When Does Travel Writing Become War Tourism?

When does travel writing become war tourism? On assignment in Sri Lanka, Leslie Jamison starts to question what lies behind the glossy image of the island paradise

It was early evening when I arrived in Colombo. We’d leapfrogged a day from New York, and everything felt half-dreamed. On my first flight, to Dubai, old men had peered out the bulkhead windows to check for the first lines of dawn, then dropped to the cabin floor in prayer. Dessert was apricot cake draped in cream. A teenage girl wore a bright pink T-shirt that read “Never look back”. The Gulf Times was full of Middle Eastern justice – “Woman to be lashed for insulting morality police”, “Arrest of atheist bloggers urged” – and chilling dispatches from my own country: “Tear gas and baton rounds can’t keep the peace in Missouri.”

I’d come to Sri Lanka on an assignment for a travel magazine. The premise of the feature was the magazine paid you to fly somewhere for a week but told you only 24 hours in advance where you were going. It was the kind of assignment that made other people jealous, but there was also something a bit shameful about it as if it had distilled a certain colonial arrogance into a jaunty journalistic lark: I’ll just show up ignorant and narrate this place! But had I turned down my free trip halfway around the world? I had not.