I’ve sat outside an airport or a train or bus station more times than I care to remember, crying my eyes out or feeling generally just like crap, because a loved one or a friend has just left. Over time I’ve developed a few habits to deal with leaving or being left while travelling.

#1 Make no promises

Never ever make any promises. I know you’d like to see your latest one-night-stand again after a good nights romp around the bedsheets (who wouldn’t), but if you’re not at all serious then a peck on the cheek and a big-bear hug will be enough. Should you actually meet up again, then that’s just great, but don’t make it harder than it should be for the two of you. Basically, anything apart from what you’ve had so far will be a bonus…

#2 Only say it once

Pretend that there is nothing unusual about you sitting in a coffee shop or a McDonalds at an airport and only one of you has a plane ticket out of the country. Just treat each other like you’ll be seeing each other the next day. This might seem like a bit of a lie (well, it is), but it will help with the transition. Never ever mention the word (or anything to do with it) starting with ‘good’ and ending with ‘bye’ just before it is actually time to say goodbye. It will only pull you in deeper. You’ll run out of things to say and it’ll just be unbearable. There will be tears. I promise you. Only say “GoodBye” when there is nothing left to say!

#3 Leave early

Continuing from the last point, you have to leave as early as humanly possible. Why people like to drag the inevitable out for as long as they can is just plainly beyond me. Maybe it’s a sado-masochist thing, who knows. You arrive at the airport 3 hours before the flight and the check-in lady just told you your flight has been delayed by three hours. Don’t make your relatives and friends sit around for ages waiting for your flight to be called up. After you checked your bags in, you go and check yourself in. Go clear security, let em take all your shampoo and shower gel bottles off you if they feel like it and get the latest John Grisham novel to read while waiting for your flight.

#4 Get drunk

Now that all the other points are out of the way, it’s time to get serious. Should you be the one that’s leaving then you’re in a bit of luck. On most long-haul flights you can still get booze for free, so get your tickets worth of alcohol down your throat. If you’re the one staying then you’ll have no choice but to pay for your own. Leaving, or being left, is never easy and it should be dealt with accordingly. Copious amounts of alcohlic beverages should dull your senses enough so that, after you have survived your hangover, you can get over your loss.

Of course, if you’re in love, then consider all of the above points as useless as Barack Obama getting the Nobel Peace Price minutes (it seemed like) after he became president…

How do you deal with saying goodbye while travelling?

It’s that time of the year again. One day left in this year, in this decade, in fact. I hope all of you have had a great year, seen some new things, met new people and simply had fun.

2009 has seen some of the best travelling I have done up till now. A year ago I was stuck in Kuala Lumpur, waiting for my Indian visa to be approved. I didn’t have anything planned for the night, except watch the fireworks. In the end I met a couple really nice people and I ended up in the Reggae Bar and still can’t remember how exactly I got home. I might have gotten in a fight with an Air Asia pilot, who’d recently crashed his plane, but my memory of that night isn’t exactly reliable.

I went to the most boring rave ever in Goa, where the music had to be turned off by 10. You then had to rent headphones to continue dancing. A party can’t get any worse. What ever happened to that hippy paradise?

In Jaipur I was chased by a mob of street children and some dogs through the slums. I was ripped off on a camel safari in Jaiselmer, but met some really cool dudes along the way.

I crossed the craziest border from India to Pakistan at Wagha. I almost reached my melting point at 47 degrees Celsius in Lahore, almost froze to death while crossing Shandur Pass in northern Pakistan and would most likely have been blown up had I stayed a day longer in Peshawar. In Quetta I’m pretty sure I saw a Taliban.

The first 100 km in Iran I was protected by an 18-year-old police conscript without any weapons. He hadn’t started shaving yet and I’m pretty sure we’d seen him get smaller in the distance very fast should we have encountered any bandits. Five days later I ran out of money, 40 km from the border to Turkey.

Where have you been last New Year’s Eve? Let us know in the comments. Whatever you have planned for tonight I wish you all a fantastic party and a great 2010!

Why should we care about Afghanistan? It’s a valid question. You probably haven’t heard any good news from that place for a long time. It’s been at war since 1979. That’s as long as some of us have been alive. Maybe even longer.

I read a lot of stories from the golden age of travelling, when you could still get from London to Kathmandu on a red double-decker bus for a few quid. Ok, probably more than that, but you know what I’m trying to say. Not so long ago Afghanistan was a highlight on the infamous Hippy Trail. The hospitality in this far away country was unprecedented and now here we are. The country is at war. A war that officially doesn’t exist. Yet every day civilians and soldiers die. What happened?

The Russians happened, that’s what. In all fairness, it wasn’t all their fault. They kind of got sucked into that war much the same way as the Americans a few years earlier in Vietnam. They should have known better, though. Learned from their enemies mistake. You can’t win a war like that. Nobody’s ever conquered Afghanistan successfully. You could ask Alexander the Great what he had to say on the matter if he were still alive.

Afghan children in Kandahar province | Image by isafmedia

Anyways, in the beginning, the Russians were winning on all fronts. The mujaheddin, still freedom fighters, not yet terrorists, were losing across the board. Even then air superiority was the name of the game and the Hind, a Russian attack helicopter, was making mince meat of any opposition. Then something happened. The freedom fighters got hold of some Stinger missiles thanks to the Americans, and the table slowly started to turn. After all, the cold war was still raging on, despite of its name, and it’s always better if someone else’s soldiers die on the battlefield.

The United States was pumping millions of dollars into that war. The Saudi kingdom didn’t want to be left out, so they matched the Americans dollar by dollar. All of this obviously had to be done covert, so the Pakistani government volunteered as the middleman. It was a win-win situation for everybody. Except for the Russians. They started dying.

The Americans got someone to fight their war for them. The Pakistanis were hoping to get some kind of control over their lawless neighbour. Maybe it was even possible to channel some of these freedom fighters across the country to destabilize the Indian held part of Kashmir and Jammu. The Indians were, and still are, after all their primary enemies. That leaves us with the Saudis. Well, they did a good deed by helping out their Muslim brothers fight the Infidels. As a nice little side effect, some say it was their main reason, they were also exporting their own extreme version of Islam, called Wahhabism, into the poverty-stricken tribal areas of Pakistan and the bordering Afghan territories.

Afghan village elder in Dangam | Image by isafmedia

Now, what happens if you couple extreme poverty with religious zeal and then point them towards an enemy where they can vent their anger? You get yourself an army. People now have a channel to vent their anger. Guess what! It worked better than anyone could have anticipated. 10 years after the war started the Russians were leaving Afghanistan, utterly defeated. Now should have come the time to rebuild Afghanistan and restore it to its former glory. All that was needed was a bit more investment into the infrastructure and the education system. But of course that didn’t happen.

The border areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan have always been blurry. The people there consider themselves first Pashtuns and then, well, nothing really. The Pashtuns are one of the largest (and poorest) tribes on our planet and their once working code of conduct and honour had been utterly corrupted by 10 years of wahhabistic influence. The war was over, but the Pashtuns, and the rest of the Afghan tribes, still had a lot of pent-up anger. They turned on each other and eventually 7 years after the Russians left, a formerly little known organization called the Taliban emerged as the winner. They promptly formed a government that was only recognized by the Pakistani government. They were obviously still hoping for some Kashmir action, although that was never gonna happen.

Afghans in Rajan Kala | Image by isafmedia

The rest is kind of history. 9/11 happened, Afghanistan got bombed once again, the Talibs got their arses kicked and now soldiers and terrorists from all over the world are locked in a deadly cat and mouse game in the Hindukush, while innocent civilians keep dying. Will there ever be peace again? Will there be, once again, come a time when Afghanistan is the place to go travelling in?

I sure hope so. While I was in Pakistan I was thinking of crossing the Kyber Pass into Afghanistan, travel north-west to Kabul and then across the country to Herat. It was just too dangerous then (plus the border had been closed for all nationalities while I was in Peshawar) and I didn’t have the funds for flights. A friend of mine flew to Kabul, though (and survived to tell the tale), so it is possible to travel Afghanistan. One day, in the near future, I will go there, despite all the dangers. I want to see what it’s like…

I gathered lots of the above information from talking to fellow travellers, journalists and locals and reading the local newspapers while in Pakistan. I also dug around the bends of my brain to see what was left from my school history lessons. We didn’t learn much. I hope this has changed, although I seriously doubt it…

The first time I went off to travel Southeast Asia people kept telling me that I’ll become a travel-addict very soon. A lot of people use that analogy and there’s quite a bit of truth in that statement. You can take it quite far actually!

The last 10 years of my life I have basically been a junkie. Isn’t admitting the problem the first step or something? I was constantly on the lookout for my next fix, the next place to go to, the next country to explore.

Being away meant a constant high for me. I love the adrenaline rush of not knowing what I’ll be doing the next day, where to sleep this night or what’s around the next corner. By talking to other travellers I found out about other fascinating places and experiences. This talk was the fuel for my addiction. There is always another place!

I never even realized that I was addicted. I only knew that I did something I love. Coming back home was always something of an anti-climax. And it didn’t take that long for my drug to wear off. Then the withdrawal symptoms set in. That’s when I started planning that next trip and started saving up as much money as possible in as short a time as possible. During these times my social life was non-existant. Every Euro I spent meant another Euro that had to be earned again. Eventually my coffers were filled and off I went getting stoned on travelling.

But as we know, every drug has some nasty side-effects. The same is true for travelling, at least in my case. Travelling changes people, there’s no doubt about that. I’d argue that 99% of these changes are good. Some other changes you don’t really notice they happen so slow.

When I’m away I’m more or less self-sufficiant. There are long stretches, sometimes up to a couple months, where I hardly meet other foreigners. I quickly learned to be on my own and to not need another person. The more I travelled the more introverted I became I guess. Once I was back where there are other travellers, starved for a good conversation, it was always easy to hook up and meet other people.

Now that I’m back home my behaviour poses a problem. I’m still self-sufficiant, but it’s a hell of a lot harder to meet people, let alone meeting someone special, without them thinking I’m a bit of a weirdo. I also find myself lost for words. I simply have nothing to say to what people commonly talk about or I find their conversations really trivial. There simply isn’t enough of a common ground on which to base a conversation.

At first I thought it’s just reverse culture shock, but I’ve been back now for half a year and I still have that feeling of not really belonging. I do wonder if my long-term travels have made me slightly socially challenged in a normal setting.

So what am I going to do about it? The easy way out would be to get another fix and go travelling, but at the moment I really want to give a normal life a go. One thing is certain though. I won’t give up travelling completely. I think the way I travel will change. Not go away for a few years at a time, but do short trips of a few months each and keep a base here in Germany.

It actually might be time to settle down a bit. What do you think?

What made you decide to live and teach on the Marshall Islands in general and Ujae in particular?

Peter Rudiak-Gould

Mostly it was an obsession with faraway places that began in my teens, the same obsession that still makes me pinpoint remote islands on maps and then look them up online.

I also wanted to get a sense, firsthand, of whether modernization was a good or a bad thing. And I was more than a little bit in love with the idea of a Shangri-la in the Pacific. The outer Marshall Islands (and Ujae was about the outermost that I could visit) seemed like a perfect place for this.

Now you speak fluent Marshallese. What make this language unique and how difficult was it to learn?

Some of the difficulties are also what make the language unique. At first, Marshallese seems pretty manageable. Sure, it’s got some tricky pronunciation, like two different rolled r’s, three different n’s, two different l’s, and some unusual vowels, but it’s easy enough to put sentences together. Before you know it you’re speaking in the past, present, and future tense.

Then comes the trouble. You find that it’s hard to build your vocabulary because words that you assume must have an equivalent in Marshallese don’t, and vice-versa. When we have many words they have one, and when we have one word they have many.

The word for ‘will not’ also means ‘cannot’ – how can this be? But it is. Such things are difficult to get one’s head around. The language chops reality into such different categories than English, and this difficulty never really goes away.

In “Surviving Paradise” you write a lot about the children on Ujae. What is it like for a child to grow up there?

In many ways, it’s idyllic. A lot of their day is free and unstructured. They can go anywhere – no one will kidnap them because there are no strangers, and no cars will run them over because there are no cars. They get into fights, but no kid is an outcast.

On the other hand, the children don’t always get enough food, and they are shouted at and insulted frequently by the adults. A lot of children seem to have a pent-up resentment towards authority figures as a result.

Children on the reef

Why was teaching at Ujae Elementary School so challenging?

No electricity. No bathroom. No bell. Next to no supplies. No firm schedule. Little enthusiasm on the part of teachers. Little community support. Low starting point of students. Poor behavior. So, pretty much everything. The fact that I didn’t know what I was doing didn’t help, either.

You say that Ujae blurs the line between the traditional and the modern. How does it do this?

We’re used to thinking that you can divide the world into traditional things, which come from inside the country and have been the same for thousands of years, and modern things, which come from outside the country and are recent inventions.

There was almost nothing on Ujae that would comfortably fit into either of those categories. Knowledge of local plants seems to be the perfect example of tradition, but what if they are using that knowledge to clean their snorkeling marks? Fishing with spears also seems traditional, but what if I told you that the spears were made of iron or fiberglass, and they used swimming flippers at the same time? What about the name “Bobson”: traditional, modern, both, or neither?

Another example is Christianity, which has been around for long enough that you could almost call it traditional—and people do talk about it as part of being Marshallese—yet is also the quintessential foreign import.

What are some central Marshallese values and how do they help people survive in a confined space?

I’ll mention just two right now. One of them is avoidance of open conflict. Living in the Marshall Islands is a bit like riding in a crowded elevator. The confined space makes things a bit tense, but is also the reason that this tension must be kept in check. Most disputes fester in private, which keeps the community outwardly harmonious yet also prevents certain issues from being resolved.

Another value is conservatism. As a Marshallese person, you would be committing social suicide if you insulted Marshallese tradition. It is axiomatic that it is good and must be followed. This discouragement of tinkering with the status quo was probably valuable in a precarious environment where a single mistake could lead to death. Of course, people do break rules, and customs have changed, but this is almost always spoken about as a bad thing.

Kids playing basketball

How are the people of the Marshall Islands dealing with the threat of global warming?

In some ways, they are like us: they are coming closer and closer to accepting the reality of the problem and planning ahead, but they still have a long way to go. Most Marshall Islanders have heard the idea of global warming, and many see environmental changes that seem to confirm it. But they are not yet forced to believe in it. It is probably #10, at best, on people’s list of worries.

Some say that they don’t trust what scientists say, that God is more trustworthy and that he promised to Noah in the Bible not to flood the earth again. But certain local organizations have tried to raise belief and awareness, and succeeded to some extent. Interestingly, though, rather than blaming industrialized countries for the problem, these organizations are more likely to place blame on all people, including Marshall Islanders, who (they argue) contribute to the problem. This self-blame is empowering in that it gives locals something they can do to help, yet also detracts attention away from the much larger culprits.

Do you have any travelling plans at the moment, maybe back to the Marshall Islands?

I’m sure I’ll go back to the Marshall Islands—for some reason, I can’t keep away for too long—but not for several years. I’m still fascinated with the Pacific’s most remote spots, and I’d love to travel through Melanesia, especially Vanuatu. For now, I’m just happy to living abroad in a place (the city of Oxford, England) where I feel like I’m traveling every day.

Do you have any advice for our readers when it comes to living in a foreign culture for an extended period of time?

There is often an idea about living in another culture that equates understanding with liking, and respecting with enjoying. I.e., if you don’t like a certain aspect of another culture, all you have to do is come to understand it, and then you will like it. And if you don’t enjoy that aspect, you must not respect it.

I don’t agree with this. A culture is like a person. Some parts of them will delight you, while other parts will drive you mad. You will agree on some things and disagree on others. That does not mean that you disrespect them; it only means that you are different from them. To say that you can, and should, enjoy everything about another culture is like saying that you can, and should, jettison your entire personality and all of your beliefs. It’s not possible, and probably wouldn’t be a good idea even if it were possible.

Finally, name three things you could not live without on a Marshallese island!

Letters from home, sunscreen, and more letters from home.

Peter has also agreed to a guest post here on Travel-Junkie, so stay tuned for that! If you have any questions for Peter or remarks about the interview, then leave a comment…

A while back I was contacted by Peter Roudiak-Gould who wondered if I was willing to write a review of his first non-academic book, “Surviving Paradise: One Year on a Disappearing Island”. He would have his publicist send over a complimentary copy. Naturally, I agreed. Apart from never refusing free stuff, I was also intruiged by what Peter told me about his book.

In 2003 Peter, just 21 years old, set out from Majuro, the Marshallese capital, to teach English on Ujae, an outer island of the Marshall Islands, for one year without any other foreigner to help or guide him. So, through the book you get to know him and his feelings quite well. You also get a glimpse into what life is really like on a tropical ‘paradise’ island. Not everything is bliss in paradise and Peter does a great job in giving us the highs and the lows in equal measures.

The cover of Surviving Paradise

But “Surviving Paradise” isn’t just Peters story. He also touches on political and linguistic matters and brings you the Marshallese society in general and life on Ujae specifically a little bit closer. The last chapter is dedicated to the sensitive subject of global warming and the effects that can be felt already now on the low-lying Marshall Islands.

If you’ve ever lived on a tiny island outside your own culture for a while you’ll be able to identify with Peter’s experiences. There were many moments where I had to laugh out loud because some hilarious incident, going spearfishing for example, would remind me of my own feeble attempts or experiences.

But the book is also for you if you have never travelled much or stayed on a tropical island. “Surviving Paradise” will get your travel bug going into warp speed faster than you can say “Live long and prosper”!

“Surviving Paradise” was published on November 3rd this year and numbers a bit less than 250 pages. It is available at amazon.com for example and will set you back a bit less than USD 15. Money well spent I think. I can whole-heartedly recommend this book.

Check out the authors webpage if you would like to know a bit more about the book. Also, if you would like to know where exactly the Marshall Islands and Ujae are, then please follow the link at the bottom of this post.

Have you read “Surviving Paradise”? Let me know what you thought of it in the comments…

It’s that time of the year again. Actually, it’s almost over. Today the aptly named Phuket Vegetarian Festival ends. Despite spending years in and around Thailand, somehow I always managed to miss this little happening.

The festival, which lasts for several days, started in 1825, when a group of opera singers got serously sick and then miraculously got better again after adhering to a strict vegetarian diet to honour their gods. I would like to know how they got from that to sticking lots of sharp pointy things through their cheeks and various other body parts.

The wounds apparently heal very fast and don’t leave any scars, so maybe the gods that healed the opera singers are still around and look out for their followers…

I was really looking forward to seeing some hammerhead sharks during my time on the Maldives. But even though I managed to always avoid these sharks I did get to see loads of other types of sharks, most notably the blacktip reef shark.

For more than ten minutes my buddy and I were surrounded by a group of maybe 8-10 blacktips. Because of this group we got ourselves into trouble with the dive crew for overstaying our dive time by around 20 minutes. But it was worth it and I’d do the same thing again…

A note from the editor: Some facts about blacktip reef sharks

• The blacktip reef shark (or carcharhinus melanopterus) is a species of requiem shark from the family carcharhinidae.
• The maximum size is around 1.6m.
• They prefer shallow water and are usually not to be found past 30m.
• This species has been classified as near threatened, which means that it might be considered threatened with extinction in the near future.
• These sharks are viviparous, meaning the female give live births.
• Although a timid species, its coastal habitat brings it in close contact with humans which, very rarely, can result in an accident. Waders are most at risk when their legs are mistaken for natural prey and accidentally bitten. Swimming instead of wading greatly reduces that risk.

I was kind of hoping that eventually people get tired of the ongoing tourist vs traveller debate and it’s offsprings. It seems to pop up now and again on the blogosphere and loads of people comment on these blog posts and it gets really heated sometimes. I tried to stay away from starting one of these discussions myself, cause, honestly, it really annoys me. I mean, it supadupa annoys me. More than two years I held out (that’s approximateley how old this site is), but today I just can’t hold back anymore (damn these beers and half-drunken conversations!). Here’s what some sites around the web have to say on the matter…

The free dictionary has this to say:
A tourist is:

1. a person who travels for pleasure, usually sightseeing and staying in hotels
2. a member of a sports team which is visiting a country to play a series of matches: the tourists were bowled out for 135
3. the lowest class of accommodation on a passenger ship

The same site has this to say abut a traveller:

1. One who travels or has traveled, as to distant places.
2. often traveller (chiefly British)
   1. A traveling salesperson.
   2. A member of any of various groups of traditionally itinerate people living especially in Scotland and Ireland.

Answers.com tells us exactly the same thing, by the way. Have a look here and here. In both cases, it’s basically number 1 that is interesting. So, a tourist is someone who travels for pleasure and a traveller is someone who has been to distant places. Well, I have been to distant places, so I guess that makes me a traveller. I also do it for pleasure among other things, so that makes me what? A travellist?

Yep, I know what many so-called travellers (I think we stick to the clichés for the sake of this discussion) will think now! It’s not about the definition, it’s about the authentic expirience and a tourist just can’t have that on a 2-week holiday. As if anybody could have an authentic experience if you’re not a local! People act differently as soon as a stranger to their culture is around. There goes your authenticity!

As for the experience, it is true that many so-called tourists stay in their cosy resorts and work on their tan all day, but many tourists don’t. They might stay in their cosy resorts, but they do go out and meet the locals, have conversations with them and interact with their culture. Now it gets complicated. So a tourist can be a traveller. What about a traveller? Can he or she be a tourist? I’ve seen plenty of travellers admiring Wat Po in Bangkok or Angkor Wat in Cambodia. So, yes, a traveller can be a tourist as well!

What a bummer!

This whole discussion is just absurd (and this will be the last time I’ll mention it, promise!)! When it comes to travelling, the only thing that counts is what you make of it, whether it is during a 2-week vacation with a suitcase or during a round-the-world trip with a backpack. It is not dependent on how much money you have or if you can bear to stay in the dirtiest and cheapest guesthouse on Khao San Road. It only depends on what you want to get out of it.

But that changes as well. I’ve had times when all I wanted was to get down and dirty and stay as cheap and as minging as possible to save a few bucks and a few weeks later I treated myself to a nice clean room, maybe even with air con. Tourist or traveller, it all becomes blurry. Sometimes I’m that and sometimes I’m the other.

But today I’m a tourist and I’m damn proud of it!

I saw this little lizard while I was walking back to the bar in the afternoon after sorting out my first few dives on Kuramathi on the Maldives.