At the end of August I realized that everyone I was trying to reach on the phone was on vacation, so I figured I may as well go myself. Summer and I took a week off and flew to Kauai, one of the Hawaiian islands. For the first time since we returned from our long honeymoon we went scuba diving, and Summer decided to try her hand at underwater photography. She spotted this turtle on our second dive.
Early last year I wrote about the Balang Dam in Cambodia: how an accidental breach in a twelfth-century dam had condemned 20,000 people to poverty.
Summer and I learned about the Balang Dam from Tobias Rose-Stockwell. Just 23 years old, Tobias is a one-man NGO who has spent the last three years working to relieve poverty in Cambodia. At dinner one night in Siem Reap we overheard Tobias talking about his work at the next table and butted in. America's reputation abroad may be at an all-time low, but not in that corner of Cambodia, thanks to Tobias.
Ten days ago we saw Tobias again, at a charity dinner in the Napa Valley. That evening he raised the balance of the money necessary to repair the Balang Dam, and more. Just thought you'd like to know.
On the last day of our nine-month honeymoon in Cartagena, Colombia
Summer and I got back to the U.S. very early this morning, after a 24-hour journey from Cartagena in Colombia to Portland, Oregon, via Bogota, Miami, and Las Vegas.
The immigration officer at Miami airport peered at the box on our customs form marked 'countries that you have visited on this trip', where in very small letters Summer had written: Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Australia, French Polynesia, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia.
"That's enough for a lifetime", he said. "Yes", we lied.
We'll be spending the next month on the west coast, visiting our family in Oregon and then exploring the Bay Area to see if we might like to live there and so that I can explore some opportunities. If you would like to meet up, please email me.
It is good to be back.
At the Museum of the Spanish Inquisition in Cartagena
For the last two weeks of our trip, we wanted to go somewhere peaceful and relaxing. Naturally we chose Colombia.
Colombia gets a lot of bad press. Bogota is a modern industrial city with a sparkling new public transportation system, stylish restaurants and bars, and lots of pretty redbrick buildings around a very pretty colonial core. Yes, the security guards at your local supermarket have bullet-proof vests that look thick enough to stop a shell from one of their own pump-action shotguns, but it's safe. At least the northern and central parts of the city are safe. In the daytime.
But the real issue turned out to be whether I was safe enough for the Colombians.
Just before 9/11, three alleged members of the IRA were arrested on their way out of Colombia and accused of training FARC guerillas. It seemed a strange, magical realist sort of retirement job for Irish terrorists. Their own story, that they travelled on false passports into the Colombian jungle in order 'to observe the peace process,' was never very credible, but it also seemed odd that the rich and well-armed FARC, a state within a state that controls half of Colombia, should have anything to learn from the IRA.
They were tried, acquitted on the main charges, and released. The prosecution appealed and the 'Colombia 3' were convicted the second time around. But in the meantime they had fled back to Ireland. Ireland has no extraditon agreement with Colombia and won't negotiate one, citing Colombia´s poor human rights record. (For the same reason U2 refuses to perform there, which seems to bother ordinary Colombians a lot more.) Ever since then Irish citizens, alone among the citizens of western Europe, have required a visa in order to enter Colombia.
I was reminded of all this when I tried, unsuccesfully, to board a plane to Bogota two weeks ago.
I had gotten complacent. Colombia is the 14th country that we have visited on this trip, and the only other place where I needed a visa in advance was communist Vietnam, where everyone needs a visa. An Irish passport is normally a free pass. Oliver North used to carry one, apparently. But not in Colombia.
The staff of Taca airlines offered to let Summer board without me. She considered leaving her idiot husband in Peru, but decided to stay with me. I did what any man would do in the circumstances: got down on my knees and begged for forgiveness.
We checked into a hotel in Lima and I started researching the visa process while Summer worked on the forgiveness, a task that became even harder when I learned that it usually takes two weeks to get a visa, if you get one at all.
So I am extremely grateful to the Colombian consulate in Lima for granting me a visa in one day. I showed up at opening time with all of the paperwork they requested, got an interview with the consul within two hours, and had my visa at 5 p.m. (Note to other Irish citizens thinking of trying this - it made a big difference that I have a U.S. greencard.) They saved the last two weeks of our trip, and my marriage with it.
This is one of my favorite photos from the trip. Summer and I spent three weeks in Peru, visiting the major sites around Cusco and spending three days in Lima (unintentionally - more on that later). We also spent five days in Peru´s part of the Amazon rainforest, near the great natural reserve of Parque Manu.
Early one morning we visited a macaw clay lick. Macaws are wonderful birds, highly intelligent, big, raucous, long-lived, and often fond of people. They make good pets - so good that the pet trade is the biggest threat to their existence in the wild, along with habitat destruction. As they become more rare the problem gets worse. Prices go up, attracting more trappers. The red-and-green macaws seen above are safe for now, but that is thanks in part to a captive breeding program.
Macaws eat clay because it trace elements that they need and because a lining of clay in their stomachs helps them to digest food that would otherwise be poisonous. But it is dangerous for them to descend from the canopy where they spend most of their time to the handful of river banks where the composition of clay is just right. Here they are exposed, vulnerable to predators like eagles, jaguars, and humans.
We had to wait three hours to get this picture, while hundreds of macaws gathered in the trees above. They flew reconnaissance missions, swooping down in ones and twos to check for threats. A gust of wind, the sound of a twig breaking, at one point a single red squirrel sent them back to the safety of the treetops.
When they did finally come down, we only had our point-and-shoot cameras, the Casio Exilims that we´ve used for every photo on this trip. But the macaws were about 200 feet from our hide. So this picture was shot through one lens of a pair of binoculars carried by our guide José Antonio. He and I took a few dozen shots each and this one, which he took, was the only shot that worked. Thank you José.
Evo Morales in his office, in front of a portrait of Che Guevara that is made out of coca leaves. Snatched from the AP, via the BBC.
Things are not going well this week for Evo Morales, the President of Bolivia. He is facing multiple strikes, a crisis at the assembly he created to draft a new constitution, and he had to send in troops to re-open the gas pipeline to Argentina after indigenous protestors sabotaged it.
Evo, as everyone calls him, has called capitalism the greatest enemy of mankind, and his party´s platform calls for the destruction of neoliberalism. His Vice-President is widely admired for having read Das Kapital before he was ten years old. He has allied himself with Hugo Chavez and praised Castro. And not surprisingly coca production appears to have increased dramatically since this former leader of the coca-growers took office. He is not getting an invitation to Crawford anytime soon.
But spare a thought for Evo and for Bolivia if you have time this week.
First a brief summary of the history of every country in Latin America from the Spanish conquest until at least 1980: one elite minority after another hijacked the state and enriched themselves at the expense of everyone else. There were a few brief intervals when well-intentioned governments got in, but most of the time it was military oppression, judicial murder and expropriation, bespoke constitutions, manipulation of both sides in the Cold War, and (even under benign governments) endemic corruption.
Bolivia fared worse than most, precisely because it is so rich in minerals. The indigenous people were effectively enslaved by the Spanish to work in Bolivia´s mines. Such were the stakes for both the Bolivians and the Spanish Empire that Bolivia was the first colony to declare independence but the last to get it. After that mining conditions improved - er, from slavery - but somehow the great mass of the people never got to benefit from the wealth.
In Bolivia the familiar Latin American class divide is deepened by race. The climate of the altiplano was too harsh for most of the Spanish and there was no silver or gold in the pleasant lowlands. The lowlands were fertile, but the Spanish thought that farming was beneath them and they did not allow other nationalities to immigrate to their colonies. Today 55% of the Bolivian population are of indigenous descent and only 15% are descended from the Spanish or other Europeans who arrived after independence (the rest are mixed-race). But guess who has most of the money.
And for the most part the races live separately, as Miss Bolivia explained during the 2004 Miss World pageant:
"Um... unfortunately, people that don't know Bolivia very much think that we are all just Indian people from the west side of the country, it's La Paz all the image that we reflect, is that poor people and very short people and Indian people ... I'm from the other side of the country, the east side and it's not cold, it's very hot and we are tall and we are white people and we know English so all that misconception that Bolivia is only an "Andean" country, it's wrong, Bolivia has a lot to offer and that's my job as an ambassador of my country to let people know much diversity we have."
Condemned in the west, she was greeted by cheering crowds on her return to the east.
Last year Evo became the first President of indigenous descent in Bolivia´s history, with 54% of the vote. Many middle-class people of all races voted for him because they wanted a break with the corrupt past, but he owes his job to poor indigenous people who want social justice, and who will walk away from him if they are not happy with the pace or style of reform. Hence the new strikes, which include teachers protesting the idea of making indigenous languages compulsory in schools and bus drivers who are upset that Evo wants to start enforcing Bolivia´s existing traffic laws.
So in the light of all this, consider just two issues facing Bolivia: the nationalization of the gas reserves, and land reform.
On May 1st, Evo nationalized Bolivia´s gas fields and sent troops into the facilities of many foreign companies that had private contracts. To the international community, it looked like the Russian Revolution. But the TV images of troops on the move were mostly for domestic consumption, in a country where 94% of the people had voted in favor of nationalization in a referendum even before Evo was elected.
What the Bolivian government is actually trying to do is not to boot out foreign investors, but to renegotiate their contracts, which it claims were struck at a crazy discount to fair value by a previous corrupt administration and were never properly ratified by Congress. These are not unreasonable claims. They could have tried international arbitration, but it was faster, cheaper, and infinitely more popular to send in the army.
At the same time as nationalizing the oil fields, the Bolivian government has been negotiating new mining contracts with companies from the U.S. and India, and Evo sent his Vice-President to Washington to campaign for a renewal of Bolivia´s free-trade agreement with the U.S. And the company that has most to lose from Bolivia´s nationalization scheme is not Exxon but Petrobras, the state-owned oil company of Bolivia´s neighbor Brazil, which has a socialist goverment. My point is that things are not as clear-cut as they appear either in the Guardian or on Fox News.
Much less reported in the international press but much uglier within Bolivia is the debate over land reform. Put simply, previous administrations bought off powerful supporters in the rich eastern part of the country with vast grants of land, much of which remains undeveloped. Meanwhile, the poor try to eke out a living with no land at all or on small plots that get smaller with each generation as they are subdivided among children. Evo wants to take undeveloped land from the rich and give it to the poor. This may sound revolutionary, but as long as the landowners are compensated somehow, it is no different from the concept of eminent domain in the U.S. Constitution.
But it´s dangerous to talk about large-scale land reform without delivering anything concrete. Now peasants anticipating grants are squatting on farms and threatening landowners. Landowners are hiring armed guards. Some of the landowners do have legitimate title to their land for which they paid fair value; others have no intention of giving up what their families were given, no matter what the consequences, a militant form of the endowment effect. And how do you prove that agricultural land is undeveloped? It may be lying fallow. Congress has blocked all of Evo´s proposals so far, leading Evo to call for popular protests, which in turns lends credence to those who say he wants to take over the state.
The Constitutional Congress in Sucre is Evo´s attempt to bypass Parliament and the existing laws, but in the spirit of democracy. The delegates have a year to draft a new constitution which will then be put directly to the people in a referendum. But Evo's party failed to win a majority of the delegates to the Congress, and now that seems deadlocked too.
I don´t claim to have any answers to Bolivia´s problems. I just don´t believe that Evo is another wannabe dictator, a megalomaniac in the mould of Chavez or Castro. But if Venezuela and Cuba are the only foreign countries that will support this (still) wildly popular and democratically elected leader, who seems genuinely motivated to redress centuries of injustice, then the western governments, narrowly focused on backing their own oil companies, will be fulfilling their own prophesies.
The view from outside our hotel room on the Isla del Sol.
We entered Bolivia in the remote south-west and crossed the Salar de Uyuni; we left by the far northern route, crossing Lake Titicaca.
The Salar is the largest salt lake in the world. Not to be outdone, Titicaca is the highest navigable body of water in the world, one of the world's deepest lakes, and the largest freshwater lake in South America.
Even now during the Bolivian winter the temperature never drops below zero at night, and during the day it was a very pleasant 18°C . The Isla del Sol - supposed birthplace of the founders of the Inca Empire and so the most famous of the 70-odd islands scattered across the lake - is green and fertile. Foreign backpackers and Bolivian daytrippers from La Paz sip coca tea and watch the sun go down from one of the many terraces built a thousand years ago, long before the Incas, to irrigate the soil.
Yet Titicaca and the Isla del Sol are two or three hundred meters higher than the Salar and its bizarre Isla Pesca, pictured at the bottom of my previous post.
In this satellite image of Bolivia that I robbed from NASA, Titicaca is the blue patch at the top and the Salar de Uyuni is the white patch at the bottom. There is a smaller salt lake above the Salar de Uyuni called Coipasa, and the light grey area above and to the right of them is the very salty Lake Poopó.
To give a sense of the scale in this picture, the Salar de Uyuni is over 10,000 square kilometers in area - about the same size as Lebanon. Neil Armstrong could see it shining from the moon.
The western half of Bolivia is dominated by two parallel ranges of the Andes. Between them lies a depression called the altiplano, the high plain where we spent almost all of our time. This corridor of land, larger in area than Ireland, slopes gently downwards from Titicaca in the north to the Salar in the south.
12,000 years ago, as the last Ice Age came to an end, the altiplano was entirely covered by a vast inland sea that geologists call Lake Ballivián. (This lake in turn may originally have been part of the Pacific Ocean, cut off by the great forces that pushed and folded the Andes into existence.) Glacial meltwaters emptying into the northern end of Ballivián gradually diluted it, carrying the salt south; rising temperatures caused it to evaporate. As the water level fell, two new, smaller lakes were formed: Titicaca in the north, and Lake Minchin in the south, connected by rivers. Finally, Minchin evaporated completely, leaving the shallow, salty Poopó - into which Titicaca still drains via the River Desaguadero - and the 10 billion tons of salt we call the Salar de Uyuni.
This is a story of climate change, and not just steady global warming following the end of the Ice Age. The desert coastal regions to the west of the altiplano get less than 100 mm of rain per annum, the Amazon rainforests to the east more than 1,500 mm; slight changes in those rates of precipitation and in the rate of evaporation have significant effects on the levels of the lakes. But the lakes themselves have a profound effect on climate. Titicaca is so deep that its temperature is near constant, and it regulates the climate of the surrounding area - which is why the Isla del Sol is fertile and never freezes and the Salar de Uyuni is a barren place where temperatures can fall to -30 °C on the same night, the question that bugged me in the first place. So climate change even in this relatively small part of the world can be extremely complex. Yet it can have drastic effects on human life. Changes in the level of Titicaca were partly or wholly responsible for the collapse of the Tiwanaku civilization, two hundred years before the Incas.
The Kalasasaya temple at Tiwanaku, already a ruin when the Spanish arrived. It used to be on the shores of Lake Titicaca, but the lake is now 20 kilometers away.
I don´t understand why some people think that science undermines our sense of awe and wonder. I don´t know of any story of gods or monsters throwing up mountains or gouging out lakes that is more extraordinary than these theories, or that carries a more potent moral - for those who take climate change for granted today.
The burned-out tourist bus at the border between Bolivia and Chile is not a good omen.
Chile and Argentina are two of the richest countries in South America, and the road from San Pedro de Atacama in northern Chile to Argentina via the Paso de Jama is well-paved and signposted.
About forty minutes out of San Pedro there is an unmarked dirt road on your left. This is the road to Bolivia, the poorest country in South America. But in three days and just 500 kilometers of driving along that dirt road and off-road to Uyuni in south-west Bolivia, Summer and I saw some of the most beautiful scenery that we have seen anywhere in the eight months since our trip began.
Sol de Mañana geyser field
The landscape changes every hour, from high desert to fields of stones scattered by volcanic explosions, from geyser fields to salt lakes. We saw mountains and lakes colored red and green and white by minerals. And we saw pasture and marshland and stone houses that might still shelter families or might have been abandoned a hundred years ago.
All of this was in the Bolivian altiplano, a high plateau between the twin cordilleras of the Andes. We were never lower than 3,500m and at one point we reached 4,900m. (For the sake of comparison, Mount Whitney is about 4,400m high and Mont Blanc 4,800m.) And crossing this almost deserted land meant spending one night at 4,600m in a ranger´s hut that had no electricity or heating.
Two kids stand by a frozen water tank in an abandoned railway town near the salt lake.
The problem was not, as I had expected, the cold. Temperature swings in the altiplano are extreme, from highs of 28°C during the day to as low as -30°C overnight. That night it was maybe -25°C outside, but the sleeping bag I'd hired at the border and the six densely-woven Bolivian blankets provided by the rangers kept me very warm. (I did forget to take my clothes into the sleeping bag with me and some fell onto the stone floor. For a similar effect, try putting tomorrow's clothes in the fridge before you go to bed tonight.)
The problem was the altitude. Different people react to altitude in different ways - headaches, vomiting, even diarrhea. My heart began to beat double time. I tried breathing deeply and evenly but my heart felt as if I had left it a thousand meters below and it was still climbing. I could not sleep, and nor could Summer or the other people in the room. One had an altitude-induced headache and moaned all night long. It was one of the worst nights of sleep of my life, but it was worth it to see places like this.
There is so much ochre in the water of Laguna Colorada, above, that the whole lake is colored a fiery red. Llamas graze on yellow-green paja brava (brave straw), one of the few plants that will grow at this altitude and in the mineral-rich soil. The flecks of pink on the surface of the lake are flamingos, which feed on micro-organisms in the water.
The Salar de Uyuni, above, is the world´s largest salt lake. I took this photo on Isla Pesca, an outcrop of rock near the center of the lake and a surreal version of the tropical islands that we have visited elsewhere on our trip. The sun is blazing, but in the morning it is still freezing cold; instead of white sand and reefs, rock and petrified coral; instead of coconut and palm trees, cactuses, some more than a thousand years old; instead of blue waters lapping the beach, a solid white ocean; instead of little fishing boats, four-wheel drive cars and trucks criss-cross the salt.
More photos from this leg of our trip here.
The Esteros del Iberá or Iberá Wetlands are a national reserve in the north-east of Argentina. They cover about 16,000 square kilometers. That´s about one quarter the area of Ireland, but most of the Argentinians we met have never heard of the place. It´s a big country and hard to get around.
To get there we had to fly to the little town of Posadas, and then drive for five hours over mostly dirt roads in a 4WD to the much littler town of Carlos Pellegrini, where 500 people live in the center of the reserve. A man from C.P. swore that the roads are left unsealed in order to deter visitors, particularly hunters. Ecotourism isn´t supposed to be easy.
Summer and I spent two days in Iberá, touring the marshes in a motorboat. The water is no more than six or seven feet deep and everywhere there are dense mats made up of aquatic plants, knitted together. Animals as big as deer graze on them, swimming gracefully from one to the next. In some places wind-blown soil has been trapped between the plants and the result is an island dense enough to bear the weight of a person. It looks like land, but wobbles underfoot like a trampoline.
The main attractions are the birds; 300 different species live in this little reserve. (There are about 800 species of birds living in the whole of the United States.) We saw dozens: herons, storks, humming-birds, kingfishers, vultures, cormorants, woodpeckers, cardinals, woodrails, southern screamers. All stayed a little too far away for a poor photographer like me. Less wary of us were the black caimans and the capybaras, the world´s largest rodents. The one above looked as if he weighed about 40 kilos.
And then there were the spiders.
In the reeds along the water´s edge we often saw great nests of spiders, hundreds of young wrapped in a sac of web. In other places, larger, adolescent spiders had built a web several feet wide, so that each had a few square inches of space. Teenagers always want their own room.
On the second day Summer spotted a pampas deer, a stag, six points for those who like to shoot them. Our guide Marco gunned the engine and took the boat right into the reeds for a closer look, but the stag bolted when we ran aground.
I turned around to look at Summer and she said simply "you are covered in spiders."
I looked down. We had run into one of the larger webs. My coat and hands were coated in web, and there were spiders everywhere. Strung out along their lines of silk, the bright red patches on their black abdomens blinking into view as they span around, they looked like Christmas lights, scary little Christmas lights that crawl off your tree.
For a moment I thought about jumping off the boat. But I knew that the spiders were not dangerous, while the dark marsh water was cold and home to black caimans, yellow anacondas, and several species of piranha, so instead I began to brush the webs off my coat. About fifty spiders fell into the bottom of the boat and started marching towards Summer.
Summer loves animals. Really. She has swum with sharks; she adores bats; she once owned a pet rat; she can even tolerate snakes. But she cannot bear spiders. To her credit, she stayed calm while I spent the next fifteen minutes bailing spiders out of the boat. (Marco was too busy driving and laughing.) Every time I thought I was done another one popped up, bearing down on Summer.
I quite like spiders. Had she been standing at the front of the boat, this would have been much less funny.
The view from the highest point - about 10,000 feet - on the Bishop´s Road in Salta Province, Argentina.
Travelling around South America is unexpectedly harder than travelling around South-East Asia.
I say unexpectedly because Asian cultures and languages seem so much more remote. Religion, food, and customs are all different. You understand what it means to be illiterate when you are surrounded by signs written in Khmer or Thai. Western tourists are awkward and obvious.
In South America we feel much less strange. Buenos Aires is so European that people usually assumed I was a local, until I opened my mouth. We took three days of Spanish lessons in Santiago. I speak a few words of French and we both grew up watching Sesame Street (SA---LI---DA; SA-LI-DA; ¡SALIDA!). Now we can understand about a quarter of what people say to us.
But cultural differences are superficial, and half a dozen muttered words of Spanish in a Chilean accent may as well be Vietnamese. Practically speaking South-East Asia is much easier to get around.
The distances here are much greater. Thailand has four times the population of Chile and twice as many people as Argentina. But Chile, that little ribbon of land on the map, is 50% larger than Thailand and Argentina is the next largest country in the world after Australia. Both are dwarfed by Brazil. The main population centers are hundreds of miles apart, often separated by deserts, rainforests, rivers so wide that you cannot see one bank from the other, and the second highest mountain range in the world.
Both a cause and an effect of these great distances, transportation is pretty poor. Unlike most of the rest of the world, there are no discount airlines. Flying from Salta in north-west Argentina to Buenos Aires costs more than $600 return; not cheap for us, and more than two weeks´ wages for a salteño. (In England it costs about one day´s wages to fly from London to Frankfurt on Ryanair.)
Almost thirty years ago Paul Theroux wrote a book called The Old Patagonian Express about a journey by rail all the way from Boston to Patagonia. It was a crazy journey then; the trains were hot, filthy, and chronically unreliable. But today much of the rail network has been closed down, and the Great Patagonian Express itself hasn't run for more than ten years.
That leaves road. People in the U.S. often forget that the government not only subsidizes gas prices, it built and continues to maintain the interstate highway system - $80 billion in tax dollars every year. Nobody down here felt the need to move ICBMs around the continent at short notice. Argentina and Chile have decent roads, but only 5% of Bolivia´s roads are even paved, and through much of the interior there are no roads at all.
If you don´t speak any Spanish, language is more of an obstacle here than it is in South-East Asia. As in the U.S. and China, Latin Americans are surrounded by hundreds of millions of people who speak the same language they do, and have no strong incentive to learn another. In South-East Asia - as in Europe - people in neighboring countries speak mutually unintelligible languages, and so many have to learn a second language for trade. And pretty much everyone who works in the tourist industry in South-East Asia speaks English.
To be clear: I am not whining that people in Chile should learn English for my benefit. They speak only Spanish for exactly the same reason that I speak only English. I am just stating that as a consequence, it´s easier for U.S. tourists to visit Vietnam.
So why come? Deserts. Rainforests. Rivers so wide that you cannot see one bank from the other. The second highest mountain range in the world. Colonial cities that rivalled Paris and London when New Yorkers were still trading beaver pelts. A native American culture that hasn´t been extinguished. Ruins to rival Angkor. I´ve been enjoying myself so much that I haven´t updated this blog for three weeks. Sorry.
I first heard about Easter Island when I was ten or eleven years old. An English teacher had us read Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki in class. Heyerdahl believed that the island´s enigmatic statues - the moais - were evidence that people from an ancient South American civilization had sailed west across the Pacific to occupy this, the most remote inhabitable island on earth (and not Polynesian people who sailed east from Tahiti, as everyone else thought). To prove that this was possible, he sailed a little wooden boat several thousand kilometers from Peru to Easter Island. Millions of romantics and armchair explorers were enthralled.
Later I remember a show on British TV called Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, a series of documentaries on ´unexplained phenomena´. This show had a ball with Easter Island. Why were many moais half buried in the hillside? How were they moved around? They weigh many tons, but there are no trees on the island to make equipment, and no large animals. What happened to the people who built them? When Europeans arrived the moais had been abandoned, many of them had been torn down, and there were just two thousand poor and badly nourished people living here, who could only offer folktales about how they were built. The segment ended with a story that the moais were men and women who had been turned to stone. Cue spooky music.
And then was Erich von Daniken, who proposed that aliens got stranded on Easter Island, built the moais for some unfathomably alien reason, and were finally rescued, by aliens.
I have always wanted to go.
In five days we got to see almost every square inch of the island, in a 4WD or on horseback. Even now there are very few trees here, and only one town, so that from the highest point on the island you can see the Pacific stretching all the way to the horizon in every direction. The nearest inhabited land is two thousand kilometers away, and that´s Pitcairn Island.
But this tiny, barren place has more to see than you expect - soft rolling hills, wild horses grazing everywhere, caves formed by lava tubes, cave paintings and rock carvings, a volcanic crater filled with rainwater with a ceremonial village and altar on its lip. And the moais.
There are almost nine hundred moais, half of them mounted on platforms like those in the first photo above, half of them scattered around a quarry in the crater of an extinct volcano called Rano Raraku, in various stages of completion, as if the builders downed tools one day a few hundred years ago and just walked away. Or vanished. It is a haunting place. Damn, now I´m doing it.
We know a lot more now than Heyerdahl did thanks to new techniques in archaeology, genetic testing, and pollen analysis (pollen from core samples reveals what used to grow here). At one point there may have been over ten thousand people living on Easter island, growing a wide variety of crops, catching sea birds, fish, and porpoises, and producing enough of a surplus to support a complex social hierarchy, including a caste of sculptors. The moais probably represented ancestors, and they and the platforms or ahus on which they are mounted are more refined forms of structures that have also been found in Tahiti - from which Easter Island was first colonized around 400 A.D., according to both genetic and linguistic analysis. When they got here the island was covered in palm trees, strong enough for scaffolding and hoists and rollers for moving the moais around, as well for building boats.
And then it all went horribly wrong. The trees slowly disappeared. The soil eroded. Crops failed. Half of the native flora and fauna went extinct, including most of the seabirds. Without large trees, the islanders could no longer make fishing boats and harpoons sturdy enough to catch porpoises, much less go on erecting moais. Remains of weapons suggest that a war followed, for control of whatever resources remained. Most controversially, there is evidence that the survivors turned to cannibalism for a time.
Jared Diamond (here and in more detail I think in his recent book Collapse) sees Easter Island as a clear example of our ability to destroy ourselves through mismanagement of the environment. He may be right, but understandably the people of Easter Island would rather focus on the high points of their ancestors´civilization, rather than the theory of a self-inflicted disaster. And they would rather emphasize the irrefutable damage done later by contact with Europeans: disease, slavery, destruction of the culture, colonial misrule. A theory that the Little Ice Age may have triggered the original collapse lets their ancestors off the hook completely.
Still, on our last day here it was ironic to see a little street fair in Hanga Roa on the theme of environmentalism. Schoolkids mounted exhibits on the evils of litter, and local organizations discussed recycling, marine conservation, and efforts to restore some of the native flora and fauna.
Sadly we saw no aliens.
The stingrays come so close to shore that you can pet them without even dropping your plastic cup of rum punch.
When we learned that in order to fly from Australia to South America, we´d have to stop over in Tahiti, our first reaction was not "oh no, is there no direct flight?"
I always thought that the problem for Tahiti was not that people don´t want to go there but that, as Captain Bligh learned, they don´t want to leave. I was wrong. Only 200,000 tourists go to Tahiti each year, roughly one tourist for each resident. Almost 7 million go to Hawaii - six tourists per resident. (The highest ratio in the world? With 200 visitors per resident, Venice is essentially a theme park.)
What this means is that Tahiti is relatively unspoilt.
I should be precise. Firstly, the name of the country is French Polynesia and it consists of 118 little islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Most people live on the island of Tahiti, which is the largest and most famous - French Polynesia is often referred to as ´Tahiti and her islands´ - but it is not the prettiest and a lot of visitors skip it altogether. Many of the other islands have white sand beaches and are surrounded by lagoons. Of these Bora Bora is best known and it´s covered in luxury resorts as you would expect. But other travelers told us that Maupiti, just west of Bora Bora, is just as beautiful and almost deserted. We spent most of our time on Moorea, a 30-minute ferry ride from Tahiti, but still underdeveloped.
Secondly, relatively unspoilt means almost destroyed by contact with Europeans, colonized, used as a test site for nuclear bombs, and now desperately seeking mass tourism, but not as spoilt as you might think, because they haven´t succeeded. It means relative to Ko Phi Phi or Ibiza or Cancun or Bali.
It does not mean cheap, which is odd, because when demand is less than expected prices ought to be low. Why I am not sure, but I think the reason is that half of the government´s revenue comes from France.
Tahiti was a subsistence economy until the mid sixties, when France, which had just lost its colony in Algeria, suddenly remembered that it owned a little paradise in the Pacific and could blow that up instead. France started paying a very large amount of money to Tahiti each year in return for testing nuclear weapons on some of the more remote atolls. (Quiz: how much would you ask for?) This went on for thirty years in the face of mounting international protests - you may remember that the French secret service blew up a ship belonging to Greenpeace - until tests finally stopped in 1996. The French decided to go on paying Tahiti a large amount of money, to help them 'adjust' their economy.
It appears that a lot of that money has been poorly spent, if not squandered. The tourist market is not as big as it ought to be and other sectors are struggling. I think that much money has to have fostered both corruption and inflation, so that everything costs more than it should. And it can´t help that half of all imports come from France; the next biggest source is New Zealand (less than 10%). Tahiti is effectively a member of the EU, but it´s hard to imagine that getting a lot of cheap butter from the other side of the planet is better than trading with your neighbors. Unless trading with France is the price of getting the subvention.
But it is beautiful. And relatively unspoilt. And it´s only two and a half hours further than Hawaii if you are flying from the US. Go.
Summer and I are getting addicted to scuba diving. From Sydney we flew to Cairns and spent three days diving off the Great Barrier Reef. The highlight was swimming alongside two beautiful green-backed turtles, the first time we'd seen these animals underwater. This photograph was taken by one of our fellow divers, Don Cantlon.
It was also the first time that we dived without a guide. At the end of our last dive I was heading back in the general direction of the boat, quite happily watching my compass, when Summer tapped me on the shoulder. She pointed in a completely different direction, and then took out a slate and wrote "Are you sure we're on right side of reef and know where boat is?"
Next time you and your spouse get lost in the car and start arguing, picture yourselves having exactly the same row while 30 feet underwater and running out of air.
To outsiders there is something very entertaining about the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne. The cities are about the same size and the same age. When Australia federated, Canberra was built and made capital to avoid choosing between the two.
People from Melbourne claim that their city is more sophisticated, intellectual; you know, classy. While we were there a newspaper was outraged to learn how few Melbourne designers had been invited to show at Sydney's Fashion Week, which of course undermined the integrity of the entire event.
Tellingly, people in Sydney seem more concerned about what the rest of the world thinks of them than anything Melbourne might say: Sydney papers speculated that their Fashion Week may now be the "fifth most important in the world, if not the fourth." But it was a woman from Sydney who made the most condescending remark that we heard: "There was a time when we would never even have considered buying a Melbourne wine."
Me, I like Sydney. It's partly that Melbourne doth protest too much. ("Sydney hosted the Olympics, but we've hosted the Olympics and the Commonwealth Games!" "What are the Commonwealth Games?" asked my American wife.) It's partly that Melbourne is more European in outlook, and Sydney is more American. But mostly it's Sydney Harbour, because it is probably the most beautiful harbour - or harbor - in the world.
Harbors occupy some place in the imagination half way between the natural and the artificial. Most are not places of great natural beauty in themselves. A harbor is a tool: a found tool, like a stone with a sharp edge or a long straight stick. Add a little fishing community and a few sailboats and even those of us who can´t tell a spinnaker from a starboard poopsail get all sentimental. Sydney Harbour has all this and is naturally beautiful and seems to go on forever and is topped off with one of the most remarkable buildings in the world.
We walked around Manly Cove, we caught a ferry, and I walked from the Botanic Gardens to the Opera House. But there is no better way to see Sydney Harbour than by climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Click on the image to see a group of people climbing.
There are very few places in the world where someone with no training or experience can climb a structure like this, which was never designed with tourists in mind. When Paul Cave, the founder of BridgeClimb, first proposed the idea to the Roads and Traffic Authority, they wrote back with a list of sixty-two objections. It took him ten years to work his way through that list, but he and his team have been rewarded with more than a million customers since the climb finally opened in 1998.
It takes about an hour to get breathalyzed, walk through the metal detector, suit up, get familiar with the safety lines and other equipment, and practise on a rig that resembles the scariest part of the climb. Once you get out there, it seems almost too easy.
If you want to try this without flying to the other side of the planet, a bridge climb is about to open in the U.S. on the Purple People Bridge at Newport on the Levee, in Newport, Kentucky. From the top of the bridge the promoters promise a spectacular view of the greater Cincinnati area.
Or you could go to Sydney.
Chris Barns´ Kangaroo Rescue Centre is one of a handful scattered around Australia. The kangaroos are rescued from roadkill; even if its mother is run over and killed, a joey in her pouch may survive. If it´s at least one month old, it can be raised by hand.
Guilt-stricken drivers and passers-by bring the tiny joeys to Chris. They are wrapped in swaddling clothes and bottle-fed, cuddled, and kept warm for about twelve months, after which they can be released into the wild. This one is called Albert, and he likes to suck his tail.
Like lambs, kangaroos are not just cute, they taste great too. Kangaroo is a lean, gamey red meat, which I first tried in New York at Aussie restaurant Eight Mile Creek.
The reds and the grays are not at all endangered - they are seen as a pest in some parts. And scientists like Tim Flannery have long argued that it´s better to eat kangaroos than to destroy their habitat in favor of raising cattle and sheep.
But they can't be farmed economically, because they can jump a three-meter fence.
Even Uluru, the Rock formerly known as Ayer's, is diminished by mass tourism. There are crowds of chattering tourists at the designated scenic photo spots, who just flew in for the day from Sydney or Tokyo, and ask each other loudly what all the fuss is about.
For it is, undeniably, just a big old rock.
To appreciate Uluru's splendid isolation, you need to take your time getting there. After a few thousand kilometers of nothing, the largest rock in the world can't help making an impression. Context is everything.
There is also an easy way to escape the crowd, and that is to walk around the rock. Perfectly flat but ten kilometers long, the hike is too much for most visitors, and for part of it we seemed to have Uluru to ourselves. If you take your time, there really is something magical about the size and the solitude and the endless patterns in the surface of the rock, patterns that appear and disappear and change color with the light.
***
Uluru was handed back to its traditional owners in 1985, and the visitors' center has a good overview of the local Aboriginal culture and the traditions that surround the rock. But there is no explanation of the geology. In a 36-page guide to Uluru, one half of one page contains a brief account of current thinking, along with a reminder that this is just the 'western' account of Uluru.
As Uluru is unique, the geology is fascinating: it involves a collision between India and Australia, an ancient inland sea, and a hell of a lot of erosion. Our tour guide made an excellent attempt to explain all this by drawing a map of Australia in the dirt, scooping up soil to illustrate mountain formation and pouring a bottle of water over his model to suggest the inland sea.
Unfortunately, we had two people in our group whose Christian faith led them to question conventional geology, and who were armed with stock lines like "that's a theory, not a fact, right?" Our guide lacked the scientific training to deal with questions like these, and many people were left confused.
You can make the case that Uluru is one of the few places where indigenous people can tell their stories to the exclusion of all others - including Genesis. But most people have a very limited understanding of science, and I believe that's a much bigger problem for all of us - because it leads to poor decisions by individuals and by governments on issues like education, healthcare, and the environment, as well as economic planning. The traditional owners of Uluru are squandering an opportunity to educate millions of people. I guess that is their right.
For six days we zig-zagged north from Adelaide to Alice Springs. It's about 1,500 kilometers, but our scenic route took us over 3,000. Amid all the nothingness there's quite a lot to see - the Flinders and McDonnell mountain ranges, the underground town of Coober Pedy, King's Canyon, Kata Tjuta, and Uluru. But there is an awful lot of nothing.
Although there are landscapes like this in America, there is nowhere so vast and so thinly populated. Every 100 km or so we'd encounter a roadhouse, basically a service station with a bar attached, some of which boasted communities of up to 30 - yes 30 - people living around them. They have all merged into one in my mind.
In the store, three elderly ladies are run off their feet trying to serve five customers. "It's like Grand Central Station in here," says one. It isn't. Stuck for something to read, I browse the magazine rack. My choices are Just Trucks, Truckin' Life, Big Rigs (which is not a porn magazine but ought to be), and Barely Legal (which is not a magazine about unroadworthy trucks but ought to be). A self-published book by a local preacher explains Australia's contribution to the founding of Israel, which will assure her children their place in heaven. Inside Spuds - the restaurant cum bar - the truckers dine alone. They are potato-shaped men: round, tapered at one end, white where their skin is peeling, wearing shapeless t-shirts and tight shorts, cut to the groin. A notice says that five of the eleven local residents are barred from the pub for three months. Out back there is a giant wooden echidna. And everywhere there are flies, flies that have all mislaid something valuable inside your left nostril and need to find it, urgently.
Australia and the U.S. have a lot in common. Britain used to transport convicts to America until the Revolution, and only then switched to Australia. Australia is roughly the same size as the lower 48. Both countries were colonized by mainly English-speaking people, starting with the east coast. But today there are fifteen times more people living in the U.S. than Australia.
In both countries, the 19th century was a period of westward exploration and expansion. Pioneers in both countries dreamed of finding an inland sea, navigable rivers, and fertile land. Those who travelled west of the Mississippi found a land of incredible bounty. Those who travelled west of New South Wales found an awful lot of this.
The iconic explorers of the American west are Lewis and Clarke: travel overland to the Pacific and back, map the American West, describe 300 new species of plants and animals.
The iconic explorers of the Australian outback are Burke and Wills: march north from Melbourne with too much equipment, abandon it as you go, leave most of your team camped in the middle of nowhere and strike out alone with no real plan, fail to reach the sea, bungle all attempts to communicate with the rest of the team, run out of food and water, and die, miserably, in the desert.
Which is not to say that there's no life here. There's spinifex and salt bush and gum trees. There are more species of reptile than anywhere else on earth, and dozens of birds. There are marsupial versions of mice, rats, and rabbits, and even more of their placental cousins. We saw wild emus and kangaroos, feral camels and horses, and domestic sheep. But before the Europeans arrived, the indigenous life supported an indigenous human population of only half a million, and the best technology that Europeans could bring from elsewhere has raised that to just twenty million.
Geography is (manifest) destiny.
At the Ian Potter Centre in Melbourne, there is a large collection of Australian landscape paintings. An environmental group has produced a pamphlet that uses these paintings to show how drastically European settlers have altered the landscape in 200 years, by clearing forests and introducing many new species of plants and animals. That's very interesting, but incidentally the pamphlet also shows how people's appreciation of the Australian landscape has changed over the same period. The first artists painted fields and gardens full of European trees and flowers, planted by homesick settlers. The bush and the gum trees show up indistinctly in the background. Later they started painting the native plants, but made the eucalypts look more graceful, like good European trees. Finally, in the middle of the last century, artists began to celebrate the great emptiness for its own sake, and so did everyone else.
The sublime is the eye of the beholder.
We have gone without TV, newspapers, or Internet access for several days, so we only learned about the earthquake in Yogyakarta today. We were there at the beginning of April, and the city was clearly suffering from the downturn in tourism. Our guide at Prambanan hoped that things would improve soon. Instead, things couldn't have gotten any worse. More than 5,000 dead, Prambanan and the royal palace heavily damaged, and Merapi is still rumbling. Please help if you can: Oxfam is one of many agencies providing emergency relief.
A winery in the Yarra Valley, just outside Melbourne, on the sunniest day we spent in Victoria.
Melbourne is a graceful Victorian city with a temperate climate. That is to say, it felt like we were spending a cold, wet week in London. Great food, wine, and beer, friendly people who call you mate all the time, shopping, theatre (their International Comedy Festival was on), fine architecture, a veteran's parade (it was ANZAC day), the Queen's head on all the coins, dull skies, chills, and a little drizzle. If it weren't so spread out - Melbourne, like most American cities, grew up in the age of motorized transport - I'd have sworn we were in London.
We started our Aussie trip in Melbourne at random; it was the first flight available when we decided to leave Indonesia. We loved the Aquarium, and Federation Square, and the Aboriginal art at the Ian Potter Centre, and strolling up and down Brunswick Street. But after five months in South-East Asia Melbourne was such a first-world oasis that I soon wanted to get out. It felt as if we'd come home early. Summer did not miss the mosquitoes, squat toilets, and bird flu as much as I did, but she was 10°C/18°F colder than she had been in Indonesia, and that's well below her recommended operating temperature.
We decided not to travel up the densely populated east coast. That seemed too much like an American road trip. Instead we wanted to head west into the outback, to see a landscape that is unique to Australia. So we booked an 'adventure tour', a coach trip that promised a meandering ten-day journey to the centre of the continent, with lots of stops along the way for hiking and sightseeing. I thought that it would be more of an adventure to drive ourselves but Summer objected on a technicality: she did not want to die in the desert.
Two pieces of advice if you are ever go to Melbourne (which you should). One, go in summer - theirs, not ours. And two, as we discovered while waiting for our bus out of town, if you need a transvestite hooker, go to Carlisle street in the suburb of St. Kilda's. But go early, they quit at 7 a.m.
The first thing that we noticed when we travelled from South-East Asia to Australia was a quite remarkable drop in the number of Asian people.
Everywhere you see European faces, English street names and pubs and meat pies, Greek restaurants, and Italian cafes. 30% of Australians claim Irish ancestry. John Howard visited Dublin this week and said "coming [to Ireland] is part of the journey of being an Australian Prime Minister."
It only takes a few days to sail from Indonesia to Australia. Intrepid researchers have shown that the first Australians could have drifted there from Timor on bamboo rafts. Aboriginal Australians had been trading with people from Macassar on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi for a thousand years before Europeans stumbled across the great southern continent. Some Aboriginal people may have been living in Indonesia in 1788, when the First Fleet arrived.
But today there are no passenger ships that sail from Indonesia to Australia. There aren't any cheap flights either. Terrorism is one factor, but that's a relatively recent phenomenon and not confined to Indonesia.
Here's another way of looking at it. About 8 million people migrated from Mexico to the U.S. between 1990 and 2002, just counting the ones who filled in a census form. In the last ten years, only thirty thousand people have migrated from Indonesia to Australia. Allowing for the big difference in total population, that's still twenty Mexicans entering the U.S. for every Indonesian who entered Australia.
I am not suggesting that America's current relationship with Mexico is a model for Australia to follow (much less the EU's relationship with Turkey and North Africa). I am just pointing out that the cultural distance between Australia and her nearest neighbors is much, much greater.
A celebrated book, The Tyranny of Distance, claims that the history of Australia has been driven by its sheer remoteness; geography is destiny, etc. etc. As if the country had only recently moved in next door, Indonesia is not mentioned until page 224. I asked a bookseller in Melbourne if he could recommend any books on Australia's relationship with Asia. He laughed, and said nobody has written such a thing. (He was wrong, but there isn't much. One book is simply titled The White Tribe of Asia.)
Australia - or at least its current administration - sees America as its most important partner in the world. By sending just 6,000 troops to Iraq, John Howard has minimized political risk at home while winning himself a state dinner at the White House. That's a big deal - the Chinese President only got lunch.
But most Americans know less about Australia than they do about Europe, and that's not much. Australians seem to realize that their most important relationships in the future will be with South-East Asia and China. But the gulf seems a lot wider than the Timor Sea.
After a week relaxing amid the rice terraces and hippies of Bali, Summer and I flew to Flores. Unlike Bali, Flores has never been a major tourist destination. I had booked the only hotel in the town of Labuan Bajo that could offer us hot water, and that hotel had eight rooms.
We've avoided flying on this trip as much as possible, but it would have taken four days to get to Flores by sea. And flying with the famously unreliable Merpati Airlines (unofficial slogan: "It's Merpati and we'll fly if we want to") was not routine jet travel.
As our little Fokker twin-prop banked and groaned and screamed over Lombok, Komodo, Rinca, and dozens of smaller islands, we had our first clear view of the Indonesian archipelago. It was one of those rare cloudless days when the land below looks exactly like it does in an atlas, bright patches of green surrounded by blue. The volcanic hills, lit from the side by the afternoon sun, looked like the little triangles that mapmakers once drew to suggest mountains.
And here be monsters. On Rinca, an hour by boat from Flores, we got to see Komodo dragons in the wild. (They are named for the island of Komodo, further to the west, but they live on Rinca too.) This one was a little over two meters long, old and sluggish. But they are typically three meters long, can run at 20 km/h, and if they bite you their viscous drool contains bacteria that will surely kill you, saving them the effort.
Here were hobbits too, once. The cave where scientists found the remains of homo floriensis is three hours' drive from Labuan Bajo.
Indonesia probably contains many more wonders like these. Flores itself is remote and wild and unexplored, and half the size of Belgium. In West Papua earlier this year scientists reported finding a 'lost world', an area of forest where it seems likely that no human had ever been before. A few previously unknown species of animals just walked up to them, out of curiosity.
The waters around Indonesia boast the greatest diversity of life on earth - a quarter of the world's known species of fish live here. We spent several days diving off Flores with Ernest Lewandowski and his wife Kath Mitchinson, who have been running a dive shop there for almost 15 years.
Ernest is a soft-spoken Scot who spent many years as a commercial diver, repairing oil rigs in the North Sea. That meant working in freezing cold water, breathing a mixture of helium and oxygen, and taking two days to descend and a week to surface. For some reason he prefers living on a tropical island, studying nudibranchs, and teaching people to dive.
I am a Special Needs diver, and he did some remedial work with me. He told me that my kicks were too short and quick, when they should be long and slow.
Actually what he said was: "Lad, lad, ye've got to quit yer faerie dancing."
The dive sites we'd visited around Koh Tao were crowded, and the sheer number of people in the water drive the fish away. Cruising around the islands off Flores we could go a whole day without seeing another boat. Bottlenose dolphins swam alongside us, and we saw manta rays and turtles feeding at the surface. Underwater we saw crocodile and scorpion fish; humphead parrotfish; great schools of fusiliers; and in the distance, watching us watching it, a white-tipped reef shark. Candy-striped shrimp reached out to clean our nails, and Ernest's beloved nudibranchs did whatever nudibranchs do. For me the highlight was sitting on the ocean floor, peeking around a wall of coral, and watching a meter-long puffer fish doing something that I can only describe as chewing the cud.
***
At the little airport on Flores, as we prepared to leave Indonesia, Summer was puzzled by a poster asking for the public's help in identifying the Bali bombers. She said that the photofit pictures of their faces looked distorted. I realized that they were photos of the bombers' actual heads. They were decapitated when their backpacks blew up, and their expressions were frozen in pain. Not enough pain. The people of Bali and Flores and all of Indonesia deserve better than this.
Some people, particularly in Australia, speak of Indonesia as the Javanese Empire. This is a loaded term, intended to convey something malevolent and bound to collapse, but it gives a sense of Java's importance. For most of its colonial and post-colonial history, power in Indonesia has been concentrated in Java, and power in Java has been concentrated in Jakarta.
It shows. Jakarta sprawls endlessly, with no center and no apparent planning. The heat and pollution make it impossible to walk anywhere, and the traffic makes it difficult to drive. The city is spreading across the western end of Java like a fast-moving glacier, and just as glaciers pile up rock and earth at their leading edge, Jakarta piles up slums. Given its size there is remarkably little for a visitor to see. We asked friends who live there. They couldn't suggest anything. We left.
All right, there's one place worth seeing. In the National Museum, there is a vast collection of artifacts from Indonesia's 200-odd ethnic groups, all neatly arranged in tall, austere, Victorian display cabinets, and with almost no labels or commentary of any kind. Bewildered, Summer and I fell in with a group of ten women who were training to be tour guides. As the only man in the group, I was the butt of all jokes about matrilineal tribes and penis gourds.
***
From the comfort of our first-class train seats, we saw the slums of Jakarta roll past; the volcanic spine of Java; our first rice terraces; a dozen cozy-looking small towns; and occasionally, glimpses of life in the cheap trains - freight cars with a bench bolted to each wall and, by way of air-conditioning, no doors.
Our next stop was Bandung, where we spent a few days with Johannes, an old schoolfriend of Summer, who was an excellent host. Bandung is a very fine provincial town, much liked by the Dutch, who planned to move the capital there from Jakarta. War and independence intervened, but the Dutch left behind something that I did not expect to find in Indonesia: one of the largest concentrations of art deco buildings anywhere in the world outside Miami. If you are a fan of this style, and we are, skip Jakarta and go to Bandung.
***
Yogyakarta in Central Java is the gateway town for Java's most important ancient monuments, Pramnaban and Borobodur, and for the volcano Merapi. But it also home to a Javanese Sultan, and thirty thousand people still live within the outer walls of the Kraton or palace of the Sultan. The photo above was taken at the Water Palace. From this vantage point Sultans in former times could watch their wives frolic in the pool below, and choose one or two to, er, dally with.
Indonesia is one of the most geologically active places on earth. There are active volcanoes all along the archipelago, and Merapi is one of the largest. I took this photo from our hotel room a few weeks ago; it was the end of the rainy season and too overcast to visit Merapi or Bromo or any of the other peaks while we were there. Today Merapi is on the brink of an eruption.
Borobodur is the largest Buddhist building on earth. (Angkor Wat is a Hindu temple.) Hinduism overwhelmed Buddhism in Java before Islam even arrived, and for several hundred years Borobodur lay buried under volcanic ash following a massive eruption of Merapi.
It's a study guide for Mahayana Buddhism; each level represents a stage in the life of the Buddha, and the progression from ignorance to nirvana to parinirvana.
But Budi, our guide, was more interested in the fact that I am Irish and Summer is American.
"Ah, Westlife is from Ireland, no?"
For the benefit of American readers, Westlife is a boy band from Ireland that has never cracked the US, but is big everywhere else in the world. Three different Indonesian people invoked their name. But only Budi serenaded us, as we slowly climbed the steps of Borobodur.
"More than words / Is all you have to do / To make it real ... my daughter loves Westlife you know ... "
We passed elaborately carved scenes from the life of the Buddha, and I realized for the first time just how much the Mahayana Buddhists have elaborated on his original teachings - the Theravada school that is followed in Thailand and Cambodia.
"Then you wouldn't have to say / That you love me / Cause I'd already know ... in fact I am teaching her English using the lyrics of Westlife... "
It began to rain. It was one of the last storms of the season. As the wind and rain mounted and the stone became slippery, we climbed further, watching each step.
"What would you do / If my heart was torn in two ... and I love America. My dream is to move there and to marry an American angel..."
On the upper terraces, 72 bell-shaped stupas concealed life-sized statues of the Buddha meditating. At the summit, a small chamber represented parinirvana: final nothingness. The storm rose, and we saw lightning. Our clothes were soaking wet.
"More than words to show you feel / That your love for me is real ... Our children would be mixed race, and all the Indonesian pop stars are mixed race you see."
Summer and I thanked Budi for his time, and left Borobodur, Yogyakarta, and Java behind us.
Summer and I spent the last month in Indonesia. I haven't written about it until now because the country is so vast that I wasn't sure where to begin. From Aceh in the west to Papua in the east is roughly the same distance as from California to New York, and 200 million people spill across the 18,000 islands that make up the archipelago. It has the greatest biodiversity - number of species per hectare of land or sea - of any place on earth. It is the world's third largest democracy, the largest Moslem country.
But let's start with whether we should have gone at all.
There are places that Summer and I would not even consider visiting right now, because our sense of self-preservation outweighs our curiosity. I trust no one will be offended when I say that Iraq and Somalia head that list.
For most countries it's not so obvious. General reading leads me to think that Chile and Argentina are safer choices than Colombia and Venezuela, but what is the most reliable source of up-to-date information?
You can ask people who've recently travelled there, or look at sites like Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree forum. But no one can claim to be an expert on a country after spending a few weeks there, and no one should be surprised that all the people working in the tourist industry were 'friendly and welcoming.'
If you have friends in the country, as we did in Indonesia, you can ask them. That's very helpful if you have concerns about crime or the threat of disease. But without direct access to the police or the terrorists, what can anyone say about the threat of a terrorist attack in their own country, apart from what they've seen on TV or read online? In New York we've been on Orange alert since September 11th. What use is that?
Most Americans have a simple solution to the problem of foreign travel: never leave America. 77% of them do not have a passport. The rest of us look to the advice of our governments. And the U.S. Department of State, the FCO, and the Australian and Irish Departments of Foreign Affairs all say Don't Go To Indonesia. In fact all four rate Iran - stealth-missile-testing, uranium-enriching, axis-of-evil Iran - as a better choice for your family vacation this year.
As the overwhelming majority of Indonesians are peace-loving, moderate Moslems who are not interested in clashing with anybody's civilization, and the people of Bali are Hindus who haven't even been invited to the clash, they are not happy about this at all, particularly since none of these four countries has suggested that you avoid New York, Madrid, or London. True, Bali was bombed in 2002 and again in October last year. But London was bombed far more regularly at the height of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and foreign visitors were just advised to be cautious.
There was a magnetometer at the Borobodur hotel in Jakarta. At the Bandung SuperMall a security guard checked the underside of our car with a mirror. At our hotel in Yogyakarta, the trunk of every car was inspected. In Bali we had to open our backpacks once or twice. But precautions like these were commonplace in London in the eighties and nineties and in New York now.
Whether people are following the advice of their governments or just reacting to the latest bombing, foreign tourism in Indonesia is suffering badly. One travel agent in Bali told me that her income dropped from $60 a month to $30 after the second bomb. We were her only customers that day. She offered me a ride on the back of her motorbike to a place near the site of the 2002 attacks, a place some people just call 'the bomb.' We puttered through a maze of side streets filled with guest houses, cafes, and stores selling surfboards and souvenirs. Most were empty. Some hadn't bothered opening. It was still the low season, but business was slow even by that standard. The bad guys are winning.
So who writes the 'advisories'? I asked three people I know who are diplomats, representing three different countries. Typically the advice is written by consular officials, based on conversations with the police, intelligence reports, local media reports, and ... what the other embassies say. The most cynical of the three said that they are written by people who never leave Jakarta, people who see a small protest outside their own embassy and assume that the whole country is on the point of collapse. That's probably unfair, but the advice is compromised in many ways. They don't want to offend the host nation, jeopardize trade, or be seen to give in to the bad guys. But they don't want their citizens to get killed on their watch. A public inquiry in Australia after the first Bali bombing criticized the Department of Foreign Affairs for not publishing a warning, given that they knew there was some risk of an attack. This suggests that from now on, unless the Australian officials believe that the risk is zero, they will advise their citizens not to go to Indonesia.
Still. In the calculus of risk, one thing makes Indonesia different. Terrorists in New York, Madrid, and London, whether foreign or domestic, do not usually target foreign visitors. (The IRA relied on foreign donors. Blowing up Americans was bad for business.) In a given attack, tourists may be more or less at risk than locals; more if the terrorists bomb a famous landmark at noon, less if they bomb the subways at 9 am. In figuring your odds, you can divide by the whole population.
In Indonesia, you count all the other western tourists and divide by that. If you had been travelling around with us for the last month you would have counted to ten in Jakarta; five in Bandung; maybe fifty in Yogyakarta; twenty in Flores. Only in Bali would you have lost count.
Here is what we decided:
Stay away from places where there are a lot of people who are unhappy with the West: embassies in Jakarta and devoutly Moslem places like Aceh and Solo.
Stay away from fights that don't concern us: long-running ethnic conflicts in Maluku, Sulawesi, and Papua Barat.
Stay away from crowds in Bali.
And support the introduction of terrorist prediction markets.
The Singapore St Patrick's Day Parade. Spot the shamrocks in the photo on the right.
We had heard that Singapore was almost freakishly clean and tidy, but when we arrived the train station seemed a little run-down. Summer even noticed some litter. Funny how these little myths build up around a place, I thought.
Outside the train station, Singapore was freakishly clean and tidy.
Our taxi driver explained: "The station belongs to Malaysia. Nobody cares what you do in the station." Indeed. When Singapore and Malaysia divorced in 1965, Malaysia kept the train station.
For no apparent reason, he adds: "Singapore is incorruptible. Don't ever try to bribe the police. It will make it much worse."
Singapore is rich and highly developed. It's the only one of the four original Tigers that we are visiting on this trip. The food is wonderful. The shopping is great, particularly for antiques. Parts of the old town and the waterfront are very pretty. The Asian Civilization Museum is the best we've seen in the region. Summer and I think that the night safari (a zoo that doesn't open until 7 pm, where you can - although of course you shouldn't - reach out and touch flying squirrels and fruit bats and tapirs and other animals that are most active after dark) is one of the best zoos in the world. With GPS in every taxi, immaculate, multi-storey, sealed subway platforms, and video mobile phones, this is one of the few cities in the world that can make New York seem backward. It's safe for you and the kids. And it's freakishly clean. It's kind of like San Diego, except it's not bankrupt and the houses are cheap.
On the other hand, this is the place that restricts both chewing gum and dissent. One notice threatened a $1000 fine for riding your bike through a pedestrian tunnel. When I stepped into the street to hail a cab, drivers rolled down their windows and shouted "no, no, that's illegal." When I stepped across an invisible line in a Chinatown restaurant I was told "the government says you cannot go there unless you have been vaccinated against typhoid." (I have been, but why quibble?) I had to produce my passport to buy some antibiotics. Over-zealous zoning means that in some areas you can't find a corner store and in some places you can't find anything else. The media is state-controlled. They hang people for dealing marijuana. And don't ever try to bribe the police. It will make it much worse.
Singapore is a parliamentary democracy. While we were there, an opposition politician who had criticized government officials (during an election, if you can imagine that), been sued for defamation, lost, failed to pay the fine, gone bankrupt, and then dared to suggest that the Singaporean judiciary lack independence, was jailed for refusing to apologize.
It may seem surprising to western-educated liberals that people put up with this. But as a friend in Singapore explained, most of these restrictions have very little effect on the average citizen. Socially conservative laws including the harsh penalties for drug crimes are very popular. And most importantly, government policies have made people here very rich, very fast. Forty years ago, the sewerage system in parts of Singapore consisted of a team of men going door to door collecting buckets. Today the place is so clean that they restrict the sale of chewing gum just to avoid staining the sidewalks. Karl Rove would understand the argument: rich, happy people don't throw out the incumbent.
No management team can keep delivering year after year. Singapore is now too rich - too rich to compete with China and India as a center of low-cost manufacturing. Instead, like the US and Western Europe, they have to move up the value chain, into media, software, and biotech. And they are struggling to attract from abroad and to develop at home the kind of creative people, both artists and entrepreneurs, necessary to make the transition. The best known example is the gay bait and switch: Singapore is going for the pink dollar, even though homosexual acts are still punishable by up to ten years in jail. But our favorite example was the sign outside the Supreme Court advertising - of all things - a grafitti workshop.
I saw the billboard-sized image above at a mall in Kuala Lumpur. It was a temporary front wall for a store that hadn't opened yet.
Images like this are very common in the West. They mean many things to many people: playful; erotic; pornographic. An impossible standard of beauty that leaves women feeling inadequate, or a commercial image that would be pulled from the market if it didn't appeal to women. The confident pose of a woman empowered by her own sexuality, or the naive treachery of a girl exploited by a male-dominated fashion industry that seeks to objectify women, et cetera. The consensus is that these images are acceptable, at least in New York or London, and I have nothing to add to that debate.
But travelling through South-East Asia for the last few months, images like this have taken on a second layer of meaning that I find a lot more troubling. While this picture is more overtly sexual than most, the images used to promote fashion and cosmetics in this part of the world are very often the same images that you see in America - images of white women.
As well as all the issues above, which still apply, in South-East Asia these images say - unambiguously - that to be white is to be beautiful. As well as being advertisements for lingerie or perfume, they are advertisements for whiteness. When you do see images of Thai or Cambodian pop-stars, actors, or models in their own countries, you can't help noticing that most of them are preternaturally white.
I have an especially white wife. Summer is very pale, doesn't tan, and wears factor 50 sunblock. All over South-East Asia, women come up to her in the street and tell her how beautiful her skin is. Sometimes they ask to have their photos taken standing next to her.
In one of my first posts I poked fun at a skin-whitening treatment for men on sale in Bangkok. Since then I have learned that people throughout the developing world spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year on skin-whitening products, and it doesn't seem as funny.
Of course this goes much deeper than Calvin Klein ads. The Thais for example have long seen white skin as a mark of aristocratic breeding. Some Cambodians mutter about the ignorant ways of the 'dark Khmer.' There is a latent racial bias here, but Western companies seem to be exploiting it and sustaining it.
Consciously or unconsciously? Surely most Western brands spent a lot of money finding out exactly how their advertising images are perceived in every market they enter? It's clear that they are not using exactly the same images that you see in America, because there are almost no black women. No pictures of Naomi Campbell. No Tyra Banks. That makes sense - there aren't many black consumers livng here. But then there aren't many white ones either.
When Summer and I arrived in Malaysia, the first Moslem country on our trip, these images suddenly took on a third layer of meaning. As well as the familiar conflicting messages about female sexuality, and the racist overtones that we first noticed in Thailand, images like the one above seen in the context of a moderate Moslem society, where many women choose to observe hijab, call out that Western women are sluts.
If that seems harsh, bear in mind that these and Hollywood movies are pretty much the only images of Western women in Asia; there are no examples of Western female executives or politicians or teachers or priests or soldiers or workers to counterbalance them, just a few ex-pats and travellers like my wife.
Pandering to local prejudices at the expense of Thai and Lao and Khmer women with dark skin is pretty unpleasant. But is it really a good idea for Western companies to portray Western women this way in Moslem countries?
For Summer and me, the border between Thailand and Malaysia was marked by a drastic change of clothing. In the train compartment next to us, a Thai girl wore kitten heels and short, short, shorts. She got off at the Thai border. At the next stop, her place was taken by six giggling Malaysian girls, in jeans and sweaters and full hijab - scarves completely covering their hair.
I had several thoughts at once: surprise at the sudden shift, after months of travelling through Buddhist countries; liberal disapproval (I wouldn't want my daughter to dress like that); a memory of a discussion with Summer about whether the hajib, when not obligatory, is or is not oppressive; and underneath it all, a feeling of discomfort. Images of Islam in western media are so bound up with bad news that for a moment I was wary of a group of laughing teenage girls.
***
One night in Istanbul, a man sitting next to me at dinner said: "This city is so cosmopolitan! You can walk down the street and see Turks, Slavs, Serbs, Croatians, Chechens, Caucasians." I stared at him blankly. I wanted to say "Sorry, all you white people look the same to me." But that would have been rude.
Kuala Lumpur on the other hand is the most racially diverse city that we've seen so far on this trip. Nationally, sixty-five percent of the population are Malay (almost all Moslem). Twenty-five percent are of Chinese descent, and most of the rest are Tamil Indian. The capital skews Chinese and Indian, with a large dollop of European ex-pats and tourists. Many Moslem women do not wear the hijab. As a model of racial harmony it rivals the bridge of the Enterprise. The government, a coalition of several groups bound together for almost fifty years by their mutual dislike of the minority Islamic fundamentalist opposition, is dominated by Malays but committed to a multicultural society. Summer and I found it very easy to relax there. Malaysia ought to be an ideal tourist destination for mainstream Americans: exotic, beautiful, rich, modern, great shopping, English-speaking, a little conservative, religious. If only they were Southern Baptists.
***
When I was in school, we learned that the history of the world came to a halt with the fall of the Roman Empire, and apart from the scribbling of Irish monks and Magna Carta, it was all nasty, brutish, and short until the 15th Century and the modestly-entitled Renaissance.
In the Islamic Arts Museum of Malaysia, which I recommend for its exhibit on Islamic architecture, history begins in 622 AD, reaches its apex in the 15th century, and peters out with the decline of the Ottoman and Moghul Empires. Following the conquest of Spain, Cordoba apparently became the 'intellectual center of Europe.' This was during what we call the Dark Ages, so we can't really argue with that. In a discussion of the achievements of Saladin, it is mentioned in passing that he 'came to Egypt to repel foreign invaders.' This is the only reference to what we call the Crusades.
While all kids should study the history of their own country in some detail, the world would be a better place if they had to have at least a superficial knowledge of everyone else's.
***
Wahab walks up to me and introduces himself. He is wearing the white skullcap of the Haji, and he says that he is from Kelantan. This is the one province governed by the PAS, the Islamic fundamentalist party. The PAS recently banned Kelantan's traditional dance, the Mak Yong, ostensibly because of its Hindu influences, but mainly because it is ... a dance. The Ministry of Tourism is not impressed. It would be like Florida banning Disney, or old people. This week the PAS introduced a bill in the national parliament that would make it a crime to leave the Moslem faith. (I bet the Baptists would love that.) It has no chance of passing.
I tell Wahab that I am from New York, and he welcomes me to his country. His son studied engineering in the US. We talk about the museum briefly, and he points out that there is no discussion of the schism in Islam between Sunni and Shia, the ultimate cause of the civil conflict now brewing in Iraq. I say that Malaysia seems to have done a great job of managing ethnic differences. He agrees, and explains that if he spoke out against the Chinese or Indian community the ISA - Internal Security Agency - would detain him indefinitely without trial. He says that is what Iraq needs: a strong government.
We may or may not agree with Wahab. So long as the US government is 'renditioning' suspects to unsavory allies and locking people up indefinitely without trial at Guantanamo, we are in no place to criticize Malaysia.
The 'giant stride' technique for leaving a dive boat.
This week Summer and I learned to scuba dive off the island of Koh Tao, Thailand. This would be worth celebrating under any circumstances, but it's particularly special for me since nine months ago I did not know how to swim.
Americans are always surprised to meet someone who can't swim. Australians are shocked. But most Americans have plenty of opportunities to swim when they're growing up, because the climate is so good. Australians get chucked into a pool at two months, just after they are dangled in front of a crocodile, and just before their first beer.
Though still rare, non-swimmers are more common in Europe, where north of a line drawn from Marseilles to Athens no-one swims in the sea or in rivers without a wetsuit or a psychological problem. Europeans learn to swim in indoor pools at their local school or state-run 'recreation center.' The very name suggests that such recreation is forbidden elsewhere.
For various reasons, I still hadn't learned to swim at ten years old when my family went on a vacation to the Canary Islands. But I was quite happy in the hotel pool, bobbing around in an inflatable life ring. One afternoon I was standing by the edge of the pool wondering how to get back my ring, which had drifted to the middle, when another kid ran up and pushed me in.
I remember the feeling of water rushing into my mouth; I remember the feeling of falling towards the bottom of the pool; and then I remember my dad's arms around me, pulling me out.
For 25 years after that, every time I felt water in my mouth, I could remember nothing else. I couldn't remember what the instructor had told me, I couldn't remember that I was in waist-deep water, or that there was a lifeguard standing next to me. I just had to get out.
The odd thing was, I loved being in the water. A lot of people dislike opening their eyes underwater; I never had a problem with that. But water in my mouth triggered a panic attack.
I worked with multiple trainers, in Dublin, London, and New York. Two of the women I dated were lifeguards. Nothing worked. Either I gave up or they did. Several people suggested therapy. But while I may have an irrational fear of water, I have a perfectly rational dislike of shrinks.
The man who finally got me past my fears was Adrian Ginju, a former member of the Romanian Olympic swimming team and now a private coach in New York. No one had more tricks than Adrian. He kept throwing new exercises at me, new strokes, new challenges: now jump into the deep end, now do a somersault underwater, now pick up your goggles from the bottom of the pool. One day I swam a single stroke, took a breath, and swam another. I was so surprised that I nearly drowned.
After that I tried to swim every day until we left for our trip. It was summer in New York, the outdoor pools were open, and I went to the Asser Levy Pool near my home in the East Village, a clean, pretty, free pool where I was the only white guy under sixty.
It was sheer joy, even though I still couldn't swim a length. My stroke is not very efficient, and scares small children. Like a man who learns to speak English late in life, I will always swim with an accent.
When we arrived last week in Koh Tao, a little island in the Gulf of Thailand, I had never in my life been in the sea without a lifejacket. I was planning to sit on a beach while Summer learned to dive, but I went out on the boat for a day and watching her learn convinced me to try.
Swimming is hard; scuba diving is easy. At the surface you inflate your jacket from your tank, after which you could fall asleep and still not drown. Underwater you breathe normally, fold your arms and kick very slowly, letting your fins do the work. Scuba divers are not athletes.
The tricky part is adjusting your depth by using your breathing: deep breath to go up, exhale to go down, shallow breaths to stay level. But even this is just yoga without the moving and stretching and downward-facing-dog stuff that makes yoga hard.
However, jumping into the ocean with a steel tank on your back and lead weights strapped around your waist is, for someone who only recently learned to swim, counter-intuitive. And for this reason, and because a small but very agitated part of my brain continued to report all through each of my dives that in case I hadn't noticed, I was sixty feet underwater and wearing a weight belt, I am not a v