Photos: author

I came to Rishikesh to relax, to write, to bathe in the Ganga, to be left alone. It’s exactly as easy as I remember it being when I first came five years ago–the heart of the “banana pancake trail.”

Rishikesh is listed on the back cover of Lonely Planet as the yoga capital of the world. Unsurprisingly, there are foreigners everywhere, and Ayurvedic apothecaries, massage centers, Nutella, Sai Baba-branded incense, chillums.

Didi’s East-West Café and Little Buddha Restaurant offer avocado lassis, cinnamon rolls, homemade kombucha. Eggs, toast, and weak Turkish coffee are available together in a set as ‘Israeli breakfast number two.’ These things are, I think, meant to seem familiar and comforting to foreigners; but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where they’re native to. Tourists who met and talked philosophy over lukewarm beer in other cities run into each other here again.

Every day I indulge myself in an Americano in air-conditioned Café Coffee Day. There are big windows in the front that look out across the street at the local jeep stand. People stare in at the mostly foreign customers, sipping our expensive coffees and magenta-colored frozen mocktails.

I imagine we look comfortable, entitled, ignoring the world outside of our glassed-in interior. I have an odd sense of guilt at being here. It’s almost too easy. I get caught in this trap of equating struggle with valor, with worth. As though by choosing to stay here I’ve temporarily checked out of India.

I keep thinking about a question someone asked me when I was here three months ago for the Kumbh. Ben, a Canadian tourist who’d also gone to Haridwar for the big bathing day, had heard that my friend Neel was fluent in Hindi and quite knowledgeable about Hinduism and North Indian culture. Ben wanted to know what was “more authentic” about my experience of the Kumbh because I was with Neel. The question startled me; I had no idea what to say. But how fitting, to ask such a thing here.

Photos: author

A silk merchant in Banaras once told me about attending a family wedding in Mumbai. It was a lavish, modern affair; the tikkas, normally made from sandalwood powder, were made instead of the dust of pearls. Out of all the male guests, the silk merchant was the only one in kurta pajama; the rest wore three-piece suits. Everyone wanted to talk to him, listen to his stories told through paan¬-stained teeth.

They were delighted: here, in Mumbai, a pakka Banarasi! Indians, too, cling to a vision of the real.

What and where is this pure, pious embodiment of Indianness that we are searching for? If it exists, so must its opposite. Before I came, an acquaintance sent me an email suggesting some possible destinations. He mentioned Pune, but warned in capital letters: “It’s NOT INDIA.”

Yes, India is changing. But if Rishikesh, Pune, and the pinstriped Mumbai businessmen aren’t Indian, what are they? Are we willing to relegate them to being as countryless as the banana pancake? The truth is, one of the things that defines India for me is how fluidly, how comfortably seeming contradictions coexist here–in her landscapes, her experiences, her people–until they no longer appear antithetical.

Here in Rishikesh, I read the Hindustan Times over my Americano. Today’s cover shows a girl in profile sitting on a raised platform. Her eye makeup is heavy and she’s wearing mounds of red silk and a garland of marigolds around her neck. The caption explains: She is a fifteen year old living goddess, revered as an incarnation of Kali. Before her kneels another girl wearing jeans and a t-shirt. The goddess is blessing her. Both girls have just passed the high school leaving certificate exam; the goddess is the first sitting deity to ever do so. Her success in the exam “[has set] her on course for a career in banking” after she retires when she reaches puberty.

Every day I go to the beginner’s yoga class at the ashram where I’m staying. One night I get drunk with my teacher, Praveen, and he tells me it’s only an ashram in name. He refers to the owner as “fatty man.” Sometimes no one else shows up for class. When it’s just the two of us, he doesn’t touch the threshold of the room and then put his hand to his chest when he enters. He doesn’t ask me to finish the session with Om chanting like usual. I could feel disillusioned when another batch of students appears the next day and again he has us sing shanti shanti shanti, but I don’t.

Seven years ago Praveen left the business world, or, if you prefer, renounced it. He lived in the forest with his guru, practicing eight hours a day, eating enough to satisfy only three quarters of his hunger. He missed his motorcycle, his cell phone. His friends and his parents distanced themselves.

When he was young, they took him to hear famous babas lecture on the right path, the holy way. Now they want to know how he’s going to make money, if he’s serious when he says he won’t get married. These days he eats finger chips and oils his hair, and he has another scooter–its model name is ‘Pleasure.’ He likes telling stories about the discotheques he went to back when he was “commercial.” I’m still getting more flexible every day.

I spend another comfortable night at my fake ashram, the banker becomes a yogi, the goddess becomes a banker. Today she doles out blessings; tomorrow, pin codes and deposit receipts.

Should I be disappointed? She shares the HT cover with a story on a new three billion dollar international airport terminal and another about the recent slew of so-called “honor killings” in metropolitan Delhi. Authenticity doesn’t sound so pretty now. But it sure is shocking, it sure is different.

In the morning, I start thinking about going back to Banaras. But I won’t make any decisions before I’ve had my Americano.

Photo: thomaswanhoff

I was lying face down on the table when my masseuse whispered into my ear, “Hello.” Five minutes into a massage, it seemed like an odd time for a greeting. When I lifted my head, she was pointing to my wife, whose neck was on fire. The flames were not particularly high, but then again, my wife’s neck isn’t very big. But that’s really not the issue when you‘re pulled from what should be a relaxing experience.

In a normal situation, I would have doused her with water to snuff out the flames. However, there wasn’t a faucet in the room, and I hadn’t mapped out a route to the nearest hose. There was also the issue of being completely nude, but I had dropped my shorts for so many masseuses that the rush had long since worn off.

Of course, this situation ⎯ like many I’ve encountered in China ⎯ was not normal. In fact, the experience was a bit surreal, which is probably why I just stared agape until the masseuse smothered the flames. It wasn’t until I put my head back down that it occurred to me: I was next. The masseuse poured something onto my head, and then came the sound of a lighter going click.

This fire business came about because our regular spa, Dragonfly, was booked. My wife and I made the pilgrimage every Friday after work. “Restoring our sanity,” we called it. One of the great things about living in China is that you can get five-star service for a quarter of the price. And, oh, how we needed that ambiance. With its elevated footpaths over babbling fountains, a treatment was no less than a sandalwood scented utopia.

Photo: aveoree

The same boy always guided us to our room, walking backwards and bowing throughout the entire 30-foot walk. I would slip into a pair of loose-fitting pajamas for the an mo ⎯ which means press and stroke ⎯ full body massage. The “stroke” restores vitality, and the “press” is when the masseuse presses on certain points to activate your qi, your life energy. The lights are low and it’s a deep experience.

By the time they massage my head, I’m slipping in and out of consciousness, which is usually accompanied by a spasmodic kick, brought on by that falling sensation. The masseuse chuckles silently, as causing someone to react this way must be a secret perk of the job.

Instead of waiting around Dragonfly for a cancellation, we walked three blocks over to the ingeniously named Massage. You can’t swing a dead cat in Suzhou without hitting one of these clinics. They’re part of Chinese culture. People drop in to restore harmony in the body, the way Americans pull into body shops to have a nail removed from the tire. Call it a Jiffy Lube for the soul.

Naturally, Massage offered massages, but from the picture in the window, they also performed traditional treatments such as cupping, where heated glass cups are applied to the back, creating a vacuum effect that leaves the patient covered with crop circle-shaped hickeys. As we entered, we did not encounter babbling fountains or candles, but rather, clinic-white walls and the sneaking suspicion that someone wanted to stick me with needles.

The girl behind the counter didn’t speak English, but a treatment “menu” was on the wall. She retracted what appeared to be a car antenna and motioned for me to choose. English translations were listed under the Chinese characters, but as we would later learn, these flowery descriptions were not always apt descriptions.

Masseuse with fire, Photo: Dan Zen

I skipped over BOWEL HARMONY and pointed to something that contained ENLIGHTENED STONES, but the girl steered me from this with a wave of the hand. The same with TAI MASSAGE. This has happened to me in restaurants as well. You point to Gong Bao chicken on the menu, but the waiter just shakes his head because earlier the cook announced that he would cleaver-hack the next person that orders Gong Bao chicken. That’s alright. I’m flexible.

The antenna pointed to STEAM MASSAGE.

“Are you sure,” she asked.

The fact that she said this in English should have raised a red flag, but we had no idea what was in store for us. We just said yes and followed her down a dark hallway to a room with two massage tables.

“Please undress,” she said, and then closed the door.

It was shortly afterward that our masseuses came in, and shortly after that that I looked up to see my wife’s flaming neck.

After some urgent pantomiming, my masseuse and I reached an agreement: If the spot that was on fire became too hot, I would howl out and she would extinguish it. Not exactly rocket science, but that‘s what we came up with. She covered my entire body with cellophane wrap, and then placed towels on top of that. When she put the towel over my head, I took a deep breath.

I heard the clanging of a glass jar, followed by a sharp aroma. She poured this alcohol solution on the towel covering my head and then lit it. The fire burned for a few seconds before she smothered the flames with a wet towel and massaged the heated area, hence the steam massage.

The thing about being set on fire is that your body can’t believe this is a conscious decision. Within the first few lights, I noticed by heartbeat accelerate. The masseuse ignited several places on my back, massaging the heated area deeply into my muscles. Tiny alarms went off in my brain, notifying me of heated areas and sending sweat to the rescue. When the entire length of my spine was set ablaze, I heard my wife say “Yeees.”

30 minutes of alternating pleasure and pain followed. The good times were warm, deep massage strokes that loosen muscles I didn’t even know I had. As for the other times, well, I didn’t exactly cry out, but my squirming did allude to a breakdown in our agreement. Amidst my silent curses, the cellophane, I was certain, had fused to my skin.

Fire cupping, Photo: malias

As if reading my mind, the masseuse removed the plastic wrap and towels, and then slathered my body with some sort of cooling lotion. A few areas were tender, and sweat was still beading up. At the end of the massage, she clasped her hands together and bowed, thanking me for my business and, apparently, for allowing her to set me on fire. I thanked her and she hurried out of the room.

“What was that?” I said.

“The girl told me to look up and your spine was on fire.”

“Yeah, I know. Your neck was on fire. Check my back for burns.”

We were red all right, but being licked by the occasional flame released a good amount of endorphins. I felt invincible. The girl at the counter offered us both a glass of water before we left, urging us to drink up. Apparently, it wasn’t enough.

When my wife and I crawled out of bed the next morning, we never made it past the couch.

“Get the remote, will ya? My back hurts.”

“I can’t reach it. Besides, you‘re sitting on it.”

That ‘hung over’ feeling we experienced was our internal organs working overtime. The heat from the fire stimulates blood circulation, which carries out toxins released from the muscle tissue.

To put it in non-medical terms: having a ‘steam massage’ was like cranking up the voltage on a HEPA air cleaner in a room with a coal-burning stove. A heating pad might serve the same purpose as the massage, but it would lack that certain primal allure: the satisfaction you get from playing with fire, and coming out ahead.

We felt as good as new, if not better, in a couple of days. That said, would I recommend the steam massage? If I knew then what I know now, I might have just went ahead and chose the bowel harmony . . . On second thought, maybe not. Like easing your way into a hot tub, I’m sure the steam massage becomes easier the more you get used to it. Be that as it may, next time I’ll leave the flames to my wok, and take my massages at the spa where I know I’ll leave well-rested ⎯ not well-done.

Photos: author

This is an era in which tourism is the most postmodern of activities, and no experience is safe from the vacuum of commodification. There are Mexican tourists simulating the experience of crossing the border illegally in Hidalgo, where indigenous Otomi people run a theme park in which participants pretend to be migrants headed to El Norte. The tourists pay $125 to race along steep ravines and riverbanks, crashing through mud, brush, and dangerous terrain with the “border patrol” (the Otomis screaming in broken English) going after them, tapes of gunshot fire playing in the background, and the occasional terrifying scream coming from the bushes, signifying rape.

Alexander Zaitchik, a reporter for Reason magazine, ran the course in 2009 with a bunch of young, wealthy Mexicans who, as he pointed out, go to the U.S on tourist visas and sport Diesel jeans and hipster haircuts. Afterwards, they sat around the campfire drinking beer and swapping stories.

There are slum tours in Mumbai and township tours in South Africa, ghetto tours in Chicago, and revolutionary tours in Venezuela and Chiapas.

Some of them indulge in blatant and perverse exploitation and romanticizing of poverty; others attempt to make tourism, an inherently inauthentic and artificial endeavor, into an educational, empathy-building experience. But they all lay uncomfortably bare economic, social and cultural divides and pit the (relatively) moneyed traveler against the rooted, frequently impoverished, often discriminated-against locals.

They all contain some degree of voyeurism, guilt, twisted and complex longing (to join the revolution, to express solidarity with the slum-dwellers of Soweto, to “help” in some way) married to commodification (buy a t-shirt and a Pepsi in the Zapatista tienda, buy the experience of crossing the border).

Photos: author

They all, to put it simply, ask travelers to navigate a swampy and ethically iffy zone between naivete and cynicism. I tend to veer towards the latter. After seeing the revolutionary tourism linked to Oaxaca’s 2006 social movement which, like all social movements, was far more complex and intricate a phenomenon than the graffiti depicted it to be, I grew even more cynical.

In the midst of the Oaxaca conflict, the editor of Narco News – which covered the unfolding movement from a leftist perspective – came to the conclusion that “revolutionary tourism” was doing more harm than good, and regretted that the organizations and people pushing Oaxaca’s movement forward hadn’t strictly regulated the activities of foreigners as the Zapatistas had.

That example of the Zapatistas seems interesting after a visit to Chiapas, where tourism appears to be thriving in the Zapotec communities in the canyons and valleys outside of San Cristóbal.

So here’s the riff – in spite of everything I’ve set up above, all the problematic, superficial interactions and replications of wildly uneven power structures inherent in revolutionary tourism, I came out of a visit with the Zapatistas changed in a way that I’d like to believe isn’t superficial, that I’d like to believe hints at meaningful engagement, at some awareness of the other that goes beyond guilt alleviation or shining idealism or perverse voyeurism to compassion and belief in change.

It is so easy to be cynical about taking some sort of perspective-altering, revelatory tour through Zapatista communities, and to interpret the whole thing as the ultimate incorporation of real efforts to subvert the neoliberal system into the same commercial tokens, ideologies and values the system survives on.

It is so easy to sit in the comedor in Oventic and listen to the tour group shuffling around you compare donut stories and talk about Israel and wine and sandwiches in Nicaragua and think that this is just another authentic experience consumed and jotted down in the moleskin to be later strutted out at a hostel in Vietnam or Sydney.

Photos: author

But you’re there, too, for a reason that you hope goes beyond a check in the moleskin of experience, so unless your cynicism is unbelievably cocky and ignorant, you have to rein it in a bit in order to let yourself off the hook. You have to suspend your disbelief; there must be something else to it. This is what I thought going in.

Initially, as we waited by the roadside in the stillness under a white-gray sky, and the women with bandannas observed us from a makeshift observation post while dozens of other unmasked women and children loitered and knitted before a community store, I was uncomfortable. I wanted to see, yes, and to understand more about the Zapatistas, but in that act of seeing my outsiderness and the problem of my purpose were so obvious it was painful.

I am an estadouniense writer who’s come to poke around your community, take photos of your walls, swoon over your movement. I will probably think higher of myself after having done so, and higher of you. Then I’ll leave and I’ll go back to my life, and you’ll keep on there, hoping the army doesn’t come in and raze it all. I’ll have touristed your revolution.

But we were let in, and we ate simple quesadillas with slices of avocado and tomato before we were shown around Oventic. Another tour group browsed around the comedor and store, bought some things, and left. I went to the bathroom, with a kind, nervous, rail-thin man in his late thirties as my escort.

“Our facilities are rustic,” he warned gently.

“It’s no problem,” I said.

“There’s no toilet paper,” he cautioned.

“It’s fine,” I said.

They were rustic, but nothing you wouldn’t find elsewhere in rural Mexico. As I picked my way back to the man, black ducks waddled around fat green plants and a small stream. Not knowing what to say I asked,

“What do you do with the ducks?” I wanted to hit myself over the head as soon as I said it, but there it was – we were standing in the backyard of a Zapatista building, with trails curving off here and there and a rustic bathroom and big black bulbous ducks scattered about, and I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“We eat the eggs,” he said.

I was going to say, “ah, like in China!” but suddenly thought that’d be weird and instead nodded wisely as if eating duck eggs was a very sage idea. I’d never met anyone in Mexico who ate duck eggs, and the thought that this was my first factoid from the Zapatistas seemed comical and pathetic. We wobbled along the small stone path back towards the comedor.

“Stop!” the main said, “wait – you can wash your hands here. There’s soap, too.” I washed my hands and he leaned in with oval, inquiring eyes and asked,

“What do you do?” There was an insistence that went beyond curiosity to worry.

“I’m a writer,” I said, afraid that wouldn’t sound right but wanting to be honest. He asked the inevitable,

“De que escribes?” What do you write about? I rambled off a list of subjects: travel, critical travel essays, politics (leftist), Mexico, Latin America. He nodded.

“And your friends?” he asked. I identified Susy and Mauricio as students and Jorge as a photographer, and rushed to specify what Jorge photographed, citing a recent project on basketball in the Sierra Norte. The man seemed satisfied, nodding a few times, and we continued back towards the restaurant, parting ways as he veered off into the kitchen.

Photos: author

The visit continued on that tone of awkward mutual recognition, interest, and caution, but as we began walking down the steep hill and into the community a feeling of intense emotion came over me. The need to weep. It is rare in such a travel situation to get a sense of honesty, of – and I can’t imagine invoking this word without a mocking overtone, but I’m about to do it here – authenticity.

Here, my presence was tolerated, accepted, perhaps even condoned, but it didn’t detract from a wider truth that was being achieved in the buildings and meetings and community there. It didn’t seem to cheapen the project at hand, or to shape it. It made me very humble; the best indicator of the authentic.

I could understand for the first time in that visit what made the Zapatistas so compelling, so emotionally and intellectually powerful for their supporters across national, economic, cultural and social borders. It was a feeling more than anything else, the feeling of an alternative project – not frenzied, not reactionary, not hateful, not tentative and skeptical, but directed and organic and meaningful – in action. Women planted flowers beneath murals that said “otro mundo es posible.”

Another me would’ve cringed. I cringe writing this. But there, it wasn’t maudlin, and I didn’t see it as a sign of peace and love and la revolucíon as much as as an example of everyday life in a community that had regained its dignity from a corrupt government. It humbled me tremendously. At its best, that’s what travel should do.

A kid played basketball on a court with EZLN hoops, and fat, shiny black cows roamed a sloping lawn. Dogs followed teenagers collecting wood. Our guide, a man in his sixties in a black ski mask, asked lots of questions about Jorge and I’s upcoming wedding. Would we spend lots of money? Would we dance with a turkey? What would we eat? Would we drink? Lots?

He was congratulatory and told us he’d married when he was fifteen, and was still married to the same woman. He’d joined the Zapatistas five years ago, and lived between Oventic and San Cristóbal. He was like an old man you’d meet at the market, who’d clasp your hand and give you his blessings for your wedding, ask you how many babies you were going to have, and laugh gently at your answers.

He knew he was the one guiding us, hosting us, giving us permission to be here, and we knew it, always asking before roaming off into an unknown corner, but beneath the firmness of his small hardened body and his ski mask were warmth and curiosity. I don’t know why that was surprising to me – I had thought the people would be harder, more closed off and resentful, and the women were certainly quiet and withdrawn but not in a shut-down way.

The place, to put it very simply, didn’t feel bought, didn’t feel incorporated into the swirling worries about authentic and inauthentic, commodofication and resistance.

Photos: author

Mostly, what I felt was emotion, which didn’t belong to one category of sadness or excitement or belief or trust but was more the simple power of witnessing. I experienced a similar thing at a goat slaughter in the Mixteca, the only other time and place in years of traveling in which I’d use the word authentic.

We took lots of pictures, and bought t-shirts and cigars, and then we were back out by the road again in the pale fogginess of the late afternoon. Mauricio and Susy took two available seats in a passing taxi and Jorge and I settled in to wait for the next one.

A few minutes later, as we were taking pictures of the sign declaring this the heart of Zapatista territory, a man came out of the community gates and offered the indigenous women waiting on the side of the road next to us a ride.

“Are you going to San Cristóbal?” we asked meekly.

“Yes, subense,” he said warmly.

We got in the back of the van after the indigenous women, who were en route to San Andrés, and greeted them and the other passengers – presumably the man’s wife and his two children – and a young male driver.

The first half of the drive was silent, taking hairpin curves and slow descents and steep rises through valleys that feel like topo maps come alive, series of squiggling lines and treacherous precipices and ridges in greens and browns. Chiapas is overwhelmingly rural – we passed tiny scatterings of wooden shacks and the occasional ramshackle store, but there were no organized villages with their churches and restaurants as in Oaxaca. We passed palm green and pale green and pine green, patches of corn, cows and sheep, and the shadows of women in black skirts and men working the fields.

At some point, I asked the man who’d allowed us on board a question.

“How long has this community been in existence?”

I wanted to get a sense of whether it had been formed after 1994 or right then and there in the thick of things. He said,

“Pues, mil-novecientos-novente-cuatro,” as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, and once again I proved my scrabbling ignorance before the Zapatistas. But it got better from there. We started talking about governance, about education, about politics. The educational system is particularly fascinating. The kids study three subjects: social sciences (predominantly history), math, and biology/zoology. Once they graduate from secondary school, they become the teachers.

The schools don’t have government certification – “what would be the point?” asked the man laughingly, “if you’re trying to break away from the government, from their miseducation, why would you want them to certify and regulate what you do?” This does pose a problem, though, for Zapatista children who want to go on and study at university. The Universidad de la Tierra is the only university that currently accepts their qualifications.

The conversation wound like the road, around to Oaxaca’s 2006 political movement and to the PRI, the PAN, and the PRD, the increasingly interchangeable parties managing the corruption of Mexico. The drive back to San Cristóbal seemed to take minutes, and in the midst of conversation we barely noticed the van was driving right past the house we were staying at,

“Aqui!” blurted Jorge, just at the opportune moment, and we opened the door, shook hands, gave effusive thanks, and said our goodbyes.

The experience lingered the rest of the day, the way a powerful airport goodbye sticks with you like an aching pain for the duration of the journey. We walked the streets of San Cristóbal dazed and temporarily possessed by our experience in Oventic.

And then the speed and motion of our lives caught up with us again and we were eating pizza for dinner and planning the next day’s journey and catching up on emails, and the Zapatistas faded into the background of travel experiences and stories that lay in waiting only to surface from time to time like small boats on a choppy sea.

A few nights after that, on one of our last nights in the city, we finally caved and went to the Revolution bar. It was like the art scene of Oaxaca, but the pretentiousness had a strong hippie vibe and all the righteousness of deciding to switch historical sides and align oneself with the oppressed (while, of course, constructing one’s casa just outside the city and sipping beers and listening to folk rock by pretty young hippies).

There was a similar privileged-and-comfortably-leftie-Bohemian vibe, similar protagonists, more young mothers with curly-haired babies in indigenous baby slings.

Indigenous kids came and tried to sell their clay animals to the patrons, who smiled much more indulgently than most and teased them but ultimately declined their offers. The kids, impervious, continued on to the next round of tourists. Meanwhile on the pedestrian street clusters of tourists and families and couples streamed by – the nightlife in San Cristóbal is consistently vivid, even on Sundays. They sometimes cast curious glances at la Revolucíon, and then kept walking.

Photos: author

It was the quintessential Chiapaneco day – an excursion to Oventic, a night at la Revolucíon. I could see how this would get addictive – bagels in the morning, wine at night, picturesque forested hills and churches, like-minded Europeans and Americans baking bread and sharing the same ideals, coming from similar backgrounds (and benefiting tremendously from them to hang around Chiapas for a time), learning about the indigenous, doing some volunteer work, getting all the perks of a high quality of life in Mexico plus free guilt alleviation plus the righteous belief in your place on the right side of the battle.

And at the same time, I could see how it could be kind of awful. In a great piece written for Casa Chapulin, Leila (no last name is cited) takes San Cristóbal’s revolutionary tourists and foreign activists to task for outsourcing guilt and blame to “neoliberalism” or “corporations” while at the same time ignoring their own complicated roles as relatively affluent outsiders in Chiapas. She writes,

“Whether I’m spending the afternoon with Americans or Europeans talking about pleasantries and minutia, or having an equally evasive conversation with urban Mexicans, something essential is being avoided. None of us are talking about what’s all around us. None of us are acknowledging our own ease of life and its morally problematic positioning. We’re not talking in personal terms about the reality of poverty that flanks us on all sides; sometimes I’m not even sure we’re letting it trouble us. We recognize it systemically, intellectually, and beyond this we excuse ourselves.”

Even more powerfully, she asserts that the revolutionary tourist, who is politically-minded and who sticks around San Cristóbal for three months to several years, is no less a “tokenizer of the indigenous” than the more iconic tourist gleefully purchasing ethnic stereotypes as trophies.

Finally, she points out that the mere ability of revolutionary tourists to be present and to live in San Cristóbal is indicative of the inequalities of power and wealth that have characterized and continue to characterize Chiapas specifically and Mexico overall. Simply ignoring the fact that one’s own presence in a Zapatista community, buying t-shirts, is the result of a specific historical process and is also symbolic of that process, and instead commending oneself for “solidarity” and exorcising all blame and guilt to “the corporate-capitalist” system, is leaving a huge, self-serving, and ignorant gap in the process of attempting to contribute to indigenous movements.

What I love most about Leila’s piece, though, is that she doesn’t call for some stripped down lifestyle of solidarity via suffering, nor does she argue that revolutionary tourists are vapid and useless and should simply leave. Rather, she insists that self-awareness and criticism are essential to doing more than simply lauding ourselves and condemning the big bad guys – the government, the system, the corporation.

I would add that humility, too, goes a long way. What I saw in Chiapas was a brash lack of humility and in fact, it’s opposite – an ironic and vulgar egoism about helping the poor indigenous get their act together, a reincarnation of noble-savage-ish fawning plus European boutique tourism. There don’t seem to be many people saying wait, how is it that I, coming from France or Mexico City or New York, can expect to be down with the indigenous and part of the great revolution, on the honorable side of history and a soldier in some glorious battle for dignity and truth, when actually, history and politics and my background and situation have set me up to be in a position in which I can live an exceedingly comfortable lifestyle amidst poverty, I can study what I want and live where I please (and, I might add, do so guilt-free because I’m sympathetic with the poor?) There seems to be little discussion at all, in fact, of the great irony that San Cristóbal has become a snazzy little boutique destination for Tuxtla’s wealthy and curious ethno-tourists, the tense center of a (now repressed) revolution, and a playground for politically-minded foreigners to set up shop and watch Ingrid Bergman movies and drink Argentine wine and express their sympathy for one another’s sympathies, while all the while the military extends its tentacles further into the forests and jungles, the poor people continue to sleep and beg in the streets, and the Zapatistas, after fifteen years, struggle to hold onto what they’ve got left.

And yet, I went to a Zapatista community and would dare to call it a transformative experience. Educational, illuminating, and transformative. But I have, frankly, no idea as to what my role would be if I were to ever get involved with the Zapatistas, and I think it would have to be one that takes into account where I come from and what my privileges have been.

I’m sure many of the revolutionary tourists living and working in San Cristóbal have had far more enduring and equally profound encounters with the Zapatistas and local communities in Chiapas, and I think those encounters mean something. I think they’re important, critical even, and they are the best of what tourism can (not necessarily does, but can) offer.

But what we make of them depends on how humble we stay before them, and how critical we are both of our own perspectives and positioning and of the movements we want so badly to believe in. The easy embrace of revolution via some vibey conversations at Café La Revolucion over a few chelas and some peanuts, cemented by a few friendships with indigenous kids, seems to me to be fairly pointless. Maybe not necessarily harmful, but certainly not charged with the real potential to change anything.

Ultimately, perhaps, if this revolutionary tourism – be it the kind that lasts an afternoon, like that which I took part in, or the kind that lingers and draws itself out over years in San Cristóbal – is going to actually affect positive change, and is going to create some sort of understanding and interaction that goes beyond the purchase of symbolic trinkets, then it’s up to each individual tourist to take his/her background, experience, and place into account, and to examine what he/she can do starting from that.

Me, I can read and read and read about the Zapatistas, something I’ve never felt the urge to do before because, dumbly, I coasted along on snippets I’d read and heard here and there and thought I’d gotten it. I can write. I can research more about this whole concept of revolutionary tourism and its implications. And I can believe, honestly and with feeling, in the authenticity of what I saw in Oventic, Chiapas.

If it’s authenticity we’re after, travelers, and solidarity, then that authenticity will have to express the authentic truth that our privilege is all tied up in the poverty we want to end and sympathize with, and our solidarity is plagued by the great fortune we’ve had in being able to choose, in comfort and relative luxury, to feel it.

We first need critical awareness of that, and humility. And from there we can take steps – respectfully, honestly, purposefully – towards solidarity.

Photo and Feature Photo: author

“The ground’s not as cold this year, and there’s twice as many people.”

We stood and looked down at the sprawling city of tents that was Qoyllur Rit’i. The ground may have been warmer, but the cold still seeped up through heavy boots and three pairs of woollen socks, wrapping icy fingers around toes that had grown up wearing flip flops on Aussie beaches. I stamped my feet and listened as Chango marvelled at the growth of the festival since his last attendance five years ago. It is, he told us, the only indigenous celebration in the Americas that is consistently growing in size.

We had left Cusco at five in the morning, crammed our party of five into a taxi, and watched the sun rise over the Sacred Valley, the mist lifting, color seeping into the landscape as we drove. Nobody talked much.

Two and a half hours later we arrived at Ocongate, the jumping-off point for the five-mile (8 km) trek to the sanctuary of Sinak’ara, where Qoyllur Rit’i takes place. We joined a procession of hundreds – Andean women of all ages with large colorful bundles on their backs, children, men on crutches, young couples, a faint smattering of tourists.

One family led a donkey loaded down with a mattress – I was to envy them later. The trek followed a river through a high valley, and as we climbed still higher the vegetation became sparser and finally disappeared, and the chill in the air became more profound.

At regular intervals we passed richly dressed crucifixes, where many stopped to pray. Almost all at least made the sign of the cross themselves while trudging past. Every kilometer or so was a collection of blue plastic tents, rest stops complete with bubbling soups, trout and chicarrones. We took full advantage; the climb, after the initial upwards slog, was gentle, but the altitude was a killer. Qoyllur Rit’i takes place at 15,420 feet (4,700 m).

Andean women, Photo: anoldent

We arrived to mayhem. Thousands of people thronged the immediate surrounds of the church, haggling over dream-replicas in the symbolic market, competing drum beats and twirling dancers, vendors hawking rolls of blue plastic as a gentle snow-rain began to soak through woollen caps.

We somehow found Chango and Coneto, who had practically sprinted the trail, amidst the hordes. John had fallen in with his fellow ukukus and would catch up with us later.

The night was full of movement. We huddled in restaurants sipping coffee, wrapping hands around cheap and delicious bowls of steaming soup. Later we walked past the hundreds in line to enter the church, clutching offerings and shivering in the less-than-zero air, and declined to join them. The dances were more exciting – frenetic drum beats, ukukus lashing at each other with whips, girls in brightly colored skirts twirling.

We passed one group in which a conspicuous gringo camera crew was circling, lights blazing, cameras pushing into singing faces, and I felt resentful of the intrusion. The walk back to camp took us past a roped-off enclave, with a grandly outfitted dining tent, a foreign tour group inside taking dinner on their camp stools. Next door a group of locals lay in sleeping bags on the ground under a stretched out piece of blue plastic.

I got thinking about this, unable to sleep on the icy ground in the wee hours as the drums beat on and my feet became increasingly numb. I was angry at the presence of the other gringos – not that they were there, but that they came as a species apart, roped off in their shiny dining tents, expensive video cameras between them and the dancers.

But where do you draw the line? This is predominately a festival for the local communities – even the Peruvians I came with were from Lima, believers in their own way, yes, friends with ukukus, but not completely and wholly of Qoyllur Rit’i.

And I had come to look, to take photos, to be a tourist – perhaps I did it a little rougher, maybe I dined knee to knee with the real celebrants, but what makes me so special? Why should others miss out who don’t have the opportunity to be shown the way by local friends, who go with tour groups and inevitably become that species apart, whether they like it or not? And why shouldn’t film crews be able to share this with those who don’t have the opportunity to travel at all?

I was still thinking about it the next morning as the ukukus came down from their night on the glacier, as mass was held, as we walked homeward in silence.

Community Connection

What do you think? Just where do we draw the line between travel and tourism? Who decides the standards of sensitive travel? Share your thoughts in the comment section!

To learn more about travel in Peru, check out Matador’s Peru Focus Page.

Feature Photo: George D Thompson Photos: author

My name is Ian and I am an airport alcoholic. I’m a nervous flier and I get tragic and poetic when I’m drunk, so plane wrecks seem noble and profound instead of scary.

Unfortunately alcohol on a plane is prohibitively expensive on domestic routes and sometimes unavailable if you are flying in the Middle East.

So what I do to calm myself in those sober moments when flying between Cairo and Tunis—when my plane is midair and about to explode for no discernible reason—is plan exactly how I’m going to survive when catastrophe strikes.

***

The engines roar and I’m pinned to the back of my seat. I’m flying EgyptAir, which is fondly referred to as EgyptScare by anyone who flies it frequently. We pick up speed and then altitude. I’m not a religious man, but I begin to bargain with God.

For example: Dear God, please get me through this flight. I promise it will be the last one I ever take. I’ll use long-haul buses and ocean freighters from here on out. Also, I will start being nicer to people. I will give strangers hugs and I’ll call my mother.

Then turbulence. Just a little wiggle. My stomach hardly drops but I grab my armrests like I might otherwise be ripped from my seat, then I paste my face against the window and watch the wing while waiting for it to fall off. We will tumble downwards and I will scream and flail until we hit something hard.

Nothing happens and the turbulence stops, so I assume karma means I get a few extra moments to plan my escape from and survival of the inevitable catastrophe, which is just moments away.

I think about grabbing a blanket and strapping it to my back like a parachute. I think about timing my free-fall and trying the tuck-and-roll method ninjas use when leaping from high places. Or if I stay inside the cabin of the plane as it barrels downward, I’ll just jump exactly when we hit, offsetting the force of the impact. These all seem like very good ideas to me.

Then the plane jitters again and I go back to bargaining.

***

Every time I land safely at my destination, I feel brave and resolute and defiant. I say to myself, see, no reason to fear. And then I go about my trip.

But every time I go back to the airport, it’s a repeat scenario. So I have begun to address this issue as one of fear management as opposed to practice and refinement of survival techniques.

In light of this, I hit the books on the subject and here’s the knowledge I found that has helped calm my nerves on recent flights:

1. Know the Odds

According to OAG Aviation, an analytical service provider for commercial airlines, you have a 1 in 5.4 million chance of being involved in a plane accident with at least one fatality on any given flight. According to Plane Crash Info a website tracking airline crash statistics, that means a passenger would have to take one flight every day for 21,000 years before they would be involved in a fatal wreck.

And to put it into perspective: according to the National Safety Council, you have a 1 in 272 chance of dying in a car wreck or a 1 in 51,199 chance of dying in what they call a ‘cataclysmic storm’. If that isn’t something to cheer about, I don’t know what is.

2. Choose Your Airline

According to the same institution (OAG), your choice of airline has a big impact on accident rate. The top 25 airlines with the lowest rates are also the largest ones: for example, Delta, KLM, and United. Flying on one of the 25 airlines with the worst accident records, on the other hand, increases your chance of being involved in an accident by over thirty times. Domestic airlines in Africa, for example, tend to wreck more frequently.

For me, it’s a matter of common sense. I try to fly airlines with higher safety standards and ones from countries with regulatory agencies. Worst-case scenario, you’re stuck on one of the scariest airlines in the world. You still only have a 1 in over 150,000 chance of crashing.

3. Sit Near an Exit

The most common causes of death in a plane crash besides the initial impact are fire and smoke inhalation. For peace of mind: sit near an exit and in the aisle. You’ll have a better chance of getting out in case something did go wrong. And anyway, there is not enough air pressure at 35,000 feet to suck you out of the plane if one of the exit doors was ripped off in midair (which had always been my hesitation in sitting by one).

4. Sit in the Back of the Plane

This is not necessarily contradictory to the advice immediately preceding it: there are exits at the back of the plane as well. And according to Popular Mechanics, which analyzed 36 years of seating charts from plane wrecks, people who sit in the back of the airplane have a 40% higher chance of survival. Suddenly the last row, the one back by the lavatories, seems like better real estate than first class.

5. Wear your Seatbelt

According to an ambiguous ‘How to Survive a Plane Crash’ article I read online, one that cited none of its statistics, every centimeter of slack in your seatbelt triples the g-force of the impact as experienced by your body. Even if this isn’t true, the notion is calming and so I choose to believe it. So wear that seat belt tight and wear it while you’re sleeping!

6. Rule of Plus Three/Minus Eight

In an interview with Time, Ben Sherwood, author of The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science That Could Save Your Life, discussed what he learned at an FAA workshop on surviving plane crashes.

One startling statistic he revealed: research shows 80% of all plane crashes occur in the first three minutes or final eight of your flight. His suggestion? Don’t get on the plane, take off your shoes, put your headphones in, and fall asleep right away. Wait until you are safely in the air.

And if you tend to fall asleep during flights, set an alarm and get up before landing. Eleven minutes of awareness could save your life. You don’t want to be groggy or disorientated if you are trying to find the exit.

7. Know How to Brace for Impact

The best way to calm your nerves before flying is to inform yourself on how to survive if something did go wrong. So if the plane is going to crash, your posture can make all the difference in the world. Keep your head low to avoid any blunt trauma from debris flying around the cabin.

Put your hands on the seat back in front of you and then rest your head firmly on them. Maintain this position all the way through impact. This will help prevent head trauma, as the seat back will provide a softer surface as support for your head and neck. As opposed to, say, your tray table.

At the end of the day, flying is scary for some and not for others. I’m one of the people that will always be afraid of it no matter what I know. But I’ve found that controlling risk factors, like proximity to an exit, help limit the amount of fear I feel. So I manage what fear I can.

But if you are on a transoceanic flight and you hear what sounds like a small child in the back of the plane crying, rest assured that it’s just me wrestling with all my midair demons. And I’ll be fine so long as someone brings me a beer.

Community Connection

Will you be studying, traveling, living and/or working abroad for at least ten weeks between August and December of 2010? Check out the Fall 2010 Glimpse Correspondents Program and apply to become a Glimpse Correspondent.

Photo: 1116 Greenland Coast. Feature Photo: 1805 Way Up!

Here, Lance deals with decreasing pilot wages and makes radical claims about Chicago O’Hare.

Q: Statistically, a plane ride is supposed to be safer than driving in a car. But I’m not sure if I’m sold, based solely on the fact that one drives in a car multiple times a day/multiple times a week/thousands of times a year, therefore increasing his/her chances of death by much more than their 1-2 plane rides/year.

How safe is air travel really?

A: Chloe: How safe is air travel really? Pretty safe. Sometimes I take off from Beijing for home and land at the exact airport we had intended. Not one person has died! It’s amazing. Compared to travel by wagon train it’s hands down, no brain-er safe.

Your question compares air travel safety to auto travel safety. I’ve never seen statistics on number of flights versus number of automobile trips. Usually stats are comparing miles flown or hours spent in transit. Since I could have fun lying with statistics and I’d be making them up anyway, I’ll just say, you have less chance of dying while sitting in an airplane than sitting in your home.

Q: I recently watched Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story”. In it they discuss pilots’ wages and uncover how little they are paid, some even having to supplement their income with other jobs (one who said he has had to use food stamps). With such a specialized and highly trained occupation, and given the enormous responsibility that befalls a pilot commanding a plane carrying several hundred passengers and staff, this seems outrageous.

To what extent is this true? And how can this happen?

Moonrise at 60 North

A: Carlo: Michael Moore got his facts exactly correct. There is however, Moore to the story. The major airlines have, for the past twenty years or so, been siphoning off parts of their business to regional carriers. They say it’s just good business practice, but from a pilot’s perspective, it has only allowed them to separate employee groups while costing them a bundle in lost profit potential as well as capital guarantees to these small carriers.

Airlines spend a dollar saving a dime to keep labor costs to a minimum. Unions cause corporate executives to make dumb decisions all the time and the major airlines have a lot of labor unions. There is a tradition in the airline pilot field, similar to that of doctors and lawyers, that when they first start in their field they work the hardest and get paid very little.

Since regional airlines have become the normal stepping stone to get to the majors, they have been able to exploit the beginner tradition into standard pay for that size jet airplane. There is still considerable pay for those few who command an aircraft with several hundred passengers. However, even the top end of the industry is being eroded significantly, and in the future there will be fewer people of high ability seeking pilot jobs when pay and benefits are far less than they can earn elsewhere.

Q: Based on past experience, it seems to me that the Chicago O’Hare airport closes down due to inclement weather far more than other airports at similar latitudes and subject to similar weather do. Is this true, or do I have a personal bias against O’Hare?

A: I cut my teeth on that airport. 727 landings with a quarter on the console (a bet between pilots on who made the best landings). Laurie,do you think that Chicago O’hare closes down, or do you mean that bad weather causes O’hare more delays and flight cancellations?

O’hare is the best run airport for its size that I’ve experienced. It almost never shuts down. The other day, I landed in fog with Catagory 3, or just a few hundred feet forward visibility. Wow! It is, however, so busy that when weather forces traffic to slow down, airlines cancel flights to keep their respective operations functioning. Blame the airlines Laurie. O’hare rocks!

Community Connection

Travelers, this is your chance! Ask Lance a question! Consider it free therapy for all your airline fears. Leave your question in the comments below, and Lance will tackle it next week.

Photos: author

“What do you mean, not tourists?” asked my friend Mauricio on our recent trip to Chiapas. “You mean these people (travelers) really make this distinction?”

Mauricio’s an anthropologist, and a traveler, but one who hasn’t made traveling into the ethic, philosophy and career it often is nowadays. He may be averse to staying in a $100/night fresa hotel and heading out on a mass tour to Agua Azul, but he wouldn’t necessarily envision these choices as the scorn of tourism and the elevation of the traveler’s quest to proportions of mystical suffering. They’re just part of getting to know a place.

Mauricio, and other friends who also travel but wouldn’t swear allegiance to “traveling,” a community and worldview in and of itself, were bewildered by my very brief overview of the anthropology of travel. Over caguamas, after a 9-hour trek out of the Oaxacan valley up into dust-coated yellow-green hills and then down into the massive blow dryer on extra hot that is the Oaxacan isthmus, pants rolled up to the knee and tongues a-flappin, and up and up again into a San Cristóbal rainstorm and then around town on an epic search for keys to a friend’s temporarily vacant house I, slightly tipsy, etched out a brief syllabus for Travel Anthropology 101.

Photos: author

There are travelers vs. tourists, and the tenants of belief that the former have developed to distinguish themselves from the latter. There are the convictions about travel’s place in the changing globalized world and its potential to change this world; there’s the hierarchy of belonging to a place and the accepted degrees of superiority and condescension involved (getting increasingly “local” you’re freer to pity the backpacked baggy-eyed dopes looking for the hostel after the night bus); and there’s the almighty authenticity, so often questioned, so often invoked, so often emulated and sought and idolized; the ambiguous, whimsical God of the modern traveler.

Yes, all of this is part of Travel Anthropology 101. The travel community has as obsessive a set of codes and customs and practices as any meticulously studied clan or tribe.

So this was the ongoing joke – “are we authentic enough? Is this local enough?”

And meanwhile, the trip played itself out, and as it did, I began to realize that formulas, for as much as they may hint at potentially more informative or enriching ways to travel (reluctant as I am to play into the “we’re not tourists” fantasy I’ll admit that my experiences winding up in places far from highlighted “destinations” have often been the most rewarding) are ultimately attempts for travelers to impose their own hierarchy of values onto the places they visit. They are more about demonstrating to other travelers who you are and what you care about then they are about actually experiencing a particular place.

Photos: author

You can believe as passionately as you want in the necessity of hitchhiking in the back of a local truck to the local Zapatista community and eating the local food and having passionate discussions in Spanish with the local people, and you can meticulously avoid anything that smacks of a tourist trap or or a Lonely Planetized “must do”, and you may win a few more random and unexpected glimpses into the way a place works, into what life there is and has been like.

But ultimately, formulas matter far less than the awareness that in traveling everything matters. You don’t have to adhere to a coded series of behaviors to learn from it. This trip was like walking a path without any passionate ethic or plan and stumbling across revelations in the haphazard way one encounters a wildflower, a stream, a clearing. A conversation with a taxi driver. An interaction between an orange juice vendor and a police officer in the street. A morning run on the Cerro de San Cristobal. A beer at the Revolution bar. A futbol game at the Tequila Zoo. A beer with an anthropologist friend studying religion in Chiapas. Niñas selling stuffed giraffes in the streets. The people swelling on the pedestrian avenues at night, the portrait on the wall of the Casa del Pan, the way the one and only sketchy cantina was tucked in a gravel parking lot on the outskirts of the city. All of these things reveal, begin calling up the feeling and history and identity of a place the way a low flute calls up ghosts.

Photos: author

So it’s not the formulas. It’s the mere act of being present and aware. I’m not making a judgment call here about travelers vs. tourists and the inherent integrity and worth of the one vs. the other, or even the purpose or meaninglessness of the debate. My point is apart from that – it’s that travel is never going to fit your formula, and that’s what makes it so freaking addictive. That’s why you keep going back again and again, because you will regain your sense of smell, and throw off your rhythms and attitudes and perceptions, and come back all jostled and shaken and ready to fizzle over, like that bottle of beer carried on a long bumpy walk to the fiesta.

Nope, no formulas, no codes. Just the day in and day out, and the barely perceptible progress of getting to know something; the way the air feels when you step outside for the first time, the color of the sky at 6 p.m., the expressions on people’s faces when they pass one another in the street, the weight of history as it creeps through doorways and cracks in the streets and becomes a palpable presence – these are things you are lucky to get to know, and your formula withers away, irrelevant.

Feature Photo: The Real Darren Stone Photo: Wootang01

The British government has long recognized that young adulthood does not come with deep resources, and so many cultural institutions offer discounts for not only students but also the unemployed – and virtually anyone under age 26. Thanks to a recent project by the Arts Council England, this now also includes London’s famous dramatic scene. Below are twelve theatres where, if you are 25 and under, you can see fantastic stage productions for free.

London theatres that offer cheap tickets regardless of age are marked as (26+).

National Theatre, Waterloo

This is where you’ll see the best of the best – from Tom Stoppard to Alec Bennett. Seeing cheap shows at the National Theatre is complicated, but absolutely worth it. Fill out the NT’s Entry Pass form, attach proof of age, and either mail it in or drop it off in person (if you’re smart, you’ll get your friends to sign up at the same time). In 2-3 weeks, you will receive your snazzy membership card by post. Your first ticket is totally free (must be a Mon-Thurs show booked by phone). Every subsequent ticket for any show at the National can be booked online for only 5 pounds!

Donmar Warehouse, Covent Garden

Becoming a member of the Donmar Discovery program is similar to the Entry Pass; you need to drop off the application form at the box office with proof of age. But unlike at the NT, a DD card only entitles you to book a ticket for a special performance of the production – though you will also score a free poster and invitation to a post-show discussion with the cast.

Shakespeare’s Globe, London Bridge (26+)

Far and away the best deal in London: every single production at this faithfully reconstructed theatre has 700 standing tickets available for only 5 pounds. While this means standing for the length of the show, it also guarantees you the best view and the chance to experience Shakespeare as he intended it. Arrive early to grab a good spot at the front, and don’t forget comfortable shoes and a raincoat.

Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square (26+)

This theatre established in 1870 is known for its modern, hard-hitting productions. Be quick to book, because seats sell out extremely quickly (often before the production even opens) – including their special 10 pound Mondays. To book up to six free tickets, call the box office or e-mail boxoffice@royalcourttheatre.com. Like at many of the other theatres, you may only book free tickets once – so next time, have a friend use their name!

Old Vic, Waterloo (26+)

The Old Vic – currently under the artistic direction of Kevin Spacey – promises one hundred 12 pound seats in every show for those age 25 and under. (They can do this because their theatre, while beautiful and dating back to 1812, seats over 1000 theatre-goers in four vertigo-inducing levels.) One can either call to book Under 26 tickets by phone, or submit a form to get a membership card – but be aware that sometimes you can snag normal balcony tickets online for as little as 10 pounds.

Barbican Centre, Liverpool Street

It’s quick to register online for the Barbican’s freeB scheme, and you can start booking tickets online before your membership card even arrives in the post. FreeB allows you to book up to two tickets at select concerts, theatre productions, film screenings, and art exhibitions.

Battersea Arts Centre, South London (26+)

While the BAC is currently not offering any free tickets, normal tickets for their contemporary productions are usually quite affordable. If you call the box office, you can secure student discounts – and Tuesdays are Pay-What-You-Can nights. On the downside, it’s a bit of a trek to Zone 2.

Lyric Hammersmith, West London

Also in Zone 2 but a little more Tube-accessible, the Lyric is a relatively new and modern theatre with a rooftop garden. To find out which shows they have free tickets for, ring up the box office.

Arcola Theatre, Hackney

Until the new Overground line debuts, this theatre is a 15-minute bus ride from Islington in northern London. Call the box office to book your free tickets and, like at many of the other theatres, don’t forget to arrive early to collect them.

The Royal Shakespeare Company, on tour and in Stratford-upon-Avon

If you decide to visit Shakespeare’s hometown, time it for a Tuesday to get free tickets at the Courtyard Theatre. Stratford-upon-Avon is a two-hour train ride from London, with advance rail tickets starting at 10 pounds. While on tour in London and all over the UK, the Royal Shakespeare Company also offers 5 pound tickets for those under 26.

Lady Annderground Photo: Kossy@FINEDAY

Lance Meade, our swashbuckling, airborne Matadorian, has kindly tackled your questions about the necessary but often terrifying experience of flying.

Here, Lance spreads his expertise around on everything from volcanic ash to potential hidden make out nooks below the cabin.

Q: I can see how it would be dangerous to fly directly a thick cloud of Eyjafjallajökull, but what is it about volcanic ash specifically that’s so dangerous for planes, even if it’s barely visible in the air?

A:: Volcanic ash is dangerous! It feels soft like talcum powder, but will dull the blades of turbine engines quickly and cause them to fail. Ash cloud will also beat against the windshield causing it to become opaque. Then the engines quit, usually one right after the other. You can’t see the ocean just before ditching. So, yes it can be a bit of a problem.

Q:Do planes really have hidden elevators and stairways like the ones do in the movies? You know – the ones to get down to the cargo hold to defuse the explosive, or the ones to go to the hidden room where flight attends and pilots sleep/make out/do whatever?

A: Some planes such as the 747 do have an elevator. Once in a while Hollywood does a pretty accurate job of showing details of aircraft. One recent movie had a pretty iffy plot intercepting a 747 with a stealth bomber to get a terrorist before he nuked D.C, but pilot aside, the inside detail of the 747 was pretty accurate other than the maneuvering space around cargo and electronics.

Some airplanes have crew rest areas above or below the cabin but I’m pretty sure there isn’t a whole lot of ‘making out’ going on. Crew members usually use their short break for some shut eye. In the old days crew members had a lot more fun!

Q:Wouldn’t it save some people’s lives, or at least give them a better chance at survival than going down in a huge fireball, if there were some way for passengers / crew / pilots / to escape (or be ‘ejected’) via parachutes?

A: Maybe the pilots could ‘punch out’ and leave the rest of you to fend for yourselves. Perhaps they could install escape pods. So far, no realistic application has been proposed, but as Sundance would say, “keep thinkin Butch. That’s what you do best.”

Q: Do you guys and gals always have the landing down stone cold (assuming no gear malfunctions), or are there some where you’re like, shit, we could’ve bounced right off the runway on that one?

A: Actually, just like driving cars, some are good, some less so and once in a while there’s a guy that shouldn’t be on the road. In the airline business the last would be extremely rare. But it doesn’t take much to go from perfect touchdown to ‘holy sh#& batman!’

Q: What would you say are the most coveted routes for pilots worldwide and why?

A: Aah, the dreamy world of free travel to beautiful exotic places. The term “livin the dream”, spoken facetiously, is way overused in my business. Most pilots choose routes for pay and accommodations. Some have friends or activities at the layover. Rarely do pilots covet, say, the Beijing flight so they can visit the Great Wall again and again.

Q: After you touch down on a landing, you hear what (I think) are called the “reverse thrusters.” I know the plane has an insane amount of inertia when it lands and you obviously need the reverse thrusters to slow down/stop, but what the hell is a reverse thruster and if the engines are still spinning in a direction to move the plane forward, how do they all of a sudden spin in the other direction to help you slow down…or is it a separate part of each jet engine?

A: Reverse thrust is used to help slow the airplane on the runway while at high speed. Using reverse causes less break wear which is good, but is never necessary to safely stop the airplane. The brakes alone are required to be good enough to get the job done. Reversers don’t spin the engines backward but turn the exhaust thrust forward using blocker doors and openings in the cowl (engine skin) to allow exhaust to do a quick u-turn as it comes out the back of the engine.

After the blocker doors are in place, the pilot increases power shooting exhaust out the back of the engines which gets redirected forward. It’s not highly effective but does help some, especially at higher speeds.

Q: Please describe just how much control a pilot exercises over, say, landing the plane. I’ve heard that computers do most of the heavy lifting with regard to not just calculating, but also executing on an approach (taking into consideration all of the information available, ie windspeed, etc). Is it really as hands off as it sounds?

A: Ever since the dawn of jet airliners autopilots and integrated navigation systems have carried the “heavy load” for pilots. In fact pilots have become very friendly with these flight deck interlopers naming them “George” and “Fred”.

George keeps the airplane steady and smooth, something that is very touchy and difficult for a pilot to do smoothly at high altitudes. Fred has navigating abilities that keep pilots from landing in Havana when the customers thought they were going to Miami. Now days Fred has triple redundant GPS with added backup to keep us on course within a foot or two all over the world. George and Fred can now even talk to each other.

So far the only mutiny news has been squelched as just rumor. An autopilot can actually land the plane and hold it on the center of the runway, but the pilot workload is actually increased not made easier for that type of landing. Also, there’s no glory in letting George get the landing.

Computers have changed the way we fly airplanes, but the workload hasn’t decreased, it’s just changed form.

Q:Ever see that movie Fight Club? Is it true what they said that the oxygen is really just given to keep people calm and mellow when/if the plane loses altitude/nosedives?

A: I’m not sure of your Fight Club reference. I promise that we do not mess with customer psyche by doling out oxygen to suit us. At normal cruise, the cabin air is like breathing in Denver (without the smog). If the oxygen masks drop, it’s because the air is now like the top of Vail or higher.

Q: I understand that turbulence isn’t really that dangerous, but it’s hard not to feel alarmed when the plane is bouncing around all over the place. Can you explain exactly what’s happening when the plane flies through an area of turbulence and why it’s not as risky as it feels?

A: Turbulence isn’t dangerous unless it’s extreme, so try the best you can to stay relaxed when it gets rough on your plane. The best answer I can give you about turbulence is an analogy, not scientific, and its similarity to riding in a boat. On smooth water the boat ride is like sweeping across glass.

But as the water gets choppy, the ride can be very bouncy. Still safe but not so comfortable. From the shore you see the chop and say to your friend with a boat, “thanks, but maybe some other time”. Air is very similar to water, though not as dense, and you can’t see the chop. There you are, stuck in an airplane wishing you were on shore. No danger, but no fun either. The biggest danger for us is the ‘puke factor’. One person gets sick, then others smell it and they get sick, etc…

And that’s all for Round 1 of Ask A Pilot, folks – ask your questions in the comments below and Lance will select a handful to answer next Monday.

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/ask-a-pilot-round-1-your-questions-answered/feed/ 7 http://matadorabroad.com/photo-essay-kashmir/ http://matadorabroad.com/photo-essay-kashmir/#comments Tue, 18 May 2010 15:21:38 +0000 Sami Calado http://matadorabroad.com/?p=4373

1.A Kashmiri woman collects lilies to use as animal fodder.

2. Houseboat on Nageen Lake.

3.An old woman takes a rest from guiding her boat with the wooden pole.

4.View of Sonamarg village.

5.Laundry drying over Dal Lake.

6.A Gujjar shepherdess guides her herd through Srinigar’s streets.

7.Typical Gujjar summer homes in Kashmir’s high pastures.

8.A nomadic family camping while making their way south for winter.

9.This Kashmiri man uses red henna to hide the gray in his beard.

10.A merchant boat makes its way across the lake.

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/photo-essay-kashmir/feed/ 10 http://matadorabroad.com/introducing-a-new-series-ask-a-pilot/ http://matadorabroad.com/introducing-a-new-series-ask-a-pilot/#comments Wed, 12 May 2010 15:00:58 +0000 Sarah Menkedick http://matadorabroad.com/?p=4312

Feature Photo: Muffet Photos: Lance Meade

Introducing a new series at Matador Abroad: Ask A Pilot.

Flying is an unavoidable part of traveling abroad, unless you’ve got the time, money and gusto to ply the oceans via cargo ship. For most people, it’s the equis, unspoken part of the journey. It’s the part that’s not written about; the alternately nerve-wrecking and crushingly boring transition zone of a journey that tends to quiet one into a contemplative, reflective state about the place and people left behind and the place and people ahead.

Flying also frightens many travelers – more than most would like to admit – into fraught states plagued by regrets and wishes and a desperate grip on the flimsy armrest. I, for one, am terrified of flying. One round of awful turbulence, which had the not-so-calm pilot saying “Flight attendants! Stop all cabin service! In your seats, now!” cemented this terror and I now suffer flights through a haze of dramamine, beer, and vague horror.

So with my fellow sufferers – and anyone who travels abroad and has to go through the ritual of rising and descending 30,000 feet – in mind, I’m introducing the Ask A Pilot series. You can ask your questions in the comments below, and we’ll choose one each week and send it along to Lance Meade, our go-to, unabashed, truth-telling pilot with a veteran’s stories. Here’s a word from Lance:

It’s my belief that everyone, especially intelligent educated responsible people, would never fly without some apprehension. When you climb on a Boeing 777 you’re handing over control of your well-being and longevity (your life) for the opportunity to ride in an aluminum tube hurling through the stratosphere at nearly the speed of sound, surrounded by more kerosene than half a dozen tanker trucks full, controlled by a couple of strangers whose only qualification you’re sure of is that they’re wearing cool sunglasses and stripes on their shoulders.

I’m one of those strangers. As a pilot for a major carrier for more than twenty-five years, over thirty on jet airliners, I’ve been flying airplanes since I was six and seriously since sixteen. It’s in the blood. Flying airplanes can be exciting and rewarding, but mostly it’s the tedious management of fragile egos and sitting on your tail for many hours.

I plan to be brutally honest with you all. There are aviation facts that can sound worse than they are if not handled well. Unfortunately,I’m not known for softening the impact. I’m not good at lying either, so if it’s the facts you want, go ahead and ask away.

Over the years I’ve seen some fun stuff. While flying some NBA stars to to the all star game I saw a 7′4″ center in a middle coach seat while a little 5′8″ guard lounged in a 1st class seat. There was the Friday evening hooker flight LAX to Vegas and the unforgettable 9/11 flight from BOS to SFO. They chose the LAX flight next to me.

There was the poor lady who needed a hospital when we were over Baffin Bay, in northern Canada, hours from the nearest airport (she made it) and the flight attendant who collapsed during our approach to LA, quickly changing a routine landing into an emergency.

Before coming to the airlines, I flew freight in old used up B-727’s.One was the airplane DB Cooper jumped from. Landing gear failures were pretty common in those old planes; that is, gear problems where special procedures were needed to get the gear down and locked. Later, while an airline pilot, we had a similar gear failure ending without incident, though that was the end of one flight attendant’s career. She even took a train home.

Please leave your questions for Lance in the comments below.

We’ll choose one each week and publish it and Lance’s answer as part of the “Ask A Pilot” series.

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/introducing-a-new-series-ask-a-pilot/feed/ 15 http://matadorabroad.com/the-dollar-value-of-a-human-life/ http://matadorabroad.com/the-dollar-value-of-a-human-life/#comments Mon, 10 May 2010 14:39:46 +0000 Ian Bassingthwaighte http://matadorabroad.com/?p=4274

Feature Photo and Above Photo: Albert Gonzalez Farran

A Glimpse Correspondent working with refugees in Egypt questions the value of having a quota for the number of refugees allowed to immigrate to the United States.

A woman covers her eyes with her hands and cries into them. She is catching her tears, ashamed that they are falling. She says, “They raped me.”

I ask her, “How many times?” I ask her, “Did they hit you?” I ask her, “Did they say they were going to kill you afterward?”

I maintain my distance. I choose my words carefully and I say them in a placid tone, as if I were asking her about the weather. This is my job: to be impartial, to be fair. I pick out the necessary details and find the objective angle.

I bullet-point a list of small crimes and large ones. Of violence committed against a body and of violence committed against a soul. I write a testimony that displays these details in text, as if the scars on her body weren’t visible enough by themselves.

She is Sudanese. She spent her youth in Darfur. She lived in a village and her father owned goats, which she loved like they were family. She called them pets. Then in the early hours of an anonymous morning a year ago, Janjaweed militiamen of northern Sudan stormed into her village on horseback and burned it down while people slept inside their huts, which had suddenly turned to kindle. The militiamen stole half of all the livestock and shot the rest. They took the women they wanted, and kissed them. Then touched them. Then shamed them. Again, and again, and again.

Photo: hdptcar

I asked her, “How many died?” She responded by trying to count. When she passed one hundred I said I didn’t want to know anymore.

But some, she said, were lucky enough to escape. Some, like her, even made it out of Sudan and all the way to Egypt.

She’d run through the bush on foot, made it to a town where she scraped enough money together to buy a passport, and ferried her way up the Nile to Luxor. A bus ride later, she was in Cairo.

Then, after six months as an unwanted refugee in a country that denied her citizenship, denied her the right to work, and barraged her with racism and sexual harassment, she meandered quietly into my area of the office, sat down, and asked if she could leave the continent that birthed her for an ambiguous place she’d seen only in the movies. She asked if I could get her to America. Amreeka, she called it.

Her story caused my stomach to turn upside down and suddenly I felt like I was falling. I wanted to vomit and scream murder at all those men with pistols and machetes like it would bring this woman’s goats back. Like it would bring back her family.

What killed my spirit wasn’t the fact that humans could commit these crimes and justify them by calling it ‘war’. It was the fact that she wasn’t unusual. She was one tragedy in a million. I had a boy like her the next day. And then an entire family after that. They came from Iraq and Eritrea and Ethiopia and Sudan. They were not extraordinary or unique and I met one every single day.

As a legal intern working for an aid office for refugees in Cairo, my job is to process people and paper. I conduct an interview with a displaced person or family from this or that conflict zone, and write their stories as testimonies. Then I determine if they qualify as refugees and, afterward, whether or not they have cases for resettlement abroad.

This last part is based primarily on the degree to which they’ve been emotionally and physically traumatized by the conflict in their country of origin, and how their long-term physical and mental health is affected by their experiences. People who have turned suicidal or have obsessed themselves into heart disease get plus points for urgency.

When the interviews and writing are complete, I submit everything to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Then I wait, often for months, to hear back about whether my client has been referred for resettlement to an embassy or some other appropriate authority.

Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t, although more often than not it is the latter. Denied requests are always conveniently vague, so we never know exactly why one person was rejected and another was not. This makes it difficult to improve our approach to screening clients and writing cases, and ensures that the application process is muddier than it needs to be. Something that should be essential in this industry of crisis—a clarity of process that could help the system function efficiently and accept all the people it possibly could—is absent.

Then there is the notion of a quota. I quickly learned what that meant: a legal cap on the importation of tragedy set by countries that permit third-country resettlement (U.S., Canada, Australia, and a few others). Third country resettlement refers to the resettlement of refugees who’ve fled their country of origin to a second country, only to be met with a ‘lack of local integration prospects’ and so must be moved to a third. Meaning every single refugee in Egypt. So not only do we have to function inside of a system that moves so slow it may as well be frozen (in no small part because of its own self-imposed ambiguity) we also have more people screaming to leave Egypt than we have space for.

Photo: Albert Gonzalez Farran

We tell most of our clients a brutal fact: they will most likely have to stay in Cairo, often under precarious circumstances. Perhaps their health is failing. This is not uncommon and is often the direct result of the tortures they’ve endured as survivors of conflict. Inevitably, proper care for their ailments is either too expensive or unavailable in Egypt. This is compounded by the reality that most refugees have little or no money.

Refugees in Egypt are not given citizenship. Without it they are legally barred from gainful employment. But neither can they leave the country to find work elsewhere because many don’t have passports. Even the ones that do are barred from travel because no country wants the responsibility of dealing with another refugee.

People think it’s hard to get a visa to travel to America. Try getting a visa for a Sudanese or Iraqi to anywhere with employment prospects. And they certainly can’t go home, since many face arrest, persecution, persistent death threats, and other circumstances that can hardly be imagined. After all, they left their countries to escape danger. The last thing they need is to go back.

So they are stuck, like bugs in honey, without a way to maintain the meager lives they’re living.

I’ve struggled most with this notion of a quota because it means that the elected officials of the richest and most powerful countries on Earth choose to set allowances on immigration before they address the need itself. That is, they make a choice to qualify tragedy by numbering it. We will accept this many people, from this country, for this calendar year. And no more.

The rest get left in Cairo, Amman, Khartoum, and countless other places where they remain unwelcome.

I’ve tried to bring their stories home via e-mails and phone calls. I’m often met with hesitation, silence, or rebuttal. After all, America didn’t start the conflict in Sudan. Or Eritrea. Or Ethiopia. And while America’s responsibility in Iraq is certainly more pronounced, it’s not just our problem. There was war and conflict there before we arrived. America didn’t rape or pillage or light anything on fire just to watch it burn.

In addition, the more refugees we bring to our country, the more liability and risk we bring with them. We have to pay for their services, which they most often cannot afford themselves. Even if a person is lucky enough to be resettled and somehow manages to scrape up a living in their new country on their own, it’s because they occupy a job that could have gone to a native resident.

Given the state of our economy and the political environment that surrounds it, these claims seem warranted. When refugees arrive in any country they are a financial and legal burden. They use resources and need jobs, education, and emotional and physical treatment. They haven’t paid taxes to our treasury, they were not born on our soil, and they rarely bring a relevant trade with them.

So when we, as a voting public, think about immigration reform and the lawmakers that lobby for and against it, we need to answer one question: When do we decide the quality of a human life is worth more than the dollar value we assign it?

Of course these people are strangers and they live so far away it’s easy to never see them. But when I speak to someone at home who is so opposed to my politics, I try to remind them of one thing. Refugees, like everyone else, are human and they deserve a reasonable opportunity to earn a life for themselves. They have friends, and families, and lovers. They have names. The quiet girl from my office is named Ashai, and she is from Darfur.

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/the-dollar-value-of-a-human-life/feed/ 14 http://matadorabroad.com/how-airport-security-changes-your-mood-when-travelin/ http://matadorabroad.com/how-airport-security-changes-your-mood-when-travelin/#comments Thu, 06 May 2010 19:08:25 +0000 Sarah Menkedick http://matadorabroad.com/?p=4221

Feature Photo: Mike LichtPhoto: Penelope Jolicoeur

This drawing by French illustrator Pénélope Jolicoeur says it all.

Ever had one of these days?

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/how-airport-security-changes-your-mood-when-travelin/feed/ 12 http://matadorabroad.com/finding-art-in-tanzanian-tingatinga/ http://matadorabroad.com/finding-art-in-tanzanian-tingatinga/#comments Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:39:39 +0000 Cara Giaimo http://matadorabroad.com/?p=4123

Photos: author

A Glimpse Correspondent comes to see “tourist art” a little differently.

Edward S. Tingatinga, a Tanzanian casual laborer in the 1960s, was the first person to paint in the style that now bears his name. I, Cara J. Giaimo, an American student in the 2010s, am now among the most recent.

In order to really connect Mr. Tingatinga and I, that one similarity has to counterbalance a lot of differences. Edward S. made his art with bicycle paint and masonite ceiling tiles leftover from the odd jobs he originally made a living off of. I’m using new materials: brightly colored, brand-name Master Paints, brought in from Dar es Salaam and brushed onto cloth that has been rubbed with wheat flour, waterproofed with white oil paint, and nailed to a homemade wooden frame.

I go to a liberal arts college; Edward didn’t go to any sort of arts school at all. And Edward was good enough that people solicited his work, good enough that dozens, if not hundreds, of Tanzanians now make a living imitating it and selling the results to tourists. I’m just supposed to be striping a zebra and I’m royally screwing up.

“No no no. Hold the brush like this . . . and put your little finger against the cloth, here.” My teacher, Max, is patient. We are seated very close together on a small bench in the entranceway to Suleman’s Art Shop in Mto wa Mbu, Tanzania, bent over a painting the size of a potholder. Currently it’s three silhouettes on a bus-yellow background, but soon it will be a zebra, a giraffe, and a hippopotamus.

Photos: author

There are six more paintings almost exactly like it on the ground, displaying various states of completion, and from then I can infer what Max did before I got here – stretched and waterproofed the campus, coated the background and let it dry, sketched out the main actors, filled in landscape details (a foamy river and trees, all children’s-book soft) – and what he’ll do after I leave, assuming I don’t botch it beyond repair.

After the animals are patterned they will be afforded eyes, big Betty Boop ones encircled in red. Then they can look around at all the each others there are, herds and herds of Tingatinga animals, hung up and propped up and laid out, covering the ex- and interior of every shop, up and down and on both sides of the long section of street. Max reaches over and calmly scrapes my latest stripe off with a fingernail.

Tingatinga is a type of what’s known as airport art – art made exclusively to be sold to tourists. And tourism is the largest and fastest-growing industry in Tanzania. People come from all over to see the wildlife, and when they leave, they want to take home nice, authentic, packable souvenirs.

That’s why the switch from ceiling tile to waterproofed cloth – the latter doesn’t break or smudge, and can be rolled down to the size of a pair or two of socks (plus you can bring it into Australia, which doesn’t allow in any foreign wood products).

It’s also why so much of it looks the same – it’s much easier and faster to paint the same things over and over. Max can make four or five notebook-sized Tingatinga in a day. Subjects are determined in the first place by what tourists want and expect to see in Tanzanian art, which may explain the colors, the jumbled and overlapping patterns (which match the fabrics that are used for everything here) and the preponderance of large savannah mammals. You look at it long enough and you start to hear thumb pianos.

Photos: author

All of this is explained to my companions and I by Big Sam, who we meet in Suleman’s shop. In spectacles and a Cape Cod baseball cap, Big Sam looks (and probably is) nearly twice the age of any of the other painters we meet in Mto wa Mbu, but he came here for the same reasons as everyone else – to learn an interesting trade and make money doing it.

He was a schoolteacher in Dar es Salaam until the pay dried up. Now, along with Max and Young Sam (who originally led us to the shop, calling it a “Tingatinga factory”), he’s being taught by Suleman, the shop’s owner and namesake. When Edward S. Tingatinga realized that his solo production team couldn’t keep up with customer demands, he taught some of his young relatives his tricks. Those boys taught other boys, and on and on, until someone taught Suleman.

Someone else taught Charles, who rushes into the shop about midway through my painting lesson, sweating through a black muscle shirt and a knit cap. We’ve run out of yellow paint and he’s generously lending us some.

He’s come all the way from the first shop on our side of the road, which he owns with his brother Thomson – Charles learned to paint Tingatinga and Maasai knife paintings in Dar es Salaam and is teaching his brother. Right now, in an attempt to diversify their styles, they’re both working on paintings of only hippos. I’m interested in this technique, and this goal – if it’s all just for money, why bother developing a personal style? Why not just go with what’s been working, and selling?

Later that day, taking a break from my zebra, I voice my question out loud to O-Man, the owner of the shop next to Suleman’s and (of course) a Tingatinga painter. He is surprised. “Personal style is key,” he assures me. “Why else would anyone buy your Tingatinga and no one else’s?”

I had been assuming that it was a matter of practical skill rather than artistic ability; that, having learned the basic components, the Tingatinga painter was more of a rearranger, a human scrapbook-and-photocopy machine. My attention is directed to a table of about 12 different paintings, some by Suleman and others by Maiko, a nationally famous Tingatinga artist who sells to many of the smaller shops.

“You’ll see,” he says, “Maiko paints fewer animals, but he paints them bigger. Suleman does many small animals.” He’s right. And there are other, subtler differences, too – color choice, placement, thickness of brush strokes, even the expressions on the animals’ faces, how they appear to be relating to each other. I can suddenly see why Maiko is renowned, and what Suleman has passed down to his apprentice.

Photos: author

Even their versions of common paintings, arrangements I’ve seen dozens of times (the canvas-wide whirlpool of fish, the impossibly long and thin birds set out in vertical parallel) have their own spin. Soon I can pick the work of either artist out of a lineup.

I go back outside and look up and down the impossibly colorful street. I’d been very close to losing interest in Tingatinga – purposefully plagiarized paintings that are originally based on stereotypes? Artists that want to sell out? I’m an English major from the American East Coast, I hang around people who would rather get thrown out of school or off a cliff than be deliberately derivative.

But to be able to be original within limits, to simultaneously express yourself, feed your family, and represent and support your country seems admirable. So I go back in to Max and keep attempting to paint, and maybe earn, my stripes.

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/finding-art-in-tanzanian-tingatinga/feed/ 4 http://matadorabroad.com/breaking-down-the-staredown/ http://matadorabroad.com/breaking-down-the-staredown/#comments Thu, 22 Apr 2010 17:24:26 +0000 Lola Akinmade http://matadorabroad.com/?p=4053 stares, when I travel in regions where not a lot of black people travel.]]>

Photos: author

As an avid traveler I often get asked how I deal with, you know, stares, when I travel in regions where not a lot of black people travel.

A prolonged stare is creepy enough to rattle even the most intrepid of travelers. As much as we don’t acknowledge it, we all experience travel differently. Sometimes on a much deeper level than we’re even aware of. And unfortunately, some experiences can be marred by how people react to us…physically.

Here’s an excerpt from a piece I wrote awhile back that talked about dealing with stereotypes:

Your friend just returned from the trip of a lifetime – traveling around remote regions, being invited into homes of locals, feasting on ethnic spreads, and immersing herself in centuries-old cultures.

Seething with travel envy, you sign up for your own life changing trip, only to arrive there and find your reception quite different from that of your friend’s.

You’re not readily welcomed with open arms and you’re constantly being gawked at. At that moment, no one can understand the level of dejection you’re feeling…..

Situations like these can leave travelers confused and unsure of themselves. Having experienced a range of reactions from locals over the years – from acceptance to blatant rejection – I’ve decoded various types of stares into seven distinct types:

The “What on Earth?” stare

This is your typical “I’ve just seen a ghost look.” Usually reserved for older men and women and accompanied with a slight jaw-drop.

The “Hellooooo…baby!” stare

They’ve watched the music videos. They’ve seen the stereotypes on TV. So when they see you, they put two-and-two together and react based on assumptions. “They” being middle-aged men.

The “Frozen in Time” stare

Similar to the way a cow stops and stares, half-chewing and frozen in time. This usually happens when I saunter into tiny villages. They stop and freeze. This look also pops up on occasion in city settings especially with much older folk (80s and older) who freeze their steps and stare. The difference between the ‘What on Earth?” and this look is that the “What on Earth?”s keep on walking while these just freeze.

The “Covert Operation” stare

The sneakiest of the bunch, they use every reflective surface to observe and study you. Unless you catch them via their reflection in the mirror. Usually reserved for older teenagers (both girls and boys) and young men who find you attractive.

The “Confused” stare

They know I exist yet are taken by surprise when I turn up in their ski lodge or on their yacht.

The “Abject Fascination” stare

Just the other day I watched as a little boy barely 8 months old, strapped into a grocery cart, trailed me up and down an aisle with just his eyes. His dad, walking back from another aisle, caught his baby rubbernecking and we shared a lighthearted laugh.

Kids point. They stare. They gawk. Sometimes they laugh. If their natural curiosity didn’t bubble to the surface, frankly, I’d be concerned.

The “Utterly Disgusted” stare

Definitely the most difficult to stomach. Sometimes, you look over your shoulder wondering who they’re staring at with such loathing only to realize it’s…you?! Usually born from previous negative experiences or just deep-seated prejudice you really can’t change in a day.

Note – All of these types of stares, excluding the “Covert Operation” stare, are usually followed by some serious rubbernecking to make sure what they’re seeing isn’t a figment of their imagination.

So, how do I handle stares, you ask?

I just keep on traveling.

That’s the only way.

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/breaking-down-the-staredown/feed/ 22 http://matadorabroad.com/dispatches-from-one-tuesday-in-iraq/ http://matadorabroad.com/dispatches-from-one-tuesday-in-iraq/#comments Thu, 15 Apr 2010 19:03:51 +0000 Adam Jones http://matadorabroad.com/?p=3979

Photo: author

If a rocket hit, I decided I would run north half a block, up the hill.

There was an alley where a fallen concrete slab made an ‘N’ with the walls. I couldn’t see the alley anymore but in my head blazed a red-hot letter ‘N.’

Norte, habebe.

A gibbous moon hung low over the four-lane artery soldiers called Route Rat, where a cluster of sidewalk stores ended a long stretch of rubble and crushed buildings.

As we hurried out of the Sunni grocery, the shopkeeper called to me: “Koosortek!”

<"Sister-fucker!">

In the States, mothers get it. In Iraq, it’s the sisters.

On the edge of the bubble of light a beat-up taxi, the token white with orange fenders, crept past a garbage fire in the middle of the street.

In the bubble our faces glowed because we had been sweating under our head clothes. Tawook’s cufflinks glinted like tiny mirrors. The fire and the bubble and Tawook’s cufflinks were the only light.

It was quiet and Baghdad didn’t seem like a ruined city.

It didn’t seem like a warzone, either.

The world stopped at the edge of the bubble.

Our voices sounded huge and the placelessness of their echo made it seem as if we could be anywhere in the world. Then the sound of the Arabs cursing behind me traveled under the loud benzene generator that sustained the isolating bubble of light.

“Did I miss something?” I asked the translator.

“They don’t like you man,” Babba Shawarma said. Shawarma rearranged his shirt sleeve to cover his withered arm.

“Check for a VBIED (Vehicle Bourne Improvised Explosive Device),” he said.

We both got down on our bellies and felt around for bombs stuck to the underside of the van. Shawarma had borrowed it from his cousin, Babba Tawook.

I trusted Tawook because I trusted Shawarma. Plenty of Iraqis in Karrada knew Tawook regularly accepted money from the Americans. Still, the van rode pretty high.

“Be easy for those guys to stick something big under there,” Shawarma said.

+++

I was interviewing Sunnis on the eve of January 31, 2009 because everyone expected Sunni bombs to flay the markets in the morning. In twelve hours, polling stations opened for the first provincial election ever held in Iraq.

The dust was kicking up. The sun was a white circle on a flat sheet of magenta sky. Weather was my excuse to wrap my head and take a car outside the wire.

Babba Tawook gave me a deal. For twenty dollars he would drive me around all day, anywhere except Sadr City.

Not Sadr city, when they see you there, they call their friends. No, but maybe he would take me to Wahshosh.

In the afternoon Tawook saw that my pistol wasn’t loaded and he refused to go to Wahshosh.

My empty pistol had got him thinking. At the end of everything, he doubled his price.

“Habebe,” he said, counting my crumpled bills, “You are American, and a scientist and I will bring at least one bullet for you next time. Mamnoon, habebe, mamnoon.”

<"I am grateful, friend, I am grateful.">

I had predicted the weather: I was a scientist. I was born in America: I was rich.

+++

Earlier that day we tried talking to women. There were some on the street. Not all of them were fully covered. None of them looked at us.

Tawook called the uncovered girls bitches. They like ficki-ficki, he said. We talked to a few of them. Tawook showed the beautiful one the wadded American bills in his money clip. Two of them at the same time would cost me two hundred dollars, Tawook said. “They are young. Very good,” he said.

All the uncovered women expected a bomb from al Queda or some other group in the morning. Quietly, one of the ugly girls said the Shi’a militants are just as bad, but no one else spoke after her.

The military newspaper and American officer friends said Sunni hearts have proven hardest in Iraq. Sunni sheiks in the Anbar province led a boycott of the first national election in 2005. Many have grumbled – and fired rounds – over each one since.

Composure is not valued among Arabs. I had already photographed victims of the market bombs at Baghdad hospital. A show of force has greater value in Iraq.

“Lee-esh?” I asked the driver, Babba Tawook, the used-car salesman with the scar below his eye.

<"Why?">

“Why do Sunnis oppose elections?”

“Why have Iraqis turned on each other?”

The fronts were missing from all the buildings we passed. Desks and chairs were flipped over inside the rooms. There were squatters putting sheet metal flaps together to sleep under. The night was getting cold and the air had thickened with powdery sand. Thirty small squatter fires in the naked rooms made the outline of a backward-turning dog.

Iraqi reporters I ate with sometimes in Karrada said Sunnis were angry at the greater Shi’a numbers in the new government. Most Shi’a are looked at as uneducated, the reporters said. Sunni’s feel the lesser sect will have a greater say because there are more of them to vote.

For Tawook, the salesman, the womanizer, the numerologist, the answer was more mysterious and smoky, like Baghdad a thousand years ago.

“There can only be one strong man,” Tawook said with his burning cigarette held upright between his thumb and index finger.

+++

I never finished the news video. Equipment broke on the helicopter ride the next day along with a lucky piece of polished marble from one of Saddam Hussein’s decimated peach-colored getaway palaces in the North Mountains.

Too bad.

The interviewees were loud. Spit was flying around in gobs. It was an easy edit.

The first minute set the pace.

I cut between shots of the store through its dirty, green plate-glass; close-ups of the store owner on a tirade; and a crooked train of women in Burquas passing by the window.

They were diamond-shaped ninjas flinching from the camera with THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU bags.

Many of those girls were wild. It came out in their walk – the shoulders and the hips.

+++

Women in Burqua’s are “ninjas,” on army radio. As in, we got thirty ninjas coming up on left. Dunno if y’all are gamblin’ men but mah bets on a suicide vest, least one or two ah reckon. Double on that heavy gal in the back. She’s prolly ‘bout fity pounds naked.

+++

We drove passed concertina wire barrier into the rundown Hateen Market area and followed the pale light and stink of warm fish to the store. The three tube lights made the inside of the store fluorescent. There were holes in the ceiling and very little on the shelves: bags of dates, strewn Bounty bars, rice and some cans covered in fine Iraqi dust. Customers were smacking the things on the shelves so the dust would billow off. When they saw the price, they shook their heads over it.

I asked the shopkeeper who he would vote for in the provincial elections.

Shawarma translated his answer back to me: “I don’t like any of the candidates. I do not want to be responsible for what they do.”

The shoppers noticed I was not Arab.

There was conviction in the shopkeeper’s voice. He was a 300-pound Sunni with a bald head, permanent frown and ball-glove hands that smacked the air when he shouted, “We have no services, nothing!”

Services are water and electricity. The man did not have reliable electricity or clean water. He had deep circles under his eyes and his clothes were unwashed. You could tell he wore them every day. “For years, this,” he said.

The shopkeeper’s fat face was tight. He was rearranging the warm, paper-wrapped meats in front of him. He said something to Shawarma in Arabic.

Shawarma’s pupils were dilated now and he was fidgeting more than usual. We were drawing a crowd.

Shawarma put his good hand on the big Sunni’s shoulder.

“Don’t talk to me like it’s my fault,” Shawarma said in slow, easy Arabic, that contradicted the look on his face. Shawarma and the big Sunni were talking real close now.

Tawook was talking to the rest. “Colooombiaano,” Tawook said, nodding toward me.

“Amereekie?” one asked.

“Lah habebe, Amreekie Janoob. Colooombiaano, Espani, same-same,” Tawook said meeting my eye.

“Makoo Mushkala.”

<“No my love, he is South American. Colombian and Spanish are similar.

No problem.”>

Outside the wire I was usually a mute Kurd. Today I was Colombian. Tawook did not want to present himself to the women with a Kurd.

Out of the back room, another humongous guy came shouting “Lah, lah, lah” pointing at my camcorder.

<"No, no, no camera!">

“Lee-esh?” I asked.

<"Why?">

Shawarma talked fast for the next 30 seconds. His head flicked back-and-forth like a prize-fighter’s. His high-pitch Americanized Arabic floated over their bass arguments and hand-slapping. Shawarma is an Iraqi from New Hampshire. He is a wiry teenaged spaz, a clarinet.

The other guy kept pointing at the camera, pounding his fist on the counter.

“So much money and they do nothing. Look around, no light! Look at the sidewalk!” Big Sunni said, red in the face.

There was no sidewalk. It was dirt, rubble and garbage.

Shawarma’s damaged right arm ticked because two men crossed the street to ogle us, and one of them got on his cell phone.

No Iraqi who deals with Americans trusts anybody. I’ve been told the price on the head of any Westerner starts at $10,000. Americans bring in much more.

There was an arms-length piece of angle iron on the floor behind me.

Ten grand is a house forever and a harem for a week. Running water and ceiling fans, a refrigerator. Two women, three times a day, very young, very good.

The sight of the angle iron superimposed itself over the flaming letter “N” in my brain. Everyone was yelling in Arabic. There was always yelling. It was yelling first, then aiming and cocking, then a slap, then a stab or a gunshot at the feet, then more.

I couldn’t see what was behind the counter.

Pointing at both shopkeepers furiously, Shawarma tried to control the conversation.

I still don’t know when pointing is rude here. I have a stringy beard. I look around too much. Tawook said if I killed someone next week and let word spread about it, I’d have better chances in Baghdad.

Shawarma was arguing now, completely frustrated: ”You don’t want to vote for someone you like? What do you want, another dictator to rob you? Just for someone to blame?”

I knew that was the last question when the lights dimmed and the giant refrigerator that had been sputtering all night – the one I was leaning on – finally quit.

Then all eyes and blame fell on me:

“Habebe, Shukron, Enamorado los Irahckis. Shukron! Futbol in Irahq kuley zien. Enamorado Futbol habebes. Lo siento, mi Arabi pocito. Que Pena! Shukron! La gente de Coluuumbia dice shukron! Hasta pronto Sadiqis. Mi Sadiqi tu. Mi Sadiqi tu. Mi Sadiqi tu. Mi Sadiqi tu. Nosotros estamos sadiqis. Estamos hermanos. Zien, Los Irahquis kuley zien. Hermanos! Futbol! Amore! Shukron, shukron, shukron!”

<"Spanglabic nonsense.">

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/dispatches-from-one-tuesday-in-iraq/feed/ 8 http://matadorabroad.com/mexico-in-a-dogs-eyes/ http://matadorabroad.com/mexico-in-a-dogs-eyes/#comments Tue, 13 Apr 2010 22:45:07 +0000 Sarah Menkedick http://matadorabroad.com/?p=3949

Photo: author

Smells good. Smells like sausage. No, wait wait wait – not just sausage, chorizo. Yes, mmm, chorizo with eggs, mmmm, those soft creamy eggs with the tang of that red sausage, meaty, creamy, wrapped in a warm tortilla.

Ow! Damn. And she’s yanking me again. Always in such a rush at this hour, ready to start the jog up the steps and onto the hill. I’m already breathing hard, looking at her expectantly, and at the same time keeping an eye out for the stray cats that dot these stairs, thin and bony and mean as hell but oh so delightful to chase up fences if I get a chance. She doesn’t like it, though, because then the señoras with tough white braids and brooms come out and give her those stern glances.

The air here in this mountain valley is fresh and strong, with character and depth and presence. It smells like cool, soft pine needles and sweet flowers, the big pink and orange flowers that look like loosely pursed lips and have the goofy tassles in the middle. Between the leaps up the stairs I also distinguish the faint stink of exhaust from city buses, the smoke of cooking fires, and the flat, warm, grainy scent of tortillas puffing up on the clay grills they call comales.

We make our rounds on the Fortin, up the steep mountain path fringed with herbs – fennel, thyme, and rosemary – and then back down and around the dirt road, kicking up little poofs of that ubiquitous terracotta dust, taking in the wide-rimmed bowl of bristling city beneath us. I take glorious flying leaps at the birds and almost get a gecko.

At 8 the sun here starts to pound from the sky like an opera singer going full force, and I have to steal moments in patches of shade when I get a chance. The light comes barreling down out of that cocky blue sky all pride and confidence and fills the landscape with great triangles and squares and heaps of itself, creeping in beneath tree branches and blasting walls with high notes.

We go to the market. Here I smell furiously, as much as I can as I’m dragged along towards the juice stand. There’s the sharp ticklish smell of cherry tomatoes, the intense perfume of mint and basil, the vague, earthy scents of squash flowers and zucchinis. The blackberries practically sock me in the nose, fat and fresh and reeking of cloying sweetness. The mangos are a balm, plush and lovely, their scent gentle and soft like a blanket.

I wait while she gets her juice. It’s green and blurry, full of stuff. I think there are raisins and pecans in there, and spinach. She sips it from the bag while we walk home. Traffic clots in the streets and cars honk and occasionally people gape out their windows at me and I gape back and secretly chuckle. She chuckles too. A man whistles nearby and I turn sharply to look at him. Knock it off, buddy. He does.

Kids in school uniforms come in loose knots up the sidewalk, estorbando as they say in Spanish (blocking the way, but there’s really no translation. Estorbando conveys a different kind of blocking, one born of the type of lingering and eventually-getting-there behavior they don’t really have in the U.S). The girls are pretty with long wavy hair and black Mary Janes, and they laugh. Their white shirts are wrinkled and haphazardly worn over plaited skirts. They eat chips out of a bag. The boys make ridiculous sounds, like monkeys or wild pigs, trying to impress them. They have dark hair whose waves they try to suppress with gel. It mostly doesn’t work.

The sounds make me want to paw at my ears: the gas truck, its clanging chains and bells to alert the neighbors to its presence, the Agua Super Agua, Agua Super Agua, Agua Super Agua through the bullhorn of the water truck again and again, the rickety pick-ups and chugging VW bugs and old motos all taking a tope (speedbump) at the same time. The church bells’ sad sing-song.

I’m grateful when we round the corner to our cobblestone, dead-end street and head uphill. I give a glance or two back, catch the sprawling grid of narrow streets, the colored buildings, the distant bulk of mountains turning purple under the morning’s bright light, and I think I can almost make out the plumes of meat-flavored steam from taco stands. Sigh. I wish. Maybe tomorrow she’ll let me have one. Today, I’ll settle for a few sips of water and a nap at her feet.

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/mexico-in-a-dogs-eyes/feed/ 5 http://matadorabroad.com/confessions-of-an-overpacker/ http://matadorabroad.com/confessions-of-an-overpacker/#comments Thu, 08 Apr 2010 17:17:12 +0000 Meagan Kelly http://matadorabroad.com/?p=3876

Feature Photo: Phineas H

Meagan Kelly is not a light packer, and she may not ever be one.

I approach the doors of the departure level towing a cartful of suitcases. I begin to sweat profusely. All I can remember is the time my entourage of luggage got me stuck in a revolving door.

Making it through, I encounter my next foe: the check-in counter. I drag what feels like dead weight. I heave my stuffed suitcase onto the scale. My heart rate climbs in tandem with the rising red digits before me.

48 pounds. 49.3 pounds. I bite my lip. 49.8 pounds. It is a close call. If there were a few more t-shirts in there, I’d have to whip out the credit card, although it wouldn’t be the first time I had to pay an exorbitant amount for excess baggage.

A fluorescent orange tag reading “Caution: Heavy” is slapped onto my enormous suitcase. The entire ordeal is then repeated for my second piece of luggage.

I am relieved to get it all done without paying this time, although my relief is tempered by embarrassment. I can sense the judgmental gazes of airline staff and fellow travelers. I think I hear a whisper, “Really? How much does one girl need?”

Photo: geishaboy500

Every journey I take begins this way: with suitcases full of suspense and a hint of humiliation.

I can’t believe I am admitting this on a travel website, where if you search for “packing light,” over ten pages of results appear. For many, efficient packing is a mantra. For me, it is a mysterious holy grail.

I am an overpacker. Confession is the first step.

I own six suitcases. I have enough vacuum-able packing bags to fill a suitcase. I have spent so much money on baggage fees and international shipping costs that I’m too ashamed to admit the exact amount. While my suitcases are full, my wallet remains empty.

With many long-term trips to a variety of climates and cultures under by belt, I had hoped to nail down the perfect packing list. Yet, my load doesn’t seem to get much lighter.

My first trip overseas was to Rwanda for two months. Before I left, I decided to purchase new luggage. I went into the store and asked the associate for the largest suitcase they had. She brought me to the back and pointed to a black behemoth. It needed an extra set of wheels that popped out of the back.

A suitcase this big could surely fit everything I needed to bring to Rwanda. Therefore, I would only need one suitcase! I was sold instantly, thinking that I was such a clever traveler. How wrong I was.

I began packing a few days before the trip. After filling the suitcase with a mound of cargo pants, t-shirts, and chocolate goodies I knew I wouldn’t find in Kigali, I zipped it up and attempted to lift the mammoth. Nothing. That sucker wasn’t going anywhere.

I forced my dad to hold the suitcase while standing on a scale, so I could calculate the weight of my problem. 80 pounds. My plan was foiled. Instead of rethinking and repacking, I emptied the excess into a duffel bag.

At this point, you might be wondering exactly what I put in my luggage. Nothing especially heavy goes in my bags. Some people pack two pairs of pants; I pack three or four. Trust me, I’ll wear almost every single thing in my suitcase. I like choice. Travel is full of the unexpected.

Photo: d proffer

I packed like a pro for my week-long trip to NYC, with a more suitably sized bag. Before I left, I checked the forecast. NYC was supposed to see sunshine. I arrived and it rained almost every day. How many sweaters did I pack? One. It stunk of body odor by day three. I had to buy new sweaters with my credit card, which is a problem. My wallet is always empty, remember?

I cursed myself for traveling light. “See! This is why I overpack,” I told my mother.

I have a lot more justifications in my bag.

I just bought this shirt, so I have to bring it. These shoes are better with this dress, but they hurt my feet so I need a second pair. I won’t have time or money to shop. I sweat a lot, so I have to change clothes a lot.

I’m not oblivious to my addiction. I am trying to get better at packing. I have read every kind of packing list, website, and guide out there. They just don’t work for me.

My biggest challenge yet lies before me. I am currently preparing for a nine-month journey around the world with the Dekeyser and Friends Foundation. I will be in a lot of places, encountering all kinds of seasons and situations: starting in the Philippines, potentially heading to Africa, and ending in Europe. My packing goal is simple: be under the weight limit and avoid having to ship anything home at the end.

On a sleepless night preparing for this packing nightmare, I realized why I overdo it. I stared at my closet, overflowing with jeans and cardigans. That’s what I miss when I’m away: choice. Call it superficial, but having more than one or two t-shirts reminds me of home. I make a lot of sacrifices to live abroad. When the homesickness sets in, I can find some solace in my suitcase.

I will keep trying to lessen my load. However, I am not likely to ever be the girl who can fit it all in one backpack. I am slowly coming to accept that.

When your baggage is your home, sometimes it’s nice to have a two-story suitcase.

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/confessions-of-an-overpacker/feed/ 28 http://matadorabroad.com/bring-your-own-food-eating-out-in-the-philippines/ http://matadorabroad.com/bring-your-own-food-eating-out-in-the-philippines/#comments Thu, 25 Mar 2010 18:35:08 +0000 Noah Pelletier http://matadorabroad.com/?p=3751

Photo: Robertoverzo Feature Photo: Salim Photography

The Philippines might be on to something with bring your own food (BYOF) restaurants.

The twin engine plane that hurtled us over the Philippine jungle had tendencies for splendid, gut-wrenching drops. My eyes were glazed, staring out the window to a thousand and one clouds. My wife, Takayo, was trying to sleep through it. Her eyes were closed, but gripping the armrest like she was, I don’t think she was having much luck. We had an eight-hour layover in Manila before our flight back to Shanghai.

Aside from being overcrowded, noisy, and hotter than Hell’s doorknob, there’s nothing wrong with the Ninoy Aquino Airport, if you have twenty minutes to kill between flights, you can pick up a liter of rum for about two dollars, or talk scuba diving with someone over a San Miguel. For longer layovers, however, you’re better off napping through it in the backseat of an air conditioned taxi. Naturally, the air conditioner in our taxi was busted, so I asked the driver if he knew of a good restaurant in the area.

“What kind of food you like?”

“Traditional Philippine food. Adobo?”

“I know a place,” he said, and then stepped on the gas.

Adobo is the Philippine national dish, made using vinegar, soy sauce, and other ingredients indigenous to the area. The vinegar has a tendency to boil away, leaving a thickened broth and meat that falls off the bone. Our hotel in Boracay had served a chicken adobo for breakfast one morning. My wife and I were now hooked.

Photo: jonicdao

It was a clear day on the outskirts of Manila. Some have called Manila an unkempt, rundown, impoverished, and threatening sprawl of a city. I wasn’t buying it. As with anywhere in the world, the experience depends on the pair of eyes you’re looking through. My eyes, as it turned out, were hungry; I saw a future of culinary opportunities.

Our driver turned off a highway and headed down an alley lined with fruit stands, fry joints, and beer halls. We arrived at a closed cul-de-sac and parked, the only car on the street. The driver told us he’d stay in the car, but we told him he could go and walked up to the restaurant. It looked utterly abandoned, but the front door swung right open.

A girl came out from the back and gave us a sleepy welcome. She told us to pick any seat we liked. We flipped through the menu, which, of course, was in Tagalog. Our waitress arrived and we began pointing to items on the menu. She wrote everything down.

“OK, Where’s your food?” She asked.

“Where’s our food?” I said.

“Yes.”

“We don’t have any food. We came here to buy food from you.”

“We don’t have food.”

Wasn’t this the beginning of an Abbot and Costello routine?

“OK,” I said. “What am I paying for?”

“You bring food in. We cook it.”

“Oh, OK. Well, where can I buy food?”

“Market’s through the alley.”

Photo: besighyawn

I asked the girl to accompany me to the market. Takayo stayed at the restaurant watching a Philippine soap opera on the wall-mounted television. I followed the waitress through a cinder block corridor to the side of the restaurant. We passed a mountain of trash. We passed a boy sleeping on a wooden pallet at the mouth of a dark hallway. The earthy smell of roots and raw meat become stronger, and then we entered the warehouse market.

What was once a fly-swarmed place full of bored fishmongers became a fly-swarmed place full of excited people bidding for my attention. Handfuls of crab and shrimp were thrust at me from every angle. Eyes bugged out from sea creatures. A little girl asked me for spare change and I placed some in her hand. Everyone went wild. By the time we finished shopping, I carried out a kilo of prawns, a half-kilo of pork, green beans, broccoli, onions, garlic, rice, and more. I waved good-by to the vendors, who returned a tremendous farewell. The waitress kept walking and I had to jog to catch up with her.

It was nearly an hour before the food landed on our table, but it was worth the wait. Philippine cuisine has elements of Southeast Asian, Chinese, and Spanish influence rolled into one. There were Adobo prawns, pork apretada, stir fried vegetables, coconut rice…it was the type of spread you’d be happy to call a last meal. And who knew, it very well could have been. We still had to walk out of that alley to catch a taxi, but that would be hours later. We gave it our best, trying to finish everything on the plates.

A restaurant with no food. It may not be practical for everyone, but it’s a change of pace for those of us who like to know what we’re eating. And there in that little alley somewhere outside of Manila, it was the best possible way to spend a long layover, eating fresh food we’d bought ourselves cooked with local expertise.

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/bring-your-own-food-eating-out-in-the-philippines/feed/ 9 http://matadorabroad.com/traveling-to-the-motherland-motherland-travel/ http://matadorabroad.com/traveling-to-the-motherland-motherland-travel/#comments Wed, 24 Mar 2010 18:02:06 +0000 Valerie Ng http://matadorabroad.com/?p=3744

Photos: Fotos China by Jorge Santiago

The unexpected complications of traveling back to the motherland.

“Do you consider yourself Chinese or American?” the Chinese man sitting across from me on the plane asked in Mandarin.

“American,” I answered after a short pause. Having been born and raised in the United States, I believed it to be the only appropriate response.

He groaned. “You should say you’re Chinese,” he replied. “And it seems like you don’t speak Chinese very well, either.” He sighed. “That’s what always happens to our people when they go abroad. They become foreigners.”

The man’s words stung me as I was heading to China for the very first time. Growing up, I had always been aware of my dual identity. I spoke English at school and Cantonese at home, and attended Chinese school to develop my reading and writing skills.

I loved shrimp dumplings and rice noodles as much as mac and cheese and pizza. And although my family did not speak Mandarin, the official language of the People’s Republic of China, my parents signed me up for classes, adding to the Spanish instruction I received in my regular school.

Yet it was clear from this encounter that because I grew up across the ocean from the motherland, in an environment that was predominantly non-Chinese, the cultural influences that had shaped me were largely American, a fact that this man did not appreciate. I soon realized that despite sharing the heritage of the inhabitants of this country, I was an outsider.

No Homecoming

I was extremely disconcerted to get such reception from a native Chinese. Having spent my entire life as a racial minority in the United States, I had looked forward to being in a country in which I could blend in. I’d figured that my ethnic ties, as well as a familiarity with the language, would give me an advantage over tourists without that connection to the country.

But throughout the trip, I still found myself struggling to communicate in Mandarin, which I’d studied as a foreign language just as I had with Spanish. My family and I were sometimes charged foreigner prices because we were overseas Chinese. And each of the locales we visited were thousands of miles from the home villages of our ancestors, making them seem as exotic as Malawi or India. What I had envisioned as a heritage trip felt like anything but a homecoming.

Motherland travel can sometimes be more challenging than visiting a country in which you are an obvious foreigner. You’re expected to speak the language with the same command as a native and possess the same cultural proclivities, as if you have spent your entire life in that country.

But when your foreignness is obvious, the locals are often sensitive to your foreign ways, respecting any cultural differences and linguistic shortcomings. This seemed to be the case when I studied abroad in Spain and France, where I did not have any clear ancestral ties. My Spanish senora and her husband were patient with my roommates and me as we developed our Spanish skills, and understood that we were not accustomed to eating dinner after 8 pm. There was a mutual awareness of the cultural gaps that existed between us, and on each side, we did our best to accommodate for them.

My situation in China was not unique. A friend of mine who has spent extensive time in Mexico recalled that Mexicans would sometimes look down upon her Mexican-American friends for their imperfect Spanish and for having forgotten their culture, but were appreciative of the fact that she, a pale-skinned American, spoke their language at all and showed interest in their country.

Matador Trips editor Hal Amen also recalled that when lived in South Korea, Koreans would often become upset that his Korean-American friends, who were often assumed to be natives, did not speak the language fluently and were not familiar with the culture.

In contrast, Hal found that the locals were “thrilled” when he could dig into his basic Korean vocabulary, and that they would make an effort to start conversations in English and make foreigners like himself feel welcome in the country. He attributed this reception to the fact that South Korea does not receive many foreign travelers and to the Koreans’ fascination with the West, with the English language in particular.

Thinking more about my experience, I realized a few things about China. When I first visited in 1998, its society was still fairly insular, having emerged only in the 1970s from a decades-long isolation from international engagement. It still would have been difficult for many people to understand why someone who was supposedly Chinese did not speak their language fluently and thought of herself to be of a nationality other than their own.

They probably found it an insult that I rejected their country and culture, in which they had such fierce pride, and adopted that of a foreign nation. A similar logic can be applied to countries like Mexico and South Korea. My situation was further complicated by the fact that my parents grew up in Hong Kong when it was still a colony of the United Kingdom, and where Mandarin, China’s national language, was not spoken.

Reclaiming My Identity

After a second family visit to China in 2000, I avoided traveling to China. I studied abroad in London, Madrid, and Paris, where I would be free from misgivings about being out of touch with my cultural identity. In Europe, I could be just another foreigner learning about new cultures and picking up new vocabulary, whose American ways would not be questioned. I admired famous works of art, discovered new foods, took siestas in the middle of the afternoon, and conversed in languages I did not grow up with.

In all my travels, I’ve always identified the United States as my home, but have been forced to acknowledge that my roots are somewhere in Asia. And while I am proud of the fact that I gained proficiency in Spanish and French during my stint in Europe, I do feel guilty for not having put the same effort into mastering Chinese.

I have yet to return to China, in part because I still lack the fluency in Mandarin that would be expected of me and because of fears that I would be derided as a sellout.

I do plan on returning one day, and when that happens, I’ll have to keep in mind that I might come under greater scrutiny than someone of Western stock, and that any cultural gaffes or deficiencies in language won’t be shrugged off the way they were in Poland or Spain.

But I realize now that I at least deserve to give myself a break, even if the locals will not. I did not make a conscious choice to reject the country, culture, and language of my ancestors. Because I grew up in the United States, it was practically inevitable that English would become my primary language, and that I would become integrated into American life.

Mandarin was essentially my third language, and my classes occurred only weekly, which was inadequate if I wanted to
achieve fluency in a difficult language that requires more years of study than Spanish.

I have never thought of myself as purely Chinese or American, but as Chinese-American. I shouldn’t feel ashamed of the fact that I am more savvy with American culture and speak English, and possibly Spanish and French, better than I speak Mandarin. What matters is that I am aware of my identity and am comfortable with it, and can only hope that native Chinese will respect that.

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/traveling-to-the-motherland-motherland-travel/feed/ 14 http://matadorabroad.com/oaxacas-pacific-coast-by-the-numbers/ http://matadorabroad.com/oaxacas-pacific-coast-by-the-numbers/#comments Thu, 18 Mar 2010 20:36:14 +0000 Sarah Menkedick http://matadorabroad.com/?p=3703

Photos: author

This past weekend I took an epic road trip from Oaxaca City to a remote bay near Huatulco for the wedding of two of my best friends. I was their (unofficial) minister; Jorge was their photographer. They invited approximately fifty friends and family members down to a small beach with an open-air restaurant, a rustic bar, and a number of dreamy cabañas scattered around the hillsides.

Three kilometers of unpaved, bumpy, winding, vertiginous road led to the cabañas, the restaurant, and the glassy jade bay giving out onto the Pacific. After tottering in in an enormous, wobbly passenger van, all of us sucking up sharp breaths of air, we didn’t leave for four days. There were Bloody Mary’s, there was phosphorescent plankton, there were quiet mornings with nothing but faint pinks, greens, and oranges, there were bird songs and waves and millions of stars.

Photos: author

I had to think about sea urchins in order not to cry as my friends gave their vows and I pronounced them husband and wife.

Like all road trips, this one came complete with about 8,952 unexpected mini-adventures. Here is a glimpse at Oaxaca’s Pacific Coast by the numbers.

Bottles Of Wine Transported In Ginormous Van: 40

Bottles Of Alcohol Transported In Ginormous Van: 20

Number Of Strange Bathroom Noises Heard During The Night At Pochutla’s “Best” Hotel: 30+

Topless Old Men In Boxers Observing Morning Traffic From Rooftops In Pochutla: 1

Number of Geckos Observed In Hammock Outside Room: 10

Number of Scorpions Inside Room: 1

Bottles Of Scorpion Mezcal Consumed: 1

Fish Tortas Eaten: 4

Number of Family Members Crying During Wedding Ceremony: 3

Number of Teary Post-Vow Wedding Kisses: 3

Beers Consumed In Highly Emotional State: 4

Siestas Taken Inside Mosquito Nets: 3

Bottles Of Wine And Alcohol Loaded Into Van For Return Trip: 0

Smelly Hitchhikers From Albuquerque Picked Up En Route: 1

Miles Traveled With Smelly Hitchhiker: 20

Pesos Required To Fill Gas Tank: 700

Alternative Tiny Mountain Roads Taken To Avoid Protest Roadblocks: 2

Number Of Bulldozers Clearing Narrow Unpaved Curves On Tiny Mountain Roads While Cars Wait To Pass: 1

Times Looked Down Out Driver’s Side Window To See Massive Drop Off Cliff: 5

Number of Military Checkpoints Encountered : 2

Searches Performed : 0

Number Of Soldiers Playing Dice As Our Van Cruised By Unnoticed: 7

Roadblocks Encountered On The One Road To Oaxaca: 3

Number of Cars Driving Aimlessly Through Desert In Hopes of Finding Alternative Routes: 7

Cacti Hit While Maneuvering Van Through Roadless Desert To Avoid Roadblocks: 20+

Cows Narrowly Avoided While Maneuvering Van Through Roadless Desert To Avoid Roadblocks: 3

Topes (speed bumps) Unsuspectingly Slammed Driving Through Tiny Pueblos To Avoid Roadblocks: 5

Random Turns Made Into Blocked Streets In Bumper-To-Bumper Traffic In Oaxaca: 3

Cars Hit While Backing Up In Ginormous Van In Tiny Oaxacan Streets: 0

Charge To Rental Van For Cactus-Tope-Hitting-Offroading-Mountain Adventures, in Pesos: 0

Minutes After Arriving Home That Two Dogs Passed Out In Imperturbable Slumber: 1

Total Hours Driven On National Strike Day: 12

Total Hours Drive Normally Takes: 6

Negra Modelos Consumed In Exhausted Stupor: 4

Minutes It Took To Miss Thrill Of The Road: 5

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/oaxacas-pacific-coast-by-the-numbers/feed/ 7 http://matadorabroad.com/a-virtual-ride-on-a-chinese-train/ http://matadorabroad.com/a-virtual-ride-on-a-chinese-train/#comments Thu, 11 Mar 2010 13:33:41 +0000 Sarah Menkedick http://matadorabroad.com/?p=3669

Photo: Micah Sittig Feature Photo: LHOON

Go for a ride on a Chinese train.

At 4:45 a.m. you wake to the gently rocking train and the early, absurdly early, Chinese morning light. It gets light around 4:30 now, probably because China rejects the idea of time zones in favor of national solidarity.

Waking up at quarter to five — usually the thickest slog of night with darkness and dreams at their heaviest — and seeing pale green light rising is yet another of those in-between-worlds sensations so frequent in life in China.

Waking up, you are not quite sure where and if you are. Awakening in the train is an unsettling experience. It’s odd to both fall asleep and get up in noticeable motion, like being in another, floating dimension.

Then the light and the snoring senior tour group below quickly ground you in reality, and it’s time to hit the bathroom before fifteen people try to pack it in and brush their teeth and spit over one another and pass each other in the hall and refill their tea thermoses, ah, the humanity!

Soon the masses will be filling the narrow corridors with all their odors and routines and steaming cups of hot tea and jabbing toothbrushes but now, at first light, it’s still calm, there are still feet sticking out from under the covers and snores and the steady, calm sound of the lulling train.

Photo: Fotos Oaxaca

You sit up and promptly catch yourself before you smack your head on the train’s ceiling. You have smartly chosen the top bunk in the hard sleeper class. Hard sleeper isn’t so much hard as cramped; each car contains 10 small door-less rooms which hold six beds.

These are actually quite comfy and come with big, fluffy white sheets which you want to believe are freshly laundered. The three beds that comprise one bunk have different prices; the lowest one is fifteen yuan more expensive than the highest one. This supposedly buys you space and ease except for the reality those in the hard seat classes, random passerby, stubborn grandmothers or people in top bunks usually end up using your bunk as a comfy window seat.

The middle bunk is alright but still puts you full on in the fro of the noodle-sellers and the curious onlookers and the random arm or foot and is much too central for your taste. So the top is the way to go, except for the fact that you have about a foot less head space than the other two bunks so you are constantly curling your neck into absurd S-shapes.

Photo: Fotos Oaxaca

But once you lie down you are in (relatively) peaceful serenity in your own individual universe. You can lie there and contemplate your culturally-determined top-bunk individualism. It’s not the closed door, roomy, soft sleeper compartment with four beds and fake felt roses on the little tables, but it’s not the hard seat with seeds being spit at your feet and migrant workers sleeping in your lap, either.

So you curl your head like a gummy worm to squeeze out of the bed and ease down the little ladder without stepping on anyone’s feet or head. You step into the narrow corridor, rock a little, straighten yourself out, and take in the wheat fields which are passing silently in the morning light.

The morning is hazy white and faintly dizzying, and under it the landscape seems uniform and endless. You make your way to the bathroom, where you pride yourself on your incredible stability faced with a squat toilet and a moving train. Then you splash your face with water, brush your teeth and head back to the two little fold-out seats in front of the window to watch the morning grow and the landscapes slide by.

Slowly the train wakes up around you. People stumble with crazy hair to the bathroom. Old men strut and flex and roam in their tight white long underwear. The senior tour group is up and busting out their bags upon bags of bizarre Chinese snack food. You count four bags alone with the two old ladies in the bottom bunks of your room. They’re wearing the unmistakable red caps of Chinese tour groups. Their male friends, donning the same caps, come over and crowd into the bunks for a little Chinese breakfast party.

You watch as the fiesta unfolds. They break out metal bowls and the women serve up millet congee. Then there are boiled eggs for everyone (some duck and some chicken) meticulously peeled and devoured. Then the freak parade of meats—tubed white sausages, chicken feet, and gooey unrecognizable who-knows-what. Then, refreshingly, apricots and cherries, which leave a big mound of pits on the small table. And finally little white bread biscuits out of an enormous bag that says, “Fine French Bred!” and finally, everyone slumps back in their seat to wait out the final hour to Qingdao.

Photo: Fotos Oaxaca

Whew. You, meanwhile, break out your French press to awe and astound your neighbors with coffee, that scandalous, criminal beverage. You put two scoops of grinds in the French press and fill it with hot water (available in all Chinese trains) as the senior tour group gathers round with looks ranging from outrage to amazement.

They whisper to each other and you hear the occasional “laowai” (foreigner). What’s the foreigner doing?! “Ruining her stomach, for sure!” you’re sure one woman is saying as she clucks her head back and forth. The group of red-capped elderly tourists watches for the full four minutes of brewing time until you push the French press down and serve your coffee, and they wait until you drink it—will she do it, will she do it?!?—before they lose interest.

From there on out, it’s a smooth caffeinated ride through the flat, silent landscape. Gigantic nuclear plants rise out of the haze and fade again into the disappearing wheat fields. You see huge stretches of vegetable fields where the tiny, distant silhouettes of farmers can be seen crouched and lost in work. From time to time a road appears between the ceaseless flat fields and on it is a girl on a bicycle.

Eventually grimy buildings covered in pipes and wires and ancient-looking metal machinery conquer the landscape and you know you’re getting closer. You pass a few rivers and ponds which are a green oily color straight out of animated TV shows. Patches of blue sky show and fade in the gray haze, and then you see the telltale lingering cloud ahead which indicates smog and encroaching civilization.

The train makes a final pass through a landscape that is now dominated by rusted parts and chugging factories of who knows what, and the occasional river bordered in brightly colored garbage, mostly plastic bags. The last kilometer of the train ride is the most brutal. Dozens of orange-shirted migrants, most of whom look older than fifty, are bent over hammering away on the tracks. Even the toughest-looking construction workers have clear plastic thermoses of tea.

The city begins to emerge out of piles of dust and bricks, and finally parallel tracks appear to either side and train cars block the scenery and the train grinds to a final halt. Everyone simultaneously makes a grab for luggage in a free-for-all chaos where it seems as if bags are falling from the sky and limbs are flailing everywhere, and then people book it for the doors. You heave your pack onto your back and step out into the streams of passing people, into the Chinese morning, into Qingdao.

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/a-virtual-ride-on-a-chinese-train/feed/ 14 http://matadorabroad.com/tourism-and-the-preservation-of-culture-a-rebuttal/ http://matadorabroad.com/tourism-and-the-preservation-of-culture-a-rebuttal/#comments Wed, 03 Mar 2010 20:22:37 +0000 Sarah Menkedick http://matadorabroad.com/?p=3582

Photo: author

In a recent World Hum piece, Eric Weiner made the claim that Turkish baths and whirling dervishes, two traditional cultural practices he enjoyed in Turkey, would not exist today if it weren’t for the support of tourist dollars.

Young Turks, he asserts, have a waning interest in these practices and therefore tourism is all that sustains them. In his view, this “inauthentic” preservation of culture and these “inauthentic” cultural experiences are better than none at all. He states that the “travel snobbery” which criticizes tourists for courting such experiences and commercializing them is “rampant, insidious, and frankly, annoying.”

To this I respond:

If we’re attacking snobbery, is it not also snobbish for a tourist to claim that he and other tourists are responsible for the preservation of culture, since the locals can’t seem to bring themselves to do it?

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with going to a Turkish bath or a Mexican dance festival or a Balinese tribal ceremony that might feel slightly – or totally – constructed for tourist consumption. But I think celebrating this as the preservation of culture is self-congratulatory and smugly condescending, and it can wind up being imperialist.

If Mexicans or Turks or the Balinese no longer value the tradition being “preserved” and have lost interest in it, or see it merely as a spectacle for foreign tourists then really, whose culture are tourists preserving, and why? And more importantly, who has the right to decide whose and what kind of culture needs to be preserved? It sounds to me like the tourist is preserving his/her desire to experience the “exotic” and the “romantic,” and not a living, vibrant and necessary part of local culture.

When a cultural phenomenon has ceased to contain significance for local people and has become an entirely commodified experience produced for tourists dollars, it has moved into that 21st century society of the spectacle.

I don’t mean to imply that we should all throw up our hands in fatalistic acceptance that culture is dead, or that it’s going to die and there’s nothing we can do about it. But I also don’t think that culture is necessarily being preserved, or being preserved in a beneficial and productive way, simply because tourists pay for it. That argument inches us closer and closer to a world in which every cultural experience is something that is inherently designated for consumption, and culture is something determined more by what foreign tourists want to see and experience than by what local people actually believe in and practice.

It seems that what is bound to happen here is that Turkey could spiral off into the 22nd century, clogged with cell phones and traffic and Starbucks just like anywhere else in the world, while tourists go on paying for massages and traditional dances. And what, really, does that preserve? A certain sector of the economy? Tourists’ precious, foreign impressions of Turkish “culture”?

Weiner’s argument brings up Edward Saïd’s now familiar point about Orientalism – the West exoticizes and simplifies the East, fixing it permanently in the past and flattening its people and culture into stereotypes.

To a certain degree, cultural tourism that no longer has roots in a particular culture and that survives off of income from tourists does exactly this. Tourists go and look at a 15th century Turkey, reinforcing established notions of what Turkey should be and negating the country’s more complex and challenging modernity.

Meanwhile, the tourist dollars seem to instruct Turkey on what kind of culture it needs to have – here, you can’t protect it yourselves? We’ll do it for you. Saïd labels this process the internalizing of cultural stereotypes: tourists come in, establish what Turkish culture is via their ideas about the preservation of culture, and then hope that the Turks will internalize it.

I find the loss of traditional cultures distressing, but I don’t think that allowing traditional cultural practices to be commercialized and purchased by tourism is necessarily a positive solution, particularly when these cultural practices may hold far more meaning in the minds of tourists than they do in the daily lives of locals.

I think this solution also ignores so many of the factors that contribute to the death of traditional culture – devastating free trade agreements and the influx of multi-national corporations, the huge push of American capitalist culture overseas (particularly evident in modern Mexico), unchecked development, environmental destruction.

Tourists may keep paying for their cultural experiences in Mexican amphitheaters and Turkish hamams, in “cultural villages” in Kenya or Borneo, but that doesn’t stop the processes that devalue traditional culture and corrode it into a mere product to be consumed. The purchase of cultural preservation with tourist money also hints at a world in which someday, the Turks or the Mexicans or the Chinese might no longer have any connections to traditional culture, but tourists will still go into little bubbles and watch dances or ceremonies, pay their money, and leave, and culture will live on in tourist enclaves as an authentic, commercial simulation of what once was. Something similar like this could be happening in China, with the rise of the country’s ethnic minority theme parks.

This is the society of the spectacle at its most grim – traditional culture no longer holds intrinsic value for the people of a particular country, but inside the bubbles “preserved” by tourism tourists can buy a different, antiquated vision, a traditional culture that is no longer of importance and value to local people but has become yet another product they can sell.

I have two points here: the first is that conflating a tourist’s consumption of a traditional cultural experience with cultural preservation is dangerous. The commodification of any traditional practice for tourist consumption is something that should be considered and handled very carefully or else it threatens to divorce that practice entirely from the realm of local cultural tradition and turn it into tourist fanfare. Secondly, tourists should be very careful about claiming they have the right –and indeed, the responsibility — to preserve a culture that is not theirs. It smacks of condescension and imperialism and ignores the phenomena that contribute to the degradation and destruction of culture in the first place.

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/tourism-and-the-preservation-of-culture-a-rebuttal/feed/ 15 http://matadorabroad.com/travels-in-bolivia-and-peru/ http://matadorabroad.com/travels-in-bolivia-and-peru/#comments Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:17:25 +0000 Irina Zhorov http://matadorabroad.com/?p=3518 A photographer’s travels in Bolivia and Peru, working on a documentary project about miners.

In 2006 and 2007 I traveled around South America with a heavy typewriter and a bag of film, intermittently working and settling in places I liked.

I came back with piles of papers and negatives, a strange Spanish accent, and a slew of projects to do. One of these which I’m finally getting around to now is a photo documentary project about the miners of Potosi, Bolivia. A place of superlatives both exciting and terrifying – highest city in the world, used to be richest city in the world, biggest silver deposit, poorest city in Bolivia now – Potosi is a historical wonder struggling to stay afloat both in reality and in our collective memories.

I want to tell its story as it stands now, keeping in mind its historical context and its uncertain future. But I need some help! Please help fund this project and get prints in exchange: you can find more information at Kickstarter.com. Below are photos from my last trip.

1. Two women look on during an homage to La Paz in Tarija, Bolivia. A giant military procession was led by a small Virgin Mary statuette dressed in camouflage.

2.A woman looks on during the Homage to La Paz, Tarija, Bolivia

3.A miner rests outside his shaft at the Cerro Rico mine, in Potosi, Bolivia. Although there are rails, most ore-filled trolleys have to be pushed along them manually.

4.Kids play during sunset in Potosi, Bolivia.

5.A man talks to a departing bus (not seen) in front one of the ubiquitous snack stands found throughout Bolivia.

6.During Mother’s Day in Cusco, Peru, children put on shows for the extended family’s mothers during a cookout.

7.Andres, from Chile, in front of a restaurant in La Paz, Bolivia.

8.A hostel in Uyuni, Bolivia.

9.Every year this bridge, hanging over the Apurimac River, in Peru, is rebuilt during a festival dedicated to it. The technique and location is the same as those used by the Incas.

10.A boy stops to pray at one of the stations of the cross at a pilgrimage festival held at the base of Mount Ausangate

11.Horses and people mingle in the camp that sits at the base of Mount Ausangate, during a pilgrimage festival.

12.Jose Gabriel, from Lima, visits Machu Picchu for the first time. Peru.

13.A girl who attended a non-profit funded school, in Cusco, Peru.

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/travels-in-bolivia-and-peru/feed/ 6 http://matadorabroad.com/on-blogs-of-the-world-intercultural-marriage-and-travel-writing-an-interview-with-liz-chatburn-of-pocket-cultures/ http://matadorabroad.com/on-blogs-of-the-world-intercultural-marriage-and-travel-writing-an-interview-with-liz-chatburn-of-pocket-cultures/#comments Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:56:17 +0000 Sarah Menkedick http://matadorabroad.com/?p=3498

Photos: Fotos Oaxaca

Liz Chatburn, managing editor of Pocket Cultures, shares her perspective on being part of a cross-cultural couple, how blogs could change travel in the future, and the qualities of a solid piece of travel writing.

PocketCultures aims to “put the world in your pocket.” The site features blogs and articles from writers around the world and attempts to provide readers with a palpable, unique sense of local places and cultures. Its writers are diverse, coming from Thailand, Costa Rica, Germany, and Britain, among other countries.

PocketCultures pushes beyond the “look at this bizarre local custom!” gawking of so much travel writing to help travelers get a feel for the social and political issues a particular culture is dealing with, and the way its people eat, dress, speak and think.

It’s a site for the travel anthropologist, who wants to not only visit a place but to see the world from the perspective of people living there.

I interviewed Liz Chatburn, managing editor of PocketCultures, about the site, blogging, and traveling.

Photos: Fotos Oaxaca

How did the idea for Pocket Cultures come about? Can you share its story?

We’re three co-founders and we have all traveled and/or lived in several different countries. One thing we noticed is that the ‘real version’ of a place, which you see through visiting or getting to know locals, is often quite different from the story you see from outside.

For example the Vice guide to Liberia has been getting a lot of attention recently. But what was featured in that series is not representative of the lives of most Liberians and if you talk to a Liberian or someone who has spent a lot of time in Liberia you’ll soon find that out. Actually, we’re working on a series of interviews with Liberian bloggers at the moment.

So, back to the story… we thought it would be great to create a place where people from many different places could share the ‘real stories’ of their countries with each other. We hope in this way we can make connections and help promote better understanding between people of different countries, cultures, religions and backgrounds.

So far we have contributors from nine different countries and they are all passionate about exploring different cultures and sharing their own. As well as wanting to share their cultures, some also joined because they feel their countries are not well understood or don’t get the attention they deserve from the rest of the world.

Pocket Cultures has a really interesting section called “My partner is a foreigner.” This is an area most travel blogs don’t cover. How did the idea for this section come about?

It seems that many people who spend an extended period in another country end up meeting someone!

As one contributor to “My partner is a foreigner” wrote about living in Turkey:

“One of the things that surprises me about the Turkish culture is the huge sense of hospitality, they meet you today and tomorrow you are at their home having dinner and finally it happens like me…. you get married!!!”

Being part of a cross-cultural couple has its own unique set of challenges but it also puts you in the special position of experiencing another culture though your partner. We thought this would be a fun way to explore cultural differences.

One of the things I love about Pocket Cultures is that it covers “blogs of the world” — blogs from all sorts of different places, both in English and in foreign languages. Do you think blogs are changing the way we travel and encounter foreign cultures? If so, how?

Definitely. Personally I think guidebooks are really useful and I don’t think they will be going away soon. But by reading blogs as well before you visit a new place you can see a local’s perspective and gain deeper insights into life and culture there.

The other great thing about blogs is the interaction – you can easily leave your own feedback, or start a discussion with someone on the other side of the world. So yes, for people really interested in better understanding of a different place and culture blogs are a great opportunity.

How did you begin traveling? How do you think it affected you as a person?

Photos: Fotos Oaxaca

I’ve always been curious about the world, but my first real travel experience was a rail trip around Europe during the summer holidays whilst I was at university. I grew up in the UK, where you have to cross water to go abroad, so it was a totally new thing to cross borders without getting off the train!

As well as the ‘hey, there’s a whole world out there!’ moment, my travelling friend and I also met some really interesting people who didn’t speak English. It was a great feeling to be able to communicate using our (very bad) high school French and German. That was a huge motivation to carry on learning languages.

You are in an intercultural marriage; can you tell us a little about what that process has been like for you? How did you meet your husband, and what sorts of rewards and frustrations have come from being part of an intercultural couple?

We met when we were both studying in Barcelona. Deciding where to live after getting married was fun: we took a map and each marked our favorite countries. It turned out that we both liked the idea of experiencing life in Turkey – that was quite a surprise! That’s how we ended up here.

One great reward of being in an intercultural marriage is learning to be more open to different cultures and flexible about different ways of doing things. I’m definitely more laid back than I used to be. Deciding where to live is one of the most difficult things, because we cannot both live near our families. At least these days it’s easier to keep in touch with Skype, email etc.

What are some of the biggest challenges you have faced while traveling and living abroad? How have you overcome them (or how are you still struggling with them)?

On one hand I have friends in a lot of countries, which is great, but on the other hand we can’t hang out without someone getting on a plane, which is not so great. Making new friends takes time, so that’s always a challenge when you travel or move to a new place. It can be even more challenging to develop deep relationships with people who have grown up with a culture that’s very different to yours.

I try to be open minded towards different points of view, and meet lots of different people rather than searching out people with a similar background. It’s more difficult at first but very rewarding. Turkish people are incredibly friendly and outgoing so living in Turkey has been a pleasure in this respect.

When you think of “travel,” what’s the first thing that pops to mind?

Photos: Fotos Oaxaca

Definitely food! I love trying food from different places.

Would you mind sharing your travel philosophy, or the way that you think about travel?

Interesting question! First I should say that I think everyone travels for different reasons and I don’t think there is a wrong way to travel, as long as you get what you want out of it (and don’t do any damage to the place you visit)

I believe that people all over the world have lots in common, but there are also some differences, and understanding and respecting those differences is key to getting along. So I travel to learn more about what makes a place and its people unique. I’m as happy sitting in an everyday café soaking up the atmosphere as I am seeing the sites.

What do you look for in a piece of travel writing?

The best kind of travel writing lets you picture the place whilst you’re reading. I love articles that show insights into daily life and culture: encounters between people, the atmosphere, what the food is like, what makes a place special.

Also, for me a respectful approach to potential readers from other cultures is really important. Often when reading an article I think ‘how would I feel if someone wrote this about my country?’ How we experience a place is partly filtered by our own cultural values and expectations and I think really good writing is aware of this subjectivity and acknowledges it somehow.

Community Connection

Attention Matador U students! Do you want to become a contributor to PocketCultures? The site is currently looking for regional contributors.

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/on-blogs-of-the-world-intercultural-marriage-and-travel-writing-an-interview-with-liz-chatburn-of-pocket-cultures/feed/ 5 http://matadorabroad.com/11-things-i-learned-in-buenos-aires-travel/ http://matadorabroad.com/11-things-i-learned-in-buenos-aires-travel/#comments Fri, 12 Feb 2010 18:54:24 +0000 Conner Gorry http://matadorabroad.com/?p=3377

Feature Photo: noeliadiaco Photo: zaqi

A glimpse of Buenos Aires.

Latin America is my turf. I’ve written guidebooks to the region since 1998 and have lived in Havana since 2002. I’ve been around the Latino block so to speak, but until my sister-in-law tied the knot in Buenos Aires this past December, I hadn’t had the opportunity to travel to Argentina.

Indeed, the extent of my knowledge of the place barely extended beyond Maradona’s “hand of god” and dulce de leche-stuffed alfajores. Now, after nearly three weeks prowling all kinds of areas – the “villas,” Ciudadela, La Boca and everything in between – I have some opinions to impart about Buenos Aires…

1.

The music, art, and dancing approach a quality I’ve experienced only in Havana and New York. The difference is the offerings are more independently creative than in the former and more economically accessible than in the latter.

Photo: lrargerich

2.

Tragic though it is, the mullet is alive and well. Ditto the rat tail, nasty worm-like dreadlocks, and other unfortunate hairstyles that died long ago (with good cause) in other latitudes.

3.

The entire city is a minefield of dogshit. When it rains, the sidewalks run with floating turds. Cursed are those caught out in this river of canine feces wearing only flip flops. Pooper scooper law, anyone?

4.

Buenos Aires may be the world’s greatest city for ice cream addicts. The night we arrived, we settled in with the family, swigged a bit of wine and smoked a few cigars. Just before 2am my brother-in-law suggested we go out for ice cream.

Within minutes, I was indulging in some of the best, most affordable ice cream of my life – no small accolade coming from me, an amateur Coppelia aficionado and veteran of the 45-minute wait for the 5 cent scoops served up in that historical parlor. The variety and quality of the Argentine product were awe inspiring in equal measure. And the flavors. Sambayón? (See note A below)

5.

Give the people the right to smoke pot in public and they will, with gusto.

Photo: j-cornelius

6.

Sorry to report: the carne ain’t all that. Since I was visiting during the holidays and a wedding, I had ample opportunity to sample everything from blood sausage and lamb to goat and beef tenderloin. It was a bit overwhelming, this compulsion Argentine’s have to eat copious amounts of meat at BBQ events known as asados.

One gut-splitting Saturday, we went to an asado in the afternoon and another in the evening. At both affairs, heavy rib racks, interminable chains of sausages, and slabs of beef sizzled over natural charcoal, lacing the air with its smoky perfume. Unfortunately, the meat was often overcooked for my taste; the blood sausage was chunky and black (only for hardcore carnivores, which I am not); and save for an exquisite sausage criollo procured by my brother-in-law, most of the meat just wasn’t the high quality, grass-fed beef I was led to expect. (See note B below)

Having said all that, Buenos Aires is a hostile destination for vegetarians. Unless you can live on chimichurri. This simple condiment of oil, vinegar, parsley (fields of it), red pepper, oregano, garlic, and a couple of other herbs is so damn toothsome, it just may be life-sustaining.

7.

From the highways of Caracas to the honking cacophony of Islamabad, I have never seen worse drivers than the locos that terrorize Buenos Aires. It’s no wonder traffic accidents are the leading cause of death there. As the old saying goes: it’s better to lose a minute of your life than your life in a minute…

Photo: zaqi

8.

If there’s an accent in the world more annoying than the whiny sing song of Buenos Aires, we’ve yet to hear it. (I’ve received a lot of dissenting opinions on this point, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!)

9.

The passion porteños have for fresh flowers is refreshing – and the erotic scent of jasmine carried on the hot winds of the Southern Cone summer is thoroughly intoxicating.

10.

I can still go out dancing and cavorting into the wee hours, returning home while others are commuting to work.

11.

Buenos Aires is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Notes

A. That first night I tried several flavors I had never heard of. One of them was the inimitable sambayón, made from farm fresh eggs and glugs and glugs of wine. Best place to sample this and other creamy, dreamy marvels: Heladería La Flor de Almagro (Since 1933! Located at: Estado de Israel 4727; tel: 4854-0717 – home delivery is, of course, available).

B. My Argentine friends proffered two reasons for this: 1) that porteños (folks from the capital) don’t know how to select and buy meat and 2) much of the domestic beef production in Argentina is being switched from grass-fed to genetically-modified soy-fed. ¡Buen provecho!

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/11-things-i-learned-in-buenos-aires-travel/feed/ 12 http://matadorabroad.com/metric-map-which-countries-dont-belong-with-the-others/ http://matadorabroad.com/metric-map-which-countries-dont-belong-with-the-others/#comments Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:05:15 +0000 Kate Sedgwick http://matadorabroad.com/?p=3312

Map : author

What sets the U.S apart from the rest of the world?

The U.S. is one of only three nations in the world (the other two being Liberia and Burma) which clings to its outmoded system of measurement, failing to get on board with the rest of the world and use the metric system.

We don’t even use the British Imperial system (that the British don’t even use anymore) – we use some bastard child of the Imperial system called “the United States customary system.” Ask any American how many ounces are in a gallon or feet are in a mile and you’re almost sure not to get a correct answer.

What does this mean for you as an American? It means that when you travel you look like an idiot. When someone asks you for directions, you are suddenly at a loss, unable to estimate distance in kilometers. If one of your South American friends asks you how cold it is, you have no idea what to say. Is 30 degrees hot? Is it cold?

There are more communist countries than there are countries not using the metric system. Everyone else has come to the conclusion that it just makes for sense to use the system everyone else in the world is using in which all units are divisible by ten.

Just try to pass the right wrench to someone and you’ll see how stupid this system is. “I need the five sixteenths hex wrench. No! I said the five sixteenths!” Of course you did.

OK. Maybe it wouldn’t be cost effective to tear down all those mile markers, but just imagine the jobs it would create to start adding kilometer markers to every highway in the U.S. of A.

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/metric-map-which-countries-dont-belong-with-the-others/feed/ 66 http://matadorabroad.com/pies-puddings-and-pints-a-foodie-guide-to-london/ http://matadorabroad.com/pies-puddings-and-pints-a-foodie-guide-to-london/#comments Tue, 02 Feb 2010 20:47:34 +0000 Sarah Menkedick http://matadorabroad.com/?p=3271

Photo: author

British food is coming into its own.

Hold on to your seats, ladies and gentlemen: it’s not just mushy peas anymore.

Well, actually, it IS mushy peas, but this time with a celeriac foam reduction and a duck egg Parmesan crostini in a martini glass on the side.

Photo: author

British food hasn’t necessarily changed; it’s just realized that hey, it can stand out on the international foodie scene, too. As Iqbal Wahhab, owner of Borough Market’s glass-walled, light-filled restaurant Roast put it, the British have just recently begun to value their own food traditions.

Photo: author

This is evident in the current foodie trends, which emphasize local legumes and veggies (lots of turnips, potatoes, celeriac, lentils, mushrooms and the inevitable peas), staple British meats (roasted Cornish hens, quail, lamb, pork belly) and of course, fish (avec or sans chips).

There are an abundance of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi restaurants, but I’m going to set those aside for another piece since I didn’t have time to explore them, and I’d like to delve into the emerging phenomenon of traditional British cuisine.

Chefs are dressing up British fare with the type of stellar presentation and attention to detail that one might normally associate with say, Italy or Spain. The local ingredients they have to work with render wild fusion feats unnecessary, and the elaborate blending of exotic foreign cuisines that characterizes so much of American food culture isn’t as obvious in Britain.

As the aforementioned Wahab pointed out, the real work of a restaurantor at the moment is sourcing exceptional ingredients and allowing them to shine. Wild beef and lamb, Stiltons and Blues and Cheddars to make you weep, fresh local fish and oysters, creams and butters from organic British dairies.

So where to begin your foray into British food?

Borough Market

Photo: author

Any good foodie will lose herself for at least an afternoon in London’s Borough Market, wiping tears from her eyes at the gorgeousness of stacked blocks of cheese and plump, speckled free range eggs.

The setting itself is a spectacle; the area has been a marketplace since the 11th century and has that charged historical energy of a place where humans have gathered for thousands of years. With Southwark Cathedral towering stoically behind you and the labyrinth of vendors in tiny winding streets, it can feel as if you’ve drifted back to an 18th or 19th century London market day.

We talked with vendors about the rise of a foodie scene in Britain and they traced it back to the mid-1990’s, when people began expressing an interest in organic, local and seasonal food. Lizzie Vines, one of the owners of Wild Beef, a Devon-based farm which prides itself on being “more than organic” and grazing its cattle on natural, health-rich local foliage, said she’s seen her and her husband Richard’s company take off in the past ten years.

Photo: author

Wild Beef is at the forefront of a foodie movement in Britain, encouraging producers to work with the climate, the fertile soil and the local landscape and to ride the flow of seasonal changes. The result is not only a beautiful steak filled with minerals from diverse plants and grasses, but a sustainable and healthy environment.

Destinations

Community Connection to Israel

Community Connection to Mexico

Photo: author

The cheese-obsessed can also irritate the staff at Neal’s Yard Dairy for hours, grilling them about the fermentation of Brie and asking for sample after sample. I hovered around the huge, photogenic blocks of cheese absorbing them through osmosis, fantasizing about customs officials not finding them in my checked luggage. There were fat rolly-polly blocks going black and blue with age and prestige, cartoonish wedges of cheddar, soft, sighing slices of Camembert. The shop offers cheese tastings and classes.

Then there’s Northfield Farms, which specializes in beef, pork, and lamb, and sources meat to celebrity chefs like the idolized Jamie Oliver. I liked the place because the butcher, Brendan Maguire, had a killer cockney accent and was the one and only Brit in my whole stay to call me “dahlin.” He pointed out that in Britain, a farm can use pesticides 10% of the year and still be organic, and was highly critical of the organic certification process.

From what I observed, Britain doesn’t have the same fascination with the organic title as the U.S does. Local food and knowledge of where food comes from and how it’s produced seem to trump the term organic. Maguire was adamant that food labeled “wild” could never be “organic” as organic refers to food that has to be very carefully monitored and cultivated. I nodded enthusiastically partially out of agreement and partially out of fear of how the cockney accent might take me down if I ventured to disagree.

There’s also locally raised and farmed ostrich meat at Gamston Wood Farm (herbed ostrich meatball, anyone?), award-winning Welsh cheese, hot mulled wine and cider, and a beer shop, Utobeer, which has over 600 beers from around the world and is part of a push to revive British microbreweries which suffered after the major breweries took over many pubs in the 1980’s.

Photo: author

Phew. Alright. On top of all the stalls, there are also restaurants and coffee shops fitted into the industrial framework of the market. We had lunch at Wright Bros Oyster Bar, where I ate each bite of mackerel and spiced potatoes as if it were my last. If you don’t feel like sitting down or doing the restaurant thing, there are steaming pots of curries and paellas which are spooned into boxes to be eaten on the fly.

The Gastropub

Photo: author

The gastropub has become a British institution. I experienced it in Camden, a London neighborhood known for its markets and its goth/punk past. The Hawley Arms is all high ceilings, old wood, and stockinged hipsters sipping pints in front of fireplaces. I had a pint of ale, a “minty lamb” pie (mint, herbs, and organic lamb) and peas and mash. At first I thought the peas were a sort of ironic hipster joke but no, they’re apparently as inseparable from pies and mash as Mac n’ Cheese is from American childhood.

The pub, I must say, cannot be done without a pie. Pork, lamb, beef, or maybe goat cheese and sweet potato for vegetarians. The crust is distinct – strong, dense and flaky at the same time. The best pies will have a crust that can hold its own, and a steaming interior of herbs, meat and veggies. The mash should have a dark, vinegary gravy and a thick texture – nothing like the mashed ‘taters that come out of boxes in the U.S. Top the whole affair – peas, mash, pie – with a dash of vinegar.

Photo: author

You could also go the fish and chips route, although I’d recommend saving that for the latter half of a long, raucous, beer-infused evening, when sitting in the corner of a fluorescent shop with vinegar dripping down your fingers and a plate of piping hot fried food in front of you is nothing less than divine.

Gastropub fare also includes bangers and mash and bubble and squeak, which sound like zany characters in a new age cartoon but are in fact basic tenets of British cuisine. Bangers and mash are sausages and mashed potatoes, and bubble and squeak (way up there in the list of all time greatest national dish names ever) is a mix of veggies left over from a Sunday roast. The roast, exactly what it sounds like, is also a gastropub essential, usually served on Saturday or Sunday (think British, carnivorous brunch).

Photo: author

Whatever route you go, you must pair it with a pint. Then, you can take 5,000 pictures of that pint like I did, since British beer is somehow so photogenic all brown and caramel in its glass. Sadly, microbrews are hard to come across, as most pubs are run by one or another major brewery. Stella Artois, a Belgian brew, is a good standby as other ales tend to be a bit watery and are much less carbonated than American beers.

Pies and Puddings : The Essentials

Photo: author

We seemed to keep running into the same ingredients and concoctions everywhere, perhaps because the emphasis in foodie world is so much on the seasonal. Polenta was the vegetarian standby; a whiter, creamier version with Parmesan, eggplant (aubergine) and zucchini (courgette: yes, Britain is closer to France than we are).

There were halibut and mackerel cooked in butter and served with spinach and/or potatoes, and roast lamb and pork belly, falling off the bone and ever so slightly pink. Beets – beetroot, in British terms – were a popular garnish and added a great, deep sweetness to savory mushrooms and the bite of vinegar.

Warning: just about anything can be a pudding in Britain. If you see pudding on the menu, do not cringe in disgust at the thought of one of those sad little plastic puddles of artificial chocolate or vanilla. No. Pudding can be a fluffy, buttery roll, a sort of hollow and lightweight biscuit, a savory stuffing-esque concoction of meat and raisins, or a desert (sometimes menus will have a whole section labeled “puddings,” which apparently include chocolate cakes and apple strudels). When it doubt as to nomenclature, the British seem to think, call it a pudding.

Cocktail wise, it’s all about the elderberry and the bramble (a Scottish fruit that looks a bit like cassis) mixed with vodka or whisky.

Photo: author

And finally, desert. Oh, desert. I am pulling myself back from the brink of drooling pseudo-poetic rhapsody here to tell you, straight up, that desert rocks. Meringues (sometimes called “pavlovas”) look like puffy white buns, but don’t be fooled. They are brittle and explosive. It is near impossible to crack into one without causing a SMACK! and a burst of debris around the tabletop.

Apparently, according to the waitress who I’m sure disappeared a moment later to mock the clueless American tourists, it is normal to create a mini disaster area of meringue bits and pieces. You then scoop these up, coat them with cream and berries, and get to feel as if you’re not really mowing down a heavy desert because the meringue is so light it melts in your mouth.

Photo: author

The cheese, oat cakes, and chutney combo is also beautiful. Usually you’ll get four or five cheeses, oat cakes, and an assortment of sweet chutneys. I tried the fig, date and walnut chutney spread on a grainy oat cake (a small cracker) with a chunk of soft, pungent Camembert. Yes. I could not speak for a few moments. Then I came around and dug into the cheddar.

To sum up, ladies and gentlemen, don’t blow off British food. It’s coming into it’s own. The British seem to be realizing that they have some phenomenal local ingredients which, when fleshed out and dressed up just a bit, can wow the foodies that normally head on over to France and Italy to eat.

The most distinctive feature of the foodie scene in Britain might be the fact that, despite the enormous popularity of Indian food and curry, the up and coming focus is really on classic, ancient British foods. And since I’m a huge believer not only in the locavore and slow food movements, but also in the assertion that one of the best ways to get to know a culture is through eating, I highly recommend a foray into British food. A pint, a pie, a pudding – and you’ve come to know a bit of Britain.

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/pies-puddings-and-pints-a-foodie-guide-to-london/feed/ 21 http://matadorabroad.com/traveling-as-a-mixed-race-couple-in-asia-no-sir-i-did-not-buy-my-wife/ http://matadorabroad.com/traveling-as-a-mixed-race-couple-in-asia-no-sir-i-did-not-buy-my-wife/#comments Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:57:05 +0000 Pete Olson http://matadorabroad.com/?p=3107

Photo: Stéfan

“Where in the Orient did you meet your wife?” asked the man in his sixties sitting beside me on the boat. We were heading to a small island off the coast of Borneo and had reached a lull in our conversation in which he had given me, in one more or less grammatically coherent sentence, his entire personal history from boyhood in Missouri, to his Mormon missionary work in Malaysia, to his current semi-retirement in Idaho.

There is a lot of subtext crammed into the nine-word question “Where in the Orient did you meet your wife?” even when you exclude the geographical relic of the term “the Orient.” As I explained that even though Aileen’s parents are from Taiwan, she has lived in New York City all her life and that, subtextually, I didn’t rescue her from a pimp in Shanghai, the light in his eyes dimmed. After I finished he sat for a moment, staring at the waves, and then looked up and said, “Huh. Well isn’t that nice.”

Now maybe it’s unfair to expect a sixty-something former missionary in tube socks and sandals to be one-hundred percent politically correct when he phrases a sentence, but I was annoyed – not at the man but at the question. Very nearly every other tourist Aileen and I meet west of the International Date Line asks us us some variation of that question. No one has ever interrogated a family of fat, fanny-pack wearing Europeans about their origin story, but if you travel as part of a Asian/Caucasian pair, you can expect the third degree throughout your trip.

Photo: Desmond Kavanagh

Interracial couples are common enough in the United States (except apparently in Idaho) that even the term “interracial” has a kind of quaint, backwards tinge to it. You’re really only only likely to hear the word used nowadays by racists, pornographers or statisticians.

Head over to South East Asia, where the confluence of economic inequality, cheap airfares, and high divorce rates has made the region the go-to destination for the recently dumped gentleman to find a woman for companionship, and the sight of a mixed couple tends to have less than positive connotations. Tourists in the region seem to be hard-wired to react to any heterogeneous racial pairing with leers, snickers, and loaded questions about where you met your wife.

These reactions do vary somewhat by country but they never completely disappear. In Singapore and Kuala Lumpur other tourists hardly seem to notice us, while Thailand – where the vision of local women giddily weaving their fingers through the ample chest-hair of Western men several decades their senior has ingrained itself into the tourist landscape along with the Grand Palace and gut-shattering spicy food – is pretty much a poisoned well as far as being able to walk around without getting the stink-eye from other travelers goes.

(Not that Aileen and I are entirely above this kind of cattiness. We once walked down a busy street in Phuket yelling out “midlife” every time we passed a mixed couple in an attempt to get a statistically valid frequency measurement).

There are two groups of people who don’t seem to be put off by us. The first is locals. People generally know whether or not someone is from their homeland, and so it’s not surprising that most natives of our host countries don’t immediately leap to the conclusion that my life partner was purchased in the seedy bar around the corner.

This is not to say that they have never made any incorrect assumptions about Aileen and I. They just make the wrong ones. We have had many recursive, Abbot-and-Costello style conversations with people who have vapor-locked when confronted with a woman which they had presupposed to be a Chinese National speaking in perfect American English.

“Excuse me, Peter, where is Aileen from?”

“New York.”

“But she looks … Chinese?”

“Her parents are from Taiwan.”

“But she speaks English…”

“Well she’s from New York.”

“But she looks…Chinese?”

“Her parents are from…look, can I just have a coffee?”

Photo: hulivili

Or, as one Indonesian woman put it, “I was confused because…she looks like…us, only more,” before pulling her eyelids back.

The second group is the men in the mixed couples. They do seem to make the same assumptions that other tourists do, but instead of acting superior, they exhibit gestures of kinship. They nod at us, the way two guys in Yankees caps might nod at each other on the streets of New York. They mark us as the people in the crowd that they can come and talk to.

In the departure lounge in the domestic terminal Bangkok, a couple – a 50-ish German man and a 30-ish Thai woman – were arguing a few seats down from us, alternating snippy comments back and forth in a mixture of Thai and German until the man stood up with a gesture that translates – in any language – to “Oh yeah, well I’ll prove it then.”

He strode over to Aileen and asked her a barrage of questions, each increasing in intensity, about where the bars are in Phuket. After several minutes of what the UN would categorize as a “minor international incident” the man stopped and said, “Oh, you’re not from this country” before wandering back to his companion who was attempting to bore small holes in his head with her eyes.

Many people travel to challenge their assumptions. Aileen and I seem to have ended up challenging other people’s assumptions through the act of travel.

So one last time, yes, she speaks English. No she wasn’t purchased down the street.

And no one has called it the Orient for fifty years.

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/traveling-as-a-mixed-race-couple-in-asia-no-sir-i-did-not-buy-my-wife/feed/ 27 http://matadorabroad.com/quick-and-dirty-travel-lessons/ http://matadorabroad.com/quick-and-dirty-travel-lessons/#comments Tue, 19 Jan 2010 21:17:40 +0000 Sarah Menkedick http://matadorabroad.com/?p=3044

Photos: Fotos Oaxaca

Travel is a way of seeing, and the lessons it teaches are often written on the landscapes right in front of our eyes.

It smelled like burning fungus. As if a whole village had collectively opened the forgotten containers of leftovers in the fridge, dumped out the contents, and set them on fire.

Outside the car sugar cane stretched for miles and miles, under a gray sky into which drifted columns of smoke. If it weren’t for the columns hinting at chugging, spewing factories, the landscape would’ve been peaceful, a tropical pastoral scene.

“What smells?” I asked.

“Caña,” said Jorge.

“That is not sugar cane,” I said righteously, “that is trash.”

It was sugar cane. I passed the cane trucks, my hands trembling at the wheel as their enormous weight heaved from side to side, sticks of cane falling out to litter the road. Once we saw one take a curve a little two quickly; it wobbled precariously for an eternal second, all its weight ready to slam down on the dirt road, before the driver righted it and drove on like nothing.

Jorge, the dog and I had come to the far northern corner of Oaxaca state, along the border with Veracruz, to take photos of a highway. Or rather, the Mexican Bank of Public Works and Services (BANOBRAS) had contracted Jorge to take photos of a highway and he had contracted me as his driver (I was to be paid in dark beer upon termination of the trip).

We had driven for five hours by the time we pulled off the federal highway to Veracruz and began jumping and jolting along the ratty, broken road through the sugar cane fields. Occasionally, we’d pass a pueblo – a ramshackle conglomeration of stores, tin-roofed houses, mud, and broken roads – our entrance and exit marked by the slam of the bumper against unmarked topes (speed bumps, which can appear anywhere and everywhere and range in size from gentle hills to massive ass-breaking wrinkles of asphalt.)

Just outside the pueblos were the cane factories. Up to then I had not associated “sugar cane” with “disgusting industrial pollution.” But there I was on the edge of a sugar cane field, taking in the scent of rot and waste and heat, watching a soot-covered factory straight out of 19th century London belch black smoke into the sky.

Backed up from the factories were trains of cane trucks waiting to be unloaded. They idled under their bulging bundles of sticks, the drivers getting drunk in nearby cantinas with broken windows. Old, weathered men with dirty wife-beaters gathered things around the train tracks. Barefoot kids cruised by on bikes. We drove on.

Finally, just as the heat had made us feel sticky, lethargic, and disgusting, we pulled up in the lucky little pueblo Banobras was smiling on. Like every other pueblo along the route, it was a heap of open-fronted stores, narrow alleyways, emaciated dogs, and trash in puddles.

We stopped to ask a woman, sitting outside of a curtained door with a couple of scruffy kids around her, where the highway was.

“Buenos tardes señora!” Jorge greeted her, “do you know where we can find the new highway?”

She crinkled up her face in confusion. “Highway?” she asked.

“Umm-hmm,” replied Jorge, “the one they just built?”

“Martina!!” she belted out to the area behind the curtain, “you know ‘bout any highway?”

A woman with kinky brown hair and full thighs in short shorts emerged from behind the curtain. “Highway?” she asked.

This situation multiplied itself several times before we realized that the citizens of this pueblo were not clued in on all the progress they were profiting from. Jorge decided to call the contact Banobras had given him, a representative of the municipal government. The contact asked us to meet him in the town square.

Like most town squares in most Mexican villages, this one was painted like a cake with blue and white frosting. A few lone men sat on benches and talked.

“Where is he?” Jorge wondered aloud. The dog, a German Shepherd completely out of place in a middle-of-nowhere tropical town, looked up at me pathetically and panted.

“I’ve gotta got to the bathroom,” I said whiningly. “I’m going to ask that guy where one is.”

I walked up to a señor with a noticeable potbelly pushing against his blue dress shirt and asked,

“Do you know where I could find a bathroom near here?”

“No hay,” he said, barely smiling under his mustache. So much for that. I thanked him anyway and turned around. Jorge, behind me, called out,

“Do you know where we can find a señor so-and-so?”

“That’s me!” the man said, and stepped forward with the puffed chest of one called to duty. How, I wondered, had this guy not been able to put together the young guy with a massive Pentax camera slung round his chest, the German Shepherd and the blond girl to figure out that maybe, just maybe, this was his photographer?

Miraculously, it turned out there was a bathroom and the man officiously ordered a pimply-faced teen to show me to it. The teen led me into the Municipal Government Office, which looked like a college frat the morning after a blowout party. Piles of folders and papers were strewn about the room, 5 peso plastic bags of salsa were dribbled here and there over (official?) documents, greasy taco wrappers overflowed from the trash cans. A heavyset woman sat amidst it all and gave me a big smile, gesturing to the door behind her.

“There’s no water!” she said cheerfully.

“No problem!” I assured her.

The bathroom scene was gruesome. I closed my eyes, held my breath, aimed for the toxic disaster of the toilet bowl, and swore to hold out next time for a patch of Earth on the side of the highway. If these were the municipal government’s facilities, I thought, what on Earth was the rest of the pueblo using?

After I’d emerged from the bathroom we piled into the car to go check out the highway. The official directed us through the labyrinth of bumpy roads composing the pueblo until we arrived at a flat stretch of asphalt parallel to the railroad tracks.

“Make sure you focus on the white line!” the Banobras rep had told Jorge. “And really show how the highway is bringing progress to the community!”

There was no white line. Scrappy dogs with their ribs showing like accordions glared up at the car. A man with a huge bundle of cut cane shuffled along the road. We pulled onto a patch of yellow grass. A few feet away, a big group of men were getting drunk.

I caught snatches of drunken babble (“gringa guera orale mira su perro ven aqui guera”) as I leashed up the dog and Jorge and his contact began walking up the road looking for a money shot.

Around me were the signs of pueblo life—men getting obliteratingly drunk, roosters (which the dog lunged at, making the drunks laugh), handfuls of wide-eyed wary kids, shacks that looked as if they might collapse at any moment from the sheer fatigue of standing all day in the heat. The sky was gray and pregnant with clouds in the late afternoon, and the air was like a bath.

The dog and I scrambled up the little gravel hill to the railroad tracks and admired the view: a thin gray line of asphalt backed by cane for miles, the ghosts of factories in the distance. I came across villagers up there, mostly women carrying eggs and babies, and realized no one was walking on the road. Just Jorge and the municipal government man far up ahead.

Thirty minutes and fifty photos later, we were carting the contact back to his ravaged office. He waved us off with a look of extreme relief to be back to his job of standing sternly before the Municipal building. We turned around and pulled out of the pueblo.

“Porquería, no?” said Jorge the second we were alone in the car. This translates more or less as “bullshit.” I wholeheartedly agreed.

“Did you focus on the white line?” I asked sarcastically.

Jorge scoffed as he tried to figure out how to photoshop out the mangy dogs and barefoot kids.

“Well,” I said, “at least we’ve got a smoother ride from here on out.”

Two minutes later, the asphalt stopped abruptly and we plunged onto a pothole-and-rock-strewn disaster of a dirt road. The car sunk and burped and slammed against the ground like a Hollywood star on a destructive binge. Progress had lasted approximately 1 kilometer. I wondered how many extra rooms the municipal government men had added to their houses with the rest of the highway.

Sometimes, I thought, all you really need to do is see; sometimes the political and social and economic realities are there laid out in everyday life and landscape and you can read them simply by being present. Travel can teach you quick and dirty. About where sugar cane comes from. About where the money for “progress” in Mexico often goes. About how quickly a highway can change, and how to pray for your life under the hulking form of a sugar cane truck soaring to the heavens with sticks.

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/quick-and-dirty-travel-lessons/feed/ 4 http://matadorabroad.com/luxury-cruises-still-stopping-at-haitis-private-beaches/ http://matadorabroad.com/luxury-cruises-still-stopping-at-haitis-private-beaches/#comments Mon, 18 Jan 2010 18:17:39 +0000 Sarah Menkedick http://matadorabroad.com/?p=3019

Feature Photo: nick hobgood Photo: roblnh00d

What does Royal Caribbean’s decision allowing cruise ships to continue docking in Haiti imply for the future of the tourism industry?

The fact that Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines is still docking luxury cruise ships at Haiti’s privatized beaches is grotesque; but sadly, taking a wider view of international tourism, it’s not shocking. The type of harsh unconcern for the circumstances of local people isn’t an aberrance from the tourism norm, but rather the norm itself.

Privatized resorts all over the Caribbean, particularly in Cuba but also in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and a host of other countries, often have little interest in the fate of the locals they bar from their premises with gates and armed guards.

Yes, you’ll hear the familiar rhetoric that Royal Caribbean has spouted in response to outrage over the decision to continue stopping in at Labadee beach in Haiti, where passengers tipple cocktails and jet ski on cordoned off beaches while Haitians endure mounting horror in Port-au-Prince. The cruise ships and the resort are helping the local economy; the resort at Labadee beach employs and supports more than 500 Haitians.

Photo: roblnh00d

Never mind that there have been major protests against the privatization of the beach and the fact that Haitians not serving a cocktail to a cruise goer are banned from entering; never mind that the vast majority of Haitians receive almost no economic benefit from Labadee other than the hope that they’ll someday be among the select few picked from the mass of cheap labor to work at the resort, never mind that a chunk of their natural wealth has been partitioned off for frolicking tourists. Never mind that these resorts follow the same model of privatization that impoverished the country in the last two centuries.

I know that the job situation in Haiti is desperate; according to Harper’s, the ratio of people in Haiti to the number of permanent full-time jobs there is 80:1. But is appropriating idyllic sections of coast for the exclusive use of wealthy tourists really the ideal way to develop job growth there or anywhere?

Above and beyond this, what sort of message is Royal Caribbean sending to the tourism industry when it says that docking a ship in Haiti following an unspeakable disaster, allowing passengers to fly down zip lines and soak up the sun on private beaches while thousands of people are dying, is OK?

It’s a message that says, “you know what, the ‘locals’ may be suffering – may be dying, may be screaming for their loved ones amidst piles of rubble – but that’s not really of our concern, because as tourists, we’re not a part of it. We drop off some packaged food and move on.”

In a nutshell, it’s saying tourism cuts off a little, beautiful, sanitized part of an impoverished country, cleans it up, and places armed security guards around it to make sure the locals don’t get in (The Guardian noted that people booked on ships scheduled to stop at Labadee are worried about desperate locals climbing fences in search of food).

Beyond the incredulous decision of the cruise line to encourage tourists to “cut loose” in Haiti at such a moment is the wider implication the decision holds. If the tourism industry – specifically, the cruise industry and the luxury resorts it relies on – can embrace such a stark and obscene dichotomy at a time like this, what does the future hold?

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/luxury-cruises-still-stopping-at-haitis-private-beaches/feed/ 12 http://matadorabroad.com/india-poverty-and-the-fear-of-traveling-to-poor-places/ http://matadorabroad.com/india-poverty-and-the-fear-of-traveling-to-poor-places/#comments Tue, 12 Jan 2010 19:11:24 +0000 Mariellen Ward http://matadorabroad.com/?p=2996

Feature Photo :MeanestIndian Photos: author

The first time I flew to India, I remember peering out into the midnight blackness as we descended into the Delhi airport. All I could see were random groupings of flickering yellow lights on the ground far below, and I realized I had no idea what to expect. It was my “holy shit” moment. There was no turning back.

I had planned my trip for a year: saved money, left my apartment, put everything in storage and lept. Six months of criss-crossing the sub-continent by myself. Though I had traveled frequently in the past, to Europe, Japan, Thailand, Australia and Central America, I had never been to a place like India.

All I knew about India was what I read, saw in the movies and heard from others. Like many travelers before me, I was told many tall tales about the challenges of travel in India: the crowds, the heat, the delays, the con men and the poverty.

Now that I travel frequently to India, I often find myself in conversations with people who have never been, and who are both fascinated and hesitant. The most common comment I get is:

“I would love to go, but I’m too afraid to face the poverty.” Or:

“I could never go to a poor country like that.”

I usually don’t say anything, but the truth is, I don’t understand this response.

Whether you go and actually see the poverty of India up close, it will be there nonetheless. Every night as you fall asleep in your warm, comfortable and safe bed in North America, thousands, even millions, of people are waking up on the sidewalks of Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata. Whether you go or not will not prevent this from happening.

Whether you choose to experience the misery to which the human condition can descend or not, these people are still your brother and sisters. We all occupy the same planet, the same mother earth. Your responsibility to your fellow global citizens is the same, whether you actually meet them all or not.

Your visit to the slums of Mumbai will probably not save anyone from a life of poverty; it will probably not change anyone’s life – except your own.

I’m a middle class woman from Canada who has traveled for a total of 11 months in India, and I have seen some sights I never thought I would see. On the grounds of my hotel in Chennai, I saw a city worker naked, except for a tiny loincloth, crawl out of a sewer, completely covered in shit. Some of it was probably mine. He was fixing my hotel’s sewer system.

I’ve seen tiny children selling flowers on the ghats in Varanasi; whole families living on the side of the road in Delhi; streets filled with people with leprosy in Dharamsala.

Yes, it’s hard to see; yes, it’s heartbreaking; yes, I wish I could do something about all of it. But I’m clear that I can’t save the world, and that’s what allows me to experience these things without too much agony.

Knowing that I can’t save anyone, and knowing that this poverty is happening despite the fact that I live in a middle-class bubble where I am immured from it, I feel the one thing I can do is raise my awareness about it. I feel it is my responsibility as a global citizen to leave my middle-class, North American life and see how the other 90% of the world lives.

My trips to India haven’t changed the world, but they have changed me. I have a greater appreciation for the materially rich life I was born into in Canada; I have a much broader perspective on the world and my place in it; I have developed a stronger sense of spiritual awareness; I have been surprised and, above all else, I have been humbled.

We in the West tend to think that money buys happiness, but India teaches otherwise. I have seen more generous gestures among the poor of India than the rich of North America. I have seen an old man share his one-chapati lunch with a cow on the bridge in Rishikesh. I have seen rural Rajasthani women walk with the grace and elegance of queens, jugs of water balanced precipitously on their heads. Just because these people are poor in material wealth, does not mean they are poor in spirit.

If you go to India after all, you may find that it is the joy that hurts, not the misery.

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/india-poverty-and-the-fear-of-traveling-to-poor-places/feed/ 19 http://matadorabroad.com/gringos-in-mexico-and-that-elusive-quest-for-authenticity/ http://matadorabroad.com/gringos-in-mexico-and-that-elusive-quest-for-authenticity/#comments Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:05:43 +0000 Sarah Menkedick http://matadorabroad.com/?p=2972

Feature and Above Photo: Fotos Oaxaca

A traveler goes for a ride on a gringo tour bus and comes away with some unexpected observations about authenticity.

We piled on the bus like a group of awkward middle-aged kindergarteners, fumbling around and smacking our heads against the plastic TV’s. My mom, sister and I, the slightly skeptical cool kids, formed a little grouplet in the back of the bus. There must’ve been around thirty of us altogether, masses of white flesh, sandals, and outdoor wear. The Spanish teacher proceeded to make very slow, meticulous announcements about where we were going and how long it would take to get there, and the middle-aged gringos shuffled around in their seats, chatting.

The bus pulled out of the city and glided onto the highway into the valley. Gringo murmurs filled the cool bus air and the valley opened up into greens, yellows, and rocky buttes, long squares of corn and grass stretching up to dry peaks. Half-built tin houses and orange-green mezcalerías with small maguey fields hinted vaguely, half-heartedly, at the presence of people.

The journey to Mitla was uneventful, all those gringo bodies carted around in a big clean gringo bus that bumbled through ramshackle Mexican pueblos, towering above the moto-taxis and pedestrians and squat Ford stick-shifts, us with our white faces stuck to the windows looking out onto hot, brown-green Mexico.

Photo: author

It felt bizarre. I don’t think I’ve ever been on a tour bus. I’m skeptical of the ol’ backpacker standard affirming the inauthenticity of the tour bus vs. the authentic quest of the “traveler” but damn, I must say that being on one of the things does throw one’s perspective for a loop. Even for someone who thinks she’s cynical enough to grasp and honor the postmodern lack of authenticity behind just about any travel experience, the organized tour can be a bit jarring.

In the beginning, I couldn’t get over the stark inside/outside divide. We sat on our big blue seats in our big white bus looking out on the jumbled cubist scenes below, disarray in various shapes, colors, and sizes, foreignness sprawled out there before us like a movie set we could venture into and shrink from when it got to be too much, and eventually wrap up neatly into a few trinkets and photos so we could say, proudly,

“One time, in Mexico…” or “In Mexico, they do this…” with that satisfied smack of the captured experience.

We got out of the bus in Mitla, blinking, stumbling, little swirls of dust rising around our feet, plunk, plunk, plunk, one gringo after another plunking out of the bus like penguins wandering dazed out of a cave under the watchful eyes of zoo-goers. The sun was high and hot at 10 a.m. and we were standing on the side of the road in a dusty pueblo.

Photo: author

The Spanish teacher guide shooed us this way and that, speaking very carefully as if one of us might dumbly wander over to the other side of the road and get lost, a scenario that I had to admit wasn’t terribly unlikely. Her Spanish came in the cadence of the kindergarten teacher who has spent years explaining how not to hit one’s neighbors and why one shouldn’t eat the glue.

We filed into a family home. One gringo after another, looking this way and that, smiling politely and trying, in all earnestness, to squeeze poignancy and insights and deeply meaningful authenticity out of everything from flowers to dog to grandma. We just kept coming in, one after another, until the simple living room, with its old faded couches in the corners and its pretty altar adorned with photos and flowers, was packed full of gringos.

The Spanish teacher admonished us to make room for the new arrivals and we kept packing in, squeezing into corners and crowding round the couches, the never-ending gringo parade. When we were all relatively settled and quiet, our gringo minder presented the house’s grandma, an older woman with gray-white hair and a gray dress, whom the gringos actually applauded, with no sense of irony or absurdity, in an outburst of gratefulness – A Mexican! A real one! And she’s old! And folkloric! And representative of everything we want to feel and experience and care about before we go back to work on Monday!

Eager and primed on all sorts of travel lit and the spiritual necessity to squeeze every ounce of Culture out of the experience, it’s hard to fight the urge to applaud Grandma Mexico.

The grandma talked about the altar and why she’d built it, and maybe half of the gringos understood, but everyone nodded because they knew she was talking about Culture and whatever it was was deeply moving and emotional and poignant and something they should talk about in hushed, contemplative tones with their friends and co-workers in a few weeks. So they nodded. The grandma finished explaining and took her leave under the mixed gazes of pity and admiration and perhaps, caught up somewhere in there, a tame form of envy.

Then they served the mezcal. We partook – five tiny plastic cups, five people sipping and laughing. We had one foot out of the experience and one foot in, but for all we tried to look at it on a meta-level our gringoness and the inherent absurdity of our presence in that house in Mitla was exposed and handed to us on a platter.

Tourism, that ugly condition “travelers” like myself try to hide, was branded on our foreheads. A gringo stepped in the flower pot containing zempasuchitl, the flower of the dead, and flowers and water went everywhere. The gringo tried to extract himself, ready the pot, tidy up the flowers, and a swarm of Mexicans surrounded him and removed him from the situation. Everyone was milling around drinking mezcal, turning red, swapping travel stories.

We went to the cemetery slightly buzzed and fully immersed in the absurdity, blinking into the sun, stepping gingerly over the speed bumps and rocks and discarded gravel of the pueblo road, the gringo parade now on full display for the town.

“I feel like we should be singing the national anthem or something,” I whispered to my friend. To complete the full-on gringo show, to make the consumption of pre-fabricated cultural assumptions a little more mutual. We were, I felt, tall and fat and white and nearly all in sneakers or sandals and professional outdoor wear bought from some glass-walled shop in the parking lot of a giant shopping complex somewhere in America.

The blue sky exposed us, the people of Mitla cast bemused passing glances at us and hurried on, and we sipped our little plastic cups of mezcal and soaked up the nearby mountains rising, the white, hot, yellow dryness of Mitla.

The cemetery was a jolt back into reality. Not the reality of the gringo imagination, but the reality of the Day of the Dead in Mitla, of Mexicans going through a ritual that was actual and felt and present and, dare I say it, genuine in that moment. A reality that would exist with or without the presence of the needy wandering gringo-child.

Photo: author

Flowers were everywhere and on everything, calla lilies, marigolds, vibrant purple masses of furry flowers on white-gray graves. The flowers, the sun, the blue sky, made a kaleidscope of color. People bustled in the unhurried way Mexicans bustle, stepping around graves, lighting incense, sorting flowers, carrying babies, sweeping.

There were babies and old people and couples and people laughing and señoras with twin braids with silken fabric woven into them. There was an old, rusted bike I focused on for a minute, narrowing my vision down to one thing. I could start to pick out the tourists after a few minutes, but they were irrelevant, all caught up just as I was.

We walked around for awhile, dazed, looking at graves and at people sweeping and dressing them in flowers, taken aback by the reality of it.

The Spanish teacher tried to keep the order of the cultural lesson in tact, instructing in the same careful tones how the family kept up the grave of the maternal grandparents and then the paternal grandparents, but the neatly packaged and constructed pseudo-authenticity of the experience had briefly disintegrated as people dispersed into different corners of the graveyard, some still chatting about travels through Sweden and only barely catching a glimpse of the spectacle of here and now in Mitla Mexico (would they even remember the town’s name? I doubted it. But it wasn’t really necessary for “one time in Mexico I went to…”) but others absorbing, sorting through that confusing mental stew of outsiderness and insiderness, of wanting to understand and almost understanding, of experiential learning where reflection and experience go side by side, jostling each other.

Then we left. It was back on the street, a little quieter, fireworks going off everywhere around the town now. The little, poppy, jolt-you-out-of-your-skin fireworks they set off every minute of every day around Mexico. Smoke trails lingered in the sky against the blue. People were “bringing back their dead” according to a friend of mine, who managed to walk through the whole experience – bus tour, family home, cemetery, mezcal – with calm grace and humility. A drunk, brown, round nut of a man in a white straw hat weaved towards and away from our gringo parade.

“I live in U.S.,” he slurred in broken English, weaving. “Atlanta.”

Only my teaching experience could help pick out the words. Other gringos shied away from him, wary. I, stupidly, caught his eye and gave a “buenos tardes,” which he latched on to instantly. I spoke in Spanish, he responded in English.

“Trabajas en los estados unidos?” I asked politely.

“I live there,” he slurred, “I’m a resident.” He was half-looking at me and half weaving.

“Ok,” I said, “y qué haces aquí?”

“Vacation,” he said, “I’m on vacation!” There was something much more doomed than enthusiastic about it.

My mom attempted to join the conversation but couldn’t understand a word the man said. We reached the house and started filing through the door again, and the man knew his vacation was ending there. There would be no authentic Mitla and mezcal sipping for him, not there, anyway. He took advantage of one last try and took my mom by the hand, pulled her aside, and attempted a gallant kiss on the cheek.

“Beautiful, very beautiful woman!” he said.

We went inside, laughing, but I felt a little sickened by the interaction with the man, jutting into the tidy cultural experience of our gringo parade. There wasn’t time for sociological analysis or guilt, though, as we were all soon crowded back around the altar and the family was crying and fireworks were going off outside and my family was crying over the death of my grandparents and then we were drinking beers and eating mole around a table on folding chairs, and a gringo was bragging about how he bought a belt off a peasant in Guatemala for “more money than that guy had ever seen in his life” and when my friend asked how the peasant held his pants up, the gringo shrugged and said, “pins or something.”

I couldn’t really deal with that without making everyone slightly uncomfortable, so I had to stand up and go hover around the baby, who was almost as exciting a gringo attraction as grandma. Being at a susceptible biological moment in my life, I couldn’t resist the baby pull.

She was a little girl called Carlita, oblivious to the oddness of the beaming white faces staring down at her, giving little coos and bubbly smiles to her adoring foreign audience. I let her clasp my finger for a bit and then wandered outside, to where my sister had escaped from the increasingly suffocating swapping of travel tales (“you’ve been to that place in the highlands of Guatemala, too? Almost no one goes there…”)

There was a yard out back, a scrappy little dog, and the quiet sense of life going on as it usually does off down the dusty roads.

The Spanish teacher instructed us that the señoras in this house hicieron trabajos artísticos muy bonitos and we should consider buying scarves porque esta familia nos dio todo gratís y son muy amables, muy amables. It was like having a National Geographic for Kids voiceover distilling the experience for us, dictating where our emotions and priorities and attention should be at any given time. Most people complied with the voiceover’s instructions and bought scarves, lots of them, and soon the gringos were bedecked in bright greens and pinks and blues, beaming over their purchases.

I stood back and observed, and I saw in their faces – trying in broken Spanish to talk with the Mexican grandma, trying on scarves, fondling the material – the desperate need for connection. Something, anything spiritual, anything “real” would do, they just wanted to be a part of it.

If they could buy it for twenty pesos it was an enormous relief, mission accomplished, and if they could give that money directly to this Mexican grandma it was like some big, sweet gulp of water in the parched spiritual desert of the American marketplace, of daily American life.

It was the brief relief from some sort of long detachment and disconnect, and maybe it was all they needed, maybe it was just a vain construct in a world gone so postmodern that even relief from commodification fed back into greater commodification, but it could also have been the spark, the indication, of something much greater. An indication of yearning for a certain connectedness between people, traditions, and beliefs outside of the realm of what could be commodified, bought and sold.

How many of those Columbia boots and jackets and t-shirts had been made in Cambodia somewhere, by a five-year old, and yet their wearers were so desperate to get a little bit of connection here, to feel like this act of buying was noble and was helping to preserve and respect something they honored and even, perhaps, envied.

Instead of seeing that paradox as ironic, I wanted to see it as hopeful – the desire to participate in and respect this culture and its people, to show gratitude for it, and to be respected by it, overlapping the blind, disconnected and detached decisions that go into buying a pair of pants at Target. Maybe the former would usurp the latter, or at least question it.

So perhaps it was the mezcal, but I felt hope there. Of course we then piled back onto the bus, with people already formulating their anecdotes to tell on next year’s trip to Belize, and promptly stopped at a sprawling tourist market full of Mexican souvenirs made in China.

Everyone plodded out and plodded on again, but hardly anyone bought anything. Perhaps that was simply an anomaly, an indication that they were all too tired and sunburned to care. But I like to think it was because they’d gotten a taste of a certain connectedness, and they were still wrapped up in it. And perhaps, the rest of it felt false. Who knew how long it’d last, who knew if it was all a figment of what I wanted to believe. Twenty minutes later we stepped back onto the colonial streets of Oaxaca and parted ways, so I suppose I’ll never know.

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/gringos-in-mexico-and-that-elusive-quest-for-authenticity/feed/ 13 http://matadorabroad.com/what-is-ethical-travel/ http://matadorabroad.com/what-is-ethical-travel/#comments Fri, 18 Dec 2009 01:43:17 +0000 Sarah Menkedick http://matadorabroad.com/?p=2737

Photos: author

The Toronto Star recently published a list of ten ethical travel destinations for 2010 (although the headline, in a little mathematical/editorial confusion, advertises seven). The ten countries have supposedly been selected on the basis of “everything from promoting natural environments to building tourism industries that benefit locals.” There seems to be a somewhat imbalanced emphasis on countries who have made conservation a priority and who boast exceptional natural environments, but the list seems fair enough.

However, I find the notion of “ethical travel destinations” bizarre. What, after all, is an “ethical destination?” And how can one classify a whole country as ethical or unethical? Obviously, the article is referring to governments and government policy and judging on that basis, but I still find the label odd.

In the context of travel, I wonder how useful it is to label certain countries ethical and others not. I can see the logic behind it and understand what kinds of factors might be figured into the ethical equation – but how much would be lost in travel if we only traveled to “ethical” places?

Mexico is deeply unethical in its treatment of women and its obscene corruption, and China is unethical in more ways than I can count, but would not having traveled to or lived in either of these places make me a better person and a “better” traveler, and would it have enhanced that global understanding we like to think emerges from travel?

Behind this definition of ethical travel lurks the old beast of holier-than-thou presumption. You, Ghana, we choose you for your “impressive commitment to genuine democracy” but you, Senegal, or Benin, or Bolivia, we’re not really going to grace you with our presence because you’re not ethical enough. And we’re going to hand pick, according to our criteria, what satisfies our definition of ethics and spend our time and our money accordingly.

I agree that it’s important to be aware of the ethical background of any place you travel. I’m always surprised at people who can travel somewhere and enjoy coral reefs and turquoise bays without giving the slightest about the situation of the people serving them, talking with them, living there year round.

But I’m not sure that defining a place as “ethical” or “unethical” is really useful in travel, and I’m not sure that avoiding places which lack the ethical standards established by Western media is really a productive or helpful idea. I lived for a year in China – couldn’t see my own blog and a whole range of other websites, saw the migrant workers working twelve hours a day throwing up buildings for the Olympics, breathed air that gave me pneumonia in two months.

But I learned more in that year than I’ve learned from any other experience, hands down.

So I ask – do you seek out ethical places? Avoid unethical ones? What is your travel ethic?

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/what-is-ethical-travel/feed/ 5 http://matadorabroad.com/culture-shock-when-where-and-how-has-it-hit-you/ http://matadorabroad.com/culture-shock-when-where-and-how-has-it-hit-you/#comments Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:06:28 +0000 Sarah Menkedick http://matadorabroad.com/?p=2697

Above Photo: Sarah Menkedick Photos: Jorge Santiago

There are cultures, then there are cultures within cultures, and then there are more cultures within those cultures. Cultures within cultures within cultures. Yes, I’m repeating this that many times to make you feel like you’re watching a spinning top, because that’s what culture starts to look like if you peer at it too closely – all the lines blur together and your head starts to spin and whir. Just when you think you’ve got it and you start to say:

“Mexico is…” some cultural entity pops up and smacks you in the face. Scratch that, you think. I don’t know. Don’t know what this culture is, and don’t know how I feel about it.

That’s why it seems to me that culture shock is the real constant in all of the exploration and exchange that happens traveling. It happens on the first day of your first trip overseas in a foreign country. It also happens on a regular basis in your eleventh year of living abroad. It’s ubiquitous and inevitable and it creeps up at the most unexpected moments.

Even after several years in Mexico, there are still little things that jolt me, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively, most of the time in a confusing gray zone between the two.

Why is it that so many men riding in cars feel the need to bark at my dog? At first I thought it was just the street sweepers in a pathetic, bored, macho pick-up attempt. But then it happened again, and again, and I realized, men notice the dog, they pay attention to the dog and…they bark.

I could make attempts to analyze this through the lens of machismo, which wouldn’t be too hard (man sees big dog, man sees girl walking big dog, man feels slightly less manly, man barks) but I actually think it goes further than that. I think it’s about contact.

If you establish some sort of connection to a person, paying attention to their kid or their dog or something about them, you’ve got to follow through with it. I think it harks back to a time when Oaxaca was still a pueblo, and social norms called for a “buenos tardes, señorita,” or its equivalent for everyone you passed. Now those times have (mostly) gone, but still, passing people on the street, I feel a strange obligation to take them into account like I don’t feel anywhere else.

There’s less of a personal space barrier here overall, and when you’ve made eye contact, you’ve made contact. There’s this pressing, suppressed need for acknowledgment. I feel that a lot, and the dog barking incidents are the most recent manifestation.

So when I came across this gorgeous, bone-deep photo essay on culture shock, I immediately related to it. Yep. As a traveler, this is a familiar feeling, sometimes jarring and unpleasant, sometimes thrilling, but indispensable to that experience of being outside one’s comfort zone.

Thus in all of that squirming around you’ve done trying to get comfortable in other cultures, what sorts of shocks and surprises have you had? What have you found traumatic, exhilarating, or both? Please share your culture shock stories below.

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/culture-shock-when-where-and-how-has-it-hit-you/feed/ 8 http://matadorabroad.com/existential-migration-is-travel-an-existential-need/ http://matadorabroad.com/existential-migration-is-travel-an-existential-need/#comments Mon, 07 Dec 2009 15:41:10 +0000 Greg Madison http://matadorabroad.com/?p=2642

Feature Photo: Sarah Menkedick Photo: goingslo

Existential migration is changing the way we think about home and belonging.

Leaving home can be a traumatic and exciting experience, especially if we are leaving to live in a foreign country. Research into the experiences of voluntary migrants has unexpectedly revealed that some of these people are actually using migration to express a deeply felt existential need. These ‘existential migrants’ discover more about themselves and feel more alive when confronting unfamiliar cultures. But by repeatedly exposing themselves to a vast range of different people and foreign places they can consequently end up living with a feeling of not being at home anywhere.

Photo: Sarah Menkedick

Alan is an executive in a large banking firm in the City of London. Six years ago as a recent business graduate, he left his native Maryland to ‘seek his fortune’. After a year in New York and two years in the Netherlands, he arrived in London where he’s worked for the past three years.

When I first met Alan he presented as an intelligent, curious and ambitious young man with a passion for travel. He was proudly self-sufficient and independent but this was mixed with a slight air of melancholy.

Alan came to therapy in order to deal with an increasing feeling of restlessness at work, mixed with a recurring anxiety about his plans to buy a property in London. For the past couple of weeks he has been feeling homesick for family and friends in America but also increasingly preoccupied with the idea of moving to Lisbon, where he spent an exciting three-week holiday last summer.

It may be tempting to simply view Alan as typifying a breed of young international executive moving around the globe according to the demands of 21st century capitalism. However, even a cursory examination of Alan’s experience and his motivations for leaving home begin to offer another story. An exploration of Alan’s life reveals that while growing up he had always assumed he would leave Annapolis, in fact he never really felt ‘at-home’ in his home. This is curious. Why would he not feel ‘at-home’ in the only home he’d ever known?

Looking back, Alan gradually realises that he made many choices, including education and career choices, based upon the likelihood that each choice would hasten his departure and increase his ability to live in other parts of the world. This was such a natural longing for Alan that he was shocked when he discovered that many of his friends had no plans to leave Annapolis but instead were happy to plan their lives around friends and family and the familiar streets where they had grown up.

Photo: Sarah Menkedick

In contrast, Alan always remembers being attracted to anything foreign. He experienced the familiar home environment as overly conventional, too homogenous, boring and even suffocating. Though he had good relationships with this family and a good social network, he always felt different from those around him and longed for the adventures he would have once he left his homeland. He remembers thinking ‘life begins when I leave home’.

Alan’s current experiences reveal his long-standing dilemma regarding the attraction and repulsion of belonging and settling in one place. He lives with ambiguous feelings regarding home, a deep longing to belong coupled with the panic of having to
conform to a quotidian life that he finds unconvincing and abhorrent.

Alan’s story illustrates a process of voluntary migration that has not been recognized until now. Unlike economic migration, simple wanderlust, or forced migration, ‘existential migration’ is conceived as a chosen attempt to express or address
two fundamental aspects of existence by leaving one’s homeland and becoming a foreigner. These individuals move cross-culturally, sometimes repeatedly, in search of self- understanding and adventure. Such people are actually seeking to resolve deeper ‘existential’ questions such as ‘who am I’, ‘how can I fulfill my potential?’, ‘where do I belong?’, ‘how can I feel at home?’

Photo: Sarah Menkedick

Most of these individuals leave their home cultures because they never felt ‘at home’ in the first place. For some, the choice to leave can eventually result in not being at home anywhere in the world, leaving these individuals to live within a sort of ‘homelessness’ that includes a complex mix of inconsolable loss as well as perpetual adventure and self-discovery.

These individuals raise interesting questions about our definitions of home and belonging. Is ‘home’ where we are most
ourselves or is home the very thing that exiles us from ourselves?

The research that revealed this process consisted of in-depth interviews with voluntary migrants from around the world now living in London. The study generated impressively consistent themes including the importance of independence, the need to
live fully, the need for freedom within belonging, the value of experiences of difference and foreignness as a stimulus to personal awareness. Among these migrants there is a marked preference for the strange and foreign and a consistent contempt for the conventional and easy life of the settled community.

The concept of existential migration fits well with themes in existential philosophy, especially concepts that point to the foreignness and mystery at the heart of human existence. The concept also challenges aspects of psychological research into
acculturation and relocation stress.

Even if an individual has relocated to a new culture solely for business purposes, he or she may find that their taken-for-granted assumptions about daily life are suddenly challenged, exposing a kind of groundlessness
to living. Upon return to the home country, that revelation is not always convincingly ‘papered-over’, resulting in a restlessness that needs to be acknowledged and explored.

Photo: Sarah Menkedick

As a process, existential migration may occur with anyone, though certain people seem more predisposed towards it as a primary orientation to life. But even for ‘existential migrants’ the day may come when their process becomes one of settling rather than migrating.

Talking about issues of home and belonging in therapy tends to be very emotional and poignant, but voluntary migrants value and even enjoy these dialogues. Paradoxically, voluntary migrants usually find that openly discussing their experiences of leaving home, often for the first time ever, results in a shift regarding their feelings of restlessness.

The approach in these sessions does not assume that anything is ‘wrong’ or pathological in these experiences; perpetual migration is not seen as less worthy than being settled. These sessions are simply an opportunity to have a facilitated dialogue that delves deeply into the motivations for leaving and the feelings that have transpired along the way.

The concept of existential migration also offers a re-consideration of the psychological effects of globalisation. As more and more of us are expected to have mobile lives, a kind of global ‘homelessness’ may be on the horizon; perhaps we are heading towards a time when no one really feels at home anywhere anymore, signaling the end of belonging. It is exactly these deeper issues that the study of existential migration has revealed as issues for us all.

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/existential-migration-is-travel-an-existential-need/feed/ 9 http://matadorabroad.com/has-the-internet-destroyed-the-spontaneity-of-travel/ http://matadorabroad.com/has-the-internet-destroyed-the-spontaneity-of-travel/#comments Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:18:26 +0000 Sarah Menkedick http://matadorabroad.com/?p=2590

Photo: Jorge Santiago

Should we be lamenting the end of an era, or heralding the rise of a new, enlightened age of travel?

There’s a lot of griping in travel about a golden age when guidebooks and backpackers didn’t give you the full picture of some middle-of-nowhere off-the-beaten-track town and you got there shimmering with innocence, sleeping on the floor of a poor local’s house, getting fed plates of food unsullied by foreign tastes, possibly being ripped off or wandering cluelessly for a few hours, the town to yourself, not a shred of info or a single other tourist to de-authenticize your experience. Ah, the good old days.

But now, of course, one devastating little word or two on Google opens the Pandora’s Box of travel, and you’re no longer the Only One, no longer pure. You find out not only have so many other people been there, but they’ve written so much about it that before you even set foot on your journey your head is crammed full of expectations and preconceived notions about everything from cafés to the local language to the right bus to take where.

The question is: is this a bad thing? Andy at 501 places does a good job of feeling out the ups and downs of this outpouring of (nearly unavoidable) travel knowledge. On the one hand, it’s nice to know what hotel is an overpriced, falling-down brothel; on the other hand, the meticulous research and googling that reveals every detail about lodging options obviously does away with the unexpected – out of which, arguably, some of the most interesting travel stories and insights emerge.

So on the one hand, sure, I’d like to know how to take the bus in Buenos Aires and how to survive a Chinese banquet; on the other hand, some of the greatest experiences I’ve had on the road have come from total ignorance, and the often slapstick, sometimes poignant efforts to learn and navigate a place from the bottom up.

I remember crossing Borneo by bus – that was the first time I had ever traveled without a Lonely Planet, which in retrospect, is fairly amazing. Four years of living, traveling, and working abroad, and I’d always had a Lonely Planet. Many travelers, including myself, come to take that particular book – or other substitutes – so much for granted that traveling without a guidebook feels like walking around naked, exposed, for a little while.

But in Borneo it was incredibly satisfying – it forced us to get on the ground knowledge everywhere we went, to piece things together on our way, to pay close attention to things we might otherwise have taken for granted. It ultimately took us to a middle of nowhere jungle town, where the only ways out were a forgotten Brunein border post (where we had to battle for hours for a visa for my Mexican husband) or weeks of jungle trekking.

That – meeting the Indonesian mafia, seeing the Brunein officials who cross the border into Sarawak to get wasted on weekends, exploring the strange distorted jungle underbelly of a Borneo that otherwise sells itself as an exotic paradise – was unpredictable and straight-up educational, because we went into it with zero expectations whatsoever.

At the same time, we could’ve very simply have gotten lucky, and we might’ve missed out on all of those experiences by taking one random turnoff. The payoff of maintaining a blank slate of expectations is that every place you reach is felt and absorbed on a different, deeper level since you haven’t been primed for it. The downside of this blank slate is that sometimes it hides places and information that could actually make a trip much richer and fuller.

Maybe your asking around or your luck leads you somewhere remarkable other tourists would or wouldn’t discover; but maybe it leads you randomly here and there, on cow paths that bypass some truly phenomenal places. I suppose it all depends on how you like to travel, how much time you have, how you balance out the experience of the journey with the need to find and see something in particular.

What do you think, readers? I’d love to hear with the Matador community has to say about this. Do you feel the Internet has enriched your travel experiences or somehow simplified them? Do you travel with guidebooks? How much research do you do? Please share your comments below.

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