Travels in the Riel World

Montevideo, Uruguay

Produce for sale at a streetside market in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Have you ever imagined what it’d be like to spend time at a yoga retreat in India? Well, now you can live vicariously through Kyle Jarrard, who wrote an account for the International Herald Tribune of the experience he and his wife had in Puducherry, India.

The first sound in the morning is crows, right at 5. Then we hear waves off the Bay of Bengal slapping the shore. In the garden, a man meditates while walking quickly over the lawn of the ashram guest house in the dark. Along the shore, other men pace the beach in the silver jetty light. Fishing boat lanterns like stars ride the black sea south to north.

My wife and I have come to this old French comptoir (formerly Pondichéry) in southeast India mostly for the yoga. The classes used to be held in one of the many parcels of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram scattered across the colonial city. But for this retreat, there’s a new venue and to get there you have to be on Ajit Sarkar’s bus by 5:45…

For the first few blocks the streets have French names: Rue Dumas, Rue Suffren, Rue Romain Rolland. Then we leave town and head south over fetid canals and clogged streams, through trash-heaped neighborhoods thumping with all-night Hindu festival music while men in dhotis stand around sipping tea out of plastic goblets. Cows with brightly painted red and green horns meditate in the middle of the road as we plunge into the lush Tamil Nadu countryside…

We take our yoga classes on the roof of the new school, under a tall thatched structure with open sides. Most of the people in the assembly know their Hatha-style yoga; others stumble a lot - but soon everyone gets into the flow, despite the great sensual distractions: banana groves to the north wavering in the gold sunlight; rice paddies to the east where a few dozen women bend weeding at daybreak; thick coconut trees to the west that invite the eye to enter and roam; and to the south, the village, overlain with teak, drumstick and casuarina trees, where cooking-fire smoke rises and every dog yaps at everything.

The best travel experiences are often the most unexpected and they frequently involve chance meetings with locals. Christopher Vourlias recently traveled through Uganda, where he found himself having a conversation about writing and life with a farmer. He wrote about the experience for World Hum.

They met on a local bus…

I’d met Colin a few days earlier, squished together in the back row of the Horizon bus from Kampala. We’d struck up a conversation on the outskirts of town, as I’d fiddled with my iPod and waited out the bumpy ride. Curious eyes followed my thumb as it whirled in circles, heads poking over seats and craning into the aisle, when the man by the window—lean, bookish, scratching at his wiry moustache—leaned toward me and cleared his throat. He asked about the storage capacity, and we soon got into a heated discussion about file-sharing and intellectual copyright law. This was not, I suspected, your typical conversation on the Horizon bus from Kampala.

And continued their conversation in Colin’s farmhouse…

He opened the mango juice and passed a muffin to me and asked about my travels. We talked about my long odyssey since leaving home almost two years ago. He smiled and sighed and shook his head as I described Barcelona and Beirut, London and Damascus. Then he told me about his own journey five years ago, when he quit his job as a lawyer in Kampala to travel through Africa. He went south, through Rwanda and Tanzania, making it as far as Malawi. Soon he was low on money. He grew lonely.

“It is all the same, wherever you go,” he said.

Returning to Uganda, he came west to look after his father’s farm. Life here was hard. Money was scarce; often, he had to ask his sister and an elder brother for help. The neighbors were guarded, suspicious.

“They see this house, and they think we must have so much money,” he said. Even years later, he had few people he could trust. He was bothered to see friends and neighbors hobbled by bitterness and petty grudges.

“We have a saying: nohandika ha maiise,” he said, tapping each syllable on the tabletop. “It means ‘like writing on water.’” He laughed at this, amused and resigned. “You cannot change how people are.”

Outside he showed me around the farm. It was a small plot of land; in just a few minutes we’d crossed through the brown stalks of maize, pausing to stop in the shade of a flowering tree. It was a sunny afternoon, and the heat rose from the dry grass crunching beneath our feet.

I hope everyone in the U.S. had an enjoyable Labor Day weekend. Travels in the Riel World will return tomorrow.

The southwestern African country of Namibia may not be well-known as a tourist destination, but travelers who have been there often return home raving about the desolate beauty of the place. Elinor Burkett is one of those travelers and she wrote about her Namibian experiences for a recent NY Times story.

As the first rays of the sun pierce the thick darkness of the Namibian desert, sinuous ridges of quartz sand ignite in a firestorm of seared orange. Then the sky lightens to the new day, revealing the sea of sand mountains, their crisp edges and perfect curves wrought and polished by the expert chisel of the Kalahari and Atlantic winds.

With the tracks of yesterday’s visitors to the Sossusvlei dunes burnished by the breeze, you can’t resist trudging — perhaps plodding or crawling — up at least one of the pristine hills, some towering to 1,000 feet, instinctively looking for shimmers of water. But from the top, there’s no sign of the sea; it retreated millions of years ago, back when continents were drifting wildly.

What’s left is a dazzling geological display of possibly the world’s highest sand dunes, extending for 400 miles along the coast and more than 80 miles inland. Those naive enough to believe that a dune is a dune is a dune are faced with a dizzying array of sand configurations: parabolic dunes with dynamic slip faces, long and narrow transverse dunes, dunes petrified by ancient climate change, and star dunes formed by winds that buffet them from all sides…

Such a forbidding panorama hardly seems the stuff of a compelling journey. But Namibia, a country of stark beauty and riveting contradictions, should be at the top of any serious traveler’s want-to-visit list.

The landscape is otherworldly, from the ocean of blood red crests along Dune Alley at Sossusvlei … to the gravity-defying rock formations and petrified forest of Damaraland, in the country’s center. Even beside the main highway, there are enough elephants, giraffes and springbok to satisfy those who can’t imagine a southern African trip without big game.

The best designed governments are those that build upon the culture of a country, rather than those that try to impose foreign ideas and systems on a people. So I read with interest this recent story in the International Herald Tribune about a movement to re-design the government of Somalia in a way that would emphasize the traditional role of clans and elders.

Does the international community have it all wrong on Somalia? After 17 years, 14 transitional governments and more than $8 billion in foreign aid, the country is as violent and lawless - and many say hopeless - as ever…

Nothing seems to be able to lift Somalia’s curse of anarchy. And part of the problem, a rising number of Western academics and Somali professionals argue, is that the bulk of outside efforts have concentrated on standing up a strong central government, which may be anathema in a country where authority tends to be diffuse and clan-based…

But there may be another answer: going local.

Many Somali intellectuals and Western academics are pushing an alternative form of government that might be better suited to Somalia’s fluid, fragmented and decentralized society. The new idea, which is actually an old idea that seems to be enjoying something of a renaissance because of the transitional government’s shortcomings, is to rebuild Somalia from the bottom up.

It is called the building block approach. The first blocks would be small governments at the lowest levels, in villages and towns. These would be stacked to form district and regional governments. The last step would be uniting the regional governments in a loose national federation that controlled, say, currency issues and the pirate-infested shoreline, but did not sideline local leaders.

“It’s the only way viable,” said Ali Doy, a Somali analyst who works closely with the United Nations. “Local government is where the actual governance is. It’s more realistic, it’s more sustainable and it’s more secure.”

Did you know that 100 million people in China are minorities? There are 55 tribal groups in the country who are not ethnic Chinese. That means there are 100 million in China who probably don’t eat all that much Chinese food. NPR’s Kitchen Window has an interesting feature about these ethnic groups and their foods, based on the book Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid.

Deep-fried cheese, crepes and carrot salad don’t sound like Chinese food. But they are.

Fried cheese momos are a standard snack in Tibet, two-layer crepes are eaten by the Hui people in Qinghai province, and dai carrot salad is from the southern Yunnan city of Jinghong.

These are some of the foods of the 55 tribal groups called “minority peoples” by the Beijing government. These tribes make up 8 percent of China’s population, which amounts to more than 100 million people.

Although these communities are not ethnically Chinese, they have lived on land that is now part of China for centuries. This includes Inner Mongolia, the western Silk Road region of Xinjiang and other lands outside central China’s westernized cities like Beijing and Shanghai.

The story includes recipes for dai carrot salad and cheese momos.

The Chicago Tribune has been asking their foreign correspondents for travel tips and for lists of their favorite destinations. One recent installment focused on places in the Middle East and Africa. An excerpt:

Liz Sly on the Middle East:

My favorite place: The Old City of Damascus, Syria, a warren of ancient cobbled streets, mosques and churches that evokes the Orient of the imagination.

Don’t miss: Petra, the majestic, rose-red city carved 8,000 years ago out of inaccessible mountains in the Jordanian desert. It’s too breathtaking for words and too old to wrap your head around.

Joel Greenberg on Israel:

When friends come to visit I always take them to … The beach, either in Tel Aviv or the beautiful strand at Beit Yanai near Netanya. The Mediterranean is warm and inviting most of the year, and there is ample opportunity for long strolls on the sand and viewing brilliant sunsets.

Best photo-op: The stunning view of Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, or, from another angle, at the Sherover Promenade, preferably a little before sunset.

Laurie Goering on Africa:

My favorite place: It’s nearly impossible to choose just one place in a continent so diverse and wonderful, but Madagascar’s lemur-filled forests, Namibia’s silent deserts and Chapman’s Peak scenic drive in Cape Town, South Africa, are contenders.

Best place no one knows about: The Matapos Hills outside of Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, a conservation area that is home to some impressive cave paintings by the ancient San people. The hike to the paintings, through gorgeous bushland, can’t be beat either.

In honor of Beijing playing host to the Olympics for the past two weeks, here is another China-themed post. Many Chinese people make it a habit to get up early every morning in order to perform tai chi exercises, often in a public park. So John Branch went to one of Beijing’s most popular parks one morning and observed the tai chi ritual. You can find his report here.

The giant gates of Temple of Heaven Park swung open at 6 a.m., magnets pulling people into a new day. People quietly poured out of apartment buildings and low-slung hutong neighborhoods and drained through the gates of Beijing’s favorite morning gathering place.

Slowly the corners of the park filled, even the shady spots deep among the tight rows of cypress trees that date back 800 years. Over there, a man performed the slow-motion dance of tai chi. Over here, a woman scratched her back against a tree. Everywhere, people gave themselves pat-downs to loosen their muscles…

Here came a woman walking backward. There went a man furiously rubbing his head. Everyone made room for the man crawling down the sidewalk on his toes and hands. It is exercise without ego. There seems to be no way to move the body in a way that would draw puzzled looks here, although the bear-crawler elicited some second glances….

This is exercise to connect with the world around, not tune it out. This is exercise done to feel good on the inside, not to impress anyone on the outside.

On living in a multipolar world. I think Eugene Robinson nailed it in a recent op-ed column:

The lesson that’s being brought home this summer is that we live in a multipolar world. We knew that, but in our political rhetoric we prefer to ignore it. Now, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are going to be able to make it through their convention without acknowledging the world’s complications and interconnections.

Obama will probably talk more about engagement and the “international community,” while McCain is likely to sound more confrontational. I’m pretty sure, though, that neither will come clean about a central truth: Our future is being decided not just in Washington but in Beijing and Moscow — and in Riyadh, Islamabad, New Delhi, Dubai, Caracas, Abuja, Brasilia. . . .

We still have the wherewithal to lead. But we’re deluding ourselves if we believe we won’t have to adapt to the new reality.

If you’re searching for a more authentic and less glitzy destination by the sea, Sarah Wildman recommends Costa Brava - the sparsely populated coastal region of Catalonia in northeastern Spain. She wrote about a recent trip there for the International Herald Tribune.

On the small roads between Cantallops and Llançà - two names that were barely dots on our map of Catalonia in northeastern Spain - the lush mountain greenery turned quickly to farmland rolling out for miles around us and filled with sunflowers and bales of hay.

We were traveling from the interior mountains of this Spanish autonomous region to the Mediterranean. Again and again, rising up in the near distance, came fantastic, if dusty, terra-cotta-colored medieval hamlets and equally ancient churches and farmhouses. On the streets everywhere the lingua franca was Catalan, not Spanish, and amid all the tourists that descend from France and elsewhere, a local pride seemed to pervade the scene, against a backdrop that fell away suddenly, breathtakingly, into the sea.

In Llançà we stopped at Platja Grifeu, one of the village’s perfect beaches, with clear tropical-looking water to swim in. At the beachside restaurant, I ordered a tortilla española, the ubiquitous potato omelet of Spain. It was, improbably, the best tortilla I had ever tasted. I savored it, facing the sea and the local families sunning themselves, in this tiny village about 10 miles from the French-Spanish border on a road that looked like nothing more than a scribble on the map.

By some small miracle - and preservation efforts that have helped to control development in Catalonia - the Costa Brava has maintained an authenticity and a refreshing resistance to change that keeps this stretch of the Mediterranean radically different from the southern coasts of Spain. Fishing villages still feel like fishing villages, medieval mountain towns are still hushed at siesta, and artists still paint on the streets of Cadaqués.

This is a bit longer than my typical post, but if you’re interested at all in U.S. politics there is a lot here that will interest you and hopefully provide some food for thought and debate…

Speculation over Barack Obama’s vice presidential candidate is reaching a fever pitch this week, with the selection widely expected to be made known between Wednesday and Saturday. Most reporting indicates that there is a three person shortlist - Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh, and Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine.

If that’s truly the case, then Biden seems to be the best choice of the three for reasons that are quite well expressed here and here. Indeed, a lot of smart people today are predicting that Biden is going to be Obama’s pick. However, these things rarely go according to conventional wisdom. Therefore, I have to agree with Nate Silver that there is a reasonable prospect of a surprise choice.

Ah, but who would be the surprise? All along, Obama has really had two options - someone who “balances” the ticket by adding a long record in national politics and foreign policy, or an “outsider” who reinforces the message of bringing change to Washington. Silver thinks a surprise choice is more likely to come from the first group and he lays out the contenders: Hilary Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry and Colin Powell. Wow! Can you imagine the media shock wave any one of these would set off? It would be a perfect Obama head fake and produce reams of publicity heading into the Democratic convention.

Frankly, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Obama went in this direction. The problem is, I have difficulty making the case for why it would be any one of the four.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Chinese are proud to be hosting this year’s Summer Olympics in Beijing, and they certainly want the home team to perform well. But perhaps not too well.

There was an interesting cultural note in a recent Washington Post article about Chinese rooting interests in these Olympics. It seems that while the Chinese are proud of their nation’s growing might on the world stage, some of them think it’s a bit too soon - and too showy - for their athletes to emerge with the most medals this year. It’s typical for the Chinese to be self deprecating, and this reminded me of a Chinese-born woman who used to work with my wife. She was horrified at the thought of filling out a performance review for herself at work because it would be unseemly to be too self congratulatory.

Apparently, that attitude even extends to the Olympics. Here is the telling anecdote from Francesco Sisci in his Post story:

The Olympic Games aren’t just a show for me; they’re a family affair, and one that’s turning out quite differently from what I’d expected. I’m Italian, but I’ve lived in China for about 20 years. My wife is Chinese — and very patriotic — and my two daughters grew up here…So you can imagine my state of mind before these games. I thought we all had to be very patriotic — that is, pro-China.

But when my mother announced before the games that she hoped that China would win the most medals, my wife, Luoyan, looked at me as if my mother had said something inappropriate. “Well,” she replied, “I hope that China comes in second and America will be first.”

She’s not alone. There’s a sizable undercurrent of hope here that the United States will top the medal rankings…The subtle reluctance to win may also be related to China’s being host of the games; by coming in first, China would look like a showoff. It could also be part of an idea that sport stands for economic and political might, and China knows that it certainly can’t challenge American supremacy, at least not yet.

“It’s not our moment. It would be too ambitious and too unreal to be the first in the Olympics now,” said a friend of mine at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the country’s premier think tank. “Many people, even among the leaders, think like this.”

Every country has to deal with contrasts between its rich and poor citizens. But in few countries is this disparity as stark as it is in India. A new film there (“Barah Aana”) looks at the life of migrant workers who are employed as waiters and chauffeurs, and it explores the contrasts between their existence and the lives of those who employ them. It has apparently stirred a good deal of conversation in India, as described in this NY Times article.

India may be changing at a disorienting pace, but one thing remains stubbornly the same: a tendency to treat the hired help like chattel, to behave as though some humans were born to serve and others to be served.

“Indians are perhaps the world’s most undemocratic people, living in the world’s largest and most plural democracy,” Sudhir Kakar and Katharina Kakar, two well-known scholars of Indian culture, wrote in a recent book, “The Indians: Portrait of a People.”

The subject, usually overlooked, has been raised by a provocative new film depicting India from a servant’s-eye view. The movie, “Barah Aana,” by Raja Menon, tells the story of three migrants to Mumbai from the ailing villages of northern India. They work as a chauffeur, a waiter and a security guard, sending most of their earnings home. They are heroes in their villages, but in Mumbai they are invisible men, enduring the callousness that comes with being an accessory to other people’s lives…

The director’s answer is that India has something deeper than a poverty problem. It has, in his view, a “dehumanization” problem. In an interview, he described India’s employers and servants as living as “two different species.”

I have to take time for a bit of book promotion here, as there was some nice press coverage in today’s Arizona Daily Star newspaper about my travel memoir, Two Laps Around the World.

It was the trip of a lifetime. Two trips, actually. In 2002, Bob Riel and Lisa Higgins, wed the year before, embarked on a three-month-long trip that took them from Greece to Turkey, then on to Kenya, Thailand, Beijing and Tokyo.

In 2005 they did it again, this time traveling to Vietnam, Cambodia, India, Singapore, Egypt and Europe.

But this was no four-star-hotel experience. The couple traveled at times by rickshaw and rickety bus, flatbed truck and camel.

More than mere sightseeing, the trip, says Riel, was a life sabbatical — one that more of us should undertake to renew and refresh our lives.

You can read more about the book, including some chapter excerpts, at my other website, www.bobriel.com.

Want to know the long-term consequences of a society filled with one-child families? Apparently, the situation gets a lot more complicated when combined with an economy that produces too few professional level jobs. Check out the current situation in China, which is described in a fascinating article in Psychology Today.

When China began limiting couples to one child 30 years ago, the policy’s most obvious goal was to contain a mushrooming population. For the Chinese people, however, the policy’s greater purpose was to turn out a group of young elites who would each enjoy the undivided resources of their whole family—the so-called xiao huangdi, or “little emperors.” The plan was to “produce a generation of high-quality children to facilitate China’s introduction as a global power,” explains Susan Greenhalgh, an expert on the policy. But while these well-educated, driven achievers are fueling the nation’s economic boom, their generation has become too modern too quickly, glutted as it is with televisions, access to computers, cash to buy name brands, and the same expectations of middle-class success as Western kids.

The shift in temperament has happened too fast for society to handle. China is still a developing nation with limited opportunity, leaving millions of ambitious little emperors out in the cold; the country now churns out more than 4 million university graduates yearly, but only 1.6 million new college-level jobs. Even the strivers end up as security guards. China may be the world’s next great superpower, but it’s facing a looming crisis as millions of overpressurized, hypereducated only children come of age in a nation that can’t fulfill their expectations…

“In this generation, every child is raised to be at the top,” says Vanessa Fong, a Harvard education professor and author of Only Hope: Coming of Age under China’s One-Child Policy. “They’ve worked hard for it, and it’s what their parents have focused their lives on. But the problem is that the country can’t provide the lifestyle they feel they deserve. Only a few will get it.” China’s accomplished young elites are celebrated on billboards as the vanguard of the nation, yet they’re quickly becoming victims of their own lofty expectations.

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for first linking to this story.

David Brooks usually focuses on politics from a conservative perspective in his NY Times op-ed column, but every once in a while he has a piece that delves into culture in some form or other. That is what he does in today’s column, which looks at some of the differences between individualist and group-oriented societies.

This is one of the key differences between countries and cultural regions around the globe. Brooks uses the topic as a pivot to discuss the rise of China and the possibility that its goal of a “harmonious collective” could rival the more individualist “American Dream” as an economic vision for developing societies. Still, it’s nice to see topics like this getting some play in the national press.

Here is an excerpt from Brooks’ piece:

The world can be divided in many ways — rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian — but one of the most striking is the divide between the societies with an individualist mentality and the ones with a collectivist mentality.

This is a divide that goes deeper than economics into the way people perceive the world. If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim.

These sorts of experiments have been done over and over again, and the results reveal the same underlying pattern. Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts…

You can create a global continuum with the most individualistic societies — like the United States or Britain — on one end, and the most collectivist societies — like China or Japan — on the other.

The individualistic countries tend to put rights and privacy first. People in these societies tend to overvalue their own skills and overestimate their own importance to any group effort. People in collective societies tend to value harmony and duty. They tend to underestimate their own skills and are more self-effacing when describing their contributions to group efforts.

A week or so ago, I had a post about Luang Prabang, Laos, and quoted an article written by Gayle Keck. Not long after that, I heard from Gayle and she told me about an interesting new website she’s created called “Been There Ate That.” There, people post photos of meals they’ve eaten around the world, and the site is searchable by location or ingredient.

Here, for instance, is a post-dessert fruit dish from Tunis, Tunisia:

Check out this new site, and add some photos of your own.