The Problem With Brazil...

Actually, I loved every second of my short trip to Brazil a few years ago when I visited the Iguazu Falls National Park, where Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay meet. After much research, I decided to stay on the Brazilian side, even though that meant dealing with the hassle of getting a Brazilian visa, something easy for Europeans... but hard for Americans-- well, not really hard, but expensive and time-consuming. And it's a hassle, purposefully so. Simple explanation: tit for tat. The Brazilians are doing exactly to American tourists what the U.S. does to Brazilian tourists. I found an easy way-- well, relatively easy way-- 'round the problems, which I explained in the link above, that fit right into my schedule: the Brazilian consul in Buenos Aires.

Today Catharine Hamm, the L.A. Times travel editor, as part of a q & a grapples with it for pissed off Americans who aren't aware the Brazilians are simply responding to Bush-era restrictions on their nationals that Obama hasn't gotten around to fixing.

“There is some promise in this issue,” said Mario Moyses, vice minister of tourism for Brazil, noting that 600,000 Americans last year visited the emerging South American superpower.

But, so far, it remains a promise. Even if you’re visiting on a cruise and staying eight hours, you need a visa, according to the local Brazilian consulate. At $160, your visit will cost you $20 an hour.

Chalk it up to a little diplomatic tit for tat. What the U.S. charges Brazilians for a visa, Brazil charges U.S. citizens.
“It is not a punishment, but an international procedure between countries,” Moyses said.

Whatever it is, if you are going to Brazil, you’ll need to allow plenty of time to get that visa. It will take at least 10 working days, the consulate website says (www.brazilian-consulate, www.brazilian-consulate.org), and the application and pick-up must be in person, whether by you or a visa agency. “No exceptions!” the website says in several places.

I’m not sure why the tone is so cranky, but maybe travelers to Brazil have been trying to game the system. Or maybe Americans are pushier than the average bear. (No. Really?)

...Brazil does not require Western Europeans to have a visa. Of course, neither do we.

With Brazil slated to host soccer’s World Cup in 2014 and the Summer Olympics in 2016, perhaps this is an opportune time to end this diplomatic tantrum. As parents often tell squabbling siblings, it doesn’t matter who started it, and it doesn’t really matter why. It does matter that travelers get caught, yet again, in affairs not of their own making.

Brazil's worth the hassle and we're planning a trip to the northeast -- Recife and Bahia-- where I have a large extended family.

British Hoteliers, Angered By Bad Reviews Threaten To Sue TripAdvisor!

When I visit a hotel or restaurant that is especially wonderful I'm always eager to recommend it to others-- and the place I go is TripAdvisor.com. I also go there to report to other travelers about crooked landlords, shoddy service, bad food, etc. It's a rule of the road I learned when I spent a few years driving across Europe and Asia in the '60s and '70s; you always look out for the brotherhood of travelers. Here are some of my most recent reviews from the best fish restaurant in Casablanca and the best Jewish restaurant in the Roman Ghetto to the best hotel in Fieri, Albania, a wonderful villa I rented in Ubud on Bali and all the best boutique hotels in Mali, as well as the best restaurant in Bamako! All the reviews but one-- for the grossly overrated Mamounia in Marrakech-- are positive. But I also have an e-mail from 2007 threatening a lawsuit for explaining how I rented an upscale apartment in Buenos Aires only to find that the landlady had stolen five one-hundred dollar bills out of the safe.

I also check on TripAdvisor for what others have to say, although unless I get a clear consensus about a place, I'm always somewhat skeptical about any one review. Besides so much is just a matter of taste. McDonald's is probably the most "popular" restaurant in the world. But I'd fast for a week before I'd ever eat in one... two weeks.

So I had to laugh today when I saw that the Guardian is featuring a news story on how British hotels are getting involved in a class action lawsuit against TripAdvisor because they don't like the reviews they're getting! It sounds like a bit of a scam by a KwikChex.com, a British "reputation management" firm, which is charging £35 (around $55) and "hopes to corral 1,000 peeved owners into a group defamation action."

One guesthouse owner says she has been branded a racist after turning a potential guest away and is so upset she has gone to the police. Another says he is giving up the B&B business he has run for 30 years following an online review claiming his rooms were dirtier than a sewage works. A third claims he is in despair because he seems to be spending more time dealing with unfair reports than actually running his successful seaside hotel.

They are just some of the 700 or so members of the hospitality business who have either committed to, or are contemplating, legal action against TripAdvisor, the world's largest travel review site, over what they regard as unfair reports.

A company specialising in protecting online reputations is collecting examples of comments that it believes overstep the mark. The firm, KwikChex, intends to collate the most "serious" examples, then ask TripAdvisor to take action. On one day this week KwikChex was dealing with an inquiry every five minutes.

Among the cases KwikChex is examining was a review on Brook Barn Country House, in Oxfordshire, a five-star B&B billing itself as a "jewel of a hideaway". Most reviewers on TripAdvisor agreed. "What a fantastic place!" says one enthusiast on the site. "A wonderful country retreat" adds a second.

But if readers scrolled down further this week they came across a review from "Ferdi", an IT salesman of Indian origin from the home counties who asked to be shown around Brook Barn. The hotel's owner, Sarah-Jane Ashman, recalls explaining that she could not as the rooms were full but was horrified a few days later when Ferdi's review appeared and seemed to accuse her of racism.

"I hate to ever think it but are there people out there who still have a problem with the colour of someone's skin?" Ferdi wrote. "I think I'll be staying away and would recommend to any other 'ethnics' to do the same. I don't think they like our sort around there."

Ashman says she was so distraught she called the police, arguing that the review could actually break the law by inciting racism. "Everybody gets bad reviews, that's fine," she said. "But to be called racist is completely wrong." [She could always move the show to South Carolina or Arizona and prosper with the reputation.]

Des Hague's B&B is at the other end of the scale. He charges £25 a night for a single room at Thornsett House, a Victorian villa five minutes from Sheffield city centre. "It's not the Hilton," he said, "But it's tidy and clean."

He claims his business has been undermined by "spiteful" reviews on TripAdvisor. Under the headline "B&B Hell" one reviewer claimed: "I have visited morgues, abandoned buildings, a sewage works and a coal pit. Each and every one was cleaner, tidier and better staffed than Thornsett House."

Other travellers disagree. "Friendly, warm, welcome" says one. But Hague says poor, unwarranted reviews are ruining his business. "Usually the phone is ringing off the hook at this time of year. Now there's nothing."

He says he has been in the business for 30 years but now plans to shut down the B&B. "I can't work out what is happening here. I've had enough," he said.

Earlier, the Guardian had an even more explicit report that must have been terribly amusing for its readers as they were learning there are over 35 million reviews on the decade-old site.

The Oddballs Palm Island Lodge is the second most popular lodge in Botswana's Okavango Delta, according to TripAdvisor. One user of the site, LASFNCY, "would recommend it in a heartbeat. Fantastic and memorable time". Duffyd, however, is not so gushing. "Snakes in my room, baboon pooping and peeing [in] my room and in the showers multiple times a day."

... Despite its critics, TripAdvisor is an online phenomenon; a brief flick through its listings has become a holiday institution, akin to last-minute passport panic, and outrage at airport sun-cream prices. The problem, of course, is oversaturation. As its listings continue to swell, things are becoming a little too noisy, and trawling through 738 reviews for a single hotel is a tiresome exercise. Increasingly, the skill is seeing the wood from the trees; sniffing out the haters (serial internet curmudgeons) and the sycophants (the owner's mum), and trusting the overall wisdom of crowds. Annoyed hoteliers should also heed the golden rule of TripAdvisor: for every 10 brilliant write-ups, there are always a couple of pooping baboons.

Another Trip To Sri Lanka? Or Is It Too Soon?

Polonnaruwa was pretty cool

I discovered Sri Lanka, still Ceylon then, in 1970 when I drove there from England. (There was a funky ferry from Rameswaram in the south of India back in those days.) I loved Ceylon so much back in those days and talked about it in such superlative terms that in 1997, during a quasi-lull in the civil war, I went back for a month with two of friends, Roland and Steve. Well, not exactly a month. The quasi-lull in the fighting wasn't quasi enough. On top of that, all the fighting had taken a serious toll on everything wonderful the country had to offer, even in the areas where there had been no sustained fighting. So Roland and Steve ganged up on me in Negombo, one of the most boring places on the island and persuaded me to cut the Sri Lanka trip short and head off to Thailand.

Now the war is over and the NY Times is calling Sri Lanka its #1 travel destination for the year-- ahead of Patagonia, Seoul, Mysore, Copenhagen, Koh Kood, Damascus, Cesme, Antarctica, Leipzig and... L.A. And guess where Roland wants to go! He's now claiming he has nothing but amazing memories of Sri Lanka and wants to see it again. I suspect its because we went to Artesia to get Indian food a couple weeks ago and he bought a book on Ayurvedic medicine and wants to go to some Ayurvedic shop we stopped by in Nuwara Eliya (although he says there are some luxurious Ayurvedic resorts near Colombo and in Beruwala and Weligama. In fact, they're sprouting up all over the country now.

Now that the war is officially over-- although, apparently some of the Tamil rebels haven't gotten the message, at least not as of last Friday-- tourism is taking off again and hotels are being built everywhere. I hope they're fixing up the infrastructure before they start selling the place to Americans. I have a feeling it is still not quite ready for prime time for non-adventure tourists. In London, today's Sunday Times explores some of the pitfalls of Lankan tourism from the perspective of a Lankan reporter.

With additional numbers expected to be promoted most popular tourism sites visited by both local and foreign tourists are going to get overcrowded. If such sites are not improved on a proper plan and good management with priority being given to sufficient parking and traffic arrangements, good quality restaurants and clean toilet facilities, visitor safety etc. the value to the visitors will not remain for long. This is most relevant to nature reserves and wildlife parks that are extremely vulnerable to pollution and overcrowding. Visiting Yala national park on a long weekend is similar to going to a popular motor-cross event. The number of vehicles entering the park is an absolute harassment to the animals and a speedy way to endanger them to extinction.

Noisy vehicles and obviously high levels of carbon emission can do much damage to the wildlife in a short span of time. Many wild life enthusiasts have highlighted this matter through the media but to no avail. The opening of the Wilpattu National Park will certainly reduce the pressure on the Yala reserve in this respect but stringent controls must be worked out to allow only tolerable numbers to enter national parks, ideally with an advance booking system for peak periods. With all relevant government agencies being wisely brought within one ministry, the processes to deal with such matters is easier than ever before. It is the fundamental right not only of our future generations to see and enjoy nature in its true form, but also of the wildlife itself for its very sustainability.

Prostitution, Paedophilia and Drug menace

These remain as byproducts of tourism especially of mass tourism in certain destinations around the world. These vices have reached dangerous levels in some Asian destinations and are now seen as irreversible, by being entwined in the social lives of local communities. In reality Sri Lanka even at the moment has an issue at hand in this regard. The irresistible love for Dollars, Sterling Pounds and Euros cannot ignore societal damage that can permanently harm civic life and the cultural values of this country. It is critical therefore that there is a broad understanding of these problems and their impacts on Sri Lankan society. This understanding and initiative to prevent it should not only come from NGOs and resource tight government agencies. Since it is virtually a direct impact of the country’s leisure industry, it is imperative that the tourism sector take responsibility and preventative action on these fronts. Damage control should not come only as a CSR activity of a few but as proactive approach from all responsible.

Tourist Police

A destination must not only be peaceful but also safe for a visitor. From early times of tourism in the island certain resorts had tourist police units. To some extent they were effective though not necessarily to the level that they should have been. Three years ago, a Tourist Police section was introduced that set up office at No 78 Steuart Place, Colombo 3, where Sri Lanka Tourism has its offices. This was to look into the safety of tourists. With the expected increase in visitor arrivals, most resorts and tourist sites will require an effective force under this administration to ensure visitor safety.

There have been numerous threats in the past on tourists by local thugs who even have manhandled tourists. Most such thugs are closely linked to local politicians. Hence the police have found that their hands are tied in most cases. A few cases of rape of female tourists also had taken place in the past in certain beach resorts. Theft on the beach and snatch thieving at other places are not uncommon and tourists leave our shores with bitter memories, never to return.

If you do decide to go before we go back and I get to write a big thing about hotels and restaurants, there was one hotel we stumbled upon in the middle of nowhere that I totally recommend, the Kandalama in Dambulla. It was down a dirt road far from anything but... WOW! What an amazing find! It was built into the side of a mountain and overlooked a gigantic lake. We would be swimming in this amazing infinity pool and watching the elephants bathing in the lake below us. The place defined serenity and if we do go back to Sri Lanka I want to spend at leats a week at this place.

The Least Expensive Cities In The World

Karakoram Highway, the world's highest, sort of Pakistan's Route 66, except you don't wind up in L.A.

Today's L.A. Times has a photo essay on the least expensive cities in the world to visit. I'm always on the lookout for a good bargain but I've never considered looking for a vacation spot because it's one of the 10 cheapest places to go. That said, between Roland and I, we've been to most of these places. They are inexpensive-- but not always the most memorable. Cheapest of all is Karachi, the biggest city in Pakistan, a virtual hellhole and someplace I wouldn't go to if someone paid me. In fact, I was in Pakistan twice and managed to avoid Karachi both times. Crowded, seething with discontent and misery, Karachi is on no one's list of places to visit-- not even Pakistan's It's dangerous and offers nothing much in return. I loved visiting Lahore, the country's cultural capital, and Peshawar, a veritable arms bazaar in the wild, untamed west, and I was in Islamabad-- third cheapest in today's list-- when it was being built and found it interesting in a theoretical way I always find cities built from scratch specifically to be a national capital. The main attraction is the giant Faisal Mosque, once the largest in the world (now the 4th largest) that holds around 300,000 people. It was built in 1986 and paid for by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. That said, according to a recent Guardian, the best places to visit in Pakistan for an average tourist (so, not counting climbing a Himalaya) are ancient Taxila, Lahore, the Karakoram Highway (the world's highest), Karimabad in the Hunza Valley, and Lake Saiful Muluk. None are on the list; all are incredibly inexpensive if you want them to be.

Roland's a big fan of Latin America and he's been to both Managua in Nicaragua (second cheapest) and La Paz, Bolivia (4th cheapest) and loved them both. He was especially unimpressed by La Paz's Mercado de las Brujas, the witch's market, which specializes in dried frogs, llama fetuses and all kind of aphrodisiacs.

Other than my extended stays in Afghanistan in the '60s and '70s neither of us has been to the Stans, although Alan Grayson, who has, assures me they are well worth the efforts. They're on the list. Today's Times essay lists Ashkhabad in Turkmenistan as the 5th cheapest place to visit and Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan as the 6th cheapest. Turkmenistan is almost all a giant desert and is sparsely populated. A normal person thinking of traveling there might read the Bradt travel guide to Turkmenistan; I'd recommend Ken Silverstein's hilarious novel, where takes place entirely in Washington, DC, Turkmeniscam: How Lobbyists Fought To Flack For A Stalinist Dictatorship. I might add, that aside from North Korea, Turkmenistan is the world's only remaining Stalinist dictatorship. I always wanted to go there to see some of the old Silk Road towns, like Ashkhabad, but there isn't really much left to see after you've taken a gander at the Ashgabat Flagpole (the world's tallest freestanding flagpole). Instead, there's the Darvaza Flaming Crater which is where, 40 years ago, n oil rig collapsed into a huge cavern of natural gas, creating a fire-filled crater. It's still burning and is hyped as the Gates of Hell.

We've both been to Calcutta many a few times-- Roland again this year-- and that's certainly worth a visit for it's old architecture from the days it was capital of the Raj. It's one of the places where it is inexpensive and filled with plenty of value including wonderful hotels and restaurants.

Roland is really jonesin' for a trip to Ethiopia, and Addis Ababa is the 7th cheapest in the world. But it doesn't have much allure for me and I'm holding out for Madagascar and South Africa. I'm not a big fan of Ethiopia's very distinctive cuisine-- which is available in great abundance on Fairfax Avenue in L.A.-- but Addis Ababa boats lots of colonial monuments and Lucy, humankind's 3-million-year-old ancestor, can be found at the National Museum there.

Numbers 9 and 10 are Tegucigalpa, Honduras and Windhoek, Namibia, neither of which I expect to visit any time soon, regardless of the cheap prices. Well... maybe Tegucigalpa if it's on the way someplace nice.

Tangier, Morocco, Rolling Stones... Paul Bowles

There are many timeless qualities about Morocco, timeless and charming, but it's a very different place now than it was the first time I went in the summer of 1969. Right now I'm putting the finishing touches on a trip there-- there have been a dozen since the first one-- and this time it'll basically just be to rent a house in Marrakesh's old city for a month... take some day trips to Essaouira, west on the sea and down over the High Atlas to Taroundant, two of my favorite smaller cities in Morocco. We're flying directly into Marrakech from London, something I don't think was possible in the '60s. I recall always either driving there or taking public transportation from either Casablanca, where Mococco's big international airport is, or from Fes.

The first time I went, though, it was in my VW van and we took a ferry from Algeciras in the south of Spain, a wonderful way to arrive in Morocco for the first time and gradually feel everything change-- the sights, sounds, smells-- between Europe and Africa. I had an idea that Tangier was like the Times Square of Morocco, a place to be avoided until you were hip to the hustles of the country. We took the boat across from Algeciras to Ceuta, still part of Spain, and then drove to Tétouan and the southeast to Rabat, missing Tangier entirely. After spending all of July traveling around Morocco we felt savvy enough to exit via Tangier. It wasn't for years until I really started liking the city and only then because I had a friend who lived there and who was able to introduce me to its secrets.

This weekend, the NY Times has a travel guide to getting lost in Tangier, Tangier in the high summer, in fact, something I've long learned to avoid. I love the "getting lost in" concept though.

Tangier seemed a good starting point. Not only does it have a magnificent medina that holds out the promise of geographical bafflement, but it is itself also lost in time and space. Since antiquity, Tangier-- at the mouth of the Mediterranean, roughly nine miles from Spain-- has been a gray zone between Africa and Europe, never quite belonging fully to one or the other, though controlled, for greater or lesser spells, by Carthaginian, Roman, British, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Arab forces.

Today, Tangier is known in America thanks in no small part to Paul Bowles, the novelist and composer who settled there in 1947, and the Beat Generation who followed him in search of cheap, exotic living (and, as William S. Burroughs said, “for the boys and the hashish”). For a few decades, Tangier was a playground for the wealthy and the literary-minded, but by the 1980s it was crumbling and dismal. When I told a friend who had visited in 1998 that I would be there more than a week, he was appalled.

Although the first time I went to Morocco I was hanging out with Jimi Hendrix, down south in Essaouira, the Rolling Stones-- and especially Brian Jones-- went there earlier than I did and got me interested in the place. Ironically it was at my friend Absalam's house in Tangier that the Stones recorded part of Steel Wheels in 1989. Good documentary from a Stones' trips to Morocco:





Tip: if you decide to go, reading Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky is more important than any guide book

Mexicana Airlines Ceases Operations

When Mexicana Airlines went bankrupt in the beginning of the month, most people thought they would, give up some routes, make some cutbacks and do some deals and be right back in business. Today they halted all flights. It was Mexico's biggest airline and the country's first-- third oldest in the world operating under the same name (after KLM and Quantas) and operated both domestically and internationally. It was the biggest foreign carrier, passengerwise, using LAX. With 110 aircraft and more than 11 million passengers annually, it accounted for close to a third of all domestic passengers in Mexico, primarily by ramping up operations at its 2 discount subsidiaries, Click and Link (both of which also ceased operations).

Last week an investor's group, Tenedora K bought 95% of the business, the pilots unions owning the rest. The Chapter 15 bankruptcy petition, which lists more than $500 million in assets and $1 billion in debt, bars U.S. creditors from seizing planes or canceling contracts. The airline is expected to restructure and start up operations again but no one is saying when. Meanwhile, Aeromexico, Interjet, Volaris and American Airlines are offering to accommodate stranded fliers. The investment group has been trying to squeeze more concessions out of the airlines' unions.

I fly a lot-- and on a lot of airlines a lot funkier than Mexicana. Sometimes Roland has to drug himself to get on puddlejumpers that fly domestically in places like Mali, India, Thailand and Egypt. So when we read last week that American Airlines isn't maintaining their planes properly, we let out a collective gulp. That's been a long time fear of ours-- corporate owners cutting back on resources for proper maintenance. And now the FAA is fining American for "$24.2 million for failing to adequately address a problem with wheel-well wiring that could cause fires in its fleet of 245 McDonnell Douglas MD-80 airplanes."

That comes right on top of the Justice Department signing off on a monopolistic merger between United and Continental that will create the world's largest airline-- and offer passengers ever fewer choices in the skies.

The airlines serve a combined 144 million passengers per year, flying to 370 destinations.

Critics of the merger between United and Continental have included Rep. James Oberstar (D., Minn.), the chairman of the House Transportation Committee.

During a hearing in June, Oberstar objected strongly to the proposed deal, arguing that continued consolidation in the airline industry will lead to "little choice for passengers, little choice for cities, little choice for competition."

"The Justice Department ought to turn it down," Oberstar said of the United-Continental bid to merge, adding, "The moment this thing is approved, I will draft and introduce legislation to reestablish market regulation by the government of airlines."

I wonder when the airlines really will start charging to use on flight toilets. They've certainly turning everything else they do into ways to rip off their passengers.

Hong Kong: One Country, Two Different Identities

Tourism has been an important part of the Hong Kong economy for decades and the last figures I was able to find showed around 26 million visitors annually-- around half of whom come from Mainland China. I asked Sandra McAubre, who normally writes on the topic of sports management degree programs to do a guest post on the feelings of Hong Kong Chinese about the change of status of the former British crown colony. She welcomes your comments at her email id: SandraA@sportsmanagementdegrees.net/ Her post follows:

How does it feel to be born Chinese, raised the British way of life, and then go back to being Chinese all over again? For the middle-aged citizen of Hong Kong, this is a very real conundrum-- the tiny island nation which belongs to China was leased to the British in 1898 for a period of 99 years. And so in 1997, it was officially handed over to the Chinese with much pomp and splendor. How do you cope with going from capitalist to socialist society in the blink of an eye? Fortunately for the people of Hong Kong, the island is not governed by the rules of Mainland China; rather, it is called a Special Administrative District and is being run the way it was when it was under the British. And so they’re able to retain their British way of life even as they revert back to their Chinese identity.

If you were to visit both Hong Kong and China, you would not be able to visibly tell the difference in the way of life in both places, but if you lived in either or both of them for some time, I guess the difference would become obvious. The larger cities of China may seem to be going the cosmopolitan route and adopting the Western way of life, but underneath the suits and inside the swanky multi-storied skyscrapers runs the thread of communism, the administration that allows only one child a couple, punishes people who speak against the State, and runs the country with an iron hand. China has only polished its external appearance to keep pace with the rest of the world and open its doors to developers and multinationals who provide opportunities for the nation to grow and flourish. Beneath the tip of the iceberg is a nation that is still proudly socialistic and which closely guards its secrets.

The people of Hong Kong are free to lead open lives, say what they want, and do what they wish to within the confines of the law that existed over the past century. But because they are no longer British, there is some form of censorship, even if it is self-imposed, as if they were a little apprehensive about some invisible punishment. And perhaps they are justified in trying to adhere to the way of life that China follows because this special status expires in 50 years. With 13 of them are already gone, only time will tell whether Hong Kong will still remain the capitalist economic success that it is or if it will slowly be assimilated into socialistic China and be forced to accept a new way
of life.

I recently visited Hong Kong and was impressed with the efficiency of the nation (I’m still unable to accept it is a part of China), and I sincerely hope it retains its unique flavor that is part British and part Asian (I cannot say Chinese in all honesty), no matter how many years go by.

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.

Travel Safety-- WE ARE Passengers Not Prisoners

I want to share a little website with you than my old friend Ian put together, Passengers Not Prisoners. I think any traveler will relate to it. Ian's an anger-management and conflict resolution counselor and lecturer. He's way into violence prevention and is always on the road speaking at shelters, schools, hospitals, clinics, and drug-treatment programs. (He's also a record producer and concert promoter.) This is the intro he wrote for Passengers Not Prisoners:

“(Don’t) stay in your place.”

Freely exercise the right to travel, and more fully know your world and that it is almost invariably a safe place. The vast majority of the people on the planet are not benevolent, they are simply indifferent to you.

The world is not becoming more dangerous, it is becoming safer. A person was six times more likely to be murdered in the Middle Ages than today. It is just that today, through the mass-media, we hear about more instances which leads to a distorted sense of jeopardy.

People invariably only attack one category of victims: those that they feel deserve it. Out of the over 6-billion people alive today, they have better people to harm than you so the key is to not give them a reason to do it. (Even among those incarcerated for violent crimes, in study after study it has consistently been found that less than 6 percent of them can be clinically classified as sadistic.)

Aggression is communication, arguably the first act of communication. All individuals, no matter how wrong they may be, at the moment of action believe that they are right. Counter-attacking only leads to an intensification of conflict and a greater sense of isolation and opposition. Empathy (emotional understanding of others) and education are the most potent antidotes to softening adversarialism.

I've been traveling since I was 16 years old, when I tried to hitch hike to Miami Beach from Brooklyn to spend Pessach with my grandparents. Two years later I succeeded in hitching to Los Angeles, where I stowed away on a ship headed for-- in a roundabout way-- Tonga. I still haven't gotten to Tonga... but I'm workin' on it. Meanwhile, all of what Ian is talking about is the kind of stuff I've experienced first hand-- walking around in "wild" places, from Timbuktu and Cairo, East Jerusalem, Tangier, Kandahar, Katmandu, Tehran, East Berlin (back in the day), Mexico City, the slums of Bombay, Calcutta, Istanbul... and, yes, it all seemed mighty safe.

On the other hand, sometimes it seems like the ruling elites are discouraging travel and drumming up divisiveness across the world. Ian addresses it as Homeland Insecurity:

A fundamental confusion seems to have occurred. The government and the entire transportation industry exists because of us. They work for us (the citizens), we do not work for them. The harassment and systematic subjugation of innocent and law-abiding individuals must stop.

Positive change almost always fails because of the inability of a system to admit its own failure, instead amplifying the intensity of what it is already doing rather than truly changing course, and, thus, compounding the original error.

Raise the bar higher and the competition inevitably rises as well. Feeling secure does not equal true security. Some risk will always exist. We will never have (…and never have had) total world peace. All that we can strive for is ever-increasing relative peace. 80 percent of the resources should not be spent attempting to control the ultra-exceptional (i.e., far less than 1 percent of instances) that by their very unique and extreme nature are unpreventable.

Clearly, the next terrorist attack will come from within the system designed to prevent it. As the system grows larger and the number of employees goes up, so does the exposure, as well as standards and ability to supervise going down.


UPDATE: Airline Food-- Worse Than You Thought

It's kind of been a truism of air travel for decades that the food isn't too good-- although in international first class it kind of is. But do the roaches and bacteria know first class from steerage? FDA inspectors found a host of health violations in recent inspections of the 3 major airline catering facilities (serving Delta, American, United, US Airways and Continental). The conditions for the food prep were rated "unsanitary and unsafe."

The FDA reports say many facilities store food at improper temperatures, use unclean equipment and employ workers who practice poor hygiene. At some, there were cockroaches, flies, mice and other signs of inadequate pest control.

10 Most Well-Known Addresses in the World

Sheryl Owen asked me to share a post, 10 Most Well-Known Addresses in the World from her blog here. The first thing that struck me off about it was that the 4th best known address in the world, and the first outside of the U.S., was 221B Baker Street in London, home of the Sherlock Holmes Museum. I used to have an office in London down the street from there. I would pass it every day. It was never all that busy-- not in the mornings, not at lunch time, not in the evenings, not in the summer and not in the winter. It wasn't deserted. It just wasn't a big deal. And it's better known than 10 Downing Street? And no Kremlin? Tiananmen Square? Masjid al-Haram, home of the Kaaba? The UN? [UPDATE: Bruce Tenenbaum e-mailed me three minutes after this was posted and asked where the Taj Mahal is on the list. Good question.]

Well, thank God there's nothing in Las Vegas listed. My next stop is Marrakesh and I would have thought the Djemaa el Fna would at least be as well known as... 221 B Baker Street. Their post:

We thought it would be interesting to put together a list of the 10 most popular and/or well-known addresses in the World.  Now the tenants in several of these addresses (at least #1) change on a regular basis, but the fact that these addresses are significant does not change.  The structures and history surrounding each of these will keep them well known for years to come.

1. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC-- This is the address where arguably the World’s most powerful man lives: the President of the United States. Known as the White House, it is located in Washington, DC and it is a national treasure.

2. 11 Wall Street New York, NY-- This is home of the New York Stock Exchange.  Tourists travel here year-round to visit the charging bull statue and to take in the hustle and bustle of one of the financial centers of the world.

3. 350 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10118-- This is where the previous world’s tallest building stands: the Empire State Building. It’s 102 stories high, and is a world-famous attraction for tourists and locals alike.   In addition, it is featured in several Hollywood movies.

4. 221 B Baker St, London, England-- This is the address to the Sherlock Homes Museum (given the address in March of 1990).  When the Sherlock Holmes series of books were written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, street numbers in London mostly stopped at 100 and even to this day the Museum’s address is out of sequence on the block.  That didn’t stop it though from becoming one of the most popular addresses of all time.

5. Tour Eiffel Champ de Mars, Paris-- Paris’s number one attraction is this address where the Eiffel Tower stands. For tourists, going to Paris is never complete unless you’ve been here. At night, there are beautiful lights you can’t help but stare at.

6. 4059 Mt Lee Dr. Hollywood, CA 90068-- This is the exact address where the Hollywood sign stands. It’s a mountain, but is now a preserved site to prevent its destruction. It’s featured frequently in Hollywood movies as well.

7. Buckingham Palace, London, England-- The most famous place in the United Kingdom. This palace is where the royal family lives and is often a place of attraction because of its important and beauty. It’s very old and retains its classic yet elegant look.

8. Statue of Liberty, Liberty Island New York, NY 10004-- This is yet another attraction in New York, the Statue of Liberty.  This is a symbol of America’s open arms and welcomed many immigrants into the country.  It’s known around the world and a top tourist destination in the U.S.

9. Manager Square, Bethlehem, West Bank--The Church of the Nativity is located here and this is a very well known and holy site for Christians from around the World.  This is cherished as the site where the baby Jesus was born and laid in the manger.

10. 2 Macquarie Street, Sydney-- This is the most popular place in Australia, the Opera House. Here, you can watch plays, operas, etc. and enjoy the beauty of the place at the same time. It’s a must-see if you’re in Australia and is no doubt the most recognized place in Australia.

It’s actually difficult to stop with just 10 famous addresses from around the World there are so many great places to go and visit and addresses that are extremely important to individual nations and to various religious groups. There are lots of honorable mentions from the Vatican to the world’s tallest building in Dubai, we hope you spend a few minutes to think about all the addresses that you think should be in the top 10 of the World.