Half a dozen ad hoc travel tips
14 - 16 October, Ian
Rather than wait until we finish our journey and
then try to compile a portentous set of reflections on travel, here, on a quiet
Monday lunchtime, are a few haphazard thoughts triggered by events of the last
few days.
1) Trust people, not books
Most of the interesting information that I've picked up about the places that we've visited has come from residents. People have provided the best insights: Alan in Africa; David, Hafid and Abdul-ghrani in Fez; Michelle in Ecuador; Robin in Argentina; taxi drivers everywhere. It's noteworthy that if we'd tried to pare our costs down further it's the services of some of these people that we would have lost. We could have got by without any of them of course, but it would have been an impoverished experience, for as well as advising us on where to eat or what to visit they have also been able to educate us in the local flora and fauna (particularly birdlife, which seems totally different between countries) and in what it's like to live in each place.
Guide books have been much less reliable. We have carried a Lonely Planet for each of our destinations and used them both for background historical and cultural information and for practical knowledge. The more we use them the more obvious are their limitations. As existential guides for each place it would be unreasonable to expect much from them, but on the practical side they're surprisingly fallible. In Ecuador I did choose the Black Sheep Inn from a recommendation in LP, but the same guide also commended a place up the road where we would had a terrible month. A few days ago, on the way back from the estancia, we could only find local numbers for Mendoza hotels in the Argentinia LP (which is, IMHO, the worst of the LP guides, despite having three countries for the price of one) and we had to call home to get the Mendoza dialling code. The current version of the LP Latin American Spanish Phrasebook still (incorrectly) reports the currency of Ecuador to be the Sucre. Attentive readers may recall that in South Africa we spent three days an hour off the correct time without realising it. Informed by this mistake, we checked in the Chile LP for when clocks adjust for daylight saving and read that it's in mid-December. I was on my mac yesterday and noticed that the system clock was showing a time an hour later than we expected: this clued me in to the fact that the LP guide was just wrong: the clocks moved forward last weekend, around the time we left for Argentina, and we were an hour late for our appointment with the owner of the place we've moved to for this week.
You don't make these mistakes if you ask someone. Even so, we still pack the LP only with a more cautious attitude regarding its use.
2) Learn some of the language
When we were in Corsica I moaned a lot in the blog about my poor French. But it's serviceable, good enough for getting most things done and for halting conversation. We used French in Fez, too, and the smattering of Arabic we acquired from our lessons was fun and useful when we tried it. We also intended to learn Spanish but we didn't - I left Disk 1 of our CD set behind in a rental car in Alaska. Luckily, in Ecuador we had people around most of the time who spoke both Spanish and English. Here in Chile we don't, and our ignorance is an impediment. Even the few words and phrases that I've managed to pick up since being here have been very useful and it wouldn't have required much effort to learn ten times as much before we arrived. One good upshot is that we're all more resolved to get better at speaking Foreign.
I don't know the best way to do it, but again I'd trust people rather than books. Chicken, for example, is pollo here, which the LP LASP says you pronounce "po-lyo". I'm sure that there are parts of Latin America where this is true but in Argentina they called it "po-zjo". (On Saturday we stopped for lunch at Upsellata and had a very tasty lunch of pollo and chips * 2, a plate of empanadas, spag boll, extra chips, 1/2 a bottle of decent white, 1/2 a litre of lemonade and an orange juice, all for less than £8 denominated in the crippled Argentine Peso. Strange, then, that our week at the hacienda was amongst the most expensive weeks of a trip when measured on a daily basis.)
So we'll all be doing extra French when we get home (and, necessarily, before then). One thing Otto, the Ecuadorian taxi driver, said still disturbs me. I'd tried to excuse my incompetence in Spanish by telling him that my French was better when he said that French and German are becoming irrelevant while Spanish is in the ascendancy. Part of the reason that I'm disturbed by this is because it's true. Stephanie and other French people we've met report that they now need to speak English in order to progress at work, while in certain of the States for some people working in a service capacity the same is true of Spanish (and presumably this is LA Spanish not Spanish Spanish). And I don't like the idea of the world map being turned inside out to centre in South (and still North) America, India and China, with Europe being flung out to the edges of relevance. Our saving grace in England is that we speak American, but this is only a linguistic rather than a cultural escape.
One place where you may not need to learn a language is Africa, where most people seem to speak several, including English.
3) It's okay to be English
If you're English, how do you feel about it? Are you proud and patriotic?
I had an interesting email exchange last week with my friend Ray regarding the English self-image, in contrast to that of the Irish (Ray's from Ireland). Personally, I think that there's a reasonable amount to like about England and its people but we aren't encouraged to feel this way: when we learn about the past and about other countries we find out about the many bad things that our progenitors did in an impressive variety of locations, and every day the worst of the gutter press (The Mail, The Express) compete with each other to see which of them can paint the most miserable and depressing picture of life in our country. It's not like this elsewhere.
But on our travels people have been reasonably well disposed towards the English, even in Argentina, where the last thing you see as you drive out of the country is a large well-maintained sign declaring that Las Malvenas are Argentinian.
The people who are hardest on the English are, led by the dreary tabloids, the English themselves. In every other country we've visited I've gathered much more of a sense of patriotism (allowing that in Corsica this is Corsican, rather than French, patriotism). One sign of this that I've written about before is that the English at home seem to think that to the extent that they run into their compatriots on holiday the vacation is a flop. Happily, the English we've met on our travels have been great to talk to and haven't suffered from this neurotic need to avoid each other. Somehow the fear of one's compatriots (Freud should have a word for it) seems to have arisen from the desire to avoid a mass-production experience of tourism.
4) Book ahead
This desire to avoid a debased version of tourism can manifest itself as a penchant for "real travel". Even while we're in the middle of a form of travel of our own devising, I find the tourist-denial phenomenon to be problematic. One illustration of what I mean is the idea that there's more romance in turning up somewhere without a reservation to see what unfolds. Why do this? What will unfold is that you wont have as wide a choice of accommodation and you may well have to pay more. On our second visit to Mendoza we found ourselves eating at the same street resto where we'd been on the way out. Despite the identical time and setting our states of mind were at polar opposites: on the way back we'd already checked into the hotel room that we'd booked en route and had no worries about where we were going to spend the night or if we'd have to sleep in the car. Hopefully our first evening in Mendoza will turn out to have been our last episode of "real travel".
5) Take a laptop
I'm surprised at how few people we've met do this. I use mine for storing information, managing music, watching DVD's, getting onto the internet, helping the girls with their school work, email, photo and video management and blogging. It's not very heavy and it's excellent value as measured in utility and entertainment per pound of weight. I much prefer doing email off line than at an internet cafe, too, and this has pretty much always been possible. Even in the most remote places in Africa where we had no electricity it seems that I could find somewhere every few days to get a connection. Ecuador was the most awkward place to get on line, though in Quito there was no insuperable problem.
Since I'm on the topic I'm going to say it: macs are better! At least for personal use. The software for every form of media management is better than its PC equivalent and they're nicer to use. Are there any drawbacks? Google Earth and the BBC World Service program notification don't work on macs yet. If you like the latest games you'll find that they always come out later on macs than PC's. The initial cost of a mac seems to be higher than it is for a PC, though I don't know how a true like-for-like comparison would play out (the ones I've seen have all been absurdly biased one way or the other). It may be harder to get a mac fixed, though when I needed a new screen in the US I got one. And there is Apple's incomprehensible love affair with Bono. Anyhow, I've never seen a mac owner looking jealously over the shoulder of someone working on a Windows machine and the converse happens all the time.
6) Try time travel
There is that cliche of relativity in which someone goes into space in a rocket and travels around for a while at close to the speed of light. When they return they find that everyone on earth has aged dramatically. While I don't want to over-burden the analogy, our trip has something of that time-stretching quality to it. The most salient example concerns the girls. Before we left I had the sense that they were hurtling into their more grown-up years at a warp speed that was leaving me standing. Our trip seems to have slowed that right down so that now day follows day at the expected rate rather than generating an experience of the exponential passage of time. Who knows what this will seem like over a longer horizon but I'm very glad that I took my chance to step off the ride for a while now.
I'm sure that work will be a totally different place when I return, and since I was doing quite well that's a risk of sorts. From here, hearing about work is like peering across empty space to see life on a distant planet: all I can discern is a cloudy atmosphere that hides every detail.
As I've written before, going away for this long seems to be changing my pattern of friendships too, and it's been nice to be in touch with some of you in a different way.
Encouraging someone to embark on a trip like this is like inviting them to be an astronaut: when you've done it it seems like the best thing and you lose all sense of risk and prudence.
Ian
1) Trust people, not books
Most of the interesting information that I've picked up about the places that we've visited has come from residents. People have provided the best insights: Alan in Africa; David, Hafid and Abdul-ghrani in Fez; Michelle in Ecuador; Robin in Argentina; taxi drivers everywhere. It's noteworthy that if we'd tried to pare our costs down further it's the services of some of these people that we would have lost. We could have got by without any of them of course, but it would have been an impoverished experience, for as well as advising us on where to eat or what to visit they have also been able to educate us in the local flora and fauna (particularly birdlife, which seems totally different between countries) and in what it's like to live in each place.
Guide books have been much less reliable. We have carried a Lonely Planet for each of our destinations and used them both for background historical and cultural information and for practical knowledge. The more we use them the more obvious are their limitations. As existential guides for each place it would be unreasonable to expect much from them, but on the practical side they're surprisingly fallible. In Ecuador I did choose the Black Sheep Inn from a recommendation in LP, but the same guide also commended a place up the road where we would had a terrible month. A few days ago, on the way back from the estancia, we could only find local numbers for Mendoza hotels in the Argentinia LP (which is, IMHO, the worst of the LP guides, despite having three countries for the price of one) and we had to call home to get the Mendoza dialling code. The current version of the LP Latin American Spanish Phrasebook still (incorrectly) reports the currency of Ecuador to be the Sucre. Attentive readers may recall that in South Africa we spent three days an hour off the correct time without realising it. Informed by this mistake, we checked in the Chile LP for when clocks adjust for daylight saving and read that it's in mid-December. I was on my mac yesterday and noticed that the system clock was showing a time an hour later than we expected: this clued me in to the fact that the LP guide was just wrong: the clocks moved forward last weekend, around the time we left for Argentina, and we were an hour late for our appointment with the owner of the place we've moved to for this week.
You don't make these mistakes if you ask someone. Even so, we still pack the LP only with a more cautious attitude regarding its use.
2) Learn some of the language
When we were in Corsica I moaned a lot in the blog about my poor French. But it's serviceable, good enough for getting most things done and for halting conversation. We used French in Fez, too, and the smattering of Arabic we acquired from our lessons was fun and useful when we tried it. We also intended to learn Spanish but we didn't - I left Disk 1 of our CD set behind in a rental car in Alaska. Luckily, in Ecuador we had people around most of the time who spoke both Spanish and English. Here in Chile we don't, and our ignorance is an impediment. Even the few words and phrases that I've managed to pick up since being here have been very useful and it wouldn't have required much effort to learn ten times as much before we arrived. One good upshot is that we're all more resolved to get better at speaking Foreign.
I don't know the best way to do it, but again I'd trust people rather than books. Chicken, for example, is pollo here, which the LP LASP says you pronounce "po-lyo". I'm sure that there are parts of Latin America where this is true but in Argentina they called it "po-zjo". (On Saturday we stopped for lunch at Upsellata and had a very tasty lunch of pollo and chips * 2, a plate of empanadas, spag boll, extra chips, 1/2 a bottle of decent white, 1/2 a litre of lemonade and an orange juice, all for less than £8 denominated in the crippled Argentine Peso. Strange, then, that our week at the hacienda was amongst the most expensive weeks of a trip when measured on a daily basis.)
So we'll all be doing extra French when we get home (and, necessarily, before then). One thing Otto, the Ecuadorian taxi driver, said still disturbs me. I'd tried to excuse my incompetence in Spanish by telling him that my French was better when he said that French and German are becoming irrelevant while Spanish is in the ascendancy. Part of the reason that I'm disturbed by this is because it's true. Stephanie and other French people we've met report that they now need to speak English in order to progress at work, while in certain of the States for some people working in a service capacity the same is true of Spanish (and presumably this is LA Spanish not Spanish Spanish). And I don't like the idea of the world map being turned inside out to centre in South (and still North) America, India and China, with Europe being flung out to the edges of relevance. Our saving grace in England is that we speak American, but this is only a linguistic rather than a cultural escape.
One place where you may not need to learn a language is Africa, where most people seem to speak several, including English.
3) It's okay to be English
If you're English, how do you feel about it? Are you proud and patriotic?
I had an interesting email exchange last week with my friend Ray regarding the English self-image, in contrast to that of the Irish (Ray's from Ireland). Personally, I think that there's a reasonable amount to like about England and its people but we aren't encouraged to feel this way: when we learn about the past and about other countries we find out about the many bad things that our progenitors did in an impressive variety of locations, and every day the worst of the gutter press (The Mail, The Express) compete with each other to see which of them can paint the most miserable and depressing picture of life in our country. It's not like this elsewhere.
But on our travels people have been reasonably well disposed towards the English, even in Argentina, where the last thing you see as you drive out of the country is a large well-maintained sign declaring that Las Malvenas are Argentinian.
The people who are hardest on the English are, led by the dreary tabloids, the English themselves. In every other country we've visited I've gathered much more of a sense of patriotism (allowing that in Corsica this is Corsican, rather than French, patriotism). One sign of this that I've written about before is that the English at home seem to think that to the extent that they run into their compatriots on holiday the vacation is a flop. Happily, the English we've met on our travels have been great to talk to and haven't suffered from this neurotic need to avoid each other. Somehow the fear of one's compatriots (Freud should have a word for it) seems to have arisen from the desire to avoid a mass-production experience of tourism.
4) Book ahead
This desire to avoid a debased version of tourism can manifest itself as a penchant for "real travel". Even while we're in the middle of a form of travel of our own devising, I find the tourist-denial phenomenon to be problematic. One illustration of what I mean is the idea that there's more romance in turning up somewhere without a reservation to see what unfolds. Why do this? What will unfold is that you wont have as wide a choice of accommodation and you may well have to pay more. On our second visit to Mendoza we found ourselves eating at the same street resto where we'd been on the way out. Despite the identical time and setting our states of mind were at polar opposites: on the way back we'd already checked into the hotel room that we'd booked en route and had no worries about where we were going to spend the night or if we'd have to sleep in the car. Hopefully our first evening in Mendoza will turn out to have been our last episode of "real travel".
5) Take a laptop
I'm surprised at how few people we've met do this. I use mine for storing information, managing music, watching DVD's, getting onto the internet, helping the girls with their school work, email, photo and video management and blogging. It's not very heavy and it's excellent value as measured in utility and entertainment per pound of weight. I much prefer doing email off line than at an internet cafe, too, and this has pretty much always been possible. Even in the most remote places in Africa where we had no electricity it seems that I could find somewhere every few days to get a connection. Ecuador was the most awkward place to get on line, though in Quito there was no insuperable problem.
Since I'm on the topic I'm going to say it: macs are better! At least for personal use. The software for every form of media management is better than its PC equivalent and they're nicer to use. Are there any drawbacks? Google Earth and the BBC World Service program notification don't work on macs yet. If you like the latest games you'll find that they always come out later on macs than PC's. The initial cost of a mac seems to be higher than it is for a PC, though I don't know how a true like-for-like comparison would play out (the ones I've seen have all been absurdly biased one way or the other). It may be harder to get a mac fixed, though when I needed a new screen in the US I got one. And there is Apple's incomprehensible love affair with Bono. Anyhow, I've never seen a mac owner looking jealously over the shoulder of someone working on a Windows machine and the converse happens all the time.
6) Try time travel
There is that cliche of relativity in which someone goes into space in a rocket and travels around for a while at close to the speed of light. When they return they find that everyone on earth has aged dramatically. While I don't want to over-burden the analogy, our trip has something of that time-stretching quality to it. The most salient example concerns the girls. Before we left I had the sense that they were hurtling into their more grown-up years at a warp speed that was leaving me standing. Our trip seems to have slowed that right down so that now day follows day at the expected rate rather than generating an experience of the exponential passage of time. Who knows what this will seem like over a longer horizon but I'm very glad that I took my chance to step off the ride for a while now.
I'm sure that work will be a totally different place when I return, and since I was doing quite well that's a risk of sorts. From here, hearing about work is like peering across empty space to see life on a distant planet: all I can discern is a cloudy atmosphere that hides every detail.
As I've written before, going away for this long seems to be changing my pattern of friendships too, and it's been nice to be in touch with some of you in a different way.
Encouraging someone to embark on a trip like this is like inviting them to be an astronaut: when you've done it it seems like the best thing and you lose all sense of risk and prudence.
Ian
Posted: Mon - October 17, 2005 at 12:36 PM
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