“The more things change, the more they stay the same...”,
someone once said. Or if they didn’t, they should have.
Nowhere is the observation truer than for travel to Asia,
or more romantically, “The Orient”. The Lure of
the East, tropical beaches, palm trees and dusky maidens (not
PC I understand), luxury colonial style hotels, exotic temples
and dances, lost cities, potentates and box wallahs, the pungent
tastes and aromas of Asia, and so on, and on.....
All highly potent images back in the 1960’s and 70’s.
Images that in large part have since made Southeast Asia one
of the world’s most favoured travel destinations and
tourism the top earner for many of the countries in the region.
The images are still there, if a bit tired, and are still
drummed into service to weave their magic anew, even if some
of the beaches and charm have been lost. There are always
new generations to be enthralled.
Having been involved in the peddling of this “Oriental
Myth & Magic” it is fun to look back and remember
how it really was. If you feel the romance has gone out of
travel you are of course right. Everybody gets in jet planes
these days and no one is the least enthralled. But the excitement
of travel has always lain within. Our preconceptions are what
makes it magical, and they need to be potent if any romance
is to survive the flight.
I used to fly out from London to Bangkok or Hong Kong regularly
back in the late 60’s and early 70’s. The Vietnam
war was at it’s height and both cities were favourite
R&R destinations, which certainly lent added flavour to
an already rich stew. Phuket hadn’t been invented yet
and Pattaya was a quiet village with just two hotels.
Bucket Shops & Affinity Groups
The cheapest way to fly to Asia from London in those days
was charter flight. You found some Soho bucket shop flogging
tickets for £90. You were supposed to be members of
what was called an “affinity” group. These journeys
did not always work out as expected. My first one to Bangkok
took 3 days. It wasn’t always as bad as this, but never
pleasant. So after several years I decided commuting was a
mugs game and wangled myself a job running an advertising
agency, first in Bangkok then in Hong Kong. Jetting back and
forth between Bangkok and Hong Kong, 35,000 feet above Da
Nang, it was weird how green and peaceful it all looked down
there. Hard to imagine there really was a war raging six miles
below. I’d peer up and down out the window port, craning
my neck to spot formations of B-52’s and sticks of bombs
falling past us or a SAM snaking its way up at us. Never saw
a thing. In fact not one civilian aircraft was ever lost or
damaged by military action crossing Vietnam during the entire
war.
That was the time Asian airlines came into their own. Airlines
like SIA, Cathay Pacific and Thai Intl. really did take off.
They were young and juicy then, none of the middle-aged spread
they’ve got now. They left the IATA airlines for dead.
Building an image that worked for these airlines against the
likes of British Airways, Lufthansa or Pan Am was like taking
candy from babies. The destination, the check-in and cabin
staff, the inflight food and drink, the music, all thrown
in for free, made the IATA airlines livid. They had to charge
people money for a pack of measly peanuts and a headset that
gave you earache. It was the time Ian Batey came up with his
“Singapore Girl” campaign, which in one form or
another runs to this day. Anodyne stuff to what we were doing
for Thai. The first major international campaign for Thai
featured this drop-dead gorgeous Indonesian model (not Thai
at all) in a damp sarong on a tropical beach with the ever
so subtle exhortation “Get Into It.....!”. Not
the most imaginative copy even then, but it worked.
Louche Lads
Very 60’s stuff, but then the 70’s were the 60’s
for most of Asia..... Our “creative” guys, louche
lads with names like Doyle & Doig, were crass but effective.
From their names you’d imagine a pair of Irish bookies
or NAAFI sergeants and you wouldn’t be far off the mark.
They stole most of their ideas from those great big annual
tomes of all the world’s advertising. As the commercial
backwaters of SE Asia morphed into emerging tigers they got
away with murder and clients loved them.
The early 70’s onward was also a great time for the
new young photographers and publishers fascinated by the region.
The first APA guide to Bali by Hans Hoefer epitomised all
this. Great photography combined with stylish design, decent
writing and unbelievably cheap production, compared to the
US and Europe, made SE Asia the name of the game when it came
to glossy images for a decade. After that it all became a
bit routine. Gloss without substance. Some publishers, whose
backgrounds straddled the cultures of East and West became
hoteliers like Adrian Zecha, leading to the 80’s Aman
concept. Now itself a much-copied cliché of white concrete
wannabes.
When the Going was Good….
The sheer explosion of trade, tourism and finance around the
region made travel junkies of us all, be we doctors, bankers,
admen, journos, garmentos, architects and property developers,
international civil servants, engineers, whatever. We tended
to be supportive of our airlines, favoured get-away beaches
and boutique hotels (we didn’t call them that then).
We bumped into each other in places like the Sugar Hut on
Jomtien Beach or the Tanjung Sari in Sanur of a weekend, on
our way to and from working weeks in the neighbouring cities.
Very different from the sad mid-management “road warriors”
of the US and Europe of the time, desperately counting up
their entitlements and status, which is what it’s been
reduced to nowadays with the joyless complexities of “loyalty”
programs.
Just to show it really does all come around, I was amused
to see a short while ago various organisations had got together
to put Bali back on the tourist map and guess what copy line
was? Yup, it was .......”Bali. Get Into It....!”
Bit more decorous than what we’d done 30 years earlier,
lacking the raunchy flavour, but unmistakably trading on the
same appeal.
Superficially some things in Bali may change with time and
fashion but the essential magic, with little relation to the
image, still remains. And if you can tear yourself away for
a moment from the “Yak” experience, the fashionable
villas of Canggu, the chic eateries of Jalan Oberoi and nightspots
& waterholes on Dhayanapura, you may still find that nostalgic
laid back hint of yesteryear in stately old dames like the
Oberoi itself, a long drink watching the sun set over the
reef at the Tanjung Sari for example, or a morning coffee
over your Herald Trib at the Cafe Batujimbar.
And, now that deregulation has finally arrived in Asia, we
have a slew of new cut price airlines. We even have the very
first low-cost long-haul carrier flying the Hong Kong/London
route for about as much as I paid in 1969. Extraordinarily,
airlines still want to try and sell us on the beauty of their
cabin staff, the wonderful food, the comfort and the romance
of travel. Why do they bother? We know it’s one variety
of hell or another, whatever class you fly in. Until we have
vast zeppelins cruising safely at 600mph, where we are treated
as human beings, don’t tell me to “Get into It
“, Please!
