Carpetblogger

Newsflash: Zimbabwe Traumatizes Carpetblogger

To steal from Tolstoy, all functional countries resemble each other, but every fucked up country is fucked up in its own way.  Pakistan has a substantial population of medieval warlords locked in a  struggle to return the country to the glories of the 14^th century, only with nukes.  Afghanistan has never really wanted to enter the 20^th century and the Taliban will ensure it never will. Qat-addled Yemen operates according to its own ancient principles. Turkmenistan is a cartoon.

Zimbabwe blows them all out of the water.

On arrival, my South African Airways flight descended from rainy clouds, only to abort the landing twice within a couple hundred feet of the ground. After sharply ovaling for 20 minutes, the pilot announced that he was waiting for the runway lights to come back on. The hotel – the 13-floor Crown Plaza in the center of the city – not only did not have internet or air conditioning, it also had no phones – as in “unable to call down for room service” no phone.  Not that it mattered; there really wasn’t much on offer in the restaurant, just gristly meat and starchy vegetables.

Lots of African cities look like they don’t work but they do. Harare looks like it works but it doesn’t. It’s attractive and organized with long straight, carefully signposted thoroughfares, edged by (albeit poorly maintained) cycle paths. Its wide avenues are lined with hundreds of mature jacarandas and flame trees, planted with British colonial precision 50 or 60 years ago. “Tree Cutting Available” signs posted on their trunks looked ominous.  As they dripped their purple and red blooms on the pavements, it was easy to imagine them hacked apart for firewood when cooking fuel becomes impossible to buy.

One of the benefits of a deprived middle class with no access to consumer goods and no money to buy them is very little trash. This is good because there’s no collection. The parking lot of the country’s largest public hospital was empty. All hospitals and clinics have shut their doors, which hasn’t done much to improve the cholera situation. I was told it’s a crisis if one percent of cholera cases die. Rumors are that in Zimbabwe, 10 percent of Cholera cases die. Now that it’s rainy season and the sewers overflow into water supplies, the coming outbreak should be particularly vivid.

Unlike Afghanistan or Somalia, Zimbabwe isn’t lawless. People queue politely at the ATMs, for buses and for fuel. Traffic laws are carefully obeyed, even when there’s no electricity to run the robots (south African for traffic lights, a term I absolutely adore and will use from now on. When a South African says it, it sounds like “rabbit”). People still throw their trash in bins, even though it won’t be collected. Harare has a substantial middle class population, which makes what’s happening here even harder to understand.

 I didn’t really believe it when colleagues said there is no food in the shops. It’s not 100% accurate. The situation has improved somewhat from six months ago when there really was nothing to buy. Since then, US dollars have been legalized as tender in certain shops. Now, there is some food in supermarkets but it's priced in US dollars. There’s absolutely nothing if you have Zimbabwe dollars, which is what most people have. With its dairy shelves filled with leaky bottled water, one market serving a middle class neighborhood reminded me of Moscow in 1991. The staples aisle stocked nothing but Mezoe Orange Crush, a Fanta-like soft drink that is definitely a Zimbabwean staple, but isn’t terribly nutritious. In the checkout line, I stood next to a man who had a rusty shopping cart filled with lunch box-sized bags of potato chips.

In an ordinary national chain, a loaf of Wonder-type white bread was $1.20. Two pounds of flour cost more than $3, payable only in USD. The typical wage in Zimbabwe? About 5 million Zim dollars, or about 10 USD, depending on the inflation rate. Should bread be available in Zim dollars, it cost 1.2 million.

Prices are bad enough, but accessing one’s money is next to impossible. There’s a daily withdrawal limit 500,000 Zim dollars from ATMs. That’s about 50 cents, or enough for bus fare home from work. All day long, lines of thousands of civil servants, office workers, teachers, police and military curve around buildings and down city blocks, waiting to use ATMs that will probably be out of money before most people reach them. Yet people continue to wait.

The whole visit was a lesson in macro-economics. If you want to understand why it’s like this, the short answer is nationalization of the farms and price controls. Other people can explain it better than I can. But it's critical to understand that Zimbabwe isn’t like it is because of war or natural disaster or the tragedy of history. It’s a predictable result of intentional economic policies made by people who should know better.

It’s one thing to see typical African or Asian poverty. Children shitting on train tracks in Delhi, spectacularly maimed beggars in Sana’a and AIDS victims sleeping on the streets in Addis are shocking but classifiable as foreign and other. Middle class people rely on electricity and mobile phone and ATMs to manage their lives. They expect their paychecks to be able to cover their rent and their food and their children’s education. That they can suddenly find their salaries worthless overnight, their health care and education systems shut down, their trash piling in the streets and their water fouled by sewage is fundamentally understandable. You know it could happen to you.

Ask Carpetblogger: What's your Favorite Haman?

Sunday's New York Times travel section has a story about Istanbul's tourist hamams and high-end spas. The piece, which was written by Carpetfriend and neighbor Parisian Suzanne, singles out the obvious ones -- Çemberlitaş and Cagaloğlu in Sultanahmet about which we've written before here and here -- and expensive spas that, in the unlikely event we'd ever darken their door, probably wouldn't let us in anyway. Reading this story, you'd think there's nowhere affordable in Istanbul to get a scrub.

We happen to have it on good authority that earlier versions of the story included cheaper hamam alternatives. We know this because we provided the data, which included the caveat that, of the three people we know who have visited the ghetto hamman at the end of our street we often recommend, two came away with unpleasant skin conditions. Why does the New York Times hate folliculitis? Since our voice cannot be silenced by the mainstream media, we will use this platform* -- read by tens of people -- to mention hamams at which we personally have never gotten any skin diseases.

First of all, there's nothing wrong with Çemberlitaş and Cagaloğlu other than they are expensive, perfunctory and crowded. If you have not yet become comfortable with taking off all your clothes in front of strangers with whom you do not share a language and having most inches of your body scrubbed by pendulous-breasted women in bikini bottoms, we recommend you have your first hamman experience at one of these two places. The scrub isn't going to go anywhere you don't want it too and the ladies can grunt enough English to suggest you need a wax. The hamam spaces are exceptionally beautiful and the worst that will happen to happen to you is you will see parts of a 60 year old Dutch woman that you wish you had not.

Because no one is going to explain anything to you at the neighborhood hamams and the potential for trauma is high, it helps to understand the drill before you head off to one. Most importantly, few local hamams are big enough to have separate sections for men and women, so men's hours are usually in the mornings and evenings and women's hours during are during the day. Don't walk in during men's hours, or you're going to see parts of hairy Turkish men you wish you had not.

My personal favorite is the Eski Kaplıca in Bursa (or rather, Çekirge). Although it is rather pricey (35YTL), it still attracts a local crowd of very, very large older women (suggesting a dual pricing structure). Since Bursa is known for its hot springs, instead of sweating on hot marble you sit in hot sulphuric pools until the attendant is ready to scrub you. We took Red State Sibling there back in April and both of us were taken aback at all the different shapes and lengths breasts can take. The ladies laughed out loud at our flat chests and inability to sit for long under the scalding stream of spring water flowing out of the wall. I recommend this hamam for ridding yourself of any preconceived notions of the shape female bodies can take.

If we weren't lazy, we'd take a ferry over to Üsküdar and try out the Çinili hamam there. It's been recommended by people we like, but we are lazy and Üsküdar is pretty far away. If you go, please report.

Finally, there's the Fıruzağa Historic Hamam at the end of Çukurcuma. Tucked back next to an ironmonger, it looks rather gritty from the outside. The changing cabins aren't very impressive and the squat toilets, by which you have to pass to enter the steam rooms,  smell bad. A full scrub here costs 25 YTL, which is about as cheap as they come.  The people we know who've had negative experiences there suggest -- a bit snottily, as a matter of fact -- that you get what you pay for. That may be, but if you are looking for a  neighborhood hamam experience and are prepared to have a scrub that's as invasive as the Çemberlitaş scrub is half-assed, Fıruzağa is for you. Just bring your own kese, okay?

Let's talk about cleanliness. All hamams are hot and steamy and smell a bit like mildew. Because I long ago learned to shut off my peripheral thought ("How often do they use bleach?" "Do you think the micoroganisms growing in there are Ottoman era as well?" "Do they use fresh wax for everyone?"), I don't think about things like this.  However, I can't not think about the ropes of skin  -- my own and everyone else's -- produced by the scrub. Where does all that skin go? Is the cursory bucketful of water enough to send the previous scrubee's leftovers down the drain? Does it clog the pipes eventually?

There's another way to look at the skin issue. The scrubbing ladies are as grossed out about it as we are. Because we don't generally exfoliate with the same degree of aggressiveness as regular haman-goers, they view us -- with all our nasty dead skin -- as dirty. Just keep that in mind as you lie on the slab.

*Let's not lose sight of the fact that like the NYT travel section we, too, embrace the opportunity for editorial content to be driven by profit.

Himalaya Pimp

Longtime readers may know that Carpetblogger and the Producer spent 2003 traveling around the world. In fact, on this day five years ago, we hiked out of Tiger Leaping Gorge in northern Yunan Province to see a Chinese dude pointing his fingers like guns at us and "pew! pew! pew!"'ing with glee as a means of informing us the US had invaded Iraq that day.

About a week or two later, we were in Litang, a Tibetan city in far western Sichuan. In many ways, Western Sichuan is more Tibetan than Tibet (a characteristic it shares with Ladakh and northern Himachal Pradesh in India). I suppose it's too remote for the Chinese to fuck up too badly. Indeed, Litang is one of the highest cities in the world. I haven't been able to find any news reports about violence there, but apparently it is a center of Tibetan resistance and has a strong Khampa influence, it's probably safe to say there have been crackdowns. Khampas are 100% badasses.

I dug up the email (I didn't even have a blog in those days!) I sent home about Litang. Even after 14 countries in 14 months, this place is seared into my brain.

There have been two times while traveling that we genuinely felt we had landed on a different planet. Burma was one and Litang, on the western edge of Tibet is the other. here's absolutely nothing remarkable about the town itself, except that it lies at about 13,500 feet on an enormous plain surrounded by snow capped "hills." It doesn't look that different from Baker City, Oregon, only there are more yaks.

To get there, we spent two days on dirt roads, crossing passes of between 18,000 and 20,000 feet high. Imagine driving from Portland to Seattle, along the crest of the Cascades, on unpaved forest service roads, in an 18 seat bus that hadn't had new shocks since the Mao administration, with 25 of your closest Chinese and Tibetan friends, many of whom are vomiting yak butter. One two-hour stretch crossed a boulder-strewn wasteland of eroded mountains and frozen shallow lakes. It was probably at least 18,000 feet high. No one lived there. I have never seen anything like it.

Litang's population is what truly distinguishes it from the rest of China. It is the largest town in the area and many of the nomads come down from the hills to deal in yak hide and to see and be seen at its markets. We were frequently greeted with a spontaneous "tashi delek," the Tibetan hello.

One thing that foreigners in China must accustom themselves to is being stared at. I feel like I was able to repay six weeks of staring in Litang. I couldn't keep my eyes off some of these people. I nearly got whiplash every time someone walked past me.

Hats and sunglasses are de riguer. The men, especially, wore, all manner of them, made from all sorts of material-- mostly fur. One guy had a two foot-tall fur hat, with a long tail down his back, and enormous Karl Lagerfeld-style sunglasses. Monks had red or gold caps. Some men wore hats of gold and scarlet brocade with fur ear flaps, and modern wraparound sunglasses with yellow lenses.

Some of the people were as dark as Africans. Others looked like they came from central casting for American Indians, with turquoise jewelery pinning thick braids to their heads. Some women wore their hair in the traditional 108 braids, wrapped with silver bangles. Every man had a knife strapped to his waist and the women wear all their amber and silver bangles, all the time. Many of them look shaggy, like their embroidered yak hair coats are a natural part of their skin.

The young men were truly astonishing. Most were tall, with long dark hair. They wore scarlet hip-length jackets with yak hair lining off one shoulder, and prayer beads around their necks. Huge round Elton-john style sunglasses and silver knives finished off the look. They walked with a swagger of indeterminate origin. I call it Himalayan pimp, but the look works.

I wouldn't have been surprised to see them all ride out of town in cloud of dust, back into the hills, leaving an empty city behind, and us wondering if it was at all real.

Other than staring at people, and being stared at ourselves, there wasn't a whole lot to do in Litang, so we sampled the local cuisine which is heavily reliant on yak. Yak is our new favorite meat. It's very fatty and a little gamy. It's great on noodles for breakfast and dried for long busrides.

Yak butter tea, however, is truly vile. I ordered a Tibetan breakfast one morning, and it came with the two staples of the Tibetan diet -- yak butter tea and tsampas, which are little baked barley biscuits. Both are staples of Tibetan hospitality. They look like little dried turds and are barely edible. Yak butter tea tastes like sour milk mixed with soap and salt. Yak butter has a very distinctive smell, and now we smell it everywhere, especially around monks, who light their monasteries with yak butter lamps.

(  Unfortunately, I took my photos in a media known as "film" so I can't post them without substantial effort.)

Within a few more weeks we were in Lhasa. Needless to say, we have been following the Chinese crackdown with interest and a great deal of sadness. I don't have a lot of confidence in the Tibetans' ability to govern themselves effectively (in a later email, I concluded they would be a lot better off if they stopped walking around in circles worshiping rocks and started organizing), but they deserve a lot better than this. 

I'm boycotting Beijing.

A Visit to Englandistan

It's a good thing that we're already used to hard, slow travel in difficult conditions. It took eight and a half hours to travel 150 miles from Heathrow to Shropshire (near the Welsh border) on flooded roads, just like Africa! The upside was, by escaping the flooded, jammed freeway and taking our chances on the country roads, we saw much more of the English countryside than we imagined we would on this short trip. And we got to drive the rental car through rivers!

The heaviest rains in history hardly slowed down the wedding, though. A tractor was dispatched to bring the groom's grandmother and the organist to the ceremony.  People like us who came from places that were 45 degrees warmer and brought completely inappropriate clothes felt dumb for failing to check Accu-weather. No one, apparently, plans to do anything outside in July in England.

A number of former colonists were quite impressed with merry old England. In fact, some of us wanted to become English so chances would increase that we could have a house like this, where the reception was held. LOVED the hedgerows.

The place is called Lorton Park. It isn't that old (1873 I think), but it is still lived in by the family whose ancestors' photos and portraits hang on the walls of the library. They rent it out now to cover its substantial maintenance costs. Set among wheat and cornfields, it was once 16,000 acres. Now, due to divorces and taxes, it's only 2000 acres. The manager gave me and the producer a tour of its cobwebby old kitchen, billiard and gun rooms in the lower level, which looked like they had never been remodeled, with all the old fixtures (labeled bells used to ring the servants from different areas of the house) and furniture. It made me nostalgic for someone else's past.

It wouldn't be Carpetblog if we didn't take issue with a few things, however. The points are minor, but important:

• Someone forgot to bring the confetti cannons! Heads should roll.
• The toasts. They were nice, for sure. But a lot of important entities were not acknowledged and that has been worrying me a little. Mothers, check. Fathers, check. Those are very important. But what about the beautiful women? Lost territories? The martyrs?
• Gin was the only liquor available at the bar (from which the beer and wine flowed admirably). But Sto Gram of gin? When we asked the bar tender why there was only gin, she answered "because this is an English wedding," as if that explained anything.

The Baku diaspora reacts to the news of no vodka

The ceremony took place in the chapel of the groom's boarding school (English boarding schools - where head boy is a command as well as a position) and was performed by a vicar (a word that always makes me giggle). And, there were lots of brilliant feathered and beribboned hats. Really, it couldn't have been more English.

How did this match ever happen? An ass for every saddle, I guess

Supermarket Porn

The Producer and I spent the last week in Latvia and Estonia. Once again, we found that our agenda when living overseas is quite a bit different than it is when we’re just traveling.

First of all is the choice of destinations. If we had been paying for the trip, we wouldn’t have selected the Baltics. We put a premium on good food, good value for the money and a place that will throw us off stride for a few days. The Baltics have none of these things, which was sort of the point.

Tallinn from St. Olaf's Tower, by The Producer

When we’re on break from Crapistan, we seek the opposite. We still want good food, but good in the way we like it at home – lots of spice and variety, including the occasional vegetable. That means that instead of sampling Baltic specialties like jellied meat covered in brown sauce, we sought out Indian and Thai. We’re not footing the bill, so as long there’s per diem, price is not a serious consideration, which is good because the Baltics are Europrices now. We get enough disorientation in Ukraine and Baku, so we’re thrilled if we get to speak our own language and read a familiar alphabet. I love that Riga and Tallinn are designed never to inconvenience Finnish retirees and British stag parties with untranslated menus and surly service.

Coming from one of Europe’s ghettos, the Baltics are paradise. Unpredictability is no longer allowed under EU directives. Risks are mitigated. Lines are toed. Traffic laws are obeyed.

It’s glorious.

More than anything else, we visit places like this for the malls, especially the Supermarkets. The one-stop shopping experience might be the pinnacle of human accomplishment. I love a good bazaar – the uncertainty, the potential for humiliation – as much as the next gal, but sometimes it’s nice just to go in, get everything on the list with a minimum of human interaction and bad smells and get out.

Nevsky Cathdral in Tallinn

I love to visit supermarkets. I learn a lot about a country’s priorities by the way food is displayed and marketed. I love color-coordinated shelves, the impeccable order of which is guided by the precise logic of an invisible hand. My super-size, rust-free cart is never full, but I like the way its round wheels glide smoothly down waxed aisles, turning sharply at right angles, never skidding on stray grains of rice on the floor. I buy things I didn’t know I was missing, like Tabasco sauce and rock salt.

I resist the urge to hoard things like brown sugar or taco shells because I know that if I ever go back to Tallinn’s Rimi Hipermarket, they’ll be there. No one will ever get an SMS from a Rimi “Hurry! They’ve got ginger today!”

Riga Graffitti, by The Producer

Even if I don’t want them in my life every day, I feel satisfied just knowing these shrines to consumerism and efficiency still exist.

There’s also the hope that by trolling the spotless paradise of a Hipermarket, I’ll find the one gadgety thing that will make the gears of hastily set-up household run more smoothly, or that ingredient for the recipe that never tastes right because we can’t find the appropriate type of vinegar. Or maybe I’ll find American peanut butter, with the correct proportion of sugar, oil and preservatives.

I never do, but just knowing I might sustains the fantasy.

Enjoy the Silence

Check in at Gridskipper for an exclusive Carpetblog report on the Depeche Mode Baar we visited in Tallinn (every other word in Estonian seems to have a superfluous letter).

Handy link if you want to pick up a tribute album done by Estonian bands.

Kiek in de Kok

Kiek in de Kok, originally uploaded by Carpetblogger.

Say out loud.

One of Star Alliance's Lesser Known Partners?

If duty calls and one must travel to, say, Zapororiziya for some meetings, one has many airline options: UmAir, DonbassAero, DniproAvia. All of these firms keep their Anatovs, Tupolevs and Yaks in top condition, I'm sure. Someday I plan to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of these products of the Soviet aviation industry ("Yak-40 vs Yak-42: The extra 2 makes all the difference").

My theory on all these domestic airlines is they're all completely safe -- until they're not. But even I paused before climbing aboard this Anatov run by "ARP 410 Airlines."

Printed on the outside of the riveted emergency exit: "use crash axe here."

Go Nuclear -- Rerun

Since nothing interesting seems to happen in Ukraine -- at least now that I'm here -- I am going to move into re-runs. Gadling has been posting about Chernobyl tours, which inspired me. When the Producer and I traveled around the world in 2003, we stopped in Kyiv for a few weeks to visit a friend. During our visit, we toured Chernobyl. This is what I wrote about it.

Go Nuclear

The former Soviet Union is rife with environmental catastrophes that have been hidden from prying eyes from decades. There are so many, in fact, that it may be time for the creation of another tourism category called, "Soviet Environmental Disasters--Greatest Hits."

Chernobyl is located just 70 miles north of Kiev and several local travel agencies offer tours. After spending a day wandering around the site of the world's worst industrial accident, I'm not sure I know any more about the mechanics of the catastrophe than I did before. I did, however, gain insight into the myths that have grown up around it. These reveal far more about the human side of the disaster than the facts anyway.

During Soviet times, the ground was always plowed and ready for rumor planting. The Chernobyl seeds were sown early in the morning on April 26th, 1986. In the intervening 17 years, myths about the disaster have taken root deep in the toxic soil. These "truths" seem to serve a number of purposes. In the days and months following the accident, they filled the information vacuum. Now, they promote the idea of Ukrainian impotence in the face of overwhelming Soviet power and fuel the fires of animosity between Ukrainians and Russians.

They also provide cover. In some cases, the truth is too awful to articulate.

We visited on a shiny fall day. Peasants were finishing up their harvest and old women in headscarves sold baskets of fresh mushrooms and apples alongside the road. As we neared the reactor, no dead trees, multi-headed deer or scorched earth provided physical evidence of what had happened. In fact, the vegetation was particularly lush and animal life abundant, both free to thrive without human interference.

In the six hours or so we spent in the zones, we received less radiation than from the average X-ray, or so they say. Still, visitors are instructed not to touch anything, just to be safe.

Geiger reading in front of the infamous Reactor #4

Rimma, our official guide, carried a Geiger counter, which would shut itself off at the point at which radiation levels became too high for safety. It never reached that point and it was a fun toy to have along. It was useful for conducting spot checks of radiation levels in buildings, on vegetation and on local dogs.

The first stop in the outer zone was the "Equipment Cemetery." Neat rows of hundreds and hundreds of buses, trucks, military helicopters, private cars and ambulances rust in the field where they were abandoned. These vehicles were contaminated, but not so badly that they needed to be buried like hundreds of others.

Vehicle graveyard

Chernobyl may be the name most associated with the disaster, but the city most affected by it was the town nearest the reactor, Prypiat. Prypiat lies within the Inner Zone, which includes the 10 kilometers closest to the reactor. No one lives in the Inner Zone. In fact, all villages within the Inner Zone were bulldozed and buried. The only evidence of their existence is their road signs, which hang from the ceiling of the Chernobyl Museum in Kiev.

Built specifically to house plant workers, Prypiat was a young city designed in high Soviet style -- tall grey apartment blocks, wide boulevards, a culture house, ferris wheel, hotel and restaurant. Now, it's a ghost town, left exactly as it was when its residents fled in a big hurry. It's like a little time capsule of mid-80’s life in the Soviet Union, lacking any of the billboards, cafes and consumer culture that are now part of the landscape of every other city in the former Soviet Union. Its kindergarten was strewn with pages from "Uncle Lenin" picture books. Prypiat will probably continue to decay until someone has the money to bulldoze it. Or turn it into a theme park.

Prypiat Amusement Park

The most compelling rumors are those that made the Soviets look most craven. One of the more persistent is that families of high ranking local party officials were evacuated immediately after the fire started, at around 2:00 am on the morning of April 26. Rimma said it was impossible to know for sure if this really happened, but again, it's a plausible scenario and confirms the perception that in Soviet society, some people were more equal than others.

Evacuation of the rest of Prypiat’s 50,000 residents wasn’t complete until the evening of April 28th. Residents were allowed to take only one suitcase with them. It's now possible to explore their looted apartments, none of which have any refrigerators. Rimma said that because folks had stocked up on food in anticipation of the upcoming holiday, crews had to come in and remove the refrigerators to prevent an epidemic. She didn't know where the refrigerators are now.

Laundry on the line in Prypiat

The cause of the accident is shrouded in mystery and thus, a prime breeding ground for rumor. The truth is entombed in the concrete sarcophagus, but for some, the date of the accident provides important clues to its cause. Reactor workers report being under pressure from high officials to demonstrate above-average power output prior to May 1, the day when the accomplishments of "the workers" and glories of the Communist party were celebrated. The reactor and its turbines were pushed beyond their capacity, resulting in the fire that destroyed the reactor and released the radiation.

The truth may never be known.

It's also impossible to know how many people died as a direct result of the accident. There's a moving memorial to the firefighters who were the first on the scene, funded and built by their comrades. Its plaque reads, “to those who saved the world.” Only one of the first responders is still alive. His longevity is attributed to the fact that he had been at a wedding the night of the accident and arrived at the fire drunk on red wine and vodka. This confirms what every Russian or Ukrainian knows --that alcohol is armor and protects against every ill, even radiation poisoning.

Rimma said the death count could be in the hundreds of thousands – possibly millions. Official counts put the number of immediate deaths at 31.

Six hundred fifty thousand “liquidators” worked at the site in the months after the disaster. What compelled this army of workers to toil at the scene, putting themselves at huge risk of radiation exposure? Rimma attributed it to Soviets' deep-seated commitment to defend the motherland."If your mother needs your help," she explained, "you do what you must." Government propaganda played into this sentiment. "The Power of the Soviet People Is Greater than the Atom" read an enormous banner hung at the reactor site.

Unfortunately, the tour was very clinical. We didn’t have the chance to talk to anyone who had been directly affected by the disaster. By placing the disaster in the category of “history,” rather than an ongoing catastrophe that will affect generations to come, the tour diminished the tragedy of Chernobyl. This, too, may prove to be another convenient coping strategy for the Ukrainians who want to put the past behind them as quickly as possible.

Near the end of the tour, our small group stood on a railway bridge, throwing bread to catfish that live in the cooling pond next to the reactor. One monster, approximately seven feet long, surfaced and snatched half a loaf before disappearing into the dark water. "That's a normal size for catfish," Rimma said quickly.

Unverifiable. But plausible? Maybe.

Travel Tips

From World hum comes this clever list of travel hints from students who did a Semester at Sea program. I think there are some excellent ideas in here.

During our round-the-world journey in 2003, the Producer and I came up with some similar tips, though we entered some uncharted territory in our list. From an email we sent home from South Africa in the last two weeks of our 13 month trip:

*You can have a lot of fun once you stop worrying about getting sick, robbed, hurt, lost or dirty.

*All soap products -- including bar, shampoo and laundry detergent -- are interchangeable. Toothpaste does not fall into this category.

*Don't ever bother to learn the word for "why?" in the local language. In the unlikely event that you understand the words in the answer, you will still never, ever understand the logic, especially in the former Soviet Union.

*Act like the rest of the world and eat for nourishment, not for pleasure. Lower your expectations and you'll never be disappointed.

*Honey is the least transportable of all condiments.

*There are two types of hotels: those with cockroaches you can see and those with cockroaches you cannot see. The key to peaceful co-existence is boundaries. Accept cockroach activity on walls, but react with violence once it moves to the floor, or near the bed.

*If you see no local chickens, don't eat chicken, or eggs. Same goes for pigs and pork products.

*Never board a vehicle for long distance, remote travel that cannot be repaired with a hammer, strips of inner tube and sand. This includes about everything built after 1985.

*A pair of socks, even underwear, can be worn more than once.

*Never write your real occupation on a visa application. That said, sullen passport control officers do not appreciate whimsical answers such as "pet psychic" or "shepherd."

*When in Ethiopia, clear your plate. Every time.

*Abandon all preconceptions about the structure and content of toilet facilities.

*Ciproflaxin cures everything. Corollary: Self-medication is not that hard.

*Swimming or showering in your clothes counts as washing them. In some countries, so does walking in the rain.

*Outside of western countries, human life has very little value, mostly due to oversupply. This philosophy is reflected in the driving habits of bus and taxi drivers. Accept --nay, embrace -- the risk.

*Always sample the local intoxicant.

*Dogs can be racist.

*When a riverside street vendor offers you a bowl of tasty-looking noodles, shut off peripheral thought. Think, "my, those noodles look tasty. I think I'll have some." Do not think, "where does she wash her dishes?"

*Before boarding any form of public transport, double and triple check its destination with at least one woman. If no woman is available, ask a small child. If no small child is available, ask any sentient being, including sheep, before relying on a male.

*If if feels like there's an insect in your pants or shirt, there probably is. React accordingly.

*Travelers checks are a costly anachronism. In any country where they're cheap and convenient to cash, there's an ATM on every corner. Any national bank that cannot create a system of functioning ATMs will not cash a travellers check without an enormous, time-consuming fuss that may result in someone being physically removed from the bank. Leave home without them.

*Never make decisions about onward travel after bus rides in excess of 12 hours.

*When on foot or bicycle in Africa, even giraffes are scary.