Shatter the Fog

Small Town Living

2009-08-04T10:14:00.000-07:00

When we aren't travelling the world we have to take vacations closer to home. And for the last five years, that's often meant southern Utah. It's the most amazing place I've ever been (except for Tajikistan, that's now the top of my list). And it's only 20 hours drive from Calgary.

We liked it so much that we decided we'd like to have a place down here. Lara's always wanted a place backing on wilderness, and I liked the idea of being able to leave stuff down here, and have a place to return to between hiking and canyoning trips. So we settled on Hanksville, Utah, which is right in the middle of nowhere.

That was a couple of years ago, and at the time there was only one house available in town, which was out of our price range (we had a VERY low price range). But there was an abandoned property, and we did have some tools and renovation knowledge. We contacted the owner, and she wanted to sell. So we bought the house. We paid the local contractor to put a new roof on it for us ( it had leaked badly, knocking down all the drywall inside). And there the house sat.

We went around the world for a year, and when we returned it was time to get the house ready to live in. It was almost like a job for us, after a year of travelling. Take this abandoned house and pay ourselves to fix it up and make it nice. The downside was that we ended up here in July and August, when daytime temperatures are often well into the 40s.

The house had no water or electricity when we arrived. Water was hooked up quickly. I went to the town clerk, paid her, and she called the town fix it guy (also her husband) and he came out right away. They needed a backhoe to dig out the old lines, and unfortunately our side of the line was totally ruined. Just a broken plastic pipe.

"We're not responsible for your side. Just ours." Which is where it would have ended in the city. But Hanksville is small, with only 200 or so people.

"I think I have some parts", said Stan, who was driving the backhoe.

"I used to do plumbing in Salt Lake", said Jeff. "We'll get you hooked up."

So they came back and forth all day until the water was running. We turned it on in the house and it sprayed out from several places. The old copper pipes had corroded or frozen. Again, no problem. Curtis, the major, contractor, owner of the local store, paramedic, firefighter, and owner of one of the hotels, had some spare parts. He ran to get them for us, and we managed to cobble together a working toilet, two sinks, and a cold shower. We were in business!

The power was the next challenge. We'd expected to replace the panel box and be done with it. Lara know how to do all this stuff. I don't. But unfortunately, the new box was bigger than the old, and the previous people hadn't left loops of wire. For those of you that don't know, electricians routinely leave extra wire in any fixture so that you have something to work with if you change things out. Professional electricians, that is. But these people had simply been decent amateurs.

Fortunately Gary, our next door neighbor, was more than happy to let us plug into his plug. At least we could run tools. We'd brought a generator along as a backup, but power tools are real hogs, and they kept tripping the fuse on the generator. Drill. Drill. Poof. Damn! The power cord was life-saver.

Back to our wiring problem though. Unfortunately, wires don't stretch. And building codes are pretty specific about connecting wires together. Don't do it. And if you do have to do it, it has to be in a junction box, protected and properly supported. Unfortunately, you can't fit 20 junction boxes into a wall, so Lara ended up buying a bunch of fancy hardware when we visited Ineke, Brad, and their new baby Levi in Colorado. It would have been a great solution except that one of the boxes she got was too small.

Hanksville is, to put it mildly, remote. The nearest home Depot is 200km away, in Richfield, over several mountain passes. Curtis runs a decent hardware store in town and he's great for getting standard supplies, but it's no substitute for Home Depot when you need weird parts. So when something like this happens, you are stuck. Luckily people cooperate, and if somebody is going into town they're often more than happy to pick stuff up. Curtis's crew run into town for hardware pretty regularly, and we've had him pick up several bits and pieces we were missing. He even brought us 30 sheets of OSB so we could replace the rotted floors.

Along with the wiring we also had to repair all the damaged drywall. Caleb, Curtis's son in law, came with a couple of Curtis's kids and they hung and taped and textured all the new drywall. And that was the end of our first trip down. We had to get back to Calgary for a wedding. We had water, but no power yet. And lots of work to do.

We ended up delayed a bit because Lara was sick, and returned in mid July to soaring temperatures. It was disgustingly hot in the house, especially on a ladder, which is where Lara had to work most of the day. She got the panel in though. Getting hold of the building inspector was a challenge. Because the lines had been cut we had to get the place re-inspected. And while he had a phone, we didn't.

The solution was Skype. There is internet in Hanksville, via a tower on a hill overlook town, and even though we had no power we got the internet hooked up. As usual, it was super-easy. Small towns are great that way. We talked to Dan, and he sent someone by the next day to get us all set up. Lara was finally able to make phone calls, but she still had nowhere for people to call her back. She ended up buying a US number through Skype.

We ended up getting the inspector over because he was in town anyway, looking at a job for Curtis. He dropped by our house, looked at the wiring, and was very impressed by how professional a job Lara had done. We were good to go. Caleb came over in a back hoe and dug a big trench for us, and two days later Garkane came to hook up our power. They were likewise impressed. Apparently homeowner jobs are a bit unpredictable. They told us that a while earlier they'd done a job and had the meter-base fall right off the wall on them. They came in 3 trucks, and ran new wires the size of my wrist to our house. We were in business! Lara turned on the fuses. And everything worked!

While all this was going on I was doing what I was best at, which is destruction. I tore out the carpets and old rotted floors and put in new OSB. I tore out plumbing we didn't need. And I tracked down all the places where cats had lived. While the house was abandonded the basement door had come off have a very distinctive odor. Not a good one. The basement door had come off while the house was abandoned, and the house had become a big den. One of the basement rooms was full of feathers even.

As I sit here, Lara has gone to town for 3 days. She borrowed a trailer from another neighbor. It's probably a $2000.00 trailer, and he just said "No problem. Take it." So now she's gone to Salt Lake to pick up carpets, a water heater, a new stove, a fridge, and hopefully a swamp cooler to keep the place more comfortable. Salt Lake is 4 hours drive away, so she spent a few nights there.

Everyone has been incredibly helpful so far. We really enjoy knowing all the people in town, and all the ones we've met have been very friendly. Many people here are pretty conservative. This is Mormon country after all. But there are enough tourists coming through that the community doesn't seem insular. It's nice people, helping each other out because that's what you do in a small town. And if we need something, then people stop what they're doing and give us a hand.

Things are looking really good here now. The ceilings are painted, the new plumbing is all run and is just waiting for some parts. There are clean new floors waiting to be covered. It's starting to feel like a home. We're looking forward to being able to share our place with people.

This will be our vacation home. But we want to share it with our friends. If you ever find yourself in Southern Utah (and believe me, if you like outdoor stuff you really need to do this at some stage of your life), then you should give us a call. We'd be happy to lend you a key.

Playing with a cheetah

2009-05-12T02:55:00.000-07:00

Lara and I both love cats. A lot. We had two cats before we left on our travels, and whenever we stop at a B&B or guest-house we are always happy if they have a cat for us to play with. So when we found out that the neighbors at one of the places we were staying in Namibia had a pet Cheetah, our ears perked up.

In Namibia, the neighbors actually meant a farm 15 km down the road. We got directions and drove out there to have a look for ourselves. A gravel road led to a collection of buildings surrounded by a high fence. There didn't seem to be anybody around and we stood at the gate for a moment wondering whether to go inside. And then we spotted it. A full grown cheetah, laying on the ground not 10m on the other side of the gate.

At the moment a young woman in her early twenties came out from inside the farm and greeted us at the gate. We explained we'd heard about the Cheetah and she invited us in. We chatted with her as a cat the weighed as much as either of us sauntered over and flopped at our feet. Apparently Cheetahs are fairly common in Namibia and they cause a lot of problems for farmers because they are killing machines when they get into a heard of sheep. This one had been raised from an infant.

At first both of us were a little bit hesitant around such a powerful animal, but the Cheetah didn't seem to care. It acted more like a house cat, except that its purr was so loud that it seemed more like the growl of an angry wolf. It flopped around, let us scratch it behind the ears, and generally seemed to enjoy being petted. It purred nearly constantly.

We hung out for a little while, playing with the cat and asking questions about life on the farm. After about an hour the parents came home ( the farm is a multi-generational affair) and we were invited to stay the night and join them for dinner. We happily accepted the generous offer and had a great dinner where we learned a lot about life on a rural Namibian farm. We even participated in the local farm-life, going out to manage the cattle in the evening, and helping feed the baby sheep in the morning.

All the while the big cat just hung around like a normal cat. Or nearly normal. It had an unnatural interest in the dog's puppies (who were kept safely behind a fence). It also apparently couldn't be trusted around small children, who it saw is prey. We quickly learned to feel completely safe though, and soon it seemed fairly normal to sit down for coffee with a cheetah laying on our feet.

Cheetahs are the only big cats that can be "safely" domesticated, mainly because they are built for speed, not power, so they aren't as strong as lions and leopards. Still, they are amazing animals and we had a great respect for just how formidable a hunter a cheetah would make.

The best part of the experience though was meeting the lovely farm family. Even without the cat it would have been one of the highlights of our trip. The opportunity to cuddle a man-sized ended up just being a wonderful bonus.

Endless Early Mornings

2009-04-18T02:39:00.000-07:00

Africa is not a place to visit if you hate mornings. We've ended up waking as early as 4:30AM 3 or 4 days a week for nearly a month now.

In the game parks the reason is that morning and night game drives are the most likely to spot good animals. By 10 AM it has warmed up to the point that most animals are hiding in the shade until it cools down again in the evening. So inevitably we end up waking up before sunrise so that we can start driving as soon as they open the roads. If we go with a park vehicle on a guided drive they often leave an hour earlier so that you can catch the sunrise out in the bush.

In Nambia the problem is the brutal heat. In Sousousvlei, the famous sand dune park, the temperatures hit 55 degrees. In the shade. We are here in the Namibian fall so it is is a little cooler, like mid 40s. Still horribly hot though. By 11:00 the temperatures are intolerable and the heat haze and high sun have made photography pointless. So in the desert, like in the game park, there is a strong incentive to get up before the sun so that you can see things when the temperatures and light are at their best.

What's that in the water?

2009-04-18T02:36:00.001-07:00

Nambia's climate has been a little crazy the last few years apparently with drastically increased rainfall in many areas. It's beautiful in the deserts right now with everything covered in the most dazzling green and gold grass which blows white fluffy seeds everywhere. The seeds are so thick that they lay along the sides of the road like snow.

In the north, in Caprivi strip there has been extensive flooding. Not only has this wiped out many villages but it also has created extra hazards. Apparently the flood waters are full of crocodiles and hippos. In the paper last weekend it said that several people have fled their flooding homes only to be torn apart by crocodiles.

Wow.

African Safaris

2009-04-18T02:19:00.000-07:00

Almost everyone who comes to Southern Africa will visit a game park. Seeing elephants, lions, giraffes, rhinos, zebras and other animals in the wild is an experience not to be missed, and South Africa and Namibia have some of the best parks in the world.

We spent about 7 days in game parks up to this point and we feel we have a much better idea what it is all about that we did previously. The experience can be both wonderful and frustrating and it is important to set your expectations.

Seeing the game is both easier and harder than you would expect. Different parks have different concentrations of animals. We visited Kruger and Hluehlue in South Africa. In Hluehlue we saw numerous rhinos- so many that by the end of the the three days in the park we didn't slow down unless they were close to the road. In Kruger I don't think we saw any.

The most common animals are the bucks: springbok, zebras, impala, gnu, etc. You see them everywhere, in such quantities that it becomes a bit numbing after a while. But even with these you can drive half a day and see none. There's some luck involved.

Baboons, hippos, and crocs are very common. Elephants and Giraffes are also easy to spot simply because they are so large. We had some great elephant sightings where they crossed right in front of us on the road, and more than once we had to reverse as a big bull elephant chased our car backwards, trumpeting and waving it's trunk. Very cool stuff.

Cats are the big prize, and they can be very hard to spot. They are nocturnal so the best bet is to go on a night drive, which the park can arrange for you at a fee. The drives are fun, in an open vehicle where you shine spotlights into the bush. About 50% of night drives spot cats, but we did 6 drives and only saw cats on one of them. That was a lion sighting, and the whole pride crossed the road not 10 meters from us. We had an excellent guide for that one who somehow spotted them when nobody in the vehicle had, even though he was driving, and then reversed to wait for them. In our 7 days we spotted only the one pride of lions and two leopards.

Time of year also has a lot to do with it. Water is the big limiting factor on game, and during dry times the animals tend to congregate at watering holes. We were there after rains so the animals were spread out a lot more, and the grass was tall making it harder to see animals hiding in the bush. Apparently in the dry season you can just camp at a watering hole in you car and watch all the animals come past.

The hardest part for me was the huge amount of driving. You aren't allowed to walk in the park except with an armed ranger on a game walk, so you end up driving most of the day looking for stuff. It doesn't feel like as much of a nature experience when everything has to be done from inside the car. The hikes are a welcome relief but they cover little ground and you are less likely to see good game because the animals are more scared of people on foot.

Apparently your viewing chances increase if you go to one of the private luxury lodges that have sprouted up around the national parks. They have less terrain and tend to know where all their animals are. Some of them have even radio collared some of the animals so they can take you right to the lions. The downside is that prices START at US$400 per person per night, and can easily go up to $2000.00 per person per night. In Kruger you can get by on about $100.00 per day if you do a couple of drives and sleep in a the less expensive places.

We have one more park to go to, the world famous Etosha pan. Etosha is a dry flat desert with a couple of watering holes that attract mind numbing quantities of animals. Unfortunatley Nambia's climate has gone completely haywire the last few years and the pan is flooded by unseasonable rains. Many people we talked to saw nothing at all in Etosha. We are holding of for a few weeks hoping things dry out a bit, but we heard that there is so much water it might be six months before things go back to normal.

How many people can you fit...

2009-03-17T08:04:00.000-07:00

Lara and I were joined in Cape Town in late February by our friends Ian, Lynette, and Sandi. The plan was to drive all the way up through South Africa and into Namibia in the car Lara and I had bought specially for this purpose. So, with some trepidation, on the morning of March 1 we all brought our packs down to the parking lot of our apartment building and piled them by our car.

A 1995 VW Jetta.

Lara carefully loaded the trunk with packs, arranging them as tightly as possible. A few minutes later the trunks was full, but there was still a full-sized backpack on the ground, as well as several other bags. We had tried to find a roof-rack, but had been unsuccessful, so somehow we would have to make things fit.

That is where Ian came in. Through some miracle of physics Ian managed to repack the trunk so that all the gear of five people could fit inside. We had to lean on it to close it, but somehow it worked. We looked at the car. Only the bottom 3/4 of the rear wheels were visible. And we weren't even inside yet.

We loaded our five people inside and backed out of the driveway. Scraaaappeee! Admittedly it was a little bit uneven. Scrape. Scrape. Every time we hit a bump we scraped the hitch in the back. We were glad to have the hitch though. It protected the bumper, which rode only a few inches above the ground.

We managed to struggle along remarkable well until we hit a dirt road a few weeks later at which point the poor vehicle just couldn't handle the weight. We bottomed out so badly we cut a cable underneath, and we had to stop regularly to get everyone out so we would get extra clearance.

In the end we decided to get new springs for the car. The first set unfortunately did not make any difference. They were better, but the car still rode right down to the rubber when fully loaded. So later the same day we bought a second set at a custom spring place. We arrived 30 minutes before they were supposed to close but to our amazment they agreed to stay open late to fix our problem.

Now our car sits nice and high! Ian is still the only one who can pack it though.

The Jaws of the Beast

2009-02-22T00:59:00.000-08:00

When we aren't travelling, both Lara and I both drive cars that are over 12 years old. Our washing machine and clothes drier are reconditioned. Many of our dishes date back to my college days when I got them from friends. Our TV is a big box instead of an expensive flat screen. We still have luxirious lifestyles by world standards, but compared to many other Canadians we live very modestly. If the world is to survive environmentally there will have to be more people like us. The planet can't afford for all of us to buy new appliances every four years.

Yet it has become increasingly obvious in the last few months that the economy of the planet is based on the opposite assumption. Our whole economic system was built around the assumption that people will relentlessly consume, buying new goods whether they need them or not. And when that consumption stops, the whole world teeters on the edge of a spiral of economic ruin. If we don't buy a new car every two years people who make cars lose their jobs. Then they can't afford new TVs, which puts TV makers out of work so they can't buy washing machines.

Governments around the world are now trying to get consumers to spend again. In many countries you can get money from the government if you throw away perfectly good products like cars and appliances and buy brand new ones. It's ridiculous, but our very livelyhoods depend on this cycle continuing.

The conclusion is inescapable. The environmental movement is doomed because a culture of recycling and reusing and making do with less is only sustainable against the backdrop of a larger culture of mass consumerism. If you are recycling paper or bottles or cans you are now the enemy; you are depriving people in the forestry and mining industry of their jobs. How can we both cut greenhouse gas emissions and increase car sales? How can we cut the destruction of forests while increasing the consumption of timber? How can we cut the mining of metals while increasing the sales of appliances?

I wish I could see a way forward from here. But it is hard. Perhaps we will still invent technologies that allow us to consume at ever increasing rates while lowering our impact on the Earth. But right now things look grim. We've built a world economy around the idea that our lifestyle will continue and the rest of the world will join us in our wealth. Yet we face an environmental crisis that requires huge drops in consumption of natural resources.

The sad thing is that eventually we will face this crisis anyway. Each time we turn the crank and feed another ecosystem into the maws of the ravening consumers we get closer to the point where we will run out. Eventually there will be nothing left to feed the beast, and then we will have to make do with less. Maybe we will reinvent our economies. Most likely it will happen in stages, with huge dieoffs from famine and environmental disasters in poorer areas, while those of us fortunate enough to live in places like Canada continue to struggle along with what is left.

Grim thoughts on a beautiful Cape Town day.

Coming to Grips With the Past

2009-01-04T10:21:00.000-08:00

Late on New Years eve I was laying awake after our party listening to loud music thumping away in the distance. I realized that I spend very little time thinking or talking about my past. Maybe that's not unusual. We all know people who talk too much about the past; they can be terribly dull.

For me, however, it goes beyond this. The very concept of a "fond memory" seems alien. It's not that there is anything remotely bad lurking in my past. Far to the contrary. Yet whenever I think about the past I always find all of my memories tinged with sadness. I think about all the people who were once my friends who I've now lost track of. I think about the places I've been and the things I've seen, and I find myself filled with regret that those things are separated from me by so many years, fading away in my memory like the yellowing pages of an old newspaper.

The funny thing is that some of the older people I know don't seem to feel this way at all. My uncle Bill van Ieperen in particular told me that as he gets older he loves to spend time thinking about all the places that he's been and the things he has experienced. On New Years Eve it struck me that perhaps one of the natural steps of aging is to come to grips with the past.

When you are young everything is fresh and new. You assume that your friends will be around forever, and that some experiences will never be forgotten. Now I am nearly 40. There is as much memory behind me as lies ahead, and things that I had thought I could never forget have faded completely from my mind. I can't remember the faces of some of my best friends from twenty years ago. They are gone.

As I sat thinking about it on New Years Eve I realized that there was no reason to feel sad about these things. We cannot keep all our old friends if we want to make new ones. We cannot remember all of our old experiences if we want the things we do today to burn brightly. We cannot learn if we do not make bad decisions and learn from them.

In that one moment of introspection I was able to completely change my relationship with the past. There are things I would have done differently to be sure. But I don't feel sad about it any more. I was able to lay back right there and then, just like my uncle described, and remember as many details as I could of some of the events in my life. It was quite enjoyable. I quickly realized that as I spent time remembering something the memories started to sharpen and all sorts of details I had completely forgotten would come back.

I have come to grips with the idea of the past. What happened yesterday, or a year ago, or a decade ago, is gone. It can never come back. It cannot be relived in the same way, if at all. But that is OK, because if we go through life gathering good experiences and memories, we will build a treasure trove of places and experiences that we will always be able to wander through.

The Cape Town Trance Music Scene

2008-12-17T03:42:00.000-08:00

We've settled into a new apartment in Cape Town closer to the beach and in a better area. It was a bit of a nightmare because the previous tenants owned a dog. They locked the poor thing up all day and it peed all over the house. Then they stopped paying rent.

When we moved into the apartment it smelled of dog pee, had no hot water and had bad leaks in the kitchen. Most of the first week was spent waiting for various trades people. On top of that they lady who owns the apartment lives in the UK and compensated for the distace with, to put it kindly, great attention to detail. We had to do a complete inventory of the contents down to the number of cheap plastic shot-glasses in the cupboards. The lease agreement was 20 pages long. We were then expected to pay an administration fee for the labor in doing this inventory!

As home owners ourselves we were as sympathetic as we could be. We didn't pay the administration fee given how much time we took to meet all the trades people, but we tried to be as helpful as possible, and to the owners credit she got right onto getting all the problems fixed. We now have new carpets and are enjoying a great apartment close to the beach. We no longer have to burn incense around the clock.

From our new home we finally started connecting to the cool stuff in Cape Town a bit. Down the street from us is a Psy-Trance pizza shop which is just one of the many facets of the incredibly
active Trance Music scene here. For those people who don't know what trance music is, it is basically a form of electronic music commonly associated with all night dance parties. If you haven't been to an all night dance party, you've probably never heard the music. It isn't something you will typically hear on the radio.

In Calgary the Trance music scene is limited to maybe a half-dozen parties a year, most of which are private or semi-private events held for a few hundred people. I've always enjoyed going to these parties as I love the music and I can dance until my legs fall off. In Cape Town the scene if far bigger. There are at least 3 clubs which have weekly trance nights with visiting DJs. On top of this there are outdoor parties almost every weekend for 8 months of the year, each of which can draw thousands of people. Most of the parties feature a host of artists from all over the world. The parties are held in private venues like farms and forest preservers and many of them have rivers to swim in and places to camp. We went to our first party last weekend and really enjoyed it. On New Years we are going to a 3 day party in the winelands that has hot showers and a dam to swim in.

Another really nice thing about the parties here is that because they are private events law enforcement generally keeps a low profile. Certainly there are many people who take drugs at these parties, and I can't argue that some of them are potentially harming themselves. Yet I've never seen any evidence that the drug taking at music parties is any more harmful than the consumption of alcohol in any western city on a Friday night. The South African police for the most part seem to agree and they let people have fun as long as they don't cause problems.

By comparison, a few years ago I was at a party in Vancouver with some friends when the police showed up at 2 AM and kicked everyone out. In Vancouver it is (was?) illegal to dance after 2AM, a rule which the city the nickname "The Land that Fun Forgot". I would personally question the wisdom of sending 200 highly inebriated people to their cars at 2 AM in the morning, but I guess that is why I'm not in law enforcement.

In Cape Town we danced through the night and had a great time. There was security there to help keep people safe but they weren't there to spoil the fun. Many people brought tents so that they could nap for a while the next day before heading home. I guess this is why Cape Town has a reputation as such a fun city. We've certainly enjoyed it so far!

Blame South Africa for the Tragedy in Zimbabwe

2008-12-10T02:31:00.000-08:00

One of the most amazing things about South Africa is just how multi-cultural it is. And I'm not just talking about the mixture of white and black and colored and indian people. When we talk to people on the streets we run into people from all over Africa. There are people from Ghana, DRC, Malawi, Namibia, and every other country you can name.

The saddest is the people from Zimbabwe. Zim (as they call it here in the papers) borders on South Africa and as Mugabe has systematically destroyed the country it has caused somewhat of a refuge crisis here. The cholera epidemic that has started with the rainy season, combined with the complete collapse of the Zimbabwe economy, has caused straving, sick refugees to flood across the borders. To their credit the South African government is trying their best to help them, although on an individual level life for the refugees is very hard.

The situation for Zimbabweans in South Africa is similar to that of imigrants all over the world. They are desperate and poor and therefor they are willing to do work that local people don't want to do, for salaries that local people wouldn't want to be paid. The result is that local people resent them and accuse them of stealing jobs. In South Africa this got to the point where imigrants were being burned alive on the streets in anti-immigration riots. I talked to one man who sells things to tourists down the road from here who said that he had lived in a township for years when the riots started and he had to flee when the local people came to burn down his house. He was lucky that he had savings in a bank and most of his supplies in storage but he says many of his friends lost everything they owned.

There can be little doubt now that there will be a tradgedy of enormous proportion in Zimbabwe this coming year. The economy has completely collapsed with the value of the currency falling by 50% every two hours last week. There is no food production, the water supply is contaminated with cholera, and the government has ceased to function. Solidiers were running rampant on the streets last week because they hadn't been paid and were trying to steal their salaries. Mugabe had a bunch of people randomly executed to restore order but it is unlikely to last as more people starve and die.

Much of the blame for the situation in Zimbabwe rests squarely on the shoulders of the South African government (the ANC). Sure, Mugabe is an evil bastard, but it is the ANC that has actively worked to keep him in power all these years. Every time Mugabe steals an election the ANC hails him as a great democrat and an example for Africa. Every time people attempt to bring Mugabe to justice or suggest pressuring him to leave, the ANC blocks the action and says they will stand by him. Post-apartheid South Africa had a strong start as a moderate country and a voice of freedom around the world. It is a real shame that only 15 years later these principles have been so completely forgotten that the ANC is willing to let millions of Zimbabweans continue to suffer.

Monkeys and Penguins

2008-11-29T08:20:00.000-08:00

We've decided to spend another two months in Cape Town. Lara is doing some volunteer work with a children's shelter to get an idea of the volunteer sector here and I'm playing around with writing a nove. On Monday we are moving to a new apartment close to the beach in a place called Sea Point. It's about 5 minutes from downtown Cape Town so it'll still be very central.

South African has been great so far but I haven't talked about any of our trips so I thought I'd tell you about two cute animal experiences we had.

A few weeks ago we went to a place called World of Birds which is a big animal rescue place on the Cape Peninsula. Almost all the animals at World of Birds are injured animals which couldn't be re-released, and one thing that makes it really nice is that you can often go right into the cages with them and see the up close. While I loved the owls and parrots and other birds the best experience by far was the monkeys. They have a big forested cage which is full of spider monkeys, and you can go in with them. The monkeys are about the size of a beer b

ottle and are very tame and will crawl all over you. They are also very clever so they stick their hands into your pockets, try to open zippers on backpacks, etc...

Lara is the big one in the middle

We hung around for a while and one of the volunteers showed us that she had some raisins. She gave the raisins to me and the monkeys went wild. I had about 15 of them on me, all of them trying to open my fist with their tiny little paws. It was very, very cute although the monkeys do have a habit of peeing on you from time to time and my shirt smelled a little ripe the next day.

The other really great place we went to was Boulder's Beach, which is one of the few on-shore nesting places for African Penguins. We knew we were in for a treat when we saw a sign that said “look out for Penguins under vehicles.” There were penguins everywhere on the beach although they were molting so they weren't in the water. The molting made them look very cute though because a lot of them had big clumps of fluffy winter feathers mixed with the sleeker summer feathers.

Lara admires a penguin on the beach.

The Penguins were so tame that we could just walk up and grab them if we wanted to, although we didn't because that would be bad form. Actually, penguins also have very big beaks that rip small fishes apart so I imagine they could do some pretty serious damage.

I have to say I do like the more interactive approach where you can get very close to the animals. I can appreciate the logic of zoos where they keep a real gap between the humans and the animals, but in World of Birds it seemed to me that the animals enjoyed having the people around. Birds, especially parrots and other clever social ones, get bored easily and having people close by can be very stimulating if they are tame enough not to be frightened.

After Apartheid

2008-11-27T22:54:00.000-08:00

When people think of South Africa often the first thing that comes to mind is apartheid. South Africa was certainly not unique in having racism as part of government policy. In the 1950s the United States was also deeply segregated, and first nations people in Canada live on reservations. The South African difference was one of scale; whites were outnumbered nearly ten to one.

South Africa remains a very racially divided country. Some of these divisions are voluntary. When we walk through Cape Town we see some restaurants and shops that are full of white people, and some that are full of black people. Bars work much the same way. Sometimes this is price related, but often it is cultural. Blacks do have a different culture and the choice of music and food in an establishment will change who that establishment appeals so. If somebody opened a dance club in Calgary that played Indian Rock videos and served Dahl it would get a very different audience than one that played rap music.

The bigger divisions are economic though. Since the end of Apartheid, the incomes of Indians have risen sharply and are now on par with those of whites. Black incomes however have seen little progress. So while whites can't send their kids to white only schools and live in white neighborhoods, they can certainly send their kids to expensive private schools and live in expensive neighborhoods. While some blacks have moved in they are still a tiny minority.

Initially there was hope that with blacks running the country conditions would improve rapidly. And while some things have gotten better, South Africa certainly hasn't turned into the tolerant multiracial democracy that many people had hoped for. While Nelson Mandela was a wonderful surprise, the current leadership of the ANC have been a profound disappointment. The post Mandela ANC has two main claims to fame: their unwavering support for unsavory dictators like Robert Mugabe who they hold up as a paragon of democracy, and destructive AIDS policies which blamed the disease on a white conspiracy rather than a virus.

What the ANC haven't done is make any progress in tackling the vast underemployment of the black population. Some of the attempts have actually been counter productive. Affirmative action programs have removed many qualified whites from their jobs and replaced them with blacks. Unfortunately, many of the whites were highly-educated and experienced professionals while, to be blunt, many of the replacements aren't. The result has been catastrophic on two levels. First of all huge numbers of educated whites are fleeing the country because they have trouble getting jobs in the current climate. Nearly everyone we talk to has family living overseas. Secondly, lots of jobs are now filled by people who are under-qualified, with enormous consequences to how well things run.

For all the problems though, South Africa would be unrecognizable to somebody who lived here under the apartheid days. Racial mixing is unusual on a close friendship level, but most white people now work with black people, live near at least some black neighbors, and have at least some black children in their schools. There is also a palpable sense that the blacks are in charge and that, for better or for worse, it is them who will determine the fate of South Africa.

Ending Apartheid was the easy step for South Africa compared to what will come ahead. Two hundred years ago power was found only at the point of a spear. Even today tribal hatreds run deep and people here don't see themselves as black or white, they see themselves as Zulu or Xhosa. The problem is that democratic governments cannot function properly in such an environment. As long as people identify more strongly with their tribe than with their neighbors then power in politics lies in appealing to old tribal hatreds. Canadian politics actually suffers a version of this problem; our federal politics is hamstrung by the presence of a separatist party chosen unfailingly by our French-speaking tribe.

For South Africa to flourish people must put aside their tribal hatreds and choose a government based on its ability to rule. Mandela recognized this. Unfortunately the current ANC government has recognized that as long as the tribal divisions exist there will be no threat to them. There are few governments that have the integrity to pursue policies that would result in them eventually losing power. The flame of democracy in South Africa has nearly burned out.

Safety in South Africa

2008-11-19T05:19:00.001-08:00

Undoubtedly the biggest concern most people have about traveling in South Africa is the security situation. South Africa has one of the highest rape and murder rates in the world, and everyone has heard the stories of daylight car-jacking on the streets of Johannesburg. After the safe and friendly countries of Central Asia, Lara and I were more than a little intimidated at the thoughts of spending every waking moment in fear of our lives.

The reality of course is far different than what you read in the media. In most ways the South African security situation is every bit as bad as it has been made out to be. Even here in Cape Town, arguably one of the safest parts of the whole country, most people live behind electric fences and alarm systems. At night the streets are strangely silent. There are a few streets where there is active night-life; security is provided by dozens of police in reflective yellow jackets. But you go there and back in a taxi, even if you live nearby. Many people won't even drive there because they would have to park in the surrounding neighborhoods and walk back to their cars in the dark.

South Africans we talk to are no more reassuring. We were warned to keep the doors of our car locked, to not go hiking alone, and to stay away from quiet streets, even in daylight. It seems everyone has a story of being robbed at gun-point or carjacked. One woman we talked to had been raped; a masked man grabbed her as she put he keys in the front door of her own house in a good neighborhood.

Yet, although we are constantly aware, these things somehow fade into the background. People still go about their lives. We still go walking downtown in the daytime. We still go to the video store after dinner. We still go hiking in the mountains. We are alert, but we do not live in constant fear.

But that is not to say that there is no impact. It is strangely oppressive to sit in our apartment at night, looking down on the city six stories below and feeling afraid to walk in the streets. After the open friendliness of the people of Central Asia it saddens us to be on constant alert, aware that anyone who comes up to talk to us may be a distraction for a bag snatcher or a pick-pocket. South Africa is a beautiful country that is well worth visiting. Most tourists have little to fear from the security situation; hotels, parks, and other tourist hot spots generally have good security. Yet I don't know that I could live here, imprisoned in my own house by an electric fence, and feeling a small joint of fear every time somebody walks past my car at an intersection.

Fear and Loathing in the Used Car Lot

2008-11-12T05:33:00.000-08:00

Few things in life cause me more anxiety than buying a used vehicle. I've had several bad experiences. Used vehicles are expensive and unpredictable and I've heard the horror stories about people who drove a vehicle off the lot only to have it fall apart at the next corner. And since I know nothing about cars I'm entirely at the mercy of the dealers. Buying a car in South Africa was the last thing I wanted to do. It was also the first thing we needed to do. South Africa isn't a place that can be visited by bus, and renting a car for six months was not an option.
We started our used car shopping with the name of dealer. It had been given to me by some South Africans I met in a pub and seemed as good a starting point as any. Lara and I hopped in cab to throw ourselves at their mercy.

“My parents in law have a car for sale,” said the cab driver. “It's an Opel Corsa. 100,000KM. If you want I can phone them and we can go to take a look at it. It's only thirty thousand rand ($3000 dollars).”

He made a couple of phone calls and a few minutes later we had stopped at a grocery store to pick up his in-laws..

“Is it far?” I asked nervously, eying the still-ticking meter.

“Only 15 km, don't worry. You'll be safe. Foreigners always think we are going to rob them.”
About 25km later we pulled into a small house and Lara did a test drive of the vehicle. It seemed OK but it was small and cheaply made. We decided to continue shopping and the cab driver took us back towards town. We went down Voortrekker road, a busy street studded with used-car dealerships. We had an address mix up and couldn't find the dealership we were heading for so we took a chance and stepped out at a random dealership. We paid the whopping cab fare.
“I've got just the vehicle for you” said the helpful young man. “It's a Toyota Camry. 3.0L motor. Lots of power. Whatever you do, don't buy a vehicle privately. Too many crooks. It could be stolen and you'd never know until you went to sell it. And if you mess up the paperwork you'll have all sorts of problems later.”

We took the Camry for a test drive. “Isn't it supposed to accelerate when I put the pedal to the floor?”, asked Lara.

“We've got a 4 wheel drive station wagon coming in tomorrow. I think that would be perfect for you. Come here early and you can go for a test drive.”

The next day we rented a car so that we could continue our shopping without taxis, and we drove off to the dealership that had been recommended to us. Unfortunately it was more high-end than what we were looking for. We were still debating whether to spend more for a better vehicle and risk losing a lot in the resale, or buying something cheap that might give us all sorts of problems. Unfortunately this dealer was completely outside of our price range, and not to friendly to top it off.

We went back to the first dealership to test drive the station wagon.

“That's it over there. Just sold it. You should have been here earlier. But I've got a Volvo coming in tomorrow. That'll be great for you! It's exactly what you need.”

The next dealership was Xenith motors. It specialized in older vehicles. “We sell to lots of foreigners” the gregarious owner assured us. “We'll even buy it back from you in six months, though of course not for what you paid. We are a business after all. And if anything goes wrong you can always call us. We rely on repeat business. You can trust us.”

We told him about the Volvo.

“Nobody buys Volvos. Impossible to get parts. No wonder they are trying to sell it to you. You want a cheap, common car with a small engine so that it gets good gas mileage. Like this Honda over here.”

“The Honda probably isn't a very good choice” said the next dealer. “If you are going to Namibia the only common vehicles are Volkswagon and Toyota. This Volkswagon over here is very nice and has very low mileage.”

We took it for a test drive and were amazed at how a vehicle with such low mileage could have such worn seats and pedals. The service history was conveniently missing. We continued our search.

“This one has had only a single owner. See the yellow license plates.” It drove great but the price was a little high. Still, if the dealer was willing to stand behind it and buy it back.

“If you give me a month's notice I might be able to find somebody to sell it to when you leave,” said the dealer. “It all depends on the market. I'm not promising anything.”

“It sounds very over-priced.” said the next dealer. “And you said it's green. Nobody buys green vehicles. And it's a big motor so it'll have no resale value. We have some great vehicles here but they might be a bit expensive for you. We can arrange a buyback if you like but the more expensive the vehicle the more you lose on the trade-in.” Their honesty was refreshing and the vehicles were beautiful. Too beautiful for me unfortunately. I couldn't see how these beautiful cars would survive driving through game parks and dirt roads for six months without some serious wear and tear.

Two days passed in a confusion of dealerships and conflicting advice. Just when we thought we had it figured out we'd find yet another option to consider. This one had fuel injection which was good. Or was it bad because it was hard to fix? The one thing almost all the dealers agreed on was that there were a lot of crooks out there who would rip us off. We were shown a number of times how to tell if a vehicle had been in an accident, and how to accurately assess the age.
In the end we went back to the Xenith motors and settled on an old VW for just over $3000.00. Of all the dealers we'd seen they had been the most welcoming and they seemed happy to buy the vehicle back from us when we left. The VW has very high mileage but it drove nicely. The only problem was a worrying pull to the left.

“Don't worry, I'll sort it out before you get it. We do a full service of all our vehicles. I want you to be happy. If anything goes wrong just call me.” We paid the deposit.

“It'll be ready in a few days. We've sold lots of vehicles this week and it takes a while to get them inspected and ready to go out.”

The next few days were agonizing. Had we made the right choice? It was cheap, but the mileage was very high. Maybe we should have bought a newer car, or a smaller one, or a whiter one, or a different model. Every time we passed a car dealer my eyes scanned the prices. Why was that 2001 Toyota so cheap compared to ours? By the time we returned we'd almost talked ourselves into abandoning our deposit and going shopping again.

“We'll take it for a test-drive before we pay the rest,” I reassured Lara. “If we aren't happy we'll just walk away. It's only a couple of hundred dollars.”

We did the registry paperwork in the morning and then waited in a shopping mall for most of the day while they finished the car. In South Africa all cars need a road-worthy inspection when they are sold. When we arrived back at the shop at 5 PM our car was still in pieces. They'd been having troubles with the brakes. It has passed inspection, we were told, but Michael felt the brakes weren't good enough and he wanted us to be happy.

“What about the pull to the left?”

“Don't worry about it”, he said. “I know these cars. It's just the tires. It's good now. You'll see.”
Finally the brakes were done but the shop was closing and we took it for a hurried test drive. “It seems good” said Lara worriedly. We paid the rest of the money and they closed the shop.
We drove off in our new car. We turned left onto Voortrekker road and drove three blocks to the freeway entrance. We turned right onto the freeway and accelerated.

Whump, whump, whump. WHUMP WHUMP WHUMP.

“What the hell is that?” said Lara.

The car was pulling badly to the left and the front end was making a sickening noise. We pulled over, but nothing was obviously wrong.

“We can't drive it like this.”

“We can't leave it here either.”

We drove slowly and made it home. If we only turned left it felt almost normal.

I didn't sleep much that night. All the horror stories about used cars floated in my head. We had only Michael's verbal assurance that we could trust him. Surely we had just been suckered. What better way to get rid of wreck then sell it to some stupid foreigners who couldn't tell the engine from the transmission.

It was a nerve-wracking weekend but fortunately the weather was nice and we were able to climb Table Mountain to take our minds of the car.

On Monday morning we hopped back into the car. It wouldn't start.

“Oh, wait a second.” said Lara. “It has a manual choke.”

She coaxed it to life and got it out onto the freeway. We drove noisily towards the dealership when the engine coughed and died. Lara pulled it over the the side of the road. The needle was on empty. In all the excitement we'd forgotten to fill up the gas. Lara went off for gas. I waited.
By the time we got to the dealership our nerves were shot. I bent down to look at the wheel one more time before we went in and my fingers instinctively probed the lug nuts. The nut turned in my hand. So did the other ones. The wheel was loose. They had forgotten to tighten the nuts after doing all the brake work.

Michael came out. “I wish you'd called me.” he said when he saw the problem. “This has happened before. One time the wheel came right off. Passed the guy on the highway. I keep telling the mechanic to double check but its hopeless.”

“It doesn't start very well either”, said Lara, still shaken.. She demonstrated.

“Oh, that's the choke. You only pull it half way out. If you pull it all the way out it floods the engine.” He demonstrated. It started flawlessly.

Our fears evaporated like the clouds pouring off Table Mountain behind us. Michael took us on a long test drive. “It's nice to be out of the shop for a while”, he said. “Our baby keeps us up all night. We get so little sleep.” The car still pulled a bit so he took us to an alignment place and negotiated a cheap price on a wheel alignment.

“It's a used car,” he said. “It's unpredictable. I can't see the future and I don't know what will go wrong, but if people are nice to me I'll try and help them out as much as I can. Just don't yell at me. If you have any more problems, just call me. Now follow me and I'll show you a place where you can get some great sausages for cheap.”

Used cars, like people, are unpredictable. We won't know until the end of our trip if we got lucky with our vehicle. We do know that we were fortunate with our choice of dealer. That's a big comfort.

Obama: The World Cheers

2008-11-06T07:44:00.000-08:00

On Wednesday night Lara and I got up at 3:00 AM South Africa time to watch history being made. From the country where Nelson Mandela was elected the first black president less than 20 years ago we got to see the United States experience its own Mandela moment. I could not have imagined what a big deal it was to see him win the presidency. It was electrifying.

It is hard for most North Americans to understand just how much impact this election will have on the rest of the world. In Central Asia we saw the enthusiasm the Muslim world has for Obama. In the 'stans there is a nearly universal belief that the war in Iraq is a war against Islam. I don't think any but the most naive Muslims believe that Obama will end the war overnight. But because of his color, and his background, they do believe that he will understand them better. And perhaps he will. After six months of travelling in the Muslim world we have an appreciation and understanding of Islam that we could never have gotten in North America. Obama's background gives us every reason to hope that he will have a wider world view than is typical of his countrymen.

In Africa the effect of his win has probably been even greater. Among white and black South Africans alike we found almost universal enthusiasm for Obama. In Kenya, birthplace of Obama's father, they have declared a national holiday to celebrate his election. In one stroke the American dream has been awoken again. Minorities the world over can look the America and see a land where somebody's abilities can transcend their skin color. America is once again the land where anything is possible. A billion disenfranchized people woke up yesterday with the knowledge that they live in a world where there is a hope for a better future for their children.

Pages of ink have been spilled describing the challenges that lie ahead and I won't go into them again. As the world has become more connected our problems have become more global. The housing crisis in America is putting blacks on the street in South Africa. A terrorist network in Afghanistan kills people in New York. The trees we cut down in Brazil will create a desert in China. The decisions we make in the next ten years will determine the future of our species.

The world needs a strong leader to pull us all together to fight these problems.

In Obama, for one magic moment, we have somebody who has that potential. Obama's miracle is that he represents the hopes and dreams not just of American's, but of everyone. To moderate Muslims he is somebody who will understand them. To the oppressed he represents hope. To the young he has brought an enthusiam for politics that we last saw in the 1960s.

The expectations are so high that Obama cannot possibly meet them all. Many of the things people believe Obama to be are contradictory. Yet two years ago, nobody would have thought it was possible for an unknown black senator from Illinois to defeat both the Clintons and the Republicans to become president of the United States. There is no doubt that Obama is a remarkable man. If he governs with the same intelligence and imagination that he has run his campaign we have every reason to be optimistic.

Arriving in South Africa

2008-11-02T05:27:00.000-08:00

We've been in South Africa a little over a week now. It's been pretty hectic so far. Lara got a bad stomach bug in Asia and by the time we arrived in Cape Town she was ready for the hospital. After a few days of travel and little sleep it wasn't the best way to arrive, especially since we didn't have any place to stay and we had heard all the safety warnings about not wandering around at night.

Luckily there was a tourist information center in the airport and I booked a reasonably priced hotel from them. Then we took a cab straight to a emergency where the nice English-speaking doctors took Lara away from me for a couple of days. It was actually the first time we've really been apart in many months, which would have been nice under other circumstances. I spent my first few nights in South Africa in a colorful, run-down hotel called the Kimberly all by myself, wishing that Lara could be there to enjoy the old tin ceilings and colorful pub downstairs. Lara spent it wondering if she could make the bathroom in time with an IV strapped to her arm.

Lara got a bunch of anti-biotics and tests but nothing conclusive came up so after two nights the hospital let her go. She spent a few more days in bed at the hotel. I spent some of the time hunting for a place to say since we wanted to rent an apartment for a while. After seeing some pretty nice little places that weren't quite right I was lucky enough to meet some people in the hotel pub and we lucked in a wonderful high-end apartment right in the downtown for about US$700 per month. Apparently it rents for many times more but somebody cancelled at the last minute and as they had paid a deposit that already covered much of the rent the manager was happy to rent it to us for a bit of a discount. It has two bedrooms, a full kitchen, laundry facilities, two baths, satellite TV, and a fantastic view of Table Mountain from the sixth floor balcony. It's within walking distance of everything. It was wonderful to rest after all the travelling. The first few days Lara was still not feeling well and we just rented lots of videos.

Now we are looking for a car. South Africa doesn't have good public transport, and renting for six months is a little pricey. Unfortunately buying hasn't been as easy as we'd like. We've found all the things we want, but not in one package.

Buying a used-car is classic trade-off. If we buy a $1000.00 vehicle we can pretty much walk away from it at the end of the trip and still be happy. Unfortunately we might spend most of our time repairing some old piece of junk. At the other end of the scale we can spend $10,000 on something in good shape, but we are unlikely to be able to get our money back out, and even if we did we might have to spend quite a bit of time selling it. Not the type of thing we want to cram into a vacation.

We've found some used car dealers who will contract to buy back a vehicle from us for about $1000.00 less than we pay for it. Unfortunately they don't carry the vehicles we want. We are looking for a Toyota or VW because we want to go to Namibia and those cars have the widest availability of parts. We found a great VW at another dealer, but it is a little pricey and he doesn't seem very interested in helping us out if we want to sell it back to him.

Cape Town is great city though, and we are really enjoying spending some time here with a flat to go back to. Lara will be hunting for some volunteer work, and I have some things I'd like to try too. If we can find a posting in Cape Town we will probably spend 3 months or so here. Otherwise we'll move wherever the work is. Either way, the adventure will continue.

Goodbye Central Asia

2008-10-23T09:39:00.000-07:00

Six months in Central Asia, gone in a flash. Amazing. Spectacular. Inspiring. Humbling. I can't think of enough good things to say.

"Are the Stans worth it?" That was the question that the Lonely Planet posted on their discussion forum a few months ago. Most people felt that they weren't, and I can sympathize. It was some of the hardest travelling I've ever done. Almost nobody speaks English and it is endlessly frustrating to never be able to communicate. Visas are a never-ending nightmare of red tape and changing rules. Any trip in a taxi involves almost certain "robbery" by the taxi sharks who try to rip off foreigners with outrageous prices. The food is some of the worst we've ever had.

Yet for us the Stans are the most amazing travel experience we have ever had. I would recommend them to anyone who like adventure travel in out of the way places.

Central Asia has some of the nicest people in the world. It is amazing how many Central Asians will invite you into their homes, feed you, and give you a place to sleep without expecting a thing in return. From shop keepers to hotel owners to people we me on the street, we were constantly made to feel welcome.

Central Asia has some of the best historic sites in the world. The cities of Uzbekistan are amazing. Samarkand just celebrated it's 2750th anniversary. Everywhere you look there is an old fort or an ancient shrine. In Tajikistan we saw Bronze age cave paintings and silk road forts. In Uzbekistan we saw some of the most beautiful buildings people have ever created.

Central Asia has some of the most spectacular mountains in the world. The Tian Shan in Kyrgyzstan and the Pamirs and Fan mountains in Tajikistan are nothing short of incredible. These are some of the highest mountains in the world and I've never seen anything like them. Until you've seen it you can't imagine what it is like to be at the base of a 2500m high vertical face that is covered with ice and has the wind whipping a plume of snow off it's summit.

Central Asia has some of the best lakes in the world. Song Kol in Kyrgyzstan is a little slice of heaven, a blue pearl surrounded by lush grasslands and beautiful peaks. Issyl Kol is a weird an wonderful vacation spot, full of Russian tourists swimming in the reflection of the glaciers that surround the lake. And the lakes in Tajikistan are like nothing I've ever seen. When you first see Karakul lake in the Pamirs it is like seeing a new color you didn't know existed. How could water look like this? How could water even exist in this landscape?

Central Asia is one of the biggest travel adventures that remains. There are whole cities that aren't in any guidebooks. There are whole valleys where no tourist has ever trekked. There are ridges nobody has ever climbed. There are ancient ruins that nobody has ever studied. And through it all there are a warm and welcoming people who will go out of their way to help you.

Yes, it was worth it!

A Good Day in Uzbekistan

2008-10-23T09:07:00.000-07:00

We had many great experience in Uzbekistan and it would be hard (and dull for readers) to describe them all in detail. Instead, I'm going to describe one wonderful day to give a sense of what this quirky little country is like.

Lara and I decided that we wanted to catch a Sunday market at a little town near Samarkand that was described in our guidebook. We woke up and had a breakfast of freshly-baked bread, tea, jam, cheese, and oatmeal at our B&B and then walked 20 minutes to the Registan shared-taxi stand. We easily found a van that was going where we wanted and after a few minutes of waiting it filled with passengers and departed. It cost $1.00 each for the 90 minute drive.

Most of the passengers were muslim women wearing their colorful dresses and headscarves. The lady ahead of us had a beautiful daughter in a pink dress. She was about six years old and kept smiling and sticking her tongue out at me. In Uzbekistan you can still look at people's children and even talk to them and play with them without everyone thinking you are a pedophile!

We arrived at the market and were blown away by the scale of it. It was a teeming mix of fruit, clothing, food vendors, textiles, brooms, coal, carpets, nails, and any other thing you can imagine. We saw maybe 4 other tourists there in the entire day. Everyone was dressed in their traditional clothing, except that for them it wasn't traditional clothing. It is simply what they wear every day to go about their business: Uzbek hats and often suits for men, colorful "pajamas" for the women.

Everyone wanted to talk to us. People gave us samples of different foods to try. Everyone wanted to know where we were from and how we liked Uzbekistan. Nobody was at all pushy or rude. "Welcome to my country" was what we were told both by people's actions, and a few times in those very words.

The market had a huge selection of old textiles although we decided not to buy any in the end because we didn't find anything that really struck us. The craftsmanship of the local weavers is incredible, but Lara and I just couldn't decide on a pattern that we both loved.

Several people wanted to practice their English with us, and we gave one young man some advice on what he needed to do to work abroad ( a common question). Then a youth with fairly decent English came up to us and offered to take us to a nearby old mosque.

We accepted the offer and he and a friend hopped in a bus with us and drove to the edge of town, from where we walked uphill for about 20 minutes to a lovely old Mosque. It was in a park of 1000 year old trees which line a small river that came out of natural spring. Two old men in white beards were sitting in front of the Mosque. One of the trees had such big roots that you could pay $1.00 to sit in a little room that had been built underneath it.

We walked to the source of the spring, a pool of incredibly clear water filled with fish. A group of girls were playing there when we arrived and they all wanted to have their photos taken. When we walked back into town the kids insisted on buying us an ice-cream (an example of how the hospitality can really get crazy here). Then they helped us find a shared taxi and we drove back to Samarkand.

We went for dinner at a nice little BBQ place near a flower market. I actually considered buying a flower for Lara but thought it logical not to buy one since she would have to carry it around all evening. Apparently logic isn't called for on these occasions as Lara kindly explained to me afterwards. The flower vendors know this apparently. When we walked back out of the market we stopped to smell the flowers and one of the vendors gave her one. Luckily I was better looking!

To finish the night we went for a beer a little pub where we had met a local business owner last time we were in town. He didn't speak any English but we (Lara) managed to communicate incredibly well with a paper, pencil and sign language. He has just finished planning an English menu and we proof-read it for him. It was pretty good for having been done using the Internet. (In China by contrast we were offered "Flesh" and "Baked hairtail" on one train menu). We fixed a few minor mistakes and gave him some suggestions to help attract tourists.

He insisted on paying for our beers.

We walked back in the dark, feeling very safe even though we were in a big city and obviously had lots of money. All in all, a good day in Uzbekistan.

How to Visit Uzbekistan

2008-10-23T08:59:00.000-07:00

Uzbekistan is a very touristy place, even if you've never heard of it. This year it got about 1.5 million tourists, most of them French of German, and 99.9% of them on package tours. As a matter of fact, the government so heavily promotes the idea of the package tour that is pretty hard to visit the country independently. We had to get a letter of invitation to get a visa, and that will only be issued with help from an Uzbekistan travel agency. Of course most of those travel agencies want you to book a tour with them, but there are a few (notably Stantours) who cater to backpackers.

Travelling independently is a wonderful way to see the country. The Uzbeks are warm, funny, and lively people, but it is hard to see this if you are in a group of 20. There were many times where we were chatting with a shopkeeper only to see him totally change as a big guided group swept in and out.

The other advantage of travelling independently is that the tour groups travel a very well-worn trail. As soon as you get off it you experience a side of Uzbekistan almost nobody sees. We often got invited to stay with people and join them for tea simply by being away from the tourist hordes.

The Uzbeks are wonderful people and if you like old stuff there is a lot of stuff to see in Uzbekistan. Ditch the guide and do it by yourself! The country has a great rail system and lots of English speakers in the tourist industry and is by far the easiest Central Asian country to travel in. It's well worth three weeks.

Three Magic Cities

2008-10-23T08:32:00.000-07:00

We spent a little over 3 weeks in Uzbekistan and saw most of the main sights. The main attractions are the ancient silk road cities of Khiva, Buhkara, and Samarkand.

The first of these that we visited was Khiva. We went here after the Savitsky Museum in Moynaq in a shared taxi. Khiva is a breathtaking place. It is a world heritage site and the inner city is essentially an open air museum which is little changed from the way it was 100 years ago. The inner city is surrounded by it's original mud fortification walls; walls that until 100 years ago were still repelling invaders and keeping people safe. There is little stone in the area so all the buildings are made of mud or baked clay.

The main attraction in Khiva is the numerous minarets (towers) which poke out from everywhere, as well as a couple of wonderful medrassas (religious schools) which date back as far as 1200 AD. When you walk around the streets the tour groups vanish and you can try to imagine what it was like 200 years ago when this place was ruled by ferocious warlords.

We spent about 5 days in Khiva soaking up the atmosphere. One of those days was spent doing a side-trip to visit some ruined forts in the surrounding country side. We hired a car with Shane (our Australian friend) and took a tour to 5 different forts in various stages of ruin ranging from little more than eroded mud walls to a few somewhat better restored sights. The ruins themselves were not that interesting but they were breathtaking in their scale and age. Whole walled cities with thousands of people dotted this area 2000 years ago and now we know almost nothing of the people who lived there. Kings who created huge walled fortresses and ruled huge areas of land have vanished so completely that even their names are forgotten. All that remains is mud walls and the outlines of the extensive irrigation system that was turning the desert into fertile farmland before Jesus walked the earth.

From Khiva we went to Bukhara which was our favorite city. Bukhara also has a very compact historical core, but it is a bit more spread out and we really enjoyed the laid back feel of the place. In Bukhara the main attraction is dozens of medrassas, all studded with blue tile mosiacs. The Uzbekistan government has been criticized for overdoing some of their restoration efforts and many of the building feel a bit too new, but overall we were very impressed by the architecture. Many of the buildings date back to just after when Ghengiz Khan razed the city to the ground. The exception is the Talon Minaret, a tower 1000 years old that so astounded Khan that he ordered it spared. It apparently survived until the early 1900s without any restoration work before the Russians bombed it and put a bunch of holes in. Luckily it didn't fall down and they fixed it up very nicely.

In Uzbekistan the government rents out space in a lot of the tourist sites to vendors who sell all range of wonderful crafts from textiles to pottery to carving. The quality of work here is really quite amazing and I'd have to say that I've probably seen the best pottery, carving, textiles, and metal working of my life in the markets here. Many of the pieces belong in museums and it was a lot of fun to shop for them although they sometimes distract a little from the buildings that house them. Still, many of the buildings are themselves ancient bazaars and it lends them life. The vendors are also pretty mellow on the whole.

Our hotel was very close to the center of town where there is a 500 year old pool surrounded by trees that were planted the same time. There are a couple of very reasonable restaurants around the pool and we had a number of meals there.

Our final stop was Samarkand, which we had already spent a few days at on the way in. 150 years ago few westerners had seen it and , although it was an important stop in the silk road. Now we could get there in 3.5 hours on an express train.

Unlike Khiva and Bukhara, there is no big concentration of sites in Samarkand. The sites that there are though rival anything in the world in their scale and beauty. The best known site is the Registan, a set of three six hundred year old medrassas that are lavishly decorated with tiles and paints. The restoration work is excellent and it is breathtaking to imagine what the ancient city must have looked like before it was wrapped in modern Russian suburbs.

We spent a few days in Samarkand and then headed to Tashkent, the laid back and pleasant capital. The best thing in Tashkent is probably the subway system. The stations are beautifully decorated, each one a unique work of art and architecture. On had tilework on the ceiling reminiscent of some of the old mosques. Another series of stations had beautiful pillars and really nice wrought iron lamps hanging from the ceiling. The subway would make a great photo art book if it weren't for the fact the for some unexplicable reason it is illegal to take photos!

How We Lost Afghanistan

2008-10-18T07:26:00.000-07:00

The war in Afghanistan is lost. The generals won't admit it yet, but nobody would expect them to. As long as their are still troops in the country it would be irresponsible to declare their task to be hopeless. The politicians won't admit it either. But nobody would expect them to. They've made great promises that this was a war we were going to win. We were going to bring stability and democracy to a country that has seen nothing but war for a thousand years. It was going to be shining victory for the forces of light.

Everyone knows that the south of Afghanistan has been a problem almost since the invastion. The optimists however, pointed to Kabul and the north. Girls were being educated for the first time in a generation, the economy was growing, and the security situation was pretty decent. A year ago some NGO workers were actually camping in the countryside in the north. Those days are past. NGOs have now banned all travel between cities in the north except with armed escorts. Many workers aren't even allowed to leave their guarded compounds to buy groceries except in a private car with an armed driver.

The reconstruction effort in the north is a complete shambles. A friend of ours who just returned from Afghanistan says that the security situation is so bad that the road building program just simply stopped. There is simply nobody who will build a road any more. For any price.

Around Kabul the situation is even worse. The only place that is still safe for foreigners is Chicken Street with it's armed perimiter and metal detectors. The hills around Kabul are all controlled by the Taliban now. Recently bandits attacked and killed a bunch of police officers just outside town. When the bigwigs arrived to investigate a car bomb went off and killed even more. The insurgents are getting more sophisticated, and the Afghan police don't have the training or staff to do anything about it.

If it was just security though, there would still be hope. An Iraq-style "surge" might restore stability and win the day. But the real loss is the hearts of the Afghan people.

To understand what is happening in Afghanistan today, one must understand it's history. Afghanistan is cursed with a geography that makes it at once isolated and at the same time strategically important. It is at the crossroads of Asia- the logical path from India to Russia and from Iran to China. Yet at the same time it is isolated by impenitrable mountain ranges and terrible deserts. This geography makes it a hard country to control. So Afghanistan has spent the last thousand years at war, overrun by one army after another, only to beat them back when their supply lines crumbled or they got too complacent.

In the 1800s Afghanistan featured as the center piece of the "Great Game", the battle between England and Russia for the control of Central Asia. The Russians encroached on neighboring states, capturing most of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan through a series of small advances. The British, worried that the encroachment would continue invaded Afghanistan twice to their great cost, before deciding it was better to support friendly warlords instead. In the late 1800s and early 1900s the British and Russians defined the boundaries that make up modern Afghanistan. The Afghan's weren't even consulted in the process. Afghanistan was simply a convenient buffer state to keep the two great empires apart.

Afghanistan was then forgotten. It languished under tribal warfare and terrible leadership until communists took control in the 1970s. At their "invitation" the Russian army invaded, and the seeds of today's problems were sowed. The United States started a proxy war against the Russians, mainly by providing money to Pakistan's Intelligence Services so that they could train and arm fighters. The Pakistanis however, had their own interests in mind, and funded a variety of competing warlords and unsavory characters including Osama bin Laden. The Russian army was no match for suicidal mountain men armed with modern American weaponry, and they pulled out at the end of the 1980s.

Afghanistan was abandoned.

A terrible civil war broke out, but the United States, who had laid the seeds for the war by funding all the competing groups no longer had any interest in Afghanistan. The world forgot about Afghanistan. The fighting was so fierce that Kabul was destroyed. There wasn't a building left standing. Millions of refugees poured across the borders.

Into this chaos came the Taliban. Their strict Islamic law wasn't particularly popular, but they were well led and they provided peace (at the point of a gun). The Taliban ended the fighting, as well as education for women, music, playing of games, television, movies, the arts, books, and any teaching not related to the Koran.

Nobody cared though, until September 11th, 2001.

A few months later the Taliban had fled to the hills and an international security force was promising peace and prosperity to Afghanistan once again. The only problem was that they weren't prepared to deliver it. The United States somehow became convinced that the real problem was Iraq, and the attention of the world shifted. Much of the reconstruction money that was promised never arrived. Afghanistan has only received a fraction of the money per-capita that Rwanda has gotten for example.

There simply weren't enough troops to provide stability for the whole country. A weak central government was set up, but with no power to back it up it was largely a joke. Afghan's refer to their president as the "Major of Kabul". Most of the areas outside of Kabul fell under the control of warlords, drug lords, and other unsavory characters, and since the government was powerless, there was no choice but to work with these groups and bring them into the fold.

With one important exception.

The newly resurgent Taliban are once again a power to deal with. Nobody in Afghanistan likes the the Taliban (most Afghans say that even the terrible situation today is better than the Taliban rule). But the Taliban are motivated and unstopable. Their insurgency has made the country ungovernable and driven out most of the groups who could help rebuilt it. Girls are no longer being educated because teachers are afraid of being killed. Women are back under the Burkha. People live in fear.

President Karzai knew that he couldn't defeat the Taliban and tried to arrange a deal with them. No surprisingly this was vetoed by the United States. The unfortunate result was that a powerless government was left trying to control a lawless country where even the miltary can't travel safely.

There is no winning now. The Afghan people are fed up. Our friend said that anti-western sentiment is so high that a local man who was helping him couldn't find a single bus that would take him from Kunduz to Mazar-i-Sharif (both in the far north) because the drivers were too afraid to carry a westerner. A guard he talked to at one of his hotels said that his Afghan friends have become increasingly radicalized as they realized that all the western promises were empty.

The path forward is clear if not that pleasant. There is no winning in a situation like this. You can't bring peace when the population of the country is against you. If I were being elected to the Presidency of the United States I would increase the number of troops in the country in order to put pressure on the Taliban. Then I would work with the Afghan government to negotiate a ceasefire along the lines of what Pakistan has done with its tribal areas. The Taliban could get autonomy in the South on the condition that they end the insurgency in the rest of the country. And maybe, just maybe, the rest of the country could be saved from another dark age. The Afghan people have suffered enough for fighting our wars.

***********
The information in this article comes from a number of sources including people who have been in Afghanistan a few weeks ago. I've tried to relate everything as well as I could, but as history is always written to support a point of view there are no doubt other interpretations of some of the events I describe.

The Savitsky Museum

2008-10-13T09:23:00.001-07:00

The Savitsky Art Museum is one of the more unlikely art museums on earth. It is in Nukus, Uzbekistan. If were possible to put the middle of nowhere on a map, Nukus would be a front-runner. Nukus is in the Kyzylkum desert, a day's drive from Tashkent (the capital) and far from any tourist attractions. We spent 18 hours on a train from Samarkand to get there. It would get no tourists except that it is a stopping point to go to the Aral Sea. And it has the Savitsky Museum.

Many people don't realize just how repressive the Soviet Regime was. The Soviets controlled almost every aspect of people's lives including the art. Stalin decided that art should not have western influences. Art should be realistic, and it's purpose should be to promote the ideal of socialism. Smiling happy workers were good. What most of us consider to be art was bad. Artists who voilated these rules were jailed, locked in mental institutions, or killed. Their works were destroyed.

Savitsky was a Russian painter, scientist, and archeologist who lived in Uzbekistan. He collected a vast array of clothing and jewelery from the area. He also did a lot of archeological work. As a result the Savitsky museum has an excellent collection of costumes and other ethnographic exhibits, as well as some great archeological stuff.

The museum is famous for another reason though. Savitsky decided to try to save some of the art which Stalin's regime had banned. With the help of supportive local authorities, and at great personal risk, he collected over 90,000 paintings, prints, sketches, and other questionable works of art. His focus was on little known artists, and he often bought hundreds of paintings by the same person. Many of these works would have been lost forever if not for his bravery.

Times have changed and Savitsky's work is now housed in a lovely museum. For $18.00 three of us got admission and a three hour tour with an English-speaking guide. We saw lots of examples of local art, and some of the best pieces from the vast Russian collection. Because there are so many works of art in the museum there is a rotating exhibit which changes regularly. Unfortunately (in my opinion) not enough space is given to the rotating exhibit. I found it much more interesting than all the costumes and pot fragments which you can see in many other museums. Still there are many great paintings and if you like art it is worth going to the museum for the story alone.

Ships in the Desert

2008-10-13T08:43:00.000-07:00

(Sorry for the lack of posts. Internet is really spotty here!)

Fifty years ago Moynaq, Uzbekistan was a thriving fishing village. It was situated on a peninsula at the edge of the Aral sea, and every day dozens of fishing boats filled their holds and brought their catch to the local cannery. The fish were cleaned and canned right in town and distributed throughout the Soviet Union.

Then Stalin came up with the idea that Uzbekistan would be a good place to grow cotton. There was only one problem. Uzbekistan is one of the driest places on earth and cotton requires a lot of water. The two main rivers leading to the Aral sea were diverted into thousands of cotton fields and Uzbekistan became the world's second largest cotton producer. And the rivers no longer reached the sea.

The sea began to dry up.

Moynaq is now a living monument to the tremendous damage we can do to our planet. The rusted hulks of ships lay just outside of town in a canal that was dug in a desperate attempt to maintain a path for the water. It wasn't enough. The sea is now hundreds of kilometers away. What is left of the Aral sea has become so concertated that there is nothing alive to fish for anyway. And it continues to shrink. From Moynaq all you can see is a parched desert of dunes and low shrubs. Beetles make their home in piles of tiny shells.

With the sea gone the real environmental disaster has begun. There is nothing to protect the former seabed from erosion, so every year the winds blow millions of tons of salt into the air and onto the neighboring farmland. As the sea shrinks in one direction and ever widening ring of blighted lands spreads in another.

Lara and I hired a car to take us to Moynaq because we felt we had to see it for ourselves. At the edge of town is a sign with a big fish on it. You can go past the old fish canning plant although the locals don't like you to take pictures. I guess it is hard enough to live in a place like this without all the tourists coming to gawk at your misfortune. And you can experience the ships. You can climb in their rusting shells, stand on their decks, and protect yourself from the blazing sun and blowing sand in their shade.

Moqnaq is a terrible place. There is no future for the people. No agriculture, no running water (it is brought in by truck). It is an environmental version of Auschwitz. And like Auschwitz we haven't learned our lessons. We saw what happened in poland and yet we allowed Rwanda, Somalia, and Cambodia. And we've seen what happened in the Aral sea, and yet we allow the destruction of the Amazon, the poisoning of the ocean, and the modification of our very climate.

Sometimes it is hard to be optimistic about our future.

Uzbekistan Money

2008-10-01T08:30:00.000-07:00

The currency in Uzbekistan is the Som and it is our first real experience with runaway inflation.

The biggest note you can get is 1000 Som, which works out to about 75 cents.

When we changed $200.00 into Som this morning we ended up with a stack of bills the thickness of the yellow pages. We have to carry our money around in a backpack since there is no way it will fit into a money belt.

Vanishing Pedestrians

2008-10-01T08:20:00.000-07:00

(This happened about 10 days ago, but it is worth repeating)

We were walking down the main North-South street in Dushanbe in the middle afternoon. The street is broad and treelined and has a nice smooth sidewalk on both sides. There are lots of pedestrians.

Suddenly we heard a scream and turned to see a lady's head and shoulders sticking out from the ground. She had stepped on a loose manhole cover, which had pivoted and dropped her into the ground.

The moment was so slapstick that we didn't know whether to laugh or be horrified. Fortunately she was OK, but both Lara and I step carefully over manholes now.

Washing Clothes

2008-10-01T08:15:00.000-07:00

We checked into a nice guesthouse in Samarkand yesterday. My laundry was filthy so I asked for a bucket so I could wash it. Then I asked where I could get water, and where I should dump it when I was done. They looked at me like I was crazy and asked me to repeat the question.

Apparently there was running water in the room. And I could just dump the dirty water down the sink. It's been so long since we've been in a place that has a tap that I didn't even consider the possibility.

Uzbekistan

2008-09-29T06:52:00.000-07:00

We just arrived in Uzbekistan today. We got up at 6AM at our guest house in the Fan mountains, hit the museum at Panjikent, saw the ruined ancient city of Panjikent, crossed the border, and took a taxi to Samarkand. We are in a lovely guest house that costs twice what anything in Tajikistan did but apparently they get electricity for 24 hours a day, water comes out of the taps, the shower is warm, the staff speaks English, and the toilet is something you sit on instead of a couple of boards over a hole in the back yard.

We will be here for 2 days and then catch a train (we love trains) to Nukus in the far NW of the country. From there we may go to check out the ruined ships in the Aral Sea, before heading to the ancient silk road cities of Kiva, Bukhara, and then back to Samarkand. On October 22nd we catch a flight from Tashkent to Turkey and on to South Africa, where the second half of our adventure will begin.

As usual, the Internet sucks, so don't expect any photos. We tried to mail photos back from Tajikistan on CD for my mom, but it is illegal to mail CDs out of the country. Luckily you can take them over the border by hand:-)

The Fan Mountains

2008-09-29T06:30:00.001-07:00

Our Tajikistan Visa expired on September 29th so we had time for one last adventure before we left this wonderful country and headed to Uzbekistan. We decided to head north from Dushanbe to the Fan mountains which is a popular trekking destination according to the Lonely Planet.

The shared taxi from Dushanbe was relatively uneventful although after the mellowness of the Pamirs we weren't quite expecting the taxi driver frenzy that met us at the taxi station. We took a local taxi from out hotel and as we pulled up to the taxi stand drivers started converging at a full sprint from all directions. Drivers were literally trying to grab our bags out of our hands so that they could claim us for their taxis. Everyone was yelling at once; we were surrounded by a frenzied mob of taxi drivers all pushing and shoving and grabbing. Lara finally resorted to putting her hands over her ears and shouting at which point they quited down enough that we managed to pick a driver and depart almost immediately for a reasonable price.

The 200km drive to Panjikent took 12 hours mainly due to extensive construction delays. The Chinese government is apparently building roads in exchange for some trade concessions. Its quite the sight as all the crews are Chinese and they live in little tent villages along the roadway. Given the incredible infrastructure we saw in China I can see why the Chinese would use their own crews.

Our guest house in Panjikent was great. Neoskul, our helpful host gave us all the information we needed to do our trek. For the first time in our trip we could actually take public transport where we were going and the next morning we set off on an ancient bus and rattled up to Jakahoma (near Artush), the start of a 3 day trek into the Fan mountains. Neoskul had given us contact information for another guesthouse in Jakahoma and the owner met us as we got off the bus. He offered to rent us a donkey and donkey man for $25.00 a day to carry our packs, but we decided to do the hike unsupported. It can be a lot of work to have another person along as we feel we have to talk to them and it changes the experience.

From Jakahoma we hiked about 5 hours uphill (900m elevation gain) to an uneven rocky plateau studded with juniper trees. In the low spots of the plateau were a series of small lakes. On the south side rose a mountain the likes of which we have never seen. Although "only" 5500m high it had a 2km vertical cliff dotted with precariously perched hanging glaciers. The snowy top of the mountain was hidden in a seething cloud which occasionally parted to give us views of the most inaccessible looking summit I've seen. It was beautiful.

We camped by one of the lakes and got up early the next morning to do the next part of the hike. We had originally planned to backpack to Alauidin lakes and camp there but the distance was too great for us to complete the loop and return all the way to town the next day. Instead we decided to do the entire loop as a day trip without the packs so that we could travel more quickly.

We had been warned not to leave gear unattended so we decided to hide our packs as best we could. This was made a little bit more complicated because the local people were gathering firewood in the area, which meant they were randomly looking around under bushes for dead branches. I had just finished reading a spy novel though and in true Robert Ludlum style we hid our packs between some rocks, wrapped in a gray tarp, and covered with stones. Nobody was going to find them (including ourselves we feared) so we GPSed the location before we left.

The hike started as a brutal 900m ascent to a 3800m high pass. After a week in Dushanbe we had lost our tolerance for altitude and were exhausted by the time we hit the top of the pass. To make matters worse the weather was overcast and there was a howling wind. I was ready to turn back, my hands numb from the cold and my lungs aching from the altitude, but Lara had some enthusiasm and we spent a few minutes sheltered behind some rocks at the top of the pass deciding what to do. We decided we were there to hike, and we ventured out from our shelter into the howling wind and into a most amazing view of jagged peaks. The clouds had lifted for a minute to reveal a landscape of mountains so sharp and desolate that we really couldn't wrap our minds around them. I would describe them as snowy teeth, but no teeth are as sharp and jagged as these peaks. It was amazing.

Far below us lay the impossibly blue Alauidin lakes and we made a quick descent to the valley bottom where we were met by a dog of all things. There weren't any people around, but the dog was friendly and well fed so we assumed it belonged to someone. It decided to follow us and we went down the valley with the dog to find our return pass and complete our journey.

About 1km downhill from the lakes there was a serious of buildings that looked like an old climber's camp. A solitary old man was sitting outside in his robe and we asked him for directions and then hurried on our way. The dog seemed to know him, but continued with us as we did another brutal 900m ascent up a second pass. The clouds which had been spattering rain on us all day finally started to dissolve revealing another enormous peak behind us. We snapped several photos before the clouds broke even more to reveal that the impossibly sharp bit we thought was the summit actually had another pinnacle of rock on top of it. Wow!

We hit the top of our return pass at 5pm, by now thoroughly exhausted, only to find that instead of the lake we were expecting the trail skirted a wide alpine bowl to yet another pass. Across the valley the lower front ranges of the fan mountains were bathed in the evening light. They were not snowy like the center ranges, but their rocky desolation was no less beautiful. The dog didn't seem to care. It just wanted to follow us. I even threw stones towards it to scare it home, but I lacked the heart to do it properly and the dog only looked puzzled and then wagged it's tail.

At 5:30 we finally got to the top of the second pass. At this point we met two shepherds who were leading a large group of sheep out from the highlands for the winter. They had four dogs with them and our dog played with their dogs. That was the last we saw of it. We wondered if shepherd dogs simply move from flock to flock, themselves travelers in their little dog worlds.

The descent was bone jarring but the trail was excellent (as it had been all day). We got back to our tents about 30 minutes after dark by the light of our headlights, having covered 1900m of elevation and about 30km of distance. We felt pretty heroic but ate a handful of Ibuprofin each to head off pain!

The next day we had to return to town. We slept in and did a nice hike to the base of the big mountain before heading back down the way we came. The hike was pleasant and uneventful although our feet ached by the end of it. As we approached Jakahoma lots of local people came out of their fields to greet us. This may be a popular trekking destination but it hasn't affected the friendliness of the people. It was hard to make progress as every 100m another group of people would stop us to talk. One couple even sent their young daughter down with us to make sure we found the guest house. Lara had energy for it all however, and her Russian is also much better than mine since she talks to people more. I just collected the apples and walnuts that we were given.

We got to our guest house just before dark and enjoyed a cold shower, a warm soup, and smashed apples and peaches freshly fallen off the tree. It was one of the best hikes we have ever done.

The Civil War in Tajikistan

2008-09-23T07:19:00.000-07:00

As I've already said, Dushanbe is a lovely city. People are nice, the weather is great right now, and the streets are pleasant. At night there are lots of people about sitting in outdoor restaurants and enjoying the parks. There are even streetlights.

It's hard to believe that martial law ended here only a few years ago, and that 10 years ago the streets were controlled by armed gangs. I won't pretend to be an expert on local history and most of my information come from the Lonely Planet. It's an interesting story however, because it shows just how different the collapse of the Soviet Union looked from the other side.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was much more complex than many people in the west realize. We saw an old enemy vanquished. The Berlin wall came down; people who had never been able to travel to the west could now cross borders that had been closed for nearly 50 years. The world seemed a safer, kinder place.

But some countries didn't really want independence. The central asian countries didn't exist until Stalin invented them. As a result, the borders are a crazy jigsaw of lines on the map; lines which often serve arbitrary political purposes rather than grouping related peoples together.

Tajikistan has a section which is entirely enclosed in Kyrgyzstan. It exists because Stalin needed 1 million people to make an administrative unit and the original borders didn't have enough population. So Stalin just cut a populated bit out of Kyrgyzstan. Uzbekistan has two such chunks inside Kyrgzstan and a large Tajik population in the east. Kyrgystan has a large Uzbek population in the west, and the western part of the country is hard to even get to because the old Soviet roads run through the Uzbek and Tajik enclaves mentioned above. The eastern Pamirs in Tajikistan are mainly Kyrgyz speaking.

This isn't the recipe for stable countries with a strong sense of national unity although it worked OK when these countries were all welfare states controlled by mother Russia. When the Soviet Union collapsed however, the money was cut off and a power scramble ensued.

For the most part the former dictators won questionable elections and ran the countries as their personal piggy banks; some of them have been in power ever since. These countries are some of the most corrupt in the world; Tajikistan ranks below Zimbabwe according to Transparency International. Turkmenistan is described as the "North Korea of Central Asia". The recently deceased ruler named one of the months after himself, created a "Ministry of Fairness", and made a big golden statues of himself that continually rotates to face the sun.

In Tajikistan there was a horrible civil war when the Pamir area, which felt little connection to the rest of the country, tried for independence. The results were catastrophic. Apparently security forces went around Dushanbe and executed anyone with a Pamir ID card on the spot.

The war eventually ended and foreign donors flooded in to help rebuild the country. The Aga Khan foundation was probably the most influential; they rebuilt much of the infrastructure themselves and the the Aga Khan is revered in most of the Pamirs. Almost every house has a little picture of the Aga Khan on the wall.

It's neat to travel in a countries that are still so young. Central asia is shaking off it's Soviet roots and trying to find it's own identity, a process which has been hard and has led to lots of excesses. Yet these are also the most beautiful countries I have ever visited, and the people are the warmest and most hospitable that I have ever met. When I walk the streets and think of the war a decade ago I can see the progress. These countries are still inventing themselves. They have some incredible materials to work with.

Getting an Uzbekistan Visa in Dushanbe

2008-09-23T06:57:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest challenges in central asia continues to be the visas. Each country we've been to requires a visa and many of them have additional requirements.

To visit Tajikistan for example, you need a visa, which is theoretically possible by simply going to a Tajik embassy and waiting. To visit the Pamir area you also need a GBAO permit, which you can theoretically only get in the country. Finally, when you show up in the country you have to register with the KGB within 72 hours of arriving.

We got both a 45 day visa Tajikistan Visa and a GBAO permit in Bishkek simply by filling out a form and writing a brief letter saying why we wanted to visit the country. We've heard though that they subsequently changed their rules and now the Bishkek embassy requires a letter of invitation from a travel agency, doesn't give GBAO permits, and only issues 30 day visas. That would have totally messed up our trip as the main border crossing into Tajikistan is only possible with the GBAO permit.

Tajikistan is not the only country that does this nonsense. Kyrgyzstan has wisely got a policy of issuing visas in the airport (Tajikistan does this too). They also didn't require visas for CIS countries like the Czech republic. They changed the rules for this in July, the middle of the tourist season. We ran into a cyclist who had cycled all the way into the Pamirs only to find out the entry requirements had changed and he couldn't complete his trip because he now needed to go back to Dushanbe and wait a week for a Kyrgyz visa. Ridiculous.

Our next destination is Uzbekistan, and the Visa requirements for there are even more silly. Canadians need a letter of invitation from a travel agent in the country. This was quite a job to get because the only decent agency that does this doesn't accept any normal payment system. We tried to pay them with a bank transfer but my bank didn't recognize any of the routing numbers and said the money would likely just vanish into a puff of electrons. Instead I paid online which required a painful registration and confirmation with some weird online payment system. In the end we got our letters, a second copy of which were sent to the Uzbekistan consulate in Dushanbe.

We had heard horror stories about this embassy from other travellers. The consul has a reputation of being none to friendly and yelling at you if you can't speak Russian. And apparently all the forms are in Russian and Uzbek only and have no translation. As a result we decided to ask for a favor. We had made friends with a guy in Khorog and we asked his brother and a female friend to come with us to the embassy to help translate. It was probably a good thing we did.

We got to the embassy at 8:30 only to find out it didn't open until 9:00. We waited on a bench for a while and then clued in and turned the corner where a small crowd had gathered at a doorway. At about 9:25 the doorway opened and people stampeded in. An unhappy man stood on stairway, barked some stuff in Russian, and gathered a handful of out-thrust passports. Then he vanished.

Our friend fought his way up the stairts and into an office for us, and after a while we were invited inside a room where we were given some forms to fill out. With our translator this turned out to be relatively easy, and we soon handed the forms, a Visa photo, a copy of our letter, a copy of the first page of our passport, and our actual passport to an unhappy man behind the desk. We were told to wait outside. Our translators were quite stressed out by now and both agreed that the people in the office weren't about to win any hospitality awards.

About 30 minute later somebody yelled "Dwa Canadensaya" (or something similar) out of a window, and we went up to the office. We paid our money and we got our passport with a Visa. The whole process had only taken about 2 hours, but I'm sure that having a translator along helped a huge amount. I've heard from other people though that you can find the form online somewhere and print it out yourself so this may work too!

Lara's decision to print out a stack of about 50 visa photos on our computer at home has turned out to be a real time saver many times over. We've used them for China, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan (including the KGB registration) and Kyrgyzstan. It would be nearly impossible to get a passport photo done over here. Don't travel in central asia without a photocopies of your passport, lots of passport photos, and a healthy tolerance for ridiculous red tape.

Dushanbe

2008-09-23T06:36:00.000-07:00

(This article features improved use of capitals to make Rachel happy!)

We are out of the mountains and into the capital of Tajikistan, a pleasant and peaceful city of 600,000 called Dushanbe. It's probably one of the more pleasant big cities I have ever been in and it reminds me a lot of Oaxaca Mexico in terms of the overall feel (although there is really no other resemblence whatsoever).

We are staying at Hotel Vaksh, which at $35.00 a night is ludicrously overpriced. It's another run-down soviet monstrosity which has seen just the minimal amount of maintenance to allow it to keep customers. The carpets are worn, the lights flickers, the doors don't close properly, and there is no sink in the room so you have to brush your teeth in the standup showers. We actually moved out of our first room because the bed looked like somebody had butchered an animal on the mattress and the toilet didn't flush. Our new room is slightly better except the hot water tap has an annoying habit of coming off in your hands. Lara has an OK bed, but mine is roughly banana shaped so I'm sleeping on the floor on my thermarest.

The good part is that the hotel is brilliantly located across from a beautiful square which is full of life and fountains and surrounded by big trees and nice historical buildings. Five minutes down the road is a wonderful market where we can get grapes that were picked just hours ago and bread that is still warm to the touch. In the other direction is the main street in Dushanbe which has some high end shops and lots of parks and beautiful buildings. The street is broad and has a big pedestrian walkway down the middle. There are four sets of mature trees lining the whole street, two on the central walkway, and one on each sidewalk.

There are basically no tourists and a lot of people ask as where we are from or stop us to chat if they know a bit of english. Everyone is extremely friendly and laid back. Cars even stop for pedestrians which we first though was a trap based on our experiences with drivers elsewhere in central asia.

The parks are all pretty sparkling and all the lawns are freshly cut around the government buildings. We heard that this is mainly because there was a big conference between the central asian countries, Russia, and China that was held here in August. Apparently the paint was still drying in many areas when the leaders arrived, but for us the results are great and we love seeing all the lovely green spaces.

The biggest problem is probably the infrastructure, which is nearly medieval. Internet here is little better than dialup speed, and often stops completely for many minutes at a time. Uploading photos is simply not possible. The electricity goes out randomly in parts of the city and apparently last winter the whole country was without power for several months. The government claims things will be bad again this winter and is predicting that people will only have 2 hours of electricity a day. This in a country where temperatures regularly drop to -40 in the mountains.

People we talked to in the Pamirs said that the situation was so grim last winter in the country that many people died. The government kicked out several NGOs that might have been able to provide statistics (MSF is no longer welcome for example) so nobody really knows the true extent of the problem. We did hear that the Murghab hospital was without power for months and they had no heating in the wards to they had to send people home.

Burning a CD with our photos has also turned out to be a challenge. CD burners seem to be an amazing new technology here and most of the internet places we've tried haven't got one. It's like walking around Calgary trying to find a particle accelerator. We've finally found a cafe that has one and we will mail our picture back in several redudant envelopes as we also don't trust the postal system.

Dushanbe is a wonderful city and if you ever get a chance to visit it is a very pleasant place to hang out. Come in September when the days are warm, the nights are cool, and the markets are full to the brim with delicious fresh fruits.

The Vanj Valley

2008-09-21T01:31:00.000-07:00

One of the more interesting valleys in the Pamirs is the Vanj valley. It runs east from the border for about 100km before ending abruptly in the massive mountains surrounding the Fedchenko glacier. The Lonely Planet doesn't mention anything about this valley, but we had talked to some people who said that there was nice hiking. We decided to have an adventure and check it out on our own on the way from Khorog to Dushanbe.

Because it was quite a distance from Khorog, hiring a car was not really an option. Instead we decided to do it the Tajik way and rely on shared transportation and hitchhiking. In Khorog everyone laughed when we said we were going to Vanj, but we did manage to eventually find a Dushanbe-bound vehicle that was willing to drop us off at the turnoff into the valley. We crammed into a van with a bunch of other passengers and slowly made our way north.

At around 4PM in the afternoon we were dropped at the turnoff. There was nothing there other than a police checkpoint (which promptly examined all our documents), and a small restaurant where some men were playing backgammon. Lara chatted a bit with some prospectors who were camped 1KM up the road, and I sat on a bench and read my book.

The road was silent. We waited.

After about 30 minutes a vehicle came from the north, but it continued to Dushanbe. I was starting to get a little worried that we'd have to camp right at the turnoff when another vehicle came and turned up our road. Improbably there was nobody in the back seat, and they were happy to give us a ride up the valley.

It took about 30 minutes to go to the town of Vanj, which was about 15km up the 95km long road that runs to the end of the valley. This turned out to be the stopping point for our vehicle which was driven by some bank employees transporting money to the local branch. I think they probably wouldn't have stopped for locals but we didn't pose a threat and they actually recognized us from the bank in Khorog.

Vanj is a pretty little town nestled in the mountains. The houses are neatly kept and many of them have multiple stories with metal roofs and decorative windows. There are lots of fruit trees, but obviously very few tourists as we drew a lot of attention. Lara went in search of a place to sleep while I stayed with our packs. A little while later she came back after having been shown a nearby guesthouse by a helpful man on the street. It wasn't until the next day when we ran into him again that we realized that he had first offered to have us stay with him. I wish we spoke more Russian.

The guesthouse was run by an old lady and her granddaughter. The granddaughter was friendly but somewhat odd, sometimes communicating only in sign language. The guesthouse only had a couple of rooms and it was nearly full so the granddaughter wanted Lara and I to share a bed in a room with two other people. The bed was pretty small, and normally people in this part of the world wouldn't mix men and women in this way so the whole thing was a little strange. Still, we didn't have much choice and we grudgingly agreed.

We wanted to get some fuel for our stove so we went in search of gasoline. This turned out to be a very lucky decision since we met Berus, a wonderful man from Dushanbe who invited us to join him for dinner. He was observing Ramazan and had been fasting all day. The meal with nothing short of a feast. He spoke a bit of English and we spent some time talking with us. He told us that there was little transport further up the valley and agreed to help us find a driver the next morning. He also invited us to stay at his house, but since we were already in our strange hotel we declined the offer.

We returned to our hotel to find that the grandmother had realized what her daughter had done and now insisted that Lara move to a couch in another room. I decided to join her and just sleep on the floor so we moved all of our gear.

At this point the police showed up. They had heard that there were foreigners in town so they wanted to check all our documents. They told us that we needed to register with them in the morning before we went off on our trip. This turned out to be no problem except that the power was off when we went to the police station and we had to wait an hour for it to come back on so that they could photocopy our passport covers.

After the police left, the other guests showed up. One of them spoke great English and he came equiped with a beer he had bought for me in a store down the street. We chatted for quite a while and found out that they were part of the Tajikistan Anti-Drug initiative that was travelling the country educating children about the dangers of drugs. They told us that the guesthouse staff was a little crazy and that they had reorganized themselves into one room so that Lara and I could have the other room to ourselves. We explained that we'd already moved to the couch but they insisted, and we moved back to our original room which had now been converted to a private room.

After some chatting we went to the toilet. Unbelievably, the guesthouse didn't have a toilet and we had to walk a block to a public toilet. Like most public toilets in the country it was a little worse for wear. I've never been able to figure out how people manage to shit on the ceiling, but it does happen and this was that kind of place.

The best was yet to come however, as the next morning at around 7:00 AM the owner's daughter marched happily into our room to say hello. Lara was sleeping with the covers pulled over her head to try and keep some annoying flies off her, so she missed the entry. She couldn't miss what happened next though, as the curious girl pulled all the covers off her to see if Lara was actually in the bed.

The four star rating system for hotels simply doesn't cover situations like this, but this guesthouse would clearly earn a negative rating.

After the police registration and a breakfast of incredibly revolting processed meat we went off to negotiate with our driver. He was very reluctant to take us to the end of the valley, complaining that the road was bad and that he wasn't very keen to spend two nights waiting for us while we went hiking. In the end we agreed to pay him $0.60/km for the rough road and $15.00 for each night of waiting, and we set off down the valley.

The drive was pretty smooth until we got close to Poi Mazar, the last town in the valley. At this point the road vanished altogether and we started to do some serious driving over big boulders and through a river. We were glad we were in a jeep and not a smaller vehicle, and it was with some relief that after 1km of rough road we found ourselves on something decent again.

We had planned to stay at Poi Mazar but realized when we got there that we really wanted to be further down the valley. The driver agreed and said that he would sleep in the vehicle for two nights while he waited for us. At this point we noticed that he just had a T-Shirt. No sweater, no blanket, no pillow. He insisted that he was tough and didn't get cold easily. We didn't believe him but figured we'd be able to help if things got bad.

The drive to the end of the valley was heroic. At one point the road vanished to the point where Lara was urging the driver to stop because she was afraid we'd get completely stuck. Somehow we made it to the final bridge in the valley at which point there was no continuing. The bridge was completely rotten and even walking across it was a scary experience.

The scenery was amazing. To our left was an enormous glacier, black and covered with rocks and debris. This glacier was part of an enormous jumble of ice which continued for 20km to reach the Fedchenko glacier 1000m above us. All around us where huge, snow-capped peaks, including the completely snowy 7000m high Revolution peak in the distance to the south. We did a short hike to the foot of the ice and then scrambled up the side of the valley a short distance to try to get some better views.

We pitched our tents on a sandbank next to the river and cooked some noodles as the temperature started to drop. I gave my down jacket to the driver, and Lara gave him a hat, extra pants, and a shell. He insisted he didn't need them, but as the temperature dropped he quickly put them on and still looked none to warm.

The next morning we went for a long day hike up the valley to the south while we left the driver to thaw in the sun. The road continued on the other side of the bridge and we walked several hours in a lovely valley before we hit a big glacier coming in from the east. We tried to continue south for a while towards Revolution peak but the going was pretty tough and we decided to head up along the glacier instead. We took a shortcut over the nose of the glacier and hiked several hours along the grassy slopes on the south side of the glacier until we could go no further. The views were incredible, with the rocky cliffs sandwiched between their snowy summits and the jumbled ice below us.

To our amazement we saw that there had at one stage been an attempt to mine the area. There we several nearly vanished roads carved into the cliffs on both sides of the valley, including one that clearly had crossed the ice. There were also remenants of a power line which led improbably to a summit far above us to the west. I have no idea what they were mining, but clearly it must have been valuable given the tremendous efforts that had been made to construct a road. In this case Russian engineering was no match for nature, and there was little left of all that hard work.

On the descent I convinced Lara that we could cross safely across the center of the glacier. Generally this isn't a very good idea, but I've taken some courses in glacier travel and since it was late in the season the glacier was bare ice without any hidden crevasses. We had a really fun time picking a route around the big twisted blocks of snow and over the big piles of rock, and eventually emerged on the other side of the glacier where a nice road led us back to the trail at the bottom of the valley.

The next day we woke to a very cold driver and a car that wouldn't start. By now we were so used to breakdowns that we payed little attention and we went for a morning wander to explore the glacier 100m across the river from our tents. We had initially hoped to walk along the bottom edge of it, but it was literally raining down rocks and debris as it melted in the hot autumn sun. Instead we found a path onto the top of the glacier and spent another few hours wandering around on the ice looking into crevases and admiring some of the enormous boulders that had been transported from who knows where by the awesome power of the glacier.

We push-started the jeep and drove back to Vanj, stopping along the way to collect gifts of walnuts from all the local ladies. We paid the driver an extra $20.00 for his heroics. That night we stayed at Berus's house in Vanj and enjoyed another fantastic dinner before falling asleep under the stars on his tea-bed.

The Gesiev Valley

2008-09-20T06:12:00.000-07:00

After a few days in Khorog we decided to do a overnight side trip. Lara was recovering from a cold so she didn't feel like hiking with a full pack. As a result we decided to check out an eco-tourism project in the Geseiv valley just north of Khorog. We found a driver who would take us for $0.50/km (the going rate) and would wait for us overnight until we returned the next day. Hiring drivers to wait is fairly typical here and it saves a lot on transportation costs.

The Pamir mountains are dominated by a set of large valleys which run more or less East-West. In the southern Pamirs these valleys run right to China but as you get further north the mountain range dominated by the enormous Fedchenko glacier blocks the way. About 60km North of Khorog is the Bartang valley, stunning and wild with huge mountains that loom over both sides. The walls are steep and brooding and there is little sunlight in the deep valley that the road runs through. A river provides water, but there is little arable land. It is a canyon in stone. It is the last of the valleys that crosses the country, and about 20km in is a side-valley called the Geseiv. This is where we wanted to go hiking.

Our driver dropped us off at a footbridge across the river. A sign in English and Russian explained that an eco-tourism project had set up a series of homestays in the valley. As usual it was sponsored by the Aga-Khan foundation. The homestays were a big attraction for us because it freed us from having to carry a heavy pack (although as a precaution we both took our sleeping bags and a bit of food).

The valley was beautiful. We followed an excellent trail along a fast flowing river. The walls of the mountains were nearly vertical and it was hard to judge how high they were (though our map claimed that some of them stretched to 2500m above us). The valley bottom was littered with fallen stone; even the fortress-like walls of the mountains were no match for the shattering winter ice. Occasionally there was a flat spot where trees hung heavy with wild apples.

About 2.5 hours hike up the valley we reached lovely Pamiri village of mud huts. There was no road and no electricity and I found myself humming the "shire" theme from Lord of the Rings. A group of people waved to us and smiled in greeting. "Please come in for tea", they said to us in Russian.

The Gesiev valley actually has 3 villages in a row and initially we'd planned to stay in the second or third village, but everyone was so nice that we decided to stop hiking for the day where we were. We stayed in "Lola Guesthouse" which was a spacious pamir house that we had all to ourselves. Lola's husband Towakal (Lara remembers all these names somehow) sat with us through dinner and peppered us with questions. Our meal was eggs and fresh bread, prepared (so they said) on a gas stove so that tourism wouldn't put increased pressure on the limited wood in the valley.

We learned that since the eco-tourism project had started there had been lots (150 anyway) of tourists in the valley. All the homestay providers we talked to were very happy and the reception we got from people couldn't have been friendlier. We did a day hike the next morning before returning to our car; everyone we ran into invited us to join them for tea even though they knew we were staying elsewhere. Our only complaint is that we didn't spend two nights.

This is one of the best eco-tourism projects we've seen. The people in the valley are marvelous, the views are fantastic, and the homestays are spotless and cozy. We felt like we had been transported to a different time. We went to bed that night to the sound of a family playing musical instruments together and we woke up to a meal of fresh eggs from the local chickens. Yet another highlight in a sea of good experiences.

Into Afghanistan (sort of)

2008-09-20T05:50:00.000-07:00

As I posted recently we decided against travelling to Afghanistan because the risks didn't seem worth the reward. Still, after living a stone's throw from the Afghan border for several weeks and seeing all of the villages and people on the other side of the river I have to admit there was still a draw. As a result we decided to do the next best thing to going there, which was the Afghan market at Ishkashim. The Afghan border post is on an island in the middle of the river, and every Saturday there is a market on the neutral zone between the countries.

We caught a mini-bus from Khorog and had a scenic 3 hour drive along the river in a very comfortable chinese van. I have gotten very tired of Russian jeeps since the windows only come up to my neck and I spend most of the time looking at the ceiling or slouched down trying to see outside. This is made worse by the lack of suspension and bad roads which send me crashing into the roof at regular intervals. It was nice to be in a well-designed vehicle with big windows and comfortable seats!

We left our passport at the border and walked across the bridge to a stone courtyard. And we were in Afghanistan. It was amazing. The men were all wearing traditional Afghan clothing and everyone had beards. There were no women at all except for a few from the Tajik side. People spoke Persian and once again, after months learning a few words of Russian, we were in a place where we didn't have the first word in common with anyone.

Everyone was incredibly friendly even though we couldn't talk to them very much. A few people spoke some English and invited us to come to Afghanistan to stay with them. People loved having their pictures taken. For the most part I think we played the part of nice Canadians well although we committed a bit of a blunder when be bought two cokes and opened them (they don't have Coke on the Tajik side). In Tajikistan Ramazan isn't a big deal for most people and you can eat freely, but in Afghanistan eating or drinking while everyone else is fasting is a major no-no. As soon as we realized our crime we put the cokes in our pockets and drank them outside.

The market itself wasn't that exciting unfortunately as there are no tourists in this area so nobody sells the types of things tourists would find interesting. Most of what was being sold was basic food stuffs, some fabrics, and a few car parts. I did manage to score a complete Afghan outfit which should look great at Burning Man next year.

All in all it was a great experience and it made us sad that circumstances are such that we couldn't cross the border entirely. The NE corner of Afghanistan looks amazing and the footpaths we see across the river would make for some remarkable hiking from village to village. Maybe one day we will return to this part of the world when circumstances are better. Until then our hopes are with the Afghani people. History has dealt them a bad hand and we hope that things turn around for them and their country.

Fruit Everywhere

2008-09-20T01:17:00.000-07:00

One of the real unexpected pleasures in Central Asia has been the fruit. The climate here is perfect for apples, pears, grapes, apricots, walnuts, figs, peaches, and other wonderful stuff. As a matter of fact we've found ourselves repeatedly given huge bags of produce by people.

One big annoyance to me however is that people really mangle their fruit. For some reason nobody here seems to mind bruised or damaged fruit. At first I thought they just ate around the mangled bits, but I've seen people happily eat brown mashed apples although obvious rot is still avoided.

As a result of this strange immunity to bruised fruit people don't bother taking care of fruit at all. The standard way to pick apples is to shake the tree and then gather all the mangled apples off the ground. So far I haven't seen anyone actually remove fruit from the tree while it is still undamaged.

It's weird, and also a little bit gross when a well meaning person brings us a 10 pound bag of pulped apples with goo oozing out of the bottom. This is just not the type of thing that is easy to backpack with. But we also don't want to offend anyone by not taking it. A driver we hired the other day stopped his car and picked some pears for us. Off the road. It looked like they'd been run over by donkeys a few time. "We'll just have these later shall we," said Lara as she passed them back to me. The sheep loved them.

Still, on the whole it is wonderful to have so much fresh food, and never was it more so than when we visited the botanical gardens in Khorog. The gardens are the highest botanical garden in the world and they contain all sorts of native fruit plants. They seem to grow nearly wild and it feels like a natural garden of Eden.

We went there when the apples were ripe and there were probably 100-200 different varieties of apple trees all ready for the picking. I was in heaven and went into "wine tasting mode" where I took a bite from each apple, even spitting it out if I didn't like it, so that I could try as many as possible before getting full. It turns out that most of the apples that we eat are much superior to the wild varieties (which is no surprise given how hard we've worked to breed good apples). Still, it is hard to describe how many different textures, colors, smells, shapes, and flavors of apples there are. Anyone going to Khorog should check out the botanical gardens (on an empty stomach).

As an interesting aside, one of the really popular snacks here is apricot seeds. If you crack the shell of an apricot there is a nut inside which tastes and looks like an almond. People love them and I think they are more prized than the apricots themselves. For a few dollars you can buy long necklaces in the market which are made of the threaded seeds.

Of course I had always heard that apricot seeds contain cyanide. This actually turns out to be true and a quick search on the Internet shows that a number of people die every year from overeating them. Luckily cyanide isn't harmful in sub-lethal quantities, so if you don't overdo it Apricot seeds can be a lovely addition to your snack mix. Also lucky for me I have a sensible wife who said "Maybe you should not eat quite so many of those just in case the rumors are true."

Down to Khorog and up a Mountain

2008-09-20T00:53:00.000-07:00

After spending about a week in Murghab it was finally time to leave the Eastern Pamirs and head to Khorog. As usual the hardest thing was finding transport, but fortunately it has become very easy to get rides towards Dushanbe. The reason is that there is a constant flow of goods coming in from China through a border post about 2 hours east of Murghab. The Chinese drivers go to the border where Tajik drivers pay bribes and then take the vehicles into Tajikistan.

Much of the traffic is actually brand new vehicles. There are very nice Chinese mini vans on sale here for $5500 brand new, and they all come down the Pamir highway. As a result there are tons of empty cars heading west, and there are also empty mini-buses that transport the drivers to the border.

We let it be know that we wanted to head to Khorog, and within an hour somebody was at our guesthouse offering an (outrageously priced) ride. It turns out that he was a guide who had just finished driving some clients around for 10 days and now wanted to head back home. When we let it be known that we knew the going rate he agreed readily and the next morning he picked us up at the guesthouse and we got door-to-door service all the way to our guesthouse in Khorog. We even had a stop at a hotsprings along the way.

In Khorog we stayed at the Pamir lodge, a cheap, clean, and very pleasant place to hang out and the only place to meet other travellers. There were five rooms around a nice courtyard and we paid $5.00 each for sleeping and $2.50 for meals.

The next day I decided to scramble up a mountain overlooking town while Lara wisely decided to hang out and relax. The mountain, which is just North of town looks big and is bigger. I think the total elevation gain must have been 2000m and the summit I made it to was still some distance from the main summit.

One of the amazing things about the mountains in this area is the sheer scale of them. In Canada summits are typically 1000-1500m above the road, and what you see is what you get. Here there are many summits that are 3 or even 4km above the surrounding landscape. When you climb a ridge you find yourself on a tiny spur of a vast massif that continues to impossible heights beyond where you stand. I'm used to being able to get up everything I see as a day hike, but I've had to content myself to hiking to a viewpoint and leaving the summit for well equiped mountaineering teams.

I think many of the summits we see here have probably never even been climbed. The rocks are so jagged that many of the peaks look like cartoon mountains; impossibly sharp and challenging to climb. On top of that there are numerous border zones which are closed to climbing.

Anyway, my particular scramble was much tougher than it seemed. It started well with a nice hike through some old streets at the edge of town and a pleasant path up the valley that splits the main peak. As I got higher up things got worse however, and what looked like a nice hillside from town was a loose jumble of boulders. The summit didn't seem to get any nearer despite my best efforts and I was pretty happy when I finally reached the top after 4 hours of climbing. I had to be extremely careful on the descent not to twist an ankle. I suspect that mountain rescue services here are not what they could be and a night at 4000m with a broken ankle wouldn't be much fun. I would only recommend this hike to serious scramblers.

The Indian restaurant where we ate dinner the next night is probably a much better bet.

Getting Money in the Middle of Nowhere

2008-09-10T01:50:00.000-07:00

One constant concern when travelling is how much money to carry. The easiest would be to take $30,000 out of the bank and just carry it around, but this is clearly a bit of theft risk. On the other end of the spectrum you'd have the smallest amount of cash possible, but then you run into problems when something unexpected happens. Most travellers have an emergency stash hidden somewhere, and enough "ready" money to pay for the next couple of days.

In Murghab you are about as remote as it is possible to get (except for maybe Central Anarctica), so it's no suprise there are no bank machines. Our plan was to spend about a week there and then head to Khorog, which has a banch machine, so we had allowed our cash piles to get lower then normal.

Then we went to the META office and found out about a great 5 day hike to the Fedchenko Glacier, the longest subarctic glacier in the world. We couldn't resist despite the $800.00 price tag for vehicles and a guide. The route would take us through some of the most remote scenery in the Pamirs and give us a chance to see a view that had never before been visited by westerners. Best of all, we'd end up in Khorog at the end of the whole thing so we could go to the bank there and pay for it.

Unfortunately, we ran into some people from the British embassy who told us the road was washed out and we couldn't complete the route. This dropped the transportation cost, but it meant that we had to come up with all the money ourselves. We didn't have enough.

No problem, said the META guy. You can do a wire transfer to the bank here and get the money from them (there is a bank in Murghab, but it doesn't have an ATM, or Visa, or any other modern connections, and normally is short on cash, so it is kind of useless). He got us all of the information, and I asked if we could use his internet (the only connection in the town) so that I could email my banker. Unfortunately, the electricity was out (Murghab only has a few hours a day of reliable power and it is often so weak that you can't see by lightbulbs because they are too dim).

Sigh... Well, maybe I could phone my mom, give her the information, and ask her to do me a huge favor and arrange the wire transfer.

That evening I went down the pitch black streets (Murghab has no street lights) to the phone office. I gave the number to the lady in the office and she phone for me. No lines. She tried again. Error. She tried again, and again, and again.

We never did go to the Fedchenko. If Tajikistan had only had any one of:

a working road system
a working electricity system
a functional internet
a functional phone network

we would have been able to do the trip. Ohhh well, you can't have it all.

The Rangkul Dunes

2008-09-10T01:27:00.000-07:00

We spent several days in Murghab after completing our Wakhan valley loop.

Our first trip was a bike ride down a valley to a meteor crater. An enterprising young man has set up a bike rental business which promises "state of the art" mountain bikes. The bikes are OK but don't have any suspension which makes for brutal riding on the washboarded dirt roads. While the Pamir Highway is mostly paved (by Central Asian standards) most of the side roads haven't seen a paver let alone a plow in years and are badly washboarded. Still, it was lovely to get out on the road.

Unfortunately we didn't make the crater because the bridge that was shown on the map was washed out and the river was a bit too big to cross. Apparently we should have crossed the river close to Murghab at Kurgan, but we didn't know this at the time. Still, it was a great ride and gave us an appreciation of how wonderful (and cold) cycling across this region would be.

The next day we did a two day trip to the nearby town or Rangkul. We hired a driver for this to take us on a loop. Our destination was some sand dunes that were shown on our map. We both love deserts and it seemed like a great adventure. The META office told us the sand dunes were off-limits because they were too close to the border, but Lara wanted an adventure so we set off anyway.

Our vehicle of course didn't work properly and every time we stopped for photos he had to park on a hill so he could do a rolling start. By now this didn't even phase us, even when we were the only thing moving for 20km in any direction.

The town of Rangkul is pretty small and lonely and is situated in a broad valley. Camels are a common means of transport around here although we didn't see any. The valley is irrigated by a river and groundwater from two very salty lakes, although by our standards it is pretty bleak. Our driver took us to a house for lunch where we had incredible fresh yak yoghurt. I had two big bowls and it was the best yogurt I have ever had. Yak milk is much tastier than regular milk I think, and eating yogurt which is only a day old is a great experience.

It turned out the lady who fed us was his sister-in-law, and she worked as a teacher in the local school. She insisted on no-payment and feeling very satisified we set off for the dunes. To our surprise we were able to drive right to the base of them, and what a worthwhile trip it was.

The prevailing winds that howl down the long valley have over the course of thousands of years created 300m high dunes at the end of the valley. They are an incredible sight and we lost no time getting out of the car and hiking towards them. Lara wasn't feeling very well so I ran up the dunes ahead of her while she took photos of the weird rock outcrops that poked out of the sand and the border between the dunes and the desert.

The view from the top was stunning. The dunes formed rounded ridges with beautiful patterns on them from the wind. To the west we could see past the salt lakes near Rangkul to to the 6000m high glaciers of the Central Pamirs that lay maybe 50km away. To the East, towering above the nearby mountains was the 7400m high Chinese peak of Mustag Ata. It was completely snow covered and it's size was staggering.

The dune field was several KM across and I had a great time running down the dunes to join Lara who now felt stronger and joined me for a second trip to the top. By now Mustag Ata had been consumed by the clouds; mountains of this height are often wrapped in perpetual cloud and show themselves rarely. I left Lara on the summit to take photos in the setting sun and ran down to the driver to let him know we would be late. An hour later, Lara showed up, delighted that the clouds had parted for a moment so that she too could glimpse one of the highest places in the world.

That evening we slept at our lunch spot in the living room on a comfortable pile of blankets and enjoyed another awesome meal. In the morning the lady again didn't want to be paid, so we gave her a donation for her kid's education instead at the standard homestay price.

From Rangkul we completed a loop back to Murghab, stopping an old mine site along the way so that we could see where the local rubies come from. We found out later that collecting Rubies is a serious crime if you don't have permission, so that's all we will say on that topic. We won't be retiring any time soon though, if anyone is wondering, although the mine site was very interesting and shows just how much hard work goes into collecting precious stones.

Why don't I spell Check?

2008-09-09T01:53:00.000-07:00

No doubt some people have noticed that I don't seem to spell check (or even proofread) very much.

There are two reasons. The first is that the Internet connections here are too slow for the spellchecker in my Google's blogging software to work.

The second is that I write these posts very quickly, as I am trying to get down as many of my impressions as possible. Generally I write the whole post from beginning to end in one go, and only if it is something that I feel strongly about will I go back and edit it. I could write twice as well, but I'd only write 20% as much and many of the impressions I'd like to capture would vanish as my memory fades. If only there were more time...

Wakhan Corridor Continued

2008-09-09T01:01:00.000-07:00

continued from previous posts...

The next morning we left Langar bright and early and rolled down the road. This part of Tajikistan is much more populated and we passed through numerous small towns. Our first stop was a museum dedicated to a local Sufi mystic. It was a single room and we were able to pick up and play with most of the exhibits. The highlight was some really neat antique instruments which the museum guide played for us. He even gave us a bag of apples for the road.

Further down we stopped to see the ruins of a Buddhist temple on a hillside. This is a testament to the range of races and religions who have travelled down this corridor over they years.

Most of the people in this part of the world are Ismaili Muslums. They recognize the Aga Khan as their spiritual leader and many of the towns had painted rocks on the hillsides above welcoming the Aga Khan. I can see one even from the Internet Cafe I am writing from in Khorog. The Aga Khan visited this area two years ago before going into Northern Afghanistan, where he has been equally active in helping reconstruct that poor country.

The Aga Khan preaches moderation and tolerance. One guide we had told us that the Aga Khan says that a diversity of viewpoints is good because we can all learn from each other. He said "Alah is great" and pretended to shoot us. Luckily he laughed loudly at this. Ismailis dress modestly but many of the women don't wear headscarfs, and the spiritual center is a community hall instead of a Mosque. Most Ismailis also don't celebrate Ramadan which is very nice since it means that restaurants are still open in the daytime and we don't offend anyone by eating a meal.

The Aga Khan does wonderful work in this area through his charities. After a ruinous civil war war in the 1990s the Aga Khan foundation almost single handedly rebuilt the area, providing bridges, health care, wells, and education. We are incredibly impressed by this charity and the good work it is doing in an area that has largely been forgotten by the rest of the world.

The result of all of this is that this is a delightful area to travel through. The people are incredibly friendly and welcoming in the best Muslim fashion, but they dress colorfully, educate their women, and are tolerant of a wide range of religions and viewpoints. If only Islam were able to show this face to the world more often there would be none of the fear that dominates our politics today.

Anyway, after the Buddhist temple we headed off again. By now we were starting to get a bit worried about the vehicle as the brakes didn't seem to be working very well any more and our driver drove through towns honking loudly so that nobody would get in his way. To make matters worse, he kept asking people for Benzine, although he assured us he had enough gas. It seemed like we would either end up in the river or stuck on the road.

Our next stop was Bibi Fatima, a natural hotspring high on the hillside above town. We had a picknick lunch here and then went inside in groups. Clothing is not generally allowed in hotsprings, so men and women bathe seperately in shifts. Most of the hotsprings have some sort of sanitorium nearby which means that you share the hot water with large groups of people who have infections skin diseases that they try to scrub off themselves.

Thankfully the water flow at Bibi Fatima was enormous so the springs were very clean. The springs came out of smooth wall that looked organic. A concrete "bunker" had been built on the other three sides, giving the whole thing a very enclosed feeling that people either love or hate.

After the springs we drove back down the road (in low gear). There was an old silk road fortress on the hillside and we took some photos and explored the ruins. The situation was spectacular. On the Afghan side of the valley we could see small plots of land that people were farming, above which rose the mighty Karakorom mountains, easily the most spectacular peaks I have ever seen. These are mountains out of fairy tales; impossibly sharp and vertical and covered in ice. Plumes of cloud whipped off the top of the highest peak, a chilling reminder of the howling winds and punishing temperatures that challenge the intrepid explorers who climb these peaks.

We continued down the hill back to the main road only to find it blocked by a car with a broken wheel. A group of people were trying to fix it, but after about 30 minutes it became clear that the vehicle wasn't going anywhere as the wheel was at a 45 degree angle to the body of the car. In the end about 20 people simply pushed the vehicle into the ditch and in an incredibly chaos of traffic the 10 vehicles that had accumulated made their way through.

Ibrahim found us another homestay although one of the gentlemen who led us there seemed quite drunk. That evening and we enjoyed a wonderful meal with a nice family and luckily the drunk person left. Like many of our homestays it seemed like we were probably simply staying with a family who offered their home to us rather than with people who regularly took in tourists. Unfortunately the experience was somewhat spoiled when my hat was stolen out of our van the next morning. Luckily we had taken our standard precautions and kept all our valuables in the room with us, so all I lost was a worn-out Tilley hat. When I get back to Canada I'll see if the warranty against loss is something that they really honor.

From here we were on our last leg of the Wakhan Corridor. We drove along the river to Ishkashim, home of a famous Saturday Market in the no-man's land between Tajikistan and Afghanistan. From there we drove down an incredibly scenic road through numerous small towns. On the Afghan side we could see children going to school and people working in their field. When we stopped to take photos they would wave. The numerous new buildings showed that our tax dollars really do work, and the road on the Afghan side looked in pretty good shape with new bridges over all the streams.

We saw little signs of technology on the Afghan side. It was like looking back 2000 years. No cars, no tractors, no electricity. Arable land is so scarce that many houses are built on big boulders so that they don't take up valuable farmland. The Afghan farmers were piling hay on their roofs for the coming winter, and many of the houses had enormous haystacks on them. The road vanished up a side valley and now the only think linking the Afghan settlements we passed to the 20th century was an impossible walking track which wound it's way through the the steep cliffs on the far side of the valley.

We stopped at one more hotspring, which was split into two halves. The men got a concrete shed while the women got an outdoor pool surrounded by lovely travertine dams. It's nice to see the women win one once it a while! That evening, after another checkpoint and a bribe for some missing papers (luckily the bribes are included in the vehicle rental fee) we ended up in Khorog. It was great to finally be in a place where there is water and regular electricity.

Ibrahim found us another homestay, again with a family that didn't normally take tourists, and I stuffed myself on the apple and pear trees in the yard. Our trip to the Wakhan was over, and the next day we said goodbye to Kay, Patrick, and Christina, our first long-term travel companions.

Ibrahim had the brakes fixed in the morning but our trip to Murghab was delayed several hours over a miscommunication of the departure time. We were delayed even more when the police pulled him over for another bribe before we left town (though in fairness, I think he really was lacking some papers). It wasn't till 4PM that we finally hit the road to head back to Murghab. Lara was feeling pretty ill from something we ate and only I was able to appreciate the spectacular scenery.

The trip back was mostly uneventful though when we reached the top of the Pamir Plateau the weather took a turn for the worse and the wind came up with the occasional spatter of rain. It was now pitch dark and we had little idea where we were. It was at this moment that Ibrahim spotted a faint light waving along the side of the road. We pulled over and an elderly lady (maybe 75) scrambled into the truck. We had no idea where she came from or how long she had been waiting there, alone in the dark. We gave her some break and a blanket and she eventually stopped shivering and sobbed quietly to herself. It is quite possible that if we hadn't picked her up she would have died there. Even in the daytime you can wait hours between cars on the Pamir highway.

It was around midnight when we got back to Murghab and Ibrahim's house. We felt strangely alone without all our friends around, but we had plenty of new adventures to look forward to.

Where are the Photos?

2008-09-09T00:56:00.000-07:00

Some people are wondering why we haven't posted any photos recently.

The reason is crappy Internet. Most cities in central Asia have no Internet at all and even the capitals only have dialup or maybe an ISDN line shared between 30 computers. At 4MB per picture it can take up to 30 minutes a photo to do an upload of one photo. We might not be able to upload the bulk of our photos until South Africa in November.

Travel to Northern Afghanistan

2008-09-08T06:16:00.000-07:00

A lot of people we've talked to on our trip have been interested in Northern Afghanistan. The Lonely Planet has just released a guidebook for the country and it is generally considered to be relatively safe. As a result we've spent some time debating the risks vs rewards of doing a quick trip through some of the more stable cities in the North. This would not only allow us to see a country that is by all acounts an amazing place to visit, but it would also give us an excuse to get an elusive Turkmenistan transit Visa. Turkmenistan is a wacky little country that is almost impossible to visit unless you are travelling through it, and we'd love to see the flaming gas craters, rotating golden statues of the president, cable cars, ministry of fairness, and other weird stuff.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) for us the security situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated terribly in the last two weeks. Our source of information is a NGO worker who spends much of his time in Afghanistan doing community development work. According to him things have gone completely to hell and the NGOs (who have been working in the area with limited problems for the last six years) have banned all road travel between the cities. While the cities themselves are safe, he describes them as islands in a shark infested sea. The highways have become incredibly dangerous, kidnapping for ransom and robberies being the main risks.

Apparently the kidnap and robbery gangs have now gotten so organized that information on the location of foreigners is sold up a food chain to those who are willing to act on it. If you are seen checking into a hotel or taking a taxi it may result in a phone call to an armed gang that would be only too happy to show you the side of Afghanistan that you didn't want to see.

Needless to say, we won't be going.

For those who are still interested it is extremely easy to get an Afghan Tourist Visa in Khorog. The Embassy is open daily until 2PM. You need to write a letter explaining why you want to go (handwritten is fine) and bring your passport and a passport photo. After filling out a form you must go to the bank to pay $30.00, for which you get a receipt that you can trade for a Visa. The whole process takes less than an hour.

All travel entails some risks, and many of the places we've visited have been lawless by any reasonable standards. With adequate precautions I believe it is possible to travel through these areas. After all, it is not fear of the law that causes us to behave kindly to each other. We've met the most amazing people in the remotest places and never had a reason to feel worried.

The situation changes however, when you become a target simply because you are a tourist. There is no substitute for local knowledge. Don't let outdated guidebooks and second-hand information lull you into a potentially fatal decision. If you are going to a potentially dangerous area like Afghanistan you owe it to yourself to talk to somebody who has extensive, on the ground experience in the area. We are glad we did.

Descending to the Wakhan Corridor

2008-09-08T05:15:00.000-07:00

continued from the previous blog post...

The first thing we had to do when we arrived in Murghab was register with the police. In Tajikistan you must register within 72 hours of arriving in the country although this is more of a money grab then anything to do with security. In our case it involved spending most of the afternoon sitting on the steps of the police station before we were escorted to a bored-looking woman who wrote our contact details down on 3 different forms and gave us a slip of paper. Payment was in a combination of Tajik Somoni and US dollars. I always find it worrying if the government itself doesn't accept the local currency, although the exchange rate has been stable for the whole trip. (In general I've found US dollars to be widely accepted in Tajikistan at the bank exchange rate, and most tourist prices are quoted in dollars although Somonis are accepted.)

The next morning we woke up late and decided to try to arrange onward transport from Khorog. Christina, Patrick and Kay were all interested in renting a car together and doing a leisurely loop of the Wakhan corridor which is a valley that is shared with Afghanistan. It is on the ancient silk road and contains hotsprings and ruined forts that date back to the time when Marco Polo travelled the road on his way to China.

Murghab Eco-Tourism Association (META) was started by foriegners to try to provide some income to the area through tourism. META arranges homestays, transportation, etc... and charges a reasonable 15% commission. We went to the META building at the edge of town and found a variety of neat side trips from Murghab. META drivers turned out to cost about 50-60 cents per kilometer plus $15.00 per night to cover food and accomodation.

Lara and I had a brief debate about whether it was better to do our side-trips first before going to the Wakhan, but we were having a lot of fun with the rest of the gang and we had to pay back transportation for the driver anyway so doing the Wahkan with the other three seemed like the best idea.

In the end we decided to see if we could hire Ibrahim, our driver from Osh, to continue the tour through the Wakhan. He was delighted that we chose him, and the next morning after a couple of hours of unexpected fussing with the vehicle and looking for gas we were ready to go.

Just outside of Murghab we hit a checkpoint but this went fairly smoothly and soon we were bouncing down the road. Our first stop was some Pictographs (rock paintings) about 15km off the highway. I'm generally not that impressed by rock art and this was no exception, but the location was incredible. The paintings were in a shelter cave in a desolate valley. Nothing moved for miles around and there was no surface water as far as the eye could see. What could have brought people to this place? It was a very powerful spot.

From the rock paintings we continued along the highway past a natural spring full of fish (stopping at the fish restaurant shortly afterwards). As the sun set we arrived at Bulankul, a small settlement at the edge of a lake. Ibrahim found us a great homestay with a nice family who moved out of their bedroom and slept in the living room. There was no electricity but they ran a generator which they used to show rock videos of various Indian performers. The whole community seemed to have come out for the event and there were about 20 people in the living room for most of the evening.

We woke up and found ourselves in another broad valley surrounded by eroded mountains. Ibrahim spent a few hours fussing with the van and then off we went to Yashikul a bigger lake just a little way down the valley. Our map showed a Solar Calendar (yawn) and a viewpoint (yeah) along the north shore of the lake, and after some debate we coaxed the van across the river and along the shore of the lake.

The lake was amazing, sparkling blue and surrounded by eroded hills that gave way to huge glaciated peaks as you moved further west. The road, little more than a track, led to a rise where we got out and had a great picknick lunch. Patrick and I decided to head to the viewpoint while Lara and Christina went in search of the solar calendar.

About 500m vertical above the car we hit the top of the ridge and were treated to magnificent views of the whole valley. The erosion in this land is amazing because everything is so visible. The mountains are sliced by valleys that feed huge fans of rock. These fans, perfectly circular, are cut by hundreds of twisting dry channels left by meltwaters that never settlу in one place for more than a season or two. Nothing grows here except next to the currently active melt-channel; a ribbon of green in an infinity of dusty rubble. And above this dry dusty wasteland, the earth and sky meet in a sea of ice.

We saw the solar calendars far below us, three large circles of rock. Lara, a speck, was standing in the center of one, a human replacement for the center stone that had long since vanished.

We spent another night with the same family and then went to the Wakhan valley. We crossed a huge pass (4300m?) and saw two small lakes on our right, and an enormous range of mountains on the horizon. Afghanistan.

Our map showed another viewpoint here and we set off to do a day hike up the round ridge to our left. It was higher than it looked and our altimeter showed 4800m by the time we summited some hours later. The valley to our South was the Wakhan, which is the funny little bit of Afghanistan that sticks out of the East. The Wakhan was ceeded to Afghanistan during the Great Game in the 1800s to provide a buffer between Russian influences in the North and British ones in the South, and is culturally and geographically far removed from the rest of Afghanistan.

We gazed at the enormous mountains of the Karakoram to the South, and the rounded Pamirs to the North, and then went back to the van and rattled down into the valley. We passed another checkpoint where our GBAO permits were examined. (To make matters even more difficult for tourists you need a special permit to visit some sensitive parts of the country). Luckily we had no problems although we later heard that some cyclists had much of their gear including a laptop stolen by the solidiers.

Past the checkpoint we were in the bottom of the valley where the road followed a narrow river. On one side was Afghanistan, and on the other, Tajikistan. On the Afghan side high mountains were occasionally intercepted by deep valley which showed even bigger peaks behind. The farthest of these were the Karakoram, the border with Pakistan, and many of them were 6000, and even 7000m high. The valley itself was dry and lifeless, with nobody living on the Afghan side and only the odd farmer on the Tajik side.

We stopped next to the river for another picknick and then drove past wild camels and spectacular views into the setting sun. The road wound up and down, sometimes high above the valley when the river cut a gorge into the valley bottom, and at other times so close to the river that we could have tossed a rock into Afghanistan out of the window. Shortly after dark we arrived in Langar, the first settlement in Wakhan.

Ibrahim found as a lovely Pamiri family and we had the luxury of private bedrooms for the first time in many days. There was even a shower, although the water was cold. Exhausted from a long day of hiking and sightseeing we were sound asleep in minutes.

We had planned to continue onward from Langar the next day, but unfortunately the truck was having mechanical issues. Our host took us on a hike to the famous Langar Petroglyphs, rock carvings a few hundred meters above the town on some smooth slabs of Granite. Unfortunately the Petroglyphs are heavily vandalized, although much of the vandalism itself is interesting as some of it dates back to silk-road caravans that travelled this valley 800 years ago. The Bronze Age petroglyphs had an unhealthy obsession with Marco-Polo sheep in my opinion. Sheep, sheep, sheep, hey look, more sheep. I could almost imagine some autistic cave man sitting up here banging sheep into the rock day after day.

We got back and found the van nearly working. However, it was late enough that we didn't feel like continuing ( and we loved the homestay and the food), so we decided to head up to a fort just up the valley. Ibrahim drove us the 10km to the bottom of the fort and we hike uphill (again) through fields of wheat. The valley at this point is a wide delta where two rivers meet and there are fruit trees as well as lots of wheat farming. Amazingly, n0ne of the agriculture is mechanized and we saw repeated scenes of people harvesting wheat with a sickle and threshing it by running a cow through it.

The fort was mostly destroyed but it's commanding position above the valley made it an awesome site. The mountains of Pakistan gleamed in the evening sun and Patrick shot most of a memory card in the every-changing light. Two local kids came to see what we were up to, leaving their goats to fend for themselves. I showed them my coin vanishing trick to rave reviews and for the next while had to fend off the one kid who wanted to see it again and again. They both vanished suddenly when they noticed their goats wandering up the hillside.

We descended down a better path and passed some houses on the hillside where we were promptly invited for tea ( a common occurance). The Pamiri houses have mud walls which support a large flat roof. The roof has a dome in the middle which drains water away from a skylight. On the inside the floor space consists of raised area which surrounds a sunken section in the center. There is generally no furniture, the raised area being a nice height for sitting on. Often there will be a stove under one of the raised sections to heat the house and provide a place to cook. Overall we like the design a lot, and we have really come to enjoy sitting on the floor and sharing food. We also like the idea of sleeping on the floor and then stacking the bedding in the daytime, something both the Pamiris and the Kyrgyz do. It seems a much more sensible use of space then buying a huge bed which is unused most of the day.

After our tea we were shyly shown some jewelry which turned out to be nice enough that Lara bought some. We were happy to be able to repay the hospitality.

To be continued...

The Roof of the World

2008-09-06T04:28:00.001-07:00

We spent about a week in Osh, Kyrgystan resting after our trekking and my assault before continuing our trip into Tajikistan. The Pamir mountains in Eastern Tajikistan are very remote and transportation is limited to occasional minibuses and the odd shared taxi. The other option is renting a vehicle and a driver, something which costs around $0.50 per kilometer and about $10.00 per day for the driver if he has to stay overnight.

Most travellers for some reason try to do the trip as cheaply as possible. We hear regular boasts from people about how the found a minibus right across the Pamirs for a very reasonable price. While I'm sure it is great to save some money, I'm not sure of the logic of spending thousands of dollars on flights and visas only to go through some of the most interesting and beautiful landscape in a 24 hour bus ride.

Lara and I were lucky enough to run into Patrick, Christina, and Kay (two Australians and a Japanese) who were all of the mind to split the cost of a car and do a more leisurely to trip. We arranged to hire a van for the first leg of the journey from Osh to Murghab, and on Monday, August 18, 2008 we left Osh in an old Russian van driven by Ibrahim, a friendly chap who spoke a little bit of English.

The drive was painfully slow as there were some huge passes and the vehicle had almost no power. It wasn't until late afternoon that we reached Sary Tash, a desolate little town perched at the edge of a big plain at the edge of the Pamir mountains. On the horizon were the white peaks of the Pamirs which marked the border with Tajikistan.

We drove across the barren plain and the mountains got larger and larger while we seemed to get no closer. Finally we arrived at the Kyrgyz border post, nestled among glaciated peaks which were bathed in the last rays of the sun. The border post was no more than a few mud houses, but for security reasons we had to stay in the car and not take photos. Immigration was painless for us, although we found out later that our driver had to bribe customs, immigration, and the drug control checkpoint to get us through.

With the border out of the way we wound our way up an enormous pass in the fading light. It was almost dusk when at the heady altitude of 4282m we reached the two metal drums which make up the Tajikistan border post. Here we were forced to wait for over an hour while Ibrahim was hit up for more "fees". A guard tried desperately to look serious as he marched back and forth in front of the gate in the freezing cold. My head pounded from the elevation (Osh was over 3km lower). I hoped that our planned stop at Karakul (3900m) would be low enough to give me some relief.

Eventually we got going again and we descended from the icy heights, gazing at the moonlight landscape through the windows. The term moonscape is overused, but there is no other description for this desolate land. It is a barren wasteland of gravel and stone, broken only by the snowy teeth of the mountains. The Pamirs are as dry as the Saharah, but with valley bottoms starting at 3500m they are also intensely cold with winter temperature dropping to -45.

Karakul was a ramshackle collection of houses along the highway. It is at the edge of a large lake, the remnant of an ancient meteor crater. Ibrahim found us a nice homestay and we were happy to get into a warm house where the family got out of bed to make us some tea. The five of us slept on the floor of a large room in the piles of blankets which are typical of all Central Asian homestays. Ibrahim vanished to stay with some family who lived in the town.

Most people rush to Murghab from Karakul, but I had seen on the map that the lake had a large peninsula extending about 10km into it's centre and our group agreed to spend a day to see if we could get a nice viewpoint from the peninsula. After some negotiation we got the son of the homestay lady to drive us out for the day and wait while we went hiking for about $35.00. It was great fun bouncing across the desert in his jeep and soon we were at the base of the small mountain range the ran along the peninsula.

The desert was intensely beautiful. The ripples of sand formed amazing patterns, only to be interrupted by jagged rocks jutting out of the ground. There was almost no vegetation, and the lake was salty and unpleasant to drink from. All around us were the giant peaks of the Pamirs, their snowy heights jutting out of the the wrinkled rubble left by thousands of years of erosion. I have never seen the earth look so old.

From the top of the ridge the views were amazing. On the north we could see the border with Tajikistan, and 7000m high Peak Lenin. To the East, the snowy glaciers of the Chinese border. Wrapped around us was Karakul Lake, so intensely blue that it seemed to have stolen the color from the sky. The lake was so beautiful that we couldn't resist the temptation to swim in one of the highest lakes in in the world, an experience which left us refreshed (and cold).

The next day we continued down the highway to Murghab. Tajikistan is still a bit of a police state and you have to register with the security forces within 3 days of your arrival so we couldn't linger two days in Karakul. However, my map showed a cave on the east side of the highway and we decided to ask Ibrahim about it when we got close. Prospects didn't look good however, as a shiny new fence had followed the highway since the border with Tajikistan. The poorer your country is, it seems, the more you must in protecting your border from imaginary threats.

We reached the valley that was supposed to have the cave and we asked Ibrahim to stop the car at just about the same instant as he was flagged down by two soldiers standing on the side of the road. After showing photos of caves on my iPod it emerged that nobody knew anything about the cave (it latered turned out that my map had it marked in the wrong valley). However, the solidiers said that there were some Petroglyphs in the demilitarized border zone with China and offered to take us there for fifteen dollars. (Note: Many people have problems with Fifteen and Fifty. Write everything down. It avoids problems.)

At $3.00 ($10.00 it turned out) each this seemed like a great adventure and before we knew it we were driving through an army base into the DMZ with a machine gun toting soldier keeping us company. Patrick even got to play with the gun once the ammunition had been removed.

The road eventually deteriorated and we walked a few kilometers to the "Petroglyphs". It turned out that these were just graffitti in the soft sandstone walls of the valley and after we spent a few minutes pretending to be interested our guide took us further up the valley. At one point he told us to stay on the road so that we wouldn't step on any landmines, although the numerous tracks of animals and vehicles made mines seem unlikely. We hoped he was taking us to the real petroglyphs, but we simply hiked to a view of the Chinese mountains in the distance and then returned to our vehicle.

Not sure whether to be dissapointed or happy about our strange adventure we continued to Murghab, our solidier now another passenger. We went over another 4000m pass and then dropped into land that was even drier. As night approached we rolled into Murghab where Ibrahim's family runs a guesthouse. Murghab sits in a broad valley is threaded by a river which provided just enough moisture to the surrounding land to allow for some agriculture. The valley is bordered by mountains of dry rubble, and on the distant horizon the 7400m Mustag Ata towers out of the Chinese Pamirs- a constant reminder of the powerhouse that lies next door and is the source of most of Murghab's wealth these days.

Not that Murghab is wealthy. The population of Murghab is only a few thousand and it is little more than a few hundred mud houses. Unemployment is 50% and winter temperatures are below -30 even before you factor in the ubiquitous wind. Other than a slow stream of Chinese trucks from the recently opened border crossing to the East, and a handful of tourists that come during the brief summer nobody passes this way. It is at the end of the earth.

It was terribly beautiful in the way that only deserts can be, yet it filled us with a deep despair. What were we going to do in this lifeless wasteland for the next five weeks until our Uzbekistan Visa started?

To be continued....

Architecture 2010

2008-08-16T05:13:00.000-07:00

Most of us are familiar with the humble metal shipping container. They have revolutionized how goods travel around the world. The idea is simple. Take the body of Semi-trailer and put it, fully loaded onto a ship or a train. Your cargo is protected and you don't have to spend time and money unloading it and reloading it to put it onto a ship or a train. In 2005, 200 million containers full of goods were shipped around the world.

In Central Asia, shipping containers have also revolutionized the construction industry. Shipping containers measure 8.5 feet high and 8 feet high, which is a pretty comfortable size for people to work in. They are strong, waterproof, cheap, and easy to move. As a result we've seen numerous container buildings. Sometimes people just open the doors. Other times people cut doors and windows into them, paint them, and make them into very nice living spaces.

Most commonly we see shipping containers in the markets. Most of the markets here in Osh are made up of row upon row of neatly lined up containers. They are wired with electricity and typically have inventory in the back and a sales section in the front. At night they just shut the big metal doors and put a padlock on them. These container markets are quite permanent, with decorative roofs covering the aisles between the containers. We've even seen places where the markets are two stories. You just stack containers two wide on the bottom and one wide on top and you have a half container worth of sidewalk on each side.

As I started researching this I found out that most of these containers are surplus. Apparently the shipping industry has high quality standards for their containers. As a result there are tens of thousands of containers which can't be shipped and which are expensive to recycle. And there are tens of thousands of vendors who would love a cool, secure place from which they can sell their products.

Maybe next time we build a garage we'll look into getting a few storage containers for the back yard instead.

The Worst Drivers in the World?

2008-08-16T04:20:00.000-07:00

Whenever westerners travel to developing countries they comment on how crazy the drivers seem. Few people can forget the experience of crossing an 8 lane street in Chengdu, driving in a Rickshaw in Thailand, or racing down a mountain road in a yellow school bus in Guatemala.

I've now been to a number of countries that lay claim to the world's worst drivers and in my opinion the quiet, unassuming people of Central Asia take the prize. Never have I felt so scared to step onto a street. The drivers are so bad that we've actually planned parts of our trip around what drives will be required.

In China for example many drivers are inexperienced and unskilled but there is a form of cooperation. If I as a pedestrian walk into a Chinese street all of the traffic will flow around me. It is incredibly nerve-wracking, but you can cross a busy street in China by slowly making your way across one lane at a time. As long as you keep moving predictably you will not be hit, although as a foreigner I always tried to keep a Chinese person on the upstream side of me as an extra precaution.

In Central Asia, they will run you down without even touching the brakes.

As far as we can tell there are two rules of driving here. The first rule is to assume that no matter how unpredictably you drive, other people will stop for you. If you miss a turn just lam on the the brakes and reverse down the road, or do a U-Turn across 3 lanes of traffic without even shoulder checking. The important thing is to act like you are the only vehicle on the road. The second rule is to never slow down or attempt to avoid another driver. If somebody steps into your way just honk and keep going. If they don't move, run them down like a dog. Don't swerve. Don't slow down.

We are very scared to cross streets here. There are no pedestrian crossings and often not even traffic lights at big intersections. People drive as fast as they can, and driving after a few bottles of Vodka is still pretty acceptable. We've even seen police officers having a good piss-up at lunch time. Traffic is also highly unpredictable. People will do U turns unexpectedly and parked vehicles will suddenly reverse down the road when you thought they were safely asleep. Uncovered manholes add to the excitement since you have to watch the pavement almost as closely as the traffic. Death can come from any direction at any time and Kyrgyzstan has the traffic fatality statistics to prove it.

The Kyrgyz Medical System

2008-08-16T03:43:00.000-07:00

As I wrote last week, I was punched in Jalalabat and injured my mouth. While my upper lip has healed up fairly nicely, my bottom lip is still very painful and it is hard for me to eat or smile.

Since we are soon heading to even poorer Tajikistan Lara and I decided we'd better get my lip checked to see if there was anything seriously wrong. In Tajikistan the biggest town we are visiting in the next 3 weeks has 4000 people and no electricity. I'm pretty confident the medical infrastructure will match the electrical grid.

We started by phoning our insurance company since we are responsible people and have got medical insurance. Our concern was that if I needed any sort of delicate oral surgery I probably wouldn't want it done in Osh. While Osh has 300,000 people and 3 universities, it is also a city that turns of the electricity every day from midnight to 7:00AM and lacks traffic lights at some amazingly big intersections. We figured our insurance company might be able to point us to some decent medical resources or maybe give us a doctor to talk to.

We went to an internet cafe to look up our insurance information and Lara called the insurance company on her cell phone. After some time on hold a friendly man talked to Lara (I'm not talking much with my mangled mouth). Unfortunately he had never even heard of Kyrgyzstan, and we realized we were pretty much on our own. Luckily while Lara was talking to the insurance company I had been looking up mouth injuries on the Internet and I was becoming more confident that my wound was something that would heal nicely given some time.

Since the insurance company was no help we looked in the Lonely Planet and found a medical clinic a few blocks from where were. The building was falling apart but there was a small booth in the lobby with a couple of nurses in it. We acted out the punch in the face thing and one of the nurses led us around the side to a doctor's office. There were two doctors in the office both of whom spoke a few words of English. They were mainly interested in how I had hurt my lip and we acted out the scene again. Our acting must have been bad because they thought that Lara had gotten drunk and punched me. We spent a minute clearing that up. Then the doctor took a quick look at my lip and wrote me a perscription on the back of a torn off computer printout.

There was no charge to see the doctors and our total waiting time was probably 30 seconds. By contrast when I had a bleeding wound in Calgary I spent 6 hours waiting in the medical clinic before somebody looked at me. My family doctor in Calgary is booking physicals for 2010.

Perscriptions in hand we set off to find our medicines. Pharmacies are everywhere here but most of them only sell condoms and aspirin. It took three tries to find the antibiotics but the $0.30 bill was more than reasonable. Three more pharmacies were needed before we found the mouth rinse, which came in a neat glass medical jar and cost another $0.50.

The standard of medical care in Kyrgyzstan is basic at best. This is not a country where you want to have anything serious go wrong with you. Yet for minor ailments I don't think you can beat a 30 second wait and a $0.80 bill for medicine.

What Were We Doing In China

2008-08-14T02:25:00.000-07:00

A couple of people have said that I haven't really explained what we were doing in China. I realized that I've been posting lots of things I found interesting but didn't provide much of an overview, so for those who care, and for Taco and Lara 20 years from now when our memories have faded, here is a quick overview of our China Trip.

I first visited China in 2002 to go on a cave exploring trip. On that trip I was lucky enough to be on the survey trip to the deepest point in China at the time and I did some fantastic caving. I've been keen to go back to China to do more cave exploring ever since. The fact that China is an amazing place to visit didn't hurt either.

Originally our plan was to start in China and work our way overland through Central Asia. We would start in the south and then cave with Erin Lynch and Duncan Collis in Wulong and then work our way to Kashgar and into Kyrgyzstan. Unfortunately, because of the Olympics and associated protests the Chinese Government denied our visa request. We changed our plans and decided to go straight to Kyrgyzstan. After we'd booked our initial flights Erin in China managed to get us some invitation letters which were good enough for a 30 day Visa to go caving. We decided that the caving sounded too good to miss so we ended up adding a somewhat arbitrary China leg to our Central Asia trip.

Our China trip was in Wulong which is in south-central China. The caves we were exploring have recently been declared a world heritage site partially because of the excellent job we cavers have done of documenting all the amazing underground passages. We were put up in a farm-house in the middle of the core zone of the world heritage site and for two weeks we explored a wonderful cave called San Wang Dong (third great cave). The family who owned the farmhouse cooked meals for us and for a toilet we pooped between boards in the chicken coop.

San Wang Dong has about 40km of mapped passages. Many of these passages have branches or pitches (vertical drops) which nobody has ever been down. Our job for two weeks was to explore these side passages and add them to the map. Erin, Lara, and I formed an impromptu team that spent most of the trip exploring one small section of the cave. It was an amazing experience. To get to the exploration front we travelled about 2 hours underground to an enormous sinkhole with huge vertical walls extending to the sky above. We came into the sinkhole about 50m above the floor and 100m below the top. We then rappelled into the daylight of the sinkhole to the green and leafy bottom before continuing back underground down another bunch of ropes.

The lead that we explored was a 40m wide passage that ended in a huge vertical drop. I got the job of figuring out how to get down the shaft, which involved hanging on a rope with a power drill trying to figure out a safe way to rapel down (avoiding lose rocks, bad rub-points, and water). It was quite a challenge but eventually we found a nice path down and were able to rapel 50m into a big chamber. None of this had ever been explored before and we did 4 trips to this chamber to map all the side passages. Because of the distance from the entrance our trips averaged over 16 hours. We did a three day rotation where we would cave one day, rest one day, do an easy trip the third day, and then a "bottoming trip" the final day.

We ended up finding a new cave which we explored on our easy days so in the end we did quite a bit of caving. All in all we mapped about 2500m of previously unexplored passages and we saw some absolutely amazing and beautiful things. It was a great experience to be able to explore beautiful underground passages that no human being has ever seen, especially in such an exotic location.

Now we are back in Central Asia continuing our travels. Our caving gear was shipped back to Canada and we are going to head to Tajikistan next to hike in the Pamir Mountains and see some spectacular high-altitude scenery.

In Defense of Organized Crime

2008-08-12T04:33:00.000-07:00

So many things happen to us in our travels that it is hard to record them all. The fist in face incident brings back some memories of a fascinating discussion we had two weeks ago.

When we got back from our caving month in China both Lara and I were ready for a few days on the beach. Of course, we are about 3000 km from the nearest ocean so we have to be flexible. We decided to go to Cholpon-Ata which is a holiday town on the north shore of lake Issy-Kol. Every summer it fills with tourists who swim in the (relatively) warm waters of the lake.

We got a lift to the lake from Abai, a restaurant owner in Bishkek. He is one of the Kyrgyz wealthy in that he has a business, a couple of apartments, and his own vehicle. Abai offered to drive us down to the lake if we paid for a tank of gas (actually a bad deal for us given how cheap buses and shared taxis are, but still not that expensive). He picked us up from our hotel in the morning and then we stopped by to pick up his friend who is a police officer.

Abai told us that after the Soviet Union collapsed his father ended up doing business in Russia. At the tail end of the 1990s his father was murdered. We didn't get details, but his was a common occurrence back then. Gangsters ruled the street and violence was everywhere.

Abai is strongly supportive of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He says that under Putin the violence has gone away and Russia is a much safer place. Apparently most of the organized crime has now become legitimate. To him the allegations of corruption in the Putin government are unimportant, and given the widespread support Putin enjoys in Russia it would seem many agree with him. When you live in a country where you are at constant risk you are willing to forgo a bit of democracy in exchange for safety.

More interestingly, Abai is not opposed to organized crime given the right circumstances. In a place like Kyrgyszstan, where the police are corrupt, it is organized crime that protects the rights of the common people. In some cases criminals become a parallel system of government providing stability and order on the streets. For example, if somebody owed you money you could go to the local gangsters and explain the situation. The gangsters would then go to the other party and hear their side and then act as judge and jury and resolve the situation. You'd be wise not to lie to the gangsters as they'd hate to be made fools of.

By contrast, Lara and I were once went to small claims court in Canada over a vehicle that had the mileage rolled back from 430,000 km to 180,000 km. The judge was totally incompetent and didn't believe that a vehicle with 250,000 extra kilometers had a reduced value. The paperwork was so complex that we were unable to appeal the judgement in the 30 days allowed. I suspect that if we'd had a working system of gangsters in Calgary we'd probably have gotten a much quicker and fairer solution.

I'm by no way advocating replacing our courts and justice system with a bunch of criminals. But I do find it interesting how our perspective changes what we see. In a place with no police the criminals can sometimes be the good guys.

An Unexpected Greeting

2008-08-12T03:01:00.000-07:00

A few days ago we arrived in Jalalabat in South Central Kyrgyszstan. It is a town of about 90,000 people that is widely spread out, and the only real center is a block or two of restaurants around the Bazaar.

Lara wanted to watch to Olympics on TV at our guest house but I was feeling a bit hungry so I went out to get some food. I popped into one restaurant but the only thing they had was an omlette which didn't excite me too much at 9PM. I crossed the street to a second restaurant and poked my head in the window. Two police officers were eating at a nearby table but otherwise the restuarant was pretty quiet. They were playing music however, and the last few days we've been hit by a number of "music" charges on our bills and I didn't want to pay to listen to bad rap.

I started to walk down the well-lit street ( a rarety in Kyrgyszstan) away from the restaurant. There was a large Kyrgyz man walking in the opposite direction. In one hand he held some roses. The other hand formed a fist, and with no warning he punched me in the face. Pain and surpise made a dizzying combination that dropped me to the ground. The man kept walking. Dozens of passers-by passed me by, completely ignoring what had just happened.

I got up, somewhat dizzy and immediately ran the 10 meters back to the restaurant where the police were having their meal. They wanted nothing to do with a bleeding tourist who spoke only English, but a lady who had seen the whole thing got involved and shamed them into getting up. We quickly caught up with the man who had hit me and two other police officers who were walking down the street joined the discussion. The original officers went back to their meal and the new officers marched me and my assailant to the police station a few blocks away.

My lips were mangled but none of my teeth were loose and I didn't seem to have a broken jaw. I was a bit shook up though and the whole experience felt very surreal.

At the police station it quickly became very clear that the police had no idea what to do. They had two main problems. The first of these was a logistical; nobody spoke English and I didn't speak Russian. The second problem is that in countries like Kyrgyzstan the police do not see it as their job to enforce the law.

In Canada we take it pretty much for granted that if somebody breaks the law and is caught doing it the police will at least make an attempt to punish them. Our RCMP even investigate members of the government from time to time. Of course transparency international rates Canada as one of the least corrupt countries in the world. Kyrgyszstan rates near the bottom, tied with Zimbabwe. One result of this corruption is that the most flagrant law-breakers are generally government officials and well-connected people. Police officers who try to enforce the law in Kyrgyszstan won't last very long in their jobs.

The police in many countries exist only to protect the well-connected. Generally that means that police officers just sit around all day and harass people for bribes ( a constant complaint that we heard about from many people). However even the most corrupt government needs to maintain some law and order or things will degenerate to the extent where there is nothing left to plunder. It is in maintaining that law and order that there is an overlap between the police in a place like Kyrgyszstan and the police in a place like Canada.

For these reasons a local person would never have bothered to talk to the police. However, as a tourist one often receives much better treatment than the locals, especially since tourism is such a great source of money for many countries. Given that I had just been attacked by somebody who obviously didn't like foreigners I felt I would be doing a service to other tourists and to Kyrgyszstan by at least attempting to get him locked up for a while.

When we arrived at the police station the two police men who had brought me to the station wanted to leave me and my assailant together while they went off to find somebody who knew something about police work. While I am quite capable of defending myself ( I took martial arts for a couple of years) I really didn't think this was a very good idea and eventually they clued in. Nobody was the least be concerned about my injuries. After about half an hour an officer showed up who spoke some English and I was escorted to the police chief's office.

The chief explained through the English-speaking officer that if I wanted to press charges I would have to come back to testify in one or two months. If I didn't press charges they would hold the man for two weeks and make sure he was punished. This had a vaguely sinister feel about it, but given that I wouldn't be able to come back to testify there was little else I could do. The police put me in a van and drove back towards my guesthouse. I had visions of my assailant being taken into a field a shot.

With 5 officers in the van we drove to the door of the guesthouse and I said "Right Here". The officer who spoke English just smiled and nodded and they kept driving. "Stop!" I said. He nodded again. They drove on. Now *I* had visions of being taken to a field and shot. It would serve me right for helping them a criminal.. Luckily it turned out that the officers simply didn't understand that much English. They turned around and took me to my guesthouse.

The owner of the guesthouse who spoke better English explained to me again that the police would hold my assailant for 2 weeks and then they would have let him go. Given that my assailant's hand was bleeding from hitting my face and that it had happened on a crowded street this was pretty lame, but what could I do? After a few minutes the police left.

The next day Lara and I walked out to get lunch and we saw the guy who attacked me walking around with a bandage on his hand. Apparently it was too inconvenient to hold him at the police station. When I pointed him out to Lara she yelled at him and he ran the other way, obviously keen to avoid another confrontation.

Nobody I talked to about this incident was surprised, least of all over the actions of the police. In Kyrgysztan people can commit small acts of violence like this with impunity, comfortable in the knowledge that the police have no interest in this type of thing.

Despite this incident and the general air of lawlessness, I still feel pretty safe here. I believe that the attack was essentially random and probably alcohol-fueled. However, I also know that if somebody does want to harm or rob us there is little protection to be found from local law-enforcement. When you are travelling in out of the way places you are responsible for your own security. It pays to be cautious, even on well-lit streets with lots of people around.

15 Little Joys You Don't Even Know About

2008-08-08T01:31:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of great things about Central Asia that you could only experience by being here.

1) Central Asian handshakes are great. People take your hand in both of theirs and bow slightly.

2) Fresh fruit is available everywhere. I bought a huge bucket of apricots along the side of the road two days ago. Our guesthouse has grapes growing in the garden, and our hotel yesterday had a plum tree outside it.

3) Little children run up to you and say "Hello! What you name?"

4) A random Taxi driver we met on the street invited us to have tea with his family today.

5) Whenever you hike in the mountains you see herds of beautiful horses.

6) You never get tired of seeing a little kid sitting on a donkey which is pulling a cart. Donkeys are cute. Little kids are cute. Enough said.

7) A lot of people have heard of the Calgary Flames. Apparently many Central Asians and Russians like hockey and the TV stations show the NHL Playoffs. Who would have guessed?

8) Meals are eaten with freshly baked bread which is broken into little pieces so that it can be shared.

9) When you stay in a yurt outside the tourist areas you sleep with the family. Everyone simply moves over and you all sleep in a big row.

10) Even in cities, much of the accomodation is in homestays (think B&B). You stay in the house of a nice family who cooks you breakfast. It's a great way to meet locals.

11) Things are very cheap. You can buy vodka for $1.00 a bottle and beer for $0.50. A nice dinner costs $10.00. For two people. Including drinks. Accomodation is about $15-$30 a night for two people.

12) Old men wear traditional hats and gray suits.

13) Women wear colorful headscarfs and lots of red. Many of the asian-looking women have blue eyes.

14) Central Asia is young and there are always children playing and laughing. Canada is so quiet in comparison.

15) We have never felt threatened or in danger from anyone (other than the drivers).

15 Little Things We Take For Granted

2008-08-08T00:57:00.000-07:00

Things are very different in the developing world. Many of the things we take for granted simply don't work the same way.

1) We believe exhaust fumes are bad. In the developing world nobody bothers fixing the exhaust systems of their vehicles and most of the buses and cars you take vent exhaust right into the passenger compartment. I've gotten some horrible headaches on buses and in taxis.

2) We believe seatbelts save lives. Even though Central Asia has one of the worst accident rates in the world nobody wears seatbelts. Many vehicles don't even have any. If you do find one and put it on prepare to be questioned.

3) Our sidewalks are level. In the developing world sidewalks often have big holes in them. Or unexpected protrusions like 30cm bits of rebar.

4) Our man-holes have covers on them. Many of them are missing in Central Asia and if you aren't careful you could literally fall 2 or 3 meters down into the sewer system. The drivers simply seem to know which ones are missing so nobody feels the need to replace them.

5) Our stairs are all the same height. That way if you walk up or down a flight of stairs you know exactly what to expect from each step. In Central Asia it is common for one or two steps to be different heights from the other ones.

6) We have streetlights. In Central Asia there are no bulbs in the streetlights which means that at night the streets and sidewalks are pitch black. See #3- #5 above to get an idea of what this is like.

7) We light hallways and stairwells in hotels and other public spaces. Not so in many Central Asian hotels. You often need a flashlight just to get to your room at night. We found one great Internet place where the stairwell was inside the building and thus completely black. The second stair from the bottom had a wire running across it about 15cm above the floor to hold the railings together. It was like they were trying to kill people, but everyone we watched knew it was there and just stepped over it. Maybe Central Asians see a different spectrum of light than I do.

8) We take electricity for granted. In Central Asia power cuts are common. In the daytime we often see the sad icecream vendors watching their stock melt in the sun. At night we always have a flashlight nearby. It is common to wake up for the bathroom only to find the power out. Later, when the power comes back all the lights you accidentally left on during the blackout come back on to wake you up.

9) We take running water for granted. Often the water just stops for half a day or more. This means warm showers are hard to come by since they require a convergence or running water and power that can be alarmingly rare.

10) We put gutters on our buildings. This doesn't seem like a big deal except that when it rains all the water runs off buildings onto the sidewalks below instead of flowing nicely away. This also means that in humid places buildings are constantly dripping nasty stuff onto the sidewalk.

11) We use P traps in our plumbing. For those who don't know, a P trap is that little loop of pipe that is on all our drains. It stays full of water and it keeps sewer gases from flowing up into the bathroom. They aren't used here, which means that most bathrooms effectively have several large vents directly into the sewer. For this reason we generally prefer shared showers and toilets because our rooms don't smell like stinky toilet.

12) Our sheets match our beds. For some reason we often end up in beds with only one sheet, one blanket, and an old mattress which is bigger than both and still wrapped in plastic. There is no good way to sleep with this setup but if you ask for extra sheets everyone thinks it is very strange. Often we use our sleeping bag liners.

13) We believe that electricity can be dangerous and treat it with respect. In the developing world it is a toy to be played with. There are exposed wires everywhere and it pays to look around in the light so you don't grab a bare wire at night instead of hitting the light switch. I've seen houses wired with a coathanger thrown over the powerlines. In China the wiring was so bad in the caver house that the wires would catch fire when the kettle was plugged in. Eventually the cavers simply rewired the place themselves. Even the power company doesn't do things right. One of our caving friends saw Chinese power engineers connecting two large wires at a power station by twisting them together and wrapping duct tape around them.

14) We believe Coca-Cola and beer should be served cold. In Central Asia they are stored in fridges but most people don't plug them in. Tricky. Yesterday we had a beer in a frosty mug at a nice hotel. Great idea keeping the mugs in the freezer, except the beer had been in the sun all day.

15) We don't allow little children to play on the highway, or near the backs of donkeys, or with large knives, or in a coral full of horses, or with cows, or .... Enough said.

The End of the Automobile Era

2008-07-25T02:15:00.000-07:00

As we travel people are constantly complaining about the price of gasoline. While it has fallen recently, the price of gasoline is still at a level that most people thought impossible just a few years ago. High fuel prices have significantly raised transportation costs in Central Asia and everything from shared taxis to food is getting more expensive as a result.

While some people blame this on speculation, there can be little doubt that the demand for gasoline is growing faster than the supply. By the inevitable forces of free markets this means that gas prices will continue to rise until demand falls or until new supplies become available. There aren't many good alternatives to gasoline right now and most of the earth has been explored so there are unlikely to be any more Saudi Arabias waiting to be discovered. The alternatives, like tarsands and shale, are dirty and expensive. I think we are going to see some profound shifts in the way we live.

Surprisingly, poor countries will probably not cut their consumption much even with big price increases. The simple reason for this is that they consume very little oil per person. Poor countries often have well developed public transportation systems because most people can't afford private cars. In China for example there is a fantastic rail network between all the major cities, and nobody but the very rich would consider driving from Beijing to Xian.

In Central Asia the public transportation systems are in a shambles. However, the majority of vehicles on the road are still jammed full of passengers. Almost everyone driving between cities here tried to find other passengers at a shared taxi stand to share the cost of gas. A shared taxi with 5 people in it uses much less gas per passenger kilometer than a Prius with a single commuter, which means that relative to us, people in poor countries are using fuel *much* more efficiently.

So if consumption is going to fall significantly it will have to fall in the rich world where the roads are full of enormous vehicles driving around with only a single passenger. In the west many people think nothing of driving an SUV to the office every day. The law of supply and demand says that driving this SUV will soon become extremely painful. At which point would most of the people *you* know change their driving behavior? That is what will determine how high gas prices will go.

Would $2.00 a litre make you take the bus? If not, it probably won't convince your neighbors either and gas prices will go up. Would $4.00 a litre convince you to sign up for a ride share program? If not, it probably won't convince your potential passengers either and they'll also continue to drive. Would a $500.00 gas surcharge on airline tickets convince you to cancel your vacation in Mexico? There comes a point at which our wasteful behaviors must change because we simply cannot afford the alternative.

We are about to witness a profound shift in the way we travel. Trips like the one Lara and I are doing where we travel great distances in planes and taxis will become much more expensive. Commuting an hour to work by yourself every day will seem like an outrageous wast of money. Cars won't go away any time soon, but we'll be taking a lot more buses and sharing a lot more rides. Gas prices can quadruple at no cost to your commute if you pick up three passengers on the way to work. I think we are up to the challenge. There are 4 billion people in the developing world who are leading the way.

The Missing Center of the Middle Kingdom

2008-07-25T02:14:00.001-07:00

Most people have never heard of Chongching. It is a city in central China. Today is has 10 million people. The population will double in the next decade. It is the fastest growing urban center in the world. (see article)

This pattern is being repeated across China. People are pouring out of the countryside to live in cities. Cities have better schools, better health care, and better jobs. If you want to start a business you'll probably do it in a city where you have access to enormous pools of both skilled and unskilled labor. Likewise, if you have little training and want a job, you'll go to a city where there are numerous factories and construction projects that will hire unskilled workers.

And if you dream of a better life you will go to a city. Cities concentrate people, which means that they concentrate talent and opportunities. Cities create more specialized (and thus higher skilled) jobs. In a small town, you can only be a general mechanic. In a city, you can specialize in restoring vintage automobiles. In mega city, you can sell your talents to the vintage automobile shop that pays the highest wages.

Cities also have the potential to be better for the environment. We simply can't have 7 billion people living on acreages in the country-side. In Chinese cities most people live in high rise apartments (many of which have amenities like swimming pools and health clubs). Apartments take up very little space and allow people to be close to work and shopping. Country living may look eco-friendly with it's green lawns and trees, but it is cities with their transit systems, central sewage treatment, and garbage collection, that are the green stars of the future.

Yet while the move to cities is a good thing in the long term the societal upheaval it is causing is enormous. Ambitious young Chinese who move to places like Chongching don't have it easy. Many of them have to work long hours for low wages in factories and other unskilled jobs. Most of them have little to offer other than their labor. It is not them who will be the highly paid specialists of the future. It is their children. The parents work so that their children can get the opportunities that they never had.

Those opportunities come at a terrible cost. A factory worker's apartment is no place to raise a small child, and unskilled laborers don't have the types of jobs that give them maternity leave. So the children are left in the countryside while the parents work. Many parents only see their kids one or two times a year. Grandpa and Grandpa raise the kids.

All through the Chinese countryside we saw the same thing. There are no young people; only children and the old. While we were caving a load of roofing tiles was dropped off and half a dozen people, all of them over 60, carried all the tiles up the hill baskets. To us it looked like some ghastly hell for retired people. I offered to help but could barely lift the load that was being carried by a a 70 year old lady half my size.

There is something tremendously sad about watching an old couple working in the fields all day with nobody to help them. And there is also something very sad about seeing all the children who will never really know the parents who are sacrificing so much. Many of the old people we see will be the last generation of their family to live in the countryside. Their children are gone already. The grandchildren will follow when the time comes for high school or university. And then the farm will be empty, and 3000 years of Chinese tradition will be but a fading memory.

Hurled out of China

2008-07-24T22:22:00.000-07:00

We are back in Bishkek. It feels so peaceful. I feel lighter when I walk down the streets. Nobody yells at me in Chinese. People are soft spoken and calm. The traffic seems impossibly mellow (it seemed insane when we arrived here the first time). Even the heat seems bearable compared to the humid horror that was Chengdu.

Yesterday afternoon our flight arrived in Urmuqi, our last stop in China. We had a pleasant experience with China Southern including a meal (yes, really). They even put us up in a hotel because our connection wasn't the next day. A bus drove us to the hotel, and we presented our vouchers and went to the first bed we had slept in for nearly a month.

Our flight was a 9:10 and the airport only 10 minutes away, so we set the alarm for 6:30 with the idea of having some breakfast and getting the airport comfortably early. It's a tiny airport with only a couple of international flights a day.

At 6:00 AM the phone rang. "You wakeup checkout", yelled somebody in Chinese. "Ok, thanks", I said. We hadn't ordered a wakeup call but they must have gotten the information from our tickets. I looked at my watch and we decided to go back to bed for another 30 minutes.

At 6:10 the phone rang again. "You checkout", yelled somebody in Chinese. Chinese people always seem to be yelling. It's just the way the language sounds to us, but at 6:10 in the morning it isn't much fun. "Yeah, yeah. We'll come."

At 6:20 the phone rang again. "You must checkout in 2 minutes" said the voice. I hung up. What the hell? "Let's just get up and get out of here, I suggested to Lara. They said we have two minutes." We were barely up when the phone rang again. We tried ignoring it for a bit and it would stop and then restart. "We're coming for god's sake", I said. Of course I could have said anything. The person at the other end spoke no real English.

At 6:25 the first person showed up at our door. He yelled something at us in Chinese. I opened the door and showed him that we weren't packed yet and that we were getting our stuff in our bags. He seemed upset and vanished. The phone was still ringing. We ignored it.

At 6:30 the door knocked again. This time there were three of them. One of them was particularly upset and gestured down the hallway. We showed her our bags and that we were nearly packed. She was unmoved. We would have to come immediately. We didn't. She yelled. The phone rang. We ignored her, and the phone.

At about 6:35 we were finally packed. We grabbed our hotel key and went to the lobby, where we presented it to the front desk to get our key deposit back. Given how upset everyone was we decided to go straight to the airport and skip breakfast. There was no hotel bus so we took a cab (cheap). We arrived at the airport at 6:50, 20 minutes before the international section even opened, and spent a bunch of time waiting in the nearly empty terminal.

When we were checked in and through customs Lara decided to take a load off her feet and have a cold (and outrageously overpriced) ice tea. She pointed at the bottle in the fridge and they opened it and poured it in a cup that was a bit too small. The woman then accompanied us back to the table. As soon as Lara had taken a sip, the woman grabbed the bottle and tried to fill Lara's cup with it. Lara tried to grab it from her, but the woman won the tussle and ran back to the counter with the remainder of Lara's tea. At this point Lara was fed up and insisted on a refun of the remaining portion of the ice-tea. The woman wouldn't give the bottle back or refund us money, but in the end she poured the last little bit of tea into a second cup.

We had a great experience in China and we loved most of the people we met. But China is also an incredibly intense country. Everything is loud and busy and crowded and hurried. It's nice to get back where life is a little bit more mellow.

Construction, construction, construction

2008-07-23T16:22:00.000-07:00

People complain a lot about the pace of construction where I live in Calgary. Calgary is a city of 1 million people and are booming to the extent that we've had about 10 new road interchanges built in the last 3 years, and currently have about 10 big skyscrapers under construction.

This is nothing compared to what we have seen in every corner of China. The construction crane is the new national bird of China.

The town of Wulong where we stayed for a few days has about 200-300,000 people. Currently there are 15 skscrapers under construction. There is also a massive divided highway linking Wulong to the nearest bigger city of Fuling. The area Wulong is in is very mountainous so more than half of the highway will be underground. The parts that are not underground will be on huge bridges. The Chinese don't look for passes. They just draw a line with a ruler on a map and tunnel and bridge their way through. The railway to Wulong which was just completed runs underground for more than 30 of the last 50 KM. It has one tunnel which is 11 KM long.

And we think building a 100m long animal overpass in Banff national park is too expensive.

Raising Babies in China

2008-07-23T08:05:00.000-07:00

Commenting on how other people raise their children is a dangerous game especially when you don't have your own. It's doubly dangerous when my sister is half way through a pregnancy with her first child. Still, it's interesting to see just how different children are from country to country and to attempt to do some amateur pattern matching with the child raising methods.

One thing I've seen in many countries is that parents rarely give in to a screaming child. A screaming child in China faces mockery. I've seen little kids running and then trip and fall on a concrete floor and start to cry. All the adults laugh at them and the kids shut up almost immediately. Similarly, I saw a child spill his food on the floor. He cried for a while but his grandmother ignored him completely and eventually just told him to shut up. In the West it seems that most crying children attract the attention of every adult.　　I see a lot more crying in the West. I guess consolation is a pretty nice reward for crying.

Another thing I've seen a lot in places like China is that parents carry their children more. In Canada we've developed these elaborate baby carrying devices; strollers that contain more technology than many 4x4 vehicles. Parents wheel their babies around in insulated cocoons. In Guatemala, most parents carry their young children around in a blanket thrown over the shoulder. The kids seem to find it much more comforting (and stimulating) than being wrapped in blankets in a dark hole.

In China, toddlers are often carried around in wicker baskets with two shoulder straps to make a backpack. The baskets have a little seat in them but the kids are often standing up and looking around. I've seen little kids carried around for hours while mom cooks, does chores, and chats with people. They seem to love the stimulation and it keeps them from wandering around and putting forks into plugs or pulling things off the counters.

A final big difference I've seen in China has to do with toilet training. Chinese parents aren't much into the diaper thing, the theory being that keeping a kid in diapers too long just teaches them to be comfortable in poopy pants. This must then be untaught. Instead, Chinese kids have pants with a flap on the back, and they are taught at a very young age that if they need to go, they just open the flap and go. Very young children have a flap which is always open. Apparently you can teach a kid to squat at a much younger age then you can teach one to use a toilet without falling in.

This is, unfortunately, a bit gross because teaching context is difficult. I've seen kids shitting on the floor in restaurants and pissing on the sidewalks. Today at the bus station somebody was holding a pooing child over a garbage can. I'm not sure that I think this is very sanitary. Of course, I've seen Chinese men pissing on he streets too. Maybe the habit is hard to unlearn.

Last week we watched in horror as the toddler where we were staying took a dump right outside our sitting area. As we were discussing who would clean it up the family dog came along. I've seen dogs fed some delicious treats before, but apparently few of them are quite as good as a still steaming pile of warm diarrhea. The floor was spotless, but the dog became a pariah for the rest of the trip.

Chinese Traffic

2008-07-23T07:36:00.000-07:00

Chinese traffic is pretty amazing. Chinese people are very nice in person, but in crowds they are often very pushy and aggressive. It's not uncommon to have somebody barge in front of you in a lineup or push you out of the way to get on the train. This transfers over to driving as well.

To make matters worse, the very rapid rise in wealth in China means the majority of drivers are new drivers. Most people who are driving literally couldn't afford a car a few years ago. It's amazing how many times we've seen people unable to do simple things like park a vehicle or turn it around on a dirty road. If you can imagine an entire country of aggressive 16 year old drivers you get an idea of the situation.

A typical scene reported by our friends here is as follows. The setting is a two lane road with a railway crossing. A train arrives and traffic stops. As soon as a lineup starts to form drivers figure they can jump the queue by driving into the now empty oncoming lanes. Or the ditch. Or the ditch in the oncoming lanes. A two lane highway becomes 4 lanes of one way traffic.

Exit the train. The same thing has happened on the other side of course. 4 lanes of jammed vehicles face each other. Nobody can back up because of all the vehicles behind them, so they just start driving at each other hoping somebody will move out of the way. Eventually it all sorts itself out, but it can take ages.

Then another train comes.

Free as in Beer

2008-07-06T09:03:00.001-07:00

We are staying at our friends Erin and Duncan's place in Wulong, China.

We just ran out to get them a case of beer. 12 bottles of beer cost 45RMB ($7.00). The lady explained that once we bring back the empties we will get 21RMB back so half the cost is in the bottle. Three beers for a dollar. Not bad.

Food is a bit more expensive because prices have been going up sharply in the last year. We paid $3.00 for lunch today. It included a meat dish, two vegetable dishes, rice, and no Kumuz. It was arguably the best meal we've had on the China part of the trip.

China: where you get a huge lunch for two and 6 beers for the cost a Chai tea at Starbucks.

Random Useful Travel Tips

2008-07-04T21:53:00.001-07:00

We are travelling for a year. One of the hardest things we had to figure out was what not to bring. The amount of fun you have while backpacking varies as the inverse of the weight of your pack.

Here are a few useful things we learned:

Entertainment

1) Bring one book each. Most backpacker hostels have book exchanges so you can leave your book and pick up a new one. Expect that you will end up reading some things you would never anticipate.

2) Bring and MP3 player and load it up with audiobooks. Trains, cheap hostels, and dorm rooms tend not to have good reading lights. Audiobooks work great in these places.

3) Take pictures of your home. I put some photos on my iPod and they've gone over very well when staying with people. People love to see your family and your city. They are less interested in the beautiful places you've been. You might want to make a few different slide shows for different audiences.

Equipment

1) You can bring a stove and fuel bottle on airlines if they are clean and you don't tell the airline. I read the regulations and they are allowed but airlines insist they aren't. Don't tell them. See #4 below. A stove is the least important bit of camping gear. Consider eating cold food if you are camping a few days.

2) Buy an overbag for your backpack. They cost about $15.00 and keep your bag from getting damaged on the plane. They also make you look less like a backpacker so nobody will ask you if you have a stove. If you are doing some day trips you can stick all your stuff in the overbag and lock the zippers together.

3) A small combination lock is essential. At home I use one as a key chain. Here I keep it on my overbag. If I store stuff somewhere I can toss it in my overbag and lock the zippers together and not worry about it being stolen. In a crowded market I can even lock my day pack; much better than being one of those dorks that carries a backpack on their stomach.

3) Take a sleeping bag liner ($100.00). Sleeping bags are hard to clean so we sleep in a liner inside the bag. The liner is also great if the bed is questionable in a hostel. In hot weather it makes a very nice bag by itself.

4) Bring a day pack. We got a little Black Diamond bag that weighs a few hundred grams and folds up ($25.00). We use it every day and it holds all our important stuff.

6) Bring some antihistamines. If you get bitten by bugs and are itching badly an antihistamine will clear it right up.

Clothing

1) Bring good socks. Socks are the best way to prevent blisters.

2) DON'T go overboard on the synthetic clothing. We brought a bunch of quick drying breathable fabrics and generally hate them. Cotton is the most comfortable thing on your skin even if it takes a while to dry.

3) Bring two sets of clothes and extra underwear. Wash one, wear the other.

4) Buy a Tilley hat. They looks stupid, but we love them.

5) Buy good trekking shoes and good sandals. The best trekking shoes are light hikers. Don't go overboard and buy some big leather boots that you'll have to haul around.

Staying Connected

1) Set up a photo website before you leave. We use Picasaweb and paid a bit of money for extra storage. That way you can upload your photos while you are travelling and not worry about them. Expect to spent a bit of time on the Internet if you do this. Uploads are often slower than downloads.

2) Don't try anything too fancy online. You'll have limited connectivity and some countries like China will block some pages (like my home page for example). I planned a fancy homepage with a map, but it was too hard to keep it up-to-date. A blog and a photo gallery are the way to go.

3) Buy a GSM phone and get SIM cards in each country. It costs us about $10.00 per country to get a local phone number and we are constantly using it to call local people we meet. Better yet, the rates to call home are often quite reasonable (generally about half the cost of a local call in Calgary).

Paperwork

1) Most of the discount airlines don't allow bookings through online travel agencies because they don't want to pay commissions. If you want the cheapest flights you can often save money by searching for discount airlines for each leg of your trip and buying individual tickets. The main problem with doing this is that if you miss a connection due to delays they aren't responsible. Solve this problem by stopping along the way.

2) Use the postal service and baggage companies. We shipped 50 lbs of caving gear to China rather than carry it with us. We'll ship it back to Canada when we are done. Plan your trip in stages and ship back the gear after each stage. For big packages you'll want a shipping agent like www.globalbaggage.com. They'll ship things from airport to airport and you can pick it up there.

3) Plan your trip from hardest to easiest. You'll have a lot less patience for Visa paperwork after 4 months of travel then you will when you are fresh.

4) Scan your important documents and put them on your photo site in a private album. That way you can always get at them.

5) If you are going to Visa requiring countries, make a bunch of passport and visa photos before you go. There are plenty of web pages that tell you the specs. Lara did ours on our printer. It's very annoying to hunt down a passport photo place when nobody speaks English.

I hope some of these tips are useful.

Enjoy your travels

Why not Esperanto?

2008-07-03T22:47:00.000-07:00

I posted a few days ago to praise English speakers everywhere. A reader asked why my opinion was of Esperanto. For those that don't know, Esperanto was designed as an international language that would be easy to learn, pronounce, read, and write. The idea was to provide a common way to communicate.

Esperanto never took off. I think there are a couple of reasons.

Probably the main problem with Esperanto, to use the business term, is that it has no installed base. Nobody speaks Esperanto, so nobody makes movies, books, or radio shows in Esperanto. Which means that there is little reason to learn Esperanto. It's a circular argument but the logic is inescapable. The only way to really get enough people to learn Esperanto to make a difference is to force them. That's why so many Central Asians speak Russian.

Learning a language is hard, and if you are going to take the time to do it, you'll probably pick the one that lets you talk to the most people, make the most business connections, and see the most movies.

Another problem is that Esperanto can't be easy for everyone to learn. Languages fall into families. For instance, most of Central Asia speaks Turkik languages including Turkish, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Kazak, and others. These languages are closely related and it is easy for Turkish speakers to learn Kazak. Dutch and German are close, as are Spanish, Italian, and French. Spanish and French and Dutch and English are all closer to each other than they are to Russian. There is actually a fascinating field of study where the migration of people around the world can be traced through the family tree of the languages they speak.

What this means is that Esperanto must either be related to nothing, in which case it is hard for everyone to learn, or related to some existing language in which case if favors the speakers of that language. There is no way to design a language that is equally easy for both Chinese and English speakers to learn because their native languages are so different.

So despite best intentions, Esperanto is a language which is quite hard for some people to learn and which nobody speaks. It never had a chance.

Time Automotive Birth

2008-07-01T01:53:00.000-07:00

Fashion is an incredibly strange thing. In China it is pretty cool to have English on things. Many magazines and books have English titles even though the magazine is in Chinese. Another thing you commonly see is people walking around with English T-shirts.

Lara and I went shopping for some clothes today and bought a really cool Chinese shirt. It reads:

The Culture is Living. Ught people to the speed and puruedyna mically since ever since that time automotive birth."

It was a bit expensive because we bought it from a fashion place, but well worth the extra couple of dollars. We loved it so much we each bought one. It is so random. People are trying so hard to be cool, but have no idea how to do it. So they spend extra money to buy some fancy brand on the assumption that the people running the brand wouldn't do anything to make them look stupid (bell bottoms anyone?).

In Canada people are doing the opposite of course, except with tattoos. I've seen tons of people with Chinese tattoos. Do they have any idea what these things say? Probably not, given that our friend Matt in Chengdu assures us there are web pages here that make fun of them. I guess it makes sense given that the average person in a tattoo shop doesn't know any more Chinese than I do.

Next time you see some cute 20 something walking around with Chinese characters tattooed on their arm, remember my shirt. They may think it says "cool chick", but it is just as likely to say "refrigerator chicken."

In Praise Of English Speakers Everywhere

2008-07-01T00:08:00.000-07:00

I speak 3 languages: English, Spanish, and Dutch. English and Dutch I learned as a child. They were free. Spanish I learned on my own. Spanish is an easy language, but I worked hard to learn it. I've spent several months in Spanish lessons and studied hundreds if not thousands of hours. I have a library of Spanish books to practice with, and a collection of Spanish Language CDs and DVDs. Learning a language is one of the most difficult things we can do.

Yet when I travel around, I barely need to know any other languages. All over the world millions of motivated people are learning English. Because of their hard work, I don't have to be able to speak their language. It's really incredibly unbalanced.

Like it or not, English has become the dominant language in the world. Part of it is due to accidents of history; the United States is the dominant military and economic power in the world. But much of it is due to the structure of the language itself. English is an incredibly flexible and powerful language which has an elegant writing system. Chinese has a 50,000 character alphabet. In French a comittee has to decide which words are allowed into the language. As English speakers we were born into one of the best technologies for expressing ourselves and recording our thoughts. English is the language of science, partially because many of the subtle concepts in Science are easier to express in English. That's also why French is good for poetry, but unfortunately for the French poets have less influence in todays world than scientists.

My study of Spanish (and a less successful attempt to grasp some Kyrgyz and Chinese) has given me a great appreciation of all those who speak English as a second language. When a Chinese person is able to talk to me in English I can only imagine how hard they must have studied. When a Kyrgyz tour guide translates for me, I realize that behind the translation are thousands of hours of study and practice, and that every discussion involves stunning mental gymnastics. All over the world there are millions of people who spend their spare time in language classes trying to learn our language. So that they can talk to us.

Think about this the next time somebody talks to you in broken English. Think of the hours they've spent with dictionaries and flash cards trying to get to the point where they could communicate with you at all. Thank them for all their hard work.

Financial Issues From Abroad

2008-06-30T09:04:00.000-07:00

One big fear you have when traveling is that you will run into some sort of financial issue back home that you can't easily deal with. For instance, I once had the experience of having a Mexican Bank machine fault and eat my bank card. In Canada this wouldn't be much of a problem, but abroad this type of thing can really mess up a trip.

As a result of previous experiences I tried hard to have everything in order. I arranged automatic payments for any house related stuff, filed my taxes, and set up all my banking so it could be done online. I took care of the house insurance, car insurance, and even cancelled my cell phone.

Unfortunately even the best laid plans can fall apart.

Today I found that Telus is billing my credit card every month even though I cancelled my cell phone before leaving Calgary. Something similar happened to me last time I went on vacation. Telus changed my rate plan without my consent and charged me $80.00 per month for 4 months even though I didn't make single phone call. It took hours to resolve, but since it was a short trip it was easy to deal with when I came back.

In Canada the whole thing would be resolved in about an hour by sitting in a bunch of voice queues. Unfortunately, because I am away the whole thing is almost impossible to deal with. The Telus website requires me to provide a username and password before I can email them. Unfortunately, since my service is cancelled my username and password won't work any more. So email is out.

I guess I could phone them. They are the phone company after all so you'd expect that to work. Unfortunately the important numbers all seem to be 1800 numbers which won't work outside of Canada. And even with a local number I'd have to deal with the horrible service levels. I've routinely been on hold 45 minutes or an hour with Telus, which is a problem when phone calls are expensive.

There real lesson here is that we simply shouldn't tolerate bad customer service. Telus has never been anything but terrible to deal with. Yet most of us are too lazy to do anything about it even though there are billboards all over the place advertising better products for lower prices. We simply deal with problems as the come up and hope for things to improve. Unfortunately when problems happen from abroad, bad customer service becomes impossible customer service.

Whether it is car insurance (another story altogether), or phone service, we need to become better consumers. If we are unhappy with what we are getting we should take a few minutes to get something better. An ounce of preventation and all that.

In my case, I managed to solve the problem with the help of my mom. She called Telus and confirmed that my account was shut down. She only had to wait on hold for 10 minutes she says. It turns out that my account cancelled in such a way that there were two more bills outstanding, and the second bill just happened to match the minimum monthly payment I make when I make no phone calls. No fault on the phone company. This time. But I still won't sign up with them again.

Hospitality

2008-06-27T00:27:00.000-07:00

Accommodation in Kyrgyzstan takes some getting used to. Outside of the big cities of Bishkek and Osh there are almost no hotels. If you want to stay somewhere, you have to find somebody to take you in.

In many places this is done through B&B style arrangements. In most towns there is a tourism office that can put you in touch with local familys. Rates are set at around $10.00 per person per day including breakfast. Most of the hosts speak little English but all the ones we've stayed with have been great.

In Balykchi, which has no tourism office a young man who spoke some English came up to us to help us out. When we asked for a place to stay he offered up his family's house and we stayed with him and his mother for the night. He wouldn't accept any money.

Outside of the towns the best place to stay is in Yurts. We did a five day backpack trip where we stayed in or at Yurts every night. The Yurts belong to nomadic families that move from the towns to the mountain pastures in the summer to feed their flocks. In the daytime they serve as a kitchen and eating area. At night the tables are pulled aside and everyone sleeps together on the floor.

On our hike we had a Kyrgyz speaking guide which was very helpful. Each evening we'd walk up to a yurt and chat with the shepherds. They'd quickly invite us in for tea (with lots of bread and butter) and Kumuz. The shepherds never knew we were coming but they were always welcoming. We soon realized that we could walk anywhere in the countryside and simply ask people if we could stay with them for the night. The never ask for money, but we typically pay about $10.00 each including dinner and breakfast. Sometimes we sleep in our tents and trade some fresh food for a meal.

We've gotten so used to the yurts that we even did an overnight backpack without supplies, confident that we would be able to find a yurt to stay in. It worked out splendidly.

Some of our best times in Kyrgyzstan have been in the yurts. In just under a month we've spent time with about ten different families. We've played with their kids, answered their questions, eaten their food, and slept on their floors. It's been a remarkable experience and we are humbled by the kindness and hospitality we have experienced here.

Living Ruins

2008-06-26T23:13:00.000-07:00

For more than half a century the Soviet Union was one of the world's great powers. Most of Asia, and a good chunk of Western Europe was part of a bold social experiment to see if there was an alternative to capitalism. There wasn't. The experiment failed spectacularly. Communist economies created only poverty. Idealism gave way to tyranny. By 1990, the entire house of cards came apart.

We travelled for a few days with Jirka, a young Czech who told us stories of life under communism. He remembers the day when Germany opened the borders. His family drove their smoky old car into Germany and everyone greeted them. They couldn't believe it when they saw all the products in a grocery store. They still have photos of all the incredible selection of laundry detergents you could buy. Under Communism there was one. When it was in stock.

Downtown Balykchy

Now, like the Mayan city of Tikal, the great buildings and artifacts of the Soviet Union are crumbling. The Soviets planned magnificent cities with broad streets and ample public spaces. Unfortunately nobody can afford to maintain them anymore. The parks are overgrown, the sidewalks are crumbled. The Pakistan border post with China is a small tin shack. Kyrgystan has a large marble building but when you go inside everything is abandoned and fallen apart. Broken lights hang from the ceiling. You walk through empty halls until you reach a small shack set up in a larger room. This is the border post now. Eventually the building will fall apart completely and the shack will be moved outside.

Lenin Statue Outside a School

The private spaces are even worse. Soviet apartment blocks are drab and poorly constructed. Now, 20 years after the last maintenance they are little more than ruins. The toilets have stopped working. The water is unreliable. The heat doesn't work. Windows have fallen out and been bricked up. Many of them are abandonded completely.

It is an amazing experience to be able to walk through the ruins of one of the world's great civilizations only 20 years after the civilization crumbled. Only two decades ago it was impossible to visit these places. Now you can walk around freely almost anywhere in the ex-Soviet Union. You can talk to the people and hear their stories. The Lenin statues still look out over the streets. But the secret police are gone and there is food in the stores.

Kumuz Again?

2008-06-21T05:01:00.000-07:00

One of the great things about traveling is trying new foods. And I'd be the first to admit that I'm pretty adventurous. I've had fried grasshoppers in Mexico (they taste like peanuts). I've eaten all sorts of revolting tentacles and internal organs in China. I ate a horse penis in Guatemala. But Kumuz is on an entirely different level.

According to the travel guides, Kumuz is a drink made from fermented horse milk. According to oe blogger, it is "The most revolting thing I have ever tasted". All I can say is that the idea of milking a horse grosses me out, and allowing the milk to go sour doesn't add to the appeal. To add to the horror, we met a Vet just before we left who warned us about horrible diseases we could catch from dairy products. National drink or not, I resolved to avoid it at all costs.

"It's Kumuz", said our driver excitedly as the expectant lady handed me an enormous bowl of white liquid. I stared in horror, trying to find a way out. There was none. The entire family was looking at me expectantly. I was an honored guest and it would be horribly rude to refuse. I shuddered in horror, a false grin on my face. I tentatively sipped the liquid. It had the consistency of water and was sour like yogurt. A little bit of grease floated on the surface. It was incredibly strange and disgusting. I had another sip. Smoky aftertaste. Another sip. I finished it. I hoped I wouldn't be ill.

That night before dinner we got to watch the horses being milked. A dozen baby horses were tied to a rope so that they couldn't lift their heads. The mares stood stoicly next to them, waiting. One by one, the baby horses were brought to their mothers to feed for a few seconds. Then they were tied up again, and the men (alway the men) milked the horse into a not very clean looking plastic bucket. The whole process looked very unsanitary.

An hour later, as dinner was ending I was handed a large bowl of white liquid. "Kumuz" said our guide happily. I tried to find somebody to give it to, but they were too fast with the bowls. There was no escape. I tried to smile as everyone looked at me. I looked at the bowl. A couple of horse hairs floated in it. There was also some straw and something I couldn't recognize. It fizzed slightly. Sour. Smoky. Weird.

Kumuz is an obsession here. Everyone loves it. The capital of Kyrgyzstan is named "Bishkek" because a Bishkek is the stick used to stir the Kumuz. It's like naming Ottawa "Hockey Puck". Whenever anyone goes into the countryside they stop at the yurts to get Kumuz. Whenever you hike past a yurt you are offered Kumuz. Whenever you are waiting for something people tell you to just "drink some Kumuz". It's crazy.

In the corner of the yurt was a large object made of dark leather. It was blackened and oily looking on the outside and smelled of smoke. The leather had been sewn together to make a waterproof container. It looked organic. A stick stuck out of the top. It was the Kumuz container. The final link in the Kumuz chain. The container which is never cleaned or emptied. You just keep adding more milk. I could easily imagine the years of milk slime on the inside of the leather. No wonder they stir it so much.

Strangely, that was my Kumuz turning point. I had seen the horses milked, the dirty buckets, the organic debris in the milk, and now the leather container in which the Kumuz was fermented. And still I could not refuse the Kumuz which was given to me. It was strong. Sour. Smoky. Weird. Strangely addicting.

As I write this I can almost taste the Kumuz. I can imagine the smell. The sourness. The watery texture. There is nothing like it. Sour. Smoky. Weird. I hope they have some in the next Yurt we visit.

Horsing Around Son-Kol

2008-06-21T04:47:00.000-07:00

Son Kol is a lake in Central Kyrgyszstan. It sits at 3000m above sea level and is surrounded by mountains. In the summer dozens of nomadic families pack up their yurts and leave their villages to bring their livestock to the summer pastures.

Lara and I arranged a 3 day horse trek to the lake. We joined a swiss couple and a few guides and mounted the rather uncomfortable beasts. Our instruction consisted of "Get on the horse". "OK, now follow". There was no attempt to adjust the saddles or stirrups to us, and backpacks were simply tied on with random bits of rope.

The horses were very well behaved, but not very excited to go hiking. We learned eventually that the way to get them to move was to "teach them harder" with the little whips we were given. Nonetheless, one horse resisted to the point that only our guides had the heart to "teach him" hard enough.

We spent about 5 hours on horseback, riding through some lovely pastures, and then arrived at a yurt where we were given a great meal and some fermented horse milk. The next day we continued 5 hours more to reach the lake. It was incredibly impressive- vast flat grasslands surrounded by mountains. A number of yurts had been set aside for tourists and we were again fed a nice meal although the experience wasn't as "homey" as it had been the previous night. Clearly these shephards were more used to tourists.

It was an incredible feeling to stand in a field surrounded by horses, cows, and sheep. When night fell, the only light was from the stars. Central Asia is still a huge black expanse at night. It reminded us of another place we love: the Black Rock Desert. The world seemed to stretch forever, and all around us there was activity. People chased horses, dogs barked, children played, and fishermen cast their nets. It was magic.

Hiking with the kids.

2008-06-09T06:09:00.000-07:00

Lara and I had a lovely hiking trip with a couple of local youth this weekend. It was arranged by a local tourism company, and for about $30.00 we got food for the weekend and transportation to and from the trailhead.

We met at the tourism office in downtown Bishkek around 3PM on Friday, and then hopped into a Minibus with 5 Kyrg youth and Medina, of the tourism company's employees. Two hours of ghastly driving in the hot bus, and we were in the mountains putting on our backpacks. We split up the group gear and food, and started our hike.

The hike started near a partially constructed building which is apparently going to be a trekking lodge. Our goal was to mark a trail and the kids had some spraypaint along which they used to make marks on rocks. The weren't the first to do so, and a times there were several arrows pointing in different directions depending on who had marked the trail before and which way they had gone. Not that it mattered, since we were in a steep valley and only a true masochist would consider leaving the valley bottom.

The food was not bad, although a little heavy, both in terms of weight as it had lots of cans and jars, and also because there were lots of greasy sausages. Still, it had all been arranged and cooked for us, and we ate it gladly. Everyone was really nice, and about half the group spoke at least a little English so we didn't have to do too much smiling and nodding.

On the second day we hiked up a steep hill to a lovely lake, where we set up camp just minutes before a 4 hour rainstorm. The weather cleared in time for dinner but we were all bundled up against the cold. The views further down the valley were spectacular and I was sorry not to be able to go further. Lara and I would probably have doubled the distance easily, although we'd have gotten caught in the rain.

Like most of the mountains in Kyrgyszstan, the meadows here are the home to Nomads who bring up cattle from the winter pastures in the lowlands. We saw a couple of their tents, and on the hike out two men on horseback caught up to Lara and I. We managed to tell them we were Canadians, and they rode off and came back with some fresh Rhubarb they had picked. It was sweet enough that my mouth waters now thinking about it.

They also brought out a bottle of liquid that they offered to us. Oh, oh. We had heard about this. Fermented Mare's milk. The milk of a cow. Fermented. Like beer. It looked even more revolting than it sounded, and the last thing we wanted was an upset stomach. Lara grabbed the bottle and took a swig, and I was stuck. I took the bottle too and took a sip. Hmmm. Not bad. If I didn't know better, I'd even say it was tasty. I took a bigger sip, but resisted having too much despite the urging of the nice gentleman.

As we got back to the bus, the youth picked up a bunch of garbage that had been dumped in the area by thoughtless campers. This was great to see, as there is a lot of trash in some areas and we were glad to see a change in attitude. Unfortunately when we got to the bus, the driver didn't want to take our two big bags of trash. We would have left all of it, but I snuck a bag in the back when he wasn't looking. You win some, you lose some.

Our Bishkek Apartment

2008-06-09T05:49:00.000-07:00

On Friday we left Bishkek for the weekend to do a hike with a local outdoor club. We decided to come back for one more day to upload some photos, pick up our Tajikistan Visa, and rest before going into the mountains.

The door to our apartment

We decided to talk to the landlady to see if we could get our apartment again. Of course we spoke no Russian, and she no English, so it took a while to communicate that we were leaving in the afternoon the next day but wanted to come back on Sunday. She asked us to pay a bit extra for leaving in the afternoon instead of the morning. She also wanted to know what time we'd show up, presumably because she had the key and had to be home to meet us. After a while we got it all sorted out, and off we went for our hike.

I'll digress quickly and say that the apartment is very clean, but quite rundown. There is no hot water, but apparently that is the case over all of Bishkek. Aparently the Soviets decided to put in a central hot water system for the entire city. Unfortunately it doesn't work well and they whole thing goes down for maintenance about one month a year. In our case though, the cold water also shut off. For a while we had a dribble and were able to fill a bucket in about 5 minutes, but today it stopped completely. Now we have to go down to the landlady two floors below to fill a bucket if we want to bathe or flush the toilet.

Lara in the Kitchen

Anyway, back to the story.

We got back from the hike a little early so we decided to take a chance and we showed up on her doorstep at 3:00. She was surprised to see us and told us that the apartment was in use until 5:00. Weird. What sort of place gets used by the hour?

Suddenly the light went on. Our apartment is normally used by prostitutes. Now the Vodka in the fridge made sense.

Not one to miss and oportunity I was able to save a few dollars by renting the apartment for 40 hours instead of 2 days.

Impressions of Bishkek

2008-06-08T02:35:00.000-07:00

We've spent a few days in Bishkek (2 million people, the capital of Kyrgysztan) doing the Visa dance and arranging our China travel.

The city has little history, and as a result, the layout is excellent. The streets are wide and lined with big trees, and there are broad sidewalks everywhere so it is very walkable. Huge mountains loom just 30km outside of town and their snowcapped peaks tease us in the 35 degree heat. There are lots of parks and public spaces although they are all very run-down. A lot of the parks are just tangles of weeds that look like they haven't seen a gardener in decades. Many of the marble buildings of the downtown are abandoned and falling apart. I think the only maintenance that has happened since the Russians left is the removal of all the Lenin statues.

There is a pretty good public transport system in mini-buses ($.25), although preversely, none of the buses has windows which open- an amazing cruelty in a city that sees 45 degrees celcius in the summer. Taxis are cheap ($3.00 anywhere in the city), and easy to find and we've taken them a few times when we couldn't handle the thought of a crowded mini-bus with all our luggage.

The people are friendly, vibrant, and young. This feels like a place that is going somewhere, and with a bit of money to fix the roads and mow the lawns this city could be a wonder. I've rarely seen a city with so much potential. In 40 years time, Bishkek may count itself among the best places in the world to live.

Getting a Tajikistan Visa in Bishkek Kyrgyszstan

2008-06-08T02:19:00.000-07:00

We arrived in Bishkek in June 2008 with the intention of getting our other Central Asian visas right here in Central Asia. We found the Tajikistan Visa was pretty easy to get and I thought I'd provide some information for other travellers since I've seen a lot of speculation on the Internet.

The Tajikistan Embassy is pretty hard to find as it is in the middle of a residential neighborhood. We had a Taxi take us for 100 som. The embassy looks like a big wall with a garage and two doors. The only signage is in Russian and it took us a few seconds to find the cyrillic letters for Tajikistan. There are no posted hours but the Lonely Planet says they are open from 9-11 Monday-Friday. We showed up at 9:45.

We rung what looked like the main doorbell and a few seconds later the door opened and a gentleman looked out. I asked for a "Visa" in English and he nodded, closed the door and vanished.  A minute later the door opened again and he handed me a Visa form.  Then he closed the door again. I rang the doorbell a second time to get a form for Lara, and then we sat on the lawn and started to fill out the form. About 5 minutes later the door opened again and he gave us a bench to sit on.

Once we had filled out the form we rang the bell again.  He opened the door, nodded, and vanished.  We waited.  And waited.  We talked to some Iranians who were applying for a Visa, and then waited some more.  Finally a woman came out, looked over the forms, and then told us in English that we would have to write a letter explaining why we wanted to go to Tajikistan and what towns we wanted to visit. She gave us a piece of paper and Lara wrote the letter. Luckily I had taken along a map so I listed a bunch of towns along the Pamir highway.

Once we had written the letter, we rang and waited again. We were then told to go to the other door, where we were finally allowed inside the compound to the Visa office. We handed our forms, passport photos, and a copy of our front passport page to the lady.  She gave us back a stamped copy of the passport front page with a note explaining that the Tajikistan Embassy had our passports. A 30 day Visa costs $50 dollars + 50 Som, and a 45 day Visa costs $60.00 + 50 som. There seemed to be no problem getting the 45 day one. We were told that it take 4 working days and we could pick up the Visa at 10:00 AM.

If you are travelling to Tajikistan and found this information useful, please let me know by leaving a comment.

Kyrgyszstan Arrival

2008-06-06T01:40:00.000-07:00

We arrived in Bishkek Airport at 4:00 AM. Our plane bounced on the bumpy runway past rows of American airforce cargo planes (Manas airport doubles as a US base). A few minutes later we stumbled, bleary eyed, to the immigration counter. Kyrgysztan is the only central asian country where you can get a visa in the airport and we were hoping things would go smoothly or our whole trip would be shot. It turned out to be no problem. We got a visa form which (a bad quality photocopy in both English and Russian) and filled it out. We paid our $30.00, stood in a line for a stamp, and we were in the country.

As we exited the arrivals area with Kyrgystan a crowd of Taxi drivers tried to sign us up for overpriced rides to the airport. Luckily we'd been warned by the Lonely Planet about Taxi sharks so we didn't agree to anything. Since it was 5AM and a bit early to check into a hotel we cooled our heels in the airport for a few hours and figured out where we wanted to stay. Then we went to the official taxi office which had a sign for a $13.00 cab ride to the city. We hopped into a BMW and a friendly driver took us the 40km to Bishkek.

When we arrived at our intended guesthouse we had a shock. Not only was it full, but we were told by some other travellers that every other place they had checked was also booked. On top of that we were told that everyone was charging $70.00-$100.00 a night instead of the advertised $30.00-$40.00. The helpful travellers told us that the one possiblity was to pay $20.00 to camp on the lawn of a hotel in our tents. We gave our cabbie the address and off we went to find expensive camping.

After a lengthy negotation in sign language at the hotel we realized that the camping option wasn't going to work either. Now we were starting to get worried. Nobody spoke English and we had no place to stay and we were tired from the ridiculously timed plane ride. I mean, who schedules a 5 hour flight to land at 4AM? We figured maybe the tourist office could help.

Luckily our cab driver made some phone calls and next thing we knew Lara was on the phone with a woman who spoke some English and offered to rent something us some mysterious object for about $35.00 a night. We had no idea what or where it was, but we had little choice so we agreed. The woman then mentioned some stuff about 10:00, we we assumed was the checkin time.

We hopped back in the cab, and the driver took us to the outskirts of town to a weird concrete amusement park. This is the sort of crumbling soviet relic that is hard to describe, but it had a neat tower that gave a good view of the nearby mountains. After that the cabbie took us for tea in a nice sitdown place with cushions. After the tea, he took us to his friend's restaurant for breakfast. We realized that he was just killing time with us until the check-in.

After a wonderful breakfast of noodles with meat we got back into the cab and drove to a decrepit apartment building. The driver punched an entry code and we walked up a scary stairway to the 4th floor, where a woman came out with a key. On the 5th floor we were let into an apartment complete with a stove, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, and balcony. Everything was in pretty bad shape, and the hot water didn't work ( we later found out that the Russians put central hot water into Kyrgyzstan, but did such a bad job that they have to shut it down one month a year for maintenance). Still, it was a great deal.

We offered to pay the cab driver for his efforts, but he wouldn't accept any money. (We repayed his hospitality two days later by hiring him for a private ride to the mountains nearby so we could go hiking for the day.) Overall, it was a pretty exciting and positive first experience in Kyrgyzstan. We hope the rest of our trip will be this good.

Always Talk to Strangers

2008-05-24T11:00:00.000-07:00

There is a tempation when travelling to focus sights rather than people. Yet I've found time and time again that some of my best and most memorable experiences come when we manage to stop ticking off museums and buildings and spend some time absorbing the local culture. There are some amazing people in this world.

The other morning we had breakfast outside our hostel. The tables were full, so we sat down next to Steven, an English teacher from the US. Soon we were engrossed in conversation about his travels in the Middle East. He's spent time in Oman, Yemen, and other countries and now lives in Turkey. He had tons of interesting insights into Islamic culture. Lots of time passed, and it was close to lunch time before we finally left the hostel. We cut our sıghtseeıng short but in the end it was worth it. There are only so many mosques you can see in a day anyway.

Every time we've stopped long enough to talk to somebody, we've found ourselves enriched by learning a little bit more about the world around us. Our travel agent told us about the history of Turkey: about Ataturk and how the Turkish republic was founded. She gave us her views on fundamentalist Islam. "I am a Muslim", she said, "but I don't pray, I don't wear a scarf, and I can't read the Koran. For me, it is a cultural thing." It's a perspective we never hear in Canada.

We've found the same with fellow travelers. In Turkey we've been staying in family run Pensions. These are basically large houses that have been opened up to travelers, and they are a completely different experience from a hotel. The best ones really feel like you are staying in somebody's home and eating in their dining room, and they are a great place to meet people. We ran into some fantastic fellow travellers in Bergama and Selchuk. When you are in an out of the way Pension in the middle of Turkey the likelyhood that you'll have something in common with your fellow travellers is pretty high. They've all passed through the same travel filter.

A ide-effect of all of this is a lot of late nights. When you meet amazing people and find easy connections based on shared experiences and outlooks it's hard not to talk late into the night. Even though we exchange email addresses, in the vast majority of cases we will never cross paths again. We treasure these moments with our fellow travellers, and we love the cups of tea with the Turkish shopkeepers. And then we head off for the next adventure.

Travel Blog Challenges

2008-05-23T13:40:00.000-07:00

Technology has allowed us to do some remarkable things while we travel. Here I sit, at a cheap hotel in Istanbul, writing a blog entry that will hopefully be read either by my friends at home, or maybe by me in my old age when I am no longer able to travel. One could argue whether this is in itself a good thing (after all, I could be out seeing the city), but it is something I enjoy doing.

Unfortunately the type of things I am doing are becoming increasingly challenging largely due to the very design decisions that are supposed to make computers easier to use.

Generally when we design a computer interface we try to avoid asking the user any questions if the computer itself can determine the answer. Hopefully the result of this is that your Grandma doesn't have to phone you up to ask whether she should install the latest security update to the operating system. As a counterpart to this we bury the complex parts of the system deep down where a novice user won't accidentally stumble into them and do harm.

The unfortunate counterpoint is that sometimes the computer makes the wrong decision on your behalf. And when you are travelling, the computer almost always makes the wrong decision for anything to do with language. The consequences are really annoying.

The first problem you run into on a foreign computer is the keyboard layout. Every country has a different keyboard and it can be an incredible hassle to search an entire keyboard looking for the @ key. To make matters worse many computers will have a physical US keyboard that is mapped to their local language. Generally every punctuation mark is in a completely new location and you have to explore the keyboard until you find it. Luckily there is sometimes a handy little menu in the bottom right to change the keyboard layout, but unfortunately there is some arcane magic needed to make it show up, and you have to reset the layout every time you open an new program.

The second problem is the language itself. In Turkey, most machines are, not suprisingly, in Turkish. You can change the language if you burrow far enough into the inards of Windows. Unfortunately, all of this stuff is in Turkish. Do I select Denemit Massasi from Baslat, or do I select Yaziki fe Fakslar? The only thing I know is that I haven't been able to find the language setting yet.

The third problem is that even if you change the language on the keyboard and the computer, you might still run into a web-page (Google for example) that tries to be too clever and gives you a local language version even when you try to get into the English version. Google's mail used to do this even when you log into a Canadian email address, but they seem to have fixed this recently.

The final problem is simply one of software. Uploading photos for example, doesn't work very well if you don't have the right software. And downloading the software is a hassle when all the confirmation dialogs are in another language, the link is slow, and the computer may be locked down.

I've made matters even worse for myself by creating a home page (http://shatterthefog.googlepages.com) which has some content on it that need to be updated with a bit of JavaScript code and some snooping around on Google Maps. I'm sure I'll get better at it, but right now each time I do it I'm amazed that the whole mess holds together.

Despite all these challenges its still fun to be able to keep in touch with friends, and so I still end up typing rambling posts late at night in Istanbul. Playing with JavaScript in Turkey also brings me back to my roots; I've had a 25 year love affair with technology and I am still excited by new developments. Email and blogs sure beats the days of $6.00 a minute phone calls and one month postal service.

Long Live the Queen

2008-05-21T07:05:00.000-07:00

The Netherlands, like many European countries, still has a monarchy. I've always thought the idea of a Queen or King pretty old-fashioned, yet as we talked to various people I realized that monarchies remain popular and that there are actually some pretty good reasons for keeping a weakened form of royalty around.

Politics in Canada (and even more so in the United States) is always overshadowed by the next election. Because the election cycle is so short this encourages some frightful short-term thinking. Politicians have little incentive to embark on a 20 year program of reform when they could easily be out of a job in 2 years. The temptation is to put off difficult problems until the next election and to score cheap popularity even if the long-term consequences are bad.

Monarchies work on longer cycles. Queens and Kings are often in office for decades so they see the consequences of their decisions. As a result, they provide a current of long-term stability in the chaos of ever-changing governments.

Modern monarchies are limited to diplomatic roles, but the ongoing popularity of monarchies reminds me of a broader idea Peter Gabriel presented at the TED conference few years ago. Maybe we need a branch of government that has a long term outlook to balance short term politicians. In Canada the senate could fill this role if we made some reforms.

Elected politicians are good at seeing the value of cutting down a forest and selling the trees. We need a balancing body that sees the value of saving a forest for our grandchildren. In a world with 6 billion people and an environment on the brink of destruction, it is time to experiment with some longer term leadership.

The Value of Family

2008-05-21T06:49:00.000-07:00

Lara and I just spent most of the last week visiting relatives in the Netherlands.
It was a treat to spend a week soaking up another culture and meeting such a wide variety of wonderful people. I really have no family in Canada outside my parents, so for me the whole experience of visiting aunts, uncles, and cousins is something new and somewhat unusual.

What I found most interesting about my family is that there is an immediate degree of intimacy simply because we are related. Yet at the same time, anything that we have in common beyond some shared genes is simply an accident. This doesn't happen with the other people in our lives. We choose our friends among people who share our outlook and interests. Family stretches us socially in a way that our friends do not.

Flights to Obscure Places

2008-05-19T01:37:00.000-07:00

After a longer than anticipated stop in Calgary (which included the best snowboarding season ever), Lara and I are on the road again as of early May. This time we are off for a year on a trip that will take us from Holland to Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, caving in China, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and finally six months in various parts of Africa. Because we are going for so long our schedule is flexible. That way we can spend more time in places we like and adjust to changing political conditions.

The first adjustment we had to make happened even before we left Calgary. We had intended to start the trip in China and head overland to Kyrgyszstan through Xinjiang province in Western China. Unfortunately because of all the political unrest China has effectively closed the country to independent travel. You need hotel reservations for every night in the country and visas are limited to 30 days. This is fine for an organized tour, but makes backpacking rather difficult. A nice man at the Chinese embassy denied us our visa request and told us to try again after the olypmics.

As a result we decided to start our trip in Kyrgyszstan instead (after visiting Lara's family in Toronto). All Central Asian countries require a Visa and Kyrgyszstan is the only one where you can get it at the airport so it is a logical starting point. Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that Toronto-Bishkek (Kyrgyszstan) is not a major travel route so we decided to book the flight ourselves as seperate legs. This turned out to be a pretty interesting experience in do-it-yourself travel booking.

I started by researching which airlines fly into Bishkek. We found out that there are direct flights to Bishkek from Istanbul on Turkish Air. The Turkish Visa is available at the airport, so that isn't a problem. Istanbul is also easily reachable from Amsterdam, and there are direct flights from Toronto to Amsterdam. Since I have family in the Netherlands that seemed like a great way to go.

We found out that websites like Cheaptickets.com and Expedia.com don't show flights on discount airlines (think Westjet), so we researched discount airlines and found a cheap charter from Toronto to Amsterdam and another cheap charter from Amsterdam to Turkey. Simply by typing "Discount Airlines" into Google we saved about $1000.00.

Just as I was about to book the first flights Erin Lynch, my friend in China managed to get us an invitation letter to go caving in China. As a result we could now get a 30 day Chinese Visa without hotel bookings. We couldn't really carry our caving gear through a month of travelling, but I was able to find a company that could ship our caving gear to China for about $300. As a result, we can now do our China caving trip even though we won't be able to do the sightseeing we had originally planned.

Luckily we didn't have to change our plans much. All we need to do is time our entry into Kyrgyszstan so that we don't overstay our welcome before heading out to China. And of course we now need to figure out how to get from Bishkek to Chengdu, China. Our research shows that it is possible via Urumqi China, but we'll have to book the tickets in Bishkek since there aren't reliable online bookings for some of the airlines we want to use.

Who knew that an adventure would need so much paperwork! And we haven't even started to get all the required Central Asian visas yet.

Back to work

2007-11-01T03:17:00.000-07:00

Lara and I are back in Calgary for a few months doing some contract work. While I have lots of stuff I'd like to write about, I simply don't have time to do any blogging right now. In the spring we are off to China and then Africa for a year. We'll start writing again then.

Childhood's End

2007-09-30T19:53:00.000-07:00

When I was growing up I walked to school every day. I rode my bike down the street, swung on swings, and ran around outside chasing my friends. My favorite toy was Lego. I preferred the bricks over the kits because with the bricks you could make anything, but a wagon wheel part could never be anything else. If I was growing up today, everyone would feel sorry for me because I didn't have any cool toys, and my parents would be frowned at for not guarding me from predators and playground accidents.

The truth is that kids don't need expensive toys to have fun. We saw this over and over while we were travelling. Groups of kids simply make their own fun as long as they have somebody to play with. Kids in Guatemala have just as much fun with a rock, a stick, and a cup, as kids in North America do with a baseball and a leather glove.

The only time the rock and stick aren't fun anymore is when the kid next door has a baseball and a leather glove. That is where the trouble lies in our society, and it is something we are teaching at a younger and younger age.

We've somehow convinced ourselves that we need fancy toys to make us happy. Unfortunately any satisfaction we get from buying a fancy toy is typically short-lived; there is always something a little better. On top of that, the very quest for material things takes us away from the things that really make us happy. We work so much overtime to pay for a big house and flatscreen TV that we are never enjoy them.

Do any of these things really make us happy? If you believe all the advertising you see, the answer is a resounding YES. Just look at how happy the people in the ads look. The purpose of a lot of advertising is to convince us that we don't have enough, and it does the job very effectively.

Kids in Guatemala are lucky in a way. They haven't yet been exposed to relentless advertising to convince them that the kids with the expensive toys are having more fun then they are, so they all have fun together. All they need is friends to play with. And once my needs are taken care of that's also what makes me happiest. I like to play with my friends too. Not with a stick and ball maybe, but a pair of hiking boots and a climbing rope go a long way.

I saw a bumper sticker once that said: "How will you know when you have enough?" I only needed to look in my basement. I'm there man. See you in the mountains!

How to Improve Governance

2007-08-24T16:31:00.000-07:00

This will be my last post for a while as we are off to Burning Man and then a few weeks of hiking in Utah. What better way to celebrate than to talk about Governance again.

In a comment on my last post, Mike Gallagher suggested that the tools to improve governance are weak. This certainly matches what we have seen in our travels. According to friends we talked to in Guatemala, a group of legal experts from a major US university came down to Guatemala a few years ago to help improve the legal system. After many months and much money spent they gave up in frustration. They had accomplished nothing.

We also encountered a couple of law students in Coban who were working on the war-crimes trial of Rios Monte. Rios Monte was head of the Guatemalan government during the time when some of the worst atrocities of the civil war took place, and many people feel that bringing him to justice would be a big step towards bringing a rule of law to Guatemala. As usual, things are not that simple. It turns out that in the areas like the Ixil triangle where the worst of the fighting occurred, Rios Monte enjoys tremendous popularity to this day. He generally gets about 90% support from the indigenous population, who view him as a hero that helped stop the violence. To many people a war-crimes trial for Rios Monte would be yet another travesty in a long history of injustice.

Governance is not something that can be imposed on a culture. I’ve seen myself in Guatemala, and the world has seen it in Iraq. Governance is something that comes from within, and I believe that ultimately it happens for mainly selfish reasons.

As cynical as it may sound, government is the tool by which the rich and build and preserve their wealth. As a result, when the rich and powerful are a small, closed group we generally end up with some form of authoritarian system. The best way for a small group to get rich is to plunder a country. As long at the dictator funnels enough money to the powerful things generally run fairly smoothly.

When the rich and powerful form a larger group however we generally end up with something more democratic. It is no accident that the wealthiest countries are all democracies. The reason is that the spoils of an authoritarian system are hard to scale. When there are tens of thousands of rich business owners, all of whom want a slice of the pie, it is hard for any central government to keep them all happy simply by plunder. This is not only because corrupt governments can only split the pie so many ways; it is also because corrupt governments stop the pie from growing. At some point there is more money to be made from economic growth than from corruption and as a result there comes a tipping point where the rich and powerful can protect their interests better in a democratic system of government. One day we wake up and realize that we are the wealthy and powerful.

Of course this raises a big question. How do we break the cycle? Bad governance prevents a big middle class from forming, yet as long as there is no big middle class there is little pressure for a better system of government.

I believe that the answer is to put pressure directly on the ruling elites. If the ruling elites are trying to do things that maximize their wealth then it makes sense for us to make it this difficult. For instance, if a country has very high rates of corruption we should not channel any money directly to its government. Or maybe we should go further and restrict access to foreign banks for members of corrupt governments. And when a country opens up its markets we should enthusiastically trade with them so that we can help grow a bigger middle class.

Our system of government may not be perfect, but it’s pretty good. Women are educated, our police are generally helpful, and we are healthy, wealthy, and free to say what we want. It’s in our own best interest to promote it. We are facing a planetary environmental emergency and it’s going to take huge amounts of money and creativity to solve it. If we help Africans get rich and get better governments, then they will stop dumping toxic chemicals and plastic into the ocean. The whole world needs to band together. There is nothing to be gained any more from dealing with corrupt and evil elites. Let’s take the moral high ground and put some pressure on the bastards!

The Importance of Governance

2007-08-19T11:35:00.000-07:00

Last week I wrote about the distinction between the goals of development (health, environment, culture, and human rights) and the means for achieving those goals (economy, education, governance). Based on what I've seen in Latin America as well as what I've read, the single most important means is governance.

It is almost impossible to achieve lasting change in a country with a bad government. There are the obvious reasons: bad governments plunder the economy and steal aid. But even worse there are the subtle reasons: bad governments create a climate in which individuals are hampered from taking action that will make their lives better. In a country with a good government however, there is little else that needs to be done. The economy will boom, wealth will increase, and educated people will be rewarded for their knowledge. We need look no further than Asia to see how quickly good government policies can bring people out of poverty.

Governments go bad in two ways. They are can be corrupt, and they can be incompetent.

Corrupt governments are mainly interested in enriching themselves and they are all too common in the developing world. In the worst cases, like the Sudan, the rulers simply take aid away from the intended recipients. In Zimbabwe for example, aid agencies are forced to buy local currency at outrageously inflated exchange rates from the central bank. As a result most of the money spent on aid in Zimbabwe ends up directly in the hands of that unspeakable monster Robert Mugabe.

I think we've seen enough of human nature over the last few centuries to safely say that most governments, including those in the western democracies, will be corrupt if given the chance. In Canada the ruling Liberal Party spent years enriching their cronies with advertising contracts. In the United States the Iraq war has created incredible wealth for those with the right connections. In China, the head of the food and medicine department was recently executed for bribery. In Mexico a typical road building contract involves a large kickback to the government.

The difference between countries that are seen as very corrupt and those that are not, is the degree to which those in power are held accountable. In Canada the Liberals were investigated by the RCMP and punished in the polls. In the United States numerous senators and government officials are currently under investigation for bribery and corruption. In Guatemala, there is silence. In Africa those that fight corruption sometimes have to flee the country. Fighting corruption requires three things: a free press that can shine a light on dirty activities, a strong democracy that allows people to replace governments that get too greedy, and a court system that can investigate the worst offenders.

The second problem facing a lot of countries is government incompetence. Most people, including many of those in government, have only the slightest understanding of how economies work and wealth is created. This means that well meaning governments can often create laws that have exactly the opposite effect of what they intend. Nowhere is this more apparent than with labor laws.

Labor laws are intended to protect people from exploitation, but laws that make it difficult to fire somebody also make it risky to hire somebody. Imagine that you owned a small business and you just got a big order and want to hire an assistant. In some countries you could hire that person and keep them as long as their was work. It would be a no-brainer because if there were no more big orders you could fire them and not go bankrupt. In other countries, when you hire that person you would not be able to get rid of them without an extremely lengthy and expensive severance process. In these countries it is often easier simply not hire somebody. The ease with which you can hire and fire people is called labor-market flexibility, and it has a tremendous impact on how easily jobs are created.

The best way to create wealth is to set up an environment where people can be rewarded for hard work and cleverness. This is what got the United States so rich and this is what is lifting a billion Asians out of poverty. It may not be glamorous work, but the work of creating legal systems and training judges is even more important than building hospitals and schools. Good governments will free people to solve their own problems and will open up a world of opportunities to provide effective aid.

Evaluating Charitable Organizations: Means and Goals

2007-08-10T08:00:00.000-07:00

Hans Rosling gave a very interesting TED talk this year about poverty. The entire talk is excellent and well worth checking out. One of his most interesting points is that to help people out of poverty it is important to separate the goals from the means. The means are the things that will actually help get people out of poverty. The goals are the reasons why they want to get out of poverty. From what I’ve seen so far, this is something many charity organizations get wrong.

Hans Rosling lists seven dimensions of development:

Human Rights

Environment

Governance

Economic Growth

Education

Health

Culture

Generally speaking, governance, economic growth, and education are the means by which people get out of poverty. As people get richer they will spend their own money on culture, health, and the environment, and they will find that human rights become more important to them personally.

The flipside of this is that if you don’t provide people with the means to get out of poverty, no amount of effort in the goals area is going to have much lasting impact. This is the part many organizations get wrong. For instance there are lots of organizations doing health work in the developing world, and they do some wonderful things. But in the long run many of them have very little lasting impact. At the end of the day a poor farmer who is cured of an illness is still a poor farmer. But a poor farmer who is taught to read and write might become a shopkeeper who can afford to pay for a visit to the doctor himself. If he is taught how to treat his water, he might avoid getting sick in the first place.

There is nothing wrong with supporting organizations that work on the goals end of development. Health, human rights, culture, and the environment are the things we care most about. They make life worth living, and it is in these areas that we can show our compassion and ease suffering. But I personally feel that it is important to look at goals-based organizations with a critical eye. It is easy to get so excited by easing suffering that you stop trying to prevent it.

Take environmental organizations for example. The environmental organizations that will have the biggest impact are first and foremost poverty reduction organizations, or organizations that try to improve governance. The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund is a great example. According to their website they “provide assistance to local communities through education, health, training and economic development initiatives.” Education and economic development are the means by which they hope to get local populations wealthy enough so that they don’t need to eat Gorillas.

There are a lot of things we can do to make the world a better place. But over the years a lot of time and money has been spent of feel-good initiatives that have had little impact. We need to spend our money wisely, and make sure that the organizations we are supporting are going to have a lasting impact.

All Hail the Mighty Cell Phone

2007-08-05T20:54:00.000-07:00

One interesting thing about travelling in the developing world is that it makes it much clearer which products are worth paying for and which ones are expensive luxuries. There is nothing like an income of $5.00 per day to make you into a shrewd consumer. Of all the technologies that could improve the life of the poor which ones do they spend their money on first? We’ve travelled three months in Guatemala and we have the answer. Cell phones.

It seems absurd at first, but upon closer examination it makes a lot of sense. Most of us live in cities and have never known life without a telephone. It is hard for us to imagine just how different life would be if we lived in a remote mountain village in a developing country. There are no doctors, no pharmacies, and no places to buy basic supplies like farming tools or seeds. Getting something from a store involves spending an entire day on a bus travelling to the nearest town and back.

Coordinating activities also becomes much harder when there are no phones. Imagine you want to get your brother to help you fix the roof on your farm. You pretty much have to go to his house to find him. If he lives in the next village and travels a lot, this may be a time-consuming exercise in luck. Is he going to be around, or will you have to come back? People in the developing world spend a lot of time sitting around waiting for stuff. We sometimes romanticize this as a slower pace of life, but in reality it simply wasted time.

Cell phones change all that. You can call ahead to find out if the people you need to talk to are available. In an emergency you can phone your family in the city and ask them to put something onto the bus for you. If you own a car you can call people when you go into town to see if they need anything. Everything becomes a little bit easier.

In Guatemala we saw cell phones in the unlikeliest places. We saw farmers in traditional clothing standing in their fields with their wooden planting sticks talking on cell phones. We saw ladies in the markets selling weavings and talking on their phones. Our friends even had a bus who simultaneously driving, filling out paperwork, and talking a cell phone. He was driving with his knees. Almost everyone had a cell phone.

In some parts of the world cell phones have created entirely new industries. For example, in many villages there are people who rent out their phones by the minute. This is a great business simply because it increases communications. Improbably, it also improves banking. If I live in CityVille and want to send money to my friend in Farmville, cell phones allow me to do it. I simply buy a $5.00 phone card. Then I can call the person who runs the public phone in Farmville and tell her I want to give money to my friend. I then read out the phone card number. The Farmville phone operator can now put $5.00 worth of minutes on her telephone, and pay my friend the cash (minus a healthy commission). With clever uses like this it is no wonder that cell phones are one of the first things financed by many micro-credit lenders. Cell phone actually decrease poverty in dramatic ways!

Of course, if the big western companies provided cell phone services nobody would be able to afford them. In the developing world the pricing structures for cell phones are completely different than we are used to. Poor people can’t afford to pay the same ludicrous prices and surcharges that the phone company adds to my phone bill every month.

In the developing world phones themselves are extremely cheap. It costs about $15.00 to buy a phone in Guatemala, and it comes with $10.00 worth of minutes. The handsets are basic, but they work well. They have voice mail, caller ID, and call history. They come pre-activated with a phone number written on the back so you don’t need to do anything to start using one. No one year contracts and signup fees.

In another concession to poor owners, the phones are pay as you go. In Guatemala it costs around 15 cents a minute to call anywhere in the country or North America. Phone cards are available in amounts as low as 50 cents so everyone but the poorest person can afford to buy a few minutes. Lots of people buy minutes only when they need to make a phone call. Twice I borrowed a cell phone to make a call, and both times I had to buy a 50-cent phone card because the owners had no minutes.

To grow market share rapidly incoming calls are always free. This means that even if your phone is out of minutes you can still receive calls. This is very important because a telephone becomes much more useful when more people have one. If you had the only phone in the country it wouldn’t do you any good. By making incoming calls free the phone company increases the base of subscribers enormously. For instance, if you live in the city you can buy a handset for your parents in the countryside and call them at your expense.

In the developed world many people feel their cell phones as highly personal fashion statements (iPhones). Others see their cell phones as the best way of staying connected to their friends. More than once I’ve sat in a movie watching teenagers ahead of me texting their friends every 5 minutes. In the developing world, cell phones are much more significant then that. They are one of the best tools for fighting poverty. The cell phone has improved the lives of billions.

The Elusive Environmental Villain

2007-07-24T10:38:00.000-07:00

There is a common idea that the developed nations are the world's environmental villains. This is a myth. True, we create most of the carbon dioxide, consume most of the energy, and use most of the raw materials. Yet when we scratch beneath the obvious, things are not that simple. Despite appearances, life in the developing world is no more sustainable than life in the first world. Where we consume fossil fuels and raw materials, the developing world consumes wilderness. Where we create CO2 and plastic water bottles, the developing world creates poverty and disease. There are no good guys and bad guys. Both paths are unsustainable, and it is only us, with our wealth and technology, that can lead the way to a better balance.

Few would argue that the western way of life can continue indefinitely. We are changing the very climate of our planet with our CO2 emissions and we are using up our resources at a tremendous rate. Clearly we must do better. But by many measures, the developed world has the right idea. Our populations are stable, we have decent environmental standards, and people live long and healthy lives. We have bought these things by using up the earth's tremendous natural wealth, and unfortunately the bank is now getting empty. The earth does not have limitless resources. The atmosphere cannot suck up endless carbon.

As a result of our excesses, many argue that we should go back to a simpler way of life. The average citizen of India produces 5% of the CO2 of the average American. Wouldn't it be great if we could all live a little bit more simply and watch our problems go away? Unfortunately, this simple way of life is another myth we have constructed. Nobody, not even a subsistence farmer, wants to be subsistence farmer. That's why so many poor people leave the countryside every year to live in horrendous conditions in urban slums: the countryside is worse. People want health, freedom, a comfortable house, and an education. And why not? The fact that many of us who have these things choose to waste our tremendous good fortune on television and inane celebrity gossip does nothing to make the life of the poor any more noble. Our culture may be shallow and depraved, but it beats being a child prostitute in Bangkok or a corn farmer in Guatemala. Poverty is horrible. We must not forget that.

We must also be careful not to equate simplicity with sustainability. The rapidly increasing population in poor countries puts tremendous pressure on natural areas. When nearly everyone is a farmer, doubling the population involves cutting down a lot of forest. And when most of the farming is slash-and-burn agriculture which destroys the land after only a few years, the problem is compounded. Poor farmers may not emit much CO2, but the land they burn is the lungs of our planet and the source of much of our biodiversity.

Subsistence agriculture is only sustainable with a stable population. But poverty itself drives population growth, so subsistence cultures almost by definition have rapidly growing populations. I argued recently that access to free birth control should be a basic right. But while better birth control will clearly have an impact on population, most poor people will still choose to have large families. When you have nothing but a plot of land (no old-age security, no decent medical care, no education) then children become your most obvious asset. The more children you have the better your chances of being fed and cared for in your old age. It's the world's oldest pyramid scheme, and like all pyramid schemes it must collapse. The collapse comes when there is no land for the children. After 10,000 years, that time has arrived.

Contrary to popular belief, it is we, in the rich world, who are closest to living sustainably. Our populations are generally stable. We live in large urban centers that allow us tremendous economies of scale on transportation and infrastructure. We treat our sewage, keep our garbage out of rivers, and try to protect our environment. Billions of dollars are being spent researching clean technologies and better ways of doing things. There is a tremendous public awareness of environmental issues and a will to pay for them. My annual water bill is greater than the yearly income of 2 billion people. It is wealth that enables me to treat my sewage.

We in the rich world already live more sustainably than we did 50 years ago, and we have the tools to do better still. Take crops for example. The green revolution has allowed us to improve crop yields tremendously. Since the 1940s corn production in the United States has quadrupled while the land used for corn farming has fallen. By using first-world farming techniques we can easily feed most of the world's population while substantially reducing the amount of cultivated land. Or look at energy; while our CO2 emissions are clearly much too high, we have all the technologies that we need to reduce them. Solar panels are getting better and cheaper every day, wind farms are popping up everywhere, and people are figuring out clever new ways to hide carbon in the ground.

We must not forget however, the damage we did on our path to wealth. We also cut our forests, mined our mountains, and polluted our water supplies. We cannot afford to repeat these errors on a global scale. We also cannot afford to leave billions in unsustainable poverty. Our road to wealth was long and dirty but now there are shortcuts. We must help poor countries leapfrog directly to cleaner, more sustainable technologies. We all share this planet, and when the last tree falls in Borneo we will all be poorer for it.

The idea of a simple, environmentally sustainable way of life that so many people cling to is a fantasy. It doesn't exist. It never did. Only we, in the rich world, have the solutions to our planet's problems and the wealth to pay for those solutions. The question is, do we have the will? Do we have the will to tax carbon to the point where we will get a 90% reduction in emissions, even if it means energy prices triple? Do we have the will to enforce such tough recycling laws even if it means that we pay much more for all our disposable stuff? Do we have the will to help poor countries get richer even if it means opening up our markets to their products? Will we give them the technologies and assistance that they need to jump directly to cleaner technologies? Are we willing to feed some of the world's poorest people so that they don't have to cut a plot of land out of the jungle? These are the choices our generation will be remembered for. They are ours to make.

The Elephant in the Room

2007-07-16T09:33:00.000-07:00

When I was walking down the street in Guatemala city I was hit by a flash of insight. It came in the form of Juan, a street vendor who was trying to sell me some tourist trinkets. I wasn't interested in buying anything, but since there were no other likely buyers around and I spoke Spanish he stopped to chat with me. One of the first questions that I was asked was how many children I had.

I had none. Juan had six.

I have had this conversation many times in my travels and inevitably I would be asked why I didn't have any children. After all, I am married and in my late 30s. In most of the developing world I should be at about half a dozen kids by now. Yet this time, the conversation took a different turn.

"How is it that you stop from having children?" asked Juan.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"You are married. How do you prevent children? Do you use condoms?"

I'm sure Juan wasn't the most educated person around. But he certainly wasn't the least. He spoke good Spanish and ran a small business selling souveniers to tourists. He was a typical Guatemalan. And he had no idea how to stop having children. So little of an idea that he was able to overcome huge societal taboos to talk to a total stranger about sex.

I proceeded to teach Juan about birth control. I told him that condoms work OK, but that the pill is much better. I told him that the most effective method would be to get a vasectomy. "It hurts a bit for two days and then you'll never have to worry about children again. You have a completely normal sex life afterwards. I've had it done and I'm very glad."

And then it struck me. None of these methods would work for Juan. He couldn't afford birth control pills or condoms. He certainly couldn't afford vasectomy surgery. And his church was probably telling him that birth control was a sin. In reality, there was nothing that somebody like Juan could do to stop having children.

There are 6.6 billion people on the planet. We all know it's too many. If there were only 500 million all of our environmental problems would vanish. The earth could sustain us by regrowing forests faster than we cut them down, and absorbing carbon faster than we release it. We could farm only the most fertile lands and people would have lots of land to live on. There would be tons of space for wilderness. Parents with smaller families would have more money to invest in the education and feeding of each child.

Yet nearly fifty years after the invention of the pill, the UN reports that 201 million women have no access to any form of birth control. In Mali 58% of women of child bearing age can't name even a single method of birth control. In Sub-Saharan Africa only 14% of married women use a modern method of birth control. (details here) The planet is dying from overpopulation and nobody is talking about population control. How could this be?

The biggest reason for this deplorable state of affairs is religion. I make no bones about being no fan of religion in general, but in few ways has religion done more harm than with it's bronze age attitudes towards family planning. The Catholic church is against birth control completely. In many developing countries it wields enough influence to keep sex education out of public education, and birth control out of public health. The Catholic church also puts strong pressure on followers to have as many children as possible. Each child is a gift from God after all. Part of His grand plan. Too bad that God isn't much interested in feeding, or clothing, or educating all these little gifts. How many young mothers have died in childbirth because the Pope doesn't want them to stop have children? How many children starve because their families can't feed an extra mouth?

Of course it isn't just the Catholics that are at fault. Many religions get completely hung up on the idea of sex before marriage. There is this absurd idea among the faithful that teaching birth control will encourage unwed couples to have more sex. If we don't teach people about sex, goes the logic, they won't have sex. It's idiotic nonsense which flies in the face of thousands of years of human history and numerous studies. It is also the official policy of the US government. The Bush administration has created a global gag order on sex education. Charities that teach anything other than abstinence-only, even if it is only a small part of their program, and even if it is from entirely seperate funding sources, risk having their entire US government funding cut. Congress insists that one third of global AIDS education focus on abstinence-only programs which discourage use of condoms. Yet for all its faults the US is an incredibly generous donor. Most organizations would rather shut down their family planning work than do without such a large source of funds.

Of course we can't just blame religion. A second problem is our obsession with growth. Economic growth is good. We all know that. We live in a society where a business that has profitably employed ten people for twenty years is considered a failure because it hasn't grown. Everything is expected to get bigger.

The easiest economic growth comes from having an increasingly large supply of consumers. If every year there are more people, then every year we need to build more houses, and produce more cars, and build more roads. Unfortunately we also have to cut down more forests and pump more carbon into the atmosphere. Until there are no more forests. Then they will starve.

Most governments are terrified of falling populations. The governments of many developed countries have programs in place specifically to encourage parents to have more children. In Russia and Signapore there are financial incentives. And I have been called selfish for chosing not to add to the problem. I should be the one getting financial incentives. Nobody is going to have to cut down an acre of Brazilian rainforest to grow beef for my little ones. Nobody is going to have to breath the carbon that my children produce. Nobody will swim in their excrement. China, with its one child policy, has probably done more to save the planet than any other single government.

Luckily for us, when people have the choice they generally choose to have smaller families. Despite the mindless policies of the Pope the overwhelming majority of Catholics defy his orders and use contraceptives. Without immigration, populations would already be falling in most of the industrialized world. Financial incentives to have children don't work well for educated populations.

It costs about $500,000 to raise a child in the industrialized world. Think of what that money could do for children in the developing world. It could buy 10,000 Nepalese girls out bonded servitude. How many vacinations could it buy? How many meals?

The world doesn't need more children. We need universal, free, access to contraceptives. There should be visiting vasectomy clinics in rural villages right next to the visiting dentists and doctors. We need to leave behind our inhibitions about sex and teach young children everywhere where babies come from and how to plan them. Our planet is full, and we don't have another one.

Enlace Quiche: Hope Through Education

2007-07-08T17:56:00.000-07:00

It's still dark at 4 AM when 16-year-old Oswaldo gets up to do his chores. He and his brothers and sisters all help their parents to run their small landholding.

In the 'developed' world, it may be a challenge training a child to make their bed in the morning: in 'undeveloped' countries, it's more than chores; children need to work so that the family can continue to have food shelter and clothing. Children born in poverty grow up working in the fields, or sometimes they live in cities and spend the day trying to sell stickers or newspapers to make a few extra pennies for their families. In rural Guatemala the average boy spends less than 6 years in school. The average girl spends less than two. They will be farmers or labourers all their lives.

Oswaldo's life will be different because of the work of one remarkable organization. Every day at 7AM Oswaldo gets on a bus and goes into the nearby town of Santa Cruz del Quiche to take classes in a computer lab at Enlace Quiche.

"If this school didn't exist, I would probably be working in agriculture," says Oswaldo in Spanish. "Most of the people that I grew up with are working now. I'm pretty much the only one who is still going to school."

Enlace Quiche was started by Andy Lieberman, who moved to Guatemala in the early 1990s to get a break from the high tech industry in San Francisco. He fell in love, married a Guatemalan social worker, and had a couple of children. In 2000 he was approached to coordinate the Enlace Quiche Project using USAID/AED funding. Through 2003 , Enlace worked with local partners and the Ministry of Education to create the first Technology Centers with computers and multimedia equipment to support the training of bilingual teachers and the production of lecture and textbook material in the K'iche' and Ixil Mayan languages. After direct funding from USAID ended Enlace Quiche continued forward as an NGO. Their website says that their mission is "to teach with computers and not about computers, contributing to the development of Quiche, of Guatemala, and of indigenous peoples in the whole world."

"One thing that is really different about our organization is that it is almost entirely run by Guatemalans," says Andy. "In many other organizations the entire executive is made up of foreigners. In Enlace Quiche I am the only person on the board of directors that isn't a native Guatemalan. This allows us to be more responsive to the local culture and needs; it also means that the organization can keep going without me."

Enlace Quiche has courses in typing, small business management, computer use , K'iche' and English. The courses are all aimed at the needs of the local indigenous people. M ost of the course materials have been developed in-house to make them more applicable to native Quiche speakers. Enlace Quiche is even creating Quiche web pages, and there is a new effort to provide a comprehensive online directory of local businesses and community organizations. The award winning course material is available for free download from the Enlace Quiche website at http://www.enlacequiche.org/.

Enlace staff working on course materials.

All the students we talked to value their traditional culture and language. The boys, who are all dressed in modern clothes, all agree that traditional dress is important for the women. The women aren't as sure about that, but they do all agree that they want to maintain their language. Spanish is important: it is the language of business. But speaking K'iche' allows them to maintain a connection with their Mayan roots.

Like most modern NGOs, Enlace Quiche requires that users pay a portion of costs. The fee structure addresses some of the effects of Guatemala's rapidly growing yet poorly funded education system. Due to the dramatic quality variance in primary school teachers, students often have not developed the discipline of good learning skills. It isn't uncommon for them to miss classes, show up late, or talk on their cell phones in class. "It is important to charge a fee so that the students will value what they are getting", explains Andy. When Lara and I walked into a class, the students were all intently focused on their assignments and teacher. If we had been really quiet, I'm sure they wouldn't have noticed us until class was over.

The classes cost around $20.00 a month, though scholarships reduce the cost for many students by up to 75%. It might not seem like much, but in an area where people earn a few dollars a day and have ten children, $5.00 is a lot to spend on one child. Most of the students also have to pay bus fare every day to get to classes. As a result, many students do extra work to pay for their education. Oswaldo, for example, goes to the town square every evening after classes and sells belts to earn tuition money.

Selling belts to earn tuition money.

The students we talked to clearly value what they are getting. We asked three girls from one of the classes to describe their experiences. They are 16,18, and 19, but could be five years younger. "Many of our friends are married already," they explain. "If we didn't have this school to go to we probably would be too." Indigenous women often marry at 13 or 14 and start having children shortly after. The girls are astonished to hear that in the developed world most people marry in their mid twenties and many in their thirties.

To spread their idea further, Enlace Quiche has just started a youth club. Students who join the club can bring friends into the computer lab and library. Oswaldo says he would really like his brothers and sisters to come, and he plans to bring them through the club. Maybe they'll be the next generation of students.

Oliver Wendel Holmes said "The mind once expanded by a new idea never returns to its original size."

Just as Enlace Quiche is expanding minds it touches, it is also expanding its vision for social impact. Enlace Quiche says on their website, "We have great dreams!" Andy L ie berman is now focusing a large part of his energy on turning the original center in Santa Cruz del Quiche into a blueprint for self-supporting technology centers in other communities. As an example of 'social entrepreneurship,' this type of proposed sustainable model uses "the enormous synergies and benefits that arise when business principles are unified with social ventures". As a social entrepreneur, Andy hopes to change the world. His plan will not only help people: it will support itself, attract investors, and eventually it will take on a life of its own.

All of the kids we talked to have bigger plans for their lives now. Salvador hopes to be a teacher. Maria wants to work in an office. Most will be the first generation of their families to have jobs outside of subsistence agriculture. They will be teachers, office workers, and computer operators. They will marry later in life, have fewer children, and earn enough money to see that their children get educated as well. For them the cycle of poverty has been broken.

You can donate to Enlace Quiche through GlobalGiving by clicking here.

Crossing into the United States

2007-07-06T08:15:00.000-07:00

We crossed back into the United States last week after four months in Guatemala and Mexico. Unlike most people the cross the border, we had all the necessary passports and paperwork. Everywhere we travelled on our trip we had run into people that had crossed into the US illegally, sometimes as many as 15 times. For some it was a weeklong treck through the desert. Other people said it was a 30 minute hike to a shuttle bus. I guess it depends on your contacts.

With proper paperwork the experience was a horrible. Many travellers that I have talked to agree that the United States is the most unpleasant and unwelcoming border that they have ever been too. Lara has a British passport, which means she needs to get fingerprinted and retina scanned. This involved walking over to a crowded office and waiting for about 90 minutes until a grumpy man gave her a form to fill out. In filling out the form she accidentally wrote her birth date on the wrong line, so she crossed it out and wrote in the correct place. When she got back to the man he circled the correction with a big red pen and said "You made an error. I need you to fill out this form again, correctly!".

"In my country the customs officials are clever enough to figure out corrections", was my reply. Fortunately it was my inside voice speaking.

As Lara was filling out her form a second time a group of Japanese tourists who had come in realized that they hadn't taken a number. The customs agent decided to help them out of order rather then make them wait like everybody else. Unfortunately, they lacked a common language and for the next half hour we waited with our completed forms for the agent to finish abusing the Japanese tourists.

After a little more then two hours Lara finally got fingerprinted and retina scanned and allowed into the United States.

Now we know why so many people swim across the Rio Grande!

Profits In, Garbage Out

2007-06-30T12:28:00.000-07:00

Egan Ehlers left this comment on my last post about garbage in Central America.

"I used to live in Central America and there is indeed a garbage problem there. But in the U.S. and Europe, the benefits from better ideas about garbage disposal are ruined by the fact that packaging is so wasteful. Open anything -- from cereal to computer software -- and you find inside is mostly air. Many American-owned companies are generating third world waste. Their political influence is one reason packaging laws are not changed, not just in Central America, but in the U.S. and Europe."

He has a good point.

Imagine that every single time Coca Cola sold a drink they dumped a piece of plastic into a nearby river. Imagine that McDonalds collected all of the packaging generated by their restaurants and dumped it directly into the ocean. People would be outraged. Yet, in effect, this is exactly what these giant corporations are doing in the developing world with their careless and irresponsible packaging.

When a country lacks the basic infrastructure to collect and dispose of its garbage there is something profoundly disturbing about packaging so many products in disposable plastic containers. The beverage companies are the worst. Central America is literally covered with plastic bottles. A small deposit on the bottles would solve the garbage problem in an instant. Only a few years ago most drinks in Central America were distributed in glass bottles with a deposit so the infrastructure was already in place when the switch to plastic happened. Drink garbage was almost unheard of. Now nearly everything is in indestructible plastic bottles and the rivers and oceans are filling with garbage.

If the beverage companies cared the least bit about the ecological disaster they were causing they would institute a recycling program and a small deposit. In countries where many people earn dollars a day, it wouldn’t take much of a deposit to make plastic bottles worth recycling. And it’s not like Coca Cola and Pepsi haven’t had plenty of experience with recycling programs in first world countries.

But of course, Coca Cola and Pepsi don’t care. Every plastic Coca Cola bottle floating in the ocean represents profit. Disposable packaging is cheap precisely because it is disposable. The oceans and rivers and caves of the world pay the disposal fees.

This is precisely where governments should step in. Free markets only work well when companies can’t pass the costs of their irresponsible actions onto others. Polluting a river with plastic garbage isn’t free, so it only makes sense that the people who create the garbage should pay for the cleanup costs. They profit from cheap packaging and we all pay the price in a garbage coated planet. Maybe it is time to leave poor Nike alone for a while and focus on the reckless and irresponsible corporations who are helping cover our planet in trash. Anyone feel like showing up at the Coca Cola general meeting with a dumpster full of plastic bottles?

Plastic Coated Planet

2007-06-16T18:54:00.000-07:00

Mike Shawcross, relates a funny story. When the mayor of a particularly dirty town he was working with was asked why people didn't get rid of their trash, he replied, in all seriousness: "Our problem is that we don't have a river."

We see that attitude all around us in the endless mountains of trash.Every street is littered with plastic. Every field is full of bottles and wrappers. The rivers are lined with garbage. The parks are filthy. If a place is clean it is only because tourists visit it and the local government pays somebody to clean up the garbage every day.

Thirty years ago most of the garbage that we created would eventually degrade. That is no longer true. Except for the tiny amount of plastic that has been burned, every scrap of plastic we have ever made still exists. It is choking the earth.

There is an island of plastic in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that is twice the size of Texas.

Some of the rivers in Asia have so much garbage in them that boats have trouble moving through them.

What amazes me the most about the garbage situation is that people literally do not see the garbage around them. In Central America people throw garbage out of the windows of their houses and allow it to pile up in their yards. We have seen schools that were so littered you could barely see the ground. If you ask people about the trash, most of them look at you like you've grown an extra arm.

Managing trash is a pain when you don't have regular garbage disposal. But it isn't that hard. A few of the Agros villages we've seen gather and burn their trash every month (though the other four weeks they just throw it on the ground). We even heard of one town that built a big pit for all their plastic-they burn and compost the rest.

It is sad to see people defacing their own environments. But it's even sadder when we have to share a planet with them. A river in Guatemala becomes a stream of plastic and sewage as soon as it hits its first village. When it hits the ocean, it becomes a problem for all of us.

Terrible Ironies: The Case for Trade

2007-06-06T12:14:00.000-07:00

One of the terrible ironies of our time is that well meaning people often fight against the very things that could help make life better for the millions who live in poverty. There is probably no better example of this then the case of trade.

There are two main reasons that people object to trade. The grim reality is that there are huge differences in working conditions and wages between the rich world and the poor. Many people feel that there is something fundamentally unfair when people who make $40,000 dollars a year buy goods made by people who earn $1000.00 a year. Other people fear that they won't be able to compete with people who earn so much less. Both arguments are wrong.

Assume that in Fruitville, for every year of labor a farmer can create 2 tons of corn, or 10 tons of fruit. Assume that in Cornville, a farmer can produce 20 tons of corn or 4 tons of fruit every year.

Fruitville: 2 tons of corn per farmer, 10 tons of fruit per farmer
Cornville: 20 tons of corn per farmer, 4 tons of fruit per farmer

Imagine that the towns require 100 tons each of corn and fruit. Here is how many farmers are needed.

Fruitville: 50 corn farmers, 10 fruit farmers = 100 tons
Cornville: 5 corn farmers, 25 fruit farmers = 100 tons

Clearly Cornville is a little richer then Fruitville since it has only half as many people working in agriculture. But look at what happens when we open up trade between the two.

Fruitville 20 fruit farmers = 200 fruit
Cornville 10 corn farmers = 200 corn

There is still enough food to go around, but there are much fewer people needed to create it.

But what about the case of Poorville vs Richville? Poorville is a bunch of substance farmers. They grow 1 ton of corn and 2 tons of fruit per year. Richville is a big industrialized area, and grows 50 tons of corn and 25 tons of fruit per year. If Poorville is worse at everything, won't it be bad for them to trade with Richville?

Poorville 1 ton of corn per farmer, 2 tons of fruit per farmer
Richville 50 tons of corn per farmer, 25 tons of fruit per farmer

Poorville 100 corn farmers, 50 fruit farmers
Richville 2 corn farmers, 4 fruit farmers

Again, lets see what happens when we open up trade.

Poorville 0 corn farmers, 100 fruit farmers = 200 fruit
Richville 4 corn farmers, 0 fruit farmers =200 corn

Once more we can produce the same amount of food with much less labor. As an added benefit we also protect the environment since the likely reason that Poorville produces so little corn is that they are growing it on marginal lands that are destroyed quickly by agriculture.

But what about all the unemployed farmers? It's a good point and one of the biggest reasons why people fear trade. The corn farmers in Fruitville and the fruit farmers in Cornville can see what is going to happen to them, and social activists can see what is going to happen to the corn farmers in Poorville. The reality is that the adjustment will be hard for many people. But that doesn't change the fact that for society as a whole the adjustment is a good thing.

The reason is that farming isn't the only job that exists. The number of possible jobs is limited only by our imaginations. When we find a more efficient way of doing something it frees up people to work in new areas. Sewing machines, cars, computers, and email all cost people their jobs. But by allowing us to do more for less these technologies created new jobs that could never have been imagined. How many web designers were there in 1990?

In a healthy economy there will always be some unemployement as people move from old inefficient industries to newer, more efficient ones. Nowhere is this more visible then in agriculture. Yet this movement is what makes the economy bigger and makes us richer.

If everyone is working in agriculture there is no hope of progress because everyone is tied to the land. In many countries children can't complete school because they are needed on the fields to help feed their families. Trade give countries the opportunity to free resources to do other things. People migrate from the farms into jobs in teaching, road building, truck driving, and eventually information technology.

We lament the jobs lost to trade and new technologies because it is so hard to see the gains in other areas. We see the farmer who is now unemployed and too old to learn new skills, but we don't see his kids who left the farm to get a teaching diploma. The reality of it is that trade is the fastest way to create growth, because it allows everyone to do what they are best at. There will be jobs lost to trade, and it will be hard on some people, but the alternative is a continuation of the status quo. If we are really worried about the people who will be effected, we should offer them support and training instead of trying to hold back entire economies to protect dead-end jobs.

For thousands of years trade has created wealth. If we really care about the poor, we should make it as easy as possible for them to sell their goods to us. It is immoral to do otherwise. It is so terribly sad that the people who protest trade agreements do not know the harm they cause.

Our Monument

2007-05-29T18:20:00.000-07:00

Last week we toured the ancient Mayan ruins of Tikal. It is a place of magic where monkeys still live wild and a pristine wilderness stretches for miles in every direction. Many of the ruins have been excavated and restored to some of their former glory, but the majority still lie burried beneath the jungle. Every hill in Tikal was once a temple for some long forgotten God, or the palace of a king whose name we no longer remember. 1200 years afer the collapse of the Mayan civilization, all that remains are some mounds in the jungle. There is almost no trace of their vast cities.

People say that when we cut down a forest it is gone forever. We hear that once the topsoil vanishes the land is ruined for thousands of years. Yet these ruins show us that this isn't true. 1200 years ago much of Central America was deforested by the Mayans. The wonderful country of Belize was home to ten times its current population. Tikal was a city of stone and concrete, yet 1200 years later you can barely find it. Nature can recover if we let it. The roots of trees can tear apart the strongest buildings. Lichens can make soil out of the hardest stones.

I know that our earth could be a paradise. I know that there exists a future where a population of some half billion humans lives on a beautiful garden planet, in harmony with the environment. The oceans will be full of fish. The jungles will be full of monkeys. We will treasure and protect our fragile home. We will take care of our fellow man so that the imbalances of the 21st century will never be repeated.

That is not our future. But it could be.

There are few things we can do that make lasting impact on history. The monuments we create will crumble under the relentless assault of time. The empires we build will eventually collapse. Everything we create will eventually be forgotten.

But if we destroy our planet we will not be forgotten. When we killed the last Dodo Bird it was forever. We can rebuild the temples of Tikal, but there will never be another Dodo Bird. It is gone. Many biologists feel that we will lose 50% of mammal and bird species before the end of the century. In our lifetimes we will see the last wild Organgatans and the last Black Rhinos. Our children will see the last Polar Bears. Every twenty minutes one more species is lost.

Forever.

If we allow this to continue our generation will not be forgotten. We will be cursed by all who follow us.

If ever there was a time to act, it is now. Go to www.globalgiving.com and support a worthy charity. Support the Nature Conservancy. Write letters to politicians and to business leaders. Shout from the rooftops. There is still time to give back some of the land we have taken from the wild things. There is still time to avert the worst of the coming catastrophy. The task has fallen to our generation. There will be no more chances.

Thousands of years from now, we could be remembered as the generations that rose above conflict, self-interest, and short-term thinking to build an unconquerable legacy.

I know that our earth could be a paradise.

Crossing Borders

2007-05-23T09:43:00.000-07:00

When travelling in the third world it is hard not be be struck by how mindboggling inefficient some things are. Take for example the border crossing from Belize into Guatemala.

All Latin American countries have large import duties on vehicles. For this reason they require that tourists get a temporary vehicle importation permit before they can enter the country. The purpose of this permit is to prevent us from leaving the country without our vehicle. Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize all require this.

Entering Belize with a vehicle is simple. The first desk is immigration. They give us permission to enter the country. The second desk is customs. They record our information in a ledger and fill out a form showing that the vehicle has been legally imported into Belize. They then make a note in the driver's passport showing that they came in with a vehicle. About 100m past the border is an insurance office where we can buy insurance by the day, week, or month. It is all very straightforward and efficient (though it is amazing that in 2007 this process is still done on paper).

Guatemala is an other story altogether. "I need a photocopy of your license, registration, passport entry stamp, and front page of the passport," explains the border guard.

The problem is that the border post doesn't have a photocopier. As a matter of fact, the only working photocopier is about 3km down the road in town. Oh, and the main road into town is closed because there is a fair today so we will have to drive the long way around. Except we can't drive because our vehicle isn't legally in the country yet.

So before we can get the vehicle into the country we have to take a 10 minute taxi ride into town to get a photocopy of our paperwork. And there is no way we could have gotten this photocopy ahead of time because it has to include the entry stamp. Luckily taxi rides are cheap, but the whole process sucks up a lot of time and would be pretty hard for a non-spanish speaker to follow.

Once we provide all the photocopies the guard fills out a form for us and we have to pay a small fee for the paperwork. Since there have been so many problems with corruption at the border we have to go to a bank to pay this fee. This is actually a great idea because it makes it hard for guards to accidentally inflate the prices. (It used to be standard practice to tell tourists that there had been a price increase but they only had outdated forms that showed the old price). Luckily the bank office is in the same building and the line is short.

Fortunately we already had car insurance from our last trip to Guatemala. If we didn't we would have had to find an office that sells car insurance to foreigners. These are few and far between. When we went into Guatemala last month we had to drive almost 3 hours to Huehuetenango to find an insurance office.

When a simple act like crossing the border takes several hours nobody benefits. This is one of the reasons why poor countries are poor. They lack the basic capital to do things efficiently. How many thousands of hours are wasted every year because border posts can't afford photocopiers? The lack of capital creates a drain on the whole economy. We have been to oil change places that didn't stock oil or filters (we have to go to a parts store and buy those seperately). We've seen lawns mowed by Machette because nobody can afford a lawnmower. Everything takes longer, and is more difficult then it needs to be because people can't afford the tools to do the job right. And that drains the whole economy and perpetuates the cycle of poverty.

Snows of Guatemala

2007-05-22T10:56:00.000-07:00

It is snowing today in Guatemala. Thick flakes of ash fall from the sky. All around us are fires as the jungle burns. It is a vicious cycle. Poor people in search of land cut down the forest to feed their families. But bronze-age farming techniques are hard on the land. Within a few years the thin topsoil washes away and another piece of forest will burn.

The good news is that there is widespread recognition that something must be done. The newspapers in Guatemala are full of stories about the threat to the environment. Many state and local governments now have environmental departments which are trying to protect the remaining forests. There are numerous agencies and conservation groups working to protect the environment.

The bad news is that the demographics are so awful. The population of Guatemala is set to double in the next twenty five years. According to the national newspaper nearly 65% of the country has been deforested already. In a country where 60% of people are subsistence farmers it isn’t hard to figure out what will happen when the population doubles. The forests will be washed away by an ocean of people.

In Guatemala, as in the rest of the world, one of the best ways to protect the environment is to address social problems. When people are educated and healthy they have fewer children. When farmers have access to modern technologies and farming techniques they can be more productive. And when people no longer need to worry about where their next meal comes from they can start to think about what type of world they want to live in.

Nobody would choose to live in a world where there are no Jaguars in the wild. We all want a world where people are healthy and educated and in balance with their environments. But there is little time to act. We are entering an age of consequences, where the actions we are taking can no longer be undone. If we are going to do something, we must do it now. In twenty years, it will be too late.

The Cultured Masses

2007-05-02T09:10:00.000-07:00

It seems like everyone agrees that culture is a good thing. Culture should be preserved. Traditional cultures should be respected. We enjoy visiting countries that have interesting cultures. But is culture really all that it is made out to be? When we attempt to preserve traditional cultures, are we doing it becaue we really want to help people? Or are we doing it because we like the pretty clothes.

In Guatemala there are many different groups of Mayan indians. Each of them has their own unique language and style of dress. Tourists love it. The indians are very colorful, and the mix of indigenous languages lends an exotic soundtrack to the street markets. Yet the same culture that gives us the clothes and the languages that we enjoy so much, also has a dark side. Women are second class citizens. Traditional slash and burn agriculture destroys the rainforest. The traditional diet of corn and beans is low in nutrients. The traditional languages of Mam and Quiche aren´t very useful in a country where all major activities are carried out in Spanish.

Some elements of traditional culture have no place in a modern world. Women should have equal rights. The environment can no longer afford traditional subsitence farming techniques. People need to learn the dominant languages of their countries if they want to have a voice. Yet each of these things destroys traditional culture.

Given real freedom, most women wouldn´t choose to spend their lives at home sewing and cleaning traditional clothing. Given decent tools and proper training in agriculture, most men wouldn´t choose to spend several months cutting down virgin rainforest with a machette. Given a choice, most parents wouldn´t choose to educate their children in a language that few people speak.

It´s hard not to feel a little sad when we go into traditional areas and see people wearing modern clothes and talking on cell phones. It seems like something precious and beautiful is being lost. Yet when I see a little indian boy wearing jeans and speaking Spanish, I feel hope. What other modern ideas is this boy being exposed to? Maybe this boy will treat his wife with respect. Maybe this boy will have a voice in politics. Maybe this boy will learn how to farm his land better. Maybe this boy won´t have ten children. The traditional clothes may be beautiful, but they come at far too great a cost.

Ten Billion Hungry Mouths

2007-04-26T14:15:00.000-07:00

Laguna Maxbal (lake Maxbal) lies deep in the jungles of Guatemala. It isn´t in any of the tourist guides yet. It is an unspoiled jewel in a wilderness where howler monkeys still roam free. From the misty shores the only sound we can hear is a cacophony of insects and birds. This is a beautiful place. It is wild.

The people in the nearby village of Maxbal recognize the value of the lake. They know that a beautiful spot like this will attract tourist and money. They know that if they cut down the trees or fill the lake with garbage, people will not come. A warden is responsible for protecting the lake and escorting visitors to make sure they don´t leave any trash. There is even a hostel, waiting the day when the first tourists arrive.

Yet despite all this, Maxbal is under enormous pressure. The population of Guatemala is exploding. People need land to feed their families. They need places to live. Places like Maxbal.

Not 30 minutes up the road from Maxbal is the future. A huge wound gapes in the earth. Burnt trees stick out of the tortured ground. A new village is being hacked out of the jungle. There is land here for the landless. To us it looks like hell, but to a landless peasant this is hope.

People with empty stomachs don´t think about the future. They don´t have the luxury of caring about the valuable hardwoods they are burning to grow corn. They don´t have the luxury of caring about sustainability. They care about feeding their children.

If we want to save places like Maxbal, we need to provide alternatives for the rural poor. We need to rethink how we feed the planet. We need to restructure how land is valued so that we no longer cut down rainforests to produce crops which can be grown hundreds of times more efficiently in other places.

As the earth´s population climbs to 10 billion people the waves of humanity will surge ever deeper into the remaining wilderness. Unless we do something soon, places like Maxbal will be swept away forever, or become islands surrounded by a sea of people.