David at Sea: Circumnavigating the Planet

Ho Chi Minh City

Wow, we’re really cruising along now. At the beginning of this voyage, we had up to eight days between ports. Now, we barely have two.

No sooner had we left Myanmar that we were arriving in Vietnam, traveling up the narrow Saigon River to our embarkation point in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon).

We arrived on a Saturday and I went straight into town with Jason and Byron in order to shoot a few webumentaries.

The first thing that struck me was the relentless flow of motorcycles, scooters, cars and buses…it’s literally a river of traffic and the only way to cross the street is to move forward confidently as people drive around you. It’s a little disconcerting at first as you stand in the middle of traffic with buses heading straight at you. In the end, you get used to it and learn to NOT stop (you have to keep moving so that people can predict where your body and empty spaces will be).

Beyond the seemingly chaotic flow of traffic, Ho Chi Minh City is very laid back. It reminds me in some ways of cities like Paris, where I grew up, because of the quality of life people enjoy here. Life is slower here and there’s a café culture – with people sipping their lattes watching people go by - that’s hard to find anywhere else in Asia. Restaurants are great and delicious Vietnamese noodle soups (Pho) can be found on just about every street corner. Young lovers make out in parks in the evenings and take strolls on their scooters. Entire families also go on strolls at night, and I saw up to 5 people (a man and woman and their three kids) sitting on these small scooters, just driving around.

I expected a communist-style city, and instead found it to be a rapidly developing hub for international businesses, where street stalls selling knockoff Gucci bags competed with stores selling the real deal, and where qualoty of life is - at least in appearance - very high.

If there’s one place I could see myself living, it would be here.

Mawlamyine

Getting off the bus in Mawlamyine at 7 am, I really had no idea what to do or where to go. So I took a seat at a crummy restaurant and ordered food and tea while I planned and woke up.

Several motorcycle taxi drivers offered me their services, and I started up a conversation with one of them, who I invited to join me for tea. Shortly after that, we were off on this tiny scooter/motorcycle on the bumpy roads on the outskirts of town, with me and my backpack hanging on for dear life on the back seat.

We first drove to a university campus outside of town and met this man’s brother there. He spoke English well and suggested I stay a while at a local monastery. They would let me stay for a few days for free if I wanted, he said, but I would have to meditate with them…that sounded like a great way for me to clear my head, so we put-put-putted our way the monastery compound. To get there, you had to drive on a dirt road lined with rubber tree plantations and rice fields. The monastery looked out from a hill covered in green vegetation….

After asking for directions from a few monks, we finally came to the main “administration” building where I would have the opportunity to pay my respects to the senior monk and ask him for permission to stay.

We took off our shoes and entered the main room. The head monk was sitting on the floor there with his legs crossed in front of him, looking calm and inviting. His “assistant”, who spoke English well, sat next to him with both legs on one side.

My driver immediately put his palms together in a respectful greeting, went down to his knees and bowed all the way to the floor. I tried to copy him, but it wasn’t as convincing.

The assistant invited us to sit, and that’s when I made my first big cultural faux pas in Myanmar: I crossed my legs in front of me and as soon as I had done that both the assistant and my driver opened up their eyes wide and reached out towards me like a parent in a Museum reaching out for their child as she pokes holes into a Monet with a pencil: “no, no, no…you cannot sit like that!” I quickly changed seating positions and sat on my legs. Oops….great first impression I made.

They invited me for lunch and I asked whether it would be possible to stay for a night or two. They said yes (not a very enthusiastic YES, and I don’t blame them after the sitting incident), but that I would have to stick to a meditation schedule that started at 5 am. And ended late into the evening. So I said, OK thanks, I think I’ll just stay for lunch….!

That afternoon I spent driving around the town, passing pagodas, decrepit mosques…I also roamed the local market, where they sold everything from shirts to mounds of dried fish. Children would occasionally shout “ey, ey!” when they saw me.

I stayed a night in a hostel looking out over the river and planned on catching a ferry to the small town of Hpa An the next morning.

The bus to Mawlamyine

The bus to Mawlamyine left at 7 pm and was supposed to arrive at one point early the following morning.

I took a pickup truck to the bus station (a 45 minute drive from the center of Yangon) and began preparing for the long trip. I bought water and chips.

Generally, I prefer to avoid sketchy meals before a long bus ride, but I was very hungry. I saw an old lady selling stew and noodles out of a big pot on the ground, so I joined the two or three people sitting and eating on small plastic chairs and ordered a bowl. For 15 cents, you really can’t do better for a meal.

I met an army vet there. A man sitting next to him quickly pointed out that his friend had been decorated three times. The military guy didn’t really say anything; he just smiled. I couldn’t help but wonder what years of military service in the Burmese army had done to shape his opinion of the US. There’s a strict embargo on Myanmar, similar to the one that was in place in Iraq between 1991 and this last war. I wondered what language officials used when speaking of the US. Were we the enemy?

[I expected the military officials to be complete assholes, but most of the ones I met turned out to be nicer than in any country I’d ever been to. One official checking my passport actually said to me, in English, “Please enjoy your stay in Myanmar.” So much for preconceived ideas…. Oh yeah, I forgot to say this: Myanmar is a military dictatorship, with so many human rights abuses that people have stopped counting and just sealed off the country (hence my surprise at meeting very friendly soldiers). The casual traveler will quickly be reminded of this soon after boarding a bus. In the twelve hours that it took to get to my destination, my passport was verified at military checkpoint 4 times!]

With my belly full of noodles and stew, I took my seat on the bus and we headed to Mawlamyine, a trip that was supposed to take 9 hours but in the end took more than 12.

I quickly befriended a passenger right behind me, a 25 year old woman who spoke English fairly well. She acted as my translator throughout the journey and at every stop would let me know whether we were at a military checkpoint (“show you passport”) or simply having a tea & pee stop (“we stop, get out”).

At one point we stopped for about 30 minutes and had the chance to sit down and chat a bit.

A kid was selling these huge deep-fried grasshoppers and she encouraged me to try one. I was a bit hesitant. I’d had fried grasshoppers in Mexico, but those had been tiny. These things were the size of shrimp! Plus, looking at them reminded me of those giant cockroaches that occasionally fly in through the window in my apartment in Brooklyn in the summer. “You’ll see, they good,” my translator said. How could I chicken out now?

The boy selling mounds of this stuff cracked one of these bad boys open, ripped off its shell (just like shrimp!), and handed me the plump, glistening creature…

I stuck it in my mouth and bit. And you know what? It was g-… not bad. Ok, it left a strong aftertaste, but that could have been the cooking oil.

We sat down and I ordered tea, she coffee. She explained that she’d recently returned to Myanmar from Thailand, where she’d worked for the past four years in Bangkok, “oh, selling things, doing jobs…”

She had a real bad cough and you could tell she had a light fever. I asked her how long she’d had this cold and she answered, Two weeks. Did she feel better? No.

Her Aunt had freaked her out by saying it might be Tuberculosis, but a doctor had confirmed that it was only a cold. With everything that we’d seen and the people we’d talked to during CURRENTS, I couldn’t help but imagine a big red neon sign with “AIDS! AIDS! AIDS! AIDS!” flashing on and off.

There’s an exploding AIDS problem in Myanmar, and a quarter of sex workers are infected. Of course, it’s all kept strictly under wraps by the government (remember, we weren’t able to get the required authorizations to work here).

I hope it turned out to be nothing but a cold.

We hopped back on the bus and I tried to get some sleep. My companion got off an hour or two later.

Shortly before arriving at our destination, we stopped at another checkpoint and all unloaded from the bus. An official told me to wait outside while he went inside with my passport. I thought: “Great, they’ve probably just made this region off-limits to foreigners and I’m going to have to take another bus back to Yangon. I’ve just spent the last 12 hours in a bus with water dripping on my head from the ceiling and no sleep. Please don’t make me go back or I’ll cry!” But just as soon as I was ready to scratch this part of my plan, the man came back outside and handed me my passport.

Hurray!

Myanmar

I worked until about 4 am the night before we arrived in Myanmar and didn’t have the courage to get up in time to see us make our way up the river to the port of Yangon (formerly Rangoon). People told me it was spectacular. Green fields, small fishing villages and pagodas lined the shore.

When I finally did go out on deck, at about 9 am, it hit me that we were like alien invaders aboard this huge 7-story vessel, where everything else is small. The river was wide - maybe 3-400 yards. Our “port” was nothing more than a concrete slab. There were no buildings in sight, just cow pastures. Except for 1 or 2 ships loading up with logs of teak, there was no activity. The air was soothingly warm, humid and thick. What a contrast from the busy ports we’d been to: Chennai, Salvador, Cape Town…

Because of the political situation here – it’s a military dictatorship - we would not be working in Myanmar. Never mind the fact that we’d have trouble with all the video equipment bringing we brought with us, the fact that CURRENTS revolves around the discussion of HIV and AIDS made it a total no-no…too bad considering HIV infections in Myanmar are apparently spreading out of control.

I didn’t make it off the ship that day. Instead, I caught up on work and planned to take the rest of the week off to see the country a bit.

Wednesday

There are several Burmese destinations on the tourist map: Bagan, a dry plain with thousands of abandoned pagodas, and Inle Lake. I’d seen the pictures, and both these sites looked beautiful.

However, hundreds of people from the voyage would be there, and given the lack of privacy we have on the ship, I wasn’t crazy about those prospects. So I decided to go to a place where there were no popular attractions. I chose the southeast Mon state, to see country life in Myanmar…

The Lonely Planet guidebook I’d purchased on the ship described the area in very broad and intriguingly vague terms: “unmapped territory”, “fascinating spit of land”, “green Mon hills”, “nomadic Moken sea gypsies”.

Wow, nomadic sea gypsies? I didn’t think I’d make it as far as the sea gypsies, but I wanted to see how far I could go.

So I picked a town (Mawlamyine) randomly, purchased a ticket in Yangon, and headed towards the bus station.

Back to India

In just two days, we’ll be docking into the port of Chennai (India), and I have to be honest with you. I’m a little nervous.

Excited, but nervous…

The last time I was in India was about 7-8 years ago. I spent a little over a month there living in a Tibetan refugee camp near Darjeeling, photographing people’s daily lives during the monsoon. I also got to visit several cities like Varanasi, Calcutta and Delhi. Over all, it was one of the most amazing experiences I have ever had.

So why am I nervous?

Experiencing India as a whole is like getting violently slapped in the face by an angry clown…there are so many things going on at once in this place that it’s sometimes overwhelming. You may occasionally find yourself in the uncomfortable position of not knowing if you’re enjoying the situation you’re in…or dreading it. Sometimes you don’t know for sure until you’ve left and had time to process the experience.

I once walked into New Delhi’s business district, where men in suits walked briskly and purposefully down the street. I remember thinking that this could be the business center of any modern city I had ever been to…when suddenly a Tantric yogi seemingly THREW himself into the middle of incoming traffic and began running in-between cars. He was completely naked and his dreadlocks swept the floor behind him. I have NO idea what he was doing.

No one seemed to notice him, or care. They just kept marching down the street.

Another time, I was coming down a mountain in the back of a jeep. We stopped to pick up a bunch of crazy-looking guys dressed in orange. They were all quite jovial (at this point there must have been a dozen of us leaning out of the jeep), and I learned that these men were followers of a specific Hindu god (whose name I forget). They joked a lot, kept slapping me- and each other - on the knees and smoked joint after joint…after joint. When we dropped them off, they began walking single file, chanting and ringing their bells… Again, this impressed no one but me.

Obviously, I knew very little about India or Hinduism at the time. But by the time I left, it’s as if I knew even less! There is so much variety, so many colors, so many smells, so many unpronounceable words, so much traffic, so many people, so many spices, so many temples, so many colorful buses, so many Hindu cults, so many gods, so many movies and so much LOUD music (often at the same time), in India that it’s hard to take it all in at once.

It takes many days to acclimate to India, and we’ll have exactly 5 days to get our work done. We will not have the luxury of “adapting”. Once we’re off the ship, we’ll have to hit the ground running.

But I know what you’re about to say and I wholeheartedly agree with you, dearest reader: “But this is GNG we’re talking about! If anyone can do it, it’s the Nomads…”

Right you are, my friend. G-G-G-G-G-G G Unit!

Ah. We’ll do fine!

Olympics at Sea

They held the Semester at Sea Olympics yesterday.

As part of the “Staff” I was paired up with other non-students - mostly professors and adult passengers & their children. We were swift, we were strong, we were frail, we were smart, we were tall, we were short, we were young (10), and we were old (80).

We were the “Vitamin Sea” team. Our color was purple. Our mascot was a purple dragon.

Our Team certainly had a lot of spirit and brainpower. For some reason, though, we only tied in 7th position (out of 8).

Our Spelling and Geography Bee team was composed of some seriously smart people. (No, I was not on that team, but I thank you anyway).

How did we let those students win? The question still baffles me, but I suspect they just had more youthful energy to lift the cards to indicate that they had the answers…

I competed in the pushup/pull-up competition with Rico the AV coordinator, a former gymnast. As old-er guys (well, he’s only 25), we certainly held our ground against those bulky weightlifting “youngsters”.

I did 54 pushups and 15 pull-ups, and Rico did 74 and 29. Not a bad combined score and probably among the top 3. Ok, ok, among the top 5.

I would have also participated in something else but they only had room for Lemonade Pong and, hey, let’s face it – I’d be up against some serious “Class A” competitors on this ship.

The previous evening, teams put on a talent show. I don’t think I’ve laughed so much – or been so impressed by the students – so far on this trip. They had an opera singer (I could have sworn it was a CD), stand-up comedians, dance routines, and videos (Rico put something together for our team).

Great time.

No Kenya, but Rest Stop in Mauritius

I don’t think I ever mentioned the fact that we had to cancel our program in Kenya because of security reasons. We were to arrive last week but the folks at Semester at Sea decided to bypass the country altogether after their insurance company warned them not to go. It’s a shame for the students that were supposed to take part in this program, but life goes on…it also gave us the opportunity to get a much-needed break in Mauritius, where we stopped for 3 days.

What can I report about the last three days? Absolutely nothing. Almost. I finished Black Star Safari, a really great book from Paul Theroux (the guy who wrote Mosquito Coast), took naps in the room I rented, and hung out on the beach.

Mauritius is a very interesting island smack in the middle of the Indian Ocean. It’s been colonized by the French, the Brits, and populated by dozens of nationalities. Most of its population is of Indian descent, but also from Madagascar and the East coast of Africa – a good, interesting mix. They speak 4 languages here, but French and Creole seem to be the most widely spoken. As someone who has lived in France most of his life though, I can tell you that the French left an indelible mark on Mauritius and its people. How so?

Well, for one thing, people don’t like to work more than they have to here. Everything is closed on Sundays, and post offices and other similar kinds of government establishments close on time….at 4 pm, mang!

Other thing: the food is (for the most part) good. Hey, no offense to the English, but when’s the last time you went to a place where culinary flavors were heavily influenced by British food?

I had some great street food that was a mix between Indian roti and a Parisian crepe. I also had a great crab curry. Oh yeah, that was good…hmmm…

So now we’re off to our next destination: Chennai, India. We have lots of work to accomplish before we arrive and things will start getting hectic after this leg of the voyage because we’ll only have a few days between ports.

This is going to be interesting.

First impressions

When you arrive in Cape Town via the waterfront like we did, it’s easy to get a skewed version of the city and of South Africa in general. Building are modern, and there’s just about every kind of store that you have back home (for the same price. Ouch). With all the restaurants, pubs, hip stores and malls, you could be in the US, France, or any first world country.

The city is well-maintained and the old colonial buildings that overlook the bay give it a quaint & cozy feel.

Go across one of the hills though, and you enter a completely different world: the Townships that were built during the Apartheid era for blacks and so-called “cape-coloreds”, when Cape Town was a “white” city. Some Townships – or even parts of townships – look somewhat comfortable. Others are just plain third world squalor and poverty.

I don’t think I’ve ever been to a place where the line dividing the rich and the poor is so clearly defined, and the contrast so big.

Under Apartheid, the social hierarchy went somewhat like this: Whites, Coloreds (mixed), Asians, and Blacks. Whites held the most privileges, while Coloreds were given preferential access to jobs, and Blacks were at the bottom of the totem pole. The system also segregated housing along the lines of race: where you lived (or allowed to live) depended pretty much on the color of your skin. As a black person, your movements were restricted. For example, if you were traveling in the city by day, you had to leave it before nightfall.

Interestingly enough, while it can be politically incorrect to bring up race in a conversation among Americans, many South Africans seemed eager to talk about racial types and the differences between them. Yesterday for example, two people innocently asked me if I was “colored”… Not a question you get every day in New York!

Apartheid officially ended in 1994, but that doesn’t mean everyone became equal overnight. It’s rare that you’ll ever find a white person in a black or colored Township, and downtown Cape Town is still very much white. Nowadays, segregation exists mostly along economic lines, but the reality is that whites still control most wealth in this country. It’s going to take a long time to break up and reverse a system of division and exclusion….

Another thing that surprised me was the question of identity. While preparing for our first videoconference, we asked the South African students to think about what defined South African culture. They didn’t understand the question and kept repeating: “but WHAT culture?”

As Americans, we had just assumed there was a shared sense of what it is to be South African. In reality, South Africa is a huge mix of very distinct cultures, and each has their own language. There are 11 official languages in South Africa...

Slums on Water and Alternative Fuels...

On our last day in Brazil – Saturday – Joselito offered to show us the place he grew up in. We took his car…

[Before I continue with my story, let me talk a little about his car:

It’s an old Russian-made 4x4 that he recently adapted to run on NATURAL GAS  (check out this webumentary we posted on this car - uses Quicktime). It costs a fraction of the price to fill up, is safe, pollutes less than petrol, and the loss of power is minimal. In fact, whenever he needs an extra vroom power going up those steep hills, Joselito can go from compressed natural gas to the gas tank instantly thanks to a little switch on his dashboard.

Think this is special? And wouldn’t it be cool if all cars could do this? Well, guess what: this is VERY common in Brazil. All the cabs we took in Salvador run on natural gas. Some cars even run on COOKING OIL for crying out loud! They are called flex-cars because they can run on a variety of different fuels.

It’s not surprising that Brazil can claim to be one of the very few countries in the world that is entirely self-reliant energetically. 80% of its energy consumption comes from its own oil reserves, and the rest from these so-called alternative fuels. Could someone in DC please recognize we could learn from this? (visions of mammoth SUVs filling up with used vegetable oil)… ]

Back to my story. We first drove the James Bond car to Baguncaco’s new administrative offices, located in a sprawling colonial mansion from the 1820s. Let me just add that if I were to win the lottery, this is where I would live…The family trust that owns this house is lending it to Baguncaco for the next two years.

The neighborhood was “once chic, now out of fashion” as Joselito put it. Foreigners are gradually coming in and buying the historic houses that line the water here and fixing them up. Across this tiny bay lies one of the most rundown slums in the city, where opportunities for young people are pretty much limited to drug dealing, theft, and sometimes low paid security jobs.

Joselito’s plan is to ship 60 students from that slum to this building every day after school and teach them specialized skills, like carpentry or computer literacy. The idea is to broaden the options of the students that live in the slum. What is amazing to me is to imagine what he will be able to accomplish on a zero-dollar budget…amazing.

After a short tour of the center, we hopped in a boat to visit the favela. The closer we got to the slums, the dirtier the water got: for lack of land to build on, the slums are awkwardly balanced on stilts literally over the water. Everything goes straight into the bay: excrement, trash, tires, you name it…the result is that the surrounding water looks – and smells – like raw sewage. Abandoned and gutted boats lie here and there…it’s very eerie. It’s incredible that people can live here, but somehow they do.

Joselito showed us where the city was planning to “re-locate” some of the slum’s inhabitants. Bulldozers pushed sand into the bay, creating more land to build on. On top of this, they constructed tiny 2-room dwellings. One per family.

I wonder which situation is better…

Kite Running in Salvador

If anyone reading this blog entry has ever read the book The Kite Runner (I think that’s what it’s called), this will sound familiar.

In the poorer neighborhoods of Salvador, it’s very common to see miniature kites – maybe 6 by 12 inches - flying over dilapidated houses, and kids yanking strings here and there with their eyes fixed upward. On Saturday, I literally saw  hundreds of people – young and old – taking part in this activity almost religiously. I noticed kids “preparing” their lines, adding what looked like strings of cotton balls to them every inch or so…At first I didn’t quite get it. Then, when I saw a group running down the street with their eyes to the sky, I remembered the novel. They were running kites!

This is how it works. First you crush glass, and then mix the resulting powder with glue. Next, you dip your line in this goop and out comes a very dangerous and sharp string (Joselito mimicked a motorcyclist getting his throat slit from the kite line…could this really happen? I don’t know).

You use that string to literally knock your opponents out of the sky. The yanking of the string that we saw over and over was really children sawing away at the kite lines of less fortunate – or skillful – children.

When the kite is released and begins flying away, students run to retrieve it. Kite running.

We wanted to bring some of these kites back as gifts, so Joselito introduced us to a massive man he knew who built them in his house. I picked up 5 for about 50 cents, and Chris got 15.  Joselito’s sons helped us string a couple together. The pictures below are of me trying to fly the damn thing and them preparing them for flight.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get any “glass” string. Joselito says you have to prepare that yourself….