, trapped in islands and surrounded by water, floods and otherwise. No wonder Filipinos, Thais and Malaysians daydream about building snowmen and engaging in snowfights.

Many westerners are held hostage by winter at least three months of every year, by intolerably humid summers for another three months, and then by rain and dreary weather most of the remaining months. Only briefly in spring and perhaps a little longer in autumn do they feel emboldened to claim their side of the world superior to ours.

And speaking of water, their beaches are almost entirely for sunbathing because ocean temperatures seldom go beyond freezing point even in August. In contrast, tropical seas tend to the pleasantly warm and ideal for water sports such as snorkeling and skindiving that are simply out of the question in Sweden or England.

In the winter months, there can be no doubt that westerners who have time and money to spare wouldn't be caught dead in London or Berlin. They're not called snowbirds for nothing because their natural tendency is to head as far south as possible. That is, to the French Riviera and the vast Mediterranean world if they have no wish to venture out of the continent. Otherwise, you encounter planeload after planeload of them from the Caribbean to the South Pacific and all over Southeast Asia.

As immortalized in The Beach, Bangkok's Khao San Road must be the epicenter or the Grand Central of this western addiction to tropical pursuits. Khao San is not a beach, but a street of honky-tonks peddling cheap tickets and rides to everywhere, cheap lodgings and food, plus all the gear, souvenirs and gewgaws that could fit into millions of backpacks.

The rich do not go to Khao San because they can go straight to Phuket, Koh Samet or all the way down to Malaysia's Langkawi and Indonesia's Bali, and there to literally wallow in beach-front luxury.

But the tropics is not only for the rich. Dollars, francs and marks go a long way in Asia. Today's catchword is eco-tourism, meaning the more primitive the better. More daring snowbirds avoid the beaten path. Once electricity and discos appear, the chain hotels catering to the tourist hordes cannot be far behind. Thus, time to move deeper into the unknown.

The nine westerners among the Jolo hostages stick out as classical adventure types who want to be far away even from their kind. They picked an island so tiny and remote it does not show up in most maps. They knew it would be dangerous, the Sulu Seas long having become notorious for piracy, smuggling and, yes, kidnapping. Like DiCaprio and his reckless friends in the film, they were playing Russian roulette with their lives. The difference was that, for them, paradise turning into hell was the real thing.