Travels in the Riel World

Interesting but somewhat sad article in the International Herald Tribune about the changing face of Venice.  This story has nothing to do with the encroaching sea, and everything to do with rising real estate prices that are driving away lifelong Venetians.  The result is a city with a shrinking population where on many days tourists actually outnumber local residents.

From a peak of 171,000 residents in 1951, the population of the historic center of Venice has fallen to fewer than 62,000.

“We’ve reached the point of collapse, the point where things could fall apart,” said Ezio Micelli, an urban planner. Should the trend continue, newspapers fretted recently, by 2030 authentic Venetians could become extinct and the historic center reduced to a shell subsisting only on tourism. For even as Venetians leave, tourists have been coming. And coming.

According to recent estimates, 15 million to 18 million tourists have come to Venice over the last year. On some days they easily outnumber residents; during the pre-Lenten Carnival there are 150,000 tourists a day.

When the ratio of tourists to residents tips in favor of the former, “it’s not meaningful to talk about Venice as a city anymore,” said Robert Davis, a professor of Italian history at Ohio State University.

Strange fate for a place that, a few centuries ago, was a thriving city-state in control of an empire in southeastern Europe.

The magazine Transitions Abroad is published for travelers who want to learn about the world through their experiences on the road.  It focuses not only on independent travel, but also on studying, working and living abroad.  The magazine was founded in 1977 by teacher and journalist Clay Hubbs.  This month, he is a featured interviewee on Rolf Potts’ website.  Some excerpts:

How did you get started traveling?

In the early sixties … my wife Joanna and my son Gregory and I went toodling off across North Africa and the Middle East in a used VW van, following the path of Alexander the Great. It was a wonderful trip — filled with many adventures and breakdowns — in which we fell in love with that part of the world and with travel.

Joanna’s second pregnancy brought us back to the West before we could reach India, so in the mid-sixties we returned — this time with two kids and a new bus. And this time we included the length of the Soviet Union in our itinerary.

What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?

Over the years I’ve recommended hundreds of books and authors — always those that describe ways to learn about (and from) a culture from the inside.

Travel, like literature, is educational, challenging…and very exciting. The transitions or changes that result — and here’s my pitch! — affect us profoundly and for the better: the mask falls and we no longer see only what our culture has conditioned us to expect. Any writing that facilitates what I have sometimes called “life-seeing” travel I welcome and recommend.

The fast-growing Indian economy is drawing business school graduates to South Asia. Despite the myriad of challenges that come with living in India, a number of young businesspeople are jumping at the chance to work in the country and gain valuable global business experience.  Here is an excerpt from a story about this trend in today’s Christian Science Monitor:

Max van Cauwenberghe could be forgiven for wondering how he ended up in a place like this.  Outside his office in this Delhi suburb of 1 million people, cows mill on roads with potholes that could be mistaken for meteor craters. It’s late September, but the sun still broils this arid landscape at more than 90 degrees F., and a dust storm is turning the air to the consistency of sandpaper.

Yet this young Belgian entrepreneur, fresh from business school, simply smiles. After all, he says, there is no place he would rather be than in India.  Just a few years ago, often the only way to tempt expatriates to set up shop here was a lecture about company loyalty or a hefty hardship allowance. Now, an increasing number of interns and even executives are coming here voluntarily to witness - and to fuel - the rise of India Inc. …

A few of them have been world travelers already. Nicolas Nizet has been to Hong Kong and Siberia for internships. Raoul Wouters spent time in Ecuador. But India offered something unique: a chance to see and understand a crucial business trend that peers only know through books and classroom lectures.

These benefits do not just flow in one direction, either, as many Indian executives are eager to bring expats into their companies.

According to the head of Evaluserve, India’s need is great. He and others agree that India already has an abundance of domestic talent. But if it wishes to compete globally, it must have global resources - in other words, it must be fluent in the language and culture of its clients.

That’s where the expats come in. “We are not only an India-centric company,” says Ashish Gupta, head of Evaluserve India. “So to have this mingling of cultures is very, very important to us.”  In all, he estimates, India will need more than 100,000 expatriates by 2010.

As companies expand their international operations, some of them neglect to account for cultural differences when recruiting and hiring local employees in foreign markets.  This has become an issue for companies worldwide, as indicated in this article from an Indian technology magazine about the need for “cultural sensitivity in overseas hiring.”

The first challenge of possessing a global workforce are the cross-cultural issues that come up right at the hiring stage itself. Selectors need to be trained in and sensitised to the nuances of a candidate’s culture. These differences must be taken into account while recruiting an individual. Many a times good candidates are rejected only because of unaware hiring managers…

When recruiting people from other nations, organisations need to be aware that national culture influences the behaviour and thinking at a fundamental level… Organisations often make the mistake of replicating the hiring process of their own country while they are selecting candidates from different nations.

“Often businesses go into cross-cultural recruitment as if it is just a bigger project than a domestic recruitment campaign. It is obvious though that a recruitment and selection process that is designed for a mono-cultural home market recruitment may be very effective at identifying the skills, attitudes, behaviours and competencies of candidates who are ‘like us’ and eliminating those who are not,” says Martin, adding that if some companies think that there is nothing wrong with that then they should stay local.

If you’re a traveler who counts culinary adventures as one of your favorite means of exploring new cultures, then Singapore may be an appealing destination.  Noted author and chef Anthony Bourdain has a mouth-watering piece in the NY Times Travel Magazine about his experiences with food in Singapore.

There’s a fever-dream quality to Singapore, particularly if you’re a foodie. Outdoors, the heat is smothering. In the ubiquitous megamalls, the air-conditioning could frost a bottle of beer. Everyone, it seems, when not shopping for Prada or Armani, is feeding their faces. Yet unlike in other modern centers of conspicuous consumption, in Singapore, the local obsession with food focuses on “hawker stands” and “eating houses,” which are clustered in open-to-the-street food courts. They offer a nearly unlimited variety of Malaysian, Chinese and Indian mom-and-pop operations, each of them specializing in one or two dishes.

Centuries ago, when Chinese merchants immigrated south and were encouraged to intermarry - and when Indian entrepreneurs and planters joined the mix - a fantastic process of natural fusion began. Not the fusion of trendy restaurants of the West, where after a trip to Thailand a chef begins to toss around lemongrass with abandon, but a long, slow process of culinary mutation, born of people from three distinct cultures living and eating together. It is not unusual for a Singaporean or a Malaysian to grow up cooking three cuisines.

For budding gastro-tourists and first-time visitors to Asia, Singapore is the perfect city to avail oneself of a broad spectrum of culinary delights without straying too far from the familiar. English is an official language. Mass transit and taxis are cleaner and more efficient than in most places. Crime and annoyances are virtually, and rather notoriously, nonexistent.

There has been a significant increase in Latin Americans rushing to learn Mandarin Chinese in recent years.  At just the University of Buenos Aires, for example, there are now more than 1,000 students registered in Chinese language classes.  Why the interest?  A rise in trade relations and business opportunities between China and Latin America, according to this Washington Post article.

China is voraciously scouring Latin America for everything from oil to lumber, and there is money to be made. That prospect has … business people in much of Latin America flocking to learn the Chinese language, increasingly heard in boardrooms and on executive junkets. …

The arrival of China in a largely Spanish-speaking region half a world away might seem unusual. But Beijing is in a relentless quest for oil, coal, iron ore and copper for its factories, soybean and poultry to feed its 1.3 billion people, lumber for housing, and fish meal for its livestock. President Hu Jintao’s government, which two years ago pledged $100 billion in investments for several South American countries, said it also wants to bankroll road, port and railroad developments that would help bring exports more quickly to China.

Veering toward China, though, is far from easy for entrepreneurs and students from a region that has long been intertwined with the giant to the north. The United States remains the biggest investor in Latin America, its trade with the region eight times that of China’s. English prevails as a second language.

Mandarin, on the other hand, is considered far harder to learn, with dialects and a tenor significantly different from the phonetic cadences of Spanish and Portuguese. Yet the Chinese language is making gains, as is the revolutionary idea of looking west across the Pacific for business opportunities.

Under normal conditions, a military coup against a democratically elected government would seem to be bad for national morale, at the very least, and potentially devastating for tourism.  Apparently, though, that is not always true.  At least not in Thailand. 

This is how the Washington Post describes the scene in Bangkok a day after the Thai Army deposed the elected government of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and established military control over the country.

Despite the new period of uncertainty, ushered in by a coup that was denounced by the United States and other foreign governments, many Thais in the capital appeared overjoyed.

“Democracy has won!” said an ecstatic Orathai Dechodomphan, 59, a tailor and Thaksin opponent who joined hundreds of people handing out roses to soldiers near the army headquarters. “Thaksin tried to steal power and did not respect our king. He never would have left on his own. What happened yesterday is our first step toward recovering a real democracy.”

The New York Times this morning points out the obvious irony of staging an undemocratic military coup in the name of restoring democracy.  In general, though, the country seems largely unaffected by the recent turn of events and even the tourist industry is only expected to be impacted for a brief period of time.

World Hum, meanwhile, has this to say about the coup’s relatively minor affect on tourists so far:

Apparently the banana pancakes-eating, hair-braiding backpacker set hanging out on Bangkok’s Kao San Road continues to, uh, chill, despite the tumultuous events of the last 24 hours in Thailand.

Politics is as much connected to culture as is business, so it was interesting to read this story about how the outgoing Prime Minister of Japan, Junichiro Koizumi, singlehandedly altered the political culture of the nation.  In particular, he was notable for exuding charisma in an otherwise bland political climate, and for making decisions on his own in a culture that strongly values consensus.

“The conventional wisdom was that Japanese prime ministers were inherently incapable of exerting leadership,” said Takeshi Sasaki, a political scientist at Gakushuin University and a former president of the University of Tokyo. “But Koizumi exercised leadership with great tenacity and tried many new things — things that prime ministers had not said or done until now.”

Unlike his predecessors, Mr. Koizumi eschewed the compromises that had led to paralysis. In a society that values consensus, he was famous for making decisions on his own and seemed to excel in making political enemies. He was — in the words of his first foreign minister, Makiko Tanaka — a “weirdo.”

And the public loved him. Each time voters had a chance to choose between him and Japan’s old-fashioned politicians and bureaucrats, they backed him in large numbers.

In a related story, Japan’s governing party has now chosen a successor to Koizumi.  In September, Shinzo Abe will become the country’s new Prime Minister.

Although it isn’t on many lists of popular travel destinations, Ethiopia offers an intriguing culture and some of the most spectacular sights in Africa, in particular the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela.  Joshua Hammer wrote an article for the New York Times about a recent visit to Ethiopia.

In Ethiopia, the per capita income is $120 a year; tuberculosis and other contagions are rampant; and the literacy rate is just 43 percent, a sad figure considering that Ethiopia was among the first societies in sub-Saharan Africa to develop a written language.

But … significant development has come to Ethiopia, including mobile phone networks, decent hotels, Internet cafes, reliable electricity, and asphalt roads — phenomena that were unheard of in the outlying provinces a decade ago. And it is now possible to travel across Ethiopia with some degree of comfort.

… those who want to venture on their own will discover that Ethiopia is reasonably well set up for independent exploring. They will find a proud, if bedraggled country with ruggedly beautiful landscapes and a unique sense of its identity.

This was the writer’s first impression of arriving in Lalibela:

Lalibela, with a population of about 30,000, still has the look of a destitute mountain village: round, thatched-roof mud huts, called tukuls, clinging to steep slopes; peasant farmers wrapped in homespun white cloth robes; goats and sheep that scatter frantically, bleating in distress, before the rare motorized vehicle. In this humble setting, King Lalibela’s 900-year-old creations seem all the more extraordinary.

Want a bit of insight into what it’s like to be a Peace Corps volunteer, teaching English in Mongolia?  Owen Johns wrote a piece for the Arizona Daily Star describing some of his experiences.

I am an English teacher in rural Mongolia. My village, Orkhon, has a population of 1,500. We have no Internet, running water or paved roads, but we do have a school, a hospital and a spirit of community.

I live in a nomad’s round felt tent, called a ger, without heat, save a wood-burning stove. The winters push 50 degrees below zero. For a native of Arizona, this is a dramatic change in climate, but one of many things to which I have become accustomed. Everywhere I go, I am followed by choruses of “hellos” from my students. I’m sure it will make the winter warmer. I am a volunteer in the United States Peace Corps. This is the greatest experience so far in my 25 years.

In a post earlier this summer, I linked to an op-ed column that suggested the United States needed to make more of an effort to increase tourism, not only for the economic benefits but also to boost the image of the country. Now even more attention is being paid to that argument, as noted in an article this week in the Los Angeles Times:

Democrats and liberal academics have been complaining for years that President Bush’s foreign policy has turned the United States into an international pariah.  Now they have an unexpected ally: Disneyland.

The international travel business is thriving everywhere — except in the United States, whose share of global tourism is plummeting in step with America’s image around the world. …

In an effort to change that, representatives of the travel industry — as large as the Disney Co. and as small as the Greater Des Moines Convention and Visitors Bureau — are converging on Washington today to launch the Discover America Partnership.

The Discover America Partnership is an effort to boost tourism and, at the same time, “strengthen America’s image around the globe.”  On its website, the group proclaims a desire to “unlock the power of travel.”

… public diplomacy is not the sole responsibility of government, but also of business and the American people.  While there are no easy solutions to our image crisis, tapping into the power of travel must be a critical element in our public diplomacy efforts.

There is an intriguing series of interviews on NPR with two young women from near Chicago who have an Algerian Muslim heritage.

Sisters Assia and Iman Boundaoui grew up outside Chicago, their lives straddling what it is to be Muslim and American. Born to Algerian parents, they attended an Islamic school and a Sunni mosque around the corner from their home. They watched Nickelodeon and Al Jazeera. They got takeout food from Kentucky Fried Chicken and the falafel place down the street.

The interviews touch on everything from terrorism to favorite music, but one of the more interesting sections deals with how they value both their American and Muslim identities.

When it comes to their own identity, do they think of themselves first as Muslim, or American?

“In America, we would say we’re Muslim first, because that’s what makes us different, I guess,” Assia says. “So you identify with that one factor within you that stands out. But in another country, like in a Muslim country, and someone asks us to identify ourselves, we would say we’re American.”

Iman says she felt most American during a trip to Paris she took as a high school senior. Her group visited a Muslim school that was opened in response to a law banning religious headwear in public schools.

“We were talking to the girls and they were crying and telling us that before the school was made, the girls there had to make the choice of not going to school or attending school without the scarf,” Iman says. “It was probably the hardest decision they’ve ever had to make. And me and my friends were looking at them and at that moment were like, ‘Thank God we live in America, that I can walk down the street with my scarf on without having to decide to take it off because I have to go to school.’”

Each culture assigns value in its own way.  Among the Masai tribespeople of Kenya, cows are particularly important and are an integral part of both tribal life and the local economy.  Hence, it was a considerable act of generosity for Masai elders to offer a gift of 14 cattle to the United States several years ago in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks.  Now, according to this story, the U.S. is using that gift in turn to support an educational fund for Masai youth.

When Masai tribesmen marry, they give cows. When a son wants to earn the respect of his father, he gives cows. When there is a friend in need or a condolence call to make, more cows.

So it was, in this one-cow-fits-all spirit, that the elders of Enoosaen four years ago donated 14 prized bulls and heifers to the people of the United States to help ease the pain of the Sept. 11 attacks.

But there was one little problem: the cattle — and how to get them from here to there.  On Sunday, American diplomats returned to this town in the carpeted hills of southern Kenya and announced, much to the delight of the hundreds of Masai gathered in their best beaded finery, that the cattle were not going anywhere, especially not to the slaughterhouse.

Instead, they will be blessed, and their offspring will be used to pay for education for the children of Enoosaen. To get the cow trust fund going, the Americans are donating 14 high school scholarships.

“What you did to help us will not be forgotten,” said the new American ambassador to Kenya, Michael E. Ranneberger.  The Masai elders, some sitting in monkey skin jackets, beamed.

“We did what we knew best,” said an elder, Mzee ole Yiamboi. “The handkerchief we give to people to wipe their tears with is a cow.”

I had to chuckle at this brief note buried inside a story about Pope Benedict’s visit to his birthplace of Marktl Am Inn, Germany.  Just a bit of anecdotal evidence about the German compulsion for order and rules.

Hans Peter Kammerer, a police spokesman, said that at least 70,000 people attended the Mass. He said that 20,000 people drove there in private cars, following special parking rules and thus revealing more than a little of the nation’s character, as did the polite and respectful, but not effusive, reception for the pope.

“The rules we gave were followed so precisely that we had to tow only two cars — and those were because they weren’t between the lines,” he said.

Today is, of course, the five-year anniversary of 9-11.  To mark the date, the Christian Science Monitor ran an interesting story - contemplating how the world has changed in the past five years.

In many ways, not a great deal is different.  After all, globalization ”continues unabated,” Middle East conflicts dominated the headlines even before 2001, and the balance of power remains much the same.  What has changed, however, is our view of the world and our approach to it.  In that respect, notes the article, the events of 9-11 ”have helped move the metaphorical tectonic plates of the globe” and may have created ”a new general organizing principle for international affairs.”

The cold war was about the Western and communist blocs, and their values, conflicts, and internal cracks. The current period is about the US and the Islamic world - their mutual suspicions and occasional cooperation, and the wedge Al Qaeda has tried to drive between them.

“Five years in, it is now clear that the 9/11 attacks created a new dynamic for global politics, and thus American foreign policy, centering around the changed relationship between a state and a religion,” argues Peter Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington.

Another change is the very presence of American troops in more Muslim countries and the consequences that has wrought:

… it is the presence of large numbers of US troops which has helped spur anti-Americanism in the (Middle East). Those troops may have given disaffected Muslims, unhappy with the shortcomings of their own economic and political structures, something else on which to focus their ire.

Much of the hostility that some Islamists bear toward the US “is driven by one of the most powerful of human emotions, a sense of indignity and humiliation,” says Lawrence Harrison, an adjunct lecturer in international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. “That’s a quite new foreign- policy problem.”

Along with this, of course, has been somewhat of a rise in anti-Americanism in general, or at least a decline in trust of the U.S. government:

Trust in the US has also eroded substantially since 9/11, according to Daalder, among friends as well as adversaries. International cooperation on a wide range of problems, from counter-proliferation to global warming, is thus “increasingly absent,” he claims.

The article, I thought, was an interesting to way to mark this five-year anniversary.  Not many would have predicted exactly these scenarios five years ago, when the entire globe seemed to rise up in support of the U.S. in the aftermath of that tragic day.  How, I wonder, will we see our world five years from now?

As the Iran edges closer to becoming the new face of evil for many Americans, it wouldn’t hurt to remind ourselves that there is often a considerable difference between people and government.  And the Iranian people, in fact, for the most part tend to be friendly towards America.  That is the conclusion drawn by Steven Knipp, who wrote about a recent trip to Iran for the Washington Post.

I wouldn’t be truthful if I didn’t admit being slightly uneasy about going to Iran … What took place over the next fortnight astonished me. Everywhere I went — from the traffic-choked streets of Tehran in the north to the dusty desert town of Yazd in central Iran, to the elegant cultural centers of Isfahan and Shiraz — I was overwhelmed by the warmth and, dare I say it, pro-Americanism of the people I met.

Ponder the irony of that last statement for a moment. While much of the rest of the world seems to be holding their collective noses at us Americans, in Iran people were literally crossing the road to shake an American’s hand and say hello. Who knew?

Initially, when Iranians asked me where I was from, I’d suggest they guess. But this game quickly proved too time-consuming — no one ever guessed correctly. So instead I would simply mumble “American.” And then their faces would light up. For better or worse, Iranians are avid fans of America: its culture, films, food, music, its open, free-wheeling society…

During my visit, I could not pause on a street corner for more than 30 seconds without someone coming up and shyly asking if they could help. Discovering that they had an American in their midst, they would often insist on walking me to my destination.

If you’d like to read a longer account of a visit to Iran and learn more about the Iranian people, I recommend the travelogue Honeymoon in Purdah by Alison Wearing.

Sure, a round-the-world trip can sound daunting.  But it can done more cheaply than you might imagine, and a few months (or more) on the road and away from home is a great way to reinvigorate yourself while having a few adventures and discovering a thing or two about our planet. 

Now, the NY Times seems to have discovered the benefits of such a journey.  They sent one of their reporters on a three-month trip that went from southern Europe to the Balkans, through Turkey and Georgia, and then into central Asia and China.  The result was a print and online series called “The Frugal Traveler Sees the World,” complete with tips for a do-it-yourself adventure.

On May 11, I’d left my home in New York City to circle the globe as the Frugal Traveler, seeking high adventure on a low budget. Over the course of 96 days, I covered more than 21,000 miles, sprinting through 12 countries and some 36 cities … I chronicled my adventures (and misadventures): I wrote about escaping crowds in Venice and tending apple trees in Turkey; drinking Montenegrin mountain wine and riding the rails through China; and, along the way, sharing strategies for traveling on the cheap.

If you want to read about my own personal experience with round-the-world travel, you can check out the blog I maintained last year during a trip that I took with my wife, Lisa.  Or, if you want additional resources, you can go to Rolf Potts’ website, or read his book Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel.

In light of the strength of Christianity, Islam and Judaism in the modern world, it’s easy to forget that another monotheistic religion that sprang from the Middle East was also quite influential at one time in history.  The International Herald Tribune has an article today about Zoroastrianism, the religion of ancient Persia, and how its modern day adherents are trying to maintain their faith across numerous countries.

“We were once at least 40, 50 million - can you imagine?” said Antia, senior priest at the fire temple here in suburban Chicago. “At one point we had reached the pinnacle of glory of the Persian Empire and had a beautiful religious philosophy that governed the Persian kings. Where are we now? Completely wiped out. It pains me to say, in 100 years we won’t have many Zoroastrians.”

There is a palpable panic among Zoroastrians today around the world that they are fighting the extinction of their faith, a monotheistic religion that most scholars say is at least 3,000 years old.

Zoroastrianism predates Christianity and Islam, and many historians say it influenced those faiths and cross-fertilized Judaism as well, with its doctrines of one God, a dualistic universe of good and evil and a final day of judgment.

While Zoroastrians once dominated an area stretching from what is now Rome and Greece to India and Russia, their global population has dwindled to 190,000 at most, and perhaps as few as 124,000 ….  The number is imprecise because of wildly diverging counts in Iran, once known as Persia - the incubator of the faith.