It seems to me, after experiences that recur, that one of the essential elements of travel is that there are some places one simply cannot go. And, if you think you have gotten there, you are deceiving yourself in some way.
A physical example is the grave of the Titanic. Steve Pinfield has been down there in a bathyscaphe but he wasn't really two miles below the ocean because humans can't live down there. There isn't oxygen and the pressure is too high. He went down in a little bubble of troposphere and watched through thick glass what he could have experienced more fully watching a robot do on a wide screen TV in Penzance. (You can deduce my opinion of space flight.)
Today's example was a social one. A California boy can't know what it's like to be a Fon villager, a Bobo villager, a Fiji villager. I can't even explain to anybody what it was like to Live in Lincoln Village and Really Live! in 1959. You read the travelers' stories of explorers who pretended to be Muslims so they could sneak into Mecca, but that's not so much of a trick. Islam is open to the whole world and has always been so, since it is a religion you Profess and Live, not some mystery race you have to be born into like Judaism or speaking Hungarian. There isn't much difference between being a poser who pretends to observe the five pillars and someone who really does, it's like driving fifty miles an hour — can you fake that and say "well, I'm not really driving fifty miles an hour, I'm just pretending"? — and even at that, the pretenders usually spent a matter of months learning the rituals, just like any child would. And God only knows what Khameini really believes. Or the Pope.
It's not open to me, in one afternoon, to know what's it's like to, say, drink kava, or practice voudoun. And if I pursue the matter, I'm going to end up in a rather uncomfortable social situation with a self-important and at the same time somewhat insecure petty chief who wants a great deal of money for doing nothing but lecturing Dave based on what he supposes Dave thinks about Voudoun and then begging to have his photo taken with us in as childish a manner as the dozens of ragamuffins upstaging him from outside the compound we have been hustled into, and without nearly the good humor. Voudoun may be an indigenous and threatened religion, but it is still a religion, and as such is populated by shysters who pretend to know what the gods are thinking based on nothing but their claim that it's so, and are continually asking for money from the gullible.
He wanted 10000 CFA. The little village that Lonely Planet said was charming has become a thoroughly annoying self parody, and that was years ago. Now they even omit the self parody, they are like those conceptual art works that consist of big pieces of text describing what they would be if anyone had actually bothered to make them. They beg you to photograph their forbidden fetishes for money.
This is a sacred place, where sacred means that you must make a donation to photograph it. What does the little kid think? He was playing peekaboo with me. For him this temple is a playground, for me it's a carnival, where's God?
