The original world nomad

Notes and curiosities

simon_monk — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 13:42:00 GMT

One of the things I've been considering on this trip is that of all the travel web sites in the world, the one I usually start with is ... Google.

Not Lonely Planet or Trip Advisor or World Nomads. These I use to plan our trip and I even use them when travelling, but I don't start with them.

I think when you are travelling you don't plan any more: you write about it, you photograph it, you email home, you might want to earn some money (?) but Google seems to pretty much the jumping off point for every other query you might have when you are actually on the road.

Now there is food for thought.

One of the things I haven't yet figured out is why the internet here in Indonesia seems to be so wayward and slow, wireless is almost non-existent and general internet access is expensive: about 1000Rps a minute ... 60,000 an hour (A$8.00).

Mobile coverage seems good, but for me doesn't seem to work very well on international roaming at least: caller ID's never come through so I don't know whose call I have missed, local calls were fine on Bali but didn't work on Lombok, International calls worked on Java and Bali but didn't work on Lombok, and SMS didn't work on Java or Bali but worked fine on Lombok.

Huh?

Beach hawkers

simon_monk — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 13:35:00 GMT

"A massage"

"Sarong?"

"a bracelet for your boy"

"Where are you from?"

"A kite mister?"

"You need car?"

Local street hawkers hassle you all the time trying to flog you crap.

"Just ignore them Dad" said Riu; my 5 year old is cottoning on fast!

Even though it is a pain in the arse and I just want to be left alone, travel with children makes you a little more sympathetic than when I was younger. So these days I don't just wave them away like a pack of seagulls and take the time to explain to Riu that these are people with families and children ... just like us, trying to earn some money to put food on the table and money to pay for school.

It is worth taking the time to sit and ask them about their lives and their families and you can get a little insight into how they live and what things cost. Most have children, often of a similar age to Riu and Kai, who are at school from 7am until noon. From what I could hear, life isn't so bad: when they get home from school they aren't made to earn for the family but have a fairly carefree existence usually on boats or down the beach. Those we saw were having an absolute ball as perhaps most kids do everywhere given half a chance.

Much as Fathers here at home and Dad's everywhere, their's were worrying about how to pay the local school fees of about $400 per year (I think).

Not that it stops them from trying to flog you stuff, but it does paint it in a slightly more sympathetic light.

Dichotomy on Lombok

simon_monk — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 10:22:00 GMT

4am. Dark. Even the cocks are asleep.

"Yohawaaaw. Awwwwwwwaaaaaahhhhhhhhh. Yohawaaaw. Awwwwwwwaaaaaahhhhhhhhh." The wailing call to prayer goes on and on and on.

We have two enduring memories from Lombok of many years ago: as we ground up a steep hill on a motorbike, being chased by a very wild and very scary monkey with long teeth through which he hissed as he tried to bite us, and arriving sodden on the same motorbike in a village in the centre of the island late one evening. We were wet, cold and hungry. It was dark and there was nowhere to stay. A kindly school teacher took us into his home, gave us some food and allowed us to stay for the night. We were absolutely knackered and despite still being hungry, fell very soundly asleep.

4am. Dark. "Yohawaaaw. Awwwwwwwaaaaaahhhhhhhhh. Yohawaaaw. Awwwwwwwaaaaaahhhhhhhhh." The call of the local mosque next door. It went on and on and on until dawn, when the cocks take over. There is certainly no tranquil dawn on a muslim island.

Fast forward almost 20 years. Travelling briefly on Lombok with our two children to see what has changed and indulging in a little luxury 5 star accommodation because the Australian dollar is so strong right now it feels like now or never.

4am. Dark. Even the cocks are asleep.

"Yohawaaaw. Awwwwwwwaaaaaahhhhhhhhh. Yohawaaaw. Awwwwwwwaaaaaahhhhhhhhh." The call of the local mosque next door. It went on and on and on until dawn, when the cocks take over.

You have to be joking.

Touring the central parts of the island again, this time by car, almost every village seemed to have a new mosque under construction. We must have seen perhaps 30 in the space of a few hours so there must be hundreds being built on the island. And not just any mosque. Not the sort of mosques that have been built here for decades and fit with the local villages, but huge, grand, enormous concrete mosques obviously funded by someone. Does anyone know? A quick search of Google doesn't seem to uncover who is behind them all. Lots of women now cover themselves with full headscarves; none that we remember from 20 years ago.

Down on the beach front at Mangsit some of the places are undeniably gorgeous, but the incongruity of white western women in skimpy bikini's wandering along the beach past the local mosque set just back from the beach and being oggled by the local men.

You can't help but wonder about the future of tourism on such an island, and feel a clash of cultures is and accident just waiting to happen.

Violent vomiting across the Wallace line

simon_monk — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 10:17:00 GMT

"Is that it?" Yuki looked decidedly dubious.

The GiliCat was described as the fastest way to get from Bali to the Gili Islands off the northern coast of Lombok, but the boat before us looked tiny. Divided by the Wallace Line, Bali and Lombok appear very close on a map, but this disguises the fact that the ocean that runs between them is one of the deepest in the world which can be witnessed by boiling currents and wild waves.

Half an hour later I was vomiting violently into a sick bag while balancing a vomiting three year old on my knee and doing my best to ensure that he didn't crack his head open as the boat leapt wildly into the air from swell to swell.

If this had been a bus journey we definitely would have just got off. By the time our 90 minutes of torture was up, most of Kai's vomit was suitably smeared over my World Nomads t-shirt.

Quite, quite disgusting.

So, travel tip: if you are on Bali and anyone tries to sell you a GiliCat boat ticket to Lombok, just laugh, run the other way and go and buy a flight ticket. They are slightly cheaper, twice as safe and much more comfortable. What's the point in getting somewhere faster if you are so sick and stinky when you get there you just want to feign being dead for the rest of the day?

Or worse. While the boat of new and fast and has life jackets and probably wouldn't sink, I'd predict it'll only be a matter of time before they get flipped in seas like that, and then what happens and how fast the rescue comes would be none too pretty.

(Sorry, no photo's to prove this story is true as I don't have six arms like Shiva)

This isn't actually our worst boat travel story, although we were at least in the same part of the world. One day I'll get around to writing about a little village on the island of Flores called Nggela and the bus ride there and boat trip out: every time we remember this it brings on fits of giggles because it was so far out there and so absurd!

Yogyakarta street urchins

simon_monk — Mon, 7 Jul 2008 10:40:00 GMT

After Bali I was slightly surprised at the general level of poverty on Java. Not extreme poverty but the sheer volume of Becak drivers willing to pedal you around for a pitance spoke volumes. Despite the vibrant market along Marlborough Street, there was inevitably a handful of beggars, usually the old but we didn't come across any children.

Not during the day at least.

"Hssssssss!!!!!!" The scruffy and barefoot street urchins hissed at the handful of low-value notes we passed to them which were obviously below their expectations. A local Bakso vendor shooed them away like a pack of wild monkeys, which probably wasn't that far off the mark.

I have travelled enough to no longer be shocked by such sights, but this experience remained with me for some days; those could have been my sons out there.

What are you meant to feel with your two young boys well fed and safely tucked up in bed when a posse of scruffy and barefoot four and five year olds accost you at the traffic lights obviously hungry and living on the street?

I have always tried to believe that giving money to children is worse than useless as it usually perpetuates 'the system' and giving anything but money and giving it to an institution is a better outcome with a longer term impact.

But those could have been my sons out there, leaving a disturbed feeling that remained with me for some days. Our work with Footprints obviously presents a neat and appropriate outcome but that doesn't mean that you can just walk away from children needing help. But what does a few thousand Rupiah do, apart from perhaps feeling quite so hungry for one more night? Nothing really.

But that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.

You type "Bird Flu" and "Symptoms" into Google ...

simon_monk — Sun, 6 Jul 2008 15:18:00 GMT

To walk to the Sultan's Water Palace in Yogyakarta you have to pass through the bird market. As you approach, many of the shops only display bamboo bird cages and it passes through your mind that maybe they have removed all the birds because of the risk of bird flu. Not so, further into the market are fighting Cocks in huge cages and all manner of other birds ands the smells that go with them. We couldn't get through it fast enough.

Three days later Riu contracts a fever, has a heart rate of 142, has shivers and a headache.

When you type "Bird Flu" and "Symptoms" into Google, these are apparently symptoms of Bird Flu, which typical start 3 - 7 days after infection.

So what do you do? Fly home? Not a chance they are going to let you near a plane if they even suspect you've got Bird Flu. So you are stuck here in a foreign land and have got to make the best of it.

Tamiflu is the most commonly known drug to combat it, but apparently to increase your chances of survival the most you have to take it within the first 48 hours after symptoms appear. But this isn't exactly readily available because Governments all over the worlds have spent years stockpiling it.

Then, in the absence of evacuation or available Tamiflu we decided our best course of action was to locate and get the hospital with the most experience dealing with Bird Flu in the country. Immediately.

SULIANTI SAROSO INFECTIOUS DISEASES HOSPITAL

Jl Sunter Permai Raya, Tanjung Priok, North Jakarta

Tel.+62-021-6506559

http://www.infeksi.com

It is a few hours by car from Yogyakarta. But as we waited and worried for the dawn to arrive so we could get to a hospital, we had to do our best to find out what it might actually be. Was this Bird flu or not?

Maybe it was Encephalitis (http://kidshealth.org/parent/infections/bacterial_viral/encephalitis.html) where symptoms can be fever, headache, loss of energy and a general sick feeling ... which also sounded pretty spot on. Then again it might be Dengue Fever (http://www.medicinenet.com/dengue_fever/article.htm) again with very similar symptoms. Then again it might just be the myriad of other viral infections that exist in the world today.

To judge by how hard it is to actually detect and diagnose (http://www.medicinenet.com/bird_flu/article.htm), this is just how a pandemic would start.

People simply wouldn't or couldn't know.

The next morning the hotel and hospital reacted with a surprising swiftness: even whisper the word 'fever' and a Doctor magically appears in your room within 10 minutes. I don't think this was just because we are foreigners staying in a nice hotel either.

His questions were pretty focused on symptoms of Bird Flu, (so it wasn't just us) gave Riu a jab in his bottom and gave us some anti-botics saying if the fever hadn't passed by the next day we'd have to get a blood test done.

As it happens it did pass and Riu was as right as rain this morning, much to the relief of Mum and Dad.

USEFUL RESOUCRES

Google on Bird Flu

Infectious Diseases Hospital

List of Hospitals in Yogyakarta

Yogjakarta the temples of central Java

simon_monk — Fri, 4 Jul 2008 15:09:00 GMT

Years ago we spent so much time on the islands between Timor and Lombok that we had no time left for this part of Indonesia so this is the first time we have ever explored central Java.

Not surprisingly we have chosen to base ourselves in Yogyakarta, but this city has surprised us, managing to retain its grasp of traditional Javanese culture to an extent that is perhaps surprising in 2008. Despite 24/7 shops and swarms of motorbikes, the city is alive with as many Becak (Cyclo's) that are everywhere and still actively used by the local population (unlike Vietnam where the only people who still use them are tourists!) We reckon that many of the Becak drivers must be itinerant workers as they all seem to sleep under a thin blanket in their vehicle by the side of the road. At about $0.50 per kilometer, they aren't actually as efficient as a plain old taxi, but, as with Vietnam, you lose something of the character of the place when these services are no more.

For what is predominantly a Muslim city (Java being largely Muslim), Yogjakarta seems to have a pretty relaxed atmosphere: I really don't know enough to say how many other Muslim places in the world you'd be able to see young couples walking along the main street hand in hand or sat by the side of the dusty road either talking or even a hug or two.

Despite the hotel security being pretty tight, with every vehicle and taxi that enters the grounds being searched, on the surface at least, there appears to be little religious tension with any foreigners and almost everyone seems to be both easygoing and friendly with genuine smiles everywhere.

Maybe this is to do with the Indonesian Rupiah losing over 80% of it's value during the 1997 Asian financial crisis or maybe it is to do with a red-hot Australian dollar that almost equals the US dollar, but generally I'd have to say it is a little poorer than I'd remembered or anticipated.

I don't know what the Becak drivers would earn but I bet it isn't more than $5.00 a day and these guys have a tough job whatever country you are in. Walking down to the markets yesterday evening, there was a row of mobile phone vendors perched on the wide sidewalk lit by flouroescent lamps. Their service was text messages: 40 rupiahs per message. When there's 8700 to the dollar, that's less than half-a-cent to send a message, and the fact that almost everyone here apparently has a mobile but there is still a market for such a service, it puts some people's income into relative perspective.

Perhaps the primary reason we actually came was to see both Prambanan and Borobudur temples, something we have been meaning to do for at least a decade. But unlike great Buddhist temples in say Thailand or Burma, where they are part of the religious culture of the country, here in a predomiantly Muslim island, they seem to have been turned into little more than a cultural theme park with coach loads of Javanase swarming and climbing all over the monuments.

Being here in a local school holidays doesn't help either, as we were accosted by hoards of 17 year old school girls who had been brought here by their teachers with the express purpose of practising their English on hapless foreigners. Riu and Kai were indescribably popular targets and it did allow us the opportunity to discover a little about their youth culture: their fathers were largely farmers, they learn English and Arabic at school, they only started learning English two years ago, and a month's school fees were 50,000 rupiah (which they thought was very cheap, but I wonder what their fathers thought!)

Stanford's Centre for Social Innovation

simon_monk — Thu, 3 Jul 2008 13:16:00 GMT

Anyone interested in the complexity of business strategy in the globalised world of the twenty first century should talk half an hour to listen to this fascinating talk by Hannah Jones, Vice President of CSR at Nike.

Hannah Jones is responsible for managing Nike's global corporate responsibility efforts including labor compliance, sustainability and business integration, global community affairs, stakeholder engagement, and regional corporate responsibility programs. She is a board member of CSR Europe, a European business-to-business network that promotes corporate responsibility.

She is convinced we are on the cusp of a tipping point, where customers not only care but act on their beliefs. She sees huge changes happening and a blurring of the boundaries between business, government and NGO's, which parallels what we have experienced ourselves with our Footprints Network.

http://fora.tv/2007/04/03/Corporate_Responsibility_Innovation_Engine

It is well worth the time.

Travel tips from 20 years on the road

simon_monk — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:55:00 GMT

Now I don't profess to know everything there is to know about travel, but I have travelled quite a lot and learn't a lot from these experiences which I have started to collate into a single set of travel tips for anyone interested.

World Nomads Travel Tips

This won't necessarily apply to all situations or cultures and will also obviously change as new scams and tricks are being thought up all the time.

Please feel free to comment or to contact me with any suggestions of your own ...

The business of being a social entrepreneur

simon_monk — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 05:33:00 GMT

The following is taken from an interview with Philanthropy Australia.

Simon Monk is a social entrepreneur who embodies a new style of giving. The founder and director of The World Nomads Group, Simon and his team established the Footprints Network, an alliance of e-commerce businesses and their customers who fund community projects from donations collected from their customers during online transactions.

Footprints collects many small donations from people already shopping online all around the world. The Footprints software API is available free to any company doing e-commerce, providing a ready-made corporate social responsibility (CSR) vehicle. The beauty of it is that it establishes a direct and meaningful connection between the business, the customer and the project they have chosen to donate to.

Is there a symbiotic relationship between travelling and giving?

I grew up in the North of England and my role models were mountaineers. Doug Scott, a mountaineer who runs treks to Nepal, was a key influence on me. The entire profit from his trekking operation goes back to the villages he knows from his travels. Travelling puts your own life in perspective – you can’t walk away from some places unaffected.

The initial impetus for Footprints came from me, but many of us in the organisation have travelled widely, and it resonated with all staff that we should be giving something back to the communities we visit. If it resonates with your staff it’s likely to resonate with your customers, so it works at a business level too.

In fact, there isn’t a clear deliniation between Footprints and my company World Nomads. We don’t consciously fund Footprints, it is budgeted for within the company as just part of the mix: we promote it and get partnerships from it, so its just an integral part of our business, a device that works.

Why does it work?

We’re trying to work that one out too! You couldn’t invent something like the Footprints Network up front if you tried. You just have to take the journey and work it out afterwards. We just knew that there is a moral responsibility what when you travel, and you travel in places where somebody’s annual salary might be $200 a year, and you’re a wealthy backpacker, you have a responsibility to give. And that works at many levels – just by going there you are contributing to those communities.

How did Footprints come about?

We literally started with an idea, a pencil sketch on the back of an envelope.

We had been considering a CSR venture for a while, um-ed and ah-ed for about a year and then the tsunami happened in December 2004. At that point we said ‘let’s just build something’, and so we sketched it up and built it within a week. Four months later we’d raised $50,000!

We refined Footprints over the course of the next year, and then opened it up to other companies as an e-commerce donation solution. Several asked ‘ how do we know our sales conversion rate won’t go down?” so we took one of our travel companies we’d bolted Footprints into and looked at the volume of sales before and after we added Footprints, and discovered that sales had actually gone up by 1.87%, which was worth $20,000 a month. That was quite unexpected. I would have predicted at best neutral, but in hindsight the products that we sell have an element of trust about them, and the fact that you’re associating yourself with brands in the not-for-profit space such as The Fred Hollows Foundation, for example, probably helps build that trust.

How does Footprints work?

One of our ideas with Footprints was to make everything quite tangible so each project has an outcome which you can see and feel and touch – like building a well or a school. Footprints focuses on health and water and sanitation and education – the pillars of getting people moving ahead. We use Maslow’s heirachy of need as a basis, which says that if you can get people past needing the essentials of life - water, food, warmth, security, health, shelter - they take care of themselves. So this is where we focus our energies. We think we should offer 3 or 4 projects only, for customers to choose from when they donate, and we can change those on offer to fit the project to be relevant to the transaction the customer is undertaking – for example if you’re paying an electricity bill you would be offered the opportunity to support a project to give solar power to a village in Nepal. Keep the list small, and make it easy for the customer to say yes.

We were looking for projects to assist Indigenous people in the Australia, and one Indigenous community came to us and asked for some drums. We were rather surprised, but we needed to be educated to understand that the purpose wasn’t the drums, the purpose was health outcomes. The drums came at the request of the elders at the village because they knew that if they put drums in school and said ‘you can’t touch them until the end of the day’ the kids would go to school and learn about health. I went to the Garma Festival and one of the key take-outs for me was ‘don’t pre-judge what works in communities – take advice from the local community and go with the flow’. If they say they need drums you can do your due diligence, measure it and trial it, but as long as it delivers outcomes then do it. The drums were completely left field, but they delivered the desired health outcomes. Again you couldn’t have made this up, you need to work and learn as you go. This is the entrepreneurial side, and it’s the exciting part of the work.

The benefits of seemingly small projects roll-out and multiply: for example in India we built a well through Water Aid Australia. A year later when they went to report on the outcomes of that project they found that because they didn’t have to cart water the children could go to school, and because the children were at school the women could go to work and because the women were working and earning there was a power shift in the village. Even the aid agencies have been flabbergasted at the by-products of very small grants. That’s the part of the social entrepreneurialsim that I find abolutely facinating, all the rules are being rewritten and there is much more flux than we’ve seen in the last hundred years.

What’s next on your social entrepreneurship agenda?

If there’s one thing I dream of it is scaling the Footprints Network, turning it into the low cost low online donation mechanism. I would like 10,000 of the top e-commerce companies in the world to be using the Footprints API – it would raise hundreds of millions of dollars if every single time you came to buy something online, from any business, there was a little checkbox that said ‘just add 20c or $1.00 for charity’.

We’re not asking for even $10 – it’s just about rounding up a bill to the nearest dollar, or from $2.50 to $5. I’ll take even one cent per transaction, because the cost of the transaction to us is zero.

How do you deal with tax deductibility?

We don’t - we don’t offer a tax deduction facility. We bypass that, believing that if you can afford to throw a dollar in a charity bucket in the street then you can afford to tick the dollar donation box online, without the tax deduction option. We’ve had customers asking if they can give us $150 for one of our projects, and the answer is ‘no, you can’t’. We’ll suggest they go to an organisation like Oxfam which runs projects and donate through their website.

With Footprints, one of the issues we’ve run into is that, when you raise money, if you’re standing on the street corner or holding a raffle in Australia you are physically in Australia, so you need to abide by the fundraising laws in this country.

With the internet, an e-commerce company sells their products everywhere and might take donations from anywhere so you simply can’t be compliant with fundraising laws from every nation at the same time.

If you want to choose who you give money to, and take donations from, globally you don’t want to be beholden to any specific government as to whether or not that is approved. As an example, we had a couple of doctors travelling and working in Khazakstan who wanted $500 to purchase the drugs to fund their clinics. They’re not a charity, don’t have DGR, but are doing great work and we wanted to give them $500. They provided acquittal reports and reciepts so that grant was transparent, but we can’t claim any of it. That doesn’t work for us – and as we want to scale up Footprints we need mechanisms where we’re not going to have to pay millions of dollars in tax.

To combat that problem what would you like to see the government do?

The trick here is that its not just ‘our’ government but all governments around the world. As with internet e-commerce, for global undertakings the rules are still being made up as you go along. In terms of defining our business, World Nomads is a micronational with only 50 people. The internet allows you to do that. The rules are being written as we speak; nobody has yet defined how to be a micronational, or fund venture philanthropy globally, so in this environment innovation and entrepreneurship, business and social, is thriving.

Ho Chi Mihn's revenge

simon_monk — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 12:00:00 GMT

"Don't drink the ice!" We've all heard it before. But having spent 20 odd years travelling around Asia I have pretty much learned the hard way how to stay healthy and eating on the street is a breeze: Pho for breakfast, Da Chanah (iced lemonade), iced coffee, those gorgeous spring rolls and loads of seafood of every kind.

No problems at all. Enter Jetstar.

Right, yes, I know they have something of a reputation for shoddy service and leaving people stranded and it's uncomfortable, but hey, it's cheap so if you want to go, get with the game.

But they really should try a bit harder not to try to poison about a third of the Airbus A330 passengers on JQ8. My son ate the yoghurt supplied for breakfast ... and then had the good sense or good fortune to promptly throw it back up again, thus avoiding the fate of many of the other passengers.

Arriving in Sydney was almost comical, like something from the movie Airplane, with about 50 people dashing down the arrivals halls in search of a toilet, only to find them full of other passengers and then having to dash off to find another one, only to find it full, and so on.

No, it's wasn't pretty and was perhaps just a touch ironic given all the warnings you read about drinks with ice or local street food.

And the word from Jetstar? Not interested. "Just write a letter to Jetstar Customer Relationships". Er, what relationship? The only relationship I had after your flight home was with my toilet and bed. What are they thinking? That I want a refund on a lousy meal?

All I would like is someone to acknowledge they have/had an issue, investigate the source of the contamination and make sure it doesn't happen again.

But I guess that would cost too much.

(Worse still, try typing this into Google: "jetstar food poisoning". Mmmm ... looks like this isn't uncommon. Maybe avoid all food on this airline)

Life lived on the street

simon_monk — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 11:14:00 GMT

Cantho and the nearby town of Soc Trang are the source of some of our strongest memories of the country: being turned away from every hotel because they just didn't have a policy on what to do with tourists who fronted up at the front desk; when we did finally find someone who let us have a grotty room, the Police turning up two hours later and telling us we couldn't stay there; the waterfront and it's market were just stunning, the river being covered in rowing boats powered by a friendly curious people easy for a laugh and happy to take us out on the water; swarms of children running after us wanting to tug my curly hair and to just gawp and laugh at me.

Just stunning

After so many years we knew much would have changed and prepared for swarms of tourists, so it was with some delight that Cantho has managed to surprise once again. The lively ramshackle market we remember with boats strewn along the river banks had been pulled down and been replaced with tourist restaurants and boats. A few largish tour groups whiz through, bit otherwise there seem to be very few tourists and a bare handful of independent travellers, which is pretty amazing really for such an incredible place.

Sigh.

But a wander up the road a short distance reveals the new replacement market, still on the river, still with loads of boats (although most are motorised these days) and a loud, vibrant and chaotic market as ever it was. Here the sun is too strong after about 10, so you need to start early. Very early. I was up at 5am and at the market by 5:20 and the place was abuzz, as you can see from the video.

Skinned and beheaded frogs still jumping trying to escape from their fate, ducks bound in a basket and plonked on the scales oblivious to their fate, women slicing banana flowers for the famous salads of this area, and hoses and water and buckets and shouting ... all somehow operating together despite the apparent chaos.

If you make it to Cantho, try this: instead of travelling up-river to see the floating markets, just take the ferry across the Mekong (VMD500 each way) with the other daily commuters and wander along the alleyways that meanders through lively local communities. To judge from people's reaction this isn't something that is done very often yet provides a fascinating glimpse into their lives. Babies asleep in hammocks, candles not electricity for lights, dogs growling & scavenging, men lounging about gambling, and cafés with low red plastic stools everywhere. Every village and dusty street is littered with them but they make truly excellent coffee, which I'm supposing is one of the few benefits of French colonial rule. Expresso on ice-cubes gives a kick start to the day and is probably the best iced coffee you are going to get anywhere in the world.

You can start early one day, but not every day, not with children in tow, so our planned day trip back to Soc Trang didn't make it as far as the bus station, and we spent the day at the weird Cantho Water Park and trying to work out our last days here: Phu Quoc island is easy enough to get to, but hard as hell to connect back to Saigon since everyone has the same idea and all the flights are full.

So the fading French colonial Cantho we knew is fast disappearing, making for some peculiar sights: they think nothing of taking a classic two story French Colonial villa, buying up one half of it, demolishing their half and building a 6 story half width family villa in bright pink instead. Well, it might not pass our European aesthetic, but at least it is theirs. Similarly with the French Colonial terraces. I wonder if anyone here has figured out rarety value yet?

A kilometer or so up the river front was a spectacular but dilapidated French Villa in it's own grounds.

I wonder if it will survive?

Taxi » Ferry » Cyclo » Motorbike » Mini-van » Ferry » Taxi

simon_monk — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 10:37:00 GMT

Sometime you just can't know how it's going to work out. Today we had planned to get to Cantho, knew it must be possible, but also knew that there weren't any obvious or direct buses, so were going to have to make it up as we went along.

This is usually a rather good travel experience, but the unknown was our two children.

From Ben Tre we caught a taxi back to the ferry crossing that takes you over towards Mytho. Once on the other side we were a little surprised to find no buses or taxi's waiting but eventually caught a couple of Cyclo's to the Cantho bus terminal ... only to be told that there was only one bus a day and that leaves at 5am.

Ho hum.

Then your average Vietnamese bus station hussler said he could take us 5Km up the road to where there were mini-buses heading to Cantho. The only catch, and of course there was a catch, was we had to travel by motorbike. So we eventually squeezed Riu between Dad and the rider on one bike and Kai between Mum and another rider in true Vietnamese fashion with the strollers across the rider and sticking out wildly and the big rucksacs following on yet a third bike. Off down narrow lanes and backstreets full of schoolkids in Ao Dai on their way home at lunch, regretting that this would have been a fantastic way to see this part of the country.

We found one of the stopping points for the Saigon to Cantho buses, and when one finally stopped had to (of course) negotiate the absurd price the driver was asking (D750,000 for the 4 of us) down to something more rerasonable (D500,00) which was still no doubt way over the odds but was significantly better than being straned on the side of a highway in the middle of the Delta for some time.

At the next ferry we got 'befriended' by a strange woman who then had the driver drop us off right on the outskirts of Cantho, which really wasn't very helpful. Ah, yet another hustler, this time of the boat ride variety. She even followed us to the hotel when we hailed a taxi and was somewhat bemused when we said we weren't in the least interested.

The Asia Hotel is recommended in the LP guidebook and is listed as #2 on TripAdvisor. You'd think between those two you couldn't go wrong: instead we got an old, pokey carpeted room, stale as though it hadn't been slept in for weeks. Pondering what to do, we went for a late lunch and then spied a new looking hotel called the Kim Tho which was spotlessly new and clean and at $60 quite the bargain.

We later learned that they weren't even officially open when we checked in and only opened on the third day of our stay.

Off the beaten track

simon_monk — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:23:00 GMT

Why do travellers (tourists?) go on those mini-bus tours everywhere? The only people you'll meet are other travellers or tourists. I know it makes it all so easy but surely far less of an experience?

It never ceases to amaze me how far off the beaten track you don't have to go to avoid tourists (or travellers). Vietnam and the Delta is bursting with tourists, but these mini-bus tours all go to the same places. The lady at our reception desk was genuinely surprised when we said we were going to use public buses to get to Ben Tre, but from the moment we stepped off the streets of Saigon, all the tourists seem to have vanished and there was a welcome lack of English.

Ben Tre. Nothing here really. A small dusty town just across the river and down a bit from bustling Mytho. Certainly no tourists or travellers and we have the place to ourselves. They obviously get one or two, but probably don't often get families! It's a real backwater and dead-end.

Nobody speaks much English, there is pretty much only one place to stay and almost nowhere to eat. Unusually, the local market here has superb fresh produce, better even than your average Mekong market, but no cheap food stalls, or none we could find. But armed with a tube of Vegemite, we boughgt some baggettes, some croissants and two huge Pomello's and have pretty much snacked across our stay here.

Our preferred modus operandi is to just wander and get lost among the everyday and see what happens. It's always unpredictable as we aren't really looking for anything and sometimes this works, sometimes not. (But when it works it is truly memorable!)

Today wasn't a bad catch of memories.

This morning we wandered across the makeshift bridge and wandered up past some local houses and farms and canals across bridges etc. The town is poor and much more as we remember the Vietnam from before: people are lean and tough. We passed one of the infamous coconut factories where families were industriously organised as only the Vietnamese can be: one tearing the outer pithe off, another methodically chopping the core in half with a rusty machete, one guy separating the shell from the fruit with a vicious looking metal thing, and the last one packing it to go somewhere.

The guy separating the nut from the shell was working at a furious pace doing one every 5 seconds or so. Apart from the fact that it would take me 10 minutes not 5 seconds to do the same thing, I reckon I'm pretty fit and I wouldn't last 2 minutes doing what he was doing.

Kai made the interesting observation that "They'll be there forever even when I go back to school." Correct. Not bad for a 3 year old.

It was enough to make me wonder about the average life expectancy is here, so here are four statistics for what they are worth:
» Average life expectancy now (up from just 62 in 1990)
» Just 3% of the population living on less than $1 a day (down from 18% in 1991)
» Infant mortality 0 to aged 5: 23 per 1000 as opposed to Australia at 6 per 1000
» And they have a population explosion going on 84 million of them (up from 66 million in 1990)

(Source: http://globalis.gvu.unu.edu/indicator_detail.cfm?Country=VN)

We continued wandering along tiny paths not sure where they were leading or going, passing and being passed by all sorts of people, usually agog at this weird family pushing two strollers to god only knows where. Past thickets of palms they use for roofing here, past jungle plants with giant leaves that the boys thought was hilarious fun, being passed by old ladies on bicycles on their way back from market.

We had just decided to turn around when we spied a café with some cold drinks and ice. The woman had a shy little girl of about two, as curious about our two boys as they were about her and her world. She showed her tiny bag of toys and demonstrated her favourite ride: a giant palm leaf that her Mum dragged around the dusty yard. All quite entertaining and somehow you don't really mind being stripped for the drinks afterwards.

This afternoon we stumbled upon a gaggle of 15 year old schoolgirls just out from school and they thought practicing their English on two young Aussie boys was a hoot.

Riu even got a kiss!

Return to Saigon

simon_monk — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 13:00:00 GMT

We dozed in the back of the shagged out 1940's bus for sleep definitely wasn't possible. Rumble, bump, rattle, and thump, all night long. As the first rays of dawn glimmered outside, I mentally forced myself out of the slumber, as stretching definitely wasn't possible, and said "Where are we?"

"About 12Km outside Saigon." came the reply.

Ha ha. That was funny. It then dawned on me that they weren't joking. We had been rattling around all night and were just 12Km outside Saigon. I could have walked faster.

That was the Saigon we visited seventeen years ago this month we arrived in Saigon as two young fit and healthy independent travellers and left six weeks later half starved and in rags.

By the end, in Hanoi, it really wasn't much fun. The U.S economic embargo was still in place, the country was desperate, and the people were the boniest, leanest, whippet like people we had ever seen.

Now, people here are getting fat, plain and simple. On a Sunday evening, when the entire city comes out to parade to itself, all you can see are plump baby boys struggling to support their own weight on their two chubby legs and lots of women jogging or power-walking around and around and around the park because they are obviously worried about how they are going to lose all this extra weight.

The communists only abandoned collective farming in 1976, with the country on the brink of starvation, and these days the Mekong Delta alone produces enough rice to feed the entire country. Back then it felt like a Communist country on the verge of collapse; these days ... well, the word Communist doesn't exactly spring to mind. It is just like any other dynamic, booming, creative, chaotic rapidly developing nation. So what does that term mean anymore I wonder?

In the Saigon of before, a great proportion of the people were simply living on the street literally. Not just a lot but a definite percentage. Hundreds of thousands. Morning Pho sellers, Cyclo drivers, women hawking their baskets of food. Now they have all gone, literally, all gone. The commercial world has now moved indoors which means the street sidewalks are less full of the detriuse of such living which means you can now actually walk along the boulevards without tripping over geese, people peeing, families cooking and all the other wonderful memories from that time.

While this actually makes it more possible with children than Hanoi, which was a surprise, it just isn't quite so ... pungent as it used to be.

There are far fewer beggars, just a few (mainly male amputees) now. Even Riu said "That man has no legs". Two years ago you could see him thinking it, now it is much more explicit. We generally have a policy of not giving to beggars, especially children, as I've always believed it perpetuates the system.

But sometimes ...

A boy of about six, shoeless and grimy in ragged clothes begging for some spare cash with his hat as we with our two boys of a very similar age sit in luxury eating iced cream ... how can you not feel, when faced with that?

No closer to the truth.

(We did give to some, usually the amputees and old people, but preferred to do so through our own children, hopefully instilling some sense of humility and humanity in so doing.)

Crossing the roads here has become a real skill, although in some ways it looks more daunting than it actually is since the sheer volume requires that everything move slooooowly, so any collision is going to be low-impact. You sort of shuffle across and let the riders avoid you rather than try anything the other way around. Another trick I discovered is not actually LOOK at anything, but just try to use your peripheral vision to look everywhere at the same time. (trust me, it works).

The Government has just passed a law requiring people to wear helmets when on their daily suicide missions to cross the city by motorbike and brain trauma has apparently declined by 85% since it's introduction.

Cholon bus station is still there, despite reports to the contrary, but now is is sealed tarmac instead of a dusty potholed yard and all the busses are new, instead of the range of Mad Max like machinery that passed for transport 17 years ago: 1940's Renault vans, vast 1950's Cadillacs with rusted chrome tailfins and carrying half a village plus geese.

Before, High school girls in Ao Dai's gliding elegantly past on their bicycles with gleaming smiles and easy laughs like bright white elegant swans, which, for what must have been a sweaty activity on such dusty pot-holed roads, was a huge feat. All gone it seems as these days their smiles are well hidden behind the face masks needed to avoid suffocation on the exhaust fumes.

No doubt a country that is better off and more efficient, but ... well, it just isn't quite so breath-taking.

Are you a tourist or a traveller?

simon_monk — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:23:00 GMT

This argument seems to have been around certainly for as long as I have been travelling, with people who define themselves as 'travellers' usually feeling they are somehow superior to 'tourists'. I know Tony Wheeler from Lonely Planet for one doesn't think there is any difference and we are all just tourists of different kinds.

When we were discussing it again recently however, Yuki, with that annoyingly fine intellect of hers, identified and articulated better than anyone else I have ever heard that there is a difference; that is that tourists generally go to see 'sights' and travellers generally go for the 'experience'.

When we first went to Vietnam at the beginning of 1991 it was incredibly hard: there was nothing much to 'see', there was no infrastructure and travelling around was plain hard and unpleasant, even if it was one hell of a memorable experience. Wandering around the Cholon bus station, full of 1940's Cadillacs and old Renault buses bursting at the seams with live geese, nobody could tell us where to go or what to see, so we just chose one at random and headed out down into the Delta ... somewhere. There was nowhere to stay as hotels needed a foreign tourist permit and nobody had one. Even once we eventually persuaded somewhere to let us take a room, the police turned up an hour later and put us back on the bus to Saigon.

Later, past Hue, wandering around the DMZ late one afternoon, a young boy rushed up, presented us with a large bunch of flowers freshly picked from the fields, grinned shyly and dashed off once more. Other memories surface too: wandering around a dusty village in Burma followed by hoards of excited screaming children in places nobody would ever have heard of as there was nothing to particularly see or do there.

Yet these and other memories of unpredictable experiences remain some of the sharpest from my travels, rather than the spectacular sights (although we did those too of course!) which leaves us with the fact that you can be both a tourist and a traveller even on the same trip. Nothing wrong with that.

Now we are headed back to Saigon with our young family, this time firmly as tourists. There are loads of places to stay and we want it to be easy, fun, pleasant and interesting. With just a little bit of luck we'll still find some tiny gems of travel experience and still just by wandering.

Indelible impressions from Japanese Hot Springs

simon_monk — Tue, 1 Jan 2008 04:26:00 GMT

Travellers often avoid Japan because of it's reputation for being expensive. This was certainly true a decade or so ago, but these days it's quite the bargain.

We visit Japan fairly regularly and go to get our fix of two things: the food and the onsen (hot springs).

I have been greatly privileged because I have always been taken to these Spa's so have never had to find these experiences myself, but they are always quite an experience but the best of them leave an indelible impression.

Some of the ones that spring (sorry for the pun) to mind over the years are the time we were trekking up in the mountains, Akadake (Red Mountain), and came across one simple onsen which was a simple bath cut into the side of the mountain with water bubbling up from the volcanic rocks below: the damn thing was quite memorably hot, so hot in fact that even the Japanese couldn't get into it, or at least stay in it for more than about 10 seconds, which is saying quite something since the Japanese like their baths HOT!

Another time we were in a Spa on Hakone with Yuki's family and our children and the Spa was created from an enormous rock they discovered when building the foundations of the Spa. By huge I mean we are talking about a single chunk of rock about 5m x 4m x 3m. It was so big you needed a ladder to climb up into it. The bath was constantly fed from two pipes made from bamboo with cold water running down one and hot running down the other and the excess just overflowing onto the rocks below. But that wasn't what was memorable about this occasion: I was there with my three year old son and was in the bath along with another Japanese family and some other local men when a small brown turd floated to the surface. Obviously Riu found it most pleasantly comfortable! You have never seen me move so fast! The Japanese take great care in bath house etiquette and this certainly didn't fall within that behaviour! Incredibly, nobodu noticed, or seemed to. Maybe they were just being polite to a gaijin.

Nakedness in this context, stripping off with loads of men and boys (including my father-in-law) and being the only guy with white skin in any of these places, has never been much of a problem with me. Even the mixed Spa's, yes, men and women together, which can be a bit weird given the general Japanese cultural modesty.

My favourite Spa though is called 'Unryu' on the Izu Peninsular, a couple of hours by train from Tokyo. If you have two days spare it is for me the quintessential Japanese experience and one I would very highly recommend. This place gets few gaijin (apart from me), makes no concessions to gaijin in terms of food, behaviour or style, is incredibly designed and so very Japanese, has fantastic food and you come away from nights stay there feeling like you've been there a week with skin as fresh and as young as a peach.

It is without a doubt my favourite and I try to go every time we visit Japan.

For more information on Izu and it's attractions, including where to stay, try the Japanese National Tourist Organisation

This HAS to be illegal ...

simon_monk — Mon, 3 Dec 2007 11:37:00 GMT

We were just returning home after six exhausting days setting up the World Nomads China office in Shenzhen and were in a taxi on the way to the airport.

Look carefully and you can see at least FIVE mobile phones in his cab ... most of them going at the same time. One had Satellite Navigation going on it, on another he was stock trading, and on yet another he seemed to be managing his small fleet of cabs.

I have no idea what the others were for.

While the driver didn't actually crash, this has to be illegal.

Friday night in Shenzhen

simon_monk — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:59:00 GMT

Smell. The first thing you notice is the smell. As you step off the air-conditioned train scents waft up from from bakeries and noodle shops to mix with the odours from the sewers and stale cigarettes.

Actually, in fairness, I find Shenzhen much cleaner than I remember it: the air is cleaner, the roads are cleaner, the shops and restaurants are MUCH cleaner, the people are cleaner. Yeah, they've come a long way that's for sure, and I like to see a country and its people doing well for themselves.

In many ways Shenzen is more fascinating than Shanghai was in May; somehow everyone knows and expects Shanghai to be booming, the place with the crazy stock market that you see on the nightly news. But Shanghai has also usurped Hong Kong's mantle together with much of the wealth and the ex-pat community.

Here in Shenzhen however there seem to be far fewer foreigners, or for that matter, foreign companies, and this can be quite revealing. Wandering around the sparkling and modern shopping centres and boutiques or for that matter the food courts or street stalls you are in effect viewing the local economy targeting the local consumer and this gives you a finger-in-the-air measure of the local purchasing capacity.

$300 pairs of jeans, $1,000 dresses and shoes ... on the prestige ground floor at least and primarily targeting the female fashion audience. I wonder if the social structures aren't similar to Japan where many young women remain living at home so the substantial part of their earning capacity is in effect powerful pocket money or, because Shenzhen is actually a city of immigrants, perhaps this isn't the case at all and there is often no family home to live in as those would be back in the provinces.

The whole city here is very reminiscent Seoul (Korea) in 1997 ... and look where they are now!

As we were eating dinner in a small place on the street, a tired older man walked past, dressed in a blue Mao jacket and cap with a bamboo pole across his shoulders carrying a bundle of something on either end.

For me this encapsulated how much had changed since last time I was here this was quite normal.

Now he is the exception.

We are here to establish World Nomads in China, which is a pretty daunting task for a small company like ours: where do you start? From no company structure, no license, no brand, no staff, no offices, no channels to market, little credit card penetration, significant internet censorship and a population that has little experience of independent international travel, the challenges ahead ... are not without their risks!

But you see what they have achieved and feel where they are going and you have to be buoyed by their optimism, even if you know the road is going to be bumpy from time to time. As the Chinese proverb says: a journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step.

You just gotta start somewhere.

Travel with Children - Part IV

simon_monk — Fri, 9 Nov 2007 10:17:00 GMT

While travelling with children has it rewards, sometimes I feel like an Octopus with four mouths. Our energetic boys have just turned 3 and 5 respectively so try to imagine using your hands to read a menu, catch a falling water glass, grab a young one before they fall off the chair backwards and drink a glass of wine while taking a photograph and shouting at one of them to get off the road while ordering some food and have a side conversation with Yuki ... all at the same time.

It's fun. Honest.

Actually, they have been pretty good and it has been quite noticeable that they have played well together and really bonded as they don't have their friends around. We brought along a large bag of lego this time, anticipating that it would gradually get lost as we travelled around, but they have been pretty good about packing it up and making sure not much got left behind. Interestingly, the lego got turned into various things we saw, did or travelled on as we moved around: suspension bridges in Amalfi, front-loading ferries with ramps on Crete, large pointed ferries in Naxos and large cantilevered cranes appeared in Athens . Interestingly too, this time neither of them really mentioned the TV or movies, just lego, lego and more lego, which is quite different from Bali which was just 10 months ago.

'Don't they get bored?' or 'Don't they want to go home?' or 'Aren't they tired?' or 'Haven't they had enough?' are questions we frequently get asked. Maybe it's because we started young and they've got used to it but people also frequently underestimate the resilience of children.

Including us.

A 4am in the morning start to catch a flight? All smiles and energy. Thirty-six hours on the go with two flights, a day in Milan and a train trip to Venice? A bundle of laughs. Stuck in Naxos for an extra day because of an unexpected storm? Bored but quite understand there was nothing we could do. Hungry and don't like the food on offer? Well that's all there is so eat or go hungry. Not a squeak of complaint.

Perhaps we are lucky or perhaps we just started them young, but they seem to eat pretty much anything, the only problem we have is getting them to eat when its available! Kai particularly is a 'grazer' so that he eats very little for breakfast and gets hungry (and cranky) pretty soon afterwards. This trip in particular we learned to take our small stash of plastic picnic boxes to breakfast (if we were staying in a hotel) and load them up with whatever was at hand to snack on through the day. These boxes were also fantastic ways of making sure fresh fruit such as bananas don't get crushed to a goo in day packs stuffed with jackets and nappies and all the other paraphernalia associated with travel with a young family.

The range of accommodation options seems to have matured and developed greatly over the last 20 years or so with nothing quite so segmented as it used to be. On Santorini we stayed in a small boutique 5-star apartment, so you get the luxury of a hotel but a small kitchenette too, which suited us fine since I reckon I could cook better food than most of the tourist fodder served up on the island. In fact, where we could, we much preferred apartments to hotels, as the flexibility makes it so much easier with kids and this included Venice, Amalfi, Rome, Crete, Santorini, Naxos and Mykonos.