So Wendy and I are wrapping up our travels. As I write this, it’s been 164 days, 12 countries and 43 different cities since we left New York. We’ve traveled by just about every possible mechanism: jet, prop plane, train, subway, dodgy wooden boat, dodgy metal boat, bus, car, rickshaw, camel and elephant. And we’ve walked miles by ourselves.
To close out our travels, I thought I’d share a couple of thoughts that have popped up while we’ve been abroad. (If you’re looking for a top x list, this will disappoint; fortunately the Internet it full of said lists).
1.
The world’s great travelers are the…French. Perhaps it’s the 26 hour work week and the mandatory retirement at 42, but the French were everywhere we went. The Dutch travel a lot too, but they seem to focus on the former colonies. On the other hand the French are ubiquitous. Laos, Indonesia, Malaysia, Uzbekistan, India; sometimes I thought they were simply following us around.
I was shocked by how few Canadians, Aussies and Americans we saw. There’s a massive gap between Southeast Asia and Turkey where, with the exception of the Golden Triangle in India (Delhi, Agra and Jaipur), you don’t hear much natively spoken English.
The other interesting trend is the rise of the Chinese tourist. They travel in packs and seem like teenagers who are aware that they’re getting stronger but aren’t quite confident with their new muscles. Hordes of them are descending on places that, like Ha Long Bay, seem curiously reminiscent of China.
In fact, their travel reminds me of Canadians. For most Canadians, their first trip is to America. It’s a chance to get a taste of a foreign country and see what “foreigners” are like yet not give up the familiarity and safety blanket of home (heck, they look like you). Yet we all go abroad eventually; expect to see many chinese tourists near you soon.
2.
Everyone loves to compare countries. It’s natural; one of the reasons we travel is to see how things are in different countries (unless you are doing the Canada -> Mexico/Cuba booze run; there’s little anthropology involved there).
The standard way economists compare countries is to use GDP or GNI per capita, adjusted for purchasing power. Said another way, take the value of everything made and traded in a country, divide it by the population and adjust for how expensive things are in different countries.
This sounds great, but having seen it in action, I think it’s one of the silliest metrics out there.
Consider the following:
You’re looking at gross national income per capital, ppp adjusted for India, Uzbekistan and Laos. India is the leader here with a value of $3,260. Uzbekistan is about 10% lower at $2,890 and Laos is the laggard at $2,210.
Based on this you might think that India is more developed than both of these countries and a better place to live. But the reality is a little more nuanced.
When you fly into Tashkent you might mistake yourself for being in a lightly populated European capital; leafy boulevards and cafes abound. You would never make this mistake flying into Mumbai or Delhi (or, god help you, Calcutta). Similarly, Laos is, on average, poorer than India but it’s low population means that you will never be accosted by 5 year old children gently tapping on your car’s window and gesturing to their mouths for food.
So if we can’t compare countries’ development based on per capita income, how might we compare them? Here are a bunch of signs that I think could be combined into some sort of development index to figure out how far along a country is:
Can you get Diet Coke? In the smaller towns?
How many households have washers and dryers?
Are there any garbage cans in public places? If there’s one, is it ceremonial or are there enough and are they frequently emptied?
Are there convenience stores that are not attached to gas stations? How sophisticated are they? Are items just arrayed on the shelves or is there some sort of science behind how they’re arranged? How frequently does the stock turn over?
What is the ratio in the cost of a liter of oil vs. a liter of bottled water?
Are people allowed to park on the sidewalks or is there zero tolerance for this?
Are there wild dogs and cats in the city?
Is there a modern art gallery in the capital city? Do people actually go there?
Can you place an outbound call from your hotel room?
Do stores have price stickers on their goods or are you negotiating every single price?
So how do select countries compare?
Japan is the clear winner in the convenience store category, followed by Hong Kong – with Laos and Vietnam getting into the game. Germany, India and Uzbekistan aren’t doing too well.
Wild dogs pop up in strange places. Istanbul is a giant squat for feral beasts and new breeds of mutt are being created daily. India gives it a run for its money.
Istanbul also has a great and popular modern art gallery; most of Uzbekistan can’t imagine one (modern art is an interesting proxy for political freedom and drive for modernity).
In Japan it’s going to cost you a lot more than gas for a liter of gas. In Germany it’s actually cheaper – thought barely – due to the ubiquity of bottle shops (people buy bulk). In India water is cheap and gas is very expensive.
Not one of these indicators will predict the level of development of any country, but put them together and you get an interesting perspective on how different places are doing.
3.
The seatbelt is universally hated by the populations of all nations. Taxi drivers around the world have rejected it.
Conversely, irrespective of whatever country you’re in, if a car you’ve never seen flashes their high beams at you, you should assume there’s a cop right around the corner.
4.
I like using travel to explore the banal. All countries face the same set of basic challenges: feed a large mass of people, protect them from famine/war/invaders/disease/etc. and then try and raise their standard of living.
I’m particularly interested in what countries do once they’ve satisfied those first two and can start to focus on the third. Because at that point, everyone starts to encounter the same set of banal problems, but lots of countries come up with different solutions.
Consider, for instance, the pressing need to open canned goods. I’m sure that every reader of this blog (all six of you) have, at one point or another in your life, used a can opener. Since many of you are Canadian, the process probably went like this:
a) Pickup can opener
b) Open jaws
c) Place one side of jaw on upper lid of can. Place other jaw underneath lid
d) Close jaws
e) Rotate large bar on side can opener while squeezing jaws shut
f) Watch in awe as your can of Alphagetti opens and shares the wonder of the latin script with you.
Simple right? You’ve done it hundreds of times, so you’re pretty confident you can open a can.
Well, I thought so too, until I tried to open a can in Germany.
Here’s how one opens a can in Germany:
The can opener immediately confused me as there were no jaws. Just two little wheels staring at me. Watching. Judging.
Like a cave man trying to decipher a telephone, I groped at the tool, tossing it gently from hand to hand, sensing its weight and hoping it would yield a clue. After a few minutes, a breakthrough: when I depressed a plastic button in the handle, a handle shot out the side. This must be the right path.
In the third photo above you can see what I tried to do next: I tried to use the German can opener with the North American technique. I thought the handle and the main body were analogues to the jaws on a normal can opener and I had to use them to vertically grip the can’s lid. Every time I closed the jaw, the can opener would shoot sideways and clatter to the floor.
Much cursing ensued.
Hunger stopped me from learning anything and instead I assumed that there was some “trick” and if I could just get the angle right the damn lid would come off.
After five minutes of this I realized that this wasn’t working. Male pride would not allow me to admit defeat and I considered getting out a knife and simply hacking away at the top of the can. (Wounded male pride must be responsible for most household accidents and visits to emergency wards)
But then I had a thought. What if the can opener didn’t work up and down, but rather sideways. It was an Archimedes-like moment of inspiration but instead of yelling “Eureuka” I simply muttered the brand of the canned soup under my breath.
I gently slid one of the rollers on the inside lid of the can and the other on the outside. I depressed the previously inscrutable handle and there was a satisfying lock as the teeth gripped the edge of the can. The can opener stuck out horizontally, sneering at gravity. Solid. German.
And then I turned. With gratifying effort, the top of the can gave way. But I wasn’t cutting off the lid, I was cutting off the top of the can.
And that’s just how they roll in Germany. I’m sure that every German over the age of three knows how to open a can. And now I do too.
I’ve kept the can opener to remind me of just how little I know.
Another banal area that I am now intimately familiar with is laundry. I’ve had the opportunity to be on the receiving end of how almost half the world’s citizens wash their clothes. You laugh, but washing your clothes when traveling – and getting back the same clothes you started with – is a decidedly non-trivial experience.
The only place I could find a self-serve laundromat was Tokyo. Interestingly, it was entirely self-service. No one worked there and it was just trusted that everyone would take care of the place: not trash the machines, take their laundry out in a timely manner, etc.
Whenever we dropped out laundry off in Germany it was handled with Prussian efficiency. Every single article had a sticker with our order number written on it:
Contrast this with India where, at Mt. Abu’s Fawlty Towers-esque Lake Palace, they actually wrote “LP” in indelible marker on every article of clothing we dropped off:
Unfortunately for Wen, they actually wrote “LP” on the front of the neck of many of her t-shirts so she had an awkward little tattoo for a few weeks of our trip.
Sometimes you come across a problem that a country has solved and you didn’t even know you had. One of the ones I noticed was the two sets of alarms on German light rail cars. You can tell the driver how long the door has to stay open when requesting a stop: if you’re traveling with a child you’ll probably need a bit more time to get out of the car:
5.
One of the unintended consequences of globalization is that whether you are in Fort Kochi (India), Hanoi or Istanbul, someone is going to try and sell you a hand-powered mini-sewing machine or a glowing toy that fires a spinning parachutist into the sky.
Somewhere in China is a factory that makes both and the workers there have absolutely no idea what they have set loose in the world.
In other news, I’d love to know the distribution system that makes sure that this useless stuff gets delivered to all the varied corners of the Earth.
6.
When Wen and I go to a town, we try and get at least a little bit off the beaten path. I want to see the popular sites, but I also want to get a sense of how the locals live (In no part because so many of the the locals in many of the countries we visited want what I have – I don’t begrudge them that as I was born very lucky in a great country – and I want to get a sense of where they’re at in getting it).
This lead us to some interesting places. A walk through Tokyo’s, Istanbul’s and Hanoi’s back streets. Aimless wandering in Kowloon. Grocery shopping in Semporna (Borneo) and Udaipur amongst other places.
I always thought Wen and I were a little weird for this, but then I found out someone who is, in part, making a career of it – and came up with the great term “Geopolitical travel.” Here’s a snippet from a great article where he describes it:
There is another part of geopolitical travel that is perhaps the most valuable: walking the streets of a city. Geopolitics affect every level of society, shaping life and culture. Walking the streets, if you know what to look for, can tell you a great deal. Don’t go to where the monuments and museums are, and don’t go to where the wealthy live. They are the least interesting and the most globally homogenized. They are personally cushioned against the world. The poor and middle class are not. If a Montblanc store is next to a Gucci shop, you are in the wrong place.
Go to the places where the people you will never hear of live. Find a school and see the children leave at the end of the day. You want the schools where there is pushing and shoving and where older brothers come to walk their sisters home. You are now where you should be. Look at their shoes. Are they old or new? Are they local or from the global market? Are they careful with them as if they were precious or casual with them as they kick a ball around? Watch children play after school and you can feel the mood and tempo of a neighborhood.
Find a food store. Look at the food being offered, particularly fruits and vegetables. Are they fresh-looking? What is the selection? Look at the price and calculate it against what you know about earnings. Then watch a woman (yes, it is usually a woman) shopping for groceries. Does she avoid the higher priced items and buy the cheapest? Does she stop to look at the price, returning a can or box after looking, or does she simply place it in her basket or cart without looking at the price? When she pays for the food, is she carefully reaching into an envelope in her pocketbook where she stores her money, or does she casually pull out some bills? Watch five women shopping for food in the late afternoon and you will know how things are there.
Go past the apartments people live in. Smell them. The unhealthy odor of decay or sewage tells you about what they must endure in their lives. Are there banks in the neighborhood? If not, there isn’t enough business there to build one. The people are living paycheck to paycheck. In the cafes where men meet, are they older men, retired? Or are they young men? Are the cafes crowded with men in their forties drinking tea or coffee, going nowhere? Are they laughing and talking or sitting quietly as if they have nothing left to say? Official figures on unemployment can be off a number of ways. But when large numbers of 40-year-old men have nothing to do, then the black economy — the one that pays no taxes and isn’t counted by the government but is always there and important — isn’t pulling the train. Are the police working in pairs or alone? What kind of weapons do they carry? Are they everywhere, nowhere or have just the right presence? There are endless things you can learn if you watch.
The next time you travel I highly recommend doing so geopolitically – even if it’s just the city down the road.
7.
Here are a couple of political thoughts I’ve had while traveling; my worldview is shifting:
Corruption is the world’s biggest problem. A corrupt society can never truly be free and will never have a standard of living that, on average, matches those of uncorrupt societies. The only way to stop corruption is through free elections and an accountable judiciary. Influences: Uzbekistan and India.
I’m currently wondering if democracy works at scale. I believe in democracy and think it’s the only form of government that will really work, but after spending time in America and India, I’m not yet sure we have the institutions to make it work at scale.
India’s the largest democracy by population but its politics are captured by caste; you don’t cast your vote – you vote your caste and then get a job from them
America, the world’s largest democracy by economic might, is currently experiencing regulatory capture where special interests seem to dictate what occurs. Direct democracy in California has been a disaster
Maybe when a country hits a certain size it simply needs a new set of democratic institutions (broader executive powers with supermajority recall? Special track for long-term, expensive projects? I don’t know)?
The emergent challenge of the 21st century is not “East” vs. “West” but “Modernity” vs. “Western Values”
“East” vs. “West” doesn’t work because Japan is definitely not Western but embodies many of the notions of the West; Turkey is in a similar but different boat
Instead, in many countries its a question of “can I give my people modern technology without freedom?” China is at the forefront of this, trying to use technology to secure the Politburo’s supremacy all the while soothing its populace at the teat of washing machines and online video games. Don’t think that countless countries in Southeast and Central Asia aren’t closely monitoring this experiment. (Any time a country explains that “social stability” is a prime goal, they’re going to be interested in this experiment)
8.
There are all sorts of indexes out there that tell you how free a country you’re visiting is. Most of the time, it’s hard to tell exactly how “free” a place is (after all, if it’s not free, the locals probably aren’t hunting down tourists to tell them so-although in Uzbekistan they sort of did). Here are a couple of things I’ve noticed are half-decent indicators of how liberal a place is.
Do you need a visa to get in the country as a tourist? Do you need an invitation to get said visa?
Can you get money out of an ATM at the foremost international airport?
Do your bags get x-rayed after you’ve landed but before you’ve entered the country? (Ostentatiously to protect the locals from drugs and contraband)
9.
One final thought. I love traveling and seeing what the social contract is like in different countries. The goods you can buy, the services offered, the quality of the dwellings, the manifestation of the state on the street via cops and other civil servants, how people treat each other: it’s all a signal of a society’s social contract between citizens.
Traveling is most fun when you start to understand how a country’s social contract is different from yours – and that maybe yours isn’t the best. We had the best chance to observe this in Germany as we spent a lot of time there and it was the least foreign of all the countries we visited and thus the easiest to compare with what we know.
Some of the interesting things we noticed: a thriving publishing industry and airport coffee in glass cups.
In North America, the physical publishing is being killed by the online world and this is taken as inexorable; in Berlin there are about a dozen daily newspapers and countless magazines vying for your attention.
In North America, a cup of coffee at the airport is going to come in a disposable mug; in Berlin it came in a glass cup. Moreover, you could take it away from the coffee bar and over to your seat in the waiting room. It was assumed you would bring it back – because why wouldn’t you? This movie would end badly in Canada or America.
—
So there you have it, the results of almost six months of travel summed up in a blog post. It was an awesome trip and hopefully a trip in a lifetime, not the trip of a lifetime. I’m looking forward to a bit of normalcy back in Canada, but one day Wen and I will have to get back on the road!
One of the simultaneously silliest and greatest trends to emerge from the 21st century’s fetishization of technology is the notion of “unboxing“. The combination of blogs and online video and cheap digital cameras now allow young male otaku to document in clinical detail the experience of opening the box of a new gadget.
There are whole sites dedicated to capturing this techno-narcissim in all its glory. Apple‘s variousproducts are the clear winners in the unboxing sweepstakes, accounting for almost half of the google hits on the topic-which seems appropriate given their leadership in turning us into techno-gear-fetishists.
I would like to take this moment to try and move the dialogue around unboxing forward and move it into a new domain.
Chocolate.
I recently procured a bespoke chocolate from Ritter Sport (this is an obnoxious way of saying that I went to the company store, waited in line with the other tourists/unemployed people for half an hour and bought an overpriced chocolate) and now you can share with me in the unboxing experience.
Here it is, my brand new, customized chocolate. My fingers are trembling as I look at it on the table. It really is my chocolate creation:
Before opening the box, let’s look at one of the accessories: the ingredient list. Nothing says sophistication like adding candied strawberry, crunch cereal, candied yoghurt and mini smarties to already sweetened milk chocolate. No one will mistake my gourmet palate for that of, say, a Chef Boyardee loving four-year-old.
The gentle tab at the back of the box gave away easily under my finger and yielded the first view of my chocolate payload:
Notice that careful fold. It’s German craftsmanship matched only by the careful placement of the sticker on the reverse:
Bunte Schokowelt is not the outcome of some sort of Germanic physical altercation, but rather means “colourful chocolate world”. And all the colour is revealed by my first glimpse of the chocolate. The underside’s texture hints at the range of flavour about to be experienced:
And, flipping it over, here’s the pinnacle of chocolate engineering:
Internet, I hope you realize what a profound shared experience we just had. This is not navel-gazing on my account whatsoever, rather it’s me increasing our universe’s stock of knowledge.
Bon appetit.
(And in all seriousness, the chocolate was delicious – if a bit sweet – and I highly recommend getting your own one made)
I’m 1,000 meters above the earth and falling at 5 meters per second. Actually, it’s not just me – Wendy’s there too, plus almost 20 unbathed French, German and Japanese tourists.
The funny thing is that I have no idea that we’re falling. We’re not accelerating so I can’t feel anything. Despite the fact that the air is in front of my face – no windows here – I can’t hear any rushing or anything. And the martian landscape we’re above gives no clues as to depth. Add in the fact that the balloons around us are both going up and down and I’d have no idea which direction we were moving if our pilot didn’t tell us.
A balloon ride over Cappadocia is an essential means of seeing the landscape. Every morning almost a thousand people go up in 72 different balloons; it’s the largest collection of balloons found anywhere outside of balloon festivals.
You arrive early to watch them inflate in the pre-dawn twilight.
Depending on the whims of your pilot, you might then rocket to a few hundred meters and watch the other balloons rise. And I should add that you have no idea where you’re going to go; your course is set by the vagaries of that morning’s wind.
Our pilot then dropped down into one of the many ravines that dot the landscape. We all watched speechless as he glided over ledges and dropped down into canyons that contain thousand year old cave dwellings. We could have literally reached out and touched them or plucked walnuts from trees. You can get a sense of it about halfway through this video:
Our pilot then rose quickly to 1000 meters where the temperature is noticeably lower and we got a profound sense of just how thin the bottom of a balloon’s basket is and how far we were from the ground…
Landing is also an interesting time. Since nobody knows where you’re going to land, a fleet of chase vehicles are following you around as you fly. When you land, a trailer pulls up directly underneath you and the basket drops into place. Very professional.
A quick glass of sugary fermented grapes masquerading as champagne and you’re back to your hotel. And it’s not even 8:30 am yet.
2.
In the distance, looming over all of Cappadocia, is the massive volcano that deposited all the rock and ash that makes the area so unique. Except that according to our guide – and one should never fully trust a guide in this touristy an area – there were actually three simultaneous volcanos that flooded the area with ash and lava millions of years ago.
I couldn’t help but wonder if there was a little bit of miscommunication here between geologists and the tourist industry. I mean, think about the word “simultaneous”. For type A people like me, it’s got a pretty clear meaning. At exactly the same moment (define it as the time taken for an atom to change state, a hummingbird’s wings to flag; whatever nano-scale small increment of time you want…), two or more identical things need to be happening.
Now imagine you’re a geologist. You spend your time wondering how a four billion year old rock evolved and most things take millions of years to occur. Unless your one of those adrenaline junkies who studies volcanos and earthquakes, it’s likely that in your entire career you’re going to see nothing happen. All the action has either occurred in the past or is set for the future. That continental drift ain’t fast enough for you to observe. On any given day, it’s the academic equivalent of watching paint dry.
So maybe, just maybe, when the geologists talk about “simultaneous” volcanos they really meant that three volcanos, only separated by a few hundred thousand years, formed the valley. I mean, they could be forgiven for getting carried away in the excitement of a few things happening in less than a few million years and calling it “simultaneous”. In the grand scheme of four billion years of volcanos blowing apart and reforming the earth, that’s a pretty inconsequential error.
But I digress; it’s just one thought that ran through my head as we were in the bus riding from site to site.
And there’s a lot to see in Cappadocia.
Let’s start with those thousands of Star Wars-style (despite any protestations by your guides, none of it was filmed in Turkey) rock-carved dwellings that are ubiquitous. Some have even been converted into hotels:
These were built by early Christians; when anyone invaded, they would rush underground to various cities they had built. The area is literally pocked with multi-layered underground cities. At Derinkuyu you can go eight floors undergound and explore countless booby traps. Interestingly, no one knows how they disposed of their bodily wastes…
There are also vast crumbling castles. The ruins of Cavusin were used from the 9th century until the Ottomans. Erosion gradually pulled down the mountain’s facade and revealed all the dwellings there:
And the similarly ruined castle of Uchisar looks like a failed cross between Mont St. Michel and Kowloon Walled City:
It also happens to have one of the best views of the area…
…and the view from the neighbouring Cafe at Argos is one of the best views you’ll ever find in a cafe (if I could afford it, I’d stay at the associated Argos In; mindblowing place).
The region also abounds with numerous stream-filled canyons, almost all of which can be hiked. It’s fun to descend from the dusty plains into the tree-lined bottoms. At some points you actually have to hike narrowly through ancient hacked-out caves or water-eroded tunnels. Also, beware that nothing is marked clearly; you occasionally come to cliffs and have to backtrack:
Finally, since Cappadocia was once covered in water and composed of different layers of sediment, the rocks have eroded at different rates and left some pretty incredible – and almost unbelievable – shapes behind:
3.
Those early settlers were mostly Christians who excelled at creating churches. There are hundreds of them; when some of them break, the Turkish authorities don’t even bother to fix them or seal them from the elements:
The earliest recorded cave paintings come from the 9th century and are fairly simple:
However, over the next two centuries they got increasingly sophisticated:
When the Muslims came, they began a process of gradual assimilation and slowly exercised their power over the locals. Since Muslims aren’t allowed to worships idols, Christians weren’t allowed to paint eyes on their saints:
What did these people do to survive? Farming was pretty common – and you can see it pretty much unaltered from how it was likely practiced then (the following photo is actually an orchard amongst many dwellings and rocks):
But the real money was in dovecotes. This is a polite way of saying that the locals earned their keep by collecting bird shit. They would create caves that contained numerous alcoves for pigeons and then brick them in:
The red paint apparently attracted the pigeons; once a year they would go in and collect all the guano. Erosion gives the casual tourist a sense of what the alcoves looked like:
Nowadays it is all tourism, all the time. In fact, the main city – Goreme – is literally built out of the old dwellings (as are Uchasir and Cavusin):
4.
If you look at all the photos above, you may noticed the complete and utter absence of horses. This would be of no consequence, except that, curiously, “Cappadocia” means “land of beautiful horses”.
If you go on a group tour of the many sites, remember this, as eventually you will be taken to a jeweler to watch onyx be carved (as a prelude to shopping!). This trinket will then be offered to the first person who can recite the meaning of Cappadocia.
Also make sure to remember that speed is more than accuracy here as your judge is not a native English speaker. If you, as I did, should yell “land of many horses” or something similar you’re likely to win. And then you, like me, will be the proud owner of an improperly finished paperweight.
If one of you kind readers gets it for Christmas, please enjoy your handmade souvenir, created by a Turkish master who has spent his life – just as his father and grandfather – perfecting the art of turning raw rock into emotion. I’m sure you’ll love it.
5.
Cappadocia is a fantastic place and here are a couple more photos to close:
Istanbul. The chaos of 13 million lives. A city bursting at the seams and simultaneously thriving. A place where you cannot escape over 2,000 years of history – nor would you want to. Where the East literally meets the West but it feels more like modern meets ancient. A fantastic place to spend a few days.
1.
A bit about the city. Founded by Greeks but developed by the Romans (most notably, they left the Hagia Sophia) whose Constantine made it the new capital of the empire. Inherited by the Byzantines who built it into the largest city of world. Conquered by the Ottomans; it took 100 years to recover. Now ruled by Turks, it has exploded in population (from 680,000 in 1927 to 1,000,000 around 1950 to 13,000,000 or so today) as waves of first Ottoman refugees and then poor Turks flooded the city seeking safety and economic opportunity.
Each of these rulers have left their fingerprints on the city; most obvious are the great monuments left by each. More subtle are the neighbourhoods. This is not really a city proper, but a series of mini-cities.
There’s modern and hip Begolyu; Muslim women sip wine in restaurants, head scarves are rare and the boutiques all have well labeled prices. There’s a modern art gallery with world class pieces. Movies are filmed. But don’t think it’s all Western decadence – in the alleys off Istiklal you’re as likely to find people playing backgammon, drinking tea and smoking a hookah as you are to find people drinking beer and cavorting.
In ancient Fatih, the crowded, narrow medieval streets are packed with open-faced stores hawking everything (negotiate furiously!), businesses shut for an hour at midday when the mosques overflow and nary a woman isn’t wearing a head scarf.
And then there’s the entire Asian shore, where well planned neighbourhoods abound with people simply living their lives and trying to create a better life for their children; the glass-walled buildings of multinationals border its many highways.
The city proper is incredibly colourful, bursting with it:
Curiously though, the locals seem to only wear dark colours. You can observe this as, on the weekend, you can conceivably walk the many kilometers from the Grand Bazaar down to the Galata Bridge via the Spice Market and then over to Istiklal and eventually Taksim square and spend the entire time in a crowd of thousands:
Perhaps the dark clothes reflect the huzzun (melancholy) that Orhan Pamuk believes hangs over this city (his book, Istanbul, is required reading before visiting the city).
Interestingly, none of the photos above capture the feel of this city. This is a city of interfaces and thresholds. The joy of the city is walking the streets and, in the string of a few hundred meters, finding yourself careening from the lighting to hardware to clothing to outdoor equipment to banking districts. Along the way the streets buzz with deliverymen lugging hundred of pounds of goods and runners delivering tea or food. Men loiter smoking furiously. And when you turn corners you never know what you’re going to see: wild dogs and cats, laundry hanging from a second floor window, an old woman or man teleported from the 1700s disappearing into a closing door or the sudden appearance of a mosque or hammam or cobblestoned alley. You have a constant feeling that things are happening that you cannot understand and all of it is ruled by some sort on unknown code.
2.
The past 90 years have been confusing for Istanbul. The empire collapsed and the city was ignored and began to decay. Then it’s population grew faster than anyone could imagine. The net result is that the city is undergoing massive change. The city used to be almost entirely wooden; you can still see this in some of the older neighbourhoods like Fatih. It can feel like going back in time:
Many of these buildings were torched in the 1950s in a spree that would have brought a tear to the eye of a 1970′s Bronx slumlord. However, you can still find many that have been restored:
The burgeoning population meant that an incredible number of new buildings needed to be built. The older parts of the city went from two storeys to six overnight and the one-horse-wide streets are now clogged with some of the worst traffic in the world; if you hate horns, beware where you walk.
Also, many of these were built on the cheap and are now being torn down. Scenes like this are everywhere:
The city is reinventing itself in six to eight storey standards of glass, steel, plaster and terra cotta.
3.
But no dispatch on Istanbul would be complete without a few comments on its monuments. The sultan used Topkapi Palace to make it clear that Istanbul was an Ottoman city and there were no more Romans or Byzantines to be found.
And the Hagia Sophia stands as a testament to Roman engineering combined with the clash of cultures:
The Grand Bazaar is literally a city within a city, with every store beneath a covered arch. You can wonder aimlessly and quickly lose your sense of direction as there are no ways to see way to see any of the city’s landmarks:
And then there are the ubiquitous mosques. They are everywhere, piercing the sky with their minarets while their stones plays tricks with the setting sun.
The sound of the call to prayer in Istanbul is haunting. Within minutes of each other, dozens (hundred? thousands?) of cries start to ululate over the sky. And within a few minutes it is all gone and it as if it never happened.
You could spend a month visiting the monuments of Istanbul (aqueducts, old city walls, fortresses…) but one additional one that should be on every visitor’s list is the cistern. If it looks vaguely familiar, it may be because Sean Connery rowed across it in From Russia With Love.
4.
For mild hapnophobes (fear of being touched) like myself, Istanbul can present some surprising issues. My first situation occurred when I went to get my hair cut. The actual hair cutting part was fine – no different from what I’m used to everywhere else I’ve had my hair cut. However, I learned that in Istanbul your haircut isn’t done simply because your hair is cut.
The barbershop consisted of two men. A young artiste who cut hair and an older man whose sole purpose seemed to be to make tea (it’s everywhere here and the national drink). However, his real job became obvious once the last strand was cut.
Through a series of grunts and gestures he directed me to lean over into a wash basin where steaming water had been surreptitiously running. He was soon lathering up my hair and running his firm old man hands across my scalp. Then down my face. A gentle poke in the eyes. A rub of the temples and cheeks. This was getting very awkward.
He then dried me off, but we were not done. My entire head – not just my scalp – was massaged. Then he worked his way down my neck and into the shoulders. Most people would enjoy this; I was trying not to squirm in my seat.
Still not done! He found time to slather me in first moisturizer, then aftershave and finally hair gel.
My hair was cut. I smelled nice. And my worst fears have been realized.
The other scenario I faced was going for a hammam: a Turkish bath. I found out that it basically involves you lying prostate, face down on a slab in a co-ed room with a piece of towel wedged between your butt cheeks while a man sits on the back of your knees and pounds your flesh. Not my idea of fun so I settled for a nice steam in the sauna instead.
5.
Turks are insanely patriotic people (or at least, their government is). Everywhere you go it is flags, flags, flags – and pictures of Attaturk.
In fact, you if you sit in a hotel that overlooks the city, you can pass your time trying to count all the massive Turkish flags that dot the skyline; they’re those massive flags that are normally only found in North America on car dealership lots at the edge of the city or next to a highway. They’re second only to the mosque minarets in defining the skyline. And they flap beautifully in the morning air.
6.
The Turks love al fresco dining so cafes and open air restaurants abound. If you wander enough, you’ll eventually find a place where grape vines have been strung across a cobblestone street and tables and chairs brought out.
But if unsurpassed quality is your goal, you will need to hunt a little further. One suggestion (thanks Jascha!) is Develi. The sign above the door says “Kebabs & Baklava” and they do not disappoint. They’re also set in one of the cutest locations possible: a square surrounded by wooden houses and fishmongers.
And no visit would be complete without a visit to Ciya Sofrasi. The New Yorker did a 10,000 word article on them in the 2009 food issue; at the time I thought it bordered on hagiography but having eaten there, I now understand it was not.
The experience is incredible. The restaurant is on the Asian side of the city, so you need to take a ferry to Kadikoy. From there, you need to wander the poorly marked pedestrian streets (one of the few grievances you can lodge against this city), through food and fish markets and past deceptively similarly named restaurants until you find it.
You then serve yourself a vegetable plate. Normally, self service is inversely proportional to the quality of the food, but it’s the opposite here. This mezze plate is one of the best things I’ve ever had, and it was all vegetarian:
To order a main, you walk up to a chef who is keeping a dozen pots of various home-style dishes cooking. You order what you want (Icli Kofte – Turkish stuffed meatball, falafel, and lamb meatballs in a mint and pomegranate sauce for us) and it is brought to your table a few minutes later.
This was easily one of the five best meals I’ve had on our travels and it came with the added benefit of being incredibly cheap for Istanbul. Don’t go to Istanbul – and you need to come here – without a visit.
Wen and I just wrapped up an eight day whirlwind tour of Uzbekistan. It was four cities, over a thousand kilometers of driving, one desert, countless mosques, madrasahs and mausoleums and more mud bricks than you can possibly imagine.
1.
We started our journey is Tashkent. This city was first rebuilt by the Czar who, after winning The Great Game, instituted his peasant eradication program by building a European-style city in the middle of the Central Asian steppes. The city – which has almost no traffic and only white cars – is full of eight lane boulevards flanked by trees, all of which radiate out from a central square.
On this square is the Hotel Uzbekistan in all its authoritarian glory – and it just happened to be where we were spending the night:
Like many things in Uzbekistan, the hotel is not all it seems to be. Despite the exterior, its interior strives to project the bland persona of a business hotel. Think Chinese machine-made furniture in anonymous colours and too much marble and fake crystal lighting.
However, if you’re in search of a drink of water (alas, tap water cannot be drunk here) like us, you might head up to the restaurant on the top floor, where you’re greeted by this sign:
An internet search reveals the following hint of what might go on up there:
This hotel is typical of what you get in this part of the world but is definitely one of the better ones in the area. Interesting item is that the lift goes to the 16th floor and you walk up to the restaraunt on the 17th floor. When you get out of the lift you will be definitely accosted by several prostitutes, The 16th floor has its own brothel. Girls will be knocking on your door at all hours once they have paid the receptionist to find out where all the single male occupiers are. $50 per girl will give you a night you won’t forget in a hurry. These girls are not ugly and some are quite stunning and are very surprised when they are refused. Buy them chocolates and pink champagne and you will be their hero. I stayed here for several months whilst working in Uzbek!!!!
Food is great and there is an eyeopening floorshow with girls in see through negliges. THIS IS NOT A WIND UP I CAN ASSURE YOU as anyone who has visited/worked in this part of the world.
Needless to say, we went elsewhere for dinner.
2.
What the Czar didn’t destroy in Tashkent, an earthquake in the 1960s did, so there’s not a whole heckuva lot to see. However, there’s a beautiful mausoleum/mosque/madrasah complex that includes the oldest copy of the Koran (alas, no photos allowed):
This site (the Khast-Imom complex), like every historical site in Uzbekistan, has been rebuilt. I used to be quite anti-restoration, thinking that if something was ruined, it should simply be left there for us to imagine what it might have been like.
After visiting Uzbekistan, I’m not sure I feel this way anymore. Most of these sites were literally just destroyed arches with a few tiles and collapsed domes. Now they’ve been beautifully reconstructed to almost exactly what they were at the height of their glory. If they hadn’t been remade there certainly wouldn’t be a single tourist who wasn’t an archeology major (instead, every tourist we saw was a 50-plus German or French person; we only saw six people under 40 the entire trip).
3.
As I mentioned above, things in Uzbekistan aren’t always as they seem. For one, the capital appears to be like an Eastern European city: a little shabby due to 50 plus years of Soviet occupation, but coming on strong. However, once you leave the city you realize that things are different. By the time you get to Khiva, mud brick construction is sporadically dotting the highway.
Similarly, the capital has all the trappings of a city, like, say, functioning gas stations. Once you leave the capital you pass abandoned gas station after abandoned gas station. In Bukhara and Khiva drivers were lined up fifty deep waiting for a lonely pump to open based on a rumour that there would be gas there later in the day. Entrepreneurs lined nearby streets trying to flag down cars with black market gas stored in plastic drinking water bottles.
The other major black market is for the currency, the s’um (pronounced like “sum” and “zoom”). There’s been a nasty bit of inflation since independence and since the largest bill is 1,000 (about sixty cents at the official rate), this is what USD 100 looks like; apparently the 10,000 s’um note is coming soon:
However, you quickly learn that the unofficial exchange rate is much, much higher. In Bukhara I was able to get 2,270 to the dollar – or about 40% more. Your introduction to this comes quickly as everyone – your hotelier, your guide, people on the street – will openly tell you that if you want to exchange dollars with them instead of the local bank, they’ll give you a better rate.
My favourite experience was getting one of our guides to help us exchange money. He led me down a set of near-forested back alleys, across a street and into a market that consisted of near-identical stalls selling a uniquely Uzbek perspective on Western fashion. The tenth or so shop turned out to be our hookup and, amongst the jeans and fur-lined jacket-wearing mannequins, they casually started pulling out stacks of elastic-banded 1,000′s to convert my money.
4.
When most people think of Uzbekistan, they think of Samarkand. It’s the most famous of the former Silk Route cities here, and it has the most massive monuments. Beyond Samarkand, I knew nothing of this country before coming here. And, before coming here, if I’d only seen Samarkand, in my naivete, I would have been satisfied.
The first place most people go is the Shaki-Zinda complex. It’s a series of mausoleums with an attached mosque. The finery of the tiling is incredible:
The entrance makes you feel like you are walking through an Islamic cavern:
Another major stop is the Gur Emir mausoleum, where the corpse of Amir Timur is kept. He’s a polarizing figure: he’s got a massive statue built to him in the geographic center of Tashkent; people in the provincial towns that he razed consider him a barbaric murderer.
Next to his tomb is the tomb of a holy man. There’s an interesting tradition here where holy tombs are marked by a yak tail hung from a high post (and I am not making any of this up):
But the real reason people come to Samarkand is to see Registan Square: two beautiful madrasahs that balance a mosque. It’s the postcard for all things Uzbek:
The details of the madrasahs are exquisite. The image below shows the one on the right in the photo above. The orange blobs above the arch are massive tiger lions (locals believe that they were tigers with the mane of a lion; alas they were conveniently hunted to extinction before someone did a proper drawing of one) with a face in the moon above their backs. These are unique in Islamic history as they come from a brief period when imams allowed designs that actually included visual representations of animals and – gasp- almost a human. I think the empire fell shortly after.
5.
If you ever find yourself in the Tashkent airport between 3 and 4 pm on a Tuesday you’ll see an interesting sight. Airports are normally a polyglot demesne, but in Uzbekistan it takes on a whole new level as the two carousel arrival area receives two flights from Seoul and one each from Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, Beijing and Bangkok. Baggage careens randomly onto one of the carousels at an arbitrary time after your flight’s arrival; the locals while away the time with flagrant disregard for the omnipresent no smoking signs.
Flying in Uzbekistan is also an interesting experience. You never have to worry about which airline you’re flying as there’s only one. Uzbekistan Airways is the only carrier that services the country and it does so via a fleet of battered Boeings and aging Iluskyins interspersed with the odd BA Avro and some things that look like they’re converted from fighting forest fires. There must have been a garage sale on some Eastern European airlines in the 1990s.
They’ve also developed their own flying techniques, most notably the ability to drift into the sky and only then fire the throttle. Avid flyers will notice that this is the anithesis of North American flying where you hurtle down the runway as fast as you can and then gradually reduce thrust once you’re in the air.
People also follow the quaint tradition of clapping upon a successful landing. However, I want to give Uzbek Air credit for it’s landings: they are single handedly the smoothest landings I’ve ever felt. You literally touch down and find yourself noting “oh look, we’re on the ground”. The pilots also don’t immediately hit the reverse thrust, so you have a few seconds to reacclimatize yourself with the Earth before you start to slow down. In fact, the pilot of our RJ 85 (yes, it is a model of plane, look it up) actually managed to slow the the plane to halt using only the brakes: no reverse thrust. It was, simply put, the best landing I have ever had. 10/10.
6.
Samarkand was followed by Bukhara – a UNESCO World Heritage site that I’d never heard of until I arrived there. It’s a shame I’d never heard of it, as it’s an ancient town that has over 500 monuments spread over a few kilometers. As you walk around the town you keep stumbling upon more and more history.
It would literally bore you to death if I were to list all the places we saw, but the highlights include the Kalon minaret and its associated mosque complex. You used to be able to climb to the top of it, but a few years back a geriatric German hurt himself (gee, maybe you shouldn’t try to climb medieval minarets in second world countries…) and then had the gall to try and sue the Uzbek government (good luck winning). In a stubbornly autocratic state this unleashed bureaucratic terror and the minaret is now closed for non-existent “renovations”:
To navigate to the complex you pass through several of the “trading domes” where merchants used to sell their wares. Now it’s mostly souvenir trinkets:
On the outskirts of town you can visit the former Khan’s summer palace. It’s built in a combined European/Islamic style and shows the influence that the Czar had over his vassal states:
Here’s the roof of the room where breakfast was served:
This palace also has one of the prettiest details I’ve seen anywhere on this trip. Many of the rooms have alcoves that use the cave design that’s so common in mihrabs (alcove in a mosque that indicates the direction of Mecca); the cave is an allusion to the one where Mohammed first received his messages from God.
In the palace they’ve painted some of the alcoves white and then placed mirrors on the flat bottom of the cave elements. The effect is sublime:
7.
I’ve never been on an organized multi-day tour before, but after this one, I could be convinced to take them in otherwise hard to visit places (to get into Uzbekistan you need a visa and that requires an invitation from a travel agency).
Here are some of the characters we met on our tour:
Anastasia. Our Russian guide in Tashkent. She showed up dressed to the nines in all matching black, heels, makeup and fingernails finished purple. She in her early twenties and has a master’s in English – explaining her fluency. She’s paying back the government (her education was free) by working for them; as she battles for choice roles against the sons and daughters of ministers and prominent citizens, she’s learning how the game is played (Uzbekistan is 174th out of 180 in Transparency International’s 2009 corruption rankings. Unlike golf, a low score is bad…).
Serik. Our Kazakh driver. He speaks a creole of broken English, florid Italian and the odd bit of German. He served in the military and his favourite motion is drawing his finger across his neck. He’s full of humour, referring to an old vodka factory as a “communist mosque”. He also refers to himself as “just the driver” but he is full of interesting wisdom, like the fact that the kindly old man who seems to run our hotel in Samarkand actually is the biggest crime boss in town
XYZ. Our guide in one of the cities. A hint of bitterness came into their voice when informing us that “of course, Uzbekistan has a new king now. But don’t tell anyone I told you that!” This was a reference to Islam Karimov, the undisputed leader of Uzbekistan – and the only leader they’ve ever known.
He took office in 1990 and then, after Independence in 1991, started routinely winning 88% of the vote. Realizing that his popularity was making elections a waste of time and money, he extended his term from five to seven years. Next election is in 2014.
He shows up for all the photo ops and is so beloved for his wisdom that monuments and museums frequently contain tributes to him, like this one from the Ulugbek Observatory museum in Samarkand:
On the basis of National program of personnel training developed and carried out under the direct supervision of our President Islam Karimov the modern educational system fairly recognized by the world community is created in Uzbekistan.
8.
Our last stop was Khiva, another Silk Route trading town that I, sadly, knew nothing about prior to visiting. It’s a stunning walled city, dotted with minarets (that you can actually go up!) and palaces, mosques, madrasahs and mausoleums.
While it’s profile is beautiful, it actually appears quite grey:
However, Khiva is home to some of the most incredible craftspeople you will ever meet and they have tiled the walls, carved the pillars and painted the roofs of all of their monuments:
It’s a beautiful city that we had to rush through in a day; I would have loved to have spent some more time there.
9.
Two things struck me with Uzbek society.
The first is that they are trying to practice autarky (creating an economy that is 100% self-sufficient). Unless they absolutely can’t make it, they don’t import it. This means that you can get a car, but unless you want to pay 100-150% of the price in import duty, you’re going to be getting a locally-made Daewoo or a Chevrolet (and a weird model with a model name like “Lacetti” or “Matiz” or “Nexia”). And it’s going to come in white or silver or black. Why would you want a different colour?
This also means that you can get a chocolate bar, but only one type. Ditto for cola, chips and a whole slew of other consumer products.
It also means that many services, like their airports, pretend at being modern, but since, for instance, there’s only one airline and zero competition, things don’t work as you’d expect. You’ll have time to think about this when two flights leave from the same gate within five minutes of one another (there are not that many flights from Uzbekistan…) and four hundred people need to herd through a six foot wide door to get on unmarked buses to their respective flights. This problem was solved generations ago in competitive economies but autarky means that we’ll have to wait a little longer for the solution to come to Uzbekistan.
The second thing I noticed is how conservative society is.
On our flight to Turkey they played the PG-13 movie “The Duchess”. At the briefest hint of any inappropriate behaviour (usually an amourous scene), the movie would cut away to images of Air Uzbek planes flying over mountains.
The plane also had an informational pamphlet on AIDS that included the following gems:
Q: What is the relationship between HIV/AIDS and people traveling abroad?
A: By going to another country for employment opportunities, business trip or tourism purposes; as well as being away from family in a new environment, changing lifestyles, the person is more exposed to the risk of being infected by HIV/AIDS.
and:
Virus transmission may occur in the following cases:
1. Unprotected sexual intercourse with persons of easy behavior.
…
This is likely a holdover from the particularly conservative branch of Islam that was/is practiced here and led to sharia being law until 1920. In Khiva, when the law was revoked, there was a festival held where women could burn their body-covering paranjas. Many women burned them and upon returning home with hair uncovered, were stoned to death by their family members.
In fact, the paranja is possibly the most suffocating device ever created to spare a woman the lustful glances of men. It’s a smock that drops down over a woman’s feet and contains decorative sleeves: her actual arms are contained within the garment. The kicker is a veil that’s a mesh of horse hair so that it’s impossible to see any part of the woman’s face:
Here’s a too-short one modeled by Wendy:
10.
The food in Uzbekistan is great. They specialize in lamb shish kebabs; if you get whole meat chunks, they come deliciously coated in salt to keep the flavour in during grilling:
Here’s the ground meat alternative:
The locals are also proud of their bread (and they bake it in a tandoor!). Each city has a variant on the same style of loaf; the people of Samarkand claim that there’s is so good that it will stay fresh for 100 years:
Quite a few dishes involved a stuffed surprise. This one was lamb crepes:
Here is a pepper stuffed with lamb and rice:
Again, the food is delicious (if you like lamb). It does take a little while to get used to the cooking style: since Uzbekistan is the world’s 3rd largest cotton exporter, everything is cooked in cottonseed oil.
11.
A few other random things I noted while traveling there:
Many Pakistanis come to Uzbekistan as it’s close and cheap. Mostly large groups of men. One of our guides told us that they quickly visit the sites and then go out and get truly wasted as it’s apparently rather difficult to do so back home
They used to have slavery in Khiva and on a truly colossal scale. When it was outlawed in 1873, they found themselves with 40K new citizens versus a population that used to only contain 30K official citizens
Names are impossible to pronounce here. One particularly overzealous soap opera actor has three apostrophes (!) in his last name
The local instruments make beautiful music. Here’s a guy demonstrating a few of them; skip ahead to 1:40 hear him play the Tor (12 strings). The Chang (75 strings) is right after: uzbek_music
We’ve spend the last few days skulking eastwards from Rajasthan towards Delhi. This has given us a chance to see all sorts of little towns that most people won’t see as they don’t have enough time. This is one of the little joys of India: the density of history is so high that there are literally hundreds of towns with something worth seeing. Compared to the great sights of India each is unremarkable, but most countries would kill to have just a couple of towns like them.
We spent a few days in Bharatpur. It initially appeared as a charmless, dusty city but in the middle of it is a massive fort. The moat now swells with plastic bottles instead of water. Once you make it past the ramparts though, things start to change.
It’s a “working” castle: many people live inside the grounds plus there are the remains of various different palaces. Impressively, there’s a park within the walls; this might not sound like much, but it’s quite the luxury for India. Getting a fresh pomegranate juice and sitting in the park was a welcome moment.
The highlight is one of the palaces that has an ancient hammam (Turkish bath) attached:
The main reason people come to Bharatpur is to go to Keloadeo National Park. About 150 years ago the Maharajah decided that he wanted a private duck hunting area. He irrigated a 29 square kilometer plot of land and then would invite people over to slaughter animals with extreme prejudice. The British took him up in earnest; on one particularly bloody day, 39 men managed to kill over 4,000 birds (there’s a plaque to memorialize these brutal hunts).
Fortunately, it’s been a national park for over forty years now so there’s no more hunting. You can while away a pleasant day by renting bikes and exploring the park on your own. We say a wealth of wildlife: black ibises, painted storks (below), kingfishers, peacocks, cormorants, parrots, hare, giant squirrel and the ubiquitous cow (there’s not supposed to graze in the park, but hey, you know…).
Conveniently, the folks at Keoladeo had jacked their prices – presumably for the Commonwealth Games. The price increase was so sudden that they didn’t even have a chance to update their flyers, which still had the 50% lower price:
About 40 kilometers away from Bharatpur is Deeg, which is famous for its water palace. This massive complex has over 200 fountains (alas, not turned on) and many of the building still contain the original furniture (alas, photography is not allowed).
The entire place is a celebration of India’s scarcest resource. Check out the maze created below for catching rainwater:
2.
India is a case study in social norms – because when you get here, you realize that so many of the things you take for granted are completely different here. To wit:
Spitting. Every morning the men compete with one another to see who has the greatest lung capacity and can summon forth the largest loogie. This is particularly charming when you’re lying in your hotel bed and all you can hear is the sound of nearby hawking.
Littering. Almost everyone throws their garbage in the street. If you pay attention you’ll notice the various different ways people dispose of their garbage: carefully pouring it on the curb for a cow to eat, tossing it off the roof or maybe just freely flinging it out the window. If, like me, you’re unlucky, someone will throw their garbage out a bus window at the exact moment you’re passing by in an open-aired tuk tuk.
Dress. Shorts are vulgar and a sign of disrespect, particularly if worn in a religious building. However, it is nothing to wear a sari that exposes one’s sagging stomach.
Pedestrian rights. In a nutshell, they don’t exist. People will drive right up into you and if you don’t get out of the way you will be hit. If you’re going to cross the road, you’re taking your life into your own hands: don’t expect anyone to try and dodge you. Caveat pedestor.
Personal space. Like pedestrian rights, this is non-existent. In an overpopulated country this shouldn’t be unexpected, but it takes a while to get used to people coming right up to you. More awkward is when you’re riding on the bus and the unperfumed man in the seat next to you puts his arm behind you and rotates toward you, allowing his ample stomach to sag over your leg. Did I mention that I hate being touched by people I don’t know?
Personal space II. Indians love music and associate it with a good time. Consequently, people play music here all the time (see Agra below). For most people this means on their cellphone. However, nobody uses headphones: they just blare their music without consideration of what anyone else. Manufacturers have caught on: the #1 feature in an ad for a popular phone is its dual stereo speakers.
Queueing: forget it, it’s a battle. Everyone for themselves. Sharp elbows are mandatory or you’ll still be standing in line an hour later.
Now, these are social norms and that means that they’re learned behaviour and changeable. The Indian government seems to think that a few of them might be worth trying to change: there are ads on tv to teach people that cutting in the line is bad behaviour and that some civility in driving can be nice. Moreover, in the few areas of the country that have garbage cans (e.g., Amber Fort, parts of Agra) you will see nary a piece of litter.
It will be interesting to see which ones society chooses to keep vs. change.
3.
After Bharatpur we went to Fatahpur Sikri. This tout-filled town used to be the capital of the great ruler Akbar, but it lacks a steady supply of water and was abandoned after Akbar’s death. It’s now a UNESCO world heritage site with an impressive mosque and equally incredible palace.
The only thing more ‘impressive’ than the buildings is the tenacity of the touts. We arrived via a motorized rickshaw; touts actually jumped into the front seat where our driver was sitting (people are always hopping on/off the front of your rickshaw, hence this was nothing new) and persuaded him to drop us off far from our hotel. I fell for this, forgetting the basic rule of travel: never get out of the vehicle before your destination, and thus had to deal with the touts.
This was not my finest moment. I was soon swarmed by at least 8 guys all trying to sell me postcards, multiple rickshaw rides, trinkets, bangles, guides, hotel rooms, etc. And nobody would take no for an answer. After trying to walk away and telling everybody “no” at least three times, I lost it. I quickly became that guy I never wanted to be and found myself screaming expletives at the touts to get them to go away. LIke I’ve said many times in this blog, traveling in India can be hard.
After we checked into our hotel we went to Akbar’s great mosque, graced by the mighty 54 meter tall Buland Darwaza (Victory Gate).
The touts have taken over this mosque complex – I think mainly because it does not charge an entrance fee. You have to leave your shoes outside where, if you’re a foreigner, you’ll have to pay a kid for the privilege of not having them stolen. Once inside, a tout – who insists that he is not a guide and will not, under any circumstances, accept payment – guides you around the complex; you have no choice but to accept. As you marvel at the architectural details and finery of the mosque and adjoining buildings, you’ll also get to fend off his attempts to sell you blankets, soapstone carvings and the eventual negotiation of a ‘gift’ for his services (and all the while he will tell you that you’re being rude/cheap by not buying anything/giving him more money).
Fortunately, next door is Akbar’s tout-free palace complex. Akbar is one of history’s most fascinating rules: while a muslim, he had three wives – one Christian, one Hindu and one Muslim. He understood that it was much more efficient to subdue the Hindu population by negotiation than force and his reign was marked by prosperity and growth. This is evident from the remarkable complex he left:
One of the most interesting buildings is the Diwan-i-Khas (Hall of Private Audiences) where Akbar would speak with is advisors. He stood on an upraised plinth, each connected by a gangway to a corner where a minister would stand. He would ask a question and rotate through his advisors for answers:
4.
There’s not a heck of a lot to do in rural India at night, so when we’ve tired of reading, we’ve watched tv. Indian television is a 200 channel universe of soap operas, Bollywood movies, singing, dancing, Business Television (talking heads and scrolling headlines who take themselves very seriously), holy men and the odd foreign channel.
You start to realize that there are certain archetypes in the tv culture:
The man-child: an early twenties to mid-thirties male who wears jeans and frequently a wife beater (known here in its less pejorative term, the “sleeveless vest”). He is truculent and insolent and incredibly cool yet still able to respect his elders.
The urban modern: an early- to late-twenties woman who wears western clothes, works, and lives in an apartment in a major city. She represents all of India’s hopes for the future yet secretly also their fear that modernizing may require them to sell out their culture
The self-confident traditionalist: also an early- to late-twenties woman who only wears saris and traditional clothes. She is much more reserved and subdued than her urban modern counterpart, but do not try and run truck over her. She embodies an India unsure of what it wants, trying to balance all of the nation’s history and traditions amongst the technology and pace of the modern world
The dominator: mid-forties to mid-sixties men and women who play overbearing father – and more usually – mother-in-laws. Again, this is the best and worst of India. They hold the family together and ensure that traditions and heritage are passed from generation to generation. Simultaneously, they do not easily let their children grow free and learn to live for themselves.
You may notice that there are a couple of groups that aren’t too well represented here:
Kids: you only see them in commercials
Seniors: as far as tv is concerned, they might as well not exist
Women with kids: ditto. You should be at home raising your kids, not being on tv. Only men of this age should be on tv.
Equally interesting are the breadth of commercials (I subscribe that the best way to get a feel for what a society feels about itself is to watch its television commercials). Almost all are deludedly aspirational: people sip coffee or eat snacks in beautiful, modern apartments that look like they’re out of New York or London. Some are ridiculously macho: a beautiful woman in an evening gown signals with a handkerchief, causing a jeep to burst over a sand dune; a man gets out with a golf club and knocks a ball into a cup. And many play to your emotions by using children as pawns; perhaps that why you otherwise don’t see many on tv.
A couple of the more interesting commercials we saw were related to matrimony. Most marriages here are arranged (a Western style marriage is called a “love marriage”) and it’s near impossible for guys to meet girls. One ad we saw was for a matrimony service; think online dating where the goal from the outset is finding a wife.
Another ad started with a stunning woman staring at the camera stating unhappily and stating: “ours was an arranged marriage”. Cut to various scenes of her and her husband feigning interest for one another while obviously masking an inner indifference. However, then one day on the train they try to find each other and realize that they actually love one another! And then they go out and buy matching rings to celebrate the day they fell in love after they were already married.
Probably the strangest thing on Indian television are the channels devoted to various gurus and religious leaders. These channels are pretty basic: a guy sits on a stage and yells/dictates/sings while an audience watches or calls in. This is a very conservative society so there’s no boobs or bad words on tv, but occasionally something odd slips in via these channels. We were flipping channels and witnessed a ceremony where an overweight, naked, middle-aged guru walked up to a row of seated disciples and touched each of them on the head. These brave pilgrims sat unblinking.
Like I said, tv is a fascinating window into a country.
5.
What is that noise? Is someone throwing squirrels in a meat grinder? Has a hyena been run over by a steam roller? Oh no, it’s just 5:30 in the morning in Agra and the local sound system (they’re everywhere in some towns) has decided to crank some Hindi music at 150% of tempo.
Well, sleep is blown, so let’s get up and go see the Taj Mahal.
But before the Taj, let me tell you about a couple of other stunning attractions that Agra has.
If it were in another city, the Itmad-Ud-Daulah, aka The Baby Taj, would stand on its own as a powerful tourist attraction. Due to the Taj, it gets barely any traffic. Which is a shame, as most people will miss out on the incredible detail that has gone into its construction (like the Taj, it too is a mausoleum to a lost wife):
Agra Fort is another of India’s innumerable UNESCO world heritage site (no other nation has done as good a job of getting their monuments listed as India; it seems like there’s one in every city – and each is legitimately on the list). This massive fort is steeped in the complex political history of India. Aurangzeb’s father built the Taj Mahal; he overthrew his father and locked him up for the rest of his life (8 years) in a room that overlooked the Taj; Aurangazeb’s throne overlooked both his father and the Taj.
Despite their individual grandeur, each of these sites is overshadowed by the Taj Mahal. Simply put, the Taj is just that much more amazing that just about any other building you’re seen. Viewed in the morning sun at a distance of 200 meters or so, it radiates like the perfect embodiment of one man’s love for his lost wife. As you get closer the immensity is replaced by the ornate detail and the subtlety of the carvings combined with marble so polished that it reflects.
It would be criminal to visit Delhi and not go to the Taj.
6.
Speaking of which, as we drove into Delhi everything began to make a little bit of sense.
As we’ve been traveling through this country, one the biggest mystery to me has been “what does everyone here do for work?” This has been made even more puzzling for two reasons:
As we’ve driven through dozens of towns – some with populations in the millions – we’ve hardly seen any factories. Contrast this to the Factory To The World that is Southeast Asia/China where the social contract is obvious: move to a town, work in factory, remit money home and live a better life than your parents
We see ads everywhere – and I mean literally everywhere: in magazines, on billboards, painted on walls – for IT, engineering and management education. My favourite ad showed two young women in leggings sitting at their laptops happily working away; nothing could have been a better embodiment of what this country oh so yearns to be. However, all of these factory-less towns have also been IT-less towns; no squat, shiny, campus-style mirrored buildings that smell of technology companies
This has compounded the disbelief I’ve had watching television here; especially when watching commercials, I haven’t been able to figure out where in India it’s supposed to be. The apartments? People in parks? Most of the scenes look as foreign from where I’ve been as Mars. Now I know that Indians have a great suspension of disbelief – witness your average Bollywood movie; sheer escapism – but this was bordering on the delusional.
But back to Delhi, as it all started to come together.
As you drive into town, you immediately notice how different it is. On the outskirts, brand new technical universities (Fully air-conditioned! 100% placement assistance!) are emerging out of the dusty plains. The tentacles of a metro (infrastructure!) reach into the hinterlands and tower over many city neighbourhoods.
The metro has brought with it easy transportation and alongside it sprout multi-storey shopping malls, giant apartment complexes and corporate offices. Those fancy, glass-enclosed, three storey testaments to technology that India so covets as its hope to becoming a superpower.
Bingo. Now this country is starting to make sense! Now I have an inkling of how it works and what it might mean.
So, what do I think? Well, I think that in India we’re witnessing the eradication of poverty and the rise of a middle class on a pretty massive scale. I also don’t think it’s happening anywhere near fast enough – and particularly not fast enough for India to become a major superpower any time in the next twenty years.
The crux of this is due to India’s focus on services and allowing China to have all the manufacturing fun. Services, on a per person level, probably bring in more income per job than manufacturing. But it comes at a cost: you need a highly trained workforce. That education is not going to come from the government alone (a high school diploma ain’t enough), so India has been building out a massive higher educational infrastructure.
However, it takes a heck of a lot longer to build a university and get it up to speed than it does to build a factory to assemble irons or lampshades. So you can’t grow as fast as your neighbour to the north. It also means that you’ve got a small part of your workforce (the service sector) fully employed and the vast majority of your workforce (the other 90+% of your workforce) vastly underemployed.
There’s a more subtle – and potentially more socially jarring – long-term consequence to this as well. People who work in services are going to want to work almost exclusively in big cities. Intellectually stimulating work tends to require intellectually stimulating play in your spare time and alas that’s typically not found in villages (for more, read Richard Florida or John Hagel). Moreover, these people are going to move to cities where there are already people like them; they’re less likely to slug it out in a ‘boring’ city (unless the pay is really, really good; not a likely prospect right now).
I think this explains why so many of India’s highly educated elites go abroad for work and show little interest in returning. It’s not that they’re not Indian patriots, rather they’re too stimulated by what they get overseas and can’t imagine going back until something similar arises in India. And once they have kids, they almost certainly won’t go back as their kids won’t give up what they’ve got.
But something similar is arising. I believe that India is going to see the rapid rise of a few incredible cities that will be more like states. They’ll go toe-to-toe in attracting the best and brightest across the world. Think Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore. Maybe not for a few more years, but barring catastrophic mismanagement (which is a possibility due to the endemic corruption here), they’ll get there.
The flip side of this is that this means huge wealth disparity in the country. India’s elites will be more comfortable and able to better to relate to people in London, New York and Tokyo than people in a rural village in Uttar Pradesh or Bihar. In ten years I wouldn’t be surprised to see something like 250,000 dollar millionaires (currently about 115,000) and 400 million people living on less than $2 a day. The wealth inequality is going to make America look like a socialist country.
Is this bad for India? I honestly don’t know. It might not happen; if it happens and is left unchecked it could lead to ridiculous scenarios like secession demands by the new princely city states who want to be the new Dubai (I’m being purposely melodramatic).
It’s also definitely not irreversible. India currently has zero focus on reducing poverty in the country at either the personal or governmental level (literally: the rich don’t give to charity and there’s no national strategy or execution on improving welfare). If this changes to spread the wealth around – and this doesn’t mean higher taxes; it likely means better thought growth policies – the situation could definitely change.
It’s going to be really interesting to see how this country plays the hands it’s been dealt. Mixing metaphors, the ball’s in your court India!
This part of Rajasthan is a land of superlatives and machismo; it is the Texas of India.
Jaisal built a golden city in the desert by erecting a massive fort on top of a rock. It thrived along the Silk Road. Unsurprisingly, he called it Jaisalmer.
Jodh responded by building an even bigger fort on top of the rock near his town. And it was known as Jodhpur. He also let the Brahmins paint their houses indigo, hence the town is now known as the Blue City.
A few hundred kilometers away, Jai decided that he would not be outdone. He build a palace beneath a fort nestled amongst hills crisscrossed with fortified walls and then built another palace in a lake. Unsatisfied, he decided to build a whole new city – arrayed along grid lines – with a palace at its center and then painted the whole thing pink. In keeping with the theme, Jaipur is known as the pink city.
When not erecting monuments to themselves, the kings of these different city states would attack one another over petty grievances. For instance, raiding each others’ caravans, snubbing one another’s invitations to meal and therefore laying siege to cities, etc. The usual contrivances of small principalities.
With Independence they were all forced into one state which was called Rajasthan as it is the land (stan) of kings (raj). Nowadays there are still Maharajahs, but they no longer command armies and audiences. To attack one another they use the major tool at their disposal: the audio guides to their respective forts.
When you tour the different fort/palace complexes it’s advisable to get the audio guides as there tends to be minimal signage. Each tour explodes with hyperbole about how the carvings/gates/walls/howdahs/palanquins/weapons/warriors/etc. of that palace are the most ornate/strongest/most beautiful/biggest/fiercest/etc. in the world.
There are interviews with the Maharajahs plus the CEOs and Senior Lead Researchers of various charities and foundations (people here are obsessed with rank and titles) tossing you pearls of wisdom about the pomp and prestige of the each fort.
A slightly revisionist history has been written where there are only brave warriors and the forts are unconquered (ignoring that several times the forts fell when guards were bribed). The Rajput kings are now unbeaten – but what’s left unsaid is that the Mughals coerced them into siding with them, understanding that they never needed to beat them to control them (the British then did exactly the same thing again).
Moreover, we hear about how strong and wise some of the Maharajahs were. For instance, there’s one of Jaipur’s Maharajahs who was made a brigadier general (or something similar) by the Brits in World War II. What’s not mentioned is that he was 22 years old and surely this could not have been for political purposes (I’m sure it was due to his Rajput attitude of “death before defeat” as is frequently repeated in the audio guides).
In all sincerity, the guides are great and they walk you through breathtakingly complex structures with hundreds of years of history. They could just use a little humility (for more on this theme, see the section below on the Commonwealth Games).
2.
Wendy is extremely popular in this part of India. Witness the following:
Everywhere we go, people want to have their photo taken with her. It’s cute.
Less cute is when boys want to have their photo taken with her and then paw her/try to kiss her/etc. That’s when my blood boils and we call a halt to it.
Equally less cute are the stares that she (and me, but more her than me) gets as we walk around. Hardcore leering: men stop work and stare at her. Boys on motorcycles gaze unblinkingly. When we sit in restaurants she has to turn her back to the crowd.
Sometimes if I stare back at these yokels they’ll stop but frequently they just don’t seem to care. The irony is that if I stared at their wives or daughters like that they’d probably come after me with a knife.
But it would be impossible for me to stare at their wives or sisters because they’re all practicing pardapratha – or parda (pronounced per-dah) for short. This is a tradition – imported to appease the Mughal overlords – that states that all women (and we’re talking predominantly Hindus here) should cover their face with a veil to protect them from the leering glances of men. There’s an even more conservative interpretation that insists that women should not go outside.
As a result, you see a disproportionate number of men on the street and rarely intermingled groups of women and men. In villages you never see women at all (unless they’re collecting children, searching for firewood or drawing water while men sit around smoking, chewing paan or drinking chai).
The whole damn culture is built around segregating women from (and keeping them below) men. When you visit the beautiful Meherangarh fort at Jodhpur, you learn that the beautiful carved courtyards were created entirely so that women could look out from behind a screen (jali) and not be seen by the men below.
Ditto with a whole wing of the Amber (near Jaipur) palace where only women were allowed. The Maharajah wasn’t even allowed in and eunuchs sent messages from him to his harem and back. In fact, the only royal woman allowed out was the mother of the current Maharajah; the rest had to stay inside (I can only imagine the politics this created within his harem; the quest to have your son become designated heir must have taken on a whole new meaning…).
(More royal nonsense: in Jaisalmer and Jodhpur, when the Maharajah died, his wives were expected to walk into his funeral pyre. This tradition was finally snuffed out in 1834 or so).
Parda, a purely cultural and not at all religious tradition, has survived the decline of the Mughal empire and shows only a few signs of abating. In the cities you see younger people of both sexes intermingling, but it’s the exception, not the rule.
In fact, this conservatism has trickled into many other aspects of life here. For instance, I have not seen a single woman driving a car. I could be in Saudi Arabia.
I’ve only seen two women wearing an outfit that revealed their shoulders. Both were young women who were obviously from a city (big sunglasses and skinny jeans). I haven’t seen one woman wearing an outfit that shows her calfs. A further irony is that the men are encouraged to show more skin: Bollywood actors have made the sleeveless vest a popular look for muscular men.
An interesting aspect of this conservatism is that it’s only come about in the past few hundred years (I’ll guess its perfectly correlated with that Muslim invasion). When you visit any number of the ancient Hindu temples around the country you can’t help but be struck by the early Indian love of the full bodied, scantily clad, big breasted woman. There are statues to them everywhere.
In other temples you also witness couples carved in erotic poses from the kama sutra. And there are numerous paintings of bare breasts and shoulder in paintings depicting scenes from the Ramayana and other sacred Hindu texts; only in the more recent versions do wobbly bits get covered up.
3.
Being close to the Pakistani border, this is one of the most heavily militarized zones in the country. As you criss-cross the state you pass numerous garrisons, each proudly displaying their division’s name: Desert Foxes, Lightning Lancers, Prancing Prancers (okay, I make that last one up).
And, in case you weren’t sure about it, the enemy is Pakistan. Outside Jodhpur we drove by one military base and perched before it was the half-destroyed fuselage of a 70′s era fighter plane; the Pakistani flag is still visible on the rear wing.
In Jaisalmer, you’re constantly reminded of the nearby presence of Pakistan. The airport is run by the military and while there’s technically a commercial flight out of there, it hasn’t run in ages (although you can confound yourself trying to book it on Kingfisher Airways’ website). And given the number of military jets performing maneuvers there, the risk of a commercial jet getting too close to the border is probably just too high (especially as these nuclear enemies are only about 30 seconds away from each other by missile; Russia and the U.S. were nine minutes).
Interestingly, the flights appear to be under radio silence. We would sit on the roof of our hotel under the blazing sun, with the smell of raw sewage occasionally wafting over us (this just randomly happens in India), and watch the jets scream in to land. Once we saw a flare rocket up from the ground and the incoming plane broke right; three minutes later he came back and made the landing. I’m guessing the runway wasn’t ready and the only way to signal it, sans radio, was to fire the flare.
4.
Jaisalmer is also probably the only city I know of where you can still get a stone house build. And it’s not just any stone house either: it’s going to be sandstone carved into some of the most ornate screens and details you can imagine. These are some of the best stone masons in the world:
Like all things, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. The downside here is that there are open sewers and the streets are lined with cows and boar (the dark spot beside the cow) to dispose of garbage:
5.
Wendy and I went on a one day camel safari. It would be better described as a two hour camel ride followed by a night on a charpoy (webbed bed)in the desert, but that doesn’t sound quite as romantic.
In was a great time. The sun in the Thar Desert is stupefyingly hot plus the desert is more scrub than sand dunes (they appear intermittently), so anything beyond two hours would frankly get a little repetitive. You’d feel like you were seeing the same thing over and over again. You’d want a break from the monotony of the repeating scenery. You…
More importantly, Wendy got to ride a camel; her second favourite animal after elephants. Our camels were incongruously named “Lucky” and “Babluji”; I can’t remember who had which:
The scene above shows two of the overwhelming contradictions that you find in India.
The first is that Ali, my camel driver, is able to talk on his cellphone in the middle of the desert. It’s amazing how wired this country is (and they don’t even have 3G networks yet; can’t wait to see what happens when that occurs); everyone is connected.
The second is that Ali’s nephew Salim is leading Wendy’s camel when he should really be in school.
When I think of child labour I think of Dickensian factories with little hands for little places and it all takes place behind closed doors. I know that some of that exists here, but a lot of the 12-60 million child labourers (gov’t vs. 3rd party numbers) here are doing much more mundane things. Washing cups at a juice stand. Updating inventory at a store. Carrying water or maybe just leading camels.
At first you think they’re just helping out part time but when you go back the next day and they’re still there you realize that this is their life. It’s scary how banal child labour is here.
In this charming scene straight out of the 20th century – BC, not AD that is – this son is helping his father out blacksmithing:
Okay, I pulled a cheap shot with the photo above (although I stick with my statement that the blacksmithing techniques are the same as those used 4,000 years ago). This kid is actually in his school uniform. He’s actually a symbol of one of the truly great features of India: society’s incredible drive to educate their youth. He’ll almost certainly never work as a blacksmith and hopefully won’t work outside at all.
It’s heartwarming to see the quest for education in this country. As you walk the street of any town or read any magazine you are bombarded with ads to learn how to program, to get an MBA, to become an engineer. (In fact, the most common ads seem to be for cell phone carriers, cement and advanced degree programs)
If you’ve ever taken a subway in New York or any other North American city you’ve also been bombarded with education ads. However, they’re for online associate degrees to become nurse assistants or medical billers; they’re low value training offered by scam universities.
I can’t speak to the quality of the education being offered here (but India has some of the finest universities in the world; witness the IIT’s), but the sheer scale of it and the focus on the higher end of the value chain is awe inspiring. I can only imagine what it’s going to be like here in 20 years when the country is teeming with highly trained people trying to solve all the complex problems India – and the world – faces.
These guys have a great future:
6.
One of the things you have to come to terms with when you travel in India is that, unless you’re buying railway or airplane tickets, there is not a single listed price in this country. And even if someone does show you that elusive listed price, it, like everything else, is negotiable.
Moreover, you are a walking ATM. Your mere presence as a tourist makes you a mark: everyone is going to try and rip you off. In fact, it’s almost perfect game theory: you’re unlikely to ever do another transaction with anyone you meet here so they’re going to try and extract the single highest price they can get from you at that very instant.
This means you should expect any of the following to happen:
You go to a fort. There are rickshaws outside and you ask the price back to your hotel. It is IDR 250. You offer IDR 100. You are then told how these are reserved rickshaws and therefore cost so much more. Threaten to walk away and you get it for IDR 100.
You call a hotel. They quote you a price that is way north of what is in your guide book. You quote the guide book. They offer you a 10% discount; now only 40% more! You reply with “I’ll pay <book price>” and they say no. You say “okay, I’ll go elsewhere” and they cave.
You want a driver. You go to the government tourist office and they show you how it costs x/km and you’re going to have to pay 2x that as the driver needs to come back. You quote the price you’re willing to pay (~1/2-1/3 less). The tourist officer tells you how he knows a few people who don’t work for the government and maybe they could get you a price below the government rate; you end up paying almost what you wanted
You’ll notice a common theme here as to what to do: threaten to walk away. In a country of over a billion people there are thousands of other people within arms reach who will happily sell you the same service for a lower price.
Another common experience you’ll have: people will follow you around trying to extort money from you. A common modus operandi is that you walk into a fort/palace/etc. and someone starts following you around. You say “thanks, but I don’t need a guide” and they say “oh sir, I’m not a guide; I just want to make sure you see a few things.”
At this point, you have two options:
Tell them you’d like to just walk around by yourself
Get ready to listen to sob stories: “I don’t make much money”; “My father is old and I am responsible for my family”; “I need to get a gift for my girlfriend.” It never stops
A similar approach is followed by some touts. They come up to you and start to engage you in pleasant conversation that it would be rude for you to shut down e.g., “where are you from”. This is followed up by a compliment to you: “you look like a Bollywood star”, “you take nice photos”. All of this is buttering you up for the ask: “why don’t you come by my shop”.
They’re using the law of reciprocity (doing something positive to you in order to make you feel like you’re indebted to them) in order to guilt you into their shop, etc. You’ve just got to be firm in letting them know that they can talk to you but that under absolutely no circumstances will you go in their shop/give them money/etc. It’s also fine to request you be left alone for your own privacy.
There are a lot of other tricks people use to try and get your money. At forts, the ticket issuers take extra long giving you your change, hoping that you’ll forget it and walk away; they even post signs telling you that if you don’t check your change before leaving the wicket, you’re out of luck. Not only will your admission price be 4-20X an Indian, you’ll also need to pay an additional camera fee.
If you have a driver, when you reach your destination, your driver will ask for more money saying that he miscalculated the rate (and this is after he picked a restaurant where you’d be overcharged so that he would eat for free). Drivers, in fact, are particularly stubborn: we’ve had a few who have tried to negotiate toll rates on the highways.
You’ve got to be in the mood to handle these things or you’re going to go insane.
Also, remember that none of it is personal.
We’ve had fierce negotiations over rickshaw prices (usually over $1; hey, it’s principle) where the driver is trying to make me feel like I am pulling food out of the mouths of his starving kids. Minutes later we’re in his rickshaw (usually at our price) and he’s asking us where we’re from, telling us how his family is so happy, etc.
It’s like we’ve never met before…
7.
From the above, you might gather that I don’t enjoy being in India. Not at all.
Rather, India is a place where you have to learn to balance two exactly opposite ideas in your head. You’re going to love what you see and experience. Unless you are paying a small fortune or traveling with a local, the process of getting to experience it is going to be awful. Zen, zen, zen…
Here are some snapshots of various great things we’ve seen recently. All were worth it:
8.
Jaipur has some pretty stupid traffic, but it’s manageable:
As you struggle to cross the road (note the local above throwing her arms up in exasperation), you can play traffic bingo by trying to count all the different forms of transports: motorcycles, bicycles, tricycles, auto rickshaws, bicycle rickshaws, cars, trucks, buses, tractors and camels:
Less fun is the traffic we faced getting to Jaipur. We had a driver for the 11 and a half, 600 km drive from Jaisalmer and we spent the last few hours of it on a three lane highway at night.
This was one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. The road was choked with overstuffed trucks whose unrestrained diesel emissions cast a pallor of the apocalypse over the highway. Many of the trucks lacked rear lighting and would just suddenly appear on the road ahead. This, combined with an arbitrariness of both their lane choice and decisions as to when to switch lanes, gave me the feeling that I was in a space ship flying through an asteroid belt.
Our driver brought this sensation to life by slaloming between these trucks. Sometimes he’d tag team with another car and we’d pass on the left while our wingman took the right. You had to be careful in the left lane (the curb side; opposite side of the road here) as it contained the odd slow-moving tractor or camel cart or someone randomly entering the highway and coming up to speed, all the while hidden from view by the endless slew of trucks.
Wendy prayed to the winged goddess of alcohol to come down and kiss her lips with her sweet nectar. I thought of how I’d tell this story assuming we got through it all…
9.
Newsflash: India is hosting the Commonwealth Games (pop quiz: who hosted the last one? Answer: I have no idea. I think it might have been Edmonton or Singapore)
The games almost didn’t happen because India did such a bad job organizing them. Bridges were falling down. Roofs were collapsing. Wild dogs were fouling the unfinished athlete’s village. Some countries almost pulled out; Britain ended up putting up their athletes in a hotel.
But the games are on! And it’s a big deal here. I don’t think India has ever hosted an event this big and they’re indignant at the success of Beijing 2008 and the current Shanghai world’s fair.
The opening ceremonies were last night (when I wrote this) and today India’s 200 channel television universe is chatting incessantly about it.
In fact, the reportage is unabashedly, navel-gazingly hagiographic. Words fail to describe the ridiculousness of the “coverage”. Check out these photos of the “news”:
In case you can’t make that out, the sentence is “World media bows to truly shining India”. Living in the U.S. I got used to over the top new coverage (Hello CNBC!), but this is a whole new dimension approaching nationalist propaganda.
And come on India: “truly shining” countries don’t have to tell themselves that they’re “truly shining”. They just are.
10.
Obligatory food notes.
Verdict: still excellent.
Check out this tandoor platter from the kitchen at the Umaid Bhawan hotel (crazy hotel: if Liberace was an Indian hotelier, he would have built it) in Jaipur. The tandoor platter is three types of grilled chicken and two types of grilled mutton. My mouth waters at the memory:
A gatta curry is a local specialty. It consists of steamed gram flour dough dumplings in spicy yoghurt gravy:
I’m also crushing on the murgh malai tikka; it’s like chicken tikka but marinated in yoghurt. This one’s from Saffron in Jaisalmer (and that’s a cucumber transmuted into a candle):
They’re all outdone by the incredible kebab stand at Handi in Jaipur:
I’m going to have to buy a tandoor when I get back to Canada…
After this, my third trip to Bangkok, I feel like I am finally getting a sense for the city. I’d like to think that it’s because I’ve experienced enough of the place that I am one with it; it’s more likely due to the fact that this time I travelled with a map. And Bangkok is one of those cities where you definitely need a map.
A few hundred years ago the royal family built a palace in an oxbow on the eastern bank of the Chao Praya river. Two arcing, narrow canals were soon built and they technically turned the oxbow into an island, although you could never tell that from the ground.
This is old Bangkok, the realm of the mandarin, minister, monk and monarch. The government offices are located here, as is the royal palace. The oldest, most spectacular temples are found here: the temple of dawn that is Wat Arun, the leaning buddha of Wat Pho, the towering lucky buddha and the Golden Mount.
Backpacker scum wander Khao San road while outside the administrative districts it’s easy to get lost in the many alleyways. [This is particularly due to the curious nature of how Bangkok seems to name its streets: thanon are streets; soi are alleyways. Sometimes the soi have their own names; other times they are numbered but named based on the main road (sukhumvit soi 10 would be off thanon sukhumvit).]
On the western bank is the forgotten side of the city, a dormitory community. To the east of old Bangkok is another ancient neighborhood, Chinatown. Each street seems to be a collection of like shops all tangentially related to a nearby block. Sort of a car repair district gives way to a series of car tire shops gives way to shops selling industrial tires as tall as you kind of vibe.
As it grew, Bangkok became crowded and unlivable and the king built a set of new canals for commerce and a series of massive roads that radiate out easterly from old Bangkok. These canals no longer transport anything and instead their foul waters rot in the blinding sun (you always know when one is nearby). The roads have become the arteries of the city (their colourful taxis the blood cells?) and a massive infrastructure campaign means that skytrains and elevated highways live on top of roads beneath which crawls the subway.
Skyscrapers have exploded around these nodes and if you could somehow place Bangkok on a balance, the entire eastern side would fall below the horizon as it is just so much more developed than the rest of the city. Moreover, more than half of these skyscrapers have been built in the past 10 years. When I visited the first time there were only a few and the partially finished concrete skeleton of the skytrain was a daily reminder of the long term effects of the 1997 currency crisis.
2.
I need to be clear that only after this visit can I say that I finally have a good line on how the city is laid out. Because I sure picked the wrong area for our hotel.
We got a really good deal on our hotel and like all good deals, it came as part of Faustian bargain. We thought it was cheap because of the Red Shirts. Instead, it was cheap because the hotel was on the main strip in Patpong.
On a rainy Friday night, getting from the skytrain to the hotel meant running a gauntlet of depravity and moral bankruptcy that would send a mormon screaming back to Utah.
From the Sala Daeng platform you can see dancers (hookers?) leaning out of a fifth floor window, smoking and depressingly waiting for work to being. At the bottom of the platform’s stairs you’re accosted to buy DVD that you can’t legally get anywhere; a man who speaks no English comes up to you and shoves into your face a laminated page that screams “pussy, pussy, pussy” and advertises an anatomically revolting girlie show.
Thanon Thaniya offers a brief respite. The street is lined with buildings where the bars are stacked six stories tall. The entrance to each property is lined with that bar’s girls, each of whom has too much makeup and long ago lost their original hair color. So that you don’t confuse them, each establishment requires the staff to wear a slightly different revealing outfit. Fortunately, their marks are Japanese men, so you can pass unfettered.
As you turn left on Thanon Surawong you’re back in it. Anonymous-looking forty-something Thai men walk up to you and ask “ping pong show?” or “live show?” despite having your wife by your side. When I firmly declined one tout, he had the nerve to ask me “why?”; another actually pulled on my arm and I had to resist the temptation to lay him out on the street (my most hated sensation: being touched by strangers).
In addition to the sex show touts, every shop front seems to be a restaurant, massage parlour or tailor. The proprietor of each is out front and emphatically offering their wares. Dodgy older white men sit drinking by themselves or slowly casting an eye at the young Thai men coming out of an alley of gay clubs. The other alleys are lined with a different type of massage parlour than the legit ones found on Surawong. On top of this, the sidewalk narrows as it’s covered by food carts and spillover stalls from the bustling nearby night market.
The funny thing is, this is not a bad neighbourhood. Some of the best hotels in town (like the Meridien) are here and our place was perfectly safe. There are also a couple of nice cafes (even a Starbucks) and the locals all walk around as though nothing is happening.
3.
I’m going to go out on a limb and call Bangkok the new Tokyo. While very different cities, the similarity between the two is striking. Both cities are temples to massive infrastructure projects and dotted with skyscrapers that seem to be randomly placed to anyone who is not a local. People are incredibly polite and the subways are almost entirely silent; every square inch of space on them has also been turned into marketable space.
Both cities have wooden houses interspersed around them (Bangkok many more so since it was never firebombed; Bangkok’s are also remarkably close to skyscrapers).
Both have a red light district (Kakbuki Cho and Patpong respectively) – and parts of Patpong look like v1.0 of Shinjuku transplants.
Tokyo has it’s famous Akhibara electronic district; in Bangkok’s Chinatown there’s an outdoor electronics market; on the weekend you can buy T1 cables and resistors in the streets. Each also worships the convenience store: 7 Eleven and Family Mart abound. (In fact, I think the best development index in Asia is the both the density of convenience stores and the range of goods offered; they are literally the street level beacons of progress here)
Of course, there are a lot of differences too. Thai society is too conservative to permit the chaos of Hirojuku to walk down its streets (although the ads here are a lot more provocative than when I first visited 10 years ago). And while both nations have monarchs, you won’t see pictures of the emperor plastered everywhere like pictures of the king in Bangkok.
4.
And about those pictures of the king. The Thai love their regent and while he’s just a constitutional monarch, he holds strong sway over the populace. This is important because of Thailand’s recent political troubles. Since an army coup in 2006, the legislative branch just hasn’t been the same and two prime ministers have been booted from office: one for conflict of interest – he was also a tv personality – and one due to alleged electoral fraud. The ‘alleged’ in this ‘alleged electoral fraud’ is significant as it has led to the Red Shirt protests and now a grenade a week explodes here, armed soldiers guard both government buildings and the skytrain and you must pass a metal detector to get on the subway (where they also check for bombs before you can get on at the end of the line).
Trouble is, the king is ailing. And he’s got one son (plus three daughters) who most people think is a ponce (and just by writing this I’m breaking Thai law – that’s how revered the king is – and so I’ll be posting this from India) thus creating a succession issue at the worst possible time (and you thought Queen Elizabeth II had issues…).
The net result of this is that you now see photos of the queen everywhere. When I was last here in 2006 there wasn’t a single photo of her anywhere – just the king – and now you might think she’s the head of state. I’m going to call it right now: when he passes she’s going to claim the throne and try to change the hereditary rules to permit one of her daughters to be regent.
The Thais live in interesting times.
5.
A few obligatory comments on the excellent food in Thailand.
a) Make sure to eat some of the ubiquitous street food:
If you go to the Old Siam Market, you can browse many stalls that sell all types of great food like mieng khum (lemongrass, dried shrimp, peanut, ginger, deep-fried coconut, chili, shallots and sauce wrapped in wild betel leaves) and spiced sausage. Take it to the nearby park for a picnic:
b) For Thai appetizers that I’ve never seen on another menu anywhere, try Taling Pling. In addition to Mieng Khum, they also have Chaw Mung (steamed mince chicken and onion wrapped in dough), Kratong Thong (minced chicken and corn served in waffle cups), Tung Thong (deep-fried chicken and black mushroom in flour dumplings) and Kha Nom Jeeb (Thai-style dim sum where steamed minced chicken is wrapped in rice).
These guys also have the best massaman curry on the face of the planet (and I know that within a certain set those are fighting words).
c) The best Gaeng Ga Hree Gai curry ever – like a spicier version of a massaman curry – is found at Thanying.
6.
Another city, another fruit I’ve never had before. If anyone knows what this is, please add a comment (I think it’s a langsart).
You pop the fruit out of the pod; it’s sweet and has a similar texture to a lychee but less consistency. There are about five slices to the fruit; one slice has a nut in it and the rest you can eat without consequence.
7.
And to close, a random selection of Bangkok photos and an amateur movie!
Wen and I were originally going to visit Nepal and then India but due to poor weather in Nepal (and poorer planning on our part), we’re only going to India for a now massive five weeks.
I love India, havingbeentheretwicein2006. While the second trip was purely a vacation, the first one was a visit to a technology conference and highlighted their seemingly inexorable rise to a leading power in the 21st century.
In preparation for this trip, I’ve been doing a bit of reading on the country. If you want to get a sense of just what India’s rise could mean and a sense of the staggering challenges they’re going to face to realize their full potential, I highly recommend In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce. They book is about four years old now and it’s remarkable how prescient many of his predictions/comments have been.
As a tease, here are a couple of gems from the book.
On the organization of India’s economy:
Less than 10 percent of India’s dauntingly large labor force is employed in the formal economy [i.e., not farming], which Indians call the “organized sector.” That means that fewer than 40 million people, out of a total of 470 million workers, have job security in any meaningful sense. It means that only 35 million Indians pay any kind of income tax.
…
Of the roughly 35 million Indians with formal sector jobs … 21 million are direct employees of the government. These are the civil servants, the teachers, the postal workers, the tea makers and sweepers, the oil sector workers, the soldiers, the coal miners, and the ticket collectors of the Indian government’s lumbering network of offices, railways stations, factories, and schools.
…
Fewer than 1 million – that is, less than a quarter of 1 percent of India’s total pool of labor – are employed in information technology, software, back-office processing and call centers.
I found this fascinating. Despite all the wealth created by India’s massive software companies it’s a drop in the bucket in terms of employment. Moreover, there are only 7 million people employed in manufacturing in India vs. more than 100 million in China. It will be interesting to see if India can turn themselves into a private sector job machine.
Another theme in the book is how the political process is breaking down as people elect people from their caste to ensure more public sector jobs for their caste members (as you literally cannot fire a public sector worker even if they do no work). This is compounded by reputed criminals seeking election as a way of making themselves legally untouchable. The net result is widespread corruption in both the political and bureaucratic sector.
Here’s a snippet of one revealing interview with a politician:
A few months after election I visited Reddy in his office at the state secretariat in Hyderabad. I asked him what he was doing to provide irrigation to the poor farmers. A large man with an equally large mustache, Reddy was every inch the local satrap. The rooms and corridors outside his office resembled a bustling railway station with dozens of local supplicants awaiting the chance to ask a favor of their chief minister. “Every detail is being taken care of,” he replied to my question. And what are the details? I asked. “Everything is possible,” he said. What was possible? “Every little detail.” Can you provide me with some? “In time, we will fix everything,” he said. And so on. At one stage during this singularly uninformative interview, Reddy started scrambling around for a bit of paper. His secretary handed him something. “Yes,” he said, reading it. “Sir Arthur Cotton built lots of irrigation for the farmers in this area. He was British. You are British.” But what are you doing? “We are doing everything possible to ensure irrigation gets to the farmers.”
The book is full of examples like this – and, in fairness, also inspiring interviews with some remarkable officials who are building a great future for Indians (check out the section on New Delhi’s now-former mayor).
Two other interesting areas that the book explores: gender discrimination and the spending habits of New India.
Here are some stats on gender discrimination:
In large tracts of northern and western India, the so-called “gender gap” between boys and girls has sharply increased. The average ratio of births of girls to boys for India was 945 to 1,000 in 1991. By 2001 it had fallen to 927. … Gujarat has fewer than 900 girls to 1,000 boys. Punjab has below 800.
Put another way, over time, 3-4% of the Indian population may never be able to marry because there simply won’t be enough girls to marry. Given India’s size this will mean millions of sex-starved men. Moreover, the traditional solutions to this problem never really worked and are already fading. China’s got this problem too; India’s going to have to learn from it.
The spending habits are interesting as India is its own juggernaut and is going to have to decide what values it wants to promote. Will it adopt Western consumerism or create something uniquely Indian?
Alok [a successful entrepreneur] said his employees, most of whom are dressed such that they would blend in with their counterparts in San Francisco, never talk about money in cash terms. The measure their pay in EMIs, or equal monthly installments. These are monthly deductions from your bank account that continue for years, enabling you to pay off the car, motorbike, microwave, freezer, air-conditioning units, and flats you have not earned. You can even take an EMI holiday. … “Saving is the last thing on these guys’ [his employess] minds,” Alok said.
I can’t wait to go back to India. I recommend that everyone go there as it’s fascinating – and read In Spite of the Gods before you go to have a better sense of what is happening behind the scenes.
Laos. Wen and I had wanted to go for ages as we’d heard nothing but great things about it. Now we’ve been. Read on.
1.
Our plane has touched down and is slowly taxiing to the gate. The pilot won’t be rushed as this is Laos and the next incoming flight is at least an hour away. And the gate is really just a parking stall where you walk to the terminal.
The other reason he’s going slow is someone probably needs time to wake everyone in the airport up. I can picture a harried air traffic controller who has been rudely jerked from sleep by the expected arrival of our plane and is now scurrying down to a boiler room and turning a massive crank to wind up the airport experience.
In Ottawa, the airport greets you with ads for high tech and defense companies. In New York, banks and software companies vie for your attention the moment you deplane.
In Vientiane – the capital of Laos – the first ad you see is for the local beer. The second ad is also for said beer. The third ad is for a cellphone company. And then you’re in customs, where, if you’re a Canadian it bafflingly costs $7 more to get a visa than for any other country’s citizens.
The whole visa process, which, with its four person, three step process that seems geared more towards full employment than border security, is a gentle introduction to the fact that Laos is a technically communist but really just autocratic state.
Don’t let the “Democratic” in “Laos Popular Democratic Republic” fool you. There’s one party. Above it is a politburo that reserve the right to issue binding decrees and it’s headed by a brigadier general (some customs officers grimly wear pins with his image).
This explains some of the subtle differences you’ll find in Laos versus almost every other country in the world. For example, there’s immigration control on domestic flights and the streets are routinely cleared for police-escorted motorcades of 30-something bureaucrats.
2.
We immediately flew to Luang Prabang. We bought our ticket in the airport and it included an escorted walk from the international terminal to the open-air concrete bunker that masquerades as the domestic terminal.
The flight to Luang Prabang reminds you that Laos is the poor child of Southeast Asia. Shortly after takeoff you notice that there are almost no paved roads on the outskirts of Vientiane, save the ‘highways’.
As you pass over Laos’ beautiful mountains, you’ll see countless notches cut in the landscape. 80% of the population is subsistence farmers and they routinely burn the rainforest to clear fields. With a rapidly growing population (up by 1/3 to 6.2 million in the past 15 years), their grandkids are not going to be able to live this way.
After a couple of stomach churning and neck bending turns (I think Mas Wings pilots train in Laos) you’re on the ground and in arguably the prettiest city in Southeast Asia.
Luang Prabang sits at the intersection of the Mekong an Nam Khan rivers. Historically it was the capital of one of the three Lao kingdoms. In the 19th century the French forcefully united them and added the ‘s’ to the country’s name. (Despite what my sixth grade geography teacher insisted, it’s pronounced ‘l-ow’, not ‘lay-os’.)
Since it was a capital, there’s an old royal palace. It contains a litany of old buddhas, royal detritus and gifts from foreign dignitaries. Their Asian neighbours gave carvings and silver goods; the U.S. gave pens, radios and a scale replica of the Apollo Lander.
There are no photos allowed because it is a royal palace and no mere layman can photograph royal goods. This rule extends to the royal cars.
In their garage, a set of aging Lincoln Continentals and even an Edsel and a rotting Citroën sit stoically awaiting royal return. The mere act of painting them white and having the king ride in them has turned them into treasures that can only be captured by official cameramen.
The odd thing about all of this show of respect to the royal family is that they ultimately got no respect from their countrymen. The war in Vietnam spilled into Laos (the Ho Chi Minh trail was mostly in Laos) with America dropping more bombs on Laos than were dropped in all of World War II (there are over 8 million unexploded bombs in the country-more than one per person) and fomenting a good old civil war.
The royal family was split in the civil war bit ultimately they all lost and the communists won. The king died in captivity and there hasn’t been a royal family since the 1970.
You wouldn’t know this from the fealty shown to the king at the palace. You also wouldn’t know it because there’s not a single sign anywhere in the museum that explains the history of the country. Nor can you ever get a Laotian to explain their country’s history. They just smile and say something like “as you know, Laos has a complex history.”
Besides the royal palace, Luang Prabang has a lot of Buddhist temples. 34 in fact, and that, combined with the colonial buildings built by the French earned the city a UNESCO world heritage designation in 1995. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that’s also the year they paves the main road in the city and tourism took off.
Luang Prabang is a reverse Potemkin village; it has a population of 200,000 but everything a tourist wants to see is found on a narrow isthmus of land between between the junction of the two rivers and around nearby Phousy Hill. The fact that almost no one lives on the far side of the Mekong or Nam Khan rivers and no buildings are above three stories reinforces this sensation.
This means that you can take in many of the temples, the royal palace (and the baffling carvings from local stories that are found in an adjoining temple), walk all the main streets, take a boat across the Mekong and still easily make it up the hill to watch the sunset.
3.
So what else to do? Besides sitting in the cafes and sipping coffee (Joma and Ancient Hotel are recommended) or taking a cooking class, you could go hiking or ride elephants.
You can actually do both courtesy of one man, Markus. He is a character who has transformed tourism in the area.
In 1998 he quit a going nowhere government job in Germany and moved to Luang Prabang to open a restaurant. In 2001, unsatisfied with what was offered, he opened Tiger Trail to provide tours (hiking, biking, etc.) that would highlight and preserve the local culture. This was followed a few years later by the Lao Spirit resort (a beautiful place 35km up the Nam Khan; the bungalows have some of the best views ever).
Then in 2008 he sold most of his shares and bought an elephant preserve where he saves elephants from the logging industry.
It was at this preserve that Wendy finally conquered a pachyderm. We got to ride them (both on a howda and on their necks). We practiced our mahout calls (seung seung to bend on one knee and get on; pie for forward) and fed them and bathed them. We also learned that you should always approach an elephant from its right; some are trained to attack on the left and they can be unpredictable if you walk behind them.
We also learned that Laos uses to called the land of a million elephants. Given that Laos is only two million square kilometers and elephants consume 200-250 kg per day in food, this was more likely hyperbole than fact.
We also learned that the first rule of being a mahout is to never trust an elephant. This was revealed several times when our elephants (more frequently Wendy’s) would suddenly stop, lumber off to the side of the river or track and eat despite all the efforts of the mahouts.
On a different day we did a seven hour hike up through the mountains that are opposite the elephant camp across the Nam Khan. Despite hiking in near continuous rain (it turns out August is the rainiest month in Luang Prabang) this was one of the best hikes I have ever done.
It started in low-lying rice paddies, climbed through banana and jungle-covered limestone hills into Hmong villages and mountain pastures.
And finally it descended down to the other great thing to see in Luang Prabang-waterfalls.
4.
I don’t know what you think waterfalls in paradise look like, but for me they’re near identical to the Tad Sae and Kuang Si falls near Luang Prabang.
The Tad Sae is approached from the river, where it spills forth from many places in the banks. As you climb alongside it, you encounter numerous swimming pools and possibly the occasional bathing monk.
The Kuang Si falls are substantially further from town and best approached by scooter. The voyage takes you along the Mekong, through villages of jeering children and is only occasionally interrupted by confused chickens or water buffalo. There is mercifully little traffic as the road ends at the falls.
The falls start out as a bear preserve that leads to a series of miniature falls and pools. You can swim here despite it being the rainy season however the current is so strong that you can’t swim against it. it is extremely depressing to try and swim somewhere and end up further back from where you started – particularly when if you go too far back you go over a waterfall.
In North America this would be the perfect drowning machine; judging from the lack of bathers, the Lao seem to have a preternatural understanding of what ‘swim at your own risk’ means.
At the top of the last pool you come to the main falls which explode out of the jungle in a furious torrent of water. In fact there’s so much water that it cascades downwards everywhere. No rock is too small to become a sluice and water tumbles from all directions. It is sublime.
5
After a week in Luang Prabang we took the let’s-call-it-eight-but-everyone-knows-it’s-at-least-ten-hours bus ride to Vientiane. It’s only 400 kilometers but since you’re winding along mountain roads it takes forever (those mountains only end maybe sixty kilometers from Vientiane). Fortunately, the scenery is spectacular and, if you spent the extra $2, you’re riding in the “king of bus”.
I can’t emphasize how beautiful Laos is. I’m definitely going to go back one day and hike around Ban Bangkalo and Ban Lakha in Kasi district. Jungle-covered limestone mountains plunge into forest and fields; farmers’ paths crisscross everything.
5.
The bus ride gives you time (lots of time) to reflect on how undeveloped Laos is. On the entire journey I saw one factory: a cement manufacturer.
As you traverse the country you see the goods of the same ten Western brands. There is not one chain store in the entire country – although some local bakeries, coffee shops and convenience stores are creating their own chains.
The people here are incredibly friendly (perhaps the civil war killed their desire to fight) but the flip side is there’s absolutely no sense of urgency on the part of anyone. The whole country trundles along at the pace of a small town while it’s neighbours battle for 21st century economic supremacy.
In addition, the quality of the Laos government’s fiscal and monetary policy is open for debate. There are signs that the country has gone through some mean inflation.
The smallest bill is 500 Kip (a great name for a currency) but you will almost never see anything priced in multiples less than 1,000.
In one shop we saw the following homage to their first sale in 1998-note the 1 Kip note.
Similarly, in one temple we saw 20 and 50 Kip notes folded into icons:
6.
You may be noticing that everything I’ve mentioned is about either Laos or Luang Prabang. I’ve said almost nothing about Vientiane.
And that’s on purpose. There’s not much to see in the city. There are a smattering of various petty bureaucracies and a few concrete temples. Nothing to write home about – and the Lao even acknowledge it themselves.
The main boulevard outside the Presidential Palace leads to a concrete gate built in the 1960s:
Here’s the description attached to it:
But all is not for nought. It’s a nice place to while away a day or two in cages as you prepare for your next adventure. It also has fantastic sunsets along the Mekong. This is big sky country:
8.
There’s one other very interesting facet to Vientiane – the people. Not the locals (great people, but you’ve already met them up north), but a curious mercenary capitalist class.
The city is full of 40- or 50-something white guys who are slightly overweight, have a lean, ex-military look with short cropped hair and they frequently carry laptops.
They give the impression of being in Laos as it is the place where some obscure form of earth needs moving: a fiber optic cable needs to be laid; a satellite uplink station needs to be built or a series of microwave towers are going up. These guys feel like hired guns who honed their skills building out Europe and America and their swan song is now calling from Asia.
9.
Reading the above, you might get the impression that I’m negative on Laos or think that it is backwards. Nothing could be further from the truth.
It’s a beautiful country with unbelievably friendly people who are finding their own path in a complex world (and carrying some very complex cultural baggage). This is a also country where few people have any money but cellphones abound, you find satellite dishes in remote thatched communities and the locals have a nicer (and substantially cheaper) international bus service than most other nations.
10.
I have no hard data to back this up, but I suspect that one of the challenges Laos is going to face is that when your country moves away from agriculture, you just can’t get drunk all the time.
There are several hints that the Lao are perpetually getting wasted. When we took our cooking class the manual emphasized how important it is for the locals to drink whiskey with each other (ah, culture).
We asked our guide on our rainy hike where all the people were in the villages: he told us they drink whiskey when it rains.
And when we went to one of the waterfalls, a bunch of locals were having a picnic. Several Johnny Walker bottles littered their table.
I should mention that the local whisky (Lao Lao) is also filthy booze. I had a glass at one restaurant and it burned so badly that I poured it into a neighbouring planter. A mere whiff of this faux rubbing alcohol is sufficient to induce nausea.
11.
As mentioned in an earlier entry, Lao food is great.
We had a few additional great dishes. Fried bamboo with pork:
The Tamarind restaurant in Luang Prabang is incredible. Here you see their Ping Som Moo. It’s cured pork placed on a bed of garlic, then wrapped in garlic and barbecued in a bamboo skewer.
They also have an appetizer that lets you taste an assortment of local salsas and dips. You’re looking at jeow bong, jeow mak len (mild tomato salsa), jeow mak keua (smoky eggplant dip) and jeow pak hom (mildly spiced blend of coriander and garlic). It comes with khai pene: Mekong seaweed pounded into sheets and sundried with tomatoes, garlic and sesame
A few other recommended places to eat in Luang Prabang: The Blue Lagoon (thanks Colleen & Tom for the recommendation!) and Dyen Sabai (across the Nam Khan; they’ve their own free boat).
12.
A few random observations:
A)
Laotian has the same script as Thai. The Lao get Thai television and read it’s subtitled foreign movies plus listen to their tv shows. The result is that all Lao can speak/read Thai but not vice versa. Our hotel receptionist couldn’t explain why, rather she chalked it up to “same same but different”.
Incidentally, despite having a relatively lovely language, the Lao all answer their phone “hello” (versus sabai dee). It looks like this is one more culture that wont be adopting Bell’s desired “ahoy, ahoy“.
B)
While in Laos and Vietnam I was reading Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War and John Sack’s M . Both talk about the omnipresent red dust that covers Vietnam and turns to sticky mud during the rainy season.
It also exists in Laos. I went for a run one night and found myself covered in a thin reddish film. And don’t even get me started on what it’s like to hike here when it rains:
C)
When we arrived in Luang Prabang we took a cab to our guest house. The airport taxi authority decided that we’d share the cab with another couple even though we were going to different hotels.
As we talked to them I felt like I was talking to my doppelgänger; it could have been me if I’d made a few different decisions.
In order to understand this, some background on me. I used to be a consultant but didn’t like it so did something else and eventually wound up at business school and then lived in New York. The Internet has also made me OCD: whenever I want to know something I instantly look it up (unless dining).
So imagine how I felt when we got in the taxi and it turned out that the other couple – who are a similar age to us – are also from New York. We asked them how long they’d lived there and it turned out to be many years except for “a few years in Boston”. This is alumni jargon used by Harvard Business School grads to test whether their audience might be receptive to their unique schooling.
I then asked if either of them happened to know the population of Laos. She turned to him and said “I’ll bet you hate not having the Internet here to look this up.” A shiver ran up my spine.
And then she said “pretend it’s a case or an interview problem”. Only consultants would ask someone a silly question like “how many people are there in Laos” as part of a job interview; calling your work a “case” is to a trick to make it sound more important than it is.
At that moment I realized that this guy was me in an alternate reality (preppy American Lindsay?) and I had to flee the car before the world collapsed in on itself.
D)
One of the odd legacies of the French is that the Laos play petanque. You will literally be driving through the countryside and stumble upon a group of men playing the game on the roadside. Perhaps it’s because the game is so suited to the Lao pace of life.
E)
One night in Luang Prabang we were walking along the Mekong when the power went out. The city went black and then the massive, swift river began to glow with the night. Previously invisible against the town’s lights, it was now the only source of illumination. Then the power flipped back on and the moment was irretrievably lost.
F)
One final comment on monks. They abound in Laos and you see them everywhere. If you’re lucky, you’ll hear them drumming to the moon cycles:
It’s not that the prepubescent male Lao are remarkably pious, rather it’s about education. There are school fees in Laos (I don’t think the tax collection is good enough for the government to provide it as a full service; this is a country where places give their street address as “near the post office”) and if you can’t afford them you send your kid to a monastery to receive an education. When they’re old enough, they typically drop out of the monastery and get a job – with more skills than they would have otherwise picked up.
Finally saw EyesWideShut only 12+ years after it's release. My confusion over its meaning led me to this awesome screed http://t.co/xF0e9u0r42 years ago
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