We're still in port, so I'm going to keep posting until we clear. Jason had time to read through my posted entries and is making fun of me for referring to the docking of the ship as "birthing". Actually, it's "berthing". I'm an idiot. That's the last time I try to use cool maritime lingo.
That's what happens when English is your second language. That would never happen in portuguese. I think.
Saturday, November 12, 2005
Hong Kong
When did we sail into Manhattan?
We're off the ship in a shortly. See you if we make it back from... where was that again? Oh yeah, Kunming. Time to start reading about the city. As far as I know, it could be just like that British guy in "Love Actually" that decides to visit Wisconsin. I can only hope to meet the same kind of locals he did.
See you in a few.
We're off the ship in a shortly. See you if we make it back from... where was that again? Oh yeah, Kunming. Time to start reading about the city. As far as I know, it could be just like that British guy in "Love Actually" that decides to visit Wisconsin. I can only hope to meet the same kind of locals he did.
See you in a few.
Friday, November 11, 2005
Allantown
There are two worlds on the ship, one in which passengers know very little about. There are about 200 crew members aboard the MV Explorer, and due to strict ship regulations, they are not allowed to fraternize much with the passengers beyond some small talk when they are doing the job. There are some awesome people on this ship's crew.
Which is why I’m very, very lucky to have a crew member assigned to be my counterpart on this trip. Mr. Allan Pesado, "Sparky", who is leaving the ship in Hong Kong to wife and kids in the Phillipines for three months. He’s been aboard the ship for 11 months, and has been living this life as a Radio or AV for 13 years.
Crew life is tough. I’ve learned all about the shipping industry in our hours and hours and hours and hours of conversation about the ship. He’s been through everything - he’s been through fire, collision, embankment, deaths, and was the radio operator calling “MAYDAY” during the infamous 50 foot wave damaged the ship earlier this year.
(That story, by the way, is one of the best stories I’ve ever heard. If I don’t find a site that fully documents this stories, I’ll have to create one myself).
Allan is a short, bald, with the body of Homer Simpson and a thick Phillipino accent. He’s also on the jolliest, funniest, hardest-working people I have ever met – he’s often working from 7:15am until well after midnight. And we get along extremely well. I can’t tell you the number of times during Global Studies we busted out in the AV booth into a quiet rendition of “The Boxer” by Simon and Garfunkel, with me singing the melody and him singing the harmony. We assume no one can hear us, but we often hear from students later telling us, “We heard you singing in Global Studies today…” Whoops.
But he’s a great musician, though most people would never know it until the crew talent show, where he played guitar or piano or sang in just about every skit they did. As we were setting up the instruments for the show in the empty union, he picked up the guitar, started strumming “The Boxer”, and next thing you know I’m on the keyboard and we’re singing our brains out. I’m sure people heard us as they walked to the library. I hope they did. How often do you get to karaoke at work?
Then when sang his original composition “MV Explorer”, with lyrics like…
The MV Explorer
It means a lot to me
Going lots of places
With Semester at Sea
…where the word “Semester” is pronounced “SEA-mester” due to his thick Philipino accent, we’ll let’s just say someone must have been chopping onions in the union that day.
The crew members don’t get paid a lot, though it is good money relative to the countries they come from. The work is rewarding but tough – they work extremely long hours, often living in small cabins with three other individuals (as an 2nd officer, Allan gets his own cabin). They work long hours every day, are required to be on the ship at least nine months at a time (though they have to stay longer or cut their vacation short if the ship management company, V-Ships, asks them to do so). Allan deserves to go home and see his family. But he’ll be missed on the ship.
This is him and his replacement Sam (who I like already)
Which is why I’m very, very lucky to have a crew member assigned to be my counterpart on this trip. Mr. Allan Pesado, "Sparky", who is leaving the ship in Hong Kong to wife and kids in the Phillipines for three months. He’s been aboard the ship for 11 months, and has been living this life as a Radio or AV for 13 years.
Crew life is tough. I’ve learned all about the shipping industry in our hours and hours and hours and hours of conversation about the ship. He’s been through everything - he’s been through fire, collision, embankment, deaths, and was the radio operator calling “MAYDAY” during the infamous 50 foot wave damaged the ship earlier this year.
(That story, by the way, is one of the best stories I’ve ever heard. If I don’t find a site that fully documents this stories, I’ll have to create one myself).
Allan is a short, bald, with the body of Homer Simpson and a thick Phillipino accent. He’s also on the jolliest, funniest, hardest-working people I have ever met – he’s often working from 7:15am until well after midnight. And we get along extremely well. I can’t tell you the number of times during Global Studies we busted out in the AV booth into a quiet rendition of “The Boxer” by Simon and Garfunkel, with me singing the melody and him singing the harmony. We assume no one can hear us, but we often hear from students later telling us, “We heard you singing in Global Studies today…” Whoops.
But he’s a great musician, though most people would never know it until the crew talent show, where he played guitar or piano or sang in just about every skit they did. As we were setting up the instruments for the show in the empty union, he picked up the guitar, started strumming “The Boxer”, and next thing you know I’m on the keyboard and we’re singing our brains out. I’m sure people heard us as they walked to the library. I hope they did. How often do you get to karaoke at work?
Then when sang his original composition “MV Explorer”, with lyrics like…
The MV Explorer
It means a lot to me
Going lots of places
With Semester at Sea
…where the word “Semester” is pronounced “SEA-mester” due to his thick Philipino accent, we’ll let’s just say someone must have been chopping onions in the union that day.
The crew members don’t get paid a lot, though it is good money relative to the countries they come from. The work is rewarding but tough – they work extremely long hours, often living in small cabins with three other individuals (as an 2nd officer, Allan gets his own cabin). They work long hours every day, are required to be on the ship at least nine months at a time (though they have to stay longer or cut their vacation short if the ship management company, V-Ships, asks them to do so). Allan deserves to go home and see his family. But he’ll be missed on the ship.
This is him and his replacement Sam (who I like already)
Thursday, November 10, 2005
The Burma Identity
Catch up time. I have lots of things to write about Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia, and my crew counterpart Allan who is leaving us in Hong Kong, so let’s get to it.
Burma/Myanmar was clearly the great unknown of this voyage. What would happen when 700 students – the largest congregation of Americans in the country since 1962 – descend and take over a country that wasn’t quite ready for it?
There was a lot of buildup to this port. Information about our arrival changed every day, and the administration made a big deal about what to prepare for, and they made it clear that they had no idea what to expect. The only thing that seemed clear, thanks to reports of our risk management company (iJet), was that the small bomb that went off at our home base in Yangon a week prior to our arrival did not pose a serious threat to our shipboard community. But otherwise, no one really knew what was going once we arrived in port, or even arriving in port.
As described in previous entries, we hit the mouth of the Ayerwaddy River on our way to the port located some 45 minutes south of Yangon. Due to the shallowness (is that a word?) of the river, we had to enter the river at high tide, and limit the amount of water aboard the ship to minimize how much of the ship was submerged (this would lead to a severe rationing of water aboard the ship which I’ll come back to).
Everybody went outside to see the rural countryside go by, and many straw houses and pagodas later, we arrived to the cargo port in the middle of rice fields. A shuttle service had been set up from the ship to Yangon for the students, and once we got off, we knew this stop was different from most others. We didn’t have to deal the usual hordes of taxi drivers and peddlers outside of the ship that have been characteristic of most of the other ports.
On the way to Yangon, a few things jump out at you:
1. Men wear these long skirts in Myanmar. ALL men except for the military wear these skirts, the longyls. If you don’t think I purchased and bought one by the time I got back on the ship, you are just plain wrong. If you don’t think that most of the guys on the ship bought and wore one at some point, you are also very wrong. They’re pretty cool and comfortable – you won’t believe the freedom down there. Alright, too much detail.
2. The women and children wear a blotch of white paste on their cheeks. I had no idea this was coming, so it is no exaggeration that I was more surprised to see this for the first time than I was seeing dead bodies at the Ganges.
3. I took a picture of the first monk I saw. After my millionth monk, I didn’t think I had to take pictures of them any longer.
4. Burmese is the coolest looking language in the world. They write in circles (which I’ve been told developed from having to write on banana leaves). At one point, the letters started looking like little people to me, which makes for some funny stories if you “read” your interpretation out loud (“So this pregnant woman gets on her knees before losing her legs…”
5. What an amazing difference from India, which we had just seen two days earlier! There wasn’t nearly as many cars and people, and the countryside seemed so much cleaner. Was this in fact representative of Myanmar? The country has twenty times less people than India, but I’ve been told about the extreme poverty and the American diplomats warned us of the “veil” of Myanmar, where tourists are able to visit without having any idea of the political turmoil of the country. Was this part of that veil?
6. Things were unbelievably cheap in Myanmar. A dollar is worth a lot in that country. The local currency doesn’t have much teeth.
7. I thought, “I bet this is what Thailand looked like 40 years ago.”
I’d say that we surprised most of the people there. We got off the bus and no one came out to us. Of the people we did talk to, they were extremely gentle and seemed almost intimidated by us. After five days in India, we were shocked to see vendors not be pushy, accept “no”s, and not try to sell you much. It was amazing to see a transformation in five days, because the vendors and peddlers became much more aggressive by the last day in port. Why? Because it works, and every time you buy from a pushy person, it becomes an incentive for them to do it again. Though to be honest, it seemed most SAS people didn’t mind when you’re asking 25 cents for a shirt priced at 50 cents. And I’d say most people didn’t mind pumping some money into the informal economy.
Chris, Jason, and I decided to hang out the first day and improvise Yangon. We took a Lonely Planet, and started walking out and about, looking completely lost, when Mr. Toe approached us.
Mr. Toe. He’s like Red in the Shawshank Redemption. He’s the man that gets you things. Myanmar only gets 300,000 tourists a year (compare this to Thailand’s 12 million visitors), but Mr. Toe is one of the few tour guides around. He walked to us in the middle of an intersection, asked us what we wanted, and we wanted food. Authentic food. Cheap food. Good food, which wouldn’t make us sick later. He told us he would take us there. Since we hadn’t agreed to pay him anything, we took his advice, and sure enough, the restaurant fit all of the criteria. We needed to pay in Kyat (pronounced “chiat”) but the official government rate is 450 kyat per dollar. The black market rate is more like 1300 Kyat per dollar. Instead of going to a bank, Mr. Toe took us to the back of a t-shirt shop, asked us to cover our money, and we discreetly exchanged our money. I’m not sure why we had to be so discreet since EVERYBODY exchanges their money in the informal market, but we did as told.
The money lasted a while. Our dinner, with drinks, was around US$5. Chris got a haircut for 40 cents. At one point, Mr. Toe looked at Jason’s bag and noticed it was all ripped, so he took us to this alleyway where a shirtless tailor was working on a 100-year-old sewing machine. Seeing how fast the tailor fixed – actually, made stronger – Jason’s bag, we started looking for things we needed worked tailoring. Chris needed to fix his expensive Canon camera straps – the man whipped out some leather (that sounds bad) and fixed them. I had a missing zipper on the side pocket of my expensive REI short/pants (shants), and without having to take them off, I had a brand new zipper in no time. Total cost for all this: $2, paid in Kyat.
By this time, we had started to develop a funny bond with Mr. Toe, and the video of us singing “Killing Me Softly” in Burmese proves it.
(By the way, why does every country have it’s own version of “Killing Me Softly”? And why does the entire world enjoy Celine Deon? And why does the entire western world wear speedos? Why?)
Mr. Toe then took us the Shwedagon Pagoda, the holiest place in Burma and one of the holiest (if not THE holiest) place in Buddhism. (We liked calling it the “SchwearToGod Pagoda”). The pagoda is huge, some , covered in billions of dollars worth of gold that accumulated over the centuries. For such a beautiful place, there was one thing in particular that never seemed right by western standards – the flashing colored Vegas lights that they put behind the heads of the Buddhas. To us, it looks tacky, but it must mean a lot to them, because these lights were very common in Myanmar (I didn’t notice them that much in Cambodia).
We watched the sunset at the pagoda and got in a long conversation with a monk who somehow learned amazing English in his one year in the monastery and was much more progressive than we’d been told to expect. (Women, for example, were told not to look a monk in the eye, yet they kept coming up to the SAS students and engaging them in conversation. There are some really nice people in Myanmar). As someone who speaks English as my second language, I’m amazed at how well people can learn English around the world without being immersed in the language. This is particularly obvious of the little children on the street, who often speak English perfecty.
We had another cheap dinner with Mr. Toe, and gave him some money for being such a quality guide in the eight hours+ we were with him. If you’re ever in Yangon, ask for Mr. Toe. If you look lost at the intersection near the Trader’s hotel, he’ll find you. Tell him you know Chris, Jason, and Rico. He’ll take you around.
We took the last shuttle back to the ship to get some sleep and get ready to fly to Bagan the next day.
I hadn’t seen any evidence of the evil Myanmar that was on everybody’s mind. They asked us not to engage in political conversation with the locals as to not endanger them and have them questioned by the police later on. We were afraid to ask, for their safety. But I wanted to. I would have to wait until Bagan.
(I’m in the Union writing this as the choir is practicing “America is Beautiful” for the first time, to be sung prior to arriving in the U.S. I just got chills. The trip is coming to an end…)
I woke up the next morning, a little too late to be able to go to Yangon and back and still make it to my flight. So I decided to explore the nearby area on foot. I made my way out of the port, towards some oxen in a muddy rice field towards some straw huts I’d seen from the bus. As I got closer, an 18-year-old (whose name I unfortunately can’t remember) came to greet me, and I spent the next hour or so talking to him, asking a million questions, learning quite a bit about the poor people in Myanmar, getting angry at the government who makes things worse for them, and thought a lot about a time when my parents were going through serious financial difficulties and had no one to turn to. I hate to compare the experiences because the conditions are obviously very different, but I thought back about the feeling of helplessness, and the inability to understand why people are unwilling to help. This brought me right back to my experience in India, and in my mind, all the sudden all the beggars have a background story – such as, what got them to the point of having to come beg at a dirty station – and I began to understand, I think, the feeling of helplessness they must feel when a “rich” individual goes by. Why won’t these people help me? Can’t they see I hungry? Can’t they see I can’t help myself?
Why is it that even though we spend thousands of dollars on elaborate trips around some of the most exotic locations around the world, some of the most meaningful moments happen alongside a non-descript road within walking distance of the ship?
I said goodbye, and hitchhiked a ride back on a truck carrying teek (sp?) and was dropped off just feet away from the ship. I joined the group, went to the airport, and headed to Bagan, home of some 2500 ancient stupas and pagodas. There were no lights visible as we landed, so we knew we were in the middle of nowhere. I won’t spend too much time describing our plan of action because I’d be summed up like this:
Pagoda, pagoda, stupa, pagodas, Buddha, Buddha, Buddha, pagoda, Buddha, stupa, stupa, pagoda, stupa, Buddha, stupa, pagoda, Buddha, stupa, stupa, stupa,. And another Buddha. Please don’t underestimate how cool that is, especially by someone who’s never been to a Buddhist country. Some of the highlights:
1. Going to some really cool resorts on the river. I thought the hotels they put us in Varanasi and Delhi were overkill, but these seemed to fit the trip. They were really nice.
2. Climbing the temples and seeing the view from the top of them. There really are thousands of ancient temples all over the place in Bagan. They should shoot the next Indiana Jones here.
3. The city is still not tourist-friendly, which is great. There aren’t many people there, most streets are still unpaved, and it isn’t hard to find large empty temples to explore. I’m not sure long this will last – the country is spending a lot of money doing out-of-place constructions in the area, and rebuilding a lot of the ruins, with modern bricks. I’m not sure what their motivation is, but I think they should just leave the temples as found. See Bagan now before it is too late.
4. Best Idea Ever – renting bikes. We had some free time, and this girl Jamie and I decided to get the bikes and go exploring. It was my favorite part of the entire trip.
5. The city is dead at night. I left our resort to meet up with a friend at another resort, and asked at the reception if it was safe to walk around. “Be careful,” they said. “Many snakes.” I was thinking I’d have to worry about some government operative, but instead they gave me the nice tip that Cobras make a hissing sound when they attack. Vipers, on the other hand, are completely quiet. When I left the hotel, it was completely dark, but I could see the very faint silhouette of the temples as I made my way past them. And I saw many huge flying foxes along the way. Good times.
6. Stargazing on the shores of the Ayerwaddy River in Bagan is one of the coolest things ever.
7. The welcome reception was jaw-dropping. They lit one of the largest ancient temples entirely by candlelight as the locals came out holding torches and playing the drums. Just one of those moments you had to be there to understand, but that by itself made the trip all worth it.
8. Finally having the political conversations I wanted. The locals we talked to asked us not to let anyone know that they had talked politics with us, and there were a lot of revealing statements. They are scared of the government, and one guy in particular believes there will be a revolution in the next few years. “No one thought Nelson Mandela would be president of South Africa someday,” he said. So true. So true.
Upon return to Bagan, I still had two days in Yangon, which I made to good use of. As soon as we got back from Bagan, Sony and I decided to walk with the goal of getting lost. In the process, we saw all of the poverty and slums that we hadn’t seen in around the tourist trail. Poverty is poverty is poverty, no matter where in the world you are. The saddes sight was of these old men swimming in the sewer looking for possible objects of value that could have been dropped in there. A few hours later, we made our way back.
I met up with some students, booked a room in $3-a-night hotel, hung out with staff and students until very late, and I met up the next day with my adopted son, Ashish (long story – I have an adopted son and three adopted daughters on the ship), and we explored Yangon and ate and ate and ate all day long. Ashish is Hindu, and since India was fresh our minds at the time, we spent several hours talking about the subcontinent. Sounds boring, but for someone who knows little about this stuff, it was fascinating.
Remember when I said there was a severe rationing of water? We couldn’t take in new water in the river, and people didn’t reduce the amount of water while on the ship, so by the time we got back, they shut off the water except for a short time in the morning and evening, including flushing of the toilets. And since we spent another half day in port, some people were really stinky by the time we hit the sea, present company included.
Myanmar was wonderful. I think it is a much easier country to travel in than was believed before we arrived there – you can see they are trying to make an effort to up the tourism in the country, and I don’t doubt that it’ll be at the same level as the other southeast asian countries someday. But the government needs to change. Though embargo is not the answer.
Thank you, Mr. Toe.
Burma/Myanmar was clearly the great unknown of this voyage. What would happen when 700 students – the largest congregation of Americans in the country since 1962 – descend and take over a country that wasn’t quite ready for it?
There was a lot of buildup to this port. Information about our arrival changed every day, and the administration made a big deal about what to prepare for, and they made it clear that they had no idea what to expect. The only thing that seemed clear, thanks to reports of our risk management company (iJet), was that the small bomb that went off at our home base in Yangon a week prior to our arrival did not pose a serious threat to our shipboard community. But otherwise, no one really knew what was going once we arrived in port, or even arriving in port.
As described in previous entries, we hit the mouth of the Ayerwaddy River on our way to the port located some 45 minutes south of Yangon. Due to the shallowness (is that a word?) of the river, we had to enter the river at high tide, and limit the amount of water aboard the ship to minimize how much of the ship was submerged (this would lead to a severe rationing of water aboard the ship which I’ll come back to).
Everybody went outside to see the rural countryside go by, and many straw houses and pagodas later, we arrived to the cargo port in the middle of rice fields. A shuttle service had been set up from the ship to Yangon for the students, and once we got off, we knew this stop was different from most others. We didn’t have to deal the usual hordes of taxi drivers and peddlers outside of the ship that have been characteristic of most of the other ports.
On the way to Yangon, a few things jump out at you:
1. Men wear these long skirts in Myanmar. ALL men except for the military wear these skirts, the longyls. If you don’t think I purchased and bought one by the time I got back on the ship, you are just plain wrong. If you don’t think that most of the guys on the ship bought and wore one at some point, you are also very wrong. They’re pretty cool and comfortable – you won’t believe the freedom down there. Alright, too much detail.
2. The women and children wear a blotch of white paste on their cheeks. I had no idea this was coming, so it is no exaggeration that I was more surprised to see this for the first time than I was seeing dead bodies at the Ganges.
3. I took a picture of the first monk I saw. After my millionth monk, I didn’t think I had to take pictures of them any longer.
4. Burmese is the coolest looking language in the world. They write in circles (which I’ve been told developed from having to write on banana leaves). At one point, the letters started looking like little people to me, which makes for some funny stories if you “read” your interpretation out loud (“So this pregnant woman gets on her knees before losing her legs…”
5. What an amazing difference from India, which we had just seen two days earlier! There wasn’t nearly as many cars and people, and the countryside seemed so much cleaner. Was this in fact representative of Myanmar? The country has twenty times less people than India, but I’ve been told about the extreme poverty and the American diplomats warned us of the “veil” of Myanmar, where tourists are able to visit without having any idea of the political turmoil of the country. Was this part of that veil?
6. Things were unbelievably cheap in Myanmar. A dollar is worth a lot in that country. The local currency doesn’t have much teeth.
7. I thought, “I bet this is what Thailand looked like 40 years ago.”
I’d say that we surprised most of the people there. We got off the bus and no one came out to us. Of the people we did talk to, they were extremely gentle and seemed almost intimidated by us. After five days in India, we were shocked to see vendors not be pushy, accept “no”s, and not try to sell you much. It was amazing to see a transformation in five days, because the vendors and peddlers became much more aggressive by the last day in port. Why? Because it works, and every time you buy from a pushy person, it becomes an incentive for them to do it again. Though to be honest, it seemed most SAS people didn’t mind when you’re asking 25 cents for a shirt priced at 50 cents. And I’d say most people didn’t mind pumping some money into the informal economy.
Chris, Jason, and I decided to hang out the first day and improvise Yangon. We took a Lonely Planet, and started walking out and about, looking completely lost, when Mr. Toe approached us.
Mr. Toe. He’s like Red in the Shawshank Redemption. He’s the man that gets you things. Myanmar only gets 300,000 tourists a year (compare this to Thailand’s 12 million visitors), but Mr. Toe is one of the few tour guides around. He walked to us in the middle of an intersection, asked us what we wanted, and we wanted food. Authentic food. Cheap food. Good food, which wouldn’t make us sick later. He told us he would take us there. Since we hadn’t agreed to pay him anything, we took his advice, and sure enough, the restaurant fit all of the criteria. We needed to pay in Kyat (pronounced “chiat”) but the official government rate is 450 kyat per dollar. The black market rate is more like 1300 Kyat per dollar. Instead of going to a bank, Mr. Toe took us to the back of a t-shirt shop, asked us to cover our money, and we discreetly exchanged our money. I’m not sure why we had to be so discreet since EVERYBODY exchanges their money in the informal market, but we did as told.
The money lasted a while. Our dinner, with drinks, was around US$5. Chris got a haircut for 40 cents. At one point, Mr. Toe looked at Jason’s bag and noticed it was all ripped, so he took us to this alleyway where a shirtless tailor was working on a 100-year-old sewing machine. Seeing how fast the tailor fixed – actually, made stronger – Jason’s bag, we started looking for things we needed worked tailoring. Chris needed to fix his expensive Canon camera straps – the man whipped out some leather (that sounds bad) and fixed them. I had a missing zipper on the side pocket of my expensive REI short/pants (shants), and without having to take them off, I had a brand new zipper in no time. Total cost for all this: $2, paid in Kyat.
By this time, we had started to develop a funny bond with Mr. Toe, and the video of us singing “Killing Me Softly” in Burmese proves it.
(By the way, why does every country have it’s own version of “Killing Me Softly”? And why does the entire world enjoy Celine Deon? And why does the entire western world wear speedos? Why?)
Mr. Toe then took us the Shwedagon Pagoda, the holiest place in Burma and one of the holiest (if not THE holiest) place in Buddhism. (We liked calling it the “SchwearToGod Pagoda”). The pagoda is huge, some , covered in billions of dollars worth of gold that accumulated over the centuries. For such a beautiful place, there was one thing in particular that never seemed right by western standards – the flashing colored Vegas lights that they put behind the heads of the Buddhas. To us, it looks tacky, but it must mean a lot to them, because these lights were very common in Myanmar (I didn’t notice them that much in Cambodia).
We watched the sunset at the pagoda and got in a long conversation with a monk who somehow learned amazing English in his one year in the monastery and was much more progressive than we’d been told to expect. (Women, for example, were told not to look a monk in the eye, yet they kept coming up to the SAS students and engaging them in conversation. There are some really nice people in Myanmar). As someone who speaks English as my second language, I’m amazed at how well people can learn English around the world without being immersed in the language. This is particularly obvious of the little children on the street, who often speak English perfecty.
We had another cheap dinner with Mr. Toe, and gave him some money for being such a quality guide in the eight hours+ we were with him. If you’re ever in Yangon, ask for Mr. Toe. If you look lost at the intersection near the Trader’s hotel, he’ll find you. Tell him you know Chris, Jason, and Rico. He’ll take you around.
We took the last shuttle back to the ship to get some sleep and get ready to fly to Bagan the next day.
I hadn’t seen any evidence of the evil Myanmar that was on everybody’s mind. They asked us not to engage in political conversation with the locals as to not endanger them and have them questioned by the police later on. We were afraid to ask, for their safety. But I wanted to. I would have to wait until Bagan.
(I’m in the Union writing this as the choir is practicing “America is Beautiful” for the first time, to be sung prior to arriving in the U.S. I just got chills. The trip is coming to an end…)
I woke up the next morning, a little too late to be able to go to Yangon and back and still make it to my flight. So I decided to explore the nearby area on foot. I made my way out of the port, towards some oxen in a muddy rice field towards some straw huts I’d seen from the bus. As I got closer, an 18-year-old (whose name I unfortunately can’t remember) came to greet me, and I spent the next hour or so talking to him, asking a million questions, learning quite a bit about the poor people in Myanmar, getting angry at the government who makes things worse for them, and thought a lot about a time when my parents were going through serious financial difficulties and had no one to turn to. I hate to compare the experiences because the conditions are obviously very different, but I thought back about the feeling of helplessness, and the inability to understand why people are unwilling to help. This brought me right back to my experience in India, and in my mind, all the sudden all the beggars have a background story – such as, what got them to the point of having to come beg at a dirty station – and I began to understand, I think, the feeling of helplessness they must feel when a “rich” individual goes by. Why won’t these people help me? Can’t they see I hungry? Can’t they see I can’t help myself?
Why is it that even though we spend thousands of dollars on elaborate trips around some of the most exotic locations around the world, some of the most meaningful moments happen alongside a non-descript road within walking distance of the ship?
I said goodbye, and hitchhiked a ride back on a truck carrying teek (sp?) and was dropped off just feet away from the ship. I joined the group, went to the airport, and headed to Bagan, home of some 2500 ancient stupas and pagodas. There were no lights visible as we landed, so we knew we were in the middle of nowhere. I won’t spend too much time describing our plan of action because I’d be summed up like this:
Pagoda, pagoda, stupa, pagodas, Buddha, Buddha, Buddha, pagoda, Buddha, stupa, stupa, pagoda, stupa, Buddha, stupa, pagoda, Buddha, stupa, stupa, stupa,. And another Buddha. Please don’t underestimate how cool that is, especially by someone who’s never been to a Buddhist country. Some of the highlights:
1. Going to some really cool resorts on the river. I thought the hotels they put us in Varanasi and Delhi were overkill, but these seemed to fit the trip. They were really nice.
2. Climbing the temples and seeing the view from the top of them. There really are thousands of ancient temples all over the place in Bagan. They should shoot the next Indiana Jones here.
3. The city is still not tourist-friendly, which is great. There aren’t many people there, most streets are still unpaved, and it isn’t hard to find large empty temples to explore. I’m not sure long this will last – the country is spending a lot of money doing out-of-place constructions in the area, and rebuilding a lot of the ruins, with modern bricks. I’m not sure what their motivation is, but I think they should just leave the temples as found. See Bagan now before it is too late.
4. Best Idea Ever – renting bikes. We had some free time, and this girl Jamie and I decided to get the bikes and go exploring. It was my favorite part of the entire trip.
5. The city is dead at night. I left our resort to meet up with a friend at another resort, and asked at the reception if it was safe to walk around. “Be careful,” they said. “Many snakes.” I was thinking I’d have to worry about some government operative, but instead they gave me the nice tip that Cobras make a hissing sound when they attack. Vipers, on the other hand, are completely quiet. When I left the hotel, it was completely dark, but I could see the very faint silhouette of the temples as I made my way past them. And I saw many huge flying foxes along the way. Good times.
6. Stargazing on the shores of the Ayerwaddy River in Bagan is one of the coolest things ever.
7. The welcome reception was jaw-dropping. They lit one of the largest ancient temples entirely by candlelight as the locals came out holding torches and playing the drums. Just one of those moments you had to be there to understand, but that by itself made the trip all worth it.
8. Finally having the political conversations I wanted. The locals we talked to asked us not to let anyone know that they had talked politics with us, and there were a lot of revealing statements. They are scared of the government, and one guy in particular believes there will be a revolution in the next few years. “No one thought Nelson Mandela would be president of South Africa someday,” he said. So true. So true.
Upon return to Bagan, I still had two days in Yangon, which I made to good use of. As soon as we got back from Bagan, Sony and I decided to walk with the goal of getting lost. In the process, we saw all of the poverty and slums that we hadn’t seen in around the tourist trail. Poverty is poverty is poverty, no matter where in the world you are. The saddes sight was of these old men swimming in the sewer looking for possible objects of value that could have been dropped in there. A few hours later, we made our way back.
I met up with some students, booked a room in $3-a-night hotel, hung out with staff and students until very late, and I met up the next day with my adopted son, Ashish (long story – I have an adopted son and three adopted daughters on the ship), and we explored Yangon and ate and ate and ate all day long. Ashish is Hindu, and since India was fresh our minds at the time, we spent several hours talking about the subcontinent. Sounds boring, but for someone who knows little about this stuff, it was fascinating.
Remember when I said there was a severe rationing of water? We couldn’t take in new water in the river, and people didn’t reduce the amount of water while on the ship, so by the time we got back, they shut off the water except for a short time in the morning and evening, including flushing of the toilets. And since we spent another half day in port, some people were really stinky by the time we hit the sea, present company included.
Myanmar was wonderful. I think it is a much easier country to travel in than was believed before we arrived there – you can see they are trying to make an effort to up the tourism in the country, and I don’t doubt that it’ll be at the same level as the other southeast asian countries someday. But the government needs to change. Though embargo is not the answer.
Thank you, Mr. Toe.
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Cambodinam
I loved this port.
I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it.
Loved it loved it loved it loved it loved loved it loved it loved it loved loved it loved it loved it loved loved it loved it loved it loved loved it loved it loved it loved loved it loved it loved it loved loved it loved it loved it loved loved it loved it loved it loved loved it loved it loved it loved.
Loved it.
Seriously.
I loved it.
I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it I loved it.
Loved it loved it loved it loved it loved loved it loved it loved it loved loved it loved it loved it loved loved it loved it loved it loved loved it loved it loved it loved loved it loved it loved it loved loved it loved it loved it loved loved it loved it loved it loved loved it loved it loved it loved.
Loved it.
Seriously.
I loved it.
Saturday, November 05, 2005
Good Morning Vietnam!
We woke up arriving on the Saigon River, and we’re doing our awesome 3 hour trek into the Heart of Darkness (actually, that’ll be in the Mekong River in Cambodia), but should be arriving in Ho Chi Minh City in a couple of hours. The river is narrow and twisty and crowded and in the middle of what appears to be some pretty dense jungle – I’m amazed at how well this huge ship handles these tight turns. The ship has gotten in some serious collisions here before. Let’s hope for the best.
This is so, so cool right now. I’m working on my Myanmar report, but I’ll be honest with you, I might get easily distracted and not finish it. But I’ll get it done, for sure.
A little about what I’m doing in Vietnam. Once we arrive, I plan on visiting the War Museum and meet up with a local named Cuong, who had befriended a friend of Anne’s. We’ve been in touch by email and he said he’d be happy to show me around.
Also, I’m trip leading one of the Cambodia, into the Killing Fields in Phnom Phen and the temples of Angkor Wat. These have been the most popular sign-ups on this trip, with hundreds of students not getting a slot, so snagging the trip-leader spot was a pretty sweet deal. I actually chose not to do much research on the subject. So why am I going if I don’t know much about where we’re going?
When I started researching what I was going to do on this trip, Anne gave me three pieces of advice:
1. Don’t let money be a concern – if there is something you really want to do, figure out how to do it, because you never know when you’re going back there.
2. If you go on SAS trips, pick the ones with the fewer maximum number of people.
3. Whatever you do, go to Cambodia.
So that was it. I was sold. We never talked much about it after. I signed up, got the trip, became so excited I started a media campaign to get the rest of my group excited – I would post on the television screens slide shows essentially saying that the “Best Trip Ever” is coming. It worked a little too well, because I brought to a halt when one student told me people who didn't get a slot were starting to get really jealous.
So yes, I’m excited. I’ll get back to the Myanmar stuff since I like writing about things when they are fresh. I’ll keep y’all posted.
This is so, so cool right now. I’m working on my Myanmar report, but I’ll be honest with you, I might get easily distracted and not finish it. But I’ll get it done, for sure.
A little about what I’m doing in Vietnam. Once we arrive, I plan on visiting the War Museum and meet up with a local named Cuong, who had befriended a friend of Anne’s. We’ve been in touch by email and he said he’d be happy to show me around.
Also, I’m trip leading one of the Cambodia, into the Killing Fields in Phnom Phen and the temples of Angkor Wat. These have been the most popular sign-ups on this trip, with hundreds of students not getting a slot, so snagging the trip-leader spot was a pretty sweet deal. I actually chose not to do much research on the subject. So why am I going if I don’t know much about where we’re going?
When I started researching what I was going to do on this trip, Anne gave me three pieces of advice:
1. Don’t let money be a concern – if there is something you really want to do, figure out how to do it, because you never know when you’re going back there.
2. If you go on SAS trips, pick the ones with the fewer maximum number of people.
3. Whatever you do, go to Cambodia.
So that was it. I was sold. We never talked much about it after. I signed up, got the trip, became so excited I started a media campaign to get the rest of my group excited – I would post on the television screens slide shows essentially saying that the “Best Trip Ever” is coming. It worked a little too well, because I brought to a halt when one student told me people who didn't get a slot were starting to get really jealous.
So yes, I’m excited. I’ll get back to the Myanmar stuff since I like writing about things when they are fresh. I’ll keep y’all posted.
Friday, November 04, 2005
The Myanmar Dilemma
Question asked by Chris at breakfast this morning:
“Do you remember that time we had lunch in Singapore?”
The answer, of course, was yesterday. We pulled over for a pit stop in Singapore for gas, a Slurpy, some twinkies and beef jerky, and a bathroom break. Well, we just stopped for refueling, but were right off the Singapore skyline and got our passport stamped even though we weren’t allowed off the ship. Which really sucks, by the way. What a tease.
Otherwise, god, I love this. One of the most surreal elements of SAS is the fact that as vast as the ocean appears to be from the seventh floor deck, the world feels as small as the big map posted in the hallway denoting where we have been. There’s a feeling of, “Hey, wanna go to New Zealand?”, and we can do that. I “just” happens.
Another reason I love being on the ship. Here’s an announcement taken verbatim from our Dean’s Memo.
“Pirates still do exist, although they probably do not look like the one we see in Hollywood movies. There are reports of pirating on the seas throughout the world, oftentimes when a ship is traveling close to land like in the Malacca Strait, which we are about to enter. Although the risk is low the ship does take precautions, like increasing our speed through the area of risk. Pirates are much more interested in cargo ships, not passenger ships.”
Any job that warns you about the danger of pirates can’t be all that bad. Can it?
I reread my final India entry, and reread my journal, and I still don’t think I’ve quite conveyed my experience there quite accurately. I had a long discussion with Janet Eastman, who is teaching journalism on board and writes for the LA Times, about our thoughts and experiences there, and neither of us have quite nailed it yet. India is a difficult country. My journal makes it seem that I jumped out of an airplane, with sensory overload, but yet I feel somewhat removed from that ten days later. But I thought about it a little further, and I’m not sure if simplifying the experience to an intellectual exercise is accurate. I also wanted to emphasize that I loved my five days there. I just wish I could have come up with a better understanding in those five days.
I have lots of pictures to upload, but as Internet is quite slow again, so I’ve only uploaded the Rinspirator picture:
http://www.executiveranch.net/sas/india/rinspirator.jpg
(Speaking of pictures, I guess the link I put up to Chris’s Mauritius pictures didn’t work, so just go directly to his main site and click on “Mauritius” (http://www.37thframe.ca/sas) and Myanmar because I hung out with him the first full day there.)
But India takes us to Myanmar. Semester at Sea had sent trips to Myanmar from other port stops, but this was the first time that the ship would “birth” (cool maritime lingo) in the country. But this would not be without controversy. Myanmar has one of the worst records of human rights violation by the government, second only perhaps to North Korea, and culminating with the house arrest of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who is still in custody to this day. Desmond Tutu called her his hero and said there is a poster of her up in his office.
The country has the worst possible diplomatic relationship with the United States and still be recognized as a country, and in defiance of the Myanmar government, the U.S. will refer to the country as Burma in its official documents.
(This leads us to our first dilemma – how do we refer to the country when we’re there? I decided that the US government should indeed call it Burma as a symbolic gesture against the government, but when talking to the locals, “Burma” is a vestige of British colonialism and only encompasses the Burmese people, which is only about two-thirds of the population. Myanmar means “Strong People” so the locals seemed to prefer that. Alas).
There is a US diplomatic staff in Myanmar, but, in a move filled with symbolism, there is no U.S. Ambassador there. We have been told that the embargo against the country is the foreign relations issue with the largest bipartisan support of any issue in the US Congress. My OMHML, Archbishop Tutu, is the world’s most ardent opponent of the Myanmar regime and a huge supporter of sanctions in the country.
A very serious dialogue started on the ship. Should we be going to Myanmar? The answer from the Institute of Shipboard Education’s side seemed pretty straightforward – this is an educational trip, and ISE will not put itself in the position to making a political statement by choosing not to go to a country. They’d been to Communist China before they opened their doors to the west, to Vietnam, Cuba, and apartheid South Africa, all in the name of education.
But that still wasn’t reason enough for me to exit the ship. Would our visit be perceived as some sort of endorsement of the government, and would our money end up in the hands of government to be used for more human-rights violations? Should we stay on the ship as some sort of protest? If I decide to not stay on the ship, would that be perceived as some sort of ignorance or indifference to these issues. Coming from India and South Africa, where there was a history of systematic injustices, these were questions that were laying quite heavily with a lot of people.
(By the way, I think this opportunity to compare so many countries in a short amount of time is the most important aspect of SAS, and have a lot to say about it, so I’m sure I’ll come back to this at the end of the voyage).
The answer, for many of us, came when the Kevin McGrath and his wife Olga, our Myanmar Interport Lecturers, boarded the ship in Chennai. He was an UN officials in Burma (and many other countries) for many years, and he built a very convincing case that the sanctions are not working at that they are the wrong approach to dealing with the country (actually, he made the case that sanctions are generally a bad way to deal with international issues, South Africa being a notable exception). Some of the main points, as I understood it:
1. In a country where the ruler believes in Karma, suffering is caused by some greater cosmic force - if my people suffer because of the economic sanctions, then it was meant to be. There’s little motivation to do anything about it. But the government can continue to splurge whatever is left on itself, which means Myanmar has the world’s most disproportionate ratio between military spending to social spending (something like 9 to 1). The ruler isn’t afraid to make insane rulings on the basis of astrology: in the early nineties, the government decided that the money needed to be based on the number 9, and the financial system lost its credibility and collapsed when certain bill denominations were deemed illegal overnight.
2. The sanctions only bring Myanmar closer to China, who fills in the void left by the sanctioning countries. It seemed like all of the major businesses, such as hotels, were owned by Chinese (and Thai) companies. This very close relationship with China is very much against the interest of the United States.
3. The government somewhat fills in the void of services that were missing before by becoming a middleman, taking in the profit, and making services too expensive for the little guy to afford.
4. Keeping Myanmar isolated keeps it away from our consciouness, since there is absolutely little motivation to learn about the human-rights violations in the country if we don’t foster some sort of business or tourist interest there. Sad but true.
5. The conditions in South Africa, under which sanctions worked, was very different from Myanmar. South Africa had a large white middle class, without a despot, which was heavily hurt by the sanctions. South Africa was also surrounded by countries that disapproved of the government, whereas Myanmar is surrounded by friends who can fill a lot of the holes created by the sanctions.
The conclusion: the country has declined tremendously in the last 10+ years, with severe poverty and on the brink of an AIDS epidemic, yet the government has not changed its human-rights record. So the sanctions aren’t working.
What can we do about it, then? Kevin and Olga have a lot of suggestions, and I hope I get a chance to talk to them about it before they leave us in Vietnam.
Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve written anything remotely academic! (Not that this counts, but, woohoo!) I just realized I vented all this on Myanmar without a word about what happened off the ship… I guess it’s been on my mind a lot. Or I just like venting. Hope you enjoyed it – I’ll post this entry, then start write about fun stuff.
“Do you remember that time we had lunch in Singapore?”
The answer, of course, was yesterday. We pulled over for a pit stop in Singapore for gas, a Slurpy, some twinkies and beef jerky, and a bathroom break. Well, we just stopped for refueling, but were right off the Singapore skyline and got our passport stamped even though we weren’t allowed off the ship. Which really sucks, by the way. What a tease.
Otherwise, god, I love this. One of the most surreal elements of SAS is the fact that as vast as the ocean appears to be from the seventh floor deck, the world feels as small as the big map posted in the hallway denoting where we have been. There’s a feeling of, “Hey, wanna go to New Zealand?”, and we can do that. I “just” happens.
Another reason I love being on the ship. Here’s an announcement taken verbatim from our Dean’s Memo.
“Pirates still do exist, although they probably do not look like the one we see in Hollywood movies. There are reports of pirating on the seas throughout the world, oftentimes when a ship is traveling close to land like in the Malacca Strait, which we are about to enter. Although the risk is low the ship does take precautions, like increasing our speed through the area of risk. Pirates are much more interested in cargo ships, not passenger ships.”
Any job that warns you about the danger of pirates can’t be all that bad. Can it?
I reread my final India entry, and reread my journal, and I still don’t think I’ve quite conveyed my experience there quite accurately. I had a long discussion with Janet Eastman, who is teaching journalism on board and writes for the LA Times, about our thoughts and experiences there, and neither of us have quite nailed it yet. India is a difficult country. My journal makes it seem that I jumped out of an airplane, with sensory overload, but yet I feel somewhat removed from that ten days later. But I thought about it a little further, and I’m not sure if simplifying the experience to an intellectual exercise is accurate. I also wanted to emphasize that I loved my five days there. I just wish I could have come up with a better understanding in those five days.
I have lots of pictures to upload, but as Internet is quite slow again, so I’ve only uploaded the Rinspirator picture:
http://www.executiveranch.net/sas/india/rinspirator.jpg
(Speaking of pictures, I guess the link I put up to Chris’s Mauritius pictures didn’t work, so just go directly to his main site and click on “Mauritius” (http://www.37thframe.ca/sas) and Myanmar because I hung out with him the first full day there.)
But India takes us to Myanmar. Semester at Sea had sent trips to Myanmar from other port stops, but this was the first time that the ship would “birth” (cool maritime lingo) in the country. But this would not be without controversy. Myanmar has one of the worst records of human rights violation by the government, second only perhaps to North Korea, and culminating with the house arrest of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who is still in custody to this day. Desmond Tutu called her his hero and said there is a poster of her up in his office.
The country has the worst possible diplomatic relationship with the United States and still be recognized as a country, and in defiance of the Myanmar government, the U.S. will refer to the country as Burma in its official documents.
(This leads us to our first dilemma – how do we refer to the country when we’re there? I decided that the US government should indeed call it Burma as a symbolic gesture against the government, but when talking to the locals, “Burma” is a vestige of British colonialism and only encompasses the Burmese people, which is only about two-thirds of the population. Myanmar means “Strong People” so the locals seemed to prefer that. Alas).
There is a US diplomatic staff in Myanmar, but, in a move filled with symbolism, there is no U.S. Ambassador there. We have been told that the embargo against the country is the foreign relations issue with the largest bipartisan support of any issue in the US Congress. My OMHML, Archbishop Tutu, is the world’s most ardent opponent of the Myanmar regime and a huge supporter of sanctions in the country.
A very serious dialogue started on the ship. Should we be going to Myanmar? The answer from the Institute of Shipboard Education’s side seemed pretty straightforward – this is an educational trip, and ISE will not put itself in the position to making a political statement by choosing not to go to a country. They’d been to Communist China before they opened their doors to the west, to Vietnam, Cuba, and apartheid South Africa, all in the name of education.
But that still wasn’t reason enough for me to exit the ship. Would our visit be perceived as some sort of endorsement of the government, and would our money end up in the hands of government to be used for more human-rights violations? Should we stay on the ship as some sort of protest? If I decide to not stay on the ship, would that be perceived as some sort of ignorance or indifference to these issues. Coming from India and South Africa, where there was a history of systematic injustices, these were questions that were laying quite heavily with a lot of people.
(By the way, I think this opportunity to compare so many countries in a short amount of time is the most important aspect of SAS, and have a lot to say about it, so I’m sure I’ll come back to this at the end of the voyage).
The answer, for many of us, came when the Kevin McGrath and his wife Olga, our Myanmar Interport Lecturers, boarded the ship in Chennai. He was an UN officials in Burma (and many other countries) for many years, and he built a very convincing case that the sanctions are not working at that they are the wrong approach to dealing with the country (actually, he made the case that sanctions are generally a bad way to deal with international issues, South Africa being a notable exception). Some of the main points, as I understood it:
1. In a country where the ruler believes in Karma, suffering is caused by some greater cosmic force - if my people suffer because of the economic sanctions, then it was meant to be. There’s little motivation to do anything about it. But the government can continue to splurge whatever is left on itself, which means Myanmar has the world’s most disproportionate ratio between military spending to social spending (something like 9 to 1). The ruler isn’t afraid to make insane rulings on the basis of astrology: in the early nineties, the government decided that the money needed to be based on the number 9, and the financial system lost its credibility and collapsed when certain bill denominations were deemed illegal overnight.
2. The sanctions only bring Myanmar closer to China, who fills in the void left by the sanctioning countries. It seemed like all of the major businesses, such as hotels, were owned by Chinese (and Thai) companies. This very close relationship with China is very much against the interest of the United States.
3. The government somewhat fills in the void of services that were missing before by becoming a middleman, taking in the profit, and making services too expensive for the little guy to afford.
4. Keeping Myanmar isolated keeps it away from our consciouness, since there is absolutely little motivation to learn about the human-rights violations in the country if we don’t foster some sort of business or tourist interest there. Sad but true.
5. The conditions in South Africa, under which sanctions worked, was very different from Myanmar. South Africa had a large white middle class, without a despot, which was heavily hurt by the sanctions. South Africa was also surrounded by countries that disapproved of the government, whereas Myanmar is surrounded by friends who can fill a lot of the holes created by the sanctions.
The conclusion: the country has declined tremendously in the last 10+ years, with severe poverty and on the brink of an AIDS epidemic, yet the government has not changed its human-rights record. So the sanctions aren’t working.
What can we do about it, then? Kevin and Olga have a lot of suggestions, and I hope I get a chance to talk to them about it before they leave us in Vietnam.
Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve written anything remotely academic! (Not that this counts, but, woohoo!) I just realized I vented all this on Myanmar without a word about what happened off the ship… I guess it’s been on my mind a lot. Or I just like venting. Hope you enjoyed it – I’ll post this entry, then start write about fun stuff.
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
The India 500
Hello from the Strait of Malacca! We’re passing by Thailand, sailing past some of those famous Thai islands (Thaislands?). A number of people threatened to jump off the ship and swim ashore. Soon we’ll have Sumatra on one side and Malaysia on the other on our way to Singapore, where we will dock for refueling. We won’t be able to leave the ship. Well, legally anyway.
It’s been a while since India was in our consciousness, but the memories are still pretty fresh. The highlight of the Varanasi trip was boarding the boat that morning on the Holy River Ganges (our guide always referred to the river as such). Just as amazing as seeing the bodies, dead or alive, in the water, was seeing the vendors that came up to you on boats and tagged along to you remora-style. One of the peddlers was selling DVDs of Varanasi and actually had a working television set playing the DVD aboard the little boat.
We left the boat and toured Varanasi on foot, getting close and personal to the funeral pyres, dodging cows along the narrow alleyways, and visiting the Golden Temple, the holiest temple in Hinduism, with a steeple (?) made of solid gold and monkeys jumping all over the place. What was most interesting to me was the mosque next door, with its 30 foot fences and hundreds of military police guards. The mosque was put in the place of an important Hindu temple that was destroyed during the last of many Muslim invasions in India, and now there are many people who want to tear down the mosque and turn it back to a Hindu temple.
The security was simply a microcosm of the immense tension between the Muslims and Hindus in that part of the world. As I alluded to earlier, this is the greatest threat to world peace, more so that the Israeli-Palestinian or the US conflicts as there are two nuclear powers (India and Pakistan) with a history of three wars between themselves in the last fifty years, compounded by possible line of command issues as to who has actual control of that launch button. Few people know how close we were to nuclear war when tensions escalated in 1999 or so (and the more we study it, the more I’m impressed at how thoughtfully and firmly the Clinton administration dealt with the issue). And as the bombings in Delhi (where we were) proved to us last week, the tensions are very, very serious. There are billions of lives at stake here.
Anyway, we get back to the comfort of our hotel, where much to the chagrin of several of us, and to the pleasure of others, they serve us Americanized food. That drove me nuts. Part of the tour involved a tour to a carpet factory, and since I had already done my shopping the previous day, I ditched the group with two girls and we went in search of adventures through the streets of Varanasi.
We are careful not to get hit by the hundreds of honking motorcycles and bicycles and trucks and cars, and eventually make our way in the rain to a village on the very polluted shore of a tributary of the Ganges on the north side of the city. We see some kids playing and we’re curious enough to go down to visit with them, and by the time we get down there, we’re surrounded. The kids are fascinated by these laughing white people dressed in funny clothes, and next thing you know, we’re teaching these very enthusiastic kids how to count to ten in English and I’m doing flips, which means the adults come out as well. I should have taken some video of it, but I did remember to finally pull out the camera before we were out of sight. They were still waving at us when I did so.
One more thing I did in Varanasi – I learned how an ancient loom works while people were gift shopping. Pretty amazing piece of primitive technology. So if you don’t get a gift from India, you can blame it on my morbid fascination for spools of thread. Oh, if I were a cat… them looms are cat-toy heaven… all them hanging spools and stuff…
[Coughing a hairball]
Anyway.
Soon we were out of Varanasi and back in Delhi, which, thanks to those crazy British imperialists, looks a little more western as we know it, though it is the smoggiest city I’ve ever visited. We arrived around 4pm, and the sky was brown on a perfectly cloudless day, and the smog was so thick that we were getting sunset light several hours before sunset – perhaps the ugliest sunset of the voyage.
We went to the largest Hindu temple in Delhi, quite a piece of work. The chanting filled the marble rooms, and in the Krishna section, a very nice old man invited me to sit as he prayed, and regardless of any sort of metaphysical or spiritual significance you attach to prayer or meditation, which I don’t, you can’t deny that it is some pretty soothing and relaxing stuff. Good times.
We also went to a Sikh temple and had to cover our heads to get in. Interesting religion. Relative to the other religions we’ve looked at, I still don’t know much about it, but they seem to steal the pageantry of Islam and the philosophy of Hinduism and seem to be a fairly organized group in India. I took some of their literature to read up a little more on them.
We woke up at 4am after a late night of hanging out and enjoying the World Series (go ‘stros!… sniff…) took off to the crazy Delhi train station and headed for a two-hour trip to Agra.
There really is one reason to visit Agra: the Taj Mahal. We visited two beautiful forts in and around Agra, one of which had the worst and most aggressive peddlers I think we will ever see, and the other which housed the prison of the king that built the Taj, with the view of the Taj down the river, spending all day as we prepared for sunset at our main attraction.
As great as they were, I won’t spend any time describing these forts, because the Taj Mahal is absolutely, positively the most beautiful man-made object I’ve ever seen. (WARNING: CHEESY, FLOWERY, OVER-THE-TOP YET ABSTRACT AND VAGUE LANGUAGE ABOUT TO FOLLOW. I would hate reading myself right now. I’m not kidding. Really, shouldn’t you be working right now? Is that your boss behind you? Should I insert some text about spreadsheets and budgets here? Alright, here it goes…)
Someone should invent a headphone device that plays angelic music every time people set their eyes on the Taj Mahal. I can’t imagine someone building something more beautiful. My first sight of the Taj, from down the river at Fort Agra, was stunning. It is perfect – you can’t stop looking at it. All our pictures from Fort Agra involve views of the Taj, even though the Fort is something to behold itself. When we eventually arrived in the Taj Mahal premises, it was clear that the building had lived up and surpassed all of the hype over the years. In typical Islamic architecture, it is perfectly symmetrical with inlaid black Persian text and artwork on the marble. The flowers and grass and trees and gardens around it are perfectly upkept. There must have been ten thousand tourists there that day, but it never seemed crowded as the marble structure is enormous. People should be required to visit the Taj. The tomb took 22 years to build, and the king was going to build a mirror image of the Taj in black marble across the river but the plan wasn’t completed after he was imprisoned by his own son. Can you imagine what that would have looked like? I know I can’t.
Ok, no more coffee after noon. I promise.
By the way, getting in was an adventure since the place is under heavy security, and I had Kerberos’s Rinspirator™ with me that I promised Tom I would take pictures with around the world. The Rinspirator™ looks like a gun, so try explaining to Indian security what that little device is for. I succeeded – the Taj has been Rinspirated™.
We were there for almost four hours, so after walking around, most of us just picked a spot and watched the sun set on the Taj. Since you’re all sunseted out, I’ll spare the pictures, but I’ll add that I did what must have been the first back flip in Taj Mahal history. Unless you’re talking about the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, which I hear is just as nice. I’m sure they do back flips over there.
We made our way back to Delhi, but not before we were delayed in the Agra train station at night. The two train stations were quite something, a home for many of India’s most impoverished and disabled beggars. We have been suggested not to give for various reasons, the main one being that if we give, we would do more good by giving to a charitable organization such as the Mother Teresa Foundation. But it doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect you. So you do what you can, and as we had well over an hour delay in the station, we would play with the kids, and no matter where you are in the world, a little juggling or a magic trick goes a long way. At one point, I started to chase the kids in a handstand, which elicited the same response as the when I chased the Pemon Indians in Venezuela, but if you saw the ground of the train station, you would agree with me when I say it was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever done. Well-worth it, but disgusting; though nothing a little bottle of Purell, a liter of bottled water, some grossed-out looks, and another bottle of Purell couldn’t take care of.
Back in Delhi, we cleaned up, went to a sheesha (sp?) bar with the students (When in Delhi…), and hung around until the start of the World Series before getting on a flight back to Chennai in the morning. Chennai would subsequently be hit by a .5 meters ( that’s about 18 inches of rain for those of you who don’t habla espanol) and a cyclone the days after we left.
People simply couldn’t stop talking about Indian experience on the ship. Some people were very affected emotionally by it, and some people preferred to stay on the ship our last day in port. I’ve been thinking a lot about my experience, and I guess I prepared a little too much for it, because as amazing and incredible and surreal as it was, I knew that I would see bodies in Ganges. I knew I would see terrible things in the train stations. I knew I would see people defecating in the streets. And I knew I would see the crazy traffic and the billions of people on the streets. Which means I might have made a protective buffer for India, and after immediately having the unknown of Myanmar as a point of reference, I think my experience in India was more intellectual than emotional. Life-changing? Certainly, I think. Not an immediate change, as I was told to expect and as many people on the ship experienced. Probably something a little more gradual, cummulative, as I still think about the experience, particularly Varanasi, the religious tension, my limited understanding of the caste system (which would be another four pages), and the future of the country, every day since. I hope to come back for at least a month next time. Because I will come back.
The digiweb is slow, so I’ll upload some pictures next, but in the meantime, check out Chris’s Mauritius pictures at http://www.shutterfly.com/progal/album.jsp?pg=2. (Hi Nicolle!) Starting with the pictures of me jumping over – gasp – another sunset, go a couple pages and you can get a sense of our excursion.
That's our wild tour of India in a nutshell. Next up: Myanmar.
It’s been a while since India was in our consciousness, but the memories are still pretty fresh. The highlight of the Varanasi trip was boarding the boat that morning on the Holy River Ganges (our guide always referred to the river as such). Just as amazing as seeing the bodies, dead or alive, in the water, was seeing the vendors that came up to you on boats and tagged along to you remora-style. One of the peddlers was selling DVDs of Varanasi and actually had a working television set playing the DVD aboard the little boat.
We left the boat and toured Varanasi on foot, getting close and personal to the funeral pyres, dodging cows along the narrow alleyways, and visiting the Golden Temple, the holiest temple in Hinduism, with a steeple (?) made of solid gold and monkeys jumping all over the place. What was most interesting to me was the mosque next door, with its 30 foot fences and hundreds of military police guards. The mosque was put in the place of an important Hindu temple that was destroyed during the last of many Muslim invasions in India, and now there are many people who want to tear down the mosque and turn it back to a Hindu temple.
The security was simply a microcosm of the immense tension between the Muslims and Hindus in that part of the world. As I alluded to earlier, this is the greatest threat to world peace, more so that the Israeli-Palestinian or the US conflicts as there are two nuclear powers (India and Pakistan) with a history of three wars between themselves in the last fifty years, compounded by possible line of command issues as to who has actual control of that launch button. Few people know how close we were to nuclear war when tensions escalated in 1999 or so (and the more we study it, the more I’m impressed at how thoughtfully and firmly the Clinton administration dealt with the issue). And as the bombings in Delhi (where we were) proved to us last week, the tensions are very, very serious. There are billions of lives at stake here.
Anyway, we get back to the comfort of our hotel, where much to the chagrin of several of us, and to the pleasure of others, they serve us Americanized food. That drove me nuts. Part of the tour involved a tour to a carpet factory, and since I had already done my shopping the previous day, I ditched the group with two girls and we went in search of adventures through the streets of Varanasi.
We are careful not to get hit by the hundreds of honking motorcycles and bicycles and trucks and cars, and eventually make our way in the rain to a village on the very polluted shore of a tributary of the Ganges on the north side of the city. We see some kids playing and we’re curious enough to go down to visit with them, and by the time we get down there, we’re surrounded. The kids are fascinated by these laughing white people dressed in funny clothes, and next thing you know, we’re teaching these very enthusiastic kids how to count to ten in English and I’m doing flips, which means the adults come out as well. I should have taken some video of it, but I did remember to finally pull out the camera before we were out of sight. They were still waving at us when I did so.
One more thing I did in Varanasi – I learned how an ancient loom works while people were gift shopping. Pretty amazing piece of primitive technology. So if you don’t get a gift from India, you can blame it on my morbid fascination for spools of thread. Oh, if I were a cat… them looms are cat-toy heaven… all them hanging spools and stuff…
[Coughing a hairball]
Anyway.
Soon we were out of Varanasi and back in Delhi, which, thanks to those crazy British imperialists, looks a little more western as we know it, though it is the smoggiest city I’ve ever visited. We arrived around 4pm, and the sky was brown on a perfectly cloudless day, and the smog was so thick that we were getting sunset light several hours before sunset – perhaps the ugliest sunset of the voyage.
We went to the largest Hindu temple in Delhi, quite a piece of work. The chanting filled the marble rooms, and in the Krishna section, a very nice old man invited me to sit as he prayed, and regardless of any sort of metaphysical or spiritual significance you attach to prayer or meditation, which I don’t, you can’t deny that it is some pretty soothing and relaxing stuff. Good times.
We also went to a Sikh temple and had to cover our heads to get in. Interesting religion. Relative to the other religions we’ve looked at, I still don’t know much about it, but they seem to steal the pageantry of Islam and the philosophy of Hinduism and seem to be a fairly organized group in India. I took some of their literature to read up a little more on them.
We woke up at 4am after a late night of hanging out and enjoying the World Series (go ‘stros!… sniff…) took off to the crazy Delhi train station and headed for a two-hour trip to Agra.
There really is one reason to visit Agra: the Taj Mahal. We visited two beautiful forts in and around Agra, one of which had the worst and most aggressive peddlers I think we will ever see, and the other which housed the prison of the king that built the Taj, with the view of the Taj down the river, spending all day as we prepared for sunset at our main attraction.
As great as they were, I won’t spend any time describing these forts, because the Taj Mahal is absolutely, positively the most beautiful man-made object I’ve ever seen. (WARNING: CHEESY, FLOWERY, OVER-THE-TOP YET ABSTRACT AND VAGUE LANGUAGE ABOUT TO FOLLOW. I would hate reading myself right now. I’m not kidding. Really, shouldn’t you be working right now? Is that your boss behind you? Should I insert some text about spreadsheets and budgets here? Alright, here it goes…)
Someone should invent a headphone device that plays angelic music every time people set their eyes on the Taj Mahal. I can’t imagine someone building something more beautiful. My first sight of the Taj, from down the river at Fort Agra, was stunning. It is perfect – you can’t stop looking at it. All our pictures from Fort Agra involve views of the Taj, even though the Fort is something to behold itself. When we eventually arrived in the Taj Mahal premises, it was clear that the building had lived up and surpassed all of the hype over the years. In typical Islamic architecture, it is perfectly symmetrical with inlaid black Persian text and artwork on the marble. The flowers and grass and trees and gardens around it are perfectly upkept. There must have been ten thousand tourists there that day, but it never seemed crowded as the marble structure is enormous. People should be required to visit the Taj. The tomb took 22 years to build, and the king was going to build a mirror image of the Taj in black marble across the river but the plan wasn’t completed after he was imprisoned by his own son. Can you imagine what that would have looked like? I know I can’t.
Ok, no more coffee after noon. I promise.
By the way, getting in was an adventure since the place is under heavy security, and I had Kerberos’s Rinspirator™ with me that I promised Tom I would take pictures with around the world. The Rinspirator™ looks like a gun, so try explaining to Indian security what that little device is for. I succeeded – the Taj has been Rinspirated™.
We were there for almost four hours, so after walking around, most of us just picked a spot and watched the sun set on the Taj. Since you’re all sunseted out, I’ll spare the pictures, but I’ll add that I did what must have been the first back flip in Taj Mahal history. Unless you’re talking about the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, which I hear is just as nice. I’m sure they do back flips over there.
We made our way back to Delhi, but not before we were delayed in the Agra train station at night. The two train stations were quite something, a home for many of India’s most impoverished and disabled beggars. We have been suggested not to give for various reasons, the main one being that if we give, we would do more good by giving to a charitable organization such as the Mother Teresa Foundation. But it doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect you. So you do what you can, and as we had well over an hour delay in the station, we would play with the kids, and no matter where you are in the world, a little juggling or a magic trick goes a long way. At one point, I started to chase the kids in a handstand, which elicited the same response as the when I chased the Pemon Indians in Venezuela, but if you saw the ground of the train station, you would agree with me when I say it was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever done. Well-worth it, but disgusting; though nothing a little bottle of Purell, a liter of bottled water, some grossed-out looks, and another bottle of Purell couldn’t take care of.
Back in Delhi, we cleaned up, went to a sheesha (sp?) bar with the students (When in Delhi…), and hung around until the start of the World Series before getting on a flight back to Chennai in the morning. Chennai would subsequently be hit by a .5 meters ( that’s about 18 inches of rain for those of you who don’t habla espanol) and a cyclone the days after we left.
People simply couldn’t stop talking about Indian experience on the ship. Some people were very affected emotionally by it, and some people preferred to stay on the ship our last day in port. I’ve been thinking a lot about my experience, and I guess I prepared a little too much for it, because as amazing and incredible and surreal as it was, I knew that I would see bodies in Ganges. I knew I would see terrible things in the train stations. I knew I would see people defecating in the streets. And I knew I would see the crazy traffic and the billions of people on the streets. Which means I might have made a protective buffer for India, and after immediately having the unknown of Myanmar as a point of reference, I think my experience in India was more intellectual than emotional. Life-changing? Certainly, I think. Not an immediate change, as I was told to expect and as many people on the ship experienced. Probably something a little more gradual, cummulative, as I still think about the experience, particularly Varanasi, the religious tension, my limited understanding of the caste system (which would be another four pages), and the future of the country, every day since. I hope to come back for at least a month next time. Because I will come back.
The digiweb is slow, so I’ll upload some pictures next, but in the meantime, check out Chris’s Mauritius pictures at http://www.shutterfly.com/progal/album.jsp?pg=2. (Hi Nicolle!) Starting with the pictures of me jumping over – gasp – another sunset, go a couple pages and you can get a sense of our excursion.
That's our wild tour of India in a nutshell. Next up: Myanmar.
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
Um.
So a while back I asked people on the ship if they would guest blog for me once in a while. “I hang out a lot with Sony,” I thought. “She's hilarious - I’m sure she’ll have a funny story or two for the folk back home.”
I guess I wasn't expecting a work of fiction. Though she did come up with a pretty funny story... if Sony wanted to make me squirm, she succeeded. (This story is actually applicable to David from the Global Nomads).
A little about Sony… she is, hands-down, the best videographer I’ve ever seen at work. She’s shooting the voyage DVD and we had the honor of using her camera work on our fun Olympics video. You can read a little more about our adventures in her blog (http://sonyss.blogspot.com) or the travel articles she writes for GoNomad.
Warts and all. Warts and all...
When he shed his long locks on Neptune Day I cried out "No, not the hair!". When he took off for Salvador solo, I secretly wished I could come with. When he dressed in a longi surely I thought he'd look too feminine to find attractive. But then he had to go and pull out all the stops last night; donning a white-pressed captains uniform with crisp clean cut pants. What's a lonely single girl in the middle of the Bay of Bengal to do with her Brazilian crush on Halloween night? He's well aware of the hypnotic power he wields and works it like bait on a hook. Cunningly tossing a toothy smile and a couple winks my way when his ego needs massaging. Unfortunately, I'm behind a long long line of perfectly shaped 22 year old princesses, all battling for a few precious seconds of Rico's attention. Looks isn't everything though and so surely Rico lacks in other areas, like perhaps personality, charisma or brains? No, no and no again. The angels above crafted yet another man out of most women's reach. But nobody's immortal and so I'm determined to find the weakest link beyond Rico's perfectly polished exterior. What makes this guy squirm? What terrifies him? What or who or when isn't he comfortable? A decade of photographing people has me trained to be more observant than most and so Rico, my beautiful buffed Adonis, your my case-study until the end of the trip. One false move and your mine!
Goo!
I guess I wasn't expecting a work of fiction. Though she did come up with a pretty funny story... if Sony wanted to make me squirm, she succeeded. (This story is actually applicable to David from the Global Nomads).
A little about Sony… she is, hands-down, the best videographer I’ve ever seen at work. She’s shooting the voyage DVD and we had the honor of using her camera work on our fun Olympics video. You can read a little more about our adventures in her blog (http://sonyss.blogspot.com) or the travel articles she writes for GoNomad.
Warts and all. Warts and all...
When he shed his long locks on Neptune Day I cried out "No, not the hair!". When he took off for Salvador solo, I secretly wished I could come with. When he dressed in a longi surely I thought he'd look too feminine to find attractive. But then he had to go and pull out all the stops last night; donning a white-pressed captains uniform with crisp clean cut pants. What's a lonely single girl in the middle of the Bay of Bengal to do with her Brazilian crush on Halloween night? He's well aware of the hypnotic power he wields and works it like bait on a hook. Cunningly tossing a toothy smile and a couple winks my way when his ego needs massaging. Unfortunately, I'm behind a long long line of perfectly shaped 22 year old princesses, all battling for a few precious seconds of Rico's attention. Looks isn't everything though and so surely Rico lacks in other areas, like perhaps personality, charisma or brains? No, no and no again. The angels above crafted yet another man out of most women's reach. But nobody's immortal and so I'm determined to find the weakest link beyond Rico's perfectly polished exterior. What makes this guy squirm? What terrifies him? What or who or when isn't he comfortable? A decade of photographing people has me trained to be more observant than most and so Rico, my beautiful buffed Adonis, your my case-study until the end of the trip. One false move and your mine!
Goo!
Sunday, October 30, 2005
Summers in Rangoon, Luge Lessons
There was one question I was dreading more than any other when I returned home: what was your favorite country? Is it possible to pick, and Jason put it, between riding an elephant, being made leader of a tribe that has never seen a camera before, swimming with whales and learning their language? Can a father choose between his children? This blog, in essence, was a defensive mechanism against that question, so I didn’t have to sum up 100 days of experiences into a simple, “SAS is cool” response.
Then we arrrived in Myanmar.
Perhaps it was the fact that the our ATM and credit cards were useless thanks to the international economic sanctions imposed on that country. Perhaps it was the fear of the totalitarian state – is this what living in Germany in the 1930s was like? Or maybe it was the fact that I had to morally justify a visit to this country when the object of my heterosexual man-lust, Desmond Tutu, is the world’s most ardent opponent of the Myanmar government and told us he would not have joined us had he known we were traveling there (Danno – I would love to talk to Anna Eshoo at some point about why I think sanctions are the wrong approach to dealing with this country….)
But perhaps it was the fact that the white paste that the women and children use on their face elicited more surprise and culture shock to me than the sight of a burning funeral pyre. Or the fact that there are monks all over the place. Or the fact that huge and ancient city ruins - without a lot of tourists - still exist in the world.
Perhaps it was the fact that we just didn’t know what to expect.
All in all, my experience was the utopian ideal of Semester at Sea’s mission. Clearly not everyone had a similar experience. But I imagine that the early Semester at Sea trips into Communist China, Vietnam, Cuba, and apartheid South Africa must have been like. I’ve been waiting to write about it all week – I hope I can convey why I enjoyed this trip so much.
By the way, when researching what I should do in Myanmar before leaving on the ship, I had the hardest time finding people who had been there (I eventually found Brent Schulkin’s uncle who gave me some great suggestions). But turns out my sister Lilian has been here and I had no idea. Who knew?
I’ll finish the India report, then write about Myanmar. In the meantime, enjoy this picture – the meterological phenomenon that created a full halo around the Shwedagon Pagoda was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen (the halo was a lot brighter in person).
Then we arrrived in Myanmar.
Perhaps it was the fact that the our ATM and credit cards were useless thanks to the international economic sanctions imposed on that country. Perhaps it was the fear of the totalitarian state – is this what living in Germany in the 1930s was like? Or maybe it was the fact that I had to morally justify a visit to this country when the object of my heterosexual man-lust, Desmond Tutu, is the world’s most ardent opponent of the Myanmar government and told us he would not have joined us had he known we were traveling there (Danno – I would love to talk to Anna Eshoo at some point about why I think sanctions are the wrong approach to dealing with this country….)
But perhaps it was the fact that the white paste that the women and children use on their face elicited more surprise and culture shock to me than the sight of a burning funeral pyre. Or the fact that there are monks all over the place. Or the fact that huge and ancient city ruins - without a lot of tourists - still exist in the world.
Perhaps it was the fact that we just didn’t know what to expect.
All in all, my experience was the utopian ideal of Semester at Sea’s mission. Clearly not everyone had a similar experience. But I imagine that the early Semester at Sea trips into Communist China, Vietnam, Cuba, and apartheid South Africa must have been like. I’ve been waiting to write about it all week – I hope I can convey why I enjoyed this trip so much.
By the way, when researching what I should do in Myanmar before leaving on the ship, I had the hardest time finding people who had been there (I eventually found Brent Schulkin’s uncle who gave me some great suggestions). But turns out my sister Lilian has been here and I had no idea. Who knew?
I’ll finish the India report, then write about Myanmar. In the meantime, enjoy this picture – the meterological phenomenon that created a full halo around the Shwedagon Pagoda was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen (the halo was a lot brighter in person).
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