2008

VIETNAM

Saigon

IN SAIGON, I STAYED AT THE HOTEL REX, an old Soviet-style block of concrete with a nice bar on the roof and a restaurant in which the only thing I could order was too-salty spaghetti and canned tomato sauce. I asked them how much it would cost to hire a car and driver for a day, and they told me it would be $100. So I went across the street to the central tourist office, where I sat in front of a pretty woman who told me they charge $70 for a car and driver for a day trip. As we were going through the details of the transaction, I noticed she was quite formal and stiff and not really enjoying her job that much. I tried to be entertaining and playful, but she was all business. This went on for about ten minutes as we worked out all the details. Then she asked me where I was staying and what my room number was. I asked why she might need to know my room number, turning my wedding band on my finger and trying to get her to smile. She explained that it is a government requirement that they get the room numbers of all tourists (the tourist agency, like most everything else in Vietnam, is government-run), and she kept her stern face the whole time as I protested lightly but eventually gave in. I said I was staying in room 444. Her face lit up. She looked right into my eyes, smiling, saying that was a VERY good number. I said thanks. She kept smiling and said it was a VERY good number. I accepted her congratulations. She became much more relaxed, smiling brightly, and enjoying our conversation. She said her name was Jessica and she would love to help make my trip as enjoyable as possible. It was as if I had told her I owned a Ducati and it was parked outside. Jessica asked where else I was going in Vietnam, and she insisted that she help me make reservations for Hanoi (I wasn’t going to Hanoi). She gave me her card, wrote her personal mobile number on it and email address and said I should be sure to contact her and she looked forward to seeing me again soon. She waved enthusiastically as I walked back to the Rex Hotel, making sure I hadn’t accidentally left my room key with Jessica.

That night I had a very pleasant dinner with a guy who runs an offshore programming operation. I told him about Jesscia and the number 444. He said people in Vietnam really are superstitious about numbers and he had already found a few that worked with the single women. He said he would try 444 and see how far it got him.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008 at 12:13AM David Siegel | Post a Comment | Share Article

Can Tho

THE DRIVER TOOK ME to Can-Tho, stopping on the way to have a tour of a floating market, which I found interesting (it turns out that EVERY town has a floating market, so they try to get you early and often). In Can-Tho, I found a restaurant where I couldn’t eat a thing but where the menu was hysterically funny to read. I tried to buy a menu but no matter how I tried to explain it, I could not get them to understand what I was trying to “order.” I really wanted it, but I was too hungry to stick around and I didn’t want to steal it. I had to leave it behind, but here are a few of the items I remember:

Fried stomach pork with cabbage
Snake tripe with chicken skiing
Fried ball with bitter melon
Fried salty fish paste with pork
Raw mixed shell meat with mangs

All around the world, people take live animals to market. It is better to kill the animals at the last second, to make the meat as fresh as possible for the consumer, than slaughter first and transport second. This means live animals are transported under all kinds of brutal conditions, with no care for their comfort as they have less than a few days to live. In Vietnam and Cambodia, people strap two dozen flapping chickens to a single motorbike, tying their legs together and hanging them upside down for a six-hour ride at wheel level in the blazing hot sun. They tie huge pigs upside down on a board and then strap the board across the back of the motorbike. Strangely, the pigs somehow become unconscious when upside down, so they ride as if asleep, while getting a very painful sunburn on their belly. They also use a long round basket to transport about a dozen small piglets at a time, each one piled on the other with no room to move. You can see photos of upside-down pigs at Flickr.

I happen to enjoy fresh sugar cane, so whenever I am in the tropics I look for it. Sugar cane is a stick of wood you chew and suck and the juice runs down your throat, but there are hazards. First, you need to get a stalk of the stuff, which is often problematic. It needs to be fresh and juicy, and often it is dry and hard. Then you need to convice someone to sell it to you, because they tend to be in the business of selling it by the hectare. Once you have a stalk, you need to cut a small enough piece to work on. You can use a pocket knife for this, but a machete is a much better tool for the job. Then you need to slice the skin off without getting all sticky and making it dirty. Finally, you need to get small chunks of cane into your mouth, where you can chew on them. I have learned the hard way that too big a piece makes your jaw muscles ache. Once you have chewed the piece of wood, you need to spit it out, so chewing on a bus or a train is not practical. By far the best way, if you can find it, is if someone has prepared small pieces of juicy cane and put about a dozen of these pieces in a plastic bag. More than a dozen and you will start to feel sick. I was able to purchase a bag of about 30 pieces like this in Phnom Penh for about a dollar (I overpaid), ate about half of them, then gave the rest to some small children.

In Southeast Asia, it’s easy to find someone with a small hand-cranked press, through which they pass the cane several times and collect the juice as it runs out. The first time I tried a glass of cane juice, it tasted buttery and I wasn’t too impressed. But finally one day on the road, after we had taken photos with live tarantulas on our arms, I decided that rather than eat a fried tarantula (our photo teacher, Nathan, ate one), I would try the cane juice again. This time it was delicious, sweet, clear, refreshing. It needs to be cold, and the ice they have is not for tourists, so I drank it quickly before the ice could melt. Later, I learned to put ice in a bag and then add the cup of cane juice on top of the ice, and when it got cold enough I would drink it – delicious. A glass of cold cane juice on a hot day is a real treat. Two glasses of cold cane juice is one glass too many.

Chau Doc

THEN I TOOK THE LOCAL BUS TO CAN-THO, on the Mekong near the Cambodian border. They said it was the express bus, but once I got on it was clear this was the local bus. We stopped and picked up several hundred pounds of sheet metal, which they put on the roof. People got on and off every few kilometers. Finally, everyone in the bus told me to get ready, and the bus stopped just long enough in Can Tho to let me get out the door before it zoomed away. Chau Doc is great. Very friendly people. Everyone in Vietnam seems to want a photo taken, even the women, even the old women! Strange, but fun for photographers. I must have taken about 700 photos today. I started at a pagoda this morning, then in the market, then I hired a boat guy to row me by hand through what is essentially a floating trailer park. Each floating house has a TV, lots of space, and a pen with thousands and thousands of fish below. One fascinating thing about Vietnam is that i have seen almost no dogs, except every floating house has at least one. And people here must have figured out sex about 5 years ago because everyone has a small child. They are everywhere. 

The mekong delta is an amazing mix of old people and old ways on the river, and new people and new consumerism on the roads. They meet in the towns, which explode with life, mostly on scooters and mobile phones. I just spent an hour standing by the road taking panning shots of people passing by on scooters. According to my guide book, Vietnam is the world’s third largest motorcycle/scooter market, and that’s NOT per-capita! Before coming to chau doc, i had seen exactly three motorcycles carrying 4 people in my entire life – I watch for them wherever i am. Here i saw about one a minute during high-traffic hours. I saw 3 of them in two minutes! I lost count at about 20. 

There is no comparison between Southeast Asia and Africa. In Asia, you see motors in use everywhere and glass windows. Glass windows are one of the best indicators of middle class. In Asia, they are everywhere. All the floating houses have TV antennas, electric motors to do the work, and glass windows. I’m sure they have corruption, but they can’t have that much if the average family is doing so well. 

I called Beatrice today and woke her up at 4am and we talked for half an hour, but the internet phone connection died 4 times in the process. She is doing great and studying hard in Bern. Too bad she can’t put the Pepi on the phone to talk to me! We miss each other and will soon be traveling around Europe together, looking for good deals on hotels and stopping to eat whatever the Pepi orders.

No one speaks English here, and English-speakers I met who have lived here don’t speak any Vietnamese. Even the waiters and waitresses don’t speak English – the menus have English and Vietnamese side by side, so when i point to the English they read the corresponding Vietnamese. Everything else is sign language. for example, to explain “no ice”, they don’t understand what no means, so i have to go back into the kitchen, find the ice chest, grab a glass, and mime putting ice in the glass, then make a scared face and draw a big X in the air. Another difference with Africa – there is ice everywhere. They seem to go through tons of it and don’t treat it like anything special. I discovered a fresh fruit juice and smoothie place today and filled up there twice. Amazing fresh fruit juices of all kinds!
Friday, August 29, 2008 at 12:11AM David Siegel | Post a Comment | Share Article

Vietnam and the War

WHILE TRAVELING IN SOUTHEAST ASIA, I read a fascinating book called “The March of Folly,” by Barbara Tuchman, showing how almost all wars are fought for insane reasons and the personal gain of just a few. The Vietnam War was essentially made up by the United States after refusing to help Ho Chi Minh get rid of the French. The French were brutal occupiers and extremely unpopular. After WWI, Ho Chi Minh went to Versailles to ask for his country back, but the Western powers wouldn’t listen to him and the US had to show support to the French (after all, the French had helped us get free of our former colonial rulers – why should we help their colonial subjects kick them out of South East Asia?). After asking the US for help FIVE MORE TIMES, Ho Chi Minhgot an invitation toMoscow, and he reluctantly took it. The Chinese were all too eager to pitch in, giving Ho a pair of powers to play off each other in getting what he wanted – the wherewithal to kick the French out.
By 1962, the US had already poured more than $2 BILLION of military advisors and materiel into the region to support the French, and it hadn’t gone well at all. After Kruschev beat up Kennedy in Vienna, Kennedy needed to show that the US was a strong ally of democracy and that it was imperative to prevent the spread of Communism in South East Asia. Only problem was that this Communist ambition was a fiction made up bythose in the administration who personally benefitted from Joe McCarthy’s fear-mongering, thinking that the Communists were going to take over the world. In the fall of 1963, all the reports came back so negative that Kennedy approved a coup that ended up killing Ngo Dinh Diem, the US puppet installed by the US in the early fifties. Kennedy was unconvinced that any number of troops could accomplish anything positive, and he confided to several people that withdrawal would be the best of a number of bad options. But he wanted to be re-elected, so instead he added troops, planning to get out as soon as elections were over. That chance never came. 

When Johnson took over, he couldn’t stand the thought of “defeat” in the region, even though he had to be seen as a pacivist to win the ‘64 election. Once firmly in office, a Cold War mentality gripped the people running the war from the White House, even though the Vietnamese people didn’t want the Americans in their country any more than they wanted the French,a ground war was unwinnable, and the Domino Theory was more fullydeveloped in Washington than it was in Beijing or Moscow. Johnson sought and got congressional approval to add more troops via the Tonkin GulfResolution. He sent in hundreds of thousands of American kids,until an inscription on a soldier’s Zippo lighter in Denang summed it up best:
The unwilling led by the unqualified doing the unnecessary for the ungrateful.
Once Nixon got involved, things got worse. By that time, even deGaule said there was nothing to be accomplished militarily in Vietnam. All told, between 1959 and 1975,at least3 and probably closer to 4 million Vietnamese lost their lives, along with 1.5-2 million Cambodians and 750,000 Laotians. In addition, we lost 58,000 Americans. After the war essentially ended, the US bombed Cambodia heavily, killing at least 500,000 Cambodians (mostly farmers and villagers), supporting Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, who killed another 2 million Cambodians in the seventies (largely Henry Kissinger’s work, among many of his other projects). The US and China gave money and arms to Pol Pot, supporting thegenocide until 1990. 

War is a sign of failed negotiations. Whenpoliticians saytheymust go to war to “prevent another Nazi Germany” or to avoid “the false comfort of appeasement” – they are drinking their own Kool-aid and asking us to follow. As Tuchman has spent her life trying to show, almost all war is foolish, folly, a political fog into which small-minded men are drawn, usually to improve their own personal position in the world. The “enemy” is always the problem, and war is always the solution. When George Bush declared that the “War on Terror will be a war of ideas,” why did he show up so lightly armed? Why have both his Secretaries of State been yes-men/women? Where are the ideas? Who are the real terrorists? 

Ashley Wilkes, Margaret Mitchell’s sage character in Gone With the Wind, summed it up:

Most of the miseries of the world were caused by wars. And when the wars were over, no one ever knew what they were about.

All throughout Vietnam and Cambodia, Ilooked for traces of past misery in the faces of people over 50: They looked into my blue eyes and smiled. Did something flash in their minds? It could have. They could have seen the worst, the thing that took their sons and daughters from them so many years ago. The blood and the smoke, the smiling blue eyes of death. Now repairing a nylon net on a shaky boat in the middle of the Mekong, trying to get a few more fish to market, the old man could have looked at me and wondered if I had any idea how connected I was to the darkest part of his life. The woman selling me a cup of cold coconut jelly on a hot day could have seen the faces of her children who would never have her grandchildren. Yet they didn’t. They just looked and smiled, one person to another, as if to say “Hey, it’s a new world. We are doing okay. Want to share some fish with us? How do you like that jelly stuff? Can I offer you a deep-fried grasshopper? They’re delicious.” People in this part of the world live simple lives, but they are happy. Those who live on the river live life essentially pre-industrially (with the exception of the gas-powered engines that seem to power most of the boats and belch out the blue smoke that causes almost everyone to wear a fabric mask over his or her face most of the day). They raise fish beneath their houses that float on the water, farm and bring their fruit to market by boat, a dog on every boat keeping watch over the children. They sleepin a hammock during the hot hours of the afternoon. They swim in, shit in, and drink from the greenish-brown river, just as their grandparents did, and their naked kids love to jump in and splash each other. Then there is the new world that lives near the road, with shopping malls, electronic gadgets, the latest scooters, mobile phones, universities, and Internet cafes. These two worlds meet in the towns, like Can Tho in the Mekong Delta, where enormous bridges are being built to make the trip to Saigon a matter of a few hours on a bus. Tens of thousands of people are moving into the region to build homes, open hotels, run gas stations, and mix with the people of the river when they drive their scooters into town to pick up fresh fruit. Kids are everywhere and old people are few. And almost everyone enjoys a garlic-fried grasshopper now and then. In Vietnam, people have more money, middle-class jobs,and economic hope. In Cambodia, most people now have good jobs making North Face backpacks orTommy Hilfigershirts, and better times are ahead. In Laos, time is stuck, as it was in East Germany, without the bullet holes. There isn’t that much to do but watch and wait for a political change. More on that next time. As I visit more countries and think about the state of world affairs, I keep thinking something I heard once and you can find in many different contexts around the Web: “It’s the occupation, stupid.” It’s not about the surge or the peace process or which superpowers have a right to re-emptive war or nuclear weapons. Look for the occupations and you’ll see the folly – Barbara Tuchman would be running a cottage industry writing about it if she were alive today. Here’s a short video by two documentary filmmakers on the New York Times web site talking about the folly of occupying Iraq and where the “Insurgency” comes from.

CAMBODIA

Motorbike Nation

I MARVELED AT HOW MANY motorbikes I saw in Asia. As I mentioned last time, I had previously seen 4 people on a motorbike twice in my life. In Asia, 4 people is common. In Chau doc, Vietnam, I saw 5 people on a bike six times in 15 minutes! I even managed to get a photo of five people on a bike. In Batambang, I finally saw what I was looking for, twice: six people on a motorbike. The first time, it was 3 adults and 3 small children. The second time it was 2 adults, 3 teens and a small child. You often see a bike putt-putting down the road with someone holding onto a child as though the child were just another piece of luggage. If you see six people on a motorbike, you are probably in Cambodia.

After spending time in both Africa and Southeast Asia, I have seen many similarities, yet there are also huge differences. I’m sure it is complicated, but on the surface I think it comes down to two things: roads and oil. In Asia, there are roads. Even in Cambodia, where the government just started paving the roads about 10 years ago, you can see the difference it makes. Somehow, people here can buy gas for their boats, scooters, and trucks (there are far more scooters than cars, and a scooter can hold almost as much cargo as a car). That makes them more productive, so they can do more, so they make more, so they can buy more gas. Once you have roads and gas, even if the gas is expensive, the econimy starts to pick up. The distances from field to factory or field to restaurant aren’t different in Africa and Asia, but the paved roads and available gas make the economy work. In Africa, the roads don’t exist and gas is only for trucks. In Africa, most people can’t afford to buy a week’s worth of charcoal – they can only buy a few day’s worth at a time. And they must get their produce to market by bicycle. This means that Asia has more pollution and contributes more to global climate change, but a country like Cambodia is building a middle class. Cambodia is far ahead of any African country save South Africa. And it’s mostly because the government builds and maintains roads. In Africa, that same money goes to the ministers who have fancy homes, Hummers, and body guards.

The Wonders of Nature

IN PHNOM PENH, I MADE THE OBLIGATORY VISIT to the Killing Fields. I usually don’t do such things, and I normally don’t visit forts, either, as there is rarely much to see except an exhibit that tells the history, and you can get a better version of that in a book or online. Physically being inside the walls doesn’t add anything to the experience for me. Alcatraz is for tourists. But in this case I wanted to learn more about Pol Pot, and while at the Killing Fields I had a chance to see hundreds and hundreds of skulls, and I became fascinated with the way human skulls are put together. The plates are joined by “sutures,” – wavy cracks that can flex and recover from impact. They weren’t just wavy lines, though. They were like meandering rivers, with interlocking tabs that were remarkably well suited to flexing and yet staying together after impact. In newborns, these areas are separated and soft; they grow together in the months after birth. In drawings, you often see a zig-zag line, but in reality it looks more like a very complicated river. A brilliant engineering solution. Here, look at this photo. Cool, huh?

And speaking of bony plates, I am constantly in awe of nature. I do wonder why we have so much mucous in our noses (there doesn’t seem to be so much benefit to that; I had sinus surgery 5 years ago and wish I’d done it 35 years ago), but in general I am impressed by the solutions nature comes up with and the diversity of life. There are between 10 million and 100 million species of plants and animals (and other things!) on Earth, and hundreds of millions more that are no longer alive. As we know, the dynosaurs roamed the earth in the Cretaceous Period (145 million years ago to 65.5 MYA), so they wouldn’t have been around during the building of the Angkor Wat temple complex in the 10th to 12th Centuries. Yet, curiously, among the various Hindu dieties and mythological beasts carved in relief on the walls of the temple, we saw this little guy, unique to all stone carvings in Cambodia.

It doesn’t actually look like a stegosaur – they had small pointy heads with no horns or bony plates behind the face. But the carving does seem authentic (carved in the 12th Century). There are plenty of made-up demons and animals carved in the temples, but was this image really just made up, with no reference to any dynosaur skeletons? There are no fossilized stegosaur skeletons in Cambodia and perhaps none in Asia. It seems to be a riddle. There are many specualtors online, but it looks like the riddle remains unsolved.

From Siem Reap to Sihanoukville

I FOUND VIETNAM INTERESTING but Cambodia exciting, and not because of the “taxi girls” waiting for me on every corner or the men shouting at me, “What you looking for – hotel, hashish, pretty girl?” And not on account of the tuk-tuk (motorbikes with carriages behind) drivers, who approached me on every corner and in between the corners, with their suggestive sales pitch, “Tuk-tuk mister? You nee-a-ride?” I always wanted to say to them, “Hey, if I needed a tuk-tuk, I would have that ‘I need a tuk-tuk’ look on my face, wouldn’t I?” No, those were simply the inevitable come-ons because I look like a tourist, and in places like this, tourists are stuffed full of money, and the locals all play the game of trying to squeeze the most money out of every passing tourist. One tuk-tuk ride can easily be $2, and that is a day’s wages in this part of the world. But the real way to get around, as I discovered back in Saigon, is to wave at a guy who has a scooter and an extra helmet, which pretty much covers 48% of the entire adult population of southeast asia. Just negitiate a price around $1 or less, put on the helmet, and hop on. One guy i rode behind was wearing a helmet that said “HONGDA” on it. (As in africa, don’t try to show local people maps – they don’t work. They know their city but can’t deal with that level of abstraction and will be puzzled by a map.) And then you’re off, merging into the stream of scooter life, a dozen or more scooters across on a big street, watching what people do on their scooters – eating, reading, applying makeup, cell-phoning – anything goes. seen from inside the flow, the sea of scooter people seems like a world in itself, with people selling things to each other, hopping on and off, and even dating – in Vietnam, girls are known to switch boyfriends based on the make and model of a guy’s scooter.

No, the reason I loved Cambodia was the mix of post-colonial independence, interesting people pouring in from all corners of the world, and entrepreneurial zeal driven by a laissez-faire government interested in clawing its way back from the stone ages of Pol Pot and the Killing Fields outside of Phnom Penh. In contrast with Vietnam, where the government has its hands in everything, Cambodia is full of entrepreneurs scheming to get a share of the exponentially growing tourism pie here.

I arrived by boat from Chau Doc, Vietnam, with a vicious sunburn and no stamp in my passport. Strangely, my visa was on a piece of paper stapled into my passport. when I left the country, they simply removed the paper and all trace that I had ever been in Vietnam. This is a setback to someone who collects passport stamps as I do.

I spent the first week at Angkor Wat and around with a photography teacher named Nathan Horton. We had a great time talking about gear and photographing monks in orange robes talking on mobile phones. The ruins were spectacular, and thinking how they had a civilization of 750,000 inhabitants in 1150 is an excercise in imagining a world far from what we see today. I highly recommend a visit – Beatrice and I were in Tikal, Guatemala, last December, visiting the ruins of a civilization similar in scope, and Angkor Wat is a much more interesting experience. When we were in Siem Reap, the town near Angkor, I noticed there were a few hundred hotels already, several luxury resorts, golf courses being built, $600/night hotel rooms turning up, and everyone who lived there was very busy. There are flights from Tokyo direct to Siem Reap and busloads of Japanese tourists. There is no threat of malaria here – I was wrong to imagine I would be in the bush with little support.

I walked into a real-estate office and asked them to show me some land. I ended up looking at a bunch of cow pastures and rice fields that were already quite expensive and getting more so each day. Back in Phnom Penh, I walked into a lawyer’s office and asked about buying land in Sihanoukville, on the Southern coast.The lawyers were out, but the receptionist, who knew how the real-estate game was played, became my new friend. She hooked me up with a real-estate agency in Sihanoukville, which send a private car to pick me up the next morning. Mr Ban drove me 4 hours south while playing love-song DVDs in Cambodian on his screen he had attached to his dashboard. He told me he liked love songs and sang me several in English I had never heard. He wouldn’t let me pay for anything. Once in Sihanoukville, I was introduced to Mr Lim, who took me around to see land in his huge 4WD Lexus driven by his chauffeur and bodyguard. He took me to nice restaurants and paid for everything. We looked at land around the new airport and a very nice hectare near the beach, which I was interested in but later learned the seller has decided not to sell just yet.

One thing I learned is that you need to have your land cleared of mines. There are still at least 4 million mines in the ground in Cambodia, and they continue to cause about 1,000 casualties every year. At the current rated of progress, it will take about 100 years to clear all the mines from Cambodia alone. You see the trucks of the Dutch and German landmine-clearing teams around, and you see their signs near property that has been certified clear.

Sihanoukville doesn’t look like much today – a small muddy market and people sitting on the curb selling corn on the cob – but that is about to change. There are huge earth movers in parts of the city, and many hotels are already breaking ground. When the new airport opens in 2010, it will be the largest airport in Cambodia, able to handle the 747s coming from Tokyo. Then Sihanoukville will be transformed into the next Honolulu. Half a dozen luxury and ultra-luxury resorts are planned outside of town and on the islands in the area. What Thailand is today, Cambodia will be in just a few short years. I am very interested in buying land in the area and may go back this fall to find a piece I want to buy.

When hanging around, people would ask me: “Diu hablonadi?” It took me a while before I realized they were asking, in English, “Did you have lunch already?” This is somehow a way of making smalltalk with strangers – even the guy checking my passport when I left Cambodia asked me this question!

LAOS

Ventiane

Ventiane, Laos, is not the most interesting city I’ve ever seen, but prices are very reasonable and the food is delicious. The country is very underdeveloped and will stay that way as long as the current government is in power. You can see everything in this former colonial capital in a day or so, and plan your trip North to Louang Prabang. That’s what I did. But the weather started to turn wet, so I decided to evacuate the region.

AZERBAIJAN

Baku

I NEEDED TO SEE MORE COUNTRIES. I could have gone to Eastern Turkey to climb Mount Ararat, but I decided to go to Azerbaijan instead. I wanted to go to Armenia, but Armenia has a lot fewer friends than it used to have. You can’t cross any land border to enter Armenia, except that with Iran – none of its other neighbors is on speaking terms. To get to Armenia, you must fly from Moscow or Tehran. In the early 1990s, after Azerbaijan declared independence from Russia, Armenia tried to take a large part of Azeri land and mostly succeeded. Today, Azerbaijan has a small exclave left in Southern Armenia that is sealed off like West Berlin was. Tourism in Armenia is for Russians and Iranians only.

So I flew to Baku. Baku is a good place to visit if you are in the oil pipeline business or are selling BMWs or Rolexes. It’s a rich city filled with poor people. There is only one thing on the menu here – Caspian Sea oil. I heard there are a few nice places to visit in the country, but I didn’t have time to explore (the old railway that went to Georgia stopped working some years ago), so I spent 3 nights in Baku and then left. There is plenty of shopping, and the hotel rooms start at 200 Euros. Fortunately, I found a not-too-bad hotel for only 80 Euros a night, but it was a far cry from the Holiday Inn. One nice thing about Baku is that, while the Caspian Sea is just a large oil slick, they have a lovely promenade where families walk and kids rollerblade and eat cotton candy on summer evenings. It was sweet to see the little kids skidding back and forth on their Wheely shoes along this old cracking crumbling Soviet-era promenade, complete with concrete monuments to failed socialism surrounded by Zegna and Gucci boutiques.

The country doesn’t have very good internet connectivity. I wanted to call my wife, so I went to an international call center, which was a single phone booth with a guy standing next to it. He had some kind of discount calling scheme, so I asked how much it would cost to call Switzerland. He didn’t understand. I wrote the word “SWITZERLAND” on a piece of paper. He said, “Franza”? I said no. I asked him in sign language to show me his list of countries and rates. All the African countries were on the list, but not Switzerland. So I said yes, France, and called my wife for about $1 a minute. I went to an internet cafe and managed to get a PC with a decent connection. In places like this, internet cafes are always either in basements or on the 3rd floor. This one was in the basement. There was a sign outside that said KSEROKS. Do you know what that meant? I’ll bet you can figure it out.

If you’re not doing business in Baku, two days is plenty. I went to a travel agent and bought a ticket on the next flight to Georgia. I would have prefered to travel overland, but there was no reasonable way to do it in a few days.

TURKEY

Istanbul

AFTER THE RAINS CAME IN LAOS, I flew to Istanbul and had a great time. There is enough to do there for an entire week, the weather was perfect, and I walked everywhere, into practically every neighborhood. The way you know you are in Turkey is that the men have square heads. This is not meant negatively, it’s just true: Turks have square heads. You see it immediately, even as far west as Germany, where there is an enormous Turkish population. Turkish women don’t have the same heads – I can’t tell a Turkish woman from a Greek woman, for example. But the men do, and it somehow suits them. In the late afternoons, I would watch men playing backgammon in the cafes. It’s so popular that most cafes put a backgammon set on each table after lunch. I watched many games and learned that most people weren’t very good at the game – they just play to pass the time. Because they don’t use the doubling cube, there is a tremendous amount of luck involved. I did manage to get into some good matches, however, and I had the same experience every time – the locals would always invite me for a tea or a beer and they would insist on paying, even if (as was usually the case) they didn’t speak any English. They were very generous people, much more generous than Americans would be in the same situation. Their hospitality and friendliness was at a different level than in most other countries I have visited. 

Istanbul is full of hotels. I estimate there are at least 400 hotels in Istanbul, and they are all expensive. My guide book was no help. Finding a room in a decent hotel for $200 per night was possible, but not for less. When I travel alone to a beautiful city like Istanbul, I’m not planning to spend a lot of time in my hotel room. I’m looking for a safe, clean place where the shower curtain, towels, and pillows don’t have mildew and where, if I’m lucky, the TV has CNN. I decided I wanted to stay in the Sultanamet area, which is Ground Zero for tourists, right near the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sofia, etc. So after looking at pretty much every hotel in town, I finally found the Hali hotel. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s incredibly well located, and, at 35 euros per night, I was going to actually have some money left over for decent food every night. The people were nice and the room was fine. Let’s call it a very nice 2-star hotel, but in this market that next star is going to set you back 5 times more Turkish Lira. And the location really was perfect. During my stay, I found some other hotels I would recommend to anyone going to Istanbul and looking for a decent hotel room at a decent price:

This so-called secular country is full of mosques – there’s always someplace to wash your feet nearby. The big mosques are impressive architectural feats that dominate the skyline, and they are cool to look at when lit up at night, but outside they are all the same and inside they are as dull as a joke told by John McCain. There is almost no reason to go inside. The more you travel, the more you see huge hulking religious buildings, and it’s nice when they have some character. The mosques of Istanbul are picturesque from a distance but don’t hold up very well as you get close. In contrast, the Topkapi Palace is a wonderful experience. There are hundreds of rooms, objects, and stories, and getting lost is half the fun. The marble baths, the hundreds of wives and children, the opulence of the Ottoman Empire – I’ll definitely take my kids there some day and read them the stories ahead of time. 

Getting around this city of people and cats is quick and easy – the trams cover the town well and are easy to jump on. The bridge from one side of town to the other is a nice walk, although I was disappointed that you couldn’t easily walk across from Asia to Europe on their beautiful Fatih Sultan Mehmet bridge, which changes colors all night long. Istanbul is a modern city combined with an old city, like Jerusalem or Rome. There is a strong upward trend – I saw plenty of BMWs and high-end fashion stores. I was there during the Euro Cup soccer matches while the Turkish team was winning, and the town just sparkled. You could walk down an old cobblestone lane at night and see a dozen flat-panel TVs outside in the open-air restaurants, and everyone cheering for the Turks. On the night of the big win against Croatia, I was at a group dinner in a huge fancy club – the kind of club where thousands of people party like rock stars until dawn with huge speakers blaring boom-chicka-boom-boom music all night long and men lighting women’s cigarettes under the moonlight. That night the women didn’t wear much, but all eyes were on the big screen TVs, and when the Turks scored in the last second the place went wild. As I walked along the streets after midnight, all the cars were honking, people waved turkish flags, and the whole town was one big celebration. 

There are plenty of Russians, and many of them are obnoxious. I went for a rooftop dinner one night and was enjoying a quiet plate of spaghetti when a group of Russians sat down. They were big, and they all smoked. The woman asked if they have a big salad that comes on a big plate they can all share. The waiter politely said they don’t, and that the salads come on salad plates. The woman bossed him into making a big salad that came on a single plate, and she wasn’t gentle about it. The smoking, drinking, loud Russians made the dining experience miserable for everyone. Does Russia have such a big upper middle class now? Yes. And they love to come to Turkey. More than 2 million Russians visit Turkey each year, and there are now seaside resorts built to resemble Russian architecture serving Russian food. Somehow, Putin has let some of his oil and gas money trickle down to the people. Russia seems to be growing a middle class – you can see it here in Turkey. The really rich Russians go to Monaco, and the Russians you see here in Turkey look and act more like Americans than the average Russians you would find back in Russia. 

If you go to Istanbul, don’t forget to explore the haunting Basilica Cisterns, located near the Hagia Sofia. They were eery and quiet, with thousands of years of stories and near-blind fish swimming among the columns. It was cool and refreshing and fascinating – a completely different subterranean world from the buses and tourist traps just a few meters away outside the door.

FRANCE

Paris

WE WENT TO PARIS for Beatrice’s birthday and stayed about a month. My favorite thing to do in Paris is walk everywhere. Even though they now have Velib bikes everywhere in town, and you can just enter your credit card and hop on one of Paris’s 20,000 public bicycles (the first half hour is free, and you can return it at any of the 1450 bike stands around town), I still prefer just to walk and take the metro. The city now makes an effort to keep people in Paris for the month of August, which doesn’t really work but it gives tourists more to do. They now set up a fake beach on the banks of the Seine; it’s nice to walk along the sand in the summer evenings and watch the kids playing and eating ice cream cones. This summer was unseasonably cold and gray. I had sent my skates ahead, though, and managed to skate along the river a few times, once on sunday when they close the roadways to cars and another time on the famous Friday Night Skate, which has as many as 15,000 skaters cruising around Paris, escorted by police on motorcycles at the front, on rollerblades in the middle, and on bikes at the rear, where several Paris ambulances follow the pack, picking up people who fall down on the cobblestones. It’s amazing how well some of the skaters handle cobblestones – I hate them and look like a constipated crab pushing my way over them. It was a beautiful evening skate – we were about 3,000 skaters enjoying the clear summer night (the skate leaves at 10pm). We went en-masse along the river, through La Madeleine, up to Pigalle, and over to the Basin de La Villette for the “pause,” where people lay around and smoke. I took off with a small group and we whooshed along the city streets at 1am down into the Marais, where the streets are narrow but very smooth and a blast to skate with no traffic. Another day I skated to the small Statue of Liberty in the middle of the Seine, which was an exercise in not getting run over by huge tour buses. Another day I took the metro to the Bois de Boulogne and tried to skate there, but the roads are no good for skating at all. Curiously, there are girls in miniskirts and high heels hanging out in that park during the day, and they are obviously from places like Brazil and Indonesia. They are working. They seem so out of place. I wonder what their story is. 

If you like Paris, you might want to click on the “metro” link above. 

Where to Stay
If you are looking for a hotel in Paris, I have a few suggestions. It’s easy to find a good 4-star hotel room for $300 euros per night. What I look for are the good 3-star hotels that are pretty, well located, and a good value. Most of my recommendations are in the Marais, which I think of as my neighborhood (the 3rd and 4th arrondisements), but as I walk around town I gather cards from hotels that look good but aren’t too expensive. If you are looking for a hotel anywhere in Europe, be sure to book through Booking.com – you’ll save a lot of money that way. Don’t book directly through the hotel’s web site.

Hotel (arrondisement)

  • Le pavillion de la reine (4th) – one of the fanciest hotels in Paris, nestled into the Place des Vosges. Stay here on your anniversary. For when you want to splurge.
  • Hotel des Chevaliers (3rd) – a fantastic deal just around the corner from the Place des Vosges. Small rooms recently updated. Sleep here and spend your days walking all over town. Because of the location, I would stay here again. I like being right near the Place des Vosges.
  • Le jardin du marais (3rd) – a modern sprawling complex hidden on the Rue Amalot with nice rooms and very good value for a 4-star hotel. A few blocks out of the way. Not for your first time in Paris. Has a sister hotel that is also excellent near the Bastille. Very good value for the money.
  • Villa Beaumarchais (3rd) – budget with a good location and funky rooms. Clean and bright.
  • Villa d’Estrees (6th) – charming, modern boutique in the heart of the tourist district on the Left Bank. I prefer the other side of the river, but if you love the Left Bank, this is very cute, recently rennovated, and worth a try.
  • Residence Des Arts (6th) – another boutique in the touristic area of St Andre des Arts. It doesn’t hurt to stay here on one of your many trips to Paris.
  • Another choice is to rent a flat. There are dozens of flat-rental agencies around Paris, and they all have stiff agency fees. Check Craigslist or Fusac or PAP or Glenn Cooper’s Paris Flats or VacationRentals or FRBO or VacationInParis.

If you want to see the city from a new angle, the City Walks programs in Paris, Istanbul, and London are fantastic. You don’t need to reserve – just show up and join a group. There is usually at least one walk every day.

Beatrice studied and I made myself busy taking photos and planning our excursions. We went to St Malo for a few days and the weather was gray and cold. We stayed at the excellent Hotel Des Cartiers, and our main memories are of the aggressive seagulls in town. We bought some pudding cups and left them on our 5th-floor window ledge, and while we were at dinner the seagulls stole them. Then, when we were walking by the marina, Beatrice bought a ham sandwich and took a few bites before a seagull swooped in and snatched it out of her hand, startling both of us! We were impressed. We also went to Mont St Michel and explored the island, along with a few thousand other tourists. The weather was gray the entire time – maybe we’ll go back and rent a flat for a month when our kids are bigger.

For her birthday, I gave Beatrice a session where she could make her own perfume , and she loved that. She made a nice bottle of perfume that we named Amelot, after the name of a street in the Marais. It was a fun way to spend an afternoon and have a nice bottle to keep and use for many months after.

PORTUGAL

Lisbon

We went to Portugal for a few days in Lisbon. I hadn’t been to Portugal, and now I only have two more countries to visit in Western Europe (San Marino and Malta, although some people count Lampedusa as a separate country). We liked Lisbon but not that much. It’s certainly more dangerous than many other capitals. It has the air of an old Havana-style capital that hasn’t really modernised. You can still ride the old electric street cars installed by GE back in the 1930s. They claim Lisbon is now a cultural capital of Europe, but I got the sense that it’s still not ready for prime time. You could buy land there at a good price and wait a long time for it to increase. Portugal is generally seen as a backwater by most Europeans, and I wouldn’t disagree. The one thing that told me most about the country was our EasyJet flight back to Paris. When we landed after this 2-hour flight, most of the people on the plane clapped. For a 2-hour flight from one European capital to another, this is a very bad sign. There was less clapping on my flight from Tbilisi to Istanbul. On a recent flight from Shanghai to Chicago, not a single person clapped when we landed.
We should have explored the coast and relaxed in the small villages, but we didn’t have time. I’m sure it’s good for a relaxing holiday, but so are many other places.

We were in Paris for another two weeks, then we went to Iceland …

ICELAND

AT THE END OF OUR SUMMER TRIP, we went to Iceland for a week. I gave a talk to graphic designers there, and we explored some of the well-worn tourist traps. Because Beatrice was pregnant, we just enjoyed the area around Reykjavik and didn’t try to do anything strenuous. We stayed at the excellent Hotel Fron, which I highly recommend. The weather was decent, which means it was in the 60s most days and 50s at night. It wasn’t hot, but there were moments in the sun when it was very pleasant. We went whale watching, which was silly, because Minke whales are nothing special to see. There are tons of them, and they look like a black shape rolling over, then they are gone, then you go look for another one. There are tons of Minkes in the Northern Atlantic, which is nice. We saw puffins, but they are small and far away, so we didn’t get to see them very close up. We enjoyed watching the gannets – expert fishers who dive at fish with their wings folded and needle-sharp beaks. They have an inflatable air sac in their necks that helps cushion the impact of the water, and they rarely miss. They make pelicans look like amateurs. We also went to the Blue Lagoon – a modern facility next to a heated pool that’s fun to play around in and claims to do wonders for your skin. Iceland is a beautiful country. One thing that makes the raw landscape so striking is the angle of the light: because it’s so far north, the light always comes in at a gentle angle, which is great for photographers. I would love to go back and drive all the way around the country. One person who’s done it and taken some wonderful photos is Dan Holdsworth. His photos are inspiring. 

One cool thing that happened was we watched the Olympics Opening Ceremonies at a pub in Reykjavik, and I noted that China considers Hong Kong a country. Whoa – in that case, I now have 85 countries! We’ll be having a baby in a few months, but I only have 15 left, so give me five years and I’ll reach 100. 

Black Holes and Dark Matter
While traveling in Asia, I read a few books on the Universe and its origins. It turns out that we don’t know a lot about galaxies. There are about 100 billion galaxies, each with an average of 100 billion stars. At the center of most galaxies, including ours, there is a black hole. It’s about 26,000 light-years away from us. The black hole weighs about as much as 4 million of our suns, yet all that mass is in a space smaller than a proton. All black holes spin on an axis, like the sun does. This particular black hole makes a complete rotation about once every 11 minutes, dragging enormous amounts of visible matter around with it.

The stars nearest the center don’t spin as fast as the black hole, but they do form a “bar” and the bar spins. On each end of this bar is a spiral arm that contains billions of stars. And yet, if you look at a movie of a galaxy spinning, you don’t see the center spinning wildly faster than the outer arms. The stuff at the edge of the galaxy can be 100 million light-years away from the center, and yet all stars in the galaxy travel at about the same velocity. Because of this (and other observations), scientists propose that much of the matter in space is “dark” – invisible to our instruments, and only a small percentage (like 6%) is the visible stuff we can see with our various telescopes. Where is all that dark matter? What is it made of?

In trying to solve the riddle of the Universe, we keep opening smaller and smaller boxes, and things keep getting stranger and stranger. The objective is to find a theory that explains both particle physics and gravity. It seems that String Theory just keeps getting more and more complicated without making any verifiable predictions or making things any simpler. One way physicists try to solve the puzzle is to add extra dimentions to space, more than the four we experience daily (three spatial dimentions plus time). But once you start adding extra dimensions, it seems hard to stop. The string theorists have added seven more dimensions and it still hasn’t made things clearer.

Hang with me for another second and you will see where this is going.

Strange as it sounds, there really is such a thing as anti-matter. In fact, in the first 100,000 years of the Universe, there were about 201 particles of matter for every 200 particles of antimatter. Once things cooled down and the dust settled, it was only that one particle in 200 that remained to form the Universe we now see. Zillions of times every second, tiny particles appear out of nowhere, meet their anti-particles, and disappear back into the nothingness they came from. This happens inside of us, inside the sun, and out in space where there is a complete vacuum and almost no regular matter. We really are surrounded by matter and anti-matter being created and destroyed all around us, all the time. Where does it come from? Where does it go? We know that anti-matter is a mirror part of matter, and there’s plenty of it, but we don’t know why it should exist.

Now, what is at the center of a black hole? Tons and tons of matter, all stuffed into a space the size of a proton. Did i say a proton? that’s far too big. Maybe even smaller than an electron – now we are talking small. Is it really all in there? Perhaps it is, but perhaps at this small scale that’s where we find the extra dimensions of space.Perhaps it all fits comfortably because of the extra dimensions. Perhaps that’s where the anti-matter comes from, or perhaps not – no one knows for sure.

So perhaps when physicists figure out where all the dark matter and dark energy live, they will find these other dimensions. Perhaps the reason we can’t see the dark matter or the dark energy is that they are curled up into these other dimensions. In that case, it’s possible that our universe is just one side of a coin – on the other side of that coin could be another universe, or millions of universes, or an infinite number. We don’t know, but we’re trying to find out. That’s what the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland is trying to learn. Some kids made a rap video that explains how it works and what they are looking for. I hope you enjoy it.

Great Books

On this trip, I finished the Harry Potter series in French. Over the last four years, I read five of seven books in French (they’re all about 800 pages), and it really helped me improve my vocabulary. Now I’m reading the Aerkaos trilogy, another series of fantasy novels. In Paris, at my favorite English-language bookshop, I bought a wonderful novel, called Carter Beats the Devil. It’s a fictional account of the 1920s and 30s life of magician Carter the Great, intertwined with the mysterious story of the death of president Warren G. Harding and the sad tale of Philo T Farnsworth , the inventor of television. It’s a mash-up of incredible magic, love stories, crazy characters, and true tales that kept me turning the pages and going without food and sleep. I loved it. I was sad when it ended. If you live in the Bay Area, if you love magic or history, you’ll enjoy this cleverly crafted spellbinder.

A thousand words

On this summer trip I covered ten countries and took over 15,000 photos. I kept my photos on compact-flash cards and edited them as I went, so by the time I got home to New York I had about 5,000 “keeper” photos on a single set of cards. I could have backed them up and sent the DVDs to myself any time, but instead I just took care and made sure to get them back to New York with me. Which I did. Unfortunately, the day after we returned, we took off for Denver, to attend my mother’s birthday party, and came back the next day. I didn’t intend to take my photo cards with me, but in the confusion of packing, I managed to. And, on the flight home from Denver, I managed to leave a pouch containing my earphones, memory cards, and my journal on the airplane. They were well marked with my contact information, but in the weeks after, I went to the lost-and-found department several times, sent relatives to the Denver lost-and-found, and nothing came of it. My memory cards and journal are gone, probably went into the trash as someone was cleaning the plane. I felt sick about it, but there was nothing I could do. I’ve suffered a tremendous digital loss. I took photos of people on motorbikes, people eating spiders, people on the street in many cities. I had photos from my trip to Germany that I was going to use for my next book. And I’m the only person to blame. Not that I shouldn’t have lost them, but that I was dumb enough not to back them up. You would think I might have learned that lesson after working with computers for 30 years. I can remember some of the photos, but the memories are starting to fade. I’ll have to take more, and I’ll have to back them up. I guess it’s training for life, somehow. I’m determined to become a better photographer and will have more images to share on later trips. Learn from my mistake – always back up your photos as you go, and find some way to separate your backups from your primary images.