Excursion

It's Quiet Round Here, Isn't It...

2009-02-11T20:29:00.000-08:00

Apologies for breaking the wonderful silence that has settled over this blog. I'm far from finished with my online life. In fact, about a month ago I hatched a cunning plan to launch an all new and improved blog. It's now running in a functional enough state that I'm ready to unveil it. Behold the new hotness!

It's not just one new blog, but 3-in-1. I plan to post photos weekly, music whenever I'm inspired by what I'm listening to, and blog posts... well, I'm not guaranteeing a return to my travel days, but I'll make the occasional post. Please update your bookmarks or your RSS subscriptions if you're using a newsreader. I will cease to update this blog and instead direct my attention to the new site. I'll be online more often, and hopefully in a more interesting way.

Of Stars and Leaders

2008-11-16T13:55:00.000-08:00

Bon Iver concert at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, From Spring / Summer

I wonder at what point Obama realised he had become a pop culture icon. The fact that many young people treat him like a rock star is old news by now, of course, but to see it in action is still startling.

I went to see The Decemberists the night after the presidential election.¹ In another life, Colin Meloy, the lead singer, would be a school teacher. I could see it in the way he led the entire packed venue to slowly crouch down, then stand up, over and over, faster and faster, until the entire audience was jumping up and down and the band kicked off a boisterous song. And in his spontaneous interactions with the audience, whether it was playing a guitar solo with a peacock feather a fan was waving around, or borrowing a cell phone from someone in the audience, calling a number in the phone book, and singing an entire song into the phone.

But the most amusing part was seeing everyone go nuts when the band brought a cardboard cutout of Obama on stage. At one point they tossed it into the audience and the cardboard Obama crowdsurfed around. People were as excited as if it were a 1997 Radiohead concert and Thom Yorke had jumped into the crowd.

Image courtesy of Faith-Ann Young

The picture at the top of this post is from a separate concert by Bon Iver, possibly the best show I've been to in New York. Now that it's winter time it seems appropriate to showcase one of his tracks.

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Hidden Lives

2008-11-13T10:49:00.000-08:00

Sam recently told me about a moment she remembers clearly from many years ago. She was walking down the street and saw a homeless woman rummaging through a trash can. As she pored through it, a homeless man walked up with his cart, dug in it, pulled out an apple and offered it to the woman. On the busy street, no one paid attention to the generosity and care of the ragged people at the trash can.

As I sit in a coffee shop in DC taking a short break from work, I'm thinking of that moment she related to me for various reasons. What jolted my memory was seeing a homeless woman walk in a couple hours ago and take a seat at the window. A while later another woman joined her and they sat talking. As I sat with my drink, secretly eating a sandwich I brought with me, a man walked in and also joined them. It looked as though he wasn't familiar with the other two, as he introduced himself. I saw him ask one of the women for some money, which she lent him with a pat on the back. Who are these people? Where do they live? What do they do every day? As they catch shelter from the grey rainy day outside, it's an interesting glimpse of a community I know nothing about.

Election

2008-11-11T22:51:00.000-08:00

Before the man said a word I could tell he was in a bad mood. He opened the door with stormclouds on his face, and without giving me the chance to whimper "sorry to bother you," he barked, "the next time you knock on the door like the police are gonna bust in, think about all the people round here that have babies you're waking up!"

I looked at Jeremy, my partner in crime, and tried to find a way out of the situation. In the best of times I don't like pressing my views on people. How were we going to convince this man to vote for Obama when we landed on the wrong foot before saying a word?

"We're apologise sir," Jeremy said, "we didn't realise how hard we had knocked." The truth was, so many people hadn't answered their doors we weren't sure that anyone could hear us use the tiny knockers on all the doors in the apartment complex. By the end of the day we would have knocked on approximately 140 doors and talked to just 15 people. We weren't sure whether to believe so many people were truly out of their apartments on a grey and soggy Saturday afternoon so we had become a little over-enthusiastic trying to get them to answer.

To my surprise, we ended up having the longest conversation of the day with this man. After introducing ourselves as volunteers for the Obama campaign and asking if he had made up his mind who he would vote for in next week's presidential election (he hadn't), we asked what issues were most important to him. His primary concern was health care – the current situation was "ridiculous" – and his wife, a teacher, wanted to know whether Obama planned to repeal the No Child Left Behind Act.

Just over a week later I sat in a bar in the Lower East Side with friends and watched the election results start to roll in. I had decided to treat the night like New Year's by pairing the spectacle with drinks. I figured no matter which way the results turned out, I'd be happier if I wasn't sober. I had watched the Palin/Biden debates in the same bar, and like that prior evening the crowd was boisterous and vocal.

We watched CNN roll out an increasingly ridiculous array of computer generated effects to illustrate the vote counts, capped with the crowning achievement of using an actual hologram to project a commentator into the news studio. In between trying to determine how much better informed I felt by hearing news from a live Princess Leia, as opposed to the more pedestrian norm of a pundit's face on a giant plasma screen, I kept track of which way states were swaying. It was certainly interesting to see CNN predict state outcomes after only the first 2,000 votes had been counted. And I found the more I drank, the less I cared how statistically insignificant a 0% vote sample was.

The crowd was so loud by the time the election was called for Obama that I had no idea what state had first handed him the victory. Virginia? Pennsylvania? I couldn't tell. All I knew was that a spontaneous cheer went up. People were hooting, clapping, pounding the tables. The bar passed out glasses of free champagne and everyone toasted.

Soon after, we spilled out onto the street and made our way to another bar. We were some distance from the real party in the streets up in Harlem, but nevertheless celebration was in the air everywhere. By the time Obama gave his acceptance speech I was another couple drinks down, which made it that much harder to believe he was really there, that he actually won the election.

Where did this ecstatic feeling come from? It's not because I expect Obama to make a lot of progress with this country's problems. I have very modest hopes for what may come of his administration. The simple and sad truth is that 8 years of one of the worst U.S. leaders of all time has lowered my expectations to the point where I am excited by the prospect of an intelligent person in the White House. Someone who seems to grasp how the world works in reality. The fact that he showed one of the most nuanced understandings of the issue of race in this country is icing on the cake.

And it is that issue of race which I have been thinking about most in the days since the election. I voted for Obama because I thought he was the best candidate for the job, and his physical appearance had nothing to do with that opinion. Now that he is the president-elect, however, I have let myself think about the colour of his skin and am moved by what has happened. There is a song by Nina Simone I've been listening to a lot recently.

Nina Simone recorded the song in a performance she gave 3 days after Martin Luther King was assassinated. Her emotion shows through in only a few places in the song, but it is enough to glimpse just how devastating the period after his death must have been.

"Will my country stand or fall?
Is it too late for us all?
And did Martin Luther King just die in vain?"

Many interviews with potential voters before the election showed just how far from resolved the problem of racism in America is. The New York Times has been covering reactions to the election from all over the country and the world. In one clip from a school in Brooklyn, a black child is asked what he thinks of Obama's election. He replies, "since a black man became president, then other people that would usually think that black people would become something bad or anything else like that, we can become presidents or whatever we want to." This child feeling like people look at him as a problem is one of the sad realities of life in the U.S. An article in the New York Times on Sunday showed the attitudes black people have to grow up dealing with. In response to Obama's success, one woman interviewed commented, "I think there are going to be outbreaks from blacks. From where I’m from, this is going to give them the right to be more aggressive."

As sad as it is to hear those comments, I am still blown away by the person we have elected to be our future president. If nothing else, it will hopefully spark more progress on the problem of racism, and recognition of the unhealed wounds of America's roots.

On that note, I've been following up Nina Simone's song with this more uplifting Marvin Gaye-sampling track by Brother Ali.

Traffick

2008-09-01T19:07:00.000-07:00

From From Thanksgiving to Christmas

Shortly after I moved into my apartment last year, the superintendent for the building was fired. As a parting farewell, he destroyed the locks on the outside front door. It seemed he had neglected to perform any kind of maintenance as the next superintendent found serious plumbing problems, and corners of the basement were apparently piled with rat droppings.

Next up was a very personable superintendent named Al. Al grew up around the corner from where I'm living. The East Village. More specifically, Alphabet City.

From Winter / Spring

This is an area where a large part of New York comes to dine and party at night. It's lively, and it feels like a neighbourhood as opposed to faceless blocks of apartments. Al told me stories of the history of the area. A couple decades ago few people would set foot here. Broken down apartments, drug addicts, and trafficking ruled the streets.

People would drive in from Jersey, put money in the one small window of an apartment block that wasn't boarded up, take the drugs that were handed back, and drive out. A network of tunnels connected the basements of apartments along Avenue B from 2nd St. all the way to 14th St. Useful for escaping when the police mounted an occasional raid.

From Spring / Summer

2nd St. and B is where I live now. The gym I go to is situated in a basement of a building on B. There are at least 5 bars and restaurants on the one short stretch of street between 2nd and 3rd. Every Friday and Saturday there are crowds of people dressed up outside these places.

From Spring / Summer

I moved without the faintest idea of the history of this area of New York. It's strange to think how it's changed. Not all traces of the past have been erased, of course. The East Village still has a grungy feel about it. Uneven pavements, pothole-strewn streets, lots of brick and concrete. A few weeks ago I sat in Tompkins Square park, the site of rioting and police brutality when police tried to evict homeless 20 years ago. As I ate my falafel, I saw a fight break out between a group of drug addicts. Nearby on the grass people lay tanning and young families with babies picnicked. A strange mix.

I've yet to delve into the history of New York. Maybe because the size of the city makes it a daunting task. It's a shame I don't know more people like Al to make it personal. Now I don't even have Al to hear anecdotes from - he quit after a short time, and the building management has managed to get through two more superintendents since then.

SantaCon

2008-01-06T07:06:00.000-08:00

From From Thanksgi...

There are certain things I miss about San Francisco. The architecture, the hills, the beautiful views, the Bay, the food. New York pizza, as an aside, is highly overrated. I've heard people defend it by saying, "it's great because it's cheap and it's on every block." You know what? So is dogshit, but you don't see many people raving about that. Something doesn't add up and I think the error in the equation is false pride. I digress.

What I really miss is the feel and culture of the city. A place where an event like the Love Parade is allowed — thousands of people dancing in front of City Hall with police standing by as weed smoke floats through the air and people run around dressed up in costumes or dressed down in nothing.

All is not lost here in New York. Occasionally I catch snatches of San Francisco invading the less whimsical nature of this city. Several weeks ago my housemate Carlos joined thousands of other people dressed up for SantaCon. The entire event consisted of nothing more than dressing up as Santa and parading all over Manhattan, stopping at plenty of bars along the way. There was a shared festive attitude which induced total strangers to talk to each other and livened the atmosphere for everyone who happened to stumble upon the event.

No-one knew what the parade route was ahead of time, but the organisers sent out text messages which were forwarded from person to person until the entire group of hundreds all headed as one to the next stopping point. At that point everyone would mill around the streets, fill up all the bars in the vicinity, and generally cause a commotion. The fascinating part was that no-one seemed to know who the organisers were. It seems that terrorist camp training can be put to good use.

A couple weeks later I was surprised to find old subway trains taking up space on the V line when I walked into the 2nd Ave. station on a Sunday morning. It reminded me of the old streetcars from all over the world running along the Embarcadero, down Market Street and into the southern area of San Francisco. For a second I thought I needed to go back to bed to clear my head, as the previous night had been inspired by a 5-litre wine bottle on display in a store which Erik and I bought and shared between not quite enough friends.

Once I affirmed that I was indeed awake, I got on the train and found that each carriage was from a different decade, stretching back to what looked like the 20s or 30s. The advertising space was lined with old ads for Pomade and filtered cigarettes ("The Healthy Cigarette!"), and the MTA authorities let people wander from one car to the next as the train was moving. The cars ran as a special event each Sunday in December, completing a loop of the city every hour and a half. It was lucky timing that my brunch excursion coincided with it.

Christmas

2007-12-23T19:46:00.000-08:00

Picture the quintessential high society party — sipping champagne and snacking on caviar. Looking out on a city 60-some storeys above the ground. Catching snippets of smalltalk about business partners and recently closed deals while a piano man plays jazz in the background. Congratulations, you've just pictured the Google Christmas party. If it sounds a little pretentious, well, it wouldn't be New York if it weren't. Relax. You obviously need to grab a couple dry martinis from the open bar. Then leave the wine- and cheese-tasting room and hit the dancefloor.

It turns out that there are benefits to long distance relationships—wait, I should rephrase that. There are benefits to other people's long distance relationships. It's good luck for me that Jasper is in one as I was his replacement girlfriend for the party.

In terms of being his invited guest.

Not afterwards.

Who would have thought that people who sit in front of computers all day long would attend an event in elegant evening dresses and stylish suits? I suppose it's understandable that people will make the effort if you rent out the entire Rainbow Room at the top of the Rockefeller Center, but I wasn't expecting it. I wonder if the case is the same in California, or if people there show up to formal office parties dressed in shorts and sandals.

An Alarming Situation

2007-11-26T22:07:00.000-08:00

From San Francisco / New York

There are two alarms which wake me up in the morning, both of them unreliable in their own unique ways. The first is a cheap plastic one I picked up in Peru when my previous one crapped out. I travelled for a year without a watch, but the number of bleary-eyed 4am rises made an alarm clock a necessity. The alarm on the Peruvian clock is accurate to the minute, give or take 20, which means I have to make sure to set it especially early, then curse it when it goes off and deprives me of those last precious minutes of sleep. It's all the more dangerous for not having a snooze button — several times I've woken up an hour late with no recollection of the earlier 15 seconds of semi-consciousness it took to turn the alarm off.

The second alarm is on my phone. It's much fancier than the standard beeping function that comes on other phones. Somewhere between 9:30 and 10:30 I get a wake-up call, usually in the form of a Spanish-speaking lady asking for a Señor Cristobal. It's never the same woman who calls twice, although the call is always from Florida, leading me to believe there is a personal assistant service based there with an unusually high turnover rate.

This level of personalised attention is rare in the modern world, and though impressive, some days I receive 3 calls while on others I don't receive any, making the utility of the service questionable at best. In fact, the reliability seems to be worsening. Two days ago my phone alarm went off at 9:30 in the evening, and I picked up to find someone calling from Chile who took quite a bit of persuading before she accepted that I was not, and did not know anyone by the name of, Eduardo.

The unintended side effect of all this is that when an unknown number calls my phone, I pick up expecting to hear Spanish. It's funny how your mind makes nonsense of English words if it's expecting to hear another language, and responding in Spanish asking the caller to repeat because I didn't understand has resulted in more than a few confused conversations.

At this point I've decided that the Spanish alarm service isn't much use, but waking up is coincidentally when I am least able to speak coherently in another language, so I have yet to be able to unsubscribe. Finding a way around this catch-22 is my current challenge, and I'm hesitant to bring a 3rd alarm clock into the mix.

One Month Later

2007-11-14T22:17:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting behind a large one-way mirror with computers and monitors strewn all over the desks around me. The lights are off, and on the other side of the glass is a brightly-lit room with two people sitting in it. If the table was bare metal and the people sat facing each other, it might be a police interrogation room. Unfortunately for the thrill-seeking side of me, I'm taking notes for a usability study rather than a murder investigation.

I made the move to New York 4 weeks ago. In that time the weather has gone from making me sweaty in a t-shirt to giving me chills walking around in a winter jacket and scarf. I'm living in one place but freelancing, which provides me with the same sense of instability I had over the last year moving to a different town every few days.

Watching the participants try to use the virtual world being tested, I'm reminded why I like this work so much. Also in the room watching the proceedings is one of the developers of the virtual world, and hearing his occasional exclamations as the participants get confused is one of the most satisfying parts of the job. The first point of surprise is inevitably when people click through all the instructions the programmer painstakingly included, explaining in step-by-step detail how to use the program.

"Why did they skip all the text? Why didn't they read what was on screen?"

Bridging the gap between how the programmer assumes people will use their creation and how everyone else actually uses it is what it's all about. A lot of the time all the advice from a usability expert isn't half as effective as having a programmer sit and watch someone else use their creation for several hours.

Particularly interesting is when a participant like the one I'm watching comes in — someone in their 30s who hasn't used the internet in years and who has no email address. It's easy to forget people like that exist. Especially in a wired area of the country where real life soap operas such as NYGirlOfMyDreams.com make up the background noise of life.

As I make my way towards a normal working life, I'm enjoying having some of the important pieces fall into place. I now know where to go for photography equipment, and having discovered a nearby developing studio, I'm excited again about taking photos. On that note, the following are from the last month.

The Move

2007-10-11T23:48:00.000-07:00

Imagine moving to a new city. What could you hope for on your first day there? I suppose the first thing you would want to sort out is accommodation. It's a big city with a tough housing market. You luck out — the very first place you visit has lots of light, is in a great area of town, and to top things off has a beautiful rooftop with a view. You click with the housemate. Done deal.

Next up is some kind of work. You make a call and set up a meeting for the beginning of the following week to get started.

Anything else? Some entertainment maybe. A night at the Metropolitan Opera watching Anna Netrebko in Romeo & Juliet.

You can see why, traipsing around town in constant rain with soaked shoes, I was happy as could be. Welcome to New York.

My Heart Goes Out

2007-09-28T21:28:00.000-07:00

As with most people, I’ve been on the receiving end of many a scam email over the years. As irritating as they are, it puts a smile on my face when I see one of them getting creative.

“Dearest in Islam,” begins the one I received today. The salutation is unique enough to divert my finger from the delete button. I can imagine the scam artist leaning back in his chair, stretching his arms in front of him and cracking his fingers while he thinks, “What character should I invent next?”

Running down a mental list of candidates, he crosses off the Nigerian desperately trying to move his money outside the country, the Russian woman who is looking to "do friendship or more than simply friendship", and the co-ordinator of Lottery Winners International who needs to know how to deliver the jackpot money. Then he reaches “Widow”. Not an instant sell, but maybe it’s got potential. His eyes fall on a copy of The Atlantic Monthly lying next to his keyboard (what, the scammers in your world don’t have a subscription to The Atlantic Monthly? Come join me my friend, my world is a far richer place) and sees an article on President Ahmadinejad denying the existence of gays in Iran. He sits upright, snapping his fingers. “Muslim widow!” he says out loud. “Now that’s an angle!”

Religious affiliations allow our author to appeal to both devotion and fear simultaneously. “Please, let this message not come to you as a surprise, but a divine duty,” begins our widow. I’m already halfway to giving her my bank account details. No one wants to be on the wrong side of God. And no one wants to reject a woman whose husband died and who is herself struggling with cancer. Oh wait, not dire enough. She’s “battling with both cancer and stroke”. That’s more like it. It’s a good thing she didn’t keel over before hitting send. Time’s obviously limited. I better help her quick.

“According to the doctor, my medical report quotes a very short life sperm due to my health status presently.” You want to laugh at the typo, but the situation is too tragic. Poor woman, she doesn't even know what she's saying! By now she's endeared herself to me. I can almost hear our author laughing at his own subversive tactics. I’ve played right into his hands. “Now I’ve got him by the emotional balls,” he thinks.

“Having known my condition I decided to donate this fund to a devoted Muslim individual or a Muslim organization that will utilize this money the way I am going to instruct herein,” continues the widow. As a rule of thumb I try to be honest. I don’t fit into the categories she listed, but then again with the typo she already made, how am I to know she didn’t make a simple grammatical mistake here? Let me fix it. “... I decided to donate this fund to a devoted Muslim, individual, or a Muslim organization that will utilize this money...” Now that’s better. I’m an individual. Sign me up.

“When my late husband was alive he deposited $1.5Million (One Million Five Hundred Thousand United States Dollars) with a security and finance company here in Cote d' Ivoire. [...] I am searching for real brother or sister in Islam to assist in using this fund.” Well sister, I’m real. And I’m glad you decided to take a chance on my random email address.

“You will be entitled to 5% of the total amount for your time and kind assistance.” Amen to that! Oh, excuse me, I mean insh'allah. My help’s on the way.

An Offer I Can Refuse

2007-09-04T23:15:00.000-07:00

As soon as I slowed down I realised I was making a mistake. I had just come out of a job interview and was lost in thought as I walked through the SoMa neighbourhood to the San Francisco CalTrain station. The man looked at me as I passed as if he knew me, and I returned his half-smile with a curious expression on my face. I pulled my mind from the interview and back to the present. Did I know him? Maybe we’d bumped into each other when I was working here last year. I stopped and turned around.

“Hi, I’m Jack,” he said, extending his hand.

I shook it and said, “I’m Nigel,” realising a second too late that all was not usual with the situation.

“Where are you headed?”

“To the train station.” And then, because walking away seemed rude and I didn’t know what else to say, “What about you?”

“Wanna go back to my place?” he replied.

“Uh, sorry, I gotta get home,” I said and turned and walked on. If only the companies I’m interviewing with would make me an offer so easily...

Sign of the Times

2007-09-04T23:00:00.000-07:00

After a day wandering Chicago’s city streets, from Bronzeville to glitzy retail stores in The Loop to a nighttime view of the skyline from the Hancock Center, I headed to Giordano’s for some Chicago-style pizza. I passed an old lady begging for money.

“Can you spare 10 dollars?” she asked.

It was the surest evidence I’ve seen that the dot-com era is back.

Summertime

2007-09-04T09:37:00.000-07:00

There are a few things I miss about Washington DC. One, the people I grew up with. Two, bagels and whitefish. Three, the sudden summer downpours. So I was more than a little pleased when my bus from New York dropped me off at a DC Metro station just as a storm burst from the clouds. The air became heavy and the sky turned a deep, dark purple. Lightning cracked through the air. And water poured over everything.

Doctor Warren

2007-09-04T09:31:00.000-07:00

From Friends / Family

Listening to my sister’s thesis defense presentation, the culmination of 6 years of hard work, I found myself simultaneously impressed and baffled. The thought crossed my mind that getting a Ph.D. is like learning a language only you and a handful of professors are able to understand.

Home Soil

2007-09-04T09:17:00.000-07:00

The passport control guard looked at my customs declaration slip, then suspiciously at me.

“What were you doing in all these countries?” he asked, referring to the long list of names I had written in the “countries visited on this trip” section. I wondered if he might confiscate my passport and accuse me of being un-American.

"Travelling," I responded. His expression didn't change, but as I had shaved recently he didn't send me for further questioning. At customs I was diverted from the green “nothing to declare” lane and sent to an inspector. He began questioning me and asked me to put my two bags on the table to be searched. I hoisted my backpack up.

“Oh, a hiking backpack. There’s no way I’m digging through that,” he said. “What’s in the other one?”

I started to list the items. “Some t-shirts, a bottle of vodka—”

“Go on, go on,” he cut me off. "You're fine," he said as he waved me through.

So here I am, back in the States, preparing myself for a string of job interviews. I felt an odd mixture of familiarity and foreignness as I stood in the dark night air after the bus from the airport dropped me at a deserted car park. It’s going to take a while to get used to living here again.

Istanbul

2007-08-28T12:24:00.000-07:00

I woke up on my birthday totally disoriented. My head was heavy with drinks. I couldn’t see clearly. I had gone to bed barely half an hour earlier after hitting a couple bars in Istanbul with a friend, yet already it was light outside. There was smoke everywhere. The 23 other people I was sharing a rooftop dorm with were making their way down the stairs. I vaguely remember following. The next thing I knew I was sitting on the curb outside with my head on my knees, trying to shut out the pale morning sky. I couldn’t stay awake. I drifted in and out of dreams. A while later I ended up back on the rooftop, asleep in my bed.

My alarm woke me a few hours later. Feeling slightly dazed, I packed and went to the airport to catch my flight to Berlin. After checking in I went to the bathroom to wash my hands and splash water on my face. Details of the previous night started coming back to me. I remembered one of the bars, and laughing upon finding out that the local slang for “prostitute” is “Natasha”, a token of appreciation of the Russian influence in Istanbul. (This came out in the course of conversation, not through a birthday present.) I remembered trying “Raki”, the local alcoholic drink tasting of anise. And something hazy about an electric shower heater left on, melting and setting a room ablaze. I looked in the mirror and was surprised to find my nostrils black with soot. So the fire and smoke in the hostel hadn’t been a dream.

Sticker Shock

2007-08-15T09:36:00.000-07:00

I knew I would have some readjusting to do to get used to western prices after a year of discount travelling. Consider London shock therapy. Economists use the Big Mac Index as one measure of price comparison between countries. I’m finding it hard to break the habit of comparing everything against an index based on a particularly cheap dorm room I stayed in in Egypt.

A meal does not register in my head as £15; instead it becomes an outraged, “I could pay a month’s accomodation for that price!” Needless to say, this is a thought pattern I will have to change soon. Otherwise I’ll be forced to dye my hair grey, wear slippers and a cardigan, and start making up stories about my days as a young boy, hiking uphill through knee-deep snow to get to school.

A Final Delhi Farewell

2007-08-13T16:35:00.000-07:00

Driving from our house to the Delhi airport, my father decided it was time to introduce some order to Indian roadways. As we approached a red light, he slowed down and stopped. Meanwhile, cars and trucks in the other 5 lanes continued speeding past in both directions.

In Delhi at night, traffic signals undergo a transformation. Instead of guiding vehicles they become roadside entertainment: just another set of bright lights, like distant cousins of the mini Ganesh shrines decked out in flashing LEDs found on so many dashboards.

And so the end of my last trip to India served up one more example of the many futile struggles that occur when West meets East. (Another notable incident includes questioning the difference between your “good name” and your plain old name, and what about your bad name?)

I hadn’t planned to end up in India again, but when I got the news that my mother broke her foot and was in a cast for 6-8 weeks with limited mobility, I soon had tickets for a surprise visit. The tears of surprise on my mother’s face when she opened the door one morning to find me standing there let me know it was a good decision. I have high hopes of exchanging the brownie points gained from that trip for a big present at Christmastime. Maybe one wrapped in shiny paper, stationed outside, in the shape of an Audi convertible.

I apologise for the month-long silence. I've been lazy, but the blog's not dead yet.

Happy Anniversary!

2007-08-13T16:34:00.000-07:00

Today, the 13th of August, marks the one year anniversay of my travels. It’s been quite a year, yet being in the UK, back in more familiar territory, it feels like I never went away. Thank goodness I have this blog to remind me it wasn't all my imagination.

Pyramids

2007-07-12T05:57:00.000-07:00

It is the most passive and most aggressive of passive aggressive behaviour.

"Want to ride a camel?"
"I'm not fat and lazy like you. I'm walking."

"Where you come from?"
"Your sister's house."

The line between exterior and interior threatens to break. But no, I keep my spite inside my head. How satisfying to walk by someone offering a welcoming handshake as if they don't exist! Mouth shut. Eyes ahead. I don't look at every piece of dirt I pass on the ground, why should I treat these any differently?

The act of ignoring is extremely effective. The minute you open your mouth, you give them a response to play off of. Draw out the irritating sales pitch. Try to fool you into paying more than you should for something you never wanted in the first place. The bastards.

Outside the heat of the moment and the midday sun and the sand and the light that makes my eyes squint and the sweat dripping down my face and soaking my shirt, these are not hated enemies. They are not inferior. They are people making a living. They are not even half as persistant as those in some other places I've been. It's obvious that I need to step back, take a break. A decision: no more sightseeing. When the enjoyment is sucked out to this extent, it's time to stop. The ancient pyramids around Cairo marked the end.

It's liberating in a way. Here's a place I've never been. Now I have no obligation to tour landmarks and monuments. I'm here to enjoy the company of people.

Last of the Dives

2007-07-12T05:40:00.000-07:00

I was detained on the way to Cairo. I stopped for a day in Dahab, on the Sinai peninsula. Then the tentacles of scuba diving grabbed hold and pulled me underwater again and again. The stunning scenery wouldn't release me. It was a full week before I managed to tear myself away and get to the big city. These are some of the images from that week I don't want to forget.

Canyon at Night

Watching a body floating downwards, chest down, legs bent at the knees, parachutist-style. Light from my torch illuminates him, then disappears into a black crevis. Darkness surrounding. Outer space.

Sitting at the bottom. Looking straight up. Watching green sparkles follow the commotion of my air bubbles as they float skywards. Long, slow inhalation. The water clears. Peace. Only the sound of my breathing, the canyon walls rising up around me, the night sky visible in the crack above, a faint grey glow through 25 metres of water. And fish swimming nearby, eyes blinking green, on off, on off, like aquatic fireflies.

The Bells

Turning, pointing my body straight down, and diving, diving, through a narrow rock chimney. I maneuver myself like an airplane in slow motion. My oxygen tank grazes a wall in the narrow space. Clang. The name rings out.

Through an archway to find the vast terrifying blue of the ocean open up. A coral wall on my right, stretching vertically down out of sight. 1,600 metres I am told. Don't lose focus, just keep swimming at the same level. Don't be intimidated. Don't let the ocean swallow you.

Blue Hole

Swimming across, the walls fade from view. The hole is effectively bottomless. Nothing but blue all around. All I can make out below me, the strange patterns the sun makes through the water. Rays of light constantly shifting. Sky. Flying. Where am I?

Lighthouse at Night

Ahmed swims ahead. I turn off my light and follow the specks of glowing plankton he leaves in his wake. Strange impression I am in a Peter Pan movie on the trail of Tinkerbell.

The Islands

Moving from one lagoon to the next. Everything teems with life. I am caught in a school of fish and mesmerised by the synchronised movement.

Thistlegorm

Around and through the wreck. World War II-vintage motorbikes and trucks are lined up. Tires still full of air. Airplane wings. Unexploded munitions.

Exhale. Air bubbles rise and are trapped on the ceiling, silver like mercury, gravity gone haywire.

Outside, fish swarm round and round. Predators dart in. The pack scatters, regroups, scatters, regroups. Trying to avoid becoming the next meal.

Ras Mohammed

Barracudas lurk in the murky blue limits of visibility. A huge green Napoleonfish — 1.5 metres long? 2? — arrives and forages for food on the coral. I swim close by. What makes me so confident about my surroundings? I feel relaxed in the presence of the giant. A parting gift before surfacing — I spot a large sea turtle swimming 15m away.

Driver, Turn South

2007-06-30T07:45:00.000-07:00

The dashboard is covered with a faded pink shag carpet. Tassels are hanging around the sides of the roof. The speedometer is stuck at 0. In the back are a young boy and a man in his late 30s. Behind them, next to two tires, is my backpack, full of clothes and a bottle of cologne I bought at one of the many perfumeries in Amman just so I could see how they mix the scented oil with alcohol and water. The man on my left has greying hair and a jolly smile. He drives the pickup with the steering wheel almost resting on his large belly, coaxing it as it struggles up slight inclines and accelerating on the downsides. In about 4 hours we should make it south to Petra.

How I came to retrace my steps through Jordan is a hard tale of rejection. I returned to Amman on the 24th after passing 4 weeks in Israel. Despite 3 previous setbacks in my attempt to visit Syria, I wanted to try once more. I had heard more positive stories about the friendliness of Syrians and the beauty of the city of Damascus than anywhere else.

So I found a taxi going north from Amman and shared the space inside with 3 others. It took an hour and a half to reach the border. I paid the Jordanian departure fee, changed my money to Syrian pounds, and continued to the Syrian border.

I made it close enough to feel the presence of the Axis of Evil, but the immigration checkpoint stood in the way of my entering and actually seeing the greasy cogwheels turning slowly, spreading badness across the globe.

The passport control hall was slightly chaotic — the type of setup where 10 people crowded around each window trying to find a space to put a hand through and wave their passport around, hoping it would be taken next by an immigration official. The man who took mine was short and grumpy. I had given him my second passport, the one without at Israeli border stamp in it. Unfortunately it also lacked a Jordanian entry stamp. It didn't take him long to figure out what was going on.

"You've been to Isra-eel! You — back to Jordan. No Syria."

I protested but to no avail. I considered trying to bribe him with the $10 I had in my pocket for that exact purpose, but there were too many people around. I preferred that my first attempt at bribing an immigration officer be in a more inconspicuous setting. Lack of courage got the better of me. In short order, the official gave my passport to a lackey who motioned me to follow him outside. There, he waved down a taxi, waited while I collected my bag from the car that brought me to the border, gave me back my passport and waved me off. And so my hopes of visiting Syria were dashed for the fourth and final time.

The next day, back in Amman, I decided to go south to Egypt, following the same route through Jordan I had travelled with Eppu a month prior. I timed my arrival at the bus station precisely — when I got there the last bus south had left long ago. I decided to wait and see what turned up, and as I sat on the curb, an old white pickup truck with faded pink shag carpet on the dash slowed to a stop next to me...

Outcast

2007-06-30T07:42:00.000-07:00

"Fuckin' mother Arab countries."

This was not a happy story.

"14 years I worked in Libya. 14 years. Then they took my money and kicked me out."

The man was in his late 40s and dead sober.

"They tell me I'm a spy. They take my money. $300,000. They take my apartment. They take my business."

I risk giving the appearance that I take pleasure in other people's pain in admitting this: this is what makes travel fascinating.

"They put me in prison. Jail. You understand, my friend? For 250 days."

I was on my way to find a late dinner when I met him at the hostel.

"They fly me back to Jordan, my country, in a special jet. With security all around. Like I am... Osama bin Laden or something."

In my normal day-to-day life, where would I ever meet someone like him? Where would I ever hear a story like his?

"I used to live like a king in Libya. 2 cars. A driver special for my wife. Large apartment. And now here I am. In a hostel."

Possibly nowhere. In a house, I feel like eating and I walk to the fridge. On my own in Amman, I get a story to fill my head while my stomach stays empty.

"What I have to do here? I sit in my room. I come out and watch TV. I smoke cigarettes, I use the internet. And wait. This is no life. Everday I wait to get out of this fuckin' country. I go to America. Or Israel."

Israel?! I checked I was awake to hear this coming from a non-Israeli middle eastern man.

"Those places, a citizen is holy I think. The government doesn't allow this to happen. They help. I go to see the foreign minister here. He tells me, 'What can we do?' Meanwhile King Abdullah is making millions in business with Libya. What is $300,000 to the government? That fucking King Abdullah. Money is all these Arab countries care about. They all should burn."

His tale was too fantastic. But he looked, acted, and talked sincerely. What to make of him? What was the other side of the story?

"Be careful of life my friend. She is like a bitch. While you have money she is fun. But one day she will take everything you have and leave you."

All I could do was take in the experience. And remember it. Because one day soon, an encounter like that won't be a normal part of my life.

As with the last post, the quotes here are reproduced to the best of my memory but are not word-for-word accurate. Next time I'll have to travel with a tape recorder. On the payroll of a newspaper.

Of People and Walls

2007-06-28T15:36:00.000-07:00

Jerusalem skyline at night

"Jerusalem... Zion... It's the place where God will create peace on Earth."

I had bumped into the man on a street corner in Tel Aviv at night. He was moving his things and I asked if he needed help. As we walked, I started wondering what sort of life he lived that his possessions seemed to include only the guitar slung over his back, a plastic bag full of unknown items, and a flat-screen monitor. But our walk was brief and didn't allow me to ask more than where he was moving and why.

"I will go there. It's... it's... a city in conflict. Jerusalem... She needs help."

The funny thing about the "city in conflict" is that it would be easy to visit and not realise the tension that exists. When I went up to the roof of my hostel in Jerusalem to set out my mattress in preparation for a sleep under the stars at night, I was surrounded by the solemn sound of calls to prayer issuing from mosques on all sides. There were 7 or 8 of them, each with their own plaintive melody. The music of Islam was traded for the churchbells of Christianity the next morning, slightly less welcome if only for waking me up at the crack of dawn following a late night out in bars and clubs.

Jews praying at the Western Wall, Jerusalem

The view from the roof was beautiful — it was possible to take in a panorama of the old city, rooftops interspersed with minarets, church steeples, and the Dome of the Rock. What I didn't see were the views people hold inside that cause conflict. I didn't see the walls people build around themselves to stop opposing opinions entering their space. I didn't see the wall dividing Israel from Palestine, over a hill and out of sight. These were the surprises hidden amongst the beautiful visuals of Jerusalem. They revealed themselves only after the city had bared its ancient white stone buildings and Roman ruins to my eyes.

"Jerusalem is the most international and least cosmopolitan city in the world," said an Israeli I met at a party there. People from all over the world come but nobody mixes, he explained.

I told a young woman who had come on a Birthright trip to Israel that I was planning to take a guided tour to Hebron, in the West Bank. It was clear from her reaction just how worthless an endeavour she considered it to be.

Filming what is presumably Sesame Street Israel on the streets of the Old City in Jerusalem

"What's the name of the guide?" she asked.

"Abu Hassam."

"Right," she said, revealing what she thought of the fact that he was Arab with her expression. "They like to make up facts, you know."

The comment was a brilliantly easy way of disregarding anything that didn't fit her worldview: anyone with a different perspective was a liar. Not only did this stop any potential exchange of ideas, her attitude frustrated me so much it stopped me from telling her about my previous visit to Ramallah, also in the West Bank, with a Palestinian journalist.

Men playing dominoes in the Jewish Quarter, Old City in Jerusalem

On that excursion, crossing into Palestine and looking back over my shoulder at the tall concrete barrier dividing the land, I found it was no longer referred to as a "security fence" but a "separation wall." I also learnt a slew of facts, no doubt all products of an overactive Palestinian imagination. I had not previously known, for example, that if you are an Israeli-born Palestinian, the state confiscates your property if you don't live in Israel for 7 years. Nor that Palestinians in Jerusalem are isolated economically — the Wall acts as a trade barrier to other Palestinians, and guided tours within Jerusalem eschew the Muslim quarter for the Jewish quarter.

Two IDF soldiers in a cafe, Old City in Jerusalem

In the end, on my second trip to the West Bank I went solo, foregoing the guide services of Mr. Abu Hassam. I wanted to see the Wall near Bethlehem, where British graffiti artist Banksy had painted some good pieces. After taking my time exploring the wall, I walked to a security checkpoint to cross back into Israel.

Beep beep beep be—

"Step back. Come here." The woman's voice commanded over the loudspeaker. I looked around, trying to figure out where "here" was.

"Step back through the metal detector." I saw the small bulletproof glass window the border security guard was sitting behind.

"Put your camera through the x-ray machine." I had tried to carry it through with me.

"The film will get destroyed in the x-ray. It's special high speed film. Can I have it checked by hand?" I asked.

"It will be fine. Put it through the machine." I could tell by the tone of her voice she didn't want to hear someone talk back. Her role was to command. My role was to obey.

"X-rays ruin this type of film. Even 'film safe' x-rays."

"I said it will be fine. Put it through."

I didn't want to lose the pictures of graffiti I had just taken, nor a few shots of Jerusalem from earlier.

"Can I take the camera outside? I don't need to cross back into Israel right now. I'll go back to Bethlehem."

"No. Why don't you want the camera to be x-rayed?" Maybe she was hoping I would admit it contained a bomb.

"Because it will ruin the film."

"I said put it through the x-ray," she ordered.

"It's high speed film. The x-ray machine will destroy it."

"Put it through."

"The pictures will be ruined. Can someone check the camera manually?"

"Put it through."

Street in the Old City, Jerusalem

She had left me no choice. I put the camera through the x-ray machine, walked through the metal detector, and collected it. In 10 short seconds she had erased my pictures.

"Stop," the voice came over the loudspeaker again. "Pick up the camera. Bring it back."

Despising her attitude, I obeyed.

"Put it through the x-ray again."

Was this a show of power just to be spiteful? I stared at the woman through the glass as I grabbed a tray, put the camera on it, and rolled it onto the conveyor belt. Back through the metal detector, I watched it emerge from the black box of the x-ray. I collected it along with my backpack and waited to be let out of the gated security area. 6 or 7 others were waiting too. The woman behind the glass was now talking on the phone. It looked like an enjoyable conversation, maybe to a friend. We stood there waiting for her to push the button which would open the gate for us to pass through and continue with our lives.

"That woman, she's a bitch," said a Palestinian student in front of me. He lived in Jerusalem and studied in Bethlehem, passing through this checkpoint almost every day. "Most of the others are OK. But her, always with the attitude."

After a minute she finished chatting, reached over, and pressed the button to release us. I walked out pissed off. Not so much at my destroyed film — I had previously taken pictures at another section of the wall on a different roll — as at the demeaning attitude the woman used with me. While many of the border security may be fine as the student had said, mine was a mild experience compared to some of the stories I had heard.

Muslim women at the Dome of the Rock, Old City in Jerusalem

Alisdair, a friend I travelled with in Israel, took a trip to the West Bank and found Ahdam, a taxi driver, who gave him a tour of several areas. Ahdam had studied and lived in Germany for many years before returning to Palestine due to the ailing health of his father. This is one of the stories Alisdair heard during the time they spent together:

Ahdam arrived at a security checkpoint one morning in his taxi. A man from border security walked up to his car and asked him what he did and where he was going.

"I'm a taxi driver, I'm going to pick up a fare," replied Ahdam.

"Ah, a taxi driver," said the border patrolman. "Then your time must be valuable."

"Yes it is. My time is very valuable," said Ahdam.

"OK. Just wait here a moment," said the patrolman and walked off.

Ahdam waited in his car. An hour later the patrolman returned.

"So is your time valuable?"

"Yes, my time is valuable. If I don't drive I don't make money," said Ahdam.

"Very good. Wait here," said the patrolman and walked off again.

Ahdam sat in his car. And waited. The patrolman returned once more after an hour.

"Your time — is it still valuable?" he asked.

"I told you it is. I'm a taxi driver."

"OK. Wait here please."

Again the patrolman walked away, leaving Ahdam in his car, unable to go anywhere. An hour passed by. The patrolman returned a third time, having made Ahdam wait 3 hours at the checkpoint.

"Now," said the patrolman, "do you still think your time is valuable?"

A pause. "No," replied Ahdam.

"Your time isn't valuable."

"My time isn't valuable."

"Your time is shit, isn't it?" said the patrolman.

"My time is shit," said Ahdam.

"OK, you can go," said the patrolman and waved him off with his hand.

Despite all of the above, I actually agree with those that argue the wall is necessary. People living in Israel have every right to stop themselves from being attacked and to lead a normal life. I have heard stories about working at a popular bar and losing a co-worker to a man who blew himself up at the entrance. About seeing a bus full of passengers explode, leaving a bloody wreckage but no survivors. The wall has stopped these attacks. It will be taken down when it's no longer needed, but today is not that day.

This is not to justify the way it is being built. Michel, the Palestinian journalist, claimed it is taking over 10% of Palestine's land (as defined by the Green Line) and 45% of its water supply. And those unlucky enough to have a shop or house lying in the path of the Wall not only have to stand aside as their buildings are demolished, they have to pay 20,000-30,000 shekels (US$4,700-7,000) towards the cost of the bulldozing. In these ways the wall cannot be considered purely defensive. It is adding fuel to a fire that doesn't need fanning.

These were some of my thoughts when I departed back to Amman. Which is another important point — I went to Israel and Palestine, I learnt a bit, and I was able to leave. Those who are born there have no choice. They start their lives on one side or the other and they are unavoidably bound to the conflict. If I want, I can choose to never think about it again. I have sympathy for those who can't.

Church, Jerusalem

Disclaimer: Most quotes in this post are paraphrased. They capture the spirit of what was said, if not the exact words.

A Parade

2007-06-27T05:39:00.000-07:00

From Gay Pride Par...

What do you get when you mix a gay pride parade with ultra-orthodox religions? Two years ago there were stabbings and Jerusalem had a disaster for an event. This year, the city added a liberal number of police and military forces. 7,000 to be precise. And the parade went off smoothly.

It was certainly controversial — two gay friends living in Tel Aviv thought it was too provocative an issue to push on Jerusalem. Despite an anti-gay demonstration organised the day before, there was no serious opposition and no trace of violent rioting on the day.

Woman debating gay rights issues with a group of young jewish men. No consensus was reached, but the civil discussion was the best thing I saw first-hand to come from the event.

In fact, I was very encouraged to come across a woman discussing whether or not being gay was wrong with 3 young jewish men. Despite having strongly opposing views, they managed to have an open debate, listening to each others' points without letting anger and righteousness edge into the conversation. It was the type of debate I wish occurred more often in the world.

Here's Something I Should Have Done Months Ago

2007-06-12T08:52:00.000-07:00

Why I didn't install statistics software on my blog at the outset, I don't know. I would have loved to know more about who's reading. (Although it is a pleasant surprise to get the occasional email and find someone has been following my travels. This is as much a personal journal as a public record for the rest of you to see where I am, and it does inspire me to write when I know someone out there is taking a look at my ramblings.)

In any case, now I've "done the needful" as they say in India, I can start taking names and kicking asses. Those of you in Delhi — yes I'm talking to you two. I see you. I know where you live. And I know when you're ignoring your son. You've only looked at my blog twice. I don't want to hear any excuses about a typhoid diagnosis and time in the hospital. Shape up!

Home?

2007-06-12T07:53:00.000-07:00

From Tel Aviv / Je...

What is home? This is a question that's been on my mind for several years. Whenever I'm feeling down and lonely while on the move, it's where I want to go. Then where is it? During my travels I've found the feeling of home whenever I return to a place more familiar than the last I was at. I may only have spent a few days there before leaving, but upon returning, whether I know a couple people or just a couple streets and restaurants, it's more comforting than a totally alien place. But surely you can only truly call one place home.

Is mine in Washington DC where I grew up? None of my family are there now, so if home is a place you can go back to, that doesn't work. Maybe it's in England, where my parents grew up, the land whose culture therefore infiltrated my upbringing and made me not wholly American. But I wasn't raised there, and my British friends wouldn't consider me a Brit. India? I've spent more time there than in either of my two "home" countries in the past 4 or 5 years. But to call myself Indian would be absurd on so many levels.

What makes up the idea of home? Is it pop culture, religion, where your friends are, where your family is from, the community you grew up in? The answer of course is no single one of these options but a combination. It's also something else, as I'm starting to find out here in Israel. It's where your ancestors lived 3,000 years ago. It's a culture you share not through common experience but through your heritage. It's being labeled as part of a group not because you choose to be part of it, but because others decide you are.

My grandfather was an atheist. That didn't stop Nazis in Germany barring him from university one semester before completing his degree to become a doctor. According to them, he was Jewish. I'm an atheist too, but should a similar situation arise in the future, I could do nothing to stop other people calling me Jewish due to the lineage passed down through my mother, and therefore I share something in common with Jews all over the world. Although this connection to something I did not previously feel a part of is a strange concept to me, I can understand it. However, I have as much trouble understanding other ideas as a fish does the Theory of Relativity.

I asked an Israeli friend why Israel had to be created where it is. Why not another, less tense part of the world? His was not religious reasoning, that God gave the land to the Jews; he is an atheist. His grandparents, originally from Czechoslovakia, had never felt at home in that country. He didn't feel at home anywhere but Israel. This was the land the Jews were exiled from almost 2,000 years ago. It is home to them. It's the only place that makes sense. This was his response. It's one I struggle to understand.

Where does this sense of home he was talking about come from? I tried searching for an equivalent example I could relate to. 3 of my 4 grandparents were from Germany. Do I feel a special draw to the country? Two years ago I visited the house one of my grandmothers grew up in in Berlin. It was a nice place which I surely wouldn't mind having as my own, but I felt no right to that piece of land she was forced to leave. With that kind of disconnect in the passage of just two generations, I cannot comprehend the connection some people draw between themselves and their ancestors thousands of years in the past.

The concept of a Jewish homeland is one that also perplexes me. When I visited Jerusalem last week, I went to the Yad Vashem, a museum about the Holocaust. It's a fantastic and devastating place. When confronted with the reality of what happened to Jews during World War II, it's easy to justify the creation of a place where Jewish people could be safe from persecution by others.

But in the end this is a racist solution, plain and simple. It brings up the question, is "good" racism possible? In an ideal world we wouldn't need it, but we live in a non-ideal world and maybe it's an appropriate non-ideal solution.

I found out I'm entitled to an Israeli passport because I'm Jewish, and went to a centre which provides help with immigration. The woman there told me what's involved in the process of becoming a citizen, or making Aliyah as it's called. The law requires people in my age bracket to serve 100 days in the military. The upshot is that the government is keen to attract Jews and provides benefits: 16,000 shekels (~US$3,800), lower income tax, free Hebrew lessons, free medical insurance for half a year.

The key to unlocking all this wealth and good fortune is proving that I'm Jewish. In explaining this, the woman at the centre explained the racist nature of the state itself.

"Israel is the only country in the world where the majority of the population is Jewish. Most people, including myself, want to keep it that way. So we have to do everything we can to encourage Jews to immigrate and discourage others. That's the game you play. If you don't like it, too bad."

I asked if it's possible to immigrate to Israel if you're not Jewish. She looked around and said in a low voice, "no," as if it were a dirty secret.

But what does this mean for me? I'm Jewish because someone somewhere at some moment in time might point in a rulebook and say so. This cannot be enough reason to call Israel my home. I share no more culture or religious beliefs with any given Israeli than I do with many other people on Earth. And I feel no loyalty to the Israeli state. Given this, the underlying question I find most bothersome is why am I entitled to be a part of Israel when others aren't?

On the level of an individual, the way this state is designed to perpetuate a Jewish majority seems no more fair to me than any other system which gives certain people rights and denies others the same ones based on meaningless groupings.¹

I am far from having a definite opinion on all this, but in the meantime, trying to understand other people's idea of what home means has brought me no closer to my own understanding. If anyone wants to clear it up for me, I'm all ears.

I realise I'm ignoring the question of other countries' automatic citizenship policies. Perhaps each could be considered as arbitrary as the next?↩

The Golden Temple

2007-06-07T04:30:00.000-07:00

Like the previous India post, this one dates to a short while ago when I was still in that country. It's taken me a while to finally write it down.

A visit to the Taj Mahal is an example of what-you-see-is-what-you-get. There is only a small degree of separation between looking at a picture of it and visiting it in real life. What I found at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest of places in the Sikh religion, was much more than a building.

I arrived in Amritsar, close to the Pakistani border in northwest India, early in the morning following an overnight train ride. Stepping inside the gurdwara (temple complex), there was an endless parade of people walking barefoot clockwise around a man-made lake, at the center of which sat the Golden Temple. I joined the crowd and before long found myself talking to a Sikh around my age. Normally I would be on edge, expecting some kind of trickery designed to end in the transfer of money from my wallet to his, but he was so genuinely friendly that I was instantly at ease. We sat on the cool marble in the shade and talked, and later, over chai in a stall outside the temple, he played me hit Punjabi and Hindi music from his phone, occasionally singing along with a heavy Indian accent.

That night I returned to the temple with Crystal, who I had met at the accommodation next door. Beds are provided free to any and all pilgrims — even to foreigners and non-Sikhs like us. Several hundred people were sleeping in the many rooms there, and also on the ground in the courtyard and the balconies surrounding it.

We went to the langar — a dining hall dishing out food to any and all who come, 24 hours a day, again, free of charge. It's an amazing operation that serves roughly 30,000 meals daily and runs on donations and the work of volunteers who prepare the food, serve, and wash the dishes.

At 1 am we entered the gurdwara once more to find some people sleeping around the perimeter of the pool and others standing on the causeway to the temple in the center. We joined the line to the central temple where during the day, the Guru Granth Sahib (holy book of the Sikhs) is kept. Each night it is ceremoniously carried out of the central temple and put to bed. We climbed several flights of stairs and came out on the open roof. There we sat with the stars above and the constant sound of singing and tabla-playing from the priests several floors below coming over the speakers. In front of and around us, people sat with prayer books following the words to the music. With each hour that passed — 2am, 3am, 4am — the temple complex filled with more and more people. By the time we left at 5am it was more crowded than when I had visited at 10 in the morning. As we walked out of the central temple and back along the causeway, I could feel the heat from the mass of people waiting in line to enter.

What I took away from my visit was far more than the image of the beautiful gurdwara. There was a very real feeling of welcoming around the temple, and a peacefulness too. (This despite the fact that there had been rioting nearby in the two days I was there, which I only found out subsequently.) I could have easily passed many more hours sitting, watching, and listening.

Inbox Count: 0

2007-06-07T04:21:00.001-07:00

This post is more for my own records than anyone else's general interest. I have zero unread emails in my inbox. This type of momentous occasion (i.e. not being lazy and replying to emails on time) happens only once or twice a year. I'll enjoy the feeling of cleanliness for the next 2 hours while it remains. Then I'll be inundated again. Probably with spam.

In other news, Eero left on Monday and I'm back to travelling solo. We fell short of our goal to eat 80 falafels in 2 weeks. We reached 60, but once we got to Tel Aviv there was such a wide variety of delicious food to choose from that we caved to temptation and got distracted.

A Delhi Night

2007-06-05T01:25:00.000-07:00

A quick note: this dates from several weeks ago before leaving India. It's taken me a while to snap out of the unproductive funk I was in there and write about it.

The evening began with an explosion. The last time it happened, my mother ducked and looked around wild-eyed, thinking a bomb had gone off. This time I knew it was the downstairs neighbours setting off fireworks. These weren't little firecrackers that shot some sparks in the air, they were full-on July 4th-caliber rockets. They let out an ear-splitting bang as they launched their payloads on skyward journeys; several seconds later the sky lit up with globes of lights and sparkles tumbling back down.

These fireworks are readily available for purchase in India at around US$8 apiece, and being somewhat of a firework fanatic, our neighbour had bought a crateload to celebrate his brother's visit to Delhi. He let off the smaller ones early on — a smart decision as apparently the launch platform had yet to be perfected. One mistakenly went off at an angle, shot into the street and under a car that happened to be passing by. I feared an explosion Hollywood style, sparks shooting everywhere as the vehicle was lifted high in the air, but luckily it let out a harmless flash and a bang while the car drove on.

As the show continued I started noticing other flashes against the dark sky, and soon a strong wind blew in with a few drops of rain. As dust flew everywhere the brothers packed up and headed indoors to wait out the oncoming storm. I went across the street to the Mother Dairy stand to buy some ice cream and as I waited for my change, the sky opened and rain poured as I've never seen before. The streetlights illuminated branches being thrashed by the wind and rain being blown in sheets. When two towers of stacked plastic crates came tumbling down onto a parked car, I thought it best to wait in the shelter of the concrete overhang of the Mother Dairy rather than risk having a tree limb land on me as I crossed the street. I stood and watched what looked like the backdrop of a live news bulletin — the type where the reporter is on site in a hurricane, clutching his raincoat against the weather onslaught.

At some point the wind subsided enough for me to venture out from under the overhang. I made a dash across the street to the house, getting drenched in a few short seconds. There was so much water washing down the road that my feet and ankles got a dirty bath in the process.

After showering and changing, I started opening the windows to let the now-cool air into my room. As I leaned out of one to fasten it open I heard a man coughing. It sounded far too close to have come from the street 3 storeys below. I looked around and in the dark, made out the shape of a monkey sitting on the balcony railing. Slightly surprised, I made sure to close the screen to avoid any surprise attacks while sleeping.

Tragically Forgotten

2007-06-05T00:26:00.000-07:00

I've heard "Can't Touch This" and "Ice Ice Baby" more and more over the past few years. The question is, if MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice are retro-cool, why not Milli Vanilli? In an effort to fix this injustice I've dug up a piece of their golden musical past.

One look at this video and I think you'll agree Milli Vanilli deserve to be remembered. There's Oscar-worthy acting to set the scene at the beginning. Some Michael Jackson-rivaling dance moves (the running stomp is a piece of choreographed genius). And even MC Hammer's parachute pants have a tough time beating the fashion sense of huge shoulder pads. You know it's true.

Tel Aviv

2007-06-01T10:37:00.000-07:00

I believe in love at first sight. It happened to me 3 days ago. After taking a long distance bus up from southern Israel, Eero and I took a local bus through Tel Aviv and I fell in love with the city. It's hard to describe the reasons why, but here are a few: relaxed atmosphere, small enough to walk around, big enough to offer a variety of neighbourhoods, lots of cafes and stores on the street, large parks, green areas, beaches easily reached by foot from the centre of the city, sunny and breezy, fantastic food.

Speaking of food, I went to an annual festival where the city's top restaurants sell samples of their dishes for around US$5 apiece. It's a great deal for restaurants and eaters alike, as people get to try many places they wouldn't otherwise.

I know what you're thinking: "I've been to a food fair before." Not like this. Picture an outdoor music festival, take out the bands but leave everything else: lights, stages, DJs playing music, food stalls encircling a huge area of grass, and above all, people. Huge crowds of people eating, drinking, talking, dancing, and sometimes even crowdsurfing. I couldn't believe that the entire celebration was centred around the enjoyment of food: Jerusalem tortillas, African-spiced sausages and potatoes, east-west fusion beef in coconut sauce, coffee cream cake, cheesecake, I could go on. I'll have some pictures from the event when Eero sends them to me after getting home next week.

I've been trying to find a fault with Tel Aviv, something that will make it easier to leave, but so far I've come up empty-handed. The good news for me is that I don't need to leave yet. I originally planned to travel up through Syria to Turkey, but ran into a 3-strikes-and-you're-out scenario. I tried and failed twice to get a Syrian visa. My last resort plan was to take a flight to Damascus and hope for more luck with the passport control officers at the airport. That dream officially died when I walked across the Jordanian-Israeli border and got a stamp in my passport. When crossing into Syria, if there is any evidence of travel in Israel you are automatically barred from entering. I had asked immigration not to stamp my passport, but the woman behind the counter accidentally put one in anyway. When she realised what she had done, she was embarrassed and apologised, but there was no way of erasing the ink from the page.

The end result is that instead of going back to Jordan and then heading north, I'll stay in Tel Aviv a little longer. Maybe after another week the rush of new love will have worn away.

Out of Jordan

2007-06-01T09:43:00.000-07:00

My last dive in Jordan was at night. There were three of us — Eero, me, and our instructor Abdullah — plus one soldier watching to make sure that all the people who entered the water came out again. We dove the same site earlier in the day, but at night it was transformed. Gone were the schools of fish swimming by, shimmering in the light blue water. In their place were lone creatures making their way through the blackness. As we shone our flashlights around we come across a tiny octopus, a strange box-shaped fish, and a large crayfish which Abdullah managed to catch and stuff in his pocket for later.

Because the dive was going so smoothly, Abdullah took us to a nearby shipwreck. The king of Jordan had sunk it specifically to create a site for divers. We had visited it previously during the day and it was spooky then. At night it was positively eery.

We had been swimming along the sea bed for a while when all of a sudden our lights illuminated a wall, the ship's hull, rising up above us. The ship was resting on its side so when we rounded the front, the deck rose up from the ground at a steep angle. 15 metres down in the black water, I couldn't see anything but the captain's cabin above me oriented almost vertically, and Eero and Abdullah floating nearby. Pointing my light away from the boat — up, down, behind me — the beam disappeared into darkness. It was the first time I felt dizzy and disoriented underwater. I had to remind myself of the way the ship was resting to figure out which way was up and which was down.

We swam along its length, the deck a wall on our right. Structures slowly took shape as we approached in the darkness. I pointed my light up and saw the ship's mast looming horizontally above our heads. I pointed it to the right and saw an open hatch with a ladder leading into the gloomy interior. Everything was rusty, with coral growing over it and the odd fish hiding in corners and recesses. As fascinating as it was, it definitely tested my nerves. The constant fear in the back of my mind was imagining what it would be like to get left behind in the darkness with the hulking skeleton of the ship for company.

I was relieved when we at last swam over the side and headed away from it, encountering the sandy ocean floor again. Before getting out of the water we sat with our flashlights held to our chests to block out the light. When we moved our hands through the water, tiny specks of phosphorescent plankton lit up.

The next morning we left Jordan. It fulfilled my expectations in the best way possible: by tearing down a lot of preconceptions about life in the middle east. Namely, that the entire area is a dangerous place and that people are at war with the west. I remember the man running the hostel I stayed at in Amman saying that if you visit a mosque during prayer time, you'll only find 5 or 6 people there. Who has time to pray 5 times a day? He may have been joking, but the point was clear. People are people, no different from the US where some are Catholic and some are Methodist and some are Jewish and on and on. In Jordan, some are Christian and some are Muslim and some are devout and some don't care much. And everyone mixes together, with Ms. Jeans chatting away to Mrs. Fully-Veiled. Not all that surprising, really, though it does conflict with the image we sometimes get from the news where the middle east is a uniform mass of people headed on a collision course with the US and EU.

Overall, I was won over by the genuine friendliness Eero and I encountered everywhere. So many people were keen to simply say hello and welcome us. Try and think of the last place the following happened to you: a policeman stops you in the street and asks where you're from. Maybe you're intimidated by his gun and wonder what problem he is about to create for you. Then he asks you if you've been here before. Upon finding it's your first time, he shakes your hand and says "welcome to our country," before walking off with a smile. If you're coming up blank on memories of this happening in your life, I used to have something in common with you before I visited Jordan.

Women in Jordan

2007-05-28T05:06:00.000-07:00

So what about the role of women in society here? Let me skip all of the questions you may have because I don't have the answers. I haven't talked to anybody, man or woman, about the topic. All I know is what I've seen on the street, which is a variety of dress ranging from skirts + t-shirt to headscarf with jeans to fully draped in black with a burqa.

(As an aside, I was curious when I saw a woman with only her eyes showing, looking through the window of a clothing store at jeans and summer tops. There are so many questions I would have loved to ask her.)

Because I don't know the first thing about traditional Jordanian culture, what women think, how they are treated, what rights they have, etc., it would be arrogant to assume anything. Things may be great, terrible, or somewhere in between.

What I can say is that from my foreign and selfish point of view, being a man in Jordan ends up tilting towards the boring end of the scale. Drinking coffee, eating at a restaurant, or smoking a nargileh, the vast majority of people you have for company are men. Think of how a typical nightclub is run. Goal #1 is get as many girls there as possible. The rest of life inside a club follows onwards from that first goal. Life here is a bit like a nightclub on opposite day.

At first glance, this may sound like a wholesome idea for daily life. But as I was walking down the street with Eero earlier today, I realised I wasn't paying attention to what he was saying because I was distracted by a mannequin in a halter top. I haven't checked with a doctor, but being accustomed to living in a different culture I imagine being around real women would be a little healthier.

Deep Water

2007-05-27T10:44:00.000-07:00

Today, day 2 of my Advanced Open Water course, I went on a deep water dive as part of my training. My instructor took me down to 28 metres (~92 feet). As we swam down I had a dizzying feeling of slight panic at how far underwater I was. It was strangely similar to the sensation of looking down when you're high up on a ledge with a hundred foot drop opening out below you. It disappeared when we stopped for a minute, however, and it was fascinating to be completely unable to see the surface of the water. I was surrounded by blue, and the only difference in looking up was that it was a paler blue.

My course book stresses that diving below 18 metres, the generally accepted boundary for deep dives, should not be done just for the sake of thrill. You should be descending to a depth because there is something you want to explore that requires it — perhaps marine life that doesn't exist at the surface or a wreck. However, I can't deny that the enjoyment I got out of my dive was largely due to the depth. It was oddly comforting to sit on the sandy bottom in the middle of so much blue, watch the life around me, and be completely enveloped in a different world.

Diving in the Red Sea

2007-05-27T10:21:00.000-07:00

From India / Jordan

We pulled up on a beach owned by the prince of Dubai at about 9:30 yesterday morning. It was a barren piece of sandy land in the middle of an even more barren landscape of brown scorched hills by the Red Sea. Some evidence of its previous life as a public beach was strewn about in the form of broken bottles and cracked tarmac parking areas. Some piece of presumably corrupt politics allowed the land to be taken from the public and sold to the prince, husband to the daughter of the king of Jordan, for the purposes of development. The land sat empty — probably awaiting a rise in property prices, at which point he will be able to sell it for a profit.

On this hot summer day in the desert, however, the beach's private ownership was being conveniently ignored by our group of 9 divers for the purposes of scuba exploration. As the sun made its presence felt on every inch of exposed skin, we unloaded tanks of compressed air on the hot ground and started getting our gear on. A jeep drove up with a large machine gun mounted in the rear. Being near the borders of Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, the military was checking that everything with our dive group was kosher. Maybe kosher is the wrong word. Can you say they were checking everything was halal? I don't know. You get the picture.

We divided into two groups and walked across the beach to the shore. I noticed a family had claimed an old shelter and hung up woven goat-hair blankets to block out the sun on two sides. They had two goats with them. I wondered if they were squatting there. It didn't seem like a pleasant place to live.

Stepping in the water was instant relief from the heat. It was calm and clear which made for very enjoyable diving. It was my first time in 3 years and I was surprised how quickly it all came back to me. Everything went smoothly apart from a slight hiccup with my BCD, the vest you inflate and deflate to control buoyancy, on the second dive. I tried letting a little air in it and something got stuck, causing it to blow up like a balloon. I started floating skywards like a cartoon character who has inflated himself with helium. Luckily I was only 5 metres underwater so there was no risk of decompression problems. My instructor caught hold of me and fixed the stuck inflate button as I pulled the emergency dump valve to let all the air out of my veset. From then on it was smooth sailing.

The most exciting thing I saw was a puffer fish, the type that blows up to a large size to intimidate would-be predators. Of course, it may have just been mocking me but either way it was fascinating.

Once back on dry land, it became apparent that the family under the shelter wasn't living there. They were having a picnic with the goats. Having slaughtered both of them and hung up the meat, they were in the process of grilling as we walked back to the van to take off our gear.

Assuming all goes well, by the end of 3 days Eero will be a newly certified PADI Open Water scuba diver and I'll get my Advanced Open Water qualification.

Haircut

2007-05-26T08:20:00.000-07:00

For a couple of years I've wondered in the back of my mind what I'd look like if I shaved my head. I had it done once when I was about 7, and I expect the results to be equally as bad now. But there's only one way to confirm my suspicion. Today, far away from the anguished cries of my mother and the laughter of everyone else, I find out...

Diary Notes from Jordan

2007-05-25T13:01:00.000-07:00

From India / Jordan

Day 3

We left Amman today to head south. Our days in Jordan's capital city are remembered through a haze of nargileh (water pipe) smoke and falafel binges (total consumed so far: 21). We visited some of the Roman ruins scattered throughout the city, as well as a huge blue-domed mosque. Also enjoyed evenings in a rooftop cafe where the western atmosphere was matched by the menu prices. Looking forward to the sites of Petra.

Day 4

Falafels consumed: 27

Eero and I set a target to eat 80 falafels by the time he leaves in under 2 weeks. Consistency is key. If we keep going at our current rate there won't be any problem.

We spent the day walking around Petra, the ruins of a city carved into the stone faces of hills 2,000 years ago. It's just as mythical as it looks in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and slightly surreal as some of the sandstone has eroded over time, making it seem as if the rock has melted. I walked around wondering how an ancient civilisation had managed to carve away such huge volumes of stone. I also wondered at the presence of a large Mövenpick resort just outside the gates. The connection between Swiss ice cream and a historical site in the middle east escapes me.

Day 5

Falafels consumed: 32

Eero is showing signs of falafel fatigue. He missed the day's goal by 1. I may have to think of a motivational remedy.

Another day spent walking around Petra. It's a surprisingly large area, and when you take things at the ~~lazy~~ relaxed pace we do, you could spend days covering it all.

In the afternoon we hiked through a narrow canyon full of twists and turns. It's not a hidden trail — it's even listed in the Lonely Planet — but it was virtually free of tourists. The walls were only a couple meters apart in some places and worn smooth. Absolutely stunning. Although it looks like it was formed by water, in actual fact it's due to tectonic plates ripping the rock apart. A highlight of the trip so far.

~~Pictures to follow once my film is finished.~~ Update: Links to pictures added.

On the Road Again

2007-05-19T09:32:00.000-07:00

After a 6 week pause in India I hit the tarmac this morning, touching down in Jordan. The temperature was below 25C, a very nice change from the 40+ searing heat of Delhi. I've yet to do much apart from sleep (the 6:30am flight was precisely timed to prevent me from resting more than an hour last night) but I get the sense of a very friendly peaceful atmosphere walking around the streets.

My good friend Eero is due to arrive in an hour and will be joining me for the next couple weeks. I'm looking forward to his company. For now, I'll wander around until he gets here. Sitting in this internet cafe I can hear the evening's prayer from a nearby mosque. It's a soothing sound in the clear evening air.

Last week I took a trip to Amritsar and the India-Pakistan border, where every evening the guards put on an incredible show when lowering the flag and closing the border gates. I didn't manage to write about it (and really, a video is needed to do it justice) but some pictures are online here. It has become such an event that crowds gather to watch from grandstands and there is an emcee to lead the crowd in chants of "Hindustan! Hindustan!" The guards' marching is straight out of John Cleese's hilarious turn in the "don't mention the war" episode of Faulty Towers.

There was more to the trip, like the incredible Golden Temple (pictures alone unfortunately cannot begin to give a sense of the atmosphere) and an unplanned jaunt up to Dharamsala / McLeod Ganj (abode of the Dalai Lama in exile). I hope to pick up my pen a bit more often now I'm on the move again.

Motorbiking Part 2

2007-05-18T00:16:00.000-07:00

When Sunil, one of our guards, got married last year, he received a new motorbike as part of the dowry from his wife's family. His happiness with the bike rivaled his happiness with the marriage, and I could see how proud of it he was when he showed it to me. When he invited me for a ride I couldn't resist.

We set off from the house one night — him in front with motorbike helmet, me holding on in back. After wizzing around the area, we reached some quieter backstreets. At this point we swapped places and he let me take control of the bike. It was good fun to ride, but after cruising for a bit I made a critical mistake. As I came up to a main road I braked to check for traffic before crossing. I forgot that an intersection is not the place to slow down — it is the place to lean on your horn as you blaze across and continue on your merry way.

My pause had given the man in uniform on the corner an opportunity and he waved at us to stop. He sauntered up, looked at me driving in a borrowed bicycle helmet and undershirt, and said, "driver's license." My instinct told me it was a good time to keep my mouth shut. Sunil started arguing in Hindi with the supposed policeman. At fairly regular intervals, when the policeman had heard enough of Sunil's excuses, he turned to me anew to demand with a sour expression, "driver's license." But I wasn't foold by his charms and kept my mouth shut.

After several minutes of the same, he finally turned away and waved us on. A block down the road Sunil said to me, "In India, anything is possible," and we burst out laughing. It turned out the man wasn't a traffic policeman after all but part of the "home guard" and had no legal authority to fine motorists. I then understood the disgusted look on his face as we pulled off — he had failed to convince us to pay him a bribe, a skill all government employees in Delhi should excel at.

Household Staff

2007-05-09T11:04:00.000-07:00

Most people, when they think of living in a place where they can employ people to serve them, picture a life of luxury. It's not easy to explain that when coming from a society which places a large emphasis on independence and the value of do-it-yourself, reality can be different than what you would assume.

Let me try to give a basic example: imagine you are the type of person that likes to be fairly inconspicuous in your day-to-day routine without causing other people too much bother. Now imagine that when you walk out of your house, you have a guard that — no matter that he's relaxing in his chair in the middle of a conversation with someone else — jumps to his feet, straightens his back, gives a salute and says, "Good morning sir!" And repeats the same performance every single time you leave or return.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. In India my parents have guards 24 hours a day (work requirement, not our choice), a driver, and a housekeeper/cook. I can't carry a bag up the stairs to our apartment without someone insisting on taking it from me. I can't lounge around the house without a shirt on for feeling lazy when the housekeeper is busy washing the floor.

It's harder for my mother, who is turned into a manager in her own home. Our needs are much more basic than the average family with young children that need to be ferried to and from school and other events. My father's work is close enough he prefers to bike many days. I tend to go out at night after the driver goes home, and now I've conquered the traffic system here¹ I can take myself. So my mother is the one worrying that without anything to do, our driver isn't getting satisfaction from his job. She also had to deal with a previous housekeeper who my parents found stealing. After being around the housekeeper for close to 2 years and helping her family, it was quite a personal blow.

But obviously it's not all rich man's misery and tears. Our current housekeeper, Asha, is wonderful. She has a great sense of humour and although she refused to go to school after the age of 5, she's very sharp. She has picked up English, language #3 after Hindi and Telugu, at an incredible rate. My friend Em and I decided to take her out to lunch one day for a break from her usual routine. We went via the Delhi metro which is a surreal experience even for me. It's not yet two years old, and to enter it is to transition from one of the dirtiest, dustiest cities anywhere to a modern world where everything is new and surfaces shine with cleanliness. It is so out of place that I expect it to collapse one day, as the city rejects it like an immune system rejects a donated organ.

Asha had never been before, and she gave a small shout upon seeing an escalator for the first time in her life. She was thrilled with the whole trip, from waiting on the platform to riding the train to coming up the escalator in a different part of the city.

As we walked around Connaught Place, she pointed at all the light-skinned, blue-eyed mannequins in the clothing store displays and named them "Em" or "Nigel", gender depending. When I protested that I had brown eyes Asha told me I needed to get coloured contact lenses.²

To make it a memorable experience we went for western instead of Indian food — TGI Friday's. I don't know if Asha understood the random pieces of Americana decorating the walls, and I struggled to explain the concept of a hippie to her although my mother helpfully pitched in with things like "long hair" and "smelly". But I was impressed with her willingness to try things. Had it been me trying Indian food for the first time, I probably would have had a spoonful and left the rest. Asha ate everything but the sour cream, which she deemed too strange.

Several weeks later we made homemade ice cream, one of the few foods that seems to bridge all cultures with its universal appeal. Once she learns to make it by herself and I can ask her to whip up a fresh batch, I won’t be able to complain about the hardships of living with household staff anymore.

It's simple actually — big rules over small. As we have an SUV, "conquered" is the right word. Cars, scooters, bikes, and all other lower life-forms scatter before my wheels.↩

Funny, but slightly unsettling as I know Asha doesn't like her dark skin. This isn't all that uncommon in a country which is disturbingly overt in promoting pale skin as beautiful — skincare products that claim to make you white are easy to find in stores.↩

Family Feud

2007-05-05T05:30:00.001-07:00

I’m through with film. I’m switching to a digital SLR. This won’t interest most of you, but I know my siblings, at least, will give me some amount of shit and it’s easier to start the process now so I can get it over with. Despite being technophiles in many ways, certain modernities incur their wrath. (For better or worse, mobile phones are here to stay Jolin. At least the future is looking bright these days).

Let me get to the meat of the matter. Take a look at this picture:

The colours are terrible — washed out, old, boring. Any ideas why? I have a few. Maybe the film expired. Maybe I got the exposure wrong. Maybe it went through one too many x-ray machines at airports. Maybe the photo lab did a bad job developing the negatives. Maybe the scans are to blame.

I don’t have the time or resources to pinpoint exactly where the error lies. I have lost more than one film to this and other equally frustrating problems, and at the rate I take pictures that equals months of photographs. I’ve finally reached the point where I don’t care, because there is a better way. All the issues I had with digital photography a year ago have slowly been crossed off my list, to the point where this is my new object of desire:

The Canon Digital Rebel XTi. I know, that’s strike two against me since it’s not a Nikon. Digital is a new and scary world. I’d like to pair it with this:

The Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS USM Lens. When pared with the smaller-than-35mm CCD in consumer digital cameras, this 17-55mm lense gives the equivalent of a 28-90mm zoom. I’m a one-lens person as it keeps the backpack light, so a lens with this range will give me a very nice break from the fixed 50mm I’m currently constrained to.

So what’s the catch? At a combined total of around US$1700, luxury doesn’t come cheap. I could travel a long time on that money. Unfortunately for me, and for those of you wanting more pictures on my blog, this may have to wait.

In the meantime, feel free to share your enragement at my abandonment of film. You’re welcome to try to convert me back. But I’ll warn you, you’ll probably end up wasting as much time as I have with film photography.

Delhi

2007-05-04T06:15:00.000-07:00

From India Picture...

I was holding onto my seat white-knuckled as we drove from New Delhi airport, dodging the cows wandering along the road, weaving around the huge trucks sharing space with cars, scooters, auto-rickshaws, bicycles, and people just walking alongside the traffic. This is the vivid memory I have of arriving in India for the first time 3 and a half years ago. I remember the sign hand-painted on the back of every truck: Horn Please. "Horn please?" I thought, as the sound of beeping came at me from all sides. "Surely they're not asking people to make more noise."

And I recall realising, upon seeing all types of vehicles heading up roads the wrong way, that in India there are no rules, only guidelines. This idea was reinforced every time Naveen, the driver-turned-friend from my father's work, entertained my mother and me by saying, "In India, anything is possible!" before doing a U-turn into oncoming heavy traffic, or taking a shortcut down an impossibly narrow street packed with people, animals, and cycle-rickshaws.

I also remember talking to people who had visited India in the '80s, commenting to them that it must have been such a different place back then. I was initially surprised when I heard the response, "No, not really." But as I got to know the excruciating beaurocracy underpinning so many facets of the country, I began to understand.

Our driver Sukhdev, for example, is involved in a lawsuit against a previous employer who didn't pay him for his last 3 months of work. The lawsuit was first brought 18 years ago. 3 plaintiffs in the same suit have died in the interim. It is still ongoing. This is the pace of things here.

So you can imagine how fascinating it's been to notice differences on each return visit. India is starting to change. There is now a highway leading from New Delhi airport. Gone are the pedestrians and non-motorised vehicles. Gone is the traffic heading the wrong way. It's smooth sailing, at least by Indian road standards.

Large areas of Delhi are now cow-free, the result of an effort that began a couple years ago to clear the streets of bovine roadblocks. The humorous scenario involved the government placing a bounty on each cow. Freelancing cow-shepherds then drove around spotting wandering groups of the animals, bundled them into the backs of trucks, drove across the river Yamuna and outside the city limits, and then dumped their loads. Sort of what I imagine the mafia do to witnesses after intimidating them.

Many of these steps are undoubtedly required to enable India to progress, but they do take away some of its charm. I left the flat one sunny day a few years ago and walked downstairs to the car to find an elephant there, tearing off tree branches for a morning snack. Although I may have hid it because this was my home and I wanted to act like a local, my excitement was no less than the first time an elephant ambled by the flat, owner in tow. Naveen was present on that first occasion, looking on as I scrambled to get my camera to capture the event.

"This is amazing!" I was thinking at the time. "An elephant! On the street! Walking by my house! An elephant!"

Just as amazing was watching Naveen when my mother commented to him that where we come from, elephants don't wander the streets.

"Really, ma'am?" he said with a look of wonder. "Don't you have elephants in your country?"

Who knows what changes are in store for India? The idea of elephants on the streets of Delhi may seem just as hilarious to Naveen's grandchildren as the idea of elephants strolling around DC seems to me.

The Cuba Blog

2007-05-02T11:08:00.000-07:00

It looks like the Anonymous Cuba Blogger has put up a final closing post. I wanted to mention the blog again for those that missed it the first time I linked to it — it's been updated periodically since then and is an interesting read for those curious about Cuba.

Himalayas

2007-05-01T10:55:00.000-07:00

From Sikkim / Darj...

A few days ago I got back from an 8-day trek in the Himalayas. It involved a lot of steep climbs, fog, and freezing weather. In other words, not unlike a summer in San Francisco. What was unlike San Francisco was the style of hiking. When I was living there last year I took a trip to Yosemite National Park with Anne. Between the two of us, we carried two hiking packs with clothing, sleeping bags, tent, and supplies. This is not the way things are done in India. I was with my parents and Marlene, a friend of ours. To sustain the four of us, there was a guide, a cook, 3 ponies, a pony-carer, 4 yaks, a yak-carer, and 3 porters. I could die of altitude sickness, but I wasn't going to die of loneliness.

Speaking of altitude sickness, the hike was tempting fate a little bit — my previous two bouts with high altitudes ended with me accepting bitter defeat (one with a dramatic K.O.). But this time, in ascending from 1,700m to roughly 4,500m, we did things in proper fashion and took two rest days to acclimatise on the way up. These seemed to do the trick as I had no major problems.

We had two 4am rises to hike to lookouts by dawn, but the pain and shortness of breath from the thin air was worth it. The scenery was spectacular. We had views of Kanchenjunga, 3rd highest peak in the world after Everest and K2, as well as neighbouring peaks and glaciers at the base of the mountains.

On the last evening, the four of us stood at the small Tibetan village of Tsokha looking out. In front of us, we could see for miles down the valley, and to the side, up to sharp peaks. We watched as an immense cloud engulfed the valley below us, then slowly moved upwards. Standing above the cloud in the clear air, we could see the edge of it approach us bit by bit, until finally we were wrapped in a cold white mist so thick that trees 10 meters away disappeared.

This may have been the last big hike on my trip. If so, it was a fine way to end things. I was a little worried on the drive to the starting point when we passed an overturned car on the windy mountain road, blood-spattered windshield lying nearby. It seemed an ill omen to begin with. It's lucky I'm not superstitious or it might not have turned out so well.

Risk Factor

2007-04-09T05:04:00.000-07:00

Every place has its stories of muggings and murdered hitchhikers. The difficulty when traveling is in separating hype from reality in any given place. After talking with some fellow travelers, I decided to test my feeling that China was relatively safe. I left a 1 yuan banknote conspicuously sticking out of my back pocket to see how long it would take to disappear. I walked around a market at night, the center of another town by day, and after a couple days it was still there. It stayed until a waitress pointed out I had money hanging out of my back pocket, and I should be careful because there are pickpockets everywhere. I tried to explain to her the irony of the situation but something got lost in translation. I put the yuan back in my wallet, amused in the way my theory of China being safe had been proven.

A couple nights later I bumped into what can only be called a true American character. The type of person who used the phrase "world famous in America" when describing a brand of knife he was partial to. In his 50s, he had been living in China for over 5 years and owned a restaurant which he ran with his Chinese wife. ("I used to be married to two redheads — I'm a Mormon, see — but now I go crazy for these cute little Chinese!") Just how much he did compared to his wife became less clear when he kindly offered french fries and then sent his wife to the kitchen to make them.

His experience with thieves in China proved more dangerous than mine. Of the 5 attempts pickpockets had made on him, 4 ended in spectacular failures for the would-be takers of his things. One guy had the pleasure of being upturned into the fishtank of a neighbouring restaurant, with his head held underwater until he gave up the knife he had taken. ("I'll be damned if they take my knife from me.") A second fellow had his arm broken after trying to snatch the bag he thought had been left momentarily unattended. ("I was watching him from the corner of my eye, but I waited until he grabbed the bag to be absolutely sure he was a thief before I taught him a lesson.") And when a group of thieves encircled the one-man army in Beijing and told him to get out his wallet, he surprised them by taking out the small bottle of gasoline he kept in his pocket and spraying it in their faces. ("Don't need to light it on fire — the fumes asphyxiate their lungs. Taught us that in 'Nam.")

So maybe it's possible China is dangerous and my carefree experiment proved I'm a victim of youthful ignorance. The only piece of advice I'm sure of is this: if you go to China and see a vigilante-looking type in a black cowboy hat, don't try taking his money.

Maonia

2007-04-09T04:30:00.000-07:00

It's funny that ~~Chairman~~ Dictator Mao is on all the banknotes in China. Germany didn't put Hitler on the Deutschmark, and Chile doesn't plaster Pinochet on its peso. I wonder at what point China will be forced to take an honest look at its past.

It's also interesting that plenty of tourists seem to buy Mao's little red book. If that's a hip piece of pop culture, imagine how cool it will be when I open a store in the States that sells figurines in white hoods holding burning crosses.

Blog Dump

2007-04-09T04:25:00.000-07:00

I've been in India a week, and now that I can kick back at my parent's house I've been slack with the blog. I meant to post these next few before leaving China, but things slipped.

Perhaps to demonstrate their opposition to oppression, the Chinese population uses its freedom to smoke to the fullest. Education on the effects of cigarettes doesn't seem very widespread, although the day after my 26-hour journey a train-load of people came close to finding out just how deadly smoking can be.

It was a day I was looking forward to as I only had to face a 3 hour ride before arriving at my destinatino of Yangshuo where I could relax. Unfortunately, things began to go wrong right at the start of the day.

I hoisted myself up from the train station platform to the carriage and the first thing that struck me was how full the train was. There were so many people the door wouldn't open all the way, and with my hiking pack I wasn't going to fit through the narrow opening. The second thing that struck me was someone from behind, putting his full weight against my pack and miraculously mashing me into the crowd.

After some physics-defying shifting, I had standing space. Not what I was hoping for, but I could deal for 3 hours. Then I found out that I wasn't on a 3 hour train ride after all. I had 16 hours to take in the experience. At this point, it seemed worth the effort to find the seat I had booked. After slowly making my way down the carriage — a painstaking process involving one passenger shifting a foot here, another moving an elbow there, then carefully taking a step while avoiding treading on a leg or head — I found my seat occupied by a couple people. I took a few inches of the corner and alternately sat and stood over the course of the ride. The crowd around me was very friendly, which helped pass the time.

When I took out my pen and paper to write, heads crowded in from all round to see the foreigner making strange characters with his left hand.¹ And the entire carriage hushed to listen (and then laugh) when I tried to learn a few basic sentences in Chinese. I later found out most of the people were rural farmers and their families — they had finished their work in the fields and were headed to the cities to earn money for 6 months until the harvest. This explained not only the crowds, but the greater than usual interest in me.

The real excitement started around midnight, the time when those stuck standing leant against a seat and closed their eyes, and those scrunched on the floor put their heads on their knees to catch some sleep. That was when a group of farmers huddled together, passing around a large bong while keeping a watchful eye for passing train inspectors. I don't know what they were smoking. It wasn't marijuana but it didn't look like tobacco either.

It was amusing to watch the looks on their faces, like teenagers doing something they knew could land them in trouble, but they weren't helping the hazy air. Despite the presence of wailing infants, people had been smoking in the enclosed space all day without any windows or doors to open.

At some point, the farmers had their fill and the bong went into hiding. That show was replaced by a man unsteadily making his way up the aisle, a uniformed inspector in tow. When he reached where I was standing, he seemed to decide he had had enough walking and stopped, looking unsure of himself. The inspector started giving him short, sharp prods, telling him to move. I looked at Mr. Had-A-Few-Too-Many, thinking, "If the inspector doesn't stop provoking him, he's going to blow his lid."

Sure enough, a second later the man started throwing drunken punches, arms flailing. Soon a second inspector arrived, and dodging fists aimed for his face, got the man under control. The two inspectors led him away down the carriage, and I sat down on my corner of seat, a little more awake for the front row spectacle.

Not half a minute had passed when I heard shouts behind me. I turned around to see a woman grasping weakly at the air before slumping into her seat. People crowded around trying to revive her, but nothing worked. A minute passed and she was still lifeless. After another minute an inspector made his way into the carriage. He wasn't having any luck either, but he did manage to clear some space around her. At this point her eyes were open and staring blankly. She looked dead. The inspector unlocked the window and fresh air came pouring in. But still nothing. Finally someone decided to take her somewhere less crowded. As he hoisted the woman on his back I heard her groan faintly. They disappeared into another train car, and presumably she recovered. Apparently all the smoke and lack of fresh air had been too much for her body.

The people in the carriage seemed to recover fairly quickly from this shock, and realising there was now an open window, began emptying the space of a day's worth of trash. First went a big plastic bag full of it. Then empty instant noodles buckets. Then a trash can packed to the brim. Then I stopped looking. The train arrived an hour late and I got off, thankful I didn't have to endure the 42 hour journey to Nanjing that many others were in for. By 4am I was checked into a hostel dorm, struggling to sleep over the roar of snoring emanating from an adjacent bed.

I learnt almost all Chinese write right-handed due to how characters are formed with brush strokes.↩

Missed Adventures in Cuisine

2007-04-02T04:45:00.000-07:00

I've had enough of illnesses and disasters on this trip, so I've been a little more cautious in the things I've chosen to eat while in China. In more adventerous days I might have tried "strange flavour meat from lamb's head," but not anymore. Other choice menu items I have restrained myself from eating include "fragrant and hot crap" and "old mother in relative shredded beef."

Finding a Purpose

2007-03-27T06:51:00.000-07:00

You could describe a trip like mine as being a tourist for 10 months, and that wouldn't be too far from the truth. But because a 10 month vacation sounds rich and lazy, I've been trying to find some excuse so I can say I got more out of my time than simply sightseeing.

The fruit of my labour is a "3 steps to success" plan. I've worked hard at this so in future job interviews, when asked what I did for the last year, I can say, "I gained valuable life skills!" instead of relating the story of how I chipped my tooth with a beer bottle in Uruguay. It's hard to believe, but small details like that can make the difference between being hired to do computer work (what company doesn't like a person with life skills?) and being hired to recruit for a college frat house. I plan to produce a full-colour illustrated guide in the future, but have decided to give my loyal readers an early glimpse at my secrets. Without further ado, the steps are:

Get on a moving vehical with something to sell. It doesn't matter what type of vehicle. I've seen this on buses all over South America, and now on a train in China. This technique is effective worldwide.

In your loudest possible voice — I'm talking so loud that people will pay you just to shut up — proclaim to the world why what you have in your hand is the best only one-of-a-kind thing being sold anywhere in the world and you'd be a fool not to buy it right here and pass up such a great deal so hand over your money folks and welcome to your new better life.

Perform your trick. This is the key part. The salesman on my train was poking holes in socks with tweezers and people seemed to be impressed. Don't ask me why, as putting tweezers through socks doesn't tend to be part of my daily routine. You could probably sell carrots by trying to write with one on a markerboard and showing that the colour doesn't rub off. As long as you do it with gusto it doesn't matter what your trick is.

That's all there is to it. Pass out your product so all the passengers can try writing on windows and chairs too, then go round and collect your fortune.

Here's a hint to get started: while flight attendants sell duty-free on planes, they haven't yet mastered this approach so I consider flights a wide open market. Try it on your next one.

Heading South

2007-03-27T06:03:00.000-07:00

Before I got on the train to Guiyang, I was dreading the prospect of 26 hours on a hard straight-back seat. With no other classes of travel available, I had no choice but to book it to get where I want to go in south China. I climbed on at the platform in Xian, the only foreigner in a carriage full of Chinese. Even if I hadn't had a hiking pack on my back so full it towered over my head, all eyes would have been on me. But the situation being what it was, there was no getting around my role at center stage. I stowed my pack and sat down with the bowls of instant noodles and fruit that I had packed for the trip, doing my best to ignore the attention. Next time I think I might give a wave and shake a few hands as I walk down the aisle, like a politician at a fundraiser.

It's coming up to nighttime and soon I'll be wishing for the sleeper I took on my last train journey from Beijing to Xian. It was extremely comfortable and the announcement as we left the station informed me the train would "run like flowing water." I didn't hear that over the PA system this time.

But for now I'm happy where I am. The people are friendly, and since all trash goes out the window it's pretty clean. People do hack up phlegm and spit it on the floor, but I passed on the suggestion from some other travelers to take sleeping pills so I don't plan on stretching out there. The only complaint I have is that unlike trains in India, you can't sit in an open doorway and watch the world pass by.

The Great Wall

2007-03-25T06:45:00.000-07:00

Several days before leaving Beijing I visited the Great Wall. Like a lot of other things in this country, the scale of it is immense. As I was standing in the cold and misty winter grey looking at it wind its way up and over steep hills, I couldn't help but wonder how insane you would have to be to order such a huge construction covering hundreds of miles just to keep people out. I realised I was thinking aloud when the Belgian I was traveling with replied, "And now the U.S. wants to build a wall to keep out Mexicans."

"Touché," I thought, and laughed.

Losing Control

2007-03-25T06:26:00.000-07:00

I don't like not being able to speak at least a few words in the language of the country I'm visiting. Granted, I never learnt anything in Finland apart from the essential curse words, but given the no-smile policy in effect throughout stores in that country, it didn't seem to matter if I said "perkele" instead of whatever the Finnish word for "thanks" is when handing over cash at the register.

Playing the part of the English-only tourist is something I will need to accept here in China. I'm not one to pick up a language without serious studying, especially one as difficult as Chinese. If there's anything good about the situation, it's that it's helping me learn to embrace uncertainty. Traveling isn't something that comes naturally to me - it's been a constant process of learning to leave things to chance. The less I am able to plan ahead of time, the more I can relax and enjoy the experience. Failures are frustrating, but when I do manage to, for example, make my own way to a historic underground tomb using local buses, it's a satisfying success.

Something Unexpected

2007-03-18T20:53:00.000-07:00

If the children I've seen playing in the street are any indication, badminton is popular in Beijing. I don't know why I find it surprising - maybe because I always imagined that the only people who play badminton have names like Percy or Cecil, and grew up attending posh schools in England set on large Victorian estates with extensive lawns, and wear bright white shoes with socks up to their knees when playing.

Then again, my mind should be a bit more open after Peru. I certainly didn't expect to come across kids playing impromptu matches of volleyball way up in small mountain towns. But it turns out the sport is all the rage there.

Side note: I haven't been able to access my blog for most of the past couple weeks due to reasons unknown to me (China's censorship at work?), hence the silence. This and some subsequent posts should have been up here a while ago.

Intelligent Design

2007-03-18T16:54:00.000-07:00

Comparing the world's major religions strictly based on visual appeal - and given my lack of knowledge on any other level, this is probably what I'd do if forced to pick one - Christianity would rate way down on my list. I'm sitting in a temple of Tibetan Buddhism in Beijing, and it's striking how imaginative and charismatic all the statues and paintings are. Witness, on the one hand:

Here are some of the words that come to mind which I look at this painting: Wan. Flaccid. Simpering.

Now take this Buddhist heavenly king on the other hand:

To borrow a word from my Patagonian hiking companions: badass. Everything from the character to the shapes to the colours grabs me. Stepping outside Buddhism, Hindus even get to worship a strange blue man who overcomes what surely was a debilitating skin condition to become a player.

It seems to me that if Buddhism and Hinduism combined with capitalism, their wild and imaginative styles would be easily marketable, and they could dominate new generations the world over through pop culture.

Of Signs and Change

2007-03-18T03:02:00.000-07:00

ATMs in Beijing dispense philosophy with cash. "Please take your advice", said the one I used earlier today. I assumed this was some kind of message to look deep inside myself and reject consumer culture and materialism, but I will need to find a spiritual teacher to unlock the full meaning.

Without speaking any Mandarin, I'm relying on these small translated tidbits to understand the Chinese mindstate. Two adjacent rubbish bins were labelled "recycling" and "unrecycling". I put it down as something to do with feng shui. And next to a parking lot gate, a James Brown-inspired sign read "get down please". Again, it all seems to be about balance in life. You've just spent an hour in slow-moving Beijing traffic, the lot owners are saying, so unwind, do a little breakdancing, and then we'll open the gate so you can park your car. Don't argue, it's for your greater good. You'll see.

Actually, maybe that last part isn't so far from the truth. China is developing at an insane pace. I remember my father telling me about his visit to Beijing 20 years ago, when the streets were so packed with bicycles that crossing to the other side was a challenge. This couldn't be further from the city of today, paved with highways and filled with cars. There are so many cranes building skyscrapers that from a plane you would probably mistake it for one huge construction site.

How can a place change so astonishingly quickly? Part of the answer lies in a neighbourhood I walked through two nights ago covering an area equivalent to a sizeable number of New York city blocks. It had narrow streets of cracked pavement and dirt, and the one- and two-storey houses were old and run down. Located just south of Tiananmen Square, it was very central. It was also eerily deserted.

The last vestiges of communism still give the government an unusual amount of power, like ownership of all land. This neighbourhood, like all the others that used to cover Beijing, had been cleared out by the government, its residents moved to the outskirts of the city to make way for demolition trucks and profitable new developments. When hundreds of thousands descend on Beijing for next year's Olympics, they will see a modern, thriving metropolis. The only remaining parts of the Beijing my father saw 20 years ago will be historical sites like the Forbidden City.

Were this type of development possible in the west, it would probably be very unpopular. After all, it gives no say to those whose entire lives were based in the neighbourhoods they were relocated from. Some are now faced with the dilemma of having to spend more on the commute to and from work than they actually earn in their jobs.

But maybe it's a different operating principle, focussed less on the individual than on the whole. The fact is, a huge and growing number of people are much better off than they were 20 years ago. They reason the growth here is so astonishing is because it's simply not possible under the governments of western societies. Trying to judge which way of running things is better reaches all the way down to fundamental questions of what you value in life, and how you view the importance of self versus the group.

So is China developing for the greater good? I don't know enough to argue. We'll see.

Filling the Time

2007-03-12T00:42:00.000-07:00

With so few blog updates from me, I know many of you have been wondering what to do with your lives. I have the answer to your prayers.

In Transit

2007-03-09T00:02:00.000-08:00

The first leg of my journey to China was an entry into the U.S., changing planes at Washington DC. Not having had much to eat on the previous 11 hour flight and facing the prospect of a further 5 hours, I caved and bought some airport food. I looked for the most un-fast-food-looking place I could find and settled for a toasted tuna sandwich. It was made "fresh", as in freshly transferred from the freezer to the grill, and wrapped in a couple layers of deli paper, then placed in a brown paper bag.

With no time to eat before boarding, I took it on the plane to wait until I was allowed to use my tray-table without causing whatever gruesome accidents all airlines fear will happen if you unfold them before reaching cruising altitude. (Severed arms? Dented foreheads? Passengers rendered uncontrollable by the sheer excitement of repeatedly folding and unfolding the tray-tables during the multi-thousand-foot climb? Who knows.) Unfortunately by that time the dirty little secret of the airport food stall had been revealed. The sandwich had soaked through all the layers of paper to literally drench the brown bag with grease. When I picked it up from the floor where I had left it during takeoff, there was a small pool of grease left behind. It occurred to me that it would be fitting if, when re-entering the U.S., the immigration control agent handed over one of those sandwiches when saying, "Welcome back to the United States, sir."

I wish I could remember the name of the stall to warn anyone reading this. Unfortunately the best I can do is to recommend giving a wide birth to any food around gate C-2 at Dulles International Airport. Oh Buenos Aires, I'm already longing for your empanadas and ice cream, with sidewalk cafes where people don't eat dinner until 11pm.

MIA

2007-02-14T18:44:00.000-08:00

I was meant to catch a flight out of Buenos Aires last night when I realised I hadn't rounded out my tour of hospitals, so instead ended up spending many hours going through various tests and doctor's consultations with a slightly worrying case of an inflamed appendix. But that's a story for another day. Luckily I was cleared this morning and am about ready to set off.

The real point of this post is to let everyone know I'll be out of contact for the next 2 to 3 weeks. No blog posts unfortunately so as not to incriminate myself. I'll leave you with this strip from my favourite comic of all time, Calvin and Hobbes. (Click to enlarge.)

Language Progress

2007-02-12T15:00:00.000-08:00

A few days ago I had a breakthrough. I sat down at a cafe and while waiting for my food to arrive, picked up Clarín. Now I know what you're thinking - uh oh, he's hitting the pills hard. No, it turns out that despite the name and logo, Clarín is one of the main papers in Buenos Aires. As far as I know there are no addictive properties, though they do try to draw you in by highlighting key phrases which makes it seem like you're reading a gossip column about Kate Winslet and Brad Pitt when in fact you're reading about the latest homicide.

In any case, I picked up the paper to kill time and found that I understood most of it. It took some work, but what a satisfying feeling. It's a change from my current project of reading the first Harry Potter in Spanish, which has me simultaneously looking up almost every word in my 1,100 page Spanish/English dictionary.

I also find myself having the occasional dream in Spanish. This of course can be confusing when English-speaking friends pop up and I push on trying to converse in broken Spanish with them. When I wake up I inevitably have dozens of grammatical questions about the things I said. They usually bug me until half an hour later when I can't remember the dream anymore.

A Weekend's Break

2007-02-12T14:18:00.000-08:00

If there's anything keeping Colonia del Sacramento off the cover of travel magazines, it's probably the water. Muddy and brown aren't characteristics that tend to lure people to vacation spots. Lucky for me, as I took a trip there last weekend to get away from the crowded city. I was surprised to find such a tranquil place just an hour's boat ride from the center of Buenos Aires. I spent my first day wandering around the beautiful colonial section of town, enjoying the old cobblestone streets and picturesque houses with walls of brick exposed by crumbling plaster.

A sign in the hostel I stayed at informed me that the water, as well as being muddy, had toxic green moss in some areas. But when I went to the beach the sun was scorching, so I surrendered to the reasoning of "everyone else is doing it, why can't I?" and went for a swim. A subsequent check didn't reveal any extra limbs sprouting, so no regrets thus far. Unless there's one on my back. That's always hard to see in the mirror.

The second night ended in the early hours of the morning, sitting with an Irish traveller outside a just-closed bar and listening to him having an extended debate with a local about various political leaders in South America. It was entertaining for a while; as the Irish didn't speak Spanish the conversation went something like this:

Irish traveller: Néstor Kirchner... bien?
Uruguayan mechanic: Más o menos, sí. Sí.
Irish traveller: Uhhh... Chavez? Hugo Chavez? Bueno?
Uruguayan mechanic: (Draws his hand across his throat.) No. No me gusta.
Irish traveller: But... Castro? Castro? Bueno?
Uruguayan mechanic: (Motions putting a gun to his head and pulling the trigger.) No! Muy malo.
Irish traveller: Oh. But Chavez? Bien, no?
Uruguayan mechanic: (Repeats his previous response.)
Irish traveller: And Castro... también?
Uruguayan mechanic: (Says he should be shot.)
(Repeat x20 minutes)

When the novelty of hearing the Uruguayan's yes/no responses, and sometimes accompanying violent hand gestures, wore thin, I decided bedtime had come. I went back to the hostel and mulled over the points and counterpoints both men had presented.

And so the following day, after this late-night debate, I fell asleep on a small beach which I had reached after renting a small motor scooter and cruising out on the surrounding country roads. I sat down to read and woke up a little later to the sound of waves on the sand. If more of my weekends ended like that I would probably be a healthier, less-stressed person.

Going... Going... Gone!

2007-01-31T18:59:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I had a nice surprise waiting for me when I got back from working at the food bank. Someone had left a business card on my door with a short printed note. I seems "Patricia" had someone all lined up to buy my flat. I like people who show initiative, but I was baffled as I wasn't planning on selling the place. In fact, I assumed that, being merely a tenant, I couldn't legally do such a thing. But I put those doubts aside when it occurred to me that Patricia, who makes a living in real estate, must know more than I do about the intricacies of property law in Buenos Aires.

And the more I thought about selling the flat, the more it made sense. I've learnt that you should always have some leverage when bargaining. My landlord is holding a month's rent worth of deposit and I'd quite like it back when I leave. I can imagine squabbling over a broken glass or scuff on the floor, and it sure would give me an edge if I could casually mention the impending sale of his flat. The way I see it, he'd have to cave to my demands otherwise I'll be running around China with his money. Maybe as part of the bargaining I could even make him teach me the art of making mate like an Argentinian. Anyway, I digress...

As I was saying, the deal was starting to make a lot of sense. "Not only is this Patricia a go-getter, but she anticipated my needs," I thought. She sounded like someone it would be a pleasure to do business with.

So today I gave her a call. Being a clever businessman, I had prepared for the negotiations by thinking over how much my offering price should be. I needed to make sure I would be selling for an amount that would give me bargaining power with the landlord. After all, if I offered him only $400 in exchange for my $500 back, it wouldn't be very compelling for him. So I decided to use the deposit as a base and add a bit on top. $800 seemed like a fair price to me. I just hoped Patricia would think so too.

"I received your card," I said when she picked up the phone. And then added, "me encanta!" I'm not sure if this was the right thing to say, but I've heard it often in situations when someone is really enthusiastic about something, and I wanted to start the conversation off in a friendly manner.

I told her I was very interested in selling the apartment, and she seemed enthused. We talked a bit, and I asked about the buyer she had lined up. She was vague, but it appeared that her company had lot of clients, and lots of them were keen on purchasing it. She then said she was interested in coming to see the apartment. I thought it a bit strange considering she already had a buyer, but decided to let it slide until we got to the details of the deal.

Unfortunately things took a downward turn when the conversation turned to the topic of my renting the apartment.

"How long are you renting it for?" she asked.

"Two or three weeks more," I replied.

"Great. Well, give me a call when it's cleared out," she said, and before I could summon the correct phrases in Spanish to let her know that I would no longer be in the country by that time, much less in control of the flat, the conversation had ended. When I heard the "click," I knew Patricia had put the phone down not only on our conversation, but also on my dreams of running giddily through the streets spraying everyone with champagne from the proceeds of the sale. It seems I still have some things to learn about business negotiations in Buenos Aires. (I didn't even get to the price haggling, which I was looking forward to. I had secretly decided I would drop down to $600 if need be, but would put up a good fight first. I do quite like the place after all.) For now, I suppose I'll have to keep being careful not to damage the apartment before I leave.

Love All Around

2007-01-28T16:50:00.000-08:00

From Anne's SLR Film

People in Buenos Aires have a fantastic way of replying whenever you thank them for something, be it at a store, at a restaurant, or on the street. "No, de nada," is the response, or some close variation thereof. While it may not look like much in writing, the "no" is always emphasised and drawn out in a way that makes it sound like a close friend saying "don't be silly, it was my pleasure".

The fact that this reaction to "gracias" follows as naturally as a bulb lighting up when you flick the switch is both comical and endearing. The other day as I was riding around on the metro, trying to take some pictures¹ of the old wooden carriages on the A line in rush hour, I was half tempted to blurt out a random "gracias" just to feel the warmth of dozens of "no, de nada chico"s shower down on me from all sides. I didn't, as I feared the inevitable awkward silence that would follow.

I'm slowly getting the impression that Argentina is a country that has embraced the philosophy described by The Beatles in "All You Need Is Love", and it's not only for the above reason. It's not uncommon to see couples heavily making out on park benches, in doorways, or just in the middle of the sidewalk. The love here also extends to inanimate objects like mate and the thermoses bearing hot water with which to make it. Whether relaxing in parks or strolling through a Sunday antique market, it often seemed like Anne and I were the only ones without the companionship of a gourd and thermos.

There is a very precise technique to making mate to which I am not privy. I can only assume that as young schoolchildren, Argentinians spend years in science class learning the exact temperature to heat the water to, how to pack the mate leaves in the gourd, and where to place the filter straw you drink the tea through. In all fairness, maybe my slightly bitter sarcasm comes from feeling like the kid left out of all the games of duck-duck-goose wherever I go. Though I should say that now I've started helping at a food bank, I've been initiated in the social ritual of mate drinking, and I can see the attraction.

I have heard that people in Uruguay actually exceed Argentinians in their mate obsession. Apparently some have perfected the technique of holding an open thermos in the crook of their armpit and a cup in the hand of the same arm, then shifting their shoulder slightly to pour hot water into the cup. While riding a bike. This I have decided I have to see, so I'm hoping to take a weekend culture safari there to spot it in the wild.

Unfortunately, all the pictures are far too dark. I will need to get better scans somewhere, or perhaps find some high-speed film and spend another hour in hot stuffy underground carriages to get better ones.↩

Memories of Rafting

2007-01-28T16:43:00.000-08:00

I didn't write about this at the time, but before crossing into Argentina for the last time, Anne and I spent a couple days in Futeleufú, a very small town in a gorgeous area of mountains. Although there are many things to do as a tourist, it's relatively undeveloped, lacking even an ATM (the first one was scheduled to arrive just a week or two after we were there), which was the ultimate reason we couldn't stay longer though we would have liked to. We went on a rafting trip, which Anne wrote a bit about, and during my time on the river I was wondering what the area would look like if I visited in 15 or 20 years. It's something I've often done in the small beautiful towns in the middle of spectacular nature I've been lucky enough to visit on this trip. I'm always fascinated by those "then and now" books with pictures of a city 100 years ago compared to the same points of view today, and I try to imagine the "then" pictures as the present day small towns with dirt roads, and make up the future "now" pictures in my head.

After the rafting trip I was talking to one of the guides and found that there is a project to dam the river, with construction starting in two or three years. It was a bit shocking to learn that the river I had just been on, one of the top spots in the world for rafting, whose waters have run the same path for hundreds of thousands of years, would be destroyed in just a few short years. There will be no coming back to relive the experience and see how things have changed.

Correction

2007-01-28T16:15:00.000-08:00

I made a mistake in my previous post when I mentioned Argentinian beef exports are forbidden. Attempting in depth discussions in Spanish is dangerous for me, as it seems I misunderstand things worse than Ronald Reagan when he tried to use Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" as his political campaign theme song. What I'm trying to say is, I was wrong - beef exports are allowed.

From 2 to 1

2007-01-23T16:30:00.000-08:00

From Anne's SLR Film

I'm not sure what I was thinking when I planned my stay in Buenos Aires to extend a month or so past when Anne returned to Germany. Having just got back alone from going to the airport with her, it sure doesn't feel like a good idea. We've shared a lot of good times and she's taken care of me through bad news, as well as the many times I got sick.

We've had to leave each other at airports about as many times as I have fingers on my hands. They say things get easier with practice, but in this case all it's done is let me know ahead of time exactly how hard it will be here without her.

Have a safe trip home Anne, and good luck starting your job. I miss you.

A New Home

2007-01-19T09:31:00.000-08:00

I signed a 1 month apartment rental contract on Monday. At least I think I did. The contract was in Spanish, so for all I know there may have been some subtle legalese which obligates me to donate organs too, but so far no-one wielding a scalpel has come knocking at my door. In any case, I'm now living in a one-room place in a nice area of Buenos Aires. There's a sushi takeout one block over (California rolls continuously beckon) and a video rental store nearby with a sign outside for Samuel L. Jackson's "Terror a Bordo". I can't help but think that with a translated name like that, "Snakes on a Plane" probably loses its comedic value.

I'm really enjoying having my own space and being able to buy groceries to cook. I saw a bottle of "Mexico Sauce" in the supermarket which piqued my curiosity. How do you distil an entire country into a small liquid filled bottle? And what would go in "America Sauce"? 2 parts entrepreneurial spirit, 1 part religious fervour, a dash of political corruption and a sprinkling of ignorance, all mixed in an oil base?

Food

2007-01-18T06:27:00.000-08:00

So you walk into a restaurant. The lights are dimmed and the place is nicely furnished - dark cherry wood tables, off-white cream linen. You look around and see couples talking, their faces lit by the candles on the tables. Some light music plays softly in the background.

You sit down and order yourself ravioli with a tomato cream sauce, a side salad, and a glass of wine. The food arrives and you tuck in. The pasta is fresh, the ricotta and cheese filling is subtle, the rose sauce has a touch of garlic, and all the flavours mix wonderfully in your mouth. It's one of the best meals you've had recently. Although you're stuffed at the end, you can't pass up trying a desert - a crepe filled with dulce de leche and a scoop of banana ice cream on the side. When made with real fruit and cream, banana ice cream is tough to do right. But from the first bite, it's clear this place knows what they're doing. It's smooth and creamy, not icy, and with only enough sugar and vanilla to bring out the flavour of banana, not smother the taste.

When the check comes, you signal to the waiter. "This can't be right. The prices on this bill are all mixed up."

"Oh no sir," replies the waiter, "I'm quite sure we didn't make a mistake."

"But look," you say, "right here. My main dish - you've only charged me the price of a side of fries. In fact, the total on this bill is a third of what it should be."

"That's right sir. We're running a special right now."

"Really? That's incredible! Fantastic!"

"It is sir. In fact, we're not the only ones. Kesta, next door to us, is doing the same thing. And so is Mezziati, 2 blocks south. In fact, come to think of it, so is every restaurant in this whole city."

"What an opportunity," you think as you pay your bill and walk out dumbstruck. As you wander home, you think about trying ultra-chic Olsen's the following night where a main is normally a wallet-busting $45, now reduced to an easier-to-swallow $15.

Welcome to the world of Argentinean restaurants. Of course, had the above scenario been true, the waiter's reaction would have been more along the lines of "Are you nuts? Our economy crashed. Thanks for rubbing it in my face buddy."

But as a foreigner without the problems of a devalued currency, it's a strange place to be. Places like Peru and India are cheap, but in many cases so is the quality. My experiences so far in Argentina suggest prices are low without the corresponding drop in quality. Ordering a deliciously prepared organic, free-range, grass fed steak costs little more than a Big Mac in the US. Even the airline-style meal on the bus from Bariloche to Buenos Aires came with steak. I've heard that one of the reasons meat is so cheap is because exports are forbidden. Opening up meat to exporting would raise the local price, which in turn would enrage much of the populace for whom it is a large part of the culture.

I was surprised a few nights ago to walk into what I thought would be a nice casual cafe, only to be treated to excellent service, extras like fresh bread with a tomato and herb sauce, and a pizza covered with chopped fresh basil. (In our first several months of travel Anne and I had trouble finding anything fresh. If you grew up in Ecuador you'd be forgiven for thinking carrots are grown in tins on supermarket shelves. So I was excited by fresh basil.)

It's a nice place to end my South American travels, and I think I'm going to enjoy the following weeks here in Buenos Aires. It's also interesting to try to understand the cause of the current scenario. I'm slowly uncovering memories of high school economics classes with Mr. Martin, although it's too bad many of them were scheduled right after lunch when I was at my drowsiest.

Dreams

2007-01-09T20:20:00.001-08:00

I've heard it said that when you start dreaming in another language, you know you're starting to get a good grip on it. A couple weeks ago I had a dream where I was in a store and the lady behind the counter was speaking Spanish to me. Great stuff, except I couldn't understand a single thing she said. I wonder if that counts?

In totally unrelated news, I got another roll of film developed. Pictures are online here. Try to ignore the washed out look of many of them - I really need to get better quality scans at some point. Had I had them ready earlier, this photo would have gone under the title of my "Summer in Patagonia" post.

From Chile / Patag...

Next stop: Buenos Aires

2007-01-08T15:17:00.000-08:00

Tonight my stomach is full with home-cooked steak, wine, and chocolates. Tomorrow I leave Bariloche, which has supplied me with this excellent food. (Chocolate and ice cream are the delicacies this town has a reputation for.) One of the things I've really liked about walking around here is seeing the window displays at the chocolate stores. Or more precisely, the people standing looking at them. There's one store with a chocolate fountain in the big glass display, and I love seeing full grown adults stop and stare at it, like kids seeing the newest toy on the other side of the glass just before Christmas. You don't see that innocent wonder on display by adults much.

Summer in Patagonia

2006-12-29T07:35:00.000-08:00

From Patagonia

Trying to find inspiration to write after several weeks' absence from the internet is difficult. It would be easy to continue coasting along without looking at emails or blogging but, as with getting out of bed on the weekend, what's good for me sometimes requires effort.

We ended up spending 9 days on the Paine circuit. The terrain ranged from the famous Torres to the immense Glaciar Grey, the weather from rain to snow to the occasional bit of sun to extremely windy, as this entry from the minimal diary I kept describes:

Day 3: Crossed a pass. Wind so strong it blew the spit out of my mouth and the snot out of my nose.

With gusts that literally pushed me backwards several steps, this was no exaggeration. The first half of the trail was relatively isolated and provided a chance to meet some of the other trekkers whose trip coincided with mine and Anne's. Among others was the group we ended up joining at the end of every day, the retired Alaskan couple on their fifth trip to Torres del Paine and whose hiking abilities far surpassed mine, and a woman from New York who commented on the second day that she could have seen the same scenery in New Hampshire. Anne restrained herself from suggesting she go back and finish her hike there.

Apart from the shared conversations while warming ourselves round wood-fired stoves, some of them expanded my knowledge of the English language. Memorably, I learnt the phrase "fuck this shit" can be used not only when you are tired of many days hiking and camping without a shower, but also as a concise way of signifying your desire to leave the dinner table.

The second half of the trail was more accessible to buses and ferries from the nearest town, which brought many day hikers staying in comfy lodges. They breezed past with tiny backpacks by day, and at night as I pitched tent and huddled over my camping stove to cook dinner, I consoled myself by feeling smugly superior.

Speaking of dinner, food figured prominently in the 4-5 sentences I wrote to my diary each day. It's no surprise that when spending hours every day trekking to the next campsite while staring at a spot on the ground roughly 2 meters in front of you, fantasizing about food becomes a regular pastime. I went from imagining what I'd like to eat, to telling Anne in tantalising detail how I would prepare the food (heat up the pan with olive oil, tip in chopped onions, listen to them sizzle, add salt and fresh ground black pepper while you smell the aroma of the onions beginning to caramelise, etc.), to writing diary entries such as this:

Day 5: Leftovers @ breakfast. 2 women who paid for a meal at the hut couldn't finish their food. Excellent start. Too bad we won't see them again.

All this despite eating very well considering Anne and I carried our supplies for the entire trek. Maybe my body is starting to notice the 6kgs I've lost since the start of my travels several months ago and wants them back.

The second hike was a much shorter and easier 4-day affair in Parque Nacional Los Glaciares in Argentinian Patagonia. Christmas day brought views of 2 beautiful ice cold lakes at the base of the Fitzroy peak, along with a lunch where the friend we hiked with excitedly exclaimed, "It's Christmas! What do you normally do to celebrate?" to a trio of Israelis.

Despite the short days, Anne and I, together with a couple others, rewarded ourselves with a large home-cooked steak and vegetable stir-fry dinner at the end. After 3 bottles of wine between the 4 of us, we decided to check out the only bar in town. We stopped en route to convince some renovation workers in the supermarket to open the doors at 1am and let us buy 2 more bottles, which the bar let us bring inside - a sure sign of a friendly small town. We realised the next day on the 15 hour bus ride over unpaved bumpy road just how bad this seemingly good idea was.

The next couple weeks will be a journey north, recrossing into Chile to travel part of the scenic Carretera Austral up the Andes. I'm hoping to make it to Argentina's winemaking region before heading to Buenos Aires. I've been wanting to do a bike tour of wineries - a combination, like chocolate fondue with strawberries, that has the potential to fantastically exceed the already enjoyable sum of its parts.

Out of Contact

2006-12-09T15:53:00.000-08:00

Summer has ended temporarily as I'm now far south in windy Patagonia. Boarded a plane at midnight last night, and 3 hours later I was on the runway in Punta Arenas. I managed to drift off during the flight, but sleep was cut short by extremely intense turbulent patches, complete with a woman who screamed with every jolt and drop (which meant there was a lot of screaming).

Anne and I will be hiking around Patagonia for the next 20 days without internet access, starting with the 8 day "Paine Circuit". No, I'm not joking about the name. Yes, this is my idea of a vacation.

Hope everyone has nice end-of-the-year holidays!

Snatch! Dash! Crash!

2006-12-05T15:23:00.000-08:00

On the way to Valparaiso, a seaside city an hour and a half northwest of Santiago, I thought to myself, "self, you've been getting too serious with your posts. What with all the dour political news of voting problems and passports. It's time to liven things up a bit. Start travelling. Put some action in there!" Which is why I ended up going to the hospital again. All to give you some excitement. A rush of adrenaline. Something worthwhile to read when you check my blog.

OK, maybe it didn't quite happen like that. Maybe it even involved a certain level of foolishness, but I can pretend it was otherwise.

After arriving in Valparaiso yesterday and having one of the best meals I've had in months (thanks for the cafe recommendation Jess), Anne and I checked our map and decided to following one of the short routes marked as a walking tour. The city reminded me a little of San Francisco, being set on a bay with colourful houses covering the surrounding steep hills. We rode a couple of the ascensors that are dotted around the city on the way to the start of the walk. They're sort of like elevators on extremely steep train tracks which you can take to avoid climbing stairs up some of the hills. Built in the 1880s, the originals are still running today, complete with creaking wood sounds.

Shortly after starting the walk, we began to see some shifty-looking people lazing around. Stopping to look at a local fish market, someone tried to open Anne's backpack without us noticing. But we did and he walked away quickly. In hindsight this may have been the obvious point to turn around, but theft is always a danger when you look like a tourist and it didn't seem unusual.

After walking on a bit further, we found ourselves in an area with a nice view out over some of the hills, empty save for what looked like a young university student who had been walking ahead of us. If you've noticed the lack of pictures so far, you may have guessed where this is headed. Anne got her camera out, took a couple pictures, and just afterwards had it snatched from her hand by the ex-student/newly revealed thief who then made a dash for it.

Reacting instead of thinking, I ran full speed after him only to find his friend throw a large rock at me, then another. After the first hit me on the arm and I dodged the second, it occurred to me that now was the time to stop chasing, and they ran off.

No major damage done, only bruises and cuts. In hindsight there were a lot of obvious clues we should have taken to turn back, but before it happened I had unfortunately not yet developed hindsight. I'm left wondering why the makers of our map plotted a walk through what we later found from the police is one of the more dangerous areas of town, especially so in the daytime.

Luckily as we are in Chile, the police were very helpful. Three of them accompanied Anne and me in a police car to the hospital, where I got my cuts cleaned. They waited for us and afterwards gave us a ride back to our hostel.

In the end, I lost a couple pages full of resume revisions I was in the process of making (left behind at some point in the confusion), and the thieves got a camera half broken due to the previously mentioned manufacturing defect. Good thing Anne has insurance.

Sunshine managed to break through at the end of the day, when Anne and I discovered "completos". Take a hot dog, load it with onions, tomatoes, avocado, mayonnaise and ketchup, sell it for $1, and you have a completo. Dinner was good.

If the lack of pictures has decreased your level of interest in this blog, feel free to chime in in the comments to suggest more fun antics I can get up to in order to keep the excitement level of my posts up.

Passports (and e-Voting Update)

2006-12-04T18:14:00.000-08:00

Several days ago I got up early and went to the US embassy to get a new passport. It has 3 years until it expires, but I wanted to get mine replaced before they start manufacturing RFID-enabled ones. This would give me 10 years of RFID-free travelling, which would hopefully be enough time for the government to sort out the mess the new passports are shaping up to be:

"The whole passport design is totally brain damaged. [...] They're not increasing security at all." Grunwald says it took him only two weeks to figure out how to clone the passport chip. Most of that time he spent reading the standards for e-passports that are posted on a website for the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations body that developed the standard.

Unfortunately I would have to wait 2 weeks for the new passport to arrive, and by that time I won't be in Santiago. It might be just as well, because the lady at the US services desk couldn't guarantee that the new passport wouldn't contain an RFID chip. She did give me a strange look, as if to say, "you must be one of those wacky conspiracy theorists." She couldn't understand why I wanted to replace my passport before it expired.

I'm starting to wonder how long it will take before the US gets a significant number of people in government who grasp technology. Money seems to be pouring into worthless IT projects all the time.

In some slightly positive related news, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has recommended that e-voting machines be decertified for future elections. It's up to states to decide whether or not to follow the guidelines, but after millions of dollars wasted and many voting problems, it's a step in the right direction.

Still for a Few Days

2006-12-01T16:07:00.001-08:00

It's been a bit over a month since Anne and I were last staying in a home. Here in Santiago, Carlos kindly put us in touch with friends and family who are housing us. Little things I am now appreciating:

Showering barefoot. Not being afraid to touch the surrounding surfaces that 10 other people already left hair on that day.
Kitchens. None of the hostels in Ecuador or Peru were equipped with them. First meal cooked: spaghetti the way I like it, i.e. covered with half a block of grated cheese. Eating cereal is a rediscovered pleasure too. Though I may have overdone it when I consumed close to half a kilo in less than 24 hours.
Music. In my normal life I get a hit of new music every day or two. The last two months' withdrawal has seen me build a list over 60 entries long of albums to check out when I end my travels. So the surprise presence of a Mac in our current place, in other words, a lifeline to put new music on my iPod, has seen me return to my addiction as if I was just out of rehab. There's so much to listen to it's hard to know where to begin.
Flushing toilet paper down the toilet instead of putting it in the trash can. No further explanation needed.

Hitchhiking

2006-11-30T19:38:00.000-08:00

From Chile

For hitchhiking, Chile rates somewhere between New Zealand (never waited more than 5 minutes) and Australia (stood by the side of the road for an hour, got a bottle thrown at us). It took us 20 minutes before we were picked up, but when we did, we got to ride in this. Which is where I'm sitting now, with a commanding view of the road. It's a nice way to travel, if a little shaky for writing. It's just as well you're reading the transcribed version otherwise you'd have to decipher my handwriting.

After crossing the border some days back, we took a bus from Arica, a border town in the north, to La Serena, a vacation spot 6 hours north of Santiago. The good part of the trip was that, being in Chile, the roads were good and the bus was comfortable.¹ The bad part was it was still 22 hours on a bus. We passed through terrain containing nothing other than rocks and sand. Fascinating to look at out of a moving bus. Less so, I would imagine, if we were to suffer a breakdown.

A lot of the world's astronomical observatories are scattered in the area around La Serena, due to its lack of rainfall and exceptionally clean and clear skies. There's also a small amateur observatory where tourists can observe the stars. We toured this on our second night there, and the sky was beautiful. If Anne's digital camera hadn't started acting up because of a CCD manufacturing defect, I would have been able to post some photos.

We went on a tour of nearby Elqui Valley the next day. On the way out of town, we pulled up at a stoplight to see two very angry looking men get out of their cars. I couldn't see any sign of a major crash, but from the looks on their faces you would think one had cheated with the other's wife. It didn't take long for a fight to break out. Not a small shoving match, but full on throwing punches. After the first hit, one guy appeared to make a dash for it, but it soon turned out he was heading for a nearby pile of rubble. He returned with a large rock in his hand and a fight-to-the-death look on his face. Then the light turned green and our front row seats were whisked away, leaving behind the sounds of a police siren and screaming women trying to break them apart.

Welcome to Chile.

I'm assuming that's the rare exception rather than then rule. Our hitchhiking driver is so nice he bought Anne and I a bag filled with manjar pastries and insisted on paying.

Our tour of the valley continued with an extended explanation of why Pisco wine is of Chilean, and not Peruvian, origin. Something a bartender in Peru had argued exactly the opposite of when we were in Cusco. Why exactly this is an issue remains a mystery to me. Apparently some people have managed to attach national pride to it, and as with most things to do with nationalism, logic has now left the party.

Our tour ended at a pretty little winery. Although Chile in general is much more expensive than other South American countries, it's hard not to be cheerful when a good bottle of wine is $5, and a very nice one is $8.

Looks like there's a couple hours left before we reach Santiago. I think I'll relax and watch the afternoon scenery roll by.

In general the country is much more developed than others in South America, and there is very little corruption. After a 17 year dictatorship, I'm curious as to how this came to be. I'm not aware of other countries progressing so well after a relatively recent political situation such as that.↩

Third Time's a Charm

2006-11-22T15:10:00.000-08:00

It became clear last night that my continuing lack of appetite and energy was not a holdover effect from the latest bout of fun with high altitude. After several trips to the bathroom produced unfortunate results, I realised my body had entered a competition to get sick as many times as possible on this vacation without first asking me what I thought of the idea.

So today, heading past living phone boxes - men and women charging by the minute to use the cellphones chained to their wrists - I went to the hospital to find out why my stomach was making life difficult. Tacna, being the southernmost city in Peru, is where "Chileans come for cheap medical and dental treatment," Anne's guide book informed me. "Perfect," I thought, "there's sure to be lots of high quality medical care available." I was happily ignorant that most of this was bound to be found in private clinics, rather than the general hospital I went to.

It's not easy for me to understand rapid Spanish, even less so when the goal is decoding a hospital bureaucracy where the first step is knowing to flag down a busy nurse who gives you a piece of paper to hand to a cashier in a separate part of the building, a place I discovered after stopping at 3 separate desks along the way.

However, as if someone on high was mocking me, one of the few words I did understand was "muestra". Knowing that "mostrar" means "to show", "muestra" struck fear into my heart. Sure enough, after a consultation with my dictionary, the English word "sample" materialised before my eyes. They needed me to collect a sample of what was causing my stomach so much difficulty, one of the least appealing things you can ask someone in a bad mood cause by lack of food to do. A mood enhanced after waiting outside the closed door of the testing lab, only to see a doctor open the door and walk in, revealing a lab technician behind the desk happily ignoring my repeated knocks.

I spent many subsequent hours bouncing between the consultation office, testing lab, cashier, and hospital pharmacy, where you must buy the relevant supplies and medication for the medical staff to administer you with. I also visited several pharmacies out front of the hospital, because obviously the hospital pharmacy itself shouldn't be expected to stock something so esoteric as a syringe.

Seeing my sour expression, the lady across the counter in one nearby pharmacy decided what I needed was cheering up, so she happily returned my syringe prescription with a needle, the size of which is commonly found in children's nightmares. I lugged it back to the hospital and gave it to a nurse who filled it with the medical fluids I had purchased and proceeded to inject me with it.

Over the course of the 5 or so minutes it took to expel the liquid into my arm, she told me how she hoped to visit the US one day, and how the US embassy had refused her visa request on a previous attempt. I listened sympathetically, while simultaneously hoping she wouldn't break the needle in anger at my country's refusal to let her in its borders.

I left the hospital with pills to take for 5 days, and a large drink meant to replenish lost vitamins and minerals. It tastes like a cross between liquorice and Gatorade, and I've taken to calling it "devil's brew".

The injection must have done some good as I have already regained the ability to eat more than a few bites of food, the disappearance of which handily undid in several days what took many months of sweat and toil in the gym to gain.

I topped the day off with a 1-2 knockout that started with a celebratory trip to the hairdresser's. I was asked to pick my haircut out of a magazine showing a multitude of hairstyles for men, all with so much oil they could have been sponsored by the Bush administration. As usual, my hair came out looking nothing like any of them, and for once I was glad.

I concluded with a wash at the hostel. The shower stall was the latest in a long line of whose designers omitted any kind of shelf, thereby assuming the washer possesses the abilities of a master circus juggler. As always, I opted to store soap and razor outside on the sink, in the process making the floor soaking wet. It's a technique guaranteed to make yourself known, if not popular, amongst fellow patrons. Other entries in this category include donning a dress for a pub quiz in the first year of university and clapping loudly at what I mistakenly thought was the end of a live classical concert.

Now feeling better, tomorrow's plan is to cross the border to Chile in the morning. Then I'll prepare to traverse the northern region, alternately described to me as containing "nothing", "desert", and "absolutely nothing".

Film Developed

2006-11-20T15:18:00.000-08:00

From SLR Colour Fi...

So far all the pictures I put up have been from Anne's compact digital camera. I've been shooting some pictures on an SLR, but mostly in B&W, which I won't get developed until I find somewhere I'm confident won't ruin my film when developing it. However I did just finish a colour roll, and you can see some of the results here. Nothing spectacular this time round (fingers crossed for the next roll, as always), but wanted to link it for those of you who may be interested.

Earthquake

2006-11-20T15:09:00.000-08:00

I was sitting at a cafe this morning, waiting for my breakfast of scrambled eggs to arrive, when I heard screams, the ground started wobbling, and plaster dust started falling from the walls. Earthquakes are a startling experience. I heard later this one was a 5.something on the Richter scale.

(I know, 4 posts in a day is a bit of an overload. Unfortunately that's the price you pay for subscribing to what is not only my communication with the world while travelling, but my diary too.)

Update: A news piece on the Spanish web informed me it was a 5.8, with the epicentre being a bit south of Arequipa.

A Change of Plans

2006-11-20T14:56:00.000-08:00

Two days ago Anne and I spent 7 hours on a bus getting to Lake Titicaca. At 3,800m, it's the highest navigable lake in the world. If that's ringing alarm bells, there's a good reason for it. Yes, I got altitude sickness. And I did what I do best in that situation. Spent the night throwing up.

We took the first bus out the next morning, back to Arequipa and a comfortable 2,300m altitude. I'm not sure what caused the problems at Titicaca as I haven't had problems since the Cotopaxi adventure, even in places where others have had headaches. But for now we've decided to leave the mysteries of altitude sickness for others to explore. We're crossing Bolivia off the agenda since most of the places we planned to visit are higher than 4,000m. Tomorrow we had south and into Chile.

Elections

2006-11-20T09:40:00.002-08:00

Elections in Peru were held yesterday, and just like in Ecuador they were preceded by weeks of parades in the streets and cars driving around blaring music at incomprehensibly distorted levels out of megaphones. I can't say I'm sorry the noisy shows are over.

I read a little about the results of the US elections, but didn't see the electronic voting machine problems being mentioned. When it's possible to vote multiple times on some machines by using post-it notes, or by holding down a yellow button on the back of other machines, the situation is serious. That's just the tip of the iceberg, as electronic voting machines are susceptible to problems at every stage of their use - from set up, to people casting multiple votes, to results being indetectably modified by viruses, to being unable to verify if votes were correctly recorded. Despite being happy with the election results, I think the lack of attention given to this issue is a shame.

This article summarises the results of two independent studies commissioned by the board of elections after e-voting machines used in Ohio earlier this year caused problems. The same machines that were used in many places in the mid-terms. The results are fairly devestating.

This article talks about some of the gathering evidence of voting problems in the mid-term elections. The author ends by stating:

On election day, a major piece of the mystery of "how did we let things get this bad?" became very clear to me. People that used the touchscreen voting machines, including my wife, who'd read my report and was duly skeptical of the DREs, raved about the experience. The touchscreen machines make fantastic demo units that really sell you on the idea of e-voting. So it's no wonder that states and counties across the country went gaga over these machines and just opened up their wallets when a vendor rep showed them a product demo.

[...]

DREs are awfully pleasant to use, in spite of the fact that they're not worth much as actual voting machines. Ultimately, the story of the triumph of the touchscreen DRE is really a story of the triumph of style over substance [...].

The most basic requirement for a voting machine is that it should be able to accurately record votes. The ones currently in widespread use can't do that. What does an election mean when the voting machines can't record votes accurately?

Inca Ruins

2006-11-19T19:43:00.000-08:00

From Machu Picchu

Anne and I reached Machu Picchu at the end of last week after a 4 day biking/hiking trip. It's a beautiful place, in large part due to its surroundings. And although it's impressive, I think a lot of the hype is due to the mythology surrounding it. What was it used for? Why did the Incans build a retreat in the mountains? How could it have been lost - to the rest of the world, if not locals - for 400 years? But in the end, villages on terraced mountainsides exist worldwide, and the stonework is far from the most impressive that the Incans constructed (more on that later).

I actually found Huayna Picchu the more worthwhile part of the trip. It's a set of terraces and temples built on a nearby peak - an optional 1 hour climb that starts from within the grounds of Machu Picchu. The structure is so steep that when descending the shallow stairs you have to lean against them to stop from falling. How the Incas ever managed to construct the buildings on that peak I don't know.

It's unfortunate that Peru has a monopoly on Machu Picchu sites worldwide because they price it accordingly. Want to hike the 4 day Inca trail? You're looking at $300/person. Maybe you just want to see Machu Picchu. Train + entrance runs around $90/person. Our trek was somewhere between those numbers. I'm glad to have been, but the cost makes a return visit highly unlikely.

During the hike Anne and I were attacked by mosquitoes which left the itchiest bites (warning - ugly foot picture) I've ever had. I've often wondered in summertime if wiping out mosquitoes would damage some part of the world's ecosystem, or simply provide a huge relief to humanity in general, and me in particular.

After returning to Cusco, Anne and I visited Sacsayhuamán, Q'enqo, and Pukapukara, all sites within 15 minutes drive of Cusco. Out of all the sites I saw, Sacsayhuamán is easily the most impressive. It's an amazing example of the expertise Incans had with stone. Constructed out of enormous blocks, fit perfectly together, no one today yet understands how the Incas worked the stone. And with evidence suggesting they didn't use the wheel, nobody has a compelling suggestion of how they moved the huge pieces either. It's incomprehensible to me how a stone like this ever could have been shifted without the use of modern machinery.

Now I Can Ride a Bike

2006-11-12T20:10:00.000-08:00

From Cusco

Other countries require months of classes, practice and a license. Peru requires $25 and a face. That's how I learnt to ride a motorbike. I spent 4 hours terrorising the roads and dirt tracks around Cusco today. Beautiful scenery and great fun. And now, if I ever find myself on the set of an action movie, I can jump on a bike and make a high-speed getaway with screeching tires. I'm adding "motorbiking" to my list of half-skills, which also currently includes horseback riding and singing.

Oh, and when I'm wearing it, the colour of the helmet is officially known as "danger yellow".

Painful Steps

2006-11-10T13:46:00.000-08:00

From Colca Canyon

I'm walking with slightly achy legs from yesterday's final day of a 3-day hike in Colca Canyon. The "Canyon" is more of a cross between a valley and a canyon, but suffice it to say it's steep. And deep - about 3200m, versus 1600m for the Grand Canyon. The first day was the toughest - we descended 1.4km in altitude and followed that by a 400m climb. By the end of the day we didn't have the energy to eat dinner, just crawl into our tent and sleep.

The hike took us through some small villages where the only access is by foot or donkey on steep rocky paths. One of the more amazing parts of the hike was being passed by locals literally jogging down these paths in nothing more than sandals. Even without a backpack there's no way my legs would be strong enough, nor my feet accurate enough, to do that.

The second day ended in Oasis, a small tourist spot where entrepreneurs set up channels fed by nearby waterfalls to irrigate grass and fill swimming pools. No need for chlorine - with an unlimited supply of water they could empty, clean, and refill the pools every day.

The last day was a nearly 4 hour straight climb, ascending approximately 1km in the hot sun. The 7 hour bus ride back to Arequipa was uneventful, though for some reason it was missing a salesman, an inseparable part of most bus journeys (along with reggaeton music and Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie" - a song I can't wait to never hear again). They stand at the front in the aisle and talk for 20 minutes, extolling the virtues of the fantastic product they're selling. Then they hand out samples to everyone on the bus, finish with a round-up of all the benefits, and see if anyone is interested in buying. At first, I was baffled as to what they could talk about for so long. Now, with limited Spanish, I know that most of the time they have in their hand seeds of an amazing medicinal plant that can reduce ulcers improve your sight help aching joints stop runny noses soothe sore throats cure cancer! Although one man managed to talk for 20 minutes about the Jolly Rancher sweets he was selling.

Joking aside, it seems like a tough job and has raised questions, like who decides which salesman gets to take which bus? Do they have to pay fare? After riding for half an hour, how do they get back home?

Tonight we'll take an overnight bus to Cusco. It used to be a central Incan city - I hear now it's gringo central. Machu Picchu and other Incan ruins are next on the agenda.

Southern Peru

2006-11-04T16:40:00.000-08:00

(Forgot to post this after writing it a week ago.)

I hadn't expected much from Peru. Before going all I heard was horror stories from other travellers about the dire state of the economy, the corruption, and the danger of getting mugged on the street or threatened in a taxi. Luckily for me, so far so good.

Anne and I decided to bypass Lima completely. Our overnight bus arrived at 11am, and we caught a 5pm bus south to Arequipa. Sometimes it pays not to be overly suspicious and hostile of strangers, which was proved when we met a very friendly Peruvian in our stopover time. Anne and I ended up spending a pleasant few hours practising our Spanish and walking around Lima with him.

As far as Lima itself, it seems to have some nice areas but my 5 hour impression doesn't make me regret bypassing it. Arequipa itself has a very nice center, equally as nice to walk around as Cuenca.t was the deepest).

Nighthawks at the Diner

2006-11-03T12:23:00.000-08:00

After the bad Jean-Claude Van Damme action movie ended and the subsequent bad Chinese action movie finished, I was reclined in my seat travelling on the darkened bus southbound in Peru, not feeling very sleepy. The type of situation that random on an iPod is perfect for. After a few songs, one of the tracks from Tom Waits' "Nighthawks at the Diner" came on, and I knew I had found the music to fit my mood.

I don't often listen to this album, but it's one of the handful that I haven't erased any tracks from. I can count on one hand the number of albums I've given that honour to.

I remember when I first heard the album. I walked into a record store without much of a purpose other than killing time. I saw the album cover, with Tom Waits sitting in the window of a diner, on a listening stand. I put the headphones on and in the first 30 seconds I was hooked. The sound immediately put me in a smoke-filled room, people sitting around small tables, some talking, some drinking. The music starts, a mixture of jazz and blues - an upright bass, piano, saxophone, drums. Tom Waits' voice comes through like a bar singer in a detective film-noir. His stories are a depressed Garrison Keillor, with tales of the down and out, diners with bad food, Warm Beer and Cold Women, and the fantastic closing storytelling of Big Joe and Phantom 309. His delivery is sometimes spoken, sometimes singing, possibly tipsy.

When travelling around, I'm always stuck when people ask about traditions where I come from. The US doesn't have much in the way of history or traditions compared to other countries. But it has innumerable different types of pop culture. As far as I'm concerned, "Nighthawks at the Diner" captures one piece of Americana perfectly. It's not for everyone. A lot of people I've shown it to just don't take to it. Maybe because it's not catchy pop music, but more like a moody audiobook with jazz backup. I like listening to it start-to-finish.

Into Peru

2006-11-02T13:31:00.000-08:00

From Peru

Last Friday I finished my 4 weeks of language school. I am supposedly at an intermediate Spanish level now, but locals would probably argue with that. Have successfully crossed the border into Peru and spent a couple days at the beach in Mancora. Tried surfing for the first time, but didn't get too far. Though I did manage to hit my funny bone hard enough that it bruised. Such is the price of this tough life.

In an hour will be catching a bus to Lima, and then on to either Cusco or Arequipa, depending which route works out best. It's a long way. 16 hours for the first bus. 18 or 22 hours for the next one, depending where we go. I'm not looking forward to it, but it's a lot cheaper than a flight.

3 minutes left on this computer, so I have to head out. Next entry will either be from Colca Canyon or Machu Picchu.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

2006-10-27T18:06:00.000-07:00

When the prairie is on fire you see animals surrounded by the fire; you see them run and try to hide themselves so that they will not burn. That is the way we are here.

-Surrounded

I picked up this book at a hostel in Quito and couldn't put it down. I finished it shortly after getting to Cuenca. It details the American expansion westward from 1850-1900 from the perspective of Native Americans. If it was fiction, I'd consider it one of the saddest books I've read. That it's non-fiction makes it disturbing and heartbreaking. It filled a gap in my knowledge that I only had vague ideas about beforehand.

My idea is that, unless removed by the government, they [the Indians] must necessarily be exterminated. ... The advantages that would accrue from the throwing open of 12,000,000 acres of land to miners and settlers would more than compensate all the expenses incurred.

-Frederick Pitkin, former miner and then-Governor of Colorado (which contained the Indian territory he wanted to "open")

Of the 3,700,000 buffalo destroyed from 1872 through 1874, only 150,000 were killed by Indians. When a group of concerned Texans asked General Sheridan if something should not be done to stop the white hunters' wholesale slaughter, he replied: 'Let them kill, skin and sell until the buffalo is exterminated, as it is the only way to bring lasting peace and allow civilization to advance.'

-Another tactic designed to destroy the Indians' livelihood

"From down the creek a large body of troops was advancing at a rapid trot... I looked toward the chief's lodge and saw that Black Kettle had a large American flag tied to the end of a long lodgepole and was standing in front of his lodge, holding the pole, with the flag fluttering in the gray light of the winter dawn. I heard him call to the people not to be afraid, that the soldiers would not hurt them; then the troops opened fire from two sides of the camp." ... By this time hundreds of Cheyenne women and children were gathering around Black Kettle's flag. Up the dry creek bed, more were coming form White Antelope's camp. After all, had not Colonel Greenwood told Black Kettle that as long as the United States flag flew above him no soldier would fire upon him? White Antelope, an old man of seventy-five, unarmed, his dark face seamed from sun and weather, strode toward the soldiers... "He came running out to meet the command holding up his hands and saying 'Stop! stop!' He spoke it in as plain English as I can. He stopped and folded his arms until shot down." ... When Left Hand saw the troops, he stood with his arms folded, saying he would not fight the white men because they were his friends. He was shot down.

-Beginning of the description of the Sand Creek Massacre, only a small glimpse of the horrors soon to occur

So documents Dee Brown the various ways millions of Indians were removed from their land and/or exterminated, otherwise known as genocide in today's language. Whether it was through brute military force, elimination of their food supply, agitating and organising armed settlers, or forcing them onto barren reservations, one by one all the tribes of Indians were pushed out to make way for the expanding nation of America.

We have sat and watched them pass here to get gold out and have said nothing... My friends, when I went to Washington I went into your money-house and I had some young men with me, but none of them took any money out of that house while I was with them. At the same time, when your Great Father's people come into my country, they go into my money-house [the Black Hills] and take money out.

-Long Mandan

Miners wanted gold, settlers wanted the best pieces of property, and a combination of racism and Manifest Destiny made stealing Native American land an easy sell. In remarkably short periods of time, areas once declared to be Indian property "forever" and "permanently" were soon overrun, and one by one, each treaty made between the Native Americans and the United States government proved to be worth nothing more than pieces of paper.

Apart from the fascinating history, it's amazing how Dee Brown managed to turn archival records into a gripping narrative as good as any novel. I can only imagine the amount of research that went into the making of the book.

When I was at Washington the Great White Father told me that all the Comanche land was ours, and that no one should hinder us in living upon it. So, why do you ask us to leave the rivers, and the sun, and the wind, and live in houses? Do not ask us to give up the buffalo for the sheep.

-Ten Bears of the Yamparika Comanches

"It is only six years since we came to live on this stream where we are living now," Red Dog said... Another chief remembered that since the Great Father promised them that they would never be moved they had been moved five times. "I think you had better put the Indians on wheels," he said sardonically, "and you can run them about whenever you wish."

-Indians talking to a commission sent to take away their land

My friends, if you took me away from this land it would be very hard for me. I wish to die in this land, I wish to be an old man here... I have not wished to give even a part of it to the Great Father. Though he were to give me a million dollars I would not give him this land... When people want to slaughter cattle they drive them along until they get them to a corral, and then they slaughter them. So it was with us.

-Standing Bear of the Poncas

Recommended.

Stealing an Election

2006-10-27T17:25:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the almost always high quality tech news coverage at ArsTechnica crosses over into more general interest subjects. They're currently running a feature article about how to hack an election. The entire article might not hold your interest, but the first page is worth reading.

Excerpt:

What if I told you that it would take only one person—one highly motivated, but only moderately skilled bad apple, with either authorized or unauthorized access to the right company's internal computer network—to steal a statewide election? You might think I was crazy, or alarmist, or just talking about something that's only a remote, highly theoretical possibility. You also probably would think I was being really over-the-top if I told you that, without sweeping and very costly changes to the American electoral process, this scenario is almost certain to play out at some point in the future in some county or state in America, and that after it happens not only will we not have a clue as to what has taken place, but if we do get suspicious there will be no way to prove anything. You certainly wouldn't want to believe me, and I don't blame you.

I'm not sure why problems with voting, a cornerstone of our current society, have flown under the radar of the mainstream press for so long. Serious problems with e-voting machines have been documented for years, and in that time I haven't seen a general awareness of it. Given that this article details how to go about stealing an election (information which is already available), maybe it will serve as a wake up call for a slightly larger number of people and we will see the companies, politicians, and shady practices responsible for putting the current e-voting systems in place put under some scrutiny. I can always dream...

Full article here.

Trouble-Free Weekend

2006-10-24T13:07:00.000-07:00

From Cuenca

Went hiking in Cajas national park on Saturday, only 30-40 minutes outside of Cuenca. Stunning scenery. Like Yosemite in the US and Milford Sound in NZ, the landscape was created by receding glaciers carving away rock faces. They left behind lakes everywhere. Went on a hike that lasted 5-6 hours. It was a very relaxed pace, although the altitude (3,400m-3,800m) made me short of breath fairly easily. For once, no disasters to report. Some of the others had minor headaches, likely due to the altitude.

After the hike we got tired of waiting for the bus back and eventually hitched a ride. One of the best decisions of the day. Riding in the back of a pickup with the sun shining and the wind in my face was the best way to admire the landscape.

Guitars

2006-10-24T12:34:00.000-07:00

From Cuenca

Last Friday our Spanish teacher, Fausto, took us to see Luis Uyapuari, an excellent guitar maker. Fausto knows Luis through working with his brother at a language school. Very nice person, and makes beautiful guitars totally by hand. I wish I had taken some closeups of the guitars, but unfortunately all I have is this picture.

From Cuenca

If you click on it, then click the magnifying glass, you can make out some of the design work. If I was a guitarist with money to spend, I'd have ordered one right there. The guitar in the picture cost a chunk of money, but it was cheap compared to the equivalent work bought in Europe or the US. If anyone has a passion for custom-made guitars, I can put you in touch.

Photos Galore

2006-10-19T20:57:00.000-07:00

Lots more photos online.

Mascotas por Almuerzo

2006-10-19T12:02:00.000-07:00

From Cuenca

The other excitement yesterday was trying a typical Ecuadorian dish, cuy. That's guinea pig in English. You can see them being sold at the market - cute little furry pets that they pay $10-$15 apiece for, drop into a sack, take home, break their necks, pop out the eyes, hold upside down to drain the blood, dunk in boiling water to remove the fur, then roast over a fire for 30-45 minutes.

Tastes similar to chicken, but more salty. There's not a lot of meat on each one, and it takes some work to eat it. Here it is on a plate:

From Cuenca

The lobster claw-looking part is actually the rear legs.

Salsa

2006-10-19T08:22:00.000-07:00

From Cuenca

Before you jump to conclusions, no, I'm not imitating Nelly. This is the result of my latest slightly worrying adventure. Wednesday night there are salsa lessons at my language school, and afterwards some of us go to a little salsa club called La Mesa. Last week was a lot of fun - I've never seen a dancefloor where people move so well. Some people are just incredible to watch, spinning in all directions, pushing off the walls, all the while making it look so stylish.

This week I planned to go back again and try and practice the latest basic moves I learnt in class. I got there with a bit of a stomach ache, but after sitting down it seemed to disappear. I went to the bar with Anne to get a drink, and my stomach started hurting again so I decided to go back and sit some more while I watched other people. My stomach ache suddenly got very bad and then my vision clouded over. The next thing I knew I was being woken from a dream, feeling extremely sleepy and confused as to why I was waking up to people crowded all around me instead of a bedroom.

The bandage is covering the nice bump on my head that I got from falling forward off my stool. I was lucky once again to have a medical student there to give advice, and everyone around was extremely helpful. Today I feel fine. I went to a clinic this morning to get checked out, and the doctor's opinion was that passing out was probably caused by my stomach ache, not anything related to a more serious condition or the altitude. If it happens again I'll go back and have more extensive tests done. Fingers crossed that won't be necessary. For now I'm spending the day resting and will go back to classes tomorrow.

I don't know if I've ever passed out in my life before, but it seems I'm almost making a sport of it on this trip.

Call Me Nacho

2006-10-11T15:59:00.000-07:00

That's what I tell some people my name is because when I say "Nigel", they end up pronouncing it nacho anyway. It's possibly my favourite nickname so far.

Ecuador has elections tomorrow (Sunday). Alcohol ceased to be served or sold everywhere starting at noon on Friday. Everyone of voting age is required to vote. According to my shakey understanding of Spanish, if you don't vote you face some type of fines.

It's getting on for 2 weeks that I've been in Cuenca. Ahora yo peudo hablar un poco español. Learning the language has been more fun than I ever imagined. Frustrating, when I realise how much I don't know how to say, and how much I don't understand, but fun all the same. It's so immediately rewarding because as soon as you learn something, you get the feedback of people understanding you. The host family that Anne and I are staying with are very friendly, and Ruth (the mother) has a great way of explaining things with her hands and simple words when we don't understand.

Anne and I spent our first weekend camping at Ingapirca, a small set of old Incan ruins. Apparently the Cañari people, who were there before the Incans conquered the area, had a society where the men cooked and washed and the women worked the fields. When we packed up and headed out after one night, a dog informed us by way of chasing us off the land that the place we camped on belonged to a farmer.

Today I went horseback riding for the first time in my life. It was good fun - got to ride in some hills which gave great views of the countryside. At a couple points we had the horses break out into a full on gallop. They go amazingly fast. I'm not used to having an animal carry me at high speed, and when I went around a corner I had to remind myself that I wasn't in a car that would spin out of control because of the deep bumps in the dirt path. After 4 hours of riding I'm feeling somewhat bruised.

We had a great guide (Fernando), which made a nice change from our Cotopaxi experience. He was very knowledgeable, and has started a farming cooperative that aims to be 80% self sufficient in a few years. They sell some nice dried fruit & meat which will go well on a hiking trip next weekend.

Fernando told us about a trip he made during the past week. He had a horse which wasn't doing so well in the high mountain altitudes, so decided to take it to his friend's ranch on the coast. Him and his friend made the 4 day journey on horseback, sleeping a couple nights under the stars. Sounded fantastic, and also made me realise that there probably aren't many areas in the US or Europe where you can still do that.

That's all for now. Pictures to follow in a few days. For some reason the computer at my host family's house won't let me upload any.

Arrived in Cuenca

2006-10-02T16:05:00.000-07:00

Got to Cuenca after an all-day journey yesterday. Took a train from Rio Bamba where everyone sits on the roof for the entire 7 hour journey. Beautiful mountains and countryside everywhere. Arrived in Alausi in the early afternoon and took a 5 hour bus ride to Cuenca.

First Spanish lesson was this morning. Intense, helpful, fun, hope it stays this way. Not sure how much I'll be able to retain; so much to learn.

Had a papaya for breakfast. Always confuse the name with pomegranate. Made the mistake of trying to eat the seeds. Definitely not the same thing. Will probably remember from now on.

Climbing Cotopaxi: A Final Note

2006-09-30T08:13:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Anne and I met up with the two hikers who had helped us in the hut on Cotopaxi. We talked a bit about what had happened and I found out some more information. The guide who had taken me down from the hut to the car (different person from Anne and my guide) had gone back up afterwards to do the climb with them. Apparently while we were on the way down I passed out.

It really unnerved me to find this out. Partly because I felt very aware during the entire ordeal. Nothing was hazy, I could think clearly, and I was very much conscious. Or at least I thought I was. It's scary to realise I passed out and had no idea.

Even more scary was finding out that 60% of people who pass out in altitude situations like that don't make it. Food for thought.

On a more cheerful note, I'm completely fine, so M&D there's nothing to worry about. I'm leaving Quito today to head south to Cuenca. Tomorrow Anne and I will meet our host family, and on Monday we start Spanish lessons.

A Question about Film

2006-09-28T14:52:00.000-07:00

I'm looking for advice - I mistakenly shot an entire roll of 100 ISO black and white film at 400. I took it to a B&W developing place in Quito, but all my limited understanding of Spanish allowed me to decipher, through fast talking and handwaving by the guy on the other side of the counter, is that I'm screwed. Is there anything I can do, whether it involves something special when developing the film into negatives, or when making prints, that will save some of the pictures? I know that all of the pictures will be hugely underexposed but I'm hoping there's some way not to lose the roll.

How to End Up in Hospital in Less Than a Week

2006-09-28T14:41:00.000-07:00

So maybe you're wondering what I was doing standing by the side of the road eating cookies at 11 at night, some 50 miles outside Quito in the middle of nowhere. Maybe not, but I'll tell you anyway. Let me rewind a bit, past the taxi ride, the rush down the mountain, the headache, back to a couple days ago when Anne and I were walking around town figuring out how to spend our last few days before heading to Cuenca.

We were thinking of doing a jungle tour - a few days seeing wildlife, taking canoe trips, visiting villages - which looked interesting enough. But then we found out we could hike up Cotopaxi, a volcano a couple hours from Quito. Definitely the better option. A good hike, amazing views, and an elevation of 5,896m, which meant using mountaineering boots, crampons, and ice picks. Who can resist a good challenge?

Yesterday morning we set off. A newly-married Italian couple joined us. They were doing a 1 day trip, up to the base of the glacier and back, whereas our trip was two days. The itinerary involved a short hike to a hut at 4,800m (15,748 feet), lunch, another short hike to the glacier at 5,100m (16,732 feet) where we would have crampon and ice pick training. We'd sleep for a bit, then at 1:00am set off for the peak, a 6-7 hour trek, to reach it at dawn. We'd be back at the hut at midday, and back in Quito in the afternoon.

Before climbing to the hut we made a couple stops. At one we saw a canyon carved by floodwater rushing down the mountain after the last eruption. At another, we saw a small beautiful lake. Once at the trailhead, we packed our gear in the wind and flying dirt and began the hike to the hut. We started at what seemed like a ridiculously slow and easy pace, but it soon became clear that at that altitude it was necessary. The 300m climb was tough and took an hour. After lunch we climbed another 300m to the base of a glacier and learnt the proper use of crampons and ice picks.

It was during this part of the trip that I began to feel funny. At first I thought I was just tired from the hiking at high altitude. By the time we got back to the hut, I needed to lie down. I was hoping that I could sleep for 7 hours and be OK by the time I got up at midnight. An hour later, I had a bad headache, and after another half hour it was pounding. I knew I wouldn't be able to climb the peak, but was hoping it would die down and I could sleep until it was time to go down the next day.

Anne asked some of the other people at the hut what to do. Thankfully she had no problems with the altitude and took care of me the entire time. The advice was to take two advil and drink lots of water. By this point I had the worst headache I'd ever experienced. I kept trying to shift my head and somehow rest it so that it didn't feel like I was getting stabbed. The advil and water didn't succeed in getting rid of my headache, but it did succeed in making me throw up a couple times. Bad news. Even worse news was that our guide was taking the Italian day-hikers back down the mountain, so no one was there to take Anne and me down.

A little while later, after pills provided by two experienced hikers who thankfully came to help, I was throwing up again. Anne started packing my things so we could leave as soon as our guide showed up.

It was dark by that point and the air had chilled, so the two hikers and another guide helped me into layers of warm clothes and my boots. When our guide showed up, we started down immediately. The hour climb to the hut took 5 minutes in reverse. The others helped me into the front seat of the car, reclined almost flat, and we set off for the hospital.

It took over an hour to drive back down the mountain and out of the park, a bouncy ride over twisting dirt roads (more vomitting), and then finally we were on blissfully smooth paved roads. My headache got better and better as we descended, and I was doing fine when we got to the hospital. I was hooked up to oxygen through nose tubes, then lay there while the nurse apparently went to watch the soap opera I could hear coming from a TV nearby. I lay there enjoying what people in New York and Tokyo pay top dollar for at hipster bars. After a little while a doctor came by and checked out my lungs, breathing, pulse, and temperature and said I was OK. I was given a prescription, and that was that.

The guide set Anne and I up with a taxi for the 1.5 hour ride back to Quito. I felt completely normal again, and hungry too because of my newly-emptied stomach. Since we hadn't done the summit climb, we still had some of the cookies and chocolate we took along as snacks. We had just broken out a pack of Chips Ahoy when we felt two thuds - BAM! BAM! - and then heard a squealing eeee-eeee-eeeeeee as the driver pulled the taxi to the side of the road. We hit something, whether it was a rock or an animal I don't know, but it managed to take out two tires on the right side of the car. The driver radioed for help, and Anne and I got out of the car, eating our snacks as we watched the driver jack up the car and start changing one of the tires.

Soon another taxi pulled up, lent the driver his spare, and we got in and left in the second car. Our new driver liked his music loud and 80s. Although he made exceptions for essential newer hits like Blue by Eiffel 65. The rest of the ride passed by uneventfully, and by the time we reached our hostel in Quito at 1 in the morning I felt like I had lived 4 days in the space of one.

The question now is how to top this experience. It can't be all downhill after the first week. Maybe we'll try being dropped out of a helicopter and skiing down a mountain. Maybe we should go back to Cotopaxi and do it there.