Travels in the Riel World

They are two things that just don’t seem to go together. The gentle Thai female and the vicious sport of Thai boxing. But according to this story, female participation in Thai boxing is a growing phenomenon despite the fact that these same women are expected to behave according to the deferential traditions of their culture when they are not in the ring.

“To be a good girl,” says Pannipa Chaiyated, a demure 13-year-old, “you must have manners, speak politely and help with the housework.”

That’s when she’s not slugging her opponents in the ring.

In a country where femininity is highly prized and girls are often told by their parents to be discreet, obedient and gracious, female boxing is now a surprise hit…

With its roots in military training, Thai boxing, or muay Thai, is a rough sport that can make Western boxing look courteous.

The sport was once known as nawa arwut, literally “nine weapons,” because the goal was to teach soldiers that even if they had no knives or guns they could use two hands, two elbows, two knees, two feet and their head to battle their enemies. The rules have evolved: boxers are no longer allowed to head-butt their opponents and are also barred from biting, spitting, pulling hair, poking at the eyes and sticking out their tongues. But a well-placed knee to the kidney or a kick to the head or neck is fair game - and encouraged.

Muay Thai has for years been popular among martial arts enthusiasts worldwide, both women and men, and has been adopted by the gym crowd for its disciplined workout regimen. But it is only in the past few years that the sport has taken off for girls and women in Thailand, partly because a slowing economy has tightened belts and girls are lured by the cash they receive for fighting.

And yet, when the fight is over, it’s a different story…

Maintaining femininity is a serious concern for many of the Thai girls who fight, says Pariyakorn, a bejeweled and delicately built woman who comes across as someone who might worry that her manicured nails might break if she put on boxing gloves…

“In the ring I have to fight and do my best as a boxer: I kick, I punch, use my elbows and knees like a boy,” said Pannipa, the 13-year-old boxer, after a fight where she gave her opponent a bloody nose but got a fat lip in return. “Once I get down from the ring I become who I am - a girl.”

Being a girl not only means helping with the housework, Pannipa said. She has absorbed the sense of deference traditionally taught to girls in Thailand: she fills a visitor’s glass during meal time, she speaks softly and bows while clasping her hands together in a traditional Thai gesture of respect several times during an interview.

Those are two of the main attractions of Harar, an ancient Ethiopian city that is trying to make its way onto the world’s crowded tourist map, according to this travel article.

For 1,000 years, this city on a hilltop has been a center of Islamic faith in the Horn of Africa, with a forbidding, 13-foot wall surrounding ancient mosques and serpentine alleyways. Now, Harar leaders are hoping it can become a center of tourism as well.

“The future of Harar is tourist attraction,” said regional president Murad Abdulhadi…

Harar was named a UNESCO World Heritage site last year…It is also the fourth holiest city in Islam — behind Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. And some consider Harar the birthplace of coffee. Its aroma wafts through the cool air of the Ethiopian highlands.

Remarkably, about half of the languages currently spoken in the world are said to be in danger of going extinct during the coming century. A story in the International Herald Tribune reports:

Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say, nearly half are in danger of extinction and likely to disappear in this century. In fact, one falls out of use about every two weeks.

Some languages vanish in an instant, at the death of the sole surviving speaker. Others are lost gradually in bilingual cultures, as indigenous tongues are overwhelmed by the dominant language at school, in the marketplace and on television.

New research, reported Tuesday, has found the five regions where languages are disappearing most rapidly: northern Australia, central South America, North America’s upper Pacific coastal zone, eastern Siberia, and Oklahoma and the southwestern United States. All have indigenous people speaking diverse languages, in falling numbers.

These facts are the result of research done by the National Geographic Society, which also ran a recent story on the topic:

…in most cases, languages die a slow death, as people simply abandon their native tongues when they become surrounded by people speaking a more common language…

“Languages not being learned by children are not just endangered - they’re doomed,” said Lyle Campbell, a linguistics professor at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

This summer, the Enduring Voices researchers traveled to Australia, whose aboriginal languages are among the world’s most endangered.

In the Northern Territory, the team documented three speakers of Magati Ke. In western Australia, they found three speakers of the little-known Yawuru language. Deep in the outback, they also located a man with rudimentary knowledge of Amurdag, a language previously declared extinct.

“Australia is amazing, because humans have been there for 50,000 years, and they represent an unbroken link to the past in a way that other places on Earth don’t,” Swarthmore’s Harrison said.

Just last month, I linked to a Boston Globe article about an organization called Couch Surfing that connects people around the world by offering free places to stay in each other’s homes. Apparently, couch surfing is the new hot thing, because now the NY Times has published a long article about the topic, which seems to bring together the worlds of social networking and travel. Check it out.

…the Couch Surfing Project, at couchsurfing.com, a three-year-old global community built on a MySpace/Facebook model of personal profiles connected through a network of “friends.” According to statistics on the site, it has well over 300,000 members from more than 31,000 towns and cities around the world.

The group’s philosophy is also its method, which might be summed up this way: I will offer you my couch free, along with the company of my friends and a tour of my favorite spots in my city. In return, you will give of yourself, and not just slink into my home at 3 a.m. after you’ve done your own tour of my city. In this way, we will be friends, if only for a day or two.

Or, as its mission statement proclaims: “Participate in creating a better world, one couch at a time.”

Couch surfing takes an ancient notion of hospitality and tucks it into a thoroughly modern paradigm, the social networking Web site. But, as its members say sternly, it is not a site for dating, or for freeloaders.

There seems to be a couch surfing subculture that has developed, with its own ethos and, inevitably perhaps, a novel about the experience.

A Kerouac mind-set inspired Ms. Huckabee to write a novel about her couch surfing experiences. Three years ago she was a lawyer in Charlotte, divorced for some years and facing an empty nest, as her children had left home. “It was a huge reconsideration of self,” she said. “Who was I if not wife, mother, etc.? I wanted to find a sense of carrying my home with me, and to do that I needed to let go of the sense that there was a home somewhere waiting for me.”

She gave away most of her belongings and set off on what was to be a three-month tour of Italy. That’s where she discovered couch surfing.

What kept her surfing were the sorts of details that delight a writer’s eye: the Algerian host in Paris who slept with a poster of Monica Bellucci above his bed so he could imagine falling asleep in her arms each night; a Bulgarian family’s grim Soviet-era concrete housing, which, when you opened the door, was like a tropical island, painted in bright greens and blues; the northern European woman who had not worked in three years and had not cleaned her bathroom in that time, either, it seemed, yet who nonetheless borrowed a bottle of wine from a neighbor to welcome Ms. Huckabee…

In an age of cheap airfares and porous borders, where nearly every corner of the earth, from Bulgaria to Bhutan, is open for tourism, the home is the final frontier, the last authentic experience. Instead of being in some sanitized hotel in Hanoi, said Erik Torkells, editor of Budget Travel magazine, “…if I couch surf I could be on some cool ex-pat’s or local’s sofa.” He added: “I’ve already leapfrogged barriers. It would take weeks under ordinary circumstances to get in someone’s home.”

With regard to “the whole MySpace thing,” he added: “This is a generation that’s all about talking to strangers. And why stop there? Why not crash at their place?”

Something is definitely sitrring in Burma (or Myanmar, as it’s currently called). In a country known for a repressive military dictatorship that tolerates no dissent, thousands of Buddhist monks are suddenly taking to the streets to lead peaceful anti-government protests in what some are dubbing a “Saffron Revolution” in honor of the monks’ saffron-colored robes. According to a report in the U.K. Times:

Twenty thousand people, including nuns, monks and ordinary Burmese, marched through the streets of Rangoon yesterday demanding freedom for Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel laureate, in a dramatic escalation of the country’s Buddhist-led “Saffron Revolution”.

Ten thousand monks, joined by about the same number of ordinary supporters, marched from the gold-covered Shwedagon Pagoda through the centre of Burma’s largest city in the biggest anti-government demonstration since the bloody suppression of the first democracy movement in 1988.

After heavy-handed efforts to put down demonstrations earlier in the month, the junta has recently been more restrained, even allowing a large group of monks to march past the house of the detained Ms Suu Kyi and pray with her on Saturday.

But the rapidly growing scale of the demonstrations — from a few thousand a week ago to tens of thousands over the weekend — inevitably raises fears of another crackdown by a dictatorship that usually tolerates no challenge whatsoever to its authority. Bystanders cheered the monks as they walked by yesterday, and presented them with flowers and drinking water and balm for their bare feet.

Meanwhile, Australia’s Sydney Herald notes:

By linking the biggest street protests in Burma in two decades to the detained democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s barefoot monks have raised the stakes against the country’s military government…

After a week of marching by the monks, the protests have become explicitly political, though the clerics prefer to make their point indirectly through chants and prayers at key locations. Members of the public who have joined them have taken up chanting the slogans of the pro-democracy movement: national reconciliation - meaning dialogue between the Government and opposition parties - freedom for political prisoners, and pleas for adequate food and shelter…

Soe Aung, a spokesman for a coalition of exile groups based in Thailand, said: “The monks are the highest moral authority in the Burmese culture. If something happens to the monks, the situation will spread much faster than what happened to the students in 1988.”

I love to hear stories about travel, and about why people choose to travel or what they gain from the experience. So I appreciated finding this little profile of Darrell Wade, chief executive of Intrepid Travel, and reading about some of his travel experiences.

I also travel to give serendipity a chance and to top up my collection of those small yet wonderful encounters that make life an amazing journey…

When it comes to incredible modes of transport, the prize surely goes to a boat I took to travel up the Congo River. I should explain that local boats are my hands-down favorite way to travel, and I have ridden down a score of rivers, including the Amazon, Ganges, Irrawaddy and Yangtze. But nothing like this.

The boat was five three-story barges tied together with steel cables. I was one of 5,000 passengers. Every inch of deck was covered with life. There were naked children and encamped families. Pigs, chickens and huge crocodiles, ready for market. Monkeys were slaughtered periodically, then cooked on makeshift grills and served as onboard haute cuisine. Bands played pulsating African rhythms, and canoes filled with people from nearby villages floated alongside the boat, selling unrecognizable merchandise.

I sailed on this ark for four days and hardly slept a wink. Would I do it again? Tomorrow.

This may come as a surprise to anyone who has traveled in India, but apparently begging is a crime in that South Asian nation, punishable by anything from a warning to several years in jail. There is even a separate judicial system in place to deal solely with panhandlers, according to this Associated Press story.

Beggars crowd every sidewalk in India, yet panhandling is illegal, so a separate judicial system exists just for those accused of pleading for coins in public. More than 1,400 people are serving sentences in beggars’ homes — rundown facilities often little better than prisons, critics say — and that number is expected to rise as the government “cleans up” the Indian capital to host the Commonwealth Games, a major sports competition, in 2010.

The beggars’ courts are corners of musty bureaucracy and Dickensian poverty untouched by India’s surging prosperity. They’re all but forgotten by most of the public, but are far from endangered.

There are some 60,000 beggars in New Delhi, most earning 50-100 rupees a day, not much less than the working poor, according to a recent government-commissioned study on beggars. Many are handicapped. Nearly all hail from India’s poor northern states. Most said they have no skills…

Convicted beggars are sentenced to one of 12 beggars’ homes on New Delhi’s outskirts.

At one such home in an industrial neighborhood, men wandered the relatively well-kept grounds, sitting in the shade or conducting Hindu rituals on the grass. Many of them spent their days napping on the floor inside stifling, cramped rooms packed with 10 to 20 others. Families almost never visit, and the men aren’t allowed to leave…

There are fewer than 350 men there now, but there is capacity for more than 1,500. Officials at the home said shuttered buildings will likely be opened for new arrivals as the Commonwealth Games approach.

There was an interesting profile recently in the NY Times about the Dinka people of southern Sudan, who are pastoralists and rely on cows for their livelihood. After musing about how life could change for the Dinka in the face of economic development, the article told the story of three boys from the same family to show how the indigenous people are trying to maintain a hold on their traditional way of life while also making some adjustments for a changing society.

… southern Sudan, an isolated area home to the Dinka people, impossibly tall and rugged pastoralists who — after suffering 50 years of war — are finally witnessing peace, development and change.

But whether Panthar and thousands of boys just like him will benefit from this change is up in the air. Cattle are fundamental to Dinka culture. The Dinka are not about to jettison them for the extra cash that city life might bring.

Panthar’s oldest brother, Moichok, 18, is Dinka all the way, with long, hard scars on his forehead that feel like rawhide rope. Six of his bottom teeth are missing, chiseled out by a spear-wielding man known as the engineer. The scars and the gap teeth are traditional Dinka marks of adulthood — and tests of pain. If a boy even winces while being cut, the saying goes, he will be teased until the day he dies.

Panthar’s next brother, Bol, 16, is in school in a nearby town, and his forehead is smooth, the sign of a city boy. It seems that Bol is the one the family has chosen to follow the new way.

As for Panthar, his father said he would like to send him to school, but that might be a stretch because then there would be no one to care for the cows.

It is never-ending work. Panthar begins his days mashed under the belly of a twitchy 700-pound beast, his face covered in a glaze of sweat and milk as he jerks on the udders and fills a bucket squeezed between his knees. He scoops cow dung for campfires and collects cow urine in maraca-like gourds for his big brother and his friends to dye their hair. He nurses the cows when they are sick and sings to them when they are restless.

Cows are Dinkaland’s diamonds. They are exchanged upon marriage and handed out as prized gifts. The Dinka are so devoted to them that they would rather live off milk (with a little sorghum here and there) than steak.

“If I ever make money,” Panthar announced earlier that morning before leading three other little boys — his helpers — into the bush, “I will buy more clothes and more cows.”

In 1993, the country of Czechoslovakia agreed to an amicable divorce and divided into two countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Some observers are now wondering if a similar future awaits Belgium. Although the country has survived for almost two centuries as a federation with Flemish and French-speaking provinces, politicians there are having increasing difficulties in forming a national government. Time magazine reports on the issue.

Composed of French and Flemish speakers who share little common culture, Belgium has always been a bit of an odd duck. Its viability as a nation has been regularly questioned since its founding in 1830, but perhaps never as much as in the last three months. Since national elections in June, the country’s politicians have proved unable to form a national government, causing more and more Belgians to wonder whether the country can — or should — stay united.

In the past, politicians from both sides of Belgium’s language divide have shown a legendary capacity for cobbling together seemingly impossible coalitions. But the will seems to have dried up this year as trust has shattered between Flanders in the north and Wallonia in the south…

The crisis has stoked a media frenzy about whether divorce is in the air. Every day seems to bring a new twist on how Belgium could emulate Czechoslovakia’s “velvet divorce,” how the country’s spoils might be divvied up, and even whether the split halves would be interested in joining with France or the Netherlands.

Not everyone is convinced that those concerns are real. “If you believe the media, this country is in a state of permanent civil war,” says Dave Sinardet, a political scientist at the University of Antwerp. “This is more a crisis of government than of the country. I expect the parties to reach some sort of solution soon — as they have done in the past — and when everyone calms down, we should see all this talk about splits and independence evaporate.”

Interestingly, the biggest stumbling block towards a separation could be the city of Brussels, as the Associated Press notes:

What would become of Brussels is anybody’s guess, and for the moment, neither the Flemish nor the Walloons are too keen on plunging into a detailed debate on the issue.

It is hard to see Flanders giving up Brussels, the city of 1 million where the majority of people speak French. But it is equally hard to imagine that Wallonia could survive without it.

The landscape of Cappadocia in central Turkey has often been described as lunar-like. Travelers have long marveled at the whimsical rock formations that have been carved by nature, and the homes and churches that have been carved by people into the soft stone terrain. Gisela Williams recently experienced this scene for herself, which she wrote about for the International Herald Tribune.

Spread across the middle of Turkey like a lunar landscape, Cappadocia is home to a bizarre field of anthill-like cones, rock-hewn churches and underground cities where Christians once hid to avoid persecution. It is a spectacular sight and one that has captivated travelers for centuries…

On that first morning I went to Pigeon Valley near the village of Uchisar, so named for the thousands of pigeon houses carved into the rock. It was a surreal vision: an outrageously phallic landscape straight out of a Salvador Dalí painting.

The conical formations are the result of volcanic eruptions that took place millions of years ago. Eons of wind, rain and other forces of nature have eaten away at the volcanic rock creating tufa, a soft and malleable stone. Many of these cones, known as fairy chimneys, contain caves and labyrinths.

There is a very good article in the September issue of Smithsonian magazine about Singapore. The article muses about this Asian city-state’s remarkable spurt of development over the past several decades, but mostly focuses on how Singapore these days is a more relaxed and hipper place than it’s ever been before.

I ordered a Kilkenny. The bartender was doing a Tom Cruise Cocktail routine, flipping bottles behind his back and pouring with a flourish. His assistant, a Chinese Singaporean with silken black hair falling to her waist and low-slung jeans, applauded and gave him a hug. I asked the bartender what time last call was. “Dawn,” he said. “We’re in one of the new entertainment zones.”

Whoooa! Could this be the stuffy, somber Singapore I had been warned about? This tiny nation - whose ascendancy from malaria-infested colonial backwater to gleaming global hub of trade, finance and transportation is one of Asia’s great success stories - is reinventing itself, this time as a party town and regional center for culture and the arts. “Prosperity is not our only goal, nor is economic growth an end in itself,” says Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong. Translation: let the good times roll. Suddenly people are describing the city with a word that, until recently, wasn’t even in the local vocabulary: trendy.

The government has lifted its prohibition on bar-top dancing and bungee jumping. Cosmopolitan is very much for sale on the newsstands (though Playboy still hasn’t made the cut) and sugarless chewing gum is available (with a doctor’s prescription saying it is for medicinal purposes, such as dental health).

Plans are under way to build two Las Vegas-style casino resorts, worth a combined $3.3 billion, on Marina Bay. International brand-name clubs, such as Ministry of Sound, the mother of London rave clubs, and Bangkok’s Q Bar, have opened satellites here. A colonial-era girls’ school, Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus, has been reborn as a complex of upscale restaurants known as Chijmes. All this is enough to make Singapore’s traditionally well-behaved 3.6 million citizens feel as though they went to sleep in Salt Lake City and woke up in pre-Katrina New Orleans.

“Night life started taking off in Singapore when the government extended bar hours, just as Bangkok, South East Asia’s traditional party town, was cutting them back from 4 a.m., to 2, then 1,” says David Jacobson, the American co-owner of Q Bar Bangkok. “It was a pretty draconian turnaround for Bangkok, and what you find is that a lot of people looking for fun these days are avoiding Bangkok and heading to Hong Kong or Singapore instead.”

When I was in Calcutta a few years ago, I was intrigued to discover that local residents alternately revered and resented Mother Teresa. They revered her, rightly, for the remarkable and selfless work she did in tending to the poor and the sick. But they also resented her work to some degree because the media attention that she drew usually depicted Calcutta as a desperately poor city while neglecting to mention the thriving middle class that also existed there.

Calcutta, in fact, encompasses both worlds - an educated middle class lives there and shops in sparkling malls, even as poverty-stricken residents live on the sidewalks. This perspective of both sides of Calcuttas is perfectly presented in this recent op-ed column by the writer Chitrita Banerji, who is a native of this Indian city:

One morning in January 1997, I walked into my office at a nonprofit group here after a visit to my hometown, Calcutta. A very senior colleague, whom I would have, until then, characterized as being the “sensitive” sort, greeted me: “Welcome back. And how is everyone in Calcutta - still starving and being looked after by Mother Teresa?”

At first I thought this might be a bad attempt at humor, but I soon realized that my colleague was seriously inquiring about my city’s suffering humanity and its ministering angel - the only images Calcutta evoked for him and countless others in the West. When Mother Teresa died eight months later…reports on the funeral portrayed a city filled with starving orphans, wretched slums and dying people abandoned on the streets, except for the fortunate ones rescued by Mother Teresa.

They described a city I didn’t recognize as the place where I had spent the first 20 years of my life. There was no mention of Calcutta’s beautiful buildings and educated middle class, or its history of religious tolerance and its vibrant literary and cultural life. Besides, other Indian cities also have their share of poverty, slums and destitution, as would be expected in a country where a third of the population lives on $1 a day - for example, more than half of Mumbai residents live in slums, far more than in Calcutta. Why were they not equally damned in the eyes of the world? …

Charity need not be inconsistent with clarity. Calcutta is a modern Indian city where poverty and inequality coexist with measurably increasing prosperity, expanding opportunities, cautious optimism and, above all, pride in its unique character.

Most of the world celebrated the dawn of the third millennium on New Year’s Day, 2000. In Ethiopia, however, which uses a different calendar, that celebration is taking place tonight.

The Christian Science Monitor reports:

After anticipating the event for more than a year, Ethiopians are getting ready to throw their biggest party ever. The east African country, which uses a slightly modified version of the Julian calendar that the West moved away from centuries ago, will be ushering in their third millennium in style as the clock strikes 12 Wednesday night.

Enormous red, yellow, and green banners flutter from the sides of most major buildings in the capital, Addis Ababa, showing off the country’s colors. Women in traditional white embroidered dresses dance through shopping malls while onlookers ululate. And residents are buzzing about which star-studded party they want to be at Wednesday.

The BBC adds some local color:

(Ethiopians) love Enkutatash, the New Year holiday. It is a time for family reunions, and visiting friends. A time for girls singing from door-to-door, home-brewed beer and honey wine, and big bowls of spicy chicken stew.

The price of hot pepper - indispensable for a good chicken stew - has rocketed from 20 ($2) to 80 birr, and fallen back again to 40 birr a kilo. Herds of sheep and goats have converged on the city; some with pink ribbons tied to their horns, the sign, I was told, that they have already been earmarked for someone’s New Year’s dinner.

And Reuters explains the calendar differences that place Ethiopia’s millennium seven years behind much of the rest of the world:

Unlike the Gregorian calendar widely used in the West, Ethiopia’s version squeezes 13 months into every year — 12 months comprising 30 days each and a final month of five or six days depending on whether it is a leap year. The dating system has roots in the ancient Ethiopian Orthodox Church which, like Orthodox churches throughout the world, ignored Pope Gregory XIII’s decision to introduce the Gregorian calendar in 1582.

Holland Carter had an interesting piece in the NY Times recently, in which he reminisced about a Greyhound bus trip he took across a good portion of the U.S. in the 1960s when he was still a teenager. The story is a worthwhile read for Cotter’s descriptions of American life as viewed from the road a few decades ago.

Next I crashed with a cousin, John, a young professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Smart, tense, busy with summer school, he gave me a tour of the neat, green campus, then said, ”I want to show you another part of town.” He drove me a short distance from the university to a road lined with falling-down houses, where African-Americans lived. I had never seen such poverty.

He asked to look at my Greyhound map, and he traced with his finger the route I was taking to Texas. ”Look,” he said, ”when you get to Mississippi, stay on the bus. Don’t get off. Go straight through.” Just a few days earlier three civil-rights workers, two of them white and from the North, had disappeared near Meridian. The word was that they’d been murdered. This was Freedom Summer in Mississippi. Bad things were happening, beatings, burnings. John was afraid the South was going to blow.

After North Carolina the trip was different because I was different, on the alert. In Atlanta, on Peachtree Street — a name I knew from ”Gone With the Wind” — I saw a restaurant with a side window for serving blacks and drinking fountains labeled ”black” and ”white.” I lost my wallet there and slept overnight in the bus station and then later in a park in Montgomery, Ala. A recruiting street preacher found me there, brought me to a soup kitchen breakfast, then gave me the third degree: ”Have you found the Lord? Are you saved?” I honestly didn’t know.

Of course I got off the bus in Mississippi, more than once. In Jackson I wanted to find Eudora Welty, but her name wasn’t in the phone book. By this time lack ofsleep, combined with hot weather, gave the days a kind of hallucinatory looseness. I was at ease on the road for the first time.

I also found this other paragraph interesting, because of the author’s sense that his experience may be difficult to re-create in the contemporary U.S.

I couldn’t know that within the year Malcolm would be dead; that the bombing of North Vietnam, and the anger in response to it, would begin; that Kerouac’s Beat would become a period artifact, replaced temporarily by something called Flower Power. Or that in a new century Americans would stop making quest-journeys, would spiritually stay put, put on weight, wait for the world to come to them.

What do you think? Have Americans become complacent? Have we stopped making quest-journeys?

It’s often been said that Iran has pehaps the most Western-oriented society in the Middle East, albeit one that is kept under wraps by one of the more repressive governments in the region. British writer Anne Penketh got an inside look at this Iranian paradox during a recent visit to the country. She wrote about her experiences for the U.K. Independent.

We had stumbled on one of the paradoxes of Iran, which seemed to me like a curious mix of America and the Soviet Union. Behind closed doors, middle-class Iranians are dressed in the latest Western fashions, enjoy a glass of black-market wine, and watch satellite television. Yet outside they are subjected to the watchful eyes of the state’s repressive security apparatus, while women can be threatened with jail for showing too much hair under their hijab…

On the flight from London to Tehran, it had been quite a sight to see the plane transformed into a giant changing room when we touched down, as Iranian women in full make-up and skimpy clothes put on their scarves and overcoats, smiling at each other in silent complicity.

During her visit, the author also had an unexpected opportunity to behold the wonders of the Iranian city of Esfahan:

I was an accidental tourist in Esfahan. A small group of Western journalists had been invited by the government to tour Iran’s most sensitive nuclear sites. But when we arrived in Esfahan on the first leg of the tour these plans immediately began to unravel. We were informed that after an afternoon’s sightseeing, we would spend part of the next day visiting a steel plant instead of a scheduled visit to the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz. Needless to say we rebelled, and Jafaar, the government representative in Esfahan, became our unofficial tour guide to his home city.

I had long wanted to visit Esfahan, once the capital of Persia, but had not been prepared for such splendour. The Persians called it Nisf-e-Jahan, ” half the world”, meaning that to see it was to see 50 per cent of all the worthwhile sights on earth. The city, framed by spectacular jagged sandstone mountains, is an oasis in the desert, and is therefore surprisingly green, cut through with an elegant garden boulevard lined by plane trees.

Well, perhaps there is hope for any nation that has been decimated by a civil war. The NY Times a few days ago did a unique story about countries that have recovered from a civil war and gone on to restore their economies with tourism:

Countries once torn by civil war are seeking to revive tourism, hoping to replace images of violence with those of hospitality and adventure travel.

The latest example is Rwanda, most closely identified in the minds of many Americans with the genocide that swept the country in 1994. The country’s main attraction is still the mountain gorillas popularized in “Gorillas in the Mist,” the 1988 movie about the primatologist Dian Fossey.

But now, aided by a newfound stability under Rwanda’s first democratically elected president, the country’s government, business leaders and entrepreneurs are trying to convey that Rwanda has more than primates to offer tourists…

In large part, Rwanda is seeking to copy the success of Vietnam. The country is perceived as a safe, tourist-friendly destination, and services, including tourism, now make up about 40 percent of its gross domestic product. South Korea, Cambodia and Laos — other Asian countries ravaged by war several decades ago —have also become popular among tourists and serious about promoting their offerings. At the end of July, Laos played host to an ecotourism conference for countries in the Mekong region…

Rwanda has taken some bold steps to encourage tourism from neighboring countries and enhance trade and economic opportunity. On July 1, Rwanda joined the East African Community, a bloc that includes Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda; much like the European Union, the group plans to introduce a single currency and relax border controls.

Most people have heard the term Bollywood used in reference to India’s film industry. Few people know that Bollywood actually turns out more movies each year than Hollywood does. But until now, most of these thousands of Indian films have followed time-honored story lines and have been produced by a tight-knit group of directors and producers who often worked spontaneously, without schedules or budgets.

Now, however, that is all changing. Newsweek International has an interesting article about the past and present of the Indian film industry:

India makes about 1,000 movies a year, including Bollywood’s 200-odd Hindi pictures and others in regional languages—about 10 times Hollywood’s total. But until recently, every Bollywood movie was an independent film made by a producer-director who ran his operation like a mom-and-pop shop. Deals were cut off the books between film families. Marketing was left to theater owners. And writers scripted scenes on the day of shooting, following stock formulas: brothers separated at birth; village rebel vs. rapacious landlord, or cops vs. robbers.

It was considered the height of innovation simply to meld these elements, creating, say, a story about brothers separated at birth who grow up on opposite sides of the law but then ultimately join forces against an evil landlord after much singing, dancing and weeping.

In its heyday, from the 1950s through the early 1980s, Bollywood managed to pack cinemas throughout this movie-crazy country with such fare. But its formulaic plots grew stale at just about the time that TV penetrated middle-class homes…

That may finally be changing. Indians are getting wealthier. The younger generation is spending more on entertainment. And innovators like Screwvala have begun professionalizing the business, bringing in outside investors and accounting standards and aggressively marketing films with novel plots.

The Chinese are busy preparing for the 2008 Summer Olympics. In addition to infrastructure, tourism and environmental projects, the government is also apparently engaged in a campaign to rid Beijing of bad (but humorous) translations on restaurant menus. The Associated Press has the story:

Hungry visitors to next summer’s Beijing Olympics won’t have to choose between “steamed crap” and “virgin chicken” if Chinese authorities succeed in ridding restaurant menus of mangled English translations.

The Beijing Tourism Bureau has released a list with 2,753 proposed names for dishes and drinks, designed to replace bizarre and sometimes ridiculous translations on menus, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Friday.

Foreigners are often stumped by dish names such as “virgin chicken” (a young chicken dish) or “burnt lion’s head” (Chinese-style pork meatballs). Other garbled names include “The temple explodes the chicken cube” (kung pao chicken) or “steamed crap” (steamed carp).

“These translations either scare or embarrass foreign customers and may cause misunderstanding on China’s diet habits,” Xinhua said.

It’s the latest effort by Beijing Olympics organizers to clean up the city and ensure that the best image is presented to the hundreds of thousands of visitors expected next summer.