L.A.'s Lucky Not To Have Lost Michael Voltaggio To Mumbai

Ink's the best restaurant in L.A. By that I mean, they serve the most unique and delicious food in town... and in a friendly, comfortable atmosphere. I eat there a lot and always try to sit in the same seat at the counter. Eventually I got to meet a lot of the people who work there. And one of them was 34 year old chef/owner Michael Voltaggio, who had his moment of Top Chef glory before I had started watching the show or even knew I could get Bravo on my TV.

I could tell immediately that Voltaggio is on fire for food. He obsesses over every dish-- and this is the kind of restaurant where nothing on the menu is in a recipe book or available at any other restaurant. It's all his creation-- like a song or a painting. I worked as a chef in Amsterdam for four years and I grokked the compulsion from the first conversation almost a year ago. But that's not why I go there so often. I go there because the food is so good and so unique; nothing like it anywhere, not even Bazaar, the other "molecular gastronomy" place in town where I used to eat all the time, never knowing Michael was Chef de Cuisine.

One day I told Michael and Cole, the other chef, that I was going to India for a month and I'd see them when I got back. Michael mentioned he had been to India not long ago, starting a restaurant. I found that fascinating of course, especially because I had been to Mumbai so many times over the years-- since it's where the Indian music business is and Warners had a subsidiary there-- and it was in the Colaba neighborhood, down the street from the Taj Hotel, that Michael and his brother Bryan were working on opening an American food restaurant.

If you ever googled Voltaggio you were overwhelmed with information. Everything about his life and his work is online-- except India. There's almost nothing about his time in India available. A couple tweets and two or three mentions in a local Mumbai city guide type paper, Mumbai Boss. Mumbai "foodies went into salivation overdrive," according to a local restaurant reviewer when word leaked out that the Voltaggios were coming to town. “It’s better to keep expectations low,” said the 27 year old partners who took over the space, a former Italian restaurant, Ranbir Batra and Rohan Talwar, in March of 2010. Eventually I figured out that the restaurant, Ellipsis, opened but that neither Michael nor Bryan was there. In fact, Michael had just opened Ink when he was flying over to Mumbai to help Batra and Talwar figure out how to start a restaurant from scratch in India. I started asking Michael about it. He's an incredibly friendly, polite guy and he always said he'd be happy to talk about it so... several months later we finally sat down and did.

Someone asked Michael, who grew up in Maryland and worked in at the Greenbriar in West Virginia, the Ritz in Naples, Florida, Dry Creek in Healdsberg and at the Langham in Pasadena, how he likes L.A. He said all he ever sees is the inside of his kitchen. That may be an exaggeration-- as you can see from the video down at the bottom-- but pretty much everything revolves around being a chef. Same with travel. He loves it. But whether it was a trip to Mexico, to Spain, to Singapore, or his excellent adveture in Mumbai, all the stuff normal travelers and tourists do took backseat to chef stuff. In fact, he's been all over the world but he's never been anywhere for a vacation. In Mexico he was looking for fresh seafood that isn't available in L.A.-- and visiting Valle de Guadalupe, the Mexican wine country in Baja California. In Spain he was learning about how they make ceramic plates. and in India... the restaurant. He'd fly over for a couple weeks at a time, sometimes he'd be there, some times Bryan would be there. I guess you could call them hands-on consultants or hands-off-chefs.

By the time Ellipsis opened Michael was working full time back at Ink (plus all the other stuff that seems to take him on the road half the time). He's never seen Ellipsis in action. I couldn't get much out of him about his experience there, beyond how excited he was to work with fresh Indian spices and how tough it was to get imported ingredients in a free-standing restaurant (India's weird that way) but I read something about Talwar and Batra enthusing about “modern American cuisine, and how the Voltaggios were helping develope the menu and were instrumental in training the staff, including chef de cuisine Rupam Bhagat (a Mumbai native who had worked with the Voltaggios in the U.S.).

He was excited, of course, to experience another culture-- and India's is about as "other" as you're going to find-- but "when you go someplace," he explained, "you have a plan and the plan changes and you're not in control of the situation... Reality was the difficulty of going into a foreign country and doing a good job."

I haven't eaten there. My last trip to India was to Cochin and Delhi and those links are about the restaurants in each, although the Delhi one is from a trip there in 2007. The reviews of Ellipis at Trip Advisor are great: "the food was absolutely amazing, the cocktails were great, the place is decked out brilliantly, the service attentive and we would highly recommend this place to anyone," came from a Brit. And American tourist was as enthusiastic: "All I can say is that my meal was fantastic, cooked exactly as I ordered and was delicious. The exact same sentiments were echoed by everyone at the table. However, the biggest surprise was awaiting us all. We decided on the Rocky Road Ice Cream for dessert. What we got seemed to be a hand-made concoction of chocolate ice cream with nuts, marshmallows and more, glazed over with chocolate that seemed to have been frozen with liquid nitrogen, a fog covering the plate. Though hard as a rock we started picking it to death with our spoons and we were all delighted with the presentation and the dessert itself. I do have to admit I was the one that finished off this huge mound of ice cream. Impressions completed and they were high. Overall, the whole experience of Ellipsis was excellent. The biggest drawback is perhaps the price, which was close to $400 USD for four, but we did have 2-3 drinks apiece which inflated the bill considerably. However, I don't care how much it was, it made for us another memory of our first trip to India and Mumbai and for the beginning of a new year. I highly recommend Ellipsis..."

If you're closer to L.A., try Ink. There's nothing like it. Best Hamachi dish I ever tasted; best black cod I ever tasted. Best corn dish I ever tasted. Best cuttlefish I ever tasted.

India, Pakistan, Mali, Maine... You Know... Everywhere

When I got to India the first time, having driven my VW van across Asia, I was just getting out of my teens. I entered in the Punjab, drove to Delphi, Bombay, Goa, through Kerala, took the ferry across to Ceylon for a few months, then drove to Pondicherry, Madras, north through Andhra Pradessh and Orissa (where Tom Wolf, probably the next governor of Pennsylvania was serving in the Peace Corps at the time), on to Calcutta, Benares and up into Nepal for a couple months, Oh, and what fun it was! I'll spare you the unsavory details of what the Kabul Runs entails, but I can still remember the first time I realized that the slab of dead animal hanging from a hook in every (unrefrigerated) marketplace across Asia was black because it was covered in flies.

Around a decade later, one of my closest friends, at least in part inspired by my stories of India, the painter Eveline Pommier, traveled to India, contracted cholera and died, not yet 30. India has never been-- and never will be-- at least not in our lifetimes-- a walk in the park. Anyone who forgets this a trip to India is a serious undertaking, vacation, business trip, spiritual pilgrimage or what-- is putting their health and even their life in jeopardy.

Years later, Roland and I were driving around Rajasthan when we stopped for dinner at a high-end restaurant in Jaipur. Yum, yum. Afterwards we were walking around town and we wound up back behind the restaurant, where we saw some small boys filling up the bottled water they had been serving from a hose. I keep traveling to the Third World-- we were back in India last Christmas, for example-- and the hygiene everywhere is... spotty. On our way to a wonderful restaurant in Bamako a few years ago, perhaps the only really "wonderful" restaurant in the whole country, we counted a number of people using the public sidewalk to squat down and... well... #2. You get used to it. Or you go to Disneyland or, maybe, London and Paris, instead.

A couple days ago I was driving around L.A. listening to Terry Gross interview Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid about his new book, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Hamid isn't some Pakistani bumpkin or, despite his previous book, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a fundamentalist, a movie version of which opens next month. He spent a lot of his childhood in Palo Alto and earned degrees from Princeton and Harvard. How to Get Filthy Rich seems to be set in his hometown (and where he lives now), Lahore, a city I first visited in 1969 (when it had a million people; today it has 10 million). Wonderful place!

The main character in Filthy Rich, which is actually written like a weird How-To book, feels his best way to get rich is through a series of scams, a tried and true tradition across cultures, as we've seen in the History Channel series, The Men Who Built America. Hamid's character doesn't seem all that foreign when he takes goods that have expired and makes labels for them with longer shelf lives. Eventually he strikes it rich by boiling tap water and selling it as expensive mineral water. When I mentioned it to Roland, he seemed relieved. "At least," he said, "he was boiling it."

"[T]he marketization of water, the sort of application of a kind of uber-capitalism that you see really all over the world and certainly in Pakistan, is in some senses you can see it most clearly in water because water used to be almost free. You could get water, you know, from a river, from a canal, from a well, from wherever. And now, of course, we're running out of clean water in most of Asia and much of Africa and much of Latin America. And so people don't have clean drinking water. And we can live for a month without food, but we can't last more than a couple of days without water. So people are selling water, and both at the luxury level, where you have these high-end mineral waters and also at the level of just poor people needing something to drink. So his scam is to take mineral water bottles that have been consumed at high-end restaurants, buy the empties, take tap water, boil it a little bit, pour it into these mineral water bottles and reseal it so it looks like it's an authentic water bottle and sell it back to the exact same restaurants, who probably suspect that it's a scam product, but because it's so much cheaper than the water they buy normally are happy to take it on." The book, Gross explains in her introduction "is both a satire of self-help books and an examination of life in an Asian city with a growing middle class and an infrastructure that can't support it, except for the crime infrastructure, which is thriving."

This book is a self-help book. Its objective, as it says on the cover, is to show you how to get filthy rich in rising Asia, and to do that, it has to find you huddled, shivering on the packed earth under your mother's cot one cold, dewy morning... I originally didn't want to write it as a self-help book. I was trying to write this as a straight novel, and as usually happens with me, I did that for a couple of years and failed and eventually stumbled across this self-help book form. And what I liked about the self-help book form was I started to realize that in a way I actually do write novels to help myself.

...I think it's a story that is a type of story that is common in Pakistan, but more than Pakistan in the entire world, because something like half the world's people now live in cities for the first time in human history. But in the course of the next generation, 25, 30 years, that number is going to go to 80 or 90 percent, which means a couple billion people are going to move to cities in Asia and Africa and Latin America, all over the world. And I think there's a lot of similarity between going from a poor countryside to a Third World megacity, which is a journey that these billions of people are on. So in a sense this is a story of that mass migration in Pakistan but also elsewhere.

Gross mentions the rotting water pipes and how "the contents of underground water mains and sewers mingling with the result that taps in locales rich and poor alike disgorge liquids that while for the most part clear and often odorless reliably contain trace levels of feces and microorganisms capable of causing diarrhea, hepatitis, dysentery and typhoid." Hamid's wife was diagnosed with hepatitis the day after their wedding. "And it was the second time she had had it," he said. "Virtually everybody in my family has had either hepatitis or typhoid or something of that sort. You know, water-borne illness is everywhere. It affects the poor, and it also affects the affluent in a place like Pakistan... [Y]ou get it from either drinking water, you know, brushing your teeth with tap water, or perhaps somebody prepared your food, and they had washed their hands in that water or touched the water or hadn't washed their hands at all. I mean it's-- the mode of transmission is what's called oral-fecal, and that sort of unsavory term really sums up how you get it." His character, the bottled water scammer millionaire had hepatitis too.

[H]e has it as a boy, and so many of us had it, and it's a strange situation. You know, living in America, where in most cities you can drink tap water, and even so, people do have bottled water, but the tap water is perfectly safe to drink almost all the time, there is an enormous difference in a society where you can do that and a society where you cannot do that. And most of the world actually you cannot do that. So the government, the state, hasn't performed the basic, basic service of taking this most common of all commodities that we use and making it safe for everybody to drink as they please.

Not even in Poland Springs, Maine.

Low wage workers at the Poland Springs Bottling Plant in Maine, which is owned by Nestlé, are so angry with the way the company treats them that they're doing pretty disgusting things to pollute the water-- not that Nestlé gives a damn. Nestlé settled a law suit accusing it of using water under a former trash and refuse dump, and below an illegal disposal site where human sewage was sprayed as fertilizer for many years. Nestlé paid $10 million in the settlement but continues to sell the same Maine water under the Poland Spring name.

And they make a lot of money selling that crap too. People are trying to get their hands on money now... everywhere. And many will do anything to get it.

Kerala-- Where To Eat in Cochin

Kerala doesn't have a restaurant culture. People eat with their families at home or are too poor to eat in what we would call restaurants. When I first visited in 1970, I recall the food being very spicy and served on banana leaves. Kerala has been developed into a major tourist destination since then and there are a lot more hotels and restaurants catering to the needs of both domestic and international tourists.

Getting into the native foods of the places I visit are part of why I live travel so much. And the food of South India is very, very different from the food of North India, the food people in the States and Europe are usually talking about when they mention "Indian food." And the food in South India is different from region to region. In Kerala, the Malayalam cuisine is obviously based on the local ingredients-- coconuts, spices (cardamom, chili, tumeric, coriander, cloves, ginger, cinnamon, pepper, cumin, etc), fish, rice, fruits and vegetables...

The tourist guide books for Kerala all celebrate the restaurants in the luxury hotels. With no real restaurant culture, they've long been the places where you could get hygienic and good-tasting food. But not remotely Keralan food. The Keralan food served in the 5-star hotel restaurants is made for elderly Brits and German-- very nearly tasteless. To say the spice factor is cut back to a minimum is a joke. Top rated restaurants in Ft. Kochi (Cochin) are expensive and attempt to be as European-friendly as they can. Fodor, for example, recommends The History at the exclusive hotel, Brunton Boatyard. It wasn't bad-- not at all-- but it was completely forgettable, uninteresting and way over-priced. We ate there on our first night. After that we asked everyone where we could find the best authentic Keralan cooking. There was a consensus and we found the Pavilion at the modest Abad Hotel in Chullickal, a one dollar tuk-tuk ride from Ft. Kochi. We ate there half a dozen times, and not because it was so shockingly inexpensive. We ate there so often because the food was absolutely delicious-- and because they didn't tone it down just because we're white.

Neither of us even had so much as a loose movement the whole time we were in Kerala. The food was healthy, clean, delicious and nutritious. As long as I'm bringing up body functions, there is one thing I want to mention. This is the "cool" and "dry" season-- relatively-- but it never drops below 90 degrees and it's so humid that nothing gets dry. So we're drinking water all the time. And sweating out out. I've rarely consumed as much water but rarely pissed as infrequently. It all gets sweated out. It's essential that if you visit Kerala you drink a lot of water-- a lot more than usual.

Kerala-- Where To Stay In Cochin

The last time-- and only time until this week-- I was in Kerala, a long skinny coastal state in southwest India, was 1970. I had left Goa, after a fantastic couple of months of recuperating from the arduous drive across Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and northern India, and was headed towards the island paradise of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Kerala is between Goa and what was then the ferry point you could take to northern Ceylon (long closed due to a civil war that raged for almost the whole time since I left until very recently).

I only remember 5 things about the week it took me in 1970 to traverse Kerala, not counting how abysmal the roads were. I remember the state was lush, green and gorgeous with incredible unspoiled beaches and no tourists. I remember visiting an old French colony called Mahe in the northern part of the state which was administratively part of Pondicherry, the 3 scattered ex-French enclaves in India, and that it was far more orderly than the rets of this chaotic and completely dysfunctional country. I remember that the spicy cuisine was delicious and simple and served on banana leaves (although some rudimentary roadside slop houses weren't high-falutin enough for banana leaves and would put the food directly onto the wooden tables... pretty revolting and seared into my memory. I never saw any silverware in Kerala.) I also remember visiting a shuttered on Jewish synagogue in Cochin that some local boys opened up for us but they couldn't speak much English and we didn't learn much other than that the Jews had all gone to Israel. And finally, I recall that south of Trivandum, the state capital, some inept dacoits (bandits) tried to waylay us with a giant boulder rolled into the middle of the road. There was enough room to drive around it and escape.

Kerala has come a long way since then. It's a relatively wealthy state now and has been successfully promoted the way Florida was in the U.S. in the 50s and 60s-- a beautiful, unspoiled tropic vacation paradise. The explosively expanding Indian middle class likes vacationing here. So do Europeans. When I checked out the best hotels on Ft. Kochi, one of the islands that makes up Cochin-- the best of the islands-- they were all over-priced and booked up. Our first choice in any case is to rent a house. So we did. This one is a brand new apartment overlooking the Arabian Sea, a little way (5-10 minute walk) from the hustle and bustle of the real touristy parts of the island. It's nothing too fancy but there are two bedooms, with their own bathrooms, a kitchen/dining area, a living room and air-conditioning units for each room. The owner, a young guy, Varghese John, somehow pronounced Valdez, lives downstairs and is a perfect host-- as well as a great cook. A lady comes in and cleans every other day and does the laundry, changes the bedding ,etc. The hot water works and so does the wifi-- more or less. The electricity goes out for half an hour twice a day-- from 7-7:30 every morning and from 9-9:30 every evening, but that's a function of Kerala, not the house. His e-mail address is varju@rediffmail.com/ If you want to visit Cochin and stay here, mention this blog or my name to Verghese and he'll give you a 10% discount.

Roland and I are only the second guests to have stayed here; it's that new. Two weeks ago Cochin had a big music festival-- it's in swing 'til March-- and M.I.A. (Maya), a U.K. pop star/rapper-- from Sri Lanka-- headlined and she and her family stayed in our house. They were the first guests. Her father was a well-known Tamil activist. She got into some kind of twitter argument with Anderson Cooper after she felt he implied she's a terrorist (which she isn't). Her 2007 second album, Kala a U.S. dance-electronic hit, went gold. Outside of the underground dance world she's best known in the U.S. for having written "Give Me All Your Luvin'" with Madonna and for performing it at the Super Bowl XLVI half time show. This video isn't that. "Born Free" is considered, like M.I.A. herself, controversial. I wonder how she went over in sleepy, very Christian Cochin.

Would You Stay In A Hotel Named Eros?

The Delhi subway system is fast and cheap-- but best avoided unless there are riots up top

Not counting teenage hitchhiking adventures to Canada and Mexico, the first time I traveled abroad was right after my 20th birthday. My girlfriend and I got special $99 tickets on Iceland Air for Luxembourg. (If you stopped over in Iceland, you got the $99 price-- and we were delighted to stop over in Iceland and spend a week driving around the dramatic lunar-scape of an island.) Anyway, when we got to Luxembourg we had no idea where to go or what to do. The next day we had to take a train to Weisbaden in Germany to pick up our VW van. So we checked into a cheap hotel near the central station that seemed, in the dark night, medieval and charming. It turned out to be one of those hotels where working girls brought their tricks for an hour. You live and you learn.

So I'm in Delhi for a week, waiting for Roland, enjoying India's fantastic capital-- great sites, nice weather, old friends, amazing restaurants and a wonderful place to get used to India before moving on to more exotic parts of the country. I was last here 2 or 3 years ago and I stayed at the Intercontinental and loved it. It was the least expensive 5-star hotel in town and it was a hassle-free enjoyable week for me and, most important, it was really close-- 10-15 minute walk-- to the center of town (Connaught Place). So, of course, I wanted to book us rooms there for this trip. But it was gone. Online, the hotel had ceased to exist. I finally tracked it down and it was now called Eros. That put me off. Was it some kind of weird sex hotel for Arabs and sleazy Indians? No, as further investigation showed me, it is heavily advertised as being managed by Hilton. OK, I figured Eros must mean something different in India.

It's part of the Eros Group and, as their website says, it's "a company, which needs no introduction!" Apparently they're giants in the real estate industry and in the hotel world as well. "Hospitality Industry (Eros Hotel Managed by Hilton at Nehru Place, Shangri-La's-- Eros Hotel at Connaught Place, Hotel Double Tree and Hotel Hilton at Mayur Vihar- city's most prestigious 5 star deluxe hotels)-- are an absolute spectacle of immaculate architecture. Group is also coming up with a new Residential Township-- Eros Sampoornam (25 acres) in Greater Noida (Noida Extension) and five star hotels-- Eros Radisson Blue Hotel (72000 sq ft) in Faridabad and RJS Hotel (4.5 acres). With more than six decades as a leading maestro in real estate promotion and town planning, the Eros Group ranks as the natural choice for smart decision makers like you. With Eros Group one can take excellent complex environment for granted." OK, what could go wrong?

The hotel's website says it's "centrally located at Nehru Place, with easy access to business and tourist destinations." Sounded like the place I stayed in, although I wasn't 100% positive. I called and they said, yes, they took over the old Intercontinental. The price was decent and the on-line reviews sounded fine. When I got here, it was 4AM and it looked the same. Emirates Air-- the most over-hyped airline ever-- had a car drive me from the airport to the hotel and it didn't seem like he was going the right way, but what the heck. Most of these cookie cutter business hotels seem the same and they were kind enough to check me in at 4AM. The room looked exactly the same as the Intercontinental, although the place seemed very remodeled. It wasn't until the next day-- when I tried walking to Connaught Place for lunch-- that I figured out I was 10 miles from Connaught Place and that there had been two Intercontinentals and that the one I had stayed in is now the Lalit Hotel.

This one doesn't suck-- except for their internet use scam. It's just not a hotel I would normally stay in if there were better choices (which, in Delhi, there are-- dozens of better choices). Roland arrived a few days after I did on the same Emirates flight that got him here at 4AM. Instead of welcoming him and showing him to his room after an 18 hour flight, they figured he would be ripe for a rip-off and told him it was be $200 to allow him into his room before 8AM. Luck of the draw. I had a kind desk clerk; Roland got a crook. (When we complained to the manager she told me that Roland's experience was the normal one and that what had happened to me was "impossible.")

Roland pays attention to toiletries and he says the hotel's stuff-- by Peter Thomas Roth-- is top notch. I never heard of them. What I do know is that the hotel charges $10/day for their internet connection and their internet connection is beyond horrible. It's barely useable and, on average, it takes me 20-30 minutes to open and e-mail and reply. Something like 75% of the replies then vanish. Google mail works better than AOL, which has been almost impossible to use here. Twitter and reddit don't function at all and basically, if it isn't google-related, it doesn't work. Most of the name there's no connectivity. A couple goofs from the IT Department came up to my room and installed a booster, which didn't do any good at all.

Instead of a 10-15 minute walk to Connaught Place, it's a 20 minute subway ride (with a transfer). I don't remember Delhi-- or anyplace in India-- even having a subway system. Turns out this one got started in 2002, although the line out to where I am opened in 2010. They're still building. It's the most crowded subway I've ever been on anywhere... ever. Words can't describe. They haven't quite figured out how to sell tickets-- which involves gigantic lines and amazing amounts of wasted time. This being India, the world's most defiantly dysfunctional place, they don't allow you to buy return trips. Fortunately, the first car on every train is strictly reserved for women. If you don't think that's important, the biggest story in Delhi for the week we've been here so far-- dominating the front page and next 4 pages of every newspaper-- is about a young woman who was gang-raped on a bus and how common it is for women to be sexually harassed. The whole city had practically been shut down by the protests over the episode and the woman was so brutally assaulted that she may die and has already had her intestines removed.

People blame the police because they spend such an inordinate amount of their assets protecting a couple hundred VIP families and leaving the rest of society to fend for itself. What's odd about that is that Delhi is the most paranoid city I've ever been in when it comes to security. Every opportunity there is for a pat-down and an x-ray machine, you find someone patting you down and x-raying you. Every subway station, every hotel, every bank... these people are insane. The real lack of security is that the subways are so packed with sick people that disease must spread like wildfire all the time. Every time I get off one I take a few Mushroom Science Immune Builders, my own kind of paranoia prevention. It didn't do any good in the end and I came down with a bad cold or something.

The Metro got us to Chandi Chawk, the main drag of Old Delhi, a short and fascinating walk from Jama Masjid, the biggest mosque in India, completed in 1656 and pictured (with me in the foreground) above

Travisa Outsourcing-- Why I Would Have Canceled My Trip To India And Gone Somewhere Else

Imagine what kind of intestinal fortitude it took, historically, to go on an international voyage... like before airplanes. There were so many considerations conspiring to keep all but the most dauntless travelers at home-- probability of violence, disease, inability to communicate, bizarre lifestyles, time constraints, being just a few. Even when I first started visiting Asia and Africa in the late 1960s, one had to pause for some semi-serious contemplation before plunging forward to overcome the inevitable roadblocks.

In 1969, for example, I drove a brand new VW van I purchased in Wiesbaden, Germany across Asia. Although I was more than excited to visit Iran, Afghanistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka, my real destination was India. Problem-- aside from how far it was and all the shots you had to take and the bandits and bad roads, was that importing cars was heavily discouraged. In fact, it was so discouraged that you had to post a bond at the border for the full value of the car.

I had sold a lot of hash in New York to buy that van on a special students-only plan in Germany ($2,500 if you picked it up at the factory) and I didn't have any more money. I mean none. I would pick up hitch-hikers to get money for gas. Arrested in Afghanistan for trying to smuggle a couple hundred pounds of hash out of the country-- through the Soviet Union-- I was lucky enough to meet an American consular official who explained that he could give me a carnet de passage which would allow me to drive the van (without the hash) into India and without leaving a deposit at the border. Problem solved.

These days, it's much easier to travel almost anywhere, and certainly to India. In fact, I've been back to India at least half a dozen times since that first trip, sometimes on business, sometimes for pleasure. This time we planned the trip out and bought our non-refundable tickets and paid our special non-refundable rates for a hotel in Delhi and a house in Kerala. And then something horrifying happened. We learned that India no longer grants visas from their consulates and embassies. The only way to get in is to get a visa from an outfit called Travisa Outsourcing.

Travisa, which as an absolute monopoly on Indian visas, has a horrendous reputation. But you have no choice. The reality of dealing with Travisa is far worse than the reputation implies. I stopped counting the endless hours on hold after it reached 24 hours-- one full day of my life wasted to listening to their cheery, sensible, pointless on-hold messages. It will probably be hard for you to believe all this. I mean, 24 hours on hold is impossible, right? So try it. Their number is 415-644-0149.

You dial. It rings and rings and rings. An automated system grabs you and asks automated questions. You punch them in. You're on hold. Hold on this first round sometimes was just half an hour... but that was rare. Usually it was an hour or more. Eventually someone answers from a headquarters in Chicago I think. No matter how many times you call or for how many weeks, each time is starting from scratch. No one knows anything. This is the most clueless and incompetent organization I have ever run into in any country and in my entire life. They can't help you, of course, but they eventually route you back through the original number you called, in my case, San Francisco. This is where the real wait time comes into it. The shortest wait I had was an hour, but that was practically a godsend compared to some of the waits. The worst, of course-- and this happened three times-- you're waiting a couple of hours on hold (after you already waited to get through to the Chicago branch) and someone picks up and disconnects the phone. Imagine what Kafka could do with his!

Once you get them on the phone, they're relatively polite, but entirely useless. No one knows anything. Early in the saga, a guy picked up and swore he was holding my money order ($176) in his hand but that the policy is they can't open it for 30 hours so I would have to wait. It was never seen again. Several times I had a sympathetic voice tell me they would update my information online by 4pm that day "for sure," which never happened, or "I promise I'll call you back before the end of the day," which also never happened. It went on for almost two excruciating weeks.

There is no doubt that I would have canceled our trip to India this year and gone to Indonesia instead-- where I wanted to go all along and which grants visas-on-arrival at the airport-- had I not already paid for the air flights and hotels. So I was stuck. I bet hundreds of people give up and just don't go to India because of Travisa. I'm a member of the Century Club. That means I've been to at least 100 countries. I've gotten a lot of visas-- including a lot for India-- but this was the first time it's ever been a real problem. Well, the second time-- the first time was to go to Brazil, but that was national policy, slowing down American visas to match the way the U.S. under Bush was treating Brazilian visa applicants who wanted to travel to the U.S.

Eventually, I just made a deal with the Travisa agent to pay for everything again-- another $176 by credit card. Fine. I got the visa. They stole my money. How can I be sure? Well, I had the money order receipt and, more important, I had the paperwork for FedEx when they delivered the money order. I sent that to Western Union and reported that someone at Travisa was stealing the money orders. There were several complaints I heard from others that that had happened to as well. Western Union refunded the $176 (minus $15 as a fee).

Travisa specializes in "facilitating" visa applications for Americans who want to travel to China, Brazil, Russia, India, Australia, Vietnam, Kenya, and Tanzania. I believe India is the only country that makes it mandatory to use them. Travisa Outsourcing handles all the India visa requests from inside the United States as a private contractor to the Indian Embassy and Consulates. "We have revolutionized the way people get their visas," said Jan Dvorak, President of Travisa Outsourcing." Yes, they have.

They claim their "online process along with the Indian Visa Application ensures a streamlined experience with fewer mistakes. In addition, real time passport tracking provides confidence that your passport is handled safely and efficiently. If applying by mail, we will keep you notified by email as your visa is processed." That's unrelated to reality. Nothing works the way it was designed to work. Every single step of the way is fraught with breakdowns and problems.

Once while I was on hold for a few hours, I tweeted I was on hold for Travisa and going insane. Immediately I started getting random tweets from people who had had the same experiences as I had had. There's even a Yelp page devoted to how horrible the service is. I don't know that there's a moral to this story. There's no way around Travisa. And India is pretty amazing. But this will certainly be my last trip there.

People Have The Power... For Pissing In A River

I crossed the Indian border from Pakistan for the first time on December 1, 1969. It changed my life. I've been back to India at least a half dozen times since then and from time to time I blog about my experiences there both here at the travel blog and at my political blog, DownWithTyranny. More about restaurants and the tombs of beheaded gay Sufi saints on the travel blog and more social commentary at DWT, like this bit from a quick visit to Delhi in 2007.

I guess they're so small because they don't eat any protein-- or much of anything-- and neither did their parents, grandparents or ancestors. I'm not in India anymore; I'm in Thailand. You don't see much of that kind of grinding, horrific poverty in Bangkok. Nor do you see the levels of garish displays of conspicuous consumption like you see in Delhi. You see some and you do see some people in appalling poverty. But it isn't anything like the extremes you see in India. In Delhi wherever I went on the streets there were always clusters of small, very dark, very skinny people. They're everywhere, but no one seems to notice. There are hundreds of millions of them-- more of them in India than the entire population of the United States! And no one seems to notice them. They don't own anything but the rags on their backs and I've never been able to figure out how they exist. The begging can't possibly support them, even if every tourist and every trendy call center-walla gives (far from the case; no one notices them).

I didn't cry the whole time I was in India. It was simply too horrible to fathom. Families laying in the filth and dust with stray dogs night after night, wrapped in their rags, bundled around a little fire burning garbage. Delhi's cold. I've being seeing it since I started coming to India in 1969. It's just unfathomable. Has anyone cared about these millions and millions of people since a right-wing religious fanatic assassinated their champion, Mahatma Gandhi 60 years ago?

So what brought me to hunt that up and resuscitate today? It was a report a noticed a few days ago from a BBC correspondent in Mumbai... about women's toilet facilities in India-- or lack thereof. Don't worry-- not for tourists; that all set these days (although when I rented a lovely beachfront home in Goa in 1969, the sewage system was pigs... I'll spare you the details). This is just for the little people. And it's not just about the homeless; half of the homes in India don't have toilets! That's 1.2 billion people.

Activists in Mumbai have launched a campaign to demand better public toilet facilities for women.

Currently, women have to pay to use public toilets while men can use the services for free.

The campaign, dubbed the "Right to Pee" campaign, is led by 35 non-government organisations (NGOs), and urges women in Mumbai's civic authority to ensure that the service is free for women.

Women currently make up 50% of Mumbai's civic authority.

Rahul Gaekward, who heads one of the 35 NGOs in the campaign, has outlined three basic requirements for women.

"They should be allowed to pee for free, the public toilets should provide vending machines with sanitary towels, like men have for condoms, and they should have a changing room in the toilets," he said.

There is an acute shortage of both public and private toilets in India, and public defecation is common across the country.

And it's worse in the countryside than in the cities. Two-thirds of the homes in the villages have no toilets.

Is the lack of toilets and preference for open defecation a cultural issue in a society where the habit actually perpetuates social oppression, as proved by the reduced but continued existence of low caste human scavengers and sweepers?

It would seem so.

Mahatma Gandhi, India's greatest leader, had, in the words of a biographer, a "Tolstoyian preoccupation with sanitation and cleaning of toilets." Once he inspected toilets in the city of Rajkot in Gujarat. He reported that they were "dark and stinking and reeking with filth and worms" in the homes of the wealthy and in a Hindu temple. The homes of the untouchables simply had no toilets. "Latrines are for you big people," an untouchable told Gandhi.

Many years later when Gandhi began encouraging his disciples to work as sanitation officers and scavengers in villages, his diligent secretary and diarist Madhav Desai noted the attitudes of villagers. "They don't have any feeling at all," he wrote. "It will not be surprising if within a few days they start believing that we are their scavengers."

India's enduring shame is clearly rooted in cultural attitudes. More than half a century after Independence, many Indians continue to relieve themselves in the open and litter unhesitatingly, but keep their homes spotlessly clean. Yes, the state has failed to extend sanitation facilities, but people must also take the blame.

In the upstart suburb of Gurgaon, where I live, my educated, upwardly mobile, rich neighbours sent their pet dogs outside with their servants to defecate and refuse to clean up the mess. As long as their condominium is clean, it is all right. These are the same people who believe that the government is at the root of all evil.

Do you think the food preparers-- even in the fanciest Mumbai and Delhi restaurants-- have adequate and hygienic facilities in their homes?

Dengue Fever-- Something You Don't Want To Bring Back From A Vacation

I didn't buy any souvenirs on my recent trip to the Yucatán. Mostly what they sell visitors to Mérida are hammocks and Guayabera shirts. I took something else home instead-- Dengue fever, an infectious tropical disease transmitted by mosquitoes. It's different from the deadly dengue hemorrhagic fever, which I don't have. The one I have takes a week or two and you're better... or so my doctor says.

I'd like to say I got it traipsing around the jungle investigating the connections between Mormon polygamists and the worship of the Mayan and Aztec feathered serpent deity Quetzalcoatl. The Mormons, who were led to Mexico as a way of preserving their polygamist lifestyle 125 years ago by Mitt Romney's great grandfather, notorious polygamist Miles Park Romney, believe that Jesus Christ came to America after he was resurrected and was remembered by the Mexican Indians as Quetzalcoatl. The second president of the Mormon church, John Taylor, who sent the Romney family down to Mexico wrote, "The story of the life of the Mexican divinity Quetzalcoatl closely resembles that of the Savior; so closely, indeed, that we can come to no other conclusion than that Quetzalcoatl and Christ are the same being." But that isn't how I contracted Dengue fever.

I met plenty of Mormons and plenty of Mayan Indians who the Mormons are trying to convert-- there's a Mormon temple next to all the big intercity bus terminals so that missionaries can prey on the illiterate peasants arriving in the cities for the first time. But the mosquito that got me came from a broken fountain in the beautiful house we rented in downtown Mérida.

When Romney’s father was five years old, the Mexican Revolution broke out and his parents moved back to the United States to avoid the violence. Mitt Romney was eventually born in Michigan. But the other branch of the family-- leading down to Romney's cousins Leighton, Mike and Meredith-- stayed behind in Mexico, their numbers growing. The Romneys chose to remain in Mexico because they established good lives for themselves and their families there.  Most of them are now dual-citizens. 

“We certainly have a love for both countries,” adds Leighton. “I can sing both national anthems and tear up at both of them.  I think that having two countries that you love and two countries that you can serve or be a beneficiary of their service is a great thing.”

The Romneys living in Mexico are well aware of their wealthy and famous relative’s popularity in the Republican primary race. They support their cousin's candidacy and they hope that Mitt will be more open about the issue of his religion and Mexican heritage during the campaign.  It’s a family history they’re proud of, despite the fact that Mitt Romney has never come to visit.

Dengue fever is becoming quite the problem for tourists in tropical countries lately. Popular tourist destinations like Cambodia, Polynesia, Bali and India have had problems recently.

The mosquito menace which has even led to a few deaths has spread its net of fear amongst the monks and tourist visiting Bodhgaya, the important Buddhist pilgrim destination in the state of Bihar.

Bodhgaya is famous for the Mahabodhi Temple and the Bodhi tree in its courtyard under which Lord Buddha attained enlightenment. The Mahabodhi Temple is a World Heritage Site and attracts a large number of Buddhist pilgrims from all over the world.

However the past three months has seen the mosquito menace increase from bad to worse and has resulted in the spread of encephalitis, dengue fever and malaria, which has resulted in quite a number of deaths that have occurred over this period.

As such most devotees, monks and even tourist who come to visit Bodhgaya are virtually caged inside portable mosquito nets even during the day, even blocking their free movement. This has caused a real panic among the visitors who are in constant fear of being bitten by mosquitoes.

"Mosquitoes killed even Alexander the Great, and hence we too are quite frightened," said Madelina Illibery, a tourist from Italy. "I was told encephalitis and malaria together [caused by mosquito bites have claimed many lives in the Gaya district alone in the past few weeks…and hence I too have brought a foldable mosquito net for I can't afford to get exposed to those deadly mosquitoes," she added.

Many of the foreign countries have advised on the need of a mosquito net in their travel advisories. This is so because of the current tourist season which attracts a lot of visitors and also to enjoy a hassle free journey in good health.

My case seems pretty mind... at least so far. Not so for this Australian tourist, Trevor Proudlove, who picked it up in Bali.

He said he knew something was wrong when, after returning home from a 10-day holiday in October, he broke out in a bad rash and was so unwell he was unable to drive.

But Mr Proudlove said it was not until he developed pain in his joints and muscles about a month later that he was diagnosed with the disease, which doctors told him he was genetically susceptible to.

He said he would not travel to Bali again because of the distress it had caused him and his family, despite their efforts to stay safe.

"I couldn't even lift my arm to comb my hair and trying to get on and off chairs caused excruciating pain," he said. "It was like somebody was tearing my muscles out of my legs every time I would get up.

"My feet swelled up to twice the size they normally are, my hands swelled up, too. I couldn't bend my wrists because my joints were so sore. It was horrific."

It's far worse than dealing with proselytizing Mormons. And, yes, you can get it here in the U.S. as well, especially in Florida and Texas.

"We know now that Key West is a high-risk area for dengue and we could have ongoing dengue outbreaks again," said the report's lead author, Carina Blackmore, from the Florida Department of Health. However, if people use air conditioners and screens and stay inside during hot, muggy days there is little chance dengue will become endemic, she said.

Dengue remains a leading cause of illness and death in tropical areas but was largely thought to be absent from the United States since the 1950s.

However, in 2009, 27 people living in Key West came down with illness via locally acquired infections, and then 66 more residents contracted the illness in 2010, the researchers report. The outbreak seems to have eased since then, with no cases reported in 2011.

...Because Key West has a large population of the type of mosquitoes that transmit dengue, called the "house mosquito," Blackmore's team decided to investigate the size of the outbreak there. They identified a number of cases and found that people who got dengue were less likely to use air conditioning, and they often had birdbaths or other types of containers where the mosquitoes could breed.

Blackmore noted that dengue is not transmitted person to person, but from humans to mosquitoes and then back to humans again. However, trying to eradicate house mosquitoes has never been successful, she said, because of where they tend to propagate. "House mosquitoes are lazy mosquitoes-- they breed in [even] very small containers," she said.

UPDATE: How Old Is That Mosquito?

Interesting story on Dengue Fever mosquito research on NPR.

There's a nasty disease called dengue that is just beginning to show up in the United States. It's caused by a virus, and it's transmitted from person to person by a mosquito. A mild case of dengue is no worse than flu. A serious case can mean death.

Michael Riehle at the University of Arizona is trying to solve a curious puzzle about dengue: why there have been dozens of cases in nearby Texas and none, or virtually none, in Arizona. Riehle thinks the answer has to do with Arizona's geography.

"It's right on the edge of the range where these dengue mosquitoes are found," he says. "It's a fairly harsh environment, and we think that they might not be surviving long enough to efficiently transfer the disease to other people."

Deadly Earthquake In Sikkim And Nepal

We are often speculating and ruminating about safety and dangers inherent in foreign travel. Somalia, Yemen and Nuevo Laredo are probably better left unvisited these days. Syria too. But how do you factor natural disasters like earthquakes into your travel plans. Today, for example, had you been walking by the British Embassy in Kathmandu, capital of Nepal, you might have been one of the 5 people killed by falling bricks when a disastrous earthquake struck on the Nepali-Sikkim border. Hundreds are injured and 18 are reported dead so far but the death total is expected to rise after the 6.8 magnitude quake.

Or you might have been walking along far from the quake, somewhere in northern India-- the whole region shook-- and been trampled by a panic-stricken mob... which is just what happened to a man in Bhagalpur in Bihar. And then there were the two persons were injured in Kathmandu's Central Jail when they tried to make their escape when the quake struck.

We were just in Nepal. The infrastructure-- like all of it-- is fragile and precarious... at best. And the quake rocked the whole country, which is historically marked by what various earthquakes have done in the past, but still totally unprepared for earthquakes from any perspective. Our favorite part of the trip-- aside from trekking in the mountains-- was our visit to Bhaktipur. Here's a photo from Bhaktipur I just found:



We'll update this post as more news comes in on the damage. Meanwhile, remember, disaster can strike almost anywhere. In March Kiplinger offered a list of the 10 American states most at risk of natural and unnatural disaster. It was done in terms of insurance risk but I guess you can take it into account when you make travel plans as well! Top on the list, predicatbly, are hurricane alley states, Louisiana, Florida, and Texas and #4 is New York (terrorist attacks), followed by-- back to hurricanes-- Mississippi. Now tornadoes and cyclones put Oklahoma at #6, tornadoes (no mention of domestic right-wing terrorism) and they close out with Alabama, California ("floods, earthquakes, landslides, tsunamis and strong Santa Ana winds that fuel wildfires"), Missouri, and Ohio ("more than 30 earthquakes between 2002 and 2007").

The death toll continues to rise and Monday morning there were 48 reported deaths throughout the region. Rescue operations are hampered by bad weather and impassable roads.

24 hours in and the latest death toll is 74 people in India, Nepal and Tibet. It's expected to continue rising as outside forces make their way to outlying regions.


UPDATE: Kathmandu Earthquake Risk Is Something To Take Into Consideration

I loved Kathmandu when I was there in 1971 and I was eager to go back. In the '90s it wasn't as good-- but which place ever is?-- but still fascinating enough for another trip. This summer I was back again-- and that was the last time. The pollution alone is enough to keep anyone sane away. And now scientists are warning that Kathmandu is "a high-risk city unprepared for the next 'Big One'."

Experts say Kathmandu is one of the most vulnerable cities in the world with an overdue earthquake predicted to kill tens of thousands of people and leave survivors cut off from international aid.

British geologist Dave Petley described the latest tremor, which killed eight people in Nepal, as a "wake-up call" for the overcrowded capital, home to two million people and connected to the outside world by just three roads and one airport runway.

...Nepal is a highly seismic region, lying above the collision of the Indian and Eurasian plates that created the Himalayas, and major earthquakes have hit the Kathmandu Valley every 75 years on average over recent centuries.

One quake destroyed a quarter of homes in Kathmandu 77 years ago, and geologists believe the area is at immediate risk of an 8.0-magnitude tremor-- ten times the size of last year's Haiti quake which killed more than 225,000 people.

Downtown Kathmandu is a maze of narrow, winding roads where rickshaws and cars jostle with cows to squeeze past dilapidated clay, brick and timber houses.

"The building stock is not seismically strengthened, suggesting that in a big earthquake there will be large numbers of building collapses," said Petley, of the Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience at Britain's Durham University.

GeoHazards International, a US-based research group, has measured the likely death toll from a quake of 6.0 magnitude or higher hitting cities in Asia and the Americas.
Kathmandu topped the list of 21 cities with 69,000 potential deaths, ahead of Istanbul and New Delhi.

The Kathmandu Valley has experienced rapid, uncontrolled urbanisation in the past few years and the lack of infrastructure and deep-rooted poverty leaves it desperately under-prepared for an earthquake, experts say.

Building codes are rarely enforced, few emergency drills are carried out, and the fact that Kathmandu lies on the site of a prehistoric lake filled with soft sediment also exacerbates the risk.

The one single-runway airport and all three access roads would likely be destroyed in a major quake, meaning the city could be stranded.

The Failed States Of South Asia-- India's Unhappy Neighborhood

In some ways India and its neighborhood is about as different from the U.S. as you can possibly be. I've been writing about that since I first went there in 1969. But, viewed from Kathmandu-- where the tourist scene these days is almost all Indian and where the English language TV channels are all Indian-- India is very much like the U.S. Oh, not that India... the other one, the 21st Century one. That one watches Glee, How I Met Your Mother, HBO and Indian TV shows that display a culture so disgustingly celebrity-oriented that it even puts our own to shame... well almost. I don't know what they call Madison Avenue in Mumbai but, God do these guys ever run the show.

I just watched an episode of a popular show, India's Most Desirable. I don't recommend it... but go ahead:



India has (another) problem. It's surrounded by the world's most failed states Africa's worse. Somalia's #1. Chad, Sudan, Nigeria, and the Congo, Zimbabwe, Central African Republic, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Niger, Burundi, Kenya, Guinea Bissau, even Ethiopia are right up there among the world's most vulnerable countries. But none of those places are as much like our country as India is. And India's neighbor's... every single one of them is high on the list of the most failed states index:

#7- Afghanistan
#12- nuclear-armed Pakistan
#18- Myanmar
#25- Bangladesh
#27- Nepal
#29- Sri Lanka
#50- Bhutan

India doesn't have any other neighbors-- except Tibet, which isn't considered a country, but a region of China. But the occupation forces there apparently feel there's a problem. They just pulled all foreigners' visas for a month. I know. I was supposed to be there now.

On Pakistan, the report said, "Pakistan has long been dubbed the world's most dangerous country in Washington policy circles" and "yet Pakistan isn't just dangerous for the West-- it's often a danger to its own people."

On Bangladesh, the report said, two of five Bangladeshis live under the poverty line. Any improvements will also be fighting the environmental clock. If sea levels rise just by 1 metre, scientists warn, 17 per cent of the country could be submerged.

"Nepal is the poorest country in South Asia, according to the United Nations, and that's unlikely to change until the peace process is implemented and security restored. There are signs that the Maoists may be losing patience-- and thinking about going back to the trenches to fight for more," the report said.

On Sri Lanka, it said, "The government's final push against the rebels relied on the shelling of civilians and other atrocities, according to a 2010 report by the International Crisis Group.

"The most recent statistics from last year indicate that some 327,000 are still displaced from the conflict."

"Despite the pronounced fractures still lingering, the Sinhalese-dominated government in Colombo seems eager to forget the past," it added.

I've visited almost all these countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan in 1969 and 1972; Nepal 3 times, Sri Lanka in 1970 and again in 1997, Myanmar in 2007. I tried getting into Bhutan this month but it was so complicated and bothersome-- and the monsoon is so awful-- that we decided to go to Nepal and Tibet instead-- a bad idea (at least the Tibet part) because China was able to pull the rug out from under us suddenly after a year of planning. Do I feel like I'm in a failed state when I'm visiting these places? HELL YEAH! They're all unsafe on one level or another, usually more than one level. Some I affectionately refer to as hellholes. Even if we don't wind up in an airplane mishap here or get caught in the crossfire between the Maoists and garden variety Communists, Roland is certain we're taking a year off our lives just by breathing the air in Kathmandu.

India Finally Has A Modern Airport Terminal

The first time I flew into Kolkata's Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International Airport (formerly Dum Dum Airport) the city was still called Calcutta. It had been the capital of British India until 1912 and today it's the capital of West Bengal and the third biggest city in India with a population of 15 million-- give or take. The airport had the torpid, languid feel of the Raj with long, slow-moving lines and devoid of any hustle or any bustle. It's about a step and a half up from a primitive tropical airstrip. Roland was just there a few months ago again and he said it hadn't changed a bit (although there's a new terminal "being built." In India everything is "being built.")

Kolkata's airport may be the silliest, but it is hardly the only silly airport. A few years ago I was so mortified by a few hours of chaos at Delhi Airport that I wrote a quickie post about the experience. Robyn Meredith's classic bestseller comparing development in India and China, The Elephant and the Dragon, uses the pace of airport development in the two countries as a metaphor for the advances made in China and the plodding, endemic backwardness of India. Largely due to Chinese authoritarianism-- and Indian democracy-- China has surged light years ahead in infrastructure. In India, writes Meredith, "companies must navigate antiquated customs processing, variations in taxes and byzantine rules for transporting goods between Indians states in addition to the crumbling highways, decrepit airports, and what-me-worry ports... Progress on India's development projects is on again, off again, as if ambivalent India still can't decide whether it wants to be part of the modern world. The city of Bangalore's airport is a prime example. Originally built in 1942, the airport has changed little in the past sixty-plus years. It's white tile floors, poorly lit corridors, and shabby stained chairs-- needed for the long wait at the lounge conveyor belt-- make the airport look as if it belonged in the developing world. One might find a thin airport worker leaning against the wall, asleep, or another staffer eating his dinner at a table set up near passport control, not far from a neatly stacked pile of fifteen-foot-long tree branches. A rumpled red carpet, held in place with duct tape, shows the way outside, where a crowd of perhaps 250 people-- waiting relatives, taxi drivers, hotel touts-- mill about at nearly any time of night or day... The Chinese government's drive to build superior physical infrastructure-- tens of thousands of miles of highways and modern airports-- allowed China to dominate manufacturing exports. Without high-capacity, dependable modern infrastructure, the world's sophisticated supply chains simply don't work." Writing in 2007 Meredith pointed out that although "China's big cities already have new airports, the nation intends to spend more than $17 billion in order to build over forty additional airports by 2010." This morning when I work up it was big news that India's capital finally has a modern airport terminal.

Frequent travelers to India are in for quite a shock the next time they fly in to New Delhi's international airport with its new state-of-the-art terminal.

For years, arrivals at Delhi's main airport were greeted by the grim sight of dingy walls, dim lighting, congested counters and the smell of overflowing toilets when they went near a washroom.

But now, with the new Terminal 3, a futuristic 2.7-billion-dollar facility in glass-and-steel, the capital finally has a showcase airport that chimes with India's global aspirations.

The sky-lit terminal, one of the world's largest, "signals the arrival of a new India, committed to joining the ranks of modern industrialized nations," Premier Manmohan Singh said at the inauguration ceremony on Saturday.

Sprawling over four square kilometres (1.5 square miles), the terminal was completed by an Indian-led consortium in just 37 months-- a huge achievement in a country where major infrastructure projects regularly run years over schedule.

"India has never been recognised as able to build an infrastructure project on time, but we have demonstrated that we are capable of beating anyone else-- and on this massive scale," said Aviation Minister Praful Patel.

That remains to be seen and I'm not counting on what optimistic India boosters are calling a "game changer." It took them longer to finally throw up a modern terminal in their capital city than for China to build forty new airports! "Improving India's famously decrepit infrastructure-- crumbling roads, shabby airports, ramshackle railways and ports and erratic power supply-- is critical to accelerating growth, economists say... But infrastructure bottlenecks are seen as the main barrier to propelling growth to the double-digit levels the government says are a pre-requisite for dragging hundreds of millions of Indians out of poverty. The airport terminal 'highlights our country's resolve to bridge the infrastructure deficiencies in our country,' Singh said." I sincerely doubt it.

Is Thailand Falling Apart? Is It Safe For Tourists?

Thai teabaggers demand fascism

Yesterday I picked Roland up at the airport. He had just returned from a couple weeks in Thailand and northeast India. Neither is on the list of the top 10 spring break destinations, which is more about Cancun, Acapulco, South Beach and South Padre Island. Not Roland's cup of tea. No, he wanted to see Benares (Varanasi) and visit a friend living in Bangkok. He got to Bangkok just as the government declared a state of emergency, flew to Calcutta and then took a train, the Vibhuti Express, to Varanasi just as reports came out about 76 Indian soldiers being slain by Maoist rebels. He was more concerned with the filth and sewer-like conditions that he experienced in town. "Why didn't I listen to you?" he asked, rhetorically, when he arrived.

China has already halted tourism to Thailand and the U.S. State Department is warning Americans about travel there. Roland said the atmosphere was "festive" in Bangkok, including among the Red Shirts.

"U.S. citizens are reminded that even demon-strations intended to be peaceful can turn confront-ational and escalate into violence with little or no warning," it said. "U.S. citizens are urged to avoid the areas that may be targeted for demonstrations and to exercise caution in their movements around Bangkok.

Tourism, which accounts for 6 percent of the Thai economy, is suffering after scenes of heavy fighting in Khao San Road.

The State Department said travel to Thailand remains "generally safe" but the possibility of explosive attacks could not be ruled out. "U.S. citizens are reminded to exercise caution and vigilance at all times." it said.

It's likely that the Thai tourist industry will be devastated by the unrest there as thousands of tourists cancel plans. It's probably a great time for intrepid risk-taking travelers to look for bargains. It's certainly safer than Kyrgyzstan.




UPDATE: Violence Escalates

I love Thailand and I've been there over a dozen times. But I wouldn't think about going there now. The pro-government yellow shirts and the teabagger/pro-fascist red shirts are turning increasingly violent. Suddenly the fireworks are now grenades and there are people dying in the Land of Smiles. Although the burgeoning medical tourism industry (mostly intra-Asian) hasn't been impacted much (at least not yet), the big, mainstream tourism industry is in really bad shape... again. The grenade attack at the Sala Daeng intersection and the adjacent BTS Skytrain station on Silom last night is a place where all tourists in Bangkok visit. The Federation of Thai Tourism Associations (FETTA) says tourists have been canceling their trips.

FETTA earlier estimated that if the political turmoil continues, the number of travelers to Thailand will fall by 2-2.5 million because the tourists have lost confidence in Thailand's safety measures.

Due to the escalating tension, Mr Apichart said, it is hard to see that there will actually be 15 million visitors traveling to Thailand this year as the government previously had projected.

Last year tourism accounted for 6.5% of Thailand's gross domestic product-- the country's single largest foreign-exchange earner. This year hotel occupancy in Bangkok was off by a third even before the grenade attack. And the hotels near the protests, including the big 5-star joints like the Four Seasons and the Grand Hyatt Erawan Hotel are closed as are malls, department stores and restaurants that cater to tourists. The carefully crafted "just like Disneyland" image is going down the drain-- with billions of dollars-- and, at least for a while, Thailand is going to be an adventurer's destination again.

UPDATE: Violence Escalates More... Much More

Going to Thailand now would be walking into the middle of a pitched battle. Soldiers have been told to shoot-- to kill. And they have. Thirty have died and hundreds are injured from this weekend's fighting. The government is fighting fascism with... fascism. What a mess! The Australian Embassy closed down and warned its nationals to leave the country at once and the British Foreign Office has told its nationals to avoid Bangkok, even if just for transit purposes. (Israelis, on the other hand, are ignoring the danger despite government warnings.) The Thai stock market is crashing and the bond market is soaring. The baht is a bargain against the dollar (32.41 per dollar). Meanwhile, Malaysia is trying to take advantage of the situation to horn in on Thailand's gigantic tourism industry, currently moribund. Tourists are generally avoiding the trouble spots but the trouble spots aren't always static and tourists are among the injured. In central Bangkok, a small number of hotels have either been caught up in the crossfire or have been used as sniper nests by the army. The tourist authorities are hoping people visit Phuket and Chiang Mai instead of Bangkok.

The 5-star Dusit Thani Hotel has one of my favorite restaurants in Bangkok, the Benjarong, and I always eat at least one meal there on any trip to Thailand. It was hit by a couple of grenades Sunday night.

Executives at the Dusit Thani Bangkok Hotel are in shock after the hotel was targeted in a grenade attack that is believed to be linked to suspicions that Maj Gen Khattiya Sawasdipol, a red-shirt leader, was fatally shot by a sniper who was hiding in the property.

Both the allegations and the attacks have shocked hotel staff and executives.

Grenades fired from an M79 launcher hit the five-star hotel late on Sunday night. The blasts sparked off fires on the 14th and 22nd floors when they exploded... The attack on the Dusit Thani may have been motivated by rumours that it was a sniper positioned in the hotel who shot Maj Gen Khattiya, also known as Seh Daeng, last Thursday night just moments after giving an interview to journalists from the protest camp outside Lumpini Park. Maj Gen Khattiya died from his head wound yesterday.

Revenues are down 13% over last year and the hotel posted a net loss of 107.9 million baht (around $3.3 million).

What Are The Most Polluted Cities On Earth? Is It Even Safe To Breath The Air In Indian And Chinese Cities?

Chongqing: bring a gas mask

The first time I was in Delhi, in 1970, the air was so unbelievably filthy that I got out of town as fast as I could. Like many cities-- Los Angeles and Bangkok being two good examples-- Delhi is a lot cleaner now. But not so much, apparently, as I thought it was when I was there last year. According to the World Bank in 2004 it still had the second worst air pollution of any city in the world. Numero uno was Cairo. Here's the list of the 20 most polluted:

Cairo
Delhi
Calcutta
Tianjin
Chongqing
Lucknow
Kanpur
Jakarta
Shenyang
Zhengzhou
Jinan
Lanzhou
Beijing
Taiyuan
Chengdu
Ahmadabad
Anshan
Wuhan
Bangkok
Nanchang

Twelve are in China and five are in India. I'm finishing up on Robyn Meredith's NY Times best selling book on the economic changes in India and China in the last two decades, The Elephant And The Dragon and she has a lot to say about the overwhelming pollution in both countries.

Nothing can prepare visitors for the pollution in China... One of the worst places to breathe on the planet is the world's biggest city: Chongqing, China, with a population of 30 million people counting the exurbs, about the same number of people as live in the entire state of California. There the New China coexists with the Old China: skyscrapers and construction sites decorate downtown, but scrawny bong-bong men wait for work on street corners. Bong-bong men are paid sixty cents an hour to ferry heavy loads-- from building materials to groceries-- up and down the city's hilly streets using bamboo poles slung over their shoulders. They must have powerful lungs, not just strong legs: the city is half dark most days. Sunlight barely reaches the ground, dimmed by thick, gray smog. Skyscrapers just three blocks away are mere outlines because of air pollution. Emerging from the inside of a building onto the streets prompts one's eyes to water. The air is filthy but that is not all. The raw sewage produced by 30 million people-- 30 million-- is dumped straight into the Yangtze River as it flows past. The countryside nearby is not the place to go for fresh air: there you notice that the leaves of trees-- along with everything else-- are coated with black dust from the coal mines and factories in the region. More acid rain falls on Chongqing than anywhere else on earth.

...Nearly a third of China's rivers are so polluted that they aren't even fit for agriculture or industrial use, according to Chinese government statistics. Village doctors have documented increased cancer rates near polluting factories and chemical plants. Untreated waste water dumped into China's famed Yangtse River is killing marine life and turning its water "cancerous," according to Xinhua, the state-controlled media outlet.

...Lack of enforcement of environmental laws is also a big problem in India. Its capital city, Delhi, used to have pollution levels ten times higher than the nation's legal limit, mostly because of the high-pollution taxis, trucks and buses on its roads. Delhi has the world's worst air pollution in 2002, but managed to clean up its filthy air after being taken to task by India's Supreme Court. The overhaul began in 1997. Some steps were long overdue: the city finally banned lead gas. However belatedly, the city reduced pollution from Delhi's power plants by installing scrubber to clean up smokestack emissions and requiring them to burn cleaner coal. It banished motorized rickshaws and buses built before 1990 from the roads. In 1998, the court required all city buses to run on compressed natural gas (CNG)-- a cleaner fuel than gasoline-- by 2001... Just 10 percent of sewage is treated in India, with the rest dumped into waterways, along with industrial pollution. India's rivers-- even the holy Ganges-- have become sewers.

I still remember leaving a restaurant in one town after dinner and seeing some kids behind it filling up the "bottled water" from a garden hose.