ACAM: The Time Warp Effect of Travelogues

Posted on September 1, 2011 by lisafindley

I’ve just finished Hard Travel to Sacred Places by Rudolph Wurlitzer, and I was struck by how of its time it is. Published in 1994 (written in ’93), it’s about Wurlitzer and his wife traveling to sacred sites in Thailand, Burma, and Cambodia as they grieve the sudden death of their son. They’re American Buddhists looking for some measure of peace at various temples and shrines, and the book is full of quotes from various Buddhist texts and religious thinkers.

book cover of Hard Travel to Sacred Places by Rudy Wurlitzer

travelogue/time machine

The jacket copy on the book mentions the word “classic” more than once, and certainly Wurlitzer’s meditations on grief and loss are moving and timeless. How do we cope with the death of a child? How do we hold that unspeakably personal sadness and also hold the tragedies of deaths on a massive scale in various parts of the world? How does the death of a loved one force us to face our own mortality? Wurlitzer’s prose is simple and swift as he grapples with these questions, and I appreciated his insight even while I, as someone who doesn’t practice a religion, couldn’t quite grasp the religious framework he’s working with.

So that part was, despite the personal nature of his grief, universal and timeless. But the rest of it was so specific to 1993! He’s horrified by the commercialization of Thailand, specifically the Coke-drinking, sex trade-working, neon-lit city of Bangkok. Now, of course, the seediness and Westernization of Bangkok is well-known and few travelers are surprised by it when they visit.

In Burma–wait, he visits Burma (Myanmar). That, right there, is different from now. According to Wikipedia, about 800,000 people visited the country in 2010, compared to 1.13 million overseas tourists visiting Chicago alone in 2009. When Wurlitzer visited, Aung San Suu Kyi had only been under house arrest for a few years, after the 1990 elections that saw her party overwhelmingly elected were disregarded and the military junta decided to stop having them for awhile. Wurlitzer talks about an antiquated country, one with very little new industry or commerce since the outside world isn’t dealing with the junta (his descriptions sound like descriptions I’ve read of Cuba), and while he wonders at the brutality of the junta, he sounds relieved to be in a calm, quiet country after the electric buzz of Thailand. Nowadays, some groups advocate tourism to Burma to bring money to the local people and help them keep in contact with the outside world, but most activist groups discourage it, since the junta has forced labor in tourist destinations and the industry mostly supports the junta and not the people. A far cry from the sleepy country Wurlitzer visited almost 20 years ago.

In Cambodia in 1993, the Khmer Rouge were still a major threat; Wurlitzer heard gunfire and saw holy sculptures vandalized by people taking parts of them over the border into Thailand to sell on the black market. He describes a country in chaos, with elections right around the corner, but no one sure of who will win or who ought to win. Today, Cambodia has finally prosecuted some Khmer Rouge as war criminals, and humanitarian groups have sprung up all over the place, but its prime minister, Hun Sen, has kept in power through some very shady means, and the country is still one of the poorest in the world. The biggest change on the ground is the lack of Khmer Rouge with guns around every corner, although the mines from the civil war that could blow up at any time in 1993 can still blow up on any unlucky pedestrian today.

I enjoyed reading Hard Travel to Sacred Places both for Wurlitzer’s thoughts on death and grieving, and also for the time warp experience. It’s fascinating to read a contemporary travelogue alongside a history textbook and see how personal experience intersects with facts.

Image from here.

Three Steps to Keeping Your Belongings Safe on the Road

Posted on August 30, 2011 by lisafindley

Or: I Did NOT Leave My Wallet in El Segundo

I’m paranoid about losing my keys or having my wallet stolen, especially since I’ve lived on my own and faced the prospect of being unable to get into my apartment if my keys go missing. So I’ve developed some overly paranoid steps to minimize the risk of these things happening. Most travel guides and websites will give you tips on how to keep your things secure when you’re in a foreign place (get a bag that zips, carry it across your chest instead of at your side, etc.), but the truth is that the same strategies work anywhere, whether at home or abroad.

Step One: Run “Ready, Set, Go”

Every single time I leave my house, I run a “ready, set, go” check. Look in my purse for keys, wallet, phone. With those three things, I’m good anywhere I end up. The one time I didn’t check, of course, my keys were still in my bedroom, and that was when I lived in a place with automatically locking doors. Not a pleasant realization, when I ran the ready, set, go after I’d already let the door close behind me with a sharp click.

Step Two: Develop a New Plane of Awareness

The CTA posts ads with tips on deterring pickpockets, including a recommendation that you not check for your wallet in your back pocket, or run a finger along your phone’s outline in your purse, or in some other way indicate to a thief the exact location of your valuables. But I don’t feel comfortable not being able to check up on things, so I’ve developed a a system of constant movement that allows me to check on things without being too obvious about it; I shift my purse from one arm to the other, and do a quick tactile check on its contents, or open it up to take out my chapstick or iPod, and do a quick visual check that way.

Step Three: Be Lucky

Okay, this is a bit of a cheat, since the very definition of luck includes being unable to control it, but I think it’s important to recognize the crucial role luck plays in keeping our belongings secure and our persons safe. There are a lot of steps we can take to protect ourselves, but sometimes thieves succeed or accidents happen, and all the precautions in the world can’t help in those instances. I mention this because I think it’s easy to blame people for not being careful enough with their things, and that’s not helpful. Especially when you’re traveling someplace new, it’s easy to get disoriented and lose track of your usual habits that keep your things with you, and if you get separated from those things, you won’t want it to ruin your trip. Do what you can to keep your belongings secure, but if misfortune strikes, remember that they are all replaceable, unlike the more pleasant memories you’re forming while traveling, so do your best to focus on those instead.

Any other suggestions?

It’s A Small, Horrifying World

Posted on August 25, 2011 by lisafindley

I’m 2/3 of the way through John Tully’s A Short History of Cambodia, and page 104 made me put down the book and say out loud, “holy shit!” When World War II started, Cambodia was still a French protectorate. In 1940, the French government capitulated to Nazi Germany and the Vichy government took over, and the governor of French Indochina, Jean Decoux, went all-out in his support of the new regime. Partly this was because Japan (a German ally, as we all recall) was quickly moving south, and there weren’t enough French/Cambodian troops to resist if they tried, so he wanted to put on a good show of support. But hoo boy did Decoux go all in. The press switched immediately from siding with the Allies to spewing hatred against Jews and cheering Allied losses. He had members of youth organizations goose-stepping in parades and doing the Nazi salute. (Tully even says that he set up concentration camps, although he doesn’t say where or who was imprisoned, and I can’t find independent verification of this.)

There’s a picture in the book (can’t find one online) that shows Cambodian youth goose-stepping. They’re all doing the Nazi salute in front of a parade dais. I just found it utterly bizarre to see Khmers doing an Aryan salute, to see that specific gesture of European terrorism imitated in Southeast Asia. The politics of why Decoux adopted these symbols and gestures for his protectorate are clear, and the Cambodians were in little position to resist his orders, but it’s still sickening and dizzying. That it reached to the other side of the globe — it really was a world war.

Travel as Exploitation, or Whatever

Posted on August 24, 2011 by lisafindley

Oh the hilarity! I mean, also sad, because I have definitely met far too many travelers whose inner monologue is probably shockingly close to this little satirical piece (without that hard-hitting bit at the end). And I have to watch myself closely to not go too far into this territory, too. But mostly it’s hilarious. Check it out:

“When I reached the end of the alley I saw this really elderly and impoverished Guatemalan woman, with like, missing teeth weaving brightly colored cloths on this big weaving apparatus. And I stopped, for like a whole three minutes and we exchanged a really long glance. I felt like I could see into her soul. I took some photos of her, like, without asking. I remember how pleased I felt, that I actually found something in that alley entirely mine. Like, I owned it or something.”

When we travel, what are we learning, what are we taking, and what right have we to do any of it? Those are the questions I hope we’re grappling with in this here blog.

Note: No need to be familiar with My So-Called Life for this to be entertaining. The author’s writing in the style of a 16-year-old TV character from the early ’90s, but that’s just icing if you know the show. (Which honestly, I don’t; I think I’ve seen one and a half episodes, and it was in this past year, so I missed out on the part where I strongly identify with Angela and draw parallels between her life and mine.)

Sex on the Road

Posted on August 4, 2011 by lisafindley

Nerve.com had a feature up this week asking travelers about their love and sex lives. (This being Nerve, you might not want to click through if your office has filters up, and you might not want to read on if you don’t want to read about my views on sex while traveling.) It’s a quick round-up of questions they asked a few people at a bar in Colombia, but I think it’s a pretty accurate slice of the average backpacking population. (ETA: I realize they’re asked very leading questions in the vein of “make your travel sound as sexy and illicit as possible,” but still, you can choose how to answer those.)

If I knew how to Photoshop, I'd put some suggestive silhouette on here to show you what the Sexy UN looks like.

The main themes seem to be:

1) Travel is better when you’re single because you can get laid more.

2) In fact, even when you’re dating someone while traveling, be quick to emphasize just how complicated and non-serious the situation is lest you feel too tied down.

3) Indulge yourself in broad generalizations about the sexual proclivities and romantic tendencies of different ethnicities.

I can really only sign off on #1, and that only if you’re not traveling with your partner. If you’re traveling with your partner, that’s a whole different kind of fun travel.

#2 just makes it sound like backpacking is the ultimate refuge of commitment-phobes, and #3 is not only inaccurate but gross.

I’ve certainly met plenty such travelers on the road, people who consider themselves ambassadors to the sexual United Nations. They use much the same checklist for their dicks as they do for their backpacks; has it been inside as many countries as possible?

And yeah, I just generalized them to be guys. There are women out there with a similar attitude, but overwhelmingly it’s dudes doing this kind of sexual tourism. Even in that Nerve interview, the woman who says she prefers to be single talks about being happy with oneself and enjoying sexual partners as they come along, not as notches on a mobile bedpost.

I think it all ties back into your general approach to travel. If you see travel as a way to meet exotic peoples with strange customs in foreign lands, you’re going to fetishize your sexual experiences with those people as times when you touched the Other. If you see travel as a way to integrate yourself into foreign cultures and look with disdain on those who stayed home, unenlightened about the wide world that you’ve just discovered, you’re going to fetishize your sexual experiences with people in the foreign culture as proof that you’re a citizen of the world to whom no label can be affixed.

If, however, you see travel as a way to meet people on their own terms, in their own lands, in their own time, as fellow travelers in the world, you’re more likely to have sexual experiences with real people rather than stereotypes and personal checklists.

Photo from here.

ACAM: Angkor Wat, Cambodia

Posted on July 28, 2011 by lisafindley

Hello, dearest fellow travelers! We are now moving from Singapore to Cambodia in the ACAM Project. I’ve been reading A Short History of Cambodia: From Empire to Survival by John Tully, and so far I’m liking it as a very brief overview. One of the things that Tully emphasizes is that there are so few records of Cambodia before the 16th century. Unlike the ancient and well-documented civilizations of China and Japan to the north, the Khmer people live in the hot, wet land of southeast Asia, which doesn’t do so well for preservation of paper. So what we know of the history of Cambodia is largely taken from what visitors wrote about it over the years, and also a bit from stone inscriptions.

If it's this magnificent now, imagine how Angkor Wat looked in its day.

The ancestors of the Khmer people built the city of Angkor in the 9th century CE, and at its height it was the largest city in antiquity, with a population of 1 million. One million people in one place in the pre-industrial age! For comparison, London grew hugely in the 16th century and still only reached 225,000. So Angkor, today a giant ruin of temples and not much else, was, for several hundred years, the largest city in the world.

Tully is eager to emphasize that the massive building projects of Angkor were all based on a huge slave population. I got a bit uncomfortable with his descriptions of the “overweening egotism and peculiar religiosity” (p. 25) of the devarajas (god-kings) who ruled over their enslaved subjects and commissioned giant temples. I’m not uncomfortable with pointing out the barbarism of slavery, but there are several other places in the book where Tully draws comparisons between the Angkor people and other ancient peoples, which helps put their culture in context. I mean, when I read about tens of thousands of slaves dragging several tons’ worth of stone to a building location to construct an enormous temple made for the glory of a god-king, the first thing I thought of was the ancient Egyptians. Right? Pharaohs, gods incarnate, built pyramids as massive tombs for themselves, to be filled with materials to carry into the afterlife; and all at the considerable expense of slaves’ sweat and blood. But Tully never draws this comparison, which strikes me as odd.

Maybe the constructions weren’t similar enough for him? He says several times that the wats were an unprecedented religious construction; they were temples and mausoleums at the same time. So they weren’t like a church or mosque, which may have some tombs in it but serves the main purpose of being a place of worship for people; nor were they like pyramids or large tombs, which serve the main purpose of housing the deceased. They were places to worship the deity Vishnu or Shiva, but only through worshiping the god’s manifestation on earth, the god-king’s body. (Or at least this is what I got from re-reading the relevant chapter over and over; please correct me in the comments if I’m missing something.)

splendid

Speaking of religion, the wats (yep, the Angkor Wat is the largest religious construction of what used to be this major city, and that’s how it got that name) were part of a strain of Hinduism practiced in Angkor, influenced by Mahayana Buddhism and Khmer folk beliefs (p. 39). Tully references historians who believe that the decline of these religions and the rise of Theravada Buddhism contributed greatly to the decline of the Angkor empire. The drive to build monuments glorifying one man, at the expense of thousands of men who literally lived to serve him, was a concept supported by Hindu and Mahayana Buddhist beliefs. Theravada Buddhism, on the other hand, emphasized living a simple life resigned to suffering. This resignation to suffering may have comforted the laborers, but the more democratic focus on achieving nirvana by living a good life rather than making great displays may have stirred up discontent among them as well and undermined the devaraja rule. (Please note that I am not familiar with the particulars of various strains of Buddhism, so I’m paraphrasing Tully here, who is talking about Buddhism as it was practiced 1000 years ago. These may not be the same as current iterations of the religion.)

Tully points to two other major factors in the decline of the Angkor empire: increased raids by neighboring Siam (today known as Thailand), and environmental destruction. The city (which was spread over a large swath of land) depended on a particular system of irrigation canals. Deforestation above the canals caused damage to the water and soil below, which destroyed many fish and introduced still water patches perfect for malarial mosquitoes to breed in.

So the people believe in a more equitable religion, one that denounces material things, right around the time armies are invading, and old farming and forestry practices are destroying the people’s habitat. Easy to see how these factors combined to kill and displace people, and transform the population of a mighty kingdom into a minor city and eventually a grand ruin.

Photos from here; photo 1 taken by Trey Ratcliff, photo 2 taken by Philip Lock.

An Australian Tradition: Welcome to Country

Posted on July 14, 2011 by lisafindley

Hello dearest fellow travelers! This week I saw a cool blog post that ties into my travels. Check out this post at Feministe, which explains the Australian Aboriginal tradition of the “welcome to country.” Here’s an excerpt from that post, explaining the concept:

The Welcome to Country and Acknowledgement of Country are protocols performed in Australia to (allegedly) indicate respect for Aboriginal history and culture, as well as to indicate respect for Aboriginal people who may be attending the event. A Welcome can be performed by a local Aboriginal elder, and represents the traditional owners of a place giving their blessing to an event and welcoming the guests onto their lands. A Welcome is one of the many services that local Aboriginal Lands Councils offer for a small fee, although Welcomes do not have to be performed by Lands Councils.

text for welcome to country in Australia

An example of a "Welcome to Country"

What a wonderful way to acknowledge the complex history of a conquered and colonized country. The tradition goes way back, when an Aboriginal group traveling to another group’s land would be formally welcomed by that group before any other business was attended to. In the last century, it also became a way for non-Indigenous people to show their respect when starting an event or ceremony.

As Hexy explains in the post and Australians write in the comments, sometimes the Welcome or Acknowledgment is done as a rote part of a ceremony, with no sincerity, which obviously misses the point of doing it. But the general idea of saying these words is still good, taking time out to specifically acknowledge and appreciate people who have endured horrifying attacks on their lives and culture. Here in the United States, if this were something we did, it would also be an important way to emphasize that it’s not like Native Americans disappeared, after white people killed them all in a tragic, romanticized West (which is a disturbingly popular view), since the Welcome explicitly welcomes Indigenous folks who may be present.

Of course Australia and the United States do not have the same history, and the indigenous peoples of both lands are very different, but there is a similarity in the way white colonizers treated them brutally, attempted to eradicate them, and now consider them an embarrassing aberration in the national history of white people’s dominance. Making even cursory attempts to acknowledge that bloody history is more than we do here, and it’s something I think would make us a better country. I am not aware of a Native American tradition of such a Welcome or Acknowledgment, and it’s not like you can just slot in one cultural tradition for another, so I don’t see this happening in the States any time soon.

But I’ll be sure to keep a sharp eye out when I’m in Australia to see which communities perform the Welcome/Acknowledgment at their events and ceremonies. I marvel at the wide world of the Internet–here’s a custom that didn’t show up in my ACAM research but is so fascinating!

Abandoned Cities, Tourist Hotspots

Posted on July 13, 2011 by lisafindley

Well, I don’t know about hotspots, per se, but this Salon slideshow of “the world’s most beautiful wastelands” makes a compelling argument for why travelers and adventurers might enjoy scrambling over eroded walls and darting across dusty plazas. These places all used to mean a lot to the people who lived in them, and now they’re crumbling into nothingness. They served different functions but now just take up space. They’re a visual reminder of our transience, a melancholy ode to human achievement and fragility. Like stumbling across Atlantis on land.

The splendor of days gone by in Detroit

Photo by Albert Duce, from http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/07/10/trazzler_slideshow_beautiful_wastelands/slideshow.html

ACAM: Singapore — Where to Go, Part 2

Posted on July 7, 2011 by lisafindley

Hello dearest fellow travelers! Last month I took a look at some of the things to do and places to go in Singapore, and got some great suggestions for further ideas both here and on Facebook. (By the way, did you know that you can now use your FB login to leave a comment in the field below, so you don’t have to go through a login process every time you want to comment? Neat!) Here I list a few more sites and attractions I’m interested in checking out when I visit Singapore.

Singapore Zoo

Several people recommended visiting the zoo in Singapore, and taking a look around their website, I can see why. The zoo has a huge range of ecosystems to explore, and it’s affiliated with other wildlife parks like the Jurong Bird Park and the Night Safari (they’re all owned by one large company). Sure, it’s corporate, but the parks are designated rescue centers for injured and at-risk wildlife, and they have breeding programs for endangered species. They also seem to have a large educational component that encourages a lot of visitor interaction, which sounds more interesting than a lot of zoos that stick to a few signs next to an animal’s cage. Also, it is in a rainforest! I’ve only ever seen rainforest animals in Midwestern climes, and I’m sure it’ll be different to see them in a place that’s naturally what they’re used to, rather than a reconstruction.

Welcome to the Jungle

Photo from http://www.asiaexplorers.com/singapore/singapore-zoo.htm

Delicious Dining Options

Everyone who has been to Singapore or knows someone who has been to Singapore has immediately mentioned the food. Oh, the food! So many dishes I’ve never heard of, like chili crab, barbequed stingray, and bak kuh teh. The blog GastroNOMmy has a wonderful list of food for first-time visitors to the city, including specific restaurants to go to when you’re there. The city is known to be a foodie’s paradise, and I can’t wait to taste just what that means.

Pulau Semakau

My friend Mindy suggested I visit this place. It’s a fascinating study in environmental care and waste management. Pulau Semakau started out as a small island and is now a gigantic garbage dump. Unlike most city dumps, however, this one serves as a multipurpose site; on top of the garbage dump rests an island of green space, mangrove plots, and trailways for walking. Since it’s essentially a pile of garbage tossed right on top of the water, engineers were careful to put screens and filters in place to keep the garbage from seeping into the water, and so far it has been successful (the island was built in 1999). However, as this article points out, most of the garbage is incinerated before being transported to the dump, and that process isn’t entirely environmentally friendly, so the cost/benefit analysis is still uncertain. I’d like to see the island and take a tour to find out more about how sustainable a model this is for other cities.

Running the Numbers: How to Save for a World Trip

Posted on July 5, 2011 by lisafindley

The title of this post is a little misleading, since this is less a top ten list of ways to cut down on costs and ramp up saving (there are tons of those out there), and more of a question about how much of that is good to do and how much is too much. Can I save up for a round-the-world trip while still enjoying my life here in Chicago, or do I need to radically alter my lifestyle?

counting my pennies

Photo from http://igotmompower.com/2011/06/pennies-from-heaven/

I’ve been planning to go on a round-the-world trip for several years now, and I’ve been putting money aside that whole time, but the amount has varied over the years. I’ve never had a special account for it; I just designate my savings account as the place I save for the trip. It’s a little scary how very basic my financial situation is (no stocks or bonds, a 401(k) with like a grand in it), and that 30 Rock episode a few seasons ago, in which Liz’s nearly identical financial situation is roundly mocked, hit a little close to home. Part of that lack of funds is because I worked in publishing for a couple years, and as anyone who ever copy edited can tell you, you lose money doing that in the first few years. So it wasn’t until recently that I was able to put aside a set amount each month, which really ramped up the saving.

I’ve worked the math a few times, and so long as my employment situation stays steady and major disasters are kept at bay (knock on wood), I should be able to make my goal of $30,000 next August, and then I’ll be off. I’m proud of my ability to save more than I made at my first office job, but on the other hand, I don’t have any dependents, I live in a pretty affordable part of town, and I’ve been supposedly saving for years. Couldn’t I have saved more, faster? Where did it all go?

The answer is: it all went into my life. I’ve been spending my money on enjoying my time here in Chicago, and that has slowed down the saving noticeably. I’ve gone back and forth on whether this is the right way to do it, and usually I think it is. Several years ago, at the end of college, my then-boyfriend and I were considering taking this trip together, and we argued over how to go about it. I wanted to hoard all our pennies as quickly as possible, so we could be on the road right away. He wanted to explore the city we’d be moving to and have enough money to enjoy it fully. He didn’t want to have to miss hanging out with friends because they were going to a bar and we’d only budgeted two beers each that month. What’s the point in saving for fun if it means not having any in the meantime?

Now I think he was mostly right. I should have been saving more aggressively in the last couple years, when my salary got to a comfortable, reliable point, but otherwise I don’t have regrets about the way I’ve been going about it. I like being able to go out with friends and occasionally buy a round, or pick up the check on a dinner with a friend who’s a little cash poor at the moment. I think this kind of relative openness with money is healthy for friendships, much better than everyone counting out their share to the decimal and holding grudges against those who deviate. (Of course, it’s a different story when people between jobs or in a different economic stratum are in the mix, in which case common sense and compassion should reign.)

I also think a general kind of karma is involved. When I was a broke 18-year-old in Berlin, two Australians bought me a drink in a cafe and we spent the afternoon chatting about our travels. I offered to pay my share, but they were several years older, on a break from good-paying jobs, and they cheerfully waved my money aside. All they required was that I pass the favor on later in my travels, when I was in a position to do the same for someone else. A simple pay it forward concept, sure, but that doesn’t make it less important, and why shouldn’t it apply in our daily lives as well as our more exotic travels? Not that I walk around peeling twenties off a giant roll I keep in my pocket, and it’s not that I’m doing any better financially than most of my friends and acquaintances, but it is a conscious choice about how to spend what I have at my disposal.

After all, generosity doesn’t save nearly so well as money, so sometimes you have to spend a little of both and trust that it’ll balance in the end.