Travels in the Riel World

Never mind pets, smokers or loud music at 2 a.m. House hunters in Bombay increasingly are being asked: “Do you eat meat?” If yes, the deal is off.

Yes, it’s true.  According to this article, it’s becoming increasingly common in Bombay (Mumbai), India, for some home owners to sell or rent only to other vegetarians, in an effort to keep particular neighborhoods meat free.  Of course, it is estimated that about 220 million Indians are vegetarians, so it’s not exactly a limited market.

A few years ago, David Elliot Cohen wrote a book (One Year Off) about a round-the-world journey with his wife and three children.  While in Thailand, his daughter had a finger injury and needed minor surgery at Bumrungrad Hospital in Bangkok.  Apprehensive at first, he was amazed at the quality and efficiency of the care, not to mention the low cost.

…in Thailand, we received more efficient, more courteous, and far less expensive health care than we could have ever gotten back home in Marin County.  I would take my kids back to Bumrungrad Hospital without hesitation.

Now, it appears more people are discovering the wonders of health care in Thailand and a few other Asian countries.  Time Magazine just did a story on the increasing numbers of Americans who are traveling to Asia for surgeries with U.S. trained doctors.  In doing so, they are spending considerably less, even when the travel costs are factored in, than it would cost for the same procedure at home.

As word has spread about the high-quality care and cut-rate surgery available in such countries as India, Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia, a growing stream of uninsured and underinsured Americans are boarding planes not for the typical face-lift or tummy tuck but for discount hip replacements and sophisticated heart surgeries. Bumrungrad alone…saw its stream of American patients climb to 55,000 last year, a 30% rise.

Even more interesting is the fact that some corporations are now looking into such “medical outsourcing” as a component of the health care benefits being offered to employees.

The calculus behind this interest isn’t complicated. Many major employers in the U.S. are self-insured, which means they pick up the tab for much of their employees’ medical care. … The bottom line: If more private payers sent patients abroad for uncomplicated elective surgeries, the savings could be enormous.

How big are the savings?  According to Time, an angioplasty could cost anywhere from $25,000 to $82,000 in the U.S., depending on several factors, including whether the procedure is insured or not.  By contrast, the same procedure in Thailand, Singapore or India would cost $11-13,000. 

Is this a preview of the globalization of health care? Heck, even Angelina and Brad journeyed to Namibia for the birth of their child … although it’s safe to presume they weren’t quite as concerned about the costs involved.

On a recent trip, Lisa and I spent a memorable afternoon in the hutongs, or alleyways, of old Beijing.  These ancient neighborhoods have streets that are too narrow for modern automobiles, so we visited the area by rickshaw.  We rolled past small shops, men playing board games, schoolchildren in uniform, and dozens of locals who were traveling to and fro on their bicycles.  Then our middle-aged driver invited us into his home, served us tea and beer, and incongruously showed us the Mel Gibson poster on his living rooom wall.

These memories came flooding back recently as a result of an NPR piece on the “lost sounds of old Beijing,” which was centered on the city’s historic hutongs, many of which are now being demolished to make way for modern apartments and offices.  Even if it’s not a trip down memory lane, it’s an intriguing glimpse into old China.

We know from previous news that many Americans don’t know a whole lot about geography.  But some do, as evidenced by the 2006 National Geographic Bee, won by 12-year-old Bonny Jain of Illinois.  Interestingly, the top three finishers, and five of the top 10, were Indian-Americans.

Not a lot of attention is paid to this geography contest, particularly when compared with the much more famous National Spelling Bee.  But, in this op-ed column, Charles Passy suggests that should change.

For all the attention that continues to be accorded to the National Spelling Bee … the less-heralded Geography Bee is more relevant. After all, we live in a global age, when events in far-flung countries have as much impact as those close to home. It stands to reason that knowing where these places are would be an invaluable skill…

And yet the spelling bee continues to receive all the attention. Perhaps that’s because spelling is a tantalizingly easy concept to grasp. You either spell a word right or you don’t. The answers are all in the dictionary. Geography, on the other hand, asks more. But it offers more in return: to know the world is to know how to make it a better place.

An editorial a few weeks ago in the Arizona Daily Star also touched on this need for geography education:

Geography needs to go pop. Spelling is “in,” thanks to its pop-culture following. Now it’s time for geography to be a pop centerpiece. … We hope the realization that geography matters becomes an urgency for parents, educators and businesses as we prepare to live in the international marketplace.

So let’s do it.  Let’s help geography “go pop.”

Tens of millions of people now know that Taylor Hicks is the newest winner of American Idol.  But what about Indian Idol?  Yes, the pop culture tv phenomenon has its own spinoff in India, where it’s also a huge hit.  This article in the International Herald Tribune discusses the popularity of this and similar shows in South Asia.  It also provides telling clues about Indian culture:

How India is changing, on the one hand, and becoming more meritocratic…

If nothing else, the proliferation of these contests testifies to a powerful set of beliefs among a generation of middle-class Indian youth: that they can make it on merit, that democracy will trounce favoritism and that no matter whether a contestant has unsung small-town roots or lacks family connections, talent will be recognized — and that the masses of unsung small-town Indians can make that possible.

“It’s our way of participating, in a vicarious manner, in this great Mumbai dream,” said Shailaja Bajpai, a television critic at The Indian Express, an English-language daily. “It says, ‘O.K., we can rise.’ “

While at the same time hanging onto other traditions, such as male dominance and provincialism…

Two uniquely Indian features have grafted themselves onto these talent shows. Not a single woman has been crowned a winner … To Ms. Bajpai’s mind, the exclusion reveals a persistent reluctance of the Indian audience to endorse an entertainer who is a woman. “Nice girls don’t go up there and become winners,” is how she put it.

Second, the talent shows have offered a platform for marginal, small-town India to rally around its own … Repeatedly this year, the judges on “Indian Idol 2″ appealed to viewers to cast their votes on the basis of merit, not parochial pride.

Two months ago, I wrote about a contest being sponsored by NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof in which he wanted to take a student with him on a future African reporting trip.  Kristof has now picked a winner, journalism student Casey Parks of Mississippi.  In a Tuesday column, he reports that he and the lucky winner will journey together to Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon and the Central African Republic.

He also makes another plug for the importance of travel to a good education:

One of our country’s basic strategic weaknesses is that Americans don’t understand the rest of the world…So, for all the rest of you who applied for my contest, see if you can’t work out your own trips.  Or take a year off before heading to college or into a job.

…be aware of the risks, travel with a buddy or two, and carry an international cellphone.  But remember that young Aussies, Kiwis and Europeans take such a year of travel all the time - women included - and usually come through not only intact, but also with a much richer understanding of how most of humanity lives…

In the 21st century, you can’t call yourself educated if you don’t understand how the other half lives - and you don’t get that understanding in a classroom.  So do something about your educational shortcomings: fly to Bangkok.

Increasingly, students and budget travelers seem to be passing up the traditional European backpacking trip in exchange for adventures in Asia.  According to an article in USA Today, youth-oriented STA Travel reported a 23% increase in bookings to Asia in 2005.  Asia is increasingly accessible to travelers, but the higher cost of visiting Western Europe also plays a strong role in this trend.  Not to mention that Asia is a less familiar and thus more exotic destination.

Although the allure of Europe has far from faded in the American consciousness, Asia has secured a foothold in the daydreams of the young and peripatetic.

“After doing Asia, the world opens up. Other places seem more accessible and totally doable,” Dory says.

Montenegro, the tiny Balkan country that has long been connected to Serbia, voted yesterday to become an independent country.

Montenegro will thus become the 193rd member of the international community (or maybe the 192nd or 194th, depending on who is counting). There are 191 members of the United Nations.  However, the U.S. State Department and many other U.N. members recognize 192 countries.  This includes Vatican City, which is considered an independent state but does not belong to the U.N.  Then there is Taiwan, which does not meet most international requirements for country status but is recognized by 25 nations.

Now, if you really want to get confused, the Travelers’ Century Club maintains a list of 315 countries, although more than one-third of them are not actually independent states but rather cultural regions that are considered “geographically, politically or ethnologically” distinct.  (Think Tibet, or Scotland, or Montenegro prior to Sunday’s vote.)

Montenegro is the fifth former republic of Yugoslavia to choose independence, joining Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Macedonia.  Only Serbia remains of the six Yugoslav republics, and there are indications that the region of Kosovo may also want to become independent.  Montenegro has dreams of joining the European Union but, as this article points out, there are hurdles ahead.  The country is small, with a population of about 650,000, and has no strong economic foundation outside of a tourism industry centered on a spectacular Adriatic coastline.

Music may be the international language, but some heavy metal bands are making themselves heard in surprising countries and in unexpected ways.  The Washington Post has a story today about some Saudi musicians who play “doom metal.”  Of course, they often do it surreptitiously, and the band leader doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink, sips tea with his bandmates, and still prays five times a day in the Muslim tradition.

Meanwhile, Lordi, a Finnish “death metal” band whose members are never seen in public without horror masks on their faces, just pulled a suprise victory in the popular Eurovision song contest.  It was the first Eurovision victory for Finland and for a heavy metal song.  As FP Passport put it:

Yes, the land of the midnight sun, naked saunas, salty licorice, and Santa Claus … has pulled a major upset and beaten out the rest of the continent. 

Heavy metal from reserved, sauna-loving Finns and from religious, tea-drinking Saudis.  Globalization gets more interesting all the time!

Saudi Arabia has always been closed to most outsiders, unless you were a Muslim pilgrim or had business interests there, but that may be about to change.  The country will begin issuing regular tourist visas in June as it strives to build a tourism industry, but the holiest sites of Mecca and Medina will remain off limits to non-Muslims.  Saudi Arabia could become an intriguing new tourist destination, although as World Travel Watch points out:

The withering summer heat, strict moral customs and minimal tourist infrastructure will work against high tourism numbers…These factors contribute to the Saudis themselves often preferring to take their vacations abroad.

Hitchhiking doesn’t have the allure it once did, and in a number of places it’s really not even an advisable activity these days.  But Mat Schultz discovered a different world in rural Romania, where he hitched rides along with the locals and wrote about his experiences for Lonely Planet.

Botiza is the most perfect European village you’ll ever find, the kind of place where traditionally garbed villagers carrying scythes return together from the fields at dusk. Cows wearing bells drink from wooden troughs at the river’s edge, graze, and find their own way home. Old women open gates to let them in. On Friday nights, people sit outside houses, chatting. There doesn’t seem to be anything else to do. The hills surrounding the village are low and as soft as green velvet.

Maybe when hitchhikers die and go to heaven they find themselves in Maramures - a place where drivers actually stop, and the people are remarkably generous.

Not really, but it’s certainly evolving.  Thomas Friedman has an interesting column in today’s NY Times (subscription required) suggesting that outsourcing in the traditional sense is giving way to what he terms ”around sourcing.”

It’s called “around sourcing” instead of outsourcing, because there is no more “out” anymore.

Using his trademark style of weaving together various stories, he touches on a Hungarian cabdriver who derives one-quarter of his business from his multilingual internet site, an Indian company that does traditional outsourcing from the U.S. but in turn outsources some of its own work to Indian villagers, and a New Jersey company that collaborates daily via videoconferencing with 60 Pakistani engineers based in Islamabad. He concludes:

What all these stories tell me is that we are seeing the emergence of collaborative business models that were simply unimaginable a decade ago.  Today, there are so many more tools, so many more ideas, so many more people able to put these ideas and tools together to discover new things, and so much better communications to disseminate these new ideas across the globe.

Did you know that the number one lost-and-found item on Eurostar trains between Paris and London is copies of the book The Da Vinci Code?  They are apparently left by the increasing numbers of people who are on Da Vinci Code quests in two of the main cities featured in Dan Brown’s novel.

That’s just one clue to the remarkable tourism boom caused by Brown’s book.  Business Week calls it “a cultural event that’s rapidly becoming an economic phenomenon.”  This involves not just books, merchandise and a major Hollywood movie, but also considerable jumps in tourist visits to France, England and Scotland, and to such sites as the Louvre in Paris and Rosslyn Chapel near Edinburgh.  This isn’t the first time, of course, that a movie has generated interest in travel to a particular place, as Gadling and Travel & Leisure have recently pointed out, but The Da Vinci Code seems to be in a class of its own.

In the Washington Post, meanwhile, Jefferson Morley has a roundup of world opinion about The Da Vinci Code, from England to India, Argentina to South Africa.  He quotes a British writer as saying that the story ”has clearly touched something in the popular psyche.”

Nice story in the English-language Japan Times about the increasing numbers of Japanese who are choosing to live and work overseas.  Almost one million Japanese now live outside of their country, a 40 percent increase in ten years.

The newspaper asked several of those expats to share their experiences from Argentina, France, Spain, the United States and other countries, even Libya and Burundi.  There are a number of interesting responses, such as the following one from Australia that points out some of the cultural differences between the individualistic Aussies and the group-oriented Japanese.

This experience taught us the different attitudes toward work between Japanese and Australian people. We Japanese tend to consider work as the center of life … Contrary to this, Australians consider that work is just a part of life…

We were also surprised by the difference in education curricula. When we arrived here, we had to send our older son to a local kindergarten. His classroom was divided into several playing sections, and each pupil was doing what he or she wanted. Some were drawing pictures or building blocks and others were playing with personal computers.  In Japan, pupils have to do the same thing all together in class, and if a pupil cannot or will not join in, then they might be left out of the group and eventually become a target of bullying.

In last night’s finale of the Amazing Race, after nine countries and 59,000 miles, it came down to a nail-biting race to the finish between the “hippies” and the “frat boys.”  In the end, BJ and Tyler, the freewheeling, globe-trotting, self-styled hippies from California, edged out Eric and Jeremy, the former college athletes from Florida, in a leg that took them from Thailand to Japan to Alaska to Colorado.

It was nice to see the winning team be a duo that truly enjoys and appreciates the opportunity to travel, meet people and interact with other cultures.  In the post-race interviews, though, the most appropriate concluding remark came from second-place Eric, who said he learned that “the world is actually not that big a place. You can go anywhere and it just takes the will to do it.”

I was intrigued by a recent story in the NY Times about literature that inspires people to travel.  The newspaper polled authors for titles that have aroused their wanderlust.  It got me to thinking about books I’ve read that fit into that category.  Not travel narratives, for they are meant to invoke dreams of the road, but other literature that makes one want to visit a particular place.  Below are three of my nominations.  What would your choices be?

On the Road.  Jack Kerouac’s ode to the American road trip…

Then came spring, the time of great traveling, and everybody in the scattered gang was getting ready to take one trip or another. … Now I could see Denver looming ahead of me like the Promised Land, way out there beneath the stars, across the prairie of Iowa and the plains of Nebraska, and I could see the greater vision of San Francisco beyond, like jewels in the night. 

The Lover.  Marguerite Duras’ book about a young girl and her lover in colonial Indochina.  She writes about Saigon…

It’s a city of pleasure that reaches its peak at night.  And night is beginning now, with the setting sun. … Whiffs of burnt sugar drift into the room, the smell of roasted peanuts, Chinese soups, roast meat, herbs, jasmine, incense, charcoal fires. 

A Moveable Feast.  Ernest Hemingway and Paris…

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

Now that the U.S. has restored full diplomatic ties with Libya, one wonders if tourism to that North African nation will begin to rise.  Libya, after all, has a beautiful Mediterranean coastline and five World Heritage sites, including Leptis Magna, which is considered one of the most impressive sets of Roman ruins in existence.

The 2006 Gates Award for Global Health will be awarded to the Carter Center.  The $1 million award from the Gates Foundation “honors extraordinary efforts to improve health in developing countries.”  The Carter Center was selected by a panel of international health officials for the honor.  According to the announcement:

The Carter Center Guinea Worm Eradication Program, has helped to reduce cases of the disease from an estimated 3.5 million in 1986 to just 10,674 in 2005. Guinea worm is expected to become the second disease, after smallpox, to be eradicated worldwide, and the Center also expects to eliminate river blindness in the Americas by 2010…

“Before The Carter Center began its work, diseases like Guinea worm and river blindness were seen as intractable - a fact of life in the world’s poorest countries,” said Dr. Nils Daulaire, President and CEO of the Global Health Council. ”The Carter Center has turned conventional wisdom on its head.”