Amid the devastation of South Asia, where the earthquake and tsunamis have killed more than 150,000 people, a striking story is quietly emerging.

Western tourists — those ne’er-do-wells better known for lounging on the beach, sipping tropical drinks and haggling over the price of $4 hotel rooms in poverty-stricken towns — are doing some good.

Proclaimed Reuters: “Tsunami turns tourists into aid workers.”

Declared The Independent in Great Britain: “The tourists still come — only now they want to help.”

Instead of fleeing the devastated areas, some Western travelers are actually seeking them out, offering to lend a hand to overburdened relief agencies and local officials. The phenomenon is repeating itself, according to reports, in Thailand, Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

As one aid worker in Sri Lanka told The Independent: “We have people coming in daily and telling us that for 24 hours or so they thought they would forget about [their] holiday. But then they realise that far from getting in the way they can actually be vitally important players in this fight to save and rebuild shattered lives.”

And so these tourists — men and women who haven’t lost loved ones and who may not have even been on the coast when the waves swept through — are trading flip-flops for sneakers and getting to work, collecting bodies, funneling aid money to the needy, picking through the rubble.

The news is heartwarming. The fact is, Western travelers to South and South East Asia, like travelers to other developing regions, often get a bad rap.

Critics accuse budget-minded backpackers of flitting through the poorest nations with a slash-and-burn mentality, cutting costs at every turn and putting frugality ahead of generosity, even as locals struggle to keep roofs over their heads.

We hear about the popularity of sex tourism in nations like Thailand and Cambodia, about children being recruited into the trade, about Westerners exploiting the needy.

Too many travelers, we are told, export their own culture when they go abroad, bringing Western demands with their dollars and Euros, encouraging old worlds to abandon traditions prematurely.

Those of us who travel often, of course, know that these criticisms, if sometimes valid, are far from the whole picture.

Long before the tsunamis struck, a subtle shift was occurring. More travelers than ever are seeking meaningful cultural exchange overseas. They are searching for ways to see the world, if only briefly, through others’ eyes, to understand foreign cultures in a way they hadn’t before.

They are signing on with organizations like Global Exchange and Cross-Cultural Solutions, which lead trips, often to little-visited places, that focus on education, understanding and, occasionally, volunteer work.

Those Westerners remaining in South Asia didn’t bargain for a disaster when they set off on their winter trips. But their willingness to help, instead of immediately returning home or setting off for more carefree climes, demonstrates a fact that too often gets overlooked: Travelers are capable of great good.

On CNN two weeks ago, Larry King asked a couple of Americans what they were still doing in Thailand, more than a week after the tsunamis struck. Why hadn’t they returned home from their disastrous winter vacation?

They stood against a backdrop of verdant Thai hills, blinking, as King’s query bounced via satellite across the globe. Then they explained, patiently, that the Thais had been kind and generous ever since the waves hit. The two wanted to help any way they could.

So, they said, they had been carrying bodies and coffins through the tropical heat. Friends back home had been wiring money to them to help, and they had been distributing it to those in need, operating their own mini-relief agency.

Rebecca Bedall told King, “I think our plan is to stay at least a week or two.”

The couple is far from alone.

At its worst, travel in the developing world only highlights the disparities between the haves and have-nots, fostering resentment toward Western tourists.

But more often than we hear about, travel forges connections between peoples across great economic and cultural divides. It brings us together. And even in the worst of times, it can reveal us at our best.

Photo of Sri Lanka Buddha by shashiBellamkonda via Flickr, (Creative Commons)

It was hot and humid when I set out for dinner in the small southern Thailand city of Hat Yai, and I felt the world expanding and shrinking around me, depending on which road I walked down. On one rutted old street, two men led a wrinkled gray elephant down the sidewalk, pausing in front of a shark-fin soup restaurant to read the menu. Around the corner, as though in a parallel universe, a well-lit 7-Eleven convenience store illuminated the road, and a couple of young women in blue jeans chatted behind street stalls, their tables lined with the latest in knock-off Oakley sunglasses and World Wrestling Federation T-shirts.

I had just stepped off the train from Malaysia and was hungry. I had been dreaming of my arrival in Thailand, and of eating the fragrant coconut-seasoned dishes I had enjoyed at Thai restaurants back home in Los Angeles. But here in southern Thailand, I wasn’t finding much. I’d passed Chinese restaurants and a few kitchens serving the same Malaysian-style curry I’d been eating for weeks. Then I spotted the Sizzler, with its familiar red and green sign: “Steaks, Seafood, Salad.”

I couldn¹t believe it. All sorts of Western chains had made inroads into Asian capitals like Bangkok and Katmandu, but I’d never seen a Sizzler abroad, and I certainly never expected to find one in a small city like Hat Yai. I wanted to head back toward the elephant.

When I began my five months of travel in Asia, I made an earnest pledge to try to avoid chain restaurants, which I saw as contributing to cultural homogenization. Instead, I told myself, I would dine only in local establishments, exasperating waiters as I butchered their native language, struggling valiantly to pronounce dishes like moo goo gai pan. As many travelers like to point out, the word “travel” is rooted in the French word “travail.” It’s work. You get out of it what you put into it, and it shouldn’t be too easy.

But after I’d walked several more blocks and still hadn’t found a restaurant serving anything new, the promise of crispy fresh vegetables from a salad bar, something I hadn’t come across in months on the road, sounded alluring. I headed for the Sizzler and put my cultural travels on hold. At least that’s what I assumed.

The Sizzler, it turned out, was packed with people. Well-dressed locals — men in slacks and button-down shirts, women in stylish skirts and blouses — sat on benches, waiting for tables. Soft-spoken Thai dinner conversations spilled out the front door, along with the buttery aroma of baked potatoes. I added my name to a waiting list. Those around me carefully studied menus on display, pointing to glossy photographs of chicken sandwiches and fries. They turned the menu pages slowly, as though leafing through an exotic wisdom text. Their eyes gleamed. I’d never seen such quiet anticipation at a Sizzler, a decidedly middle-of-the-road American chain. After a short wait, a slight young woman opened the front door and carefully enunciated my name: “Mr. Jim?”

Once inside, I was surprised to find myself surrounded by pastoral images of California, my home state. Colorful wall-sized murals depicted sight after familiar sight. In one, the Golden Gate Bridge spanned the blue waters of San Francisco Bay, giving way to Marin County’s rolling hills. In another, Santa Barbara’s whitewashed Spanish-style courthouse looked out over the city’s inviting red-tile roofs. Yet another wall featured the famous Hollywood sign beaming forth from the Santa Monica Mountains. The scenes brought back warm memories, but they also struck me in a way I wouldn’t have expected. How dry and desert-like California looked, how brown and dusty and sun-scorched, through the prism of the lush, green Southeast Asian countryside I’d been traveling in for weeks.

A visit to the Sizzler in Thailand was more complicated than I had imagined. I was seeing the familiar as deliciously exotic, and the exotic as oddly familiar. In a way, the Sizzler offered the perfect chance to see America, or at least one idealized version of America, through Thai eyes.

A waiter smiled and handed me an English-language menu, and I studied my options: steaks, fried shrimp, salads. One item in particular, the Malibu Chicken Supreme, caught my eye. The menu lovingly described the dish’s features, raving that it was a “favorite of the stars.” A favorite of the stars? The message to these Thai diners was clear: Thousands of miles away, in the shadow of the real Hollywood sign, Tom Cruise himself probably stopped by the local Sizzler for a bite of Malibu Chicken after a long day at the studio lot. Even more seductively, the description seemed to imply that anyone, anywhere in the world, even in a small town in southern Thailand, could enjoy the sweet taste of Hollywood stardom, or at least a glimmer of celebrity glamour, by ordering the Malibu Chicken.

As I devoured a plateful of salad (I passed on the celebrity chicken), I looked at the diners around me, sitting in booths, sipping Cokes and munching burgers, surrounded by California scenes. They were devouring a vision of the American dream. Did they know that their chances of spotting Tom Cruise at a Hollywood Sizzler were about the same as mine were of meeting the Buddha in a Bangkok nightclub? Did they care? I suspected not.

I could relate to them. Back home, I hadn’t eaten at a Sizzler in at least a decade. But I drove right by one each week to eat at my favorite Thai restaurant, a delicious hole-in-the-wall in the middle of a Thai immigrant neighborhood. How often I had sat inside, filling myself with panang curry and coconut soup, studying the black-and-white photographs of wild-looking Buddhist temples and Thai markets hung on the walls, nursing my dream of one day sampling my favorite dishes in their Thai homeland. Now, here I was, in just that place, surrounded by Thais eating my native food, surrounded by images of California, perhaps dreaming the same dream I had been, only in reverse.

What drives us to jet off to a foreign country where we know not a soul and can’t begin to speak the language? At least in my case, it can be something as simple as a photograph in a magazine, an exotic song whose lyrics I can’t begin to understand, or a savory dish served up at a local ethnic restaurant. These images and sounds and flavors, however innocuous they may at first appear, plant seeds in our imaginations. Sometimes, days or months or even years later, those seeds take root in our dreams. When they do, we find ourselves on wide-bodied jets, crossing oceans or continents, burning to explore the world on the other side.

But the best part of the adventure is that when we finally arrive in that other place, we rarely find just what we had expected. The world is far more complex, and people are far more complicated, than most of our imaginations can accommodate. Never would I have imagined, sitting back home in my favorite Thai cafe, that I’d spend my first night in Thailand searching in vain for panang curry but settling for a Sizzler. My dream never would have tolerated that. And I never would have guessed that I’d actually enjoy it.

After dinner, I walked back onto the steamy streets of Hat Yai, and I saw the traditional Thailand I had dreamed of back in Los Angeles. It was visible in the ancient buildings plastered with squiggly Thai writing, in a dark, musty shop selling bee products, and in that same wrinkled elephant still making its way silently down the road. Yet I also saw a distinctly more modern Thailand, one that I hadn’t fully envisioned at home. It was embodied on a nearby street corner, not far from the 7-Eleven. There, a band of young, long-haired Thai musicians plugged a guitar, bass and microphone into an amplifier. Counting off a few beats, they launched into the Eagles’ rock classic, Hotel California. It was an anthem from another place and another time, resurrected here for a new generation of dreamers nurturing their own visions of a faraway land.