The Amazing Race 13, Episode 8

(I was on an Amtrak train to Los Angeles during this week's brooadcast, en route to the PhoCusWright conference and Travel Bloggers' Summit . Watch this space for my column on the race to be posted when I get home at the end of the week -- along with reports from PhoCusWright on what's happening in the travel industry.)

"Secure Flight" and the Right to Travel

I've been getting too many questions to answer individually about the regulations issued last week for the so-called Secure Flight program to require ID and permision for air travel in the USA: What does it mean? How will it work (and will it work)? When will it go into effect?

I've worked with the Identity Project on a set of Answers to Frequently-Asked Questions about Secure Flight which may help. If you still have questions after reading the FAQ, let me know.

And if the question that you are left with, after learning about "Secure Flight", is "What can I do about it?", you might want to read the recommendations submitted to the Obama transition team by the Identity Project, identifying what the new Presidential administration, and the new Congress, could and should do to restore and protect the right to travel in the USA. I hope those recommendations give you ideas for letters to the the editor of your local paper, to the President-Elect, and to incoming and incumbent members of the House and Senate.

The Amazing Race 13, Episode 7

Delhi (India)

Why do so many foreign visitors have such extreme reactions to India?

Some visitors stay in India for months at a time, and return again and again. At the same time, I suspect that more people experience major "culture shock" in India than anywhere else, and a significant minority are so freaked out by India that they cut their planned stay short.

And this has been going on for generations, including in my own family of "old India hands".

When my newlywed grandmother "went out" to India for the first time in 1922, she landed in Bombay (now "Mumbai") by ship, and continued to Delhi by train:

Delhi was the first large town (city) we had stopped at. We pulled in there at night -- dark, a huge station, lots of smoke and noise, a lot of it coming from men carrying trays, and in one hand a torch, shouting their wares. And, worst of all lying on the platform in various places -- bodies -- bodies wrapped in white sheets, faces covered. It looked like a picture out of Hell. I really thought they were corpses!

Dad [her husband, my grandfather, whose parents lived in India and who had grown up there himself] had to calm me and explain. It still looked awful, and all the torches and vendors yelling. But it seemed the sight was normal. Indians love to travel, have family gatherings, etc. Few villagers had watches, so when they went visiting they just went to the station and waited for a train that was going their way, even if they waited all night!

[Some Memories of Marguerite Davis Velte Weir, 1986]

Today, decades later, nobody would think of calling the megalopolis of Delhi, with its population of more than ten million people, a "town". And transportation and communications have improved in India, although literacy among the poor has not. But there are still people sleeping on the platforms at Indian railway stations. More recently, my most vivid memories of Delhi include a late-night trip to the airport to meet my mother's flight from the USA, with the auto-rickshaw threading its way between rows of "street sleepers" perilously close to the traffic on both sides.

Part of the problem, as my grandmother's little story suggests, is the lack of understanding that results from a lack of knowledge of the cultural context that explains "strange"-seeming actions.

That was clearly part of the disorientation for the cast of The Amazing Race 13 this week: in one day entirely within Delhi, they went from Bahá'í House to a celebration of the Hindu festival of Holi to a Jain animal sanctuary to a Sikh Gurdwara to a Muslim tomb, seemingly unaware that these each of these had its distinct religious significance, much less what that might be.

As a result, they react with anger to a group of neighbors celebrating the spring festival of Holi in the courtyard of their apartment complex by throwing colored water at each other, when what is expected is to join in the play. (There's no Christian holiday exactly comparable to Holi, although it bears comparison with certain aspects of a May Day festival, April Fools' Day or Halloween pranks, and the Jewish celebration of Purim.) The result is what you might expect for spoilsports at a water fight: the racers become everyone else's laughing target.

At the Gurdwara (Sikh temple), Tina and Ken serve water to the "patrons" (worshippers). Ken draws puzzled looks with his loud jokes at the entrance to a place of meditation, and admits at the ends of the episode that despite the clue they were given, he didn't realize that what they were serving was holy water.

There are other places in the world as culturally distant from the USA (or from that which calls itself "Western Civilization") as India, but few such places that are common destinations for Western tourists, even for independent backpackers and around-the-world travellers. Visitors to India do go to "Old Delhi", while visitors to, say, the Philippines or Indonesia tend to spend most of their time at beach resorts or smaller towns and villages, and little in the parts of Manila or Jakarta that are just as frenzied and disorienting as any Indian city.

A major reason that India is peculiarly overwhelming is, of course, that there is too much new and different, all at once, for a newcomer mentally to digest. At the finish line for this episode of the race, Phil Keoghan alludes to the marketing slogan of India's Ministry of Tourism, Incredible India . A more precise description of the impression it makes on the typical visitor would be, "Intense" India.

The intensity visitors experience in India is partly because of one of India's best features, its relative safety, which lets visitors immerse themselves in its most intense neighborhoods. White foreigners ("The Amazing Race" has always had a diverse cast, but all the non-white contestants have already been eliminated this season) rarely wander alone, without a guide or interpreter, through those parts of African cities as dense and "intense" as the parts of Delhi that the race was in this week.

The African exceptions -- Cairo and Casablanca -- are among those that come closest to India for the incidence of culture shock that rises to the level of panic or revulsion. The difference, at least in Cairo, is that there are quiet, peaceful enclaves like Zemalek, where I stayed earlier this year, where one can get away from the frenzied street life from time to time. In Delhi, as in other big Indian cities, almost every street is alive, and there is little rest for the stranger's mind from the extra effort of trying to interpret the unfamiliar.

In a familiar place, our minds figure out what is significant in our stream of sensory impressions, largely without conscious effort, and filter out most "ordinary" things without our even noticing them. In a place where we have no body of experience by which to judge what is "normal", it takes much more effort to figure out what we need to pay attention to. The more intense and complex the set of stimuli, the more work this is. Some people enjoy that "stranger in a strange land" impetus to constant hyper-awareness, the way they would a drug like caffeine. Others experience it unpleasantly, as though they were being forcibly deprived of sleep or of the opportunity for mental rest and mental digestion. It's this dichotomy, in the end, that I think best explains why India retains such a reputation as a place tourists either love or hate.

What do you think? Did you love india? Hate it? Neither? Where was your most extreme "culture shock" (other than when you returned home)? Please share your views in the comments.

"Nine perfect ways to prepare for the End of Bush"

Sodomy and gratitude

Nine perfect ways to prepare for the End of Bush. Can you believe it?

by Mark Morford, SFGate.com (San Francisco Chronicle) columnist, 17 October 2008

1) Make new travel plans. Yes, the dollar has been gutted. Yes, a small espresso and a day-old sourdough baguette on the rue du Cherche-Midi will cost you 97 dollars. But if you can afford it, now is the time to plan a new European jaunt.

Why? Easy: No more foreigners scowling at you. No more shameful hiding of your nationality. No more telling that hot barista you're from Canada and instead confessing, with even a tiny hint of Obama-infused national pride, "I'm American," and then not apologizing and feeling that sickly sense of mortification. Incredible.

[More from Morford worth reading on today's news: Yes We Did ]

The Amazing Race 13, Episode 6

Angkor Wat (Cambodia) - Delhi (India)

This week The Amazing Race 13 went to India once again. In Delhi, they encounter, the "dhobi", long an object of curiosity and sometimes amusement for tourists and other foreigners:

OUR DHOBI

Our dhobi is a funny man;
He likes to take my socks,
And fill them full of water,
And bang them on the rocks.

He likes to grab my nicest shirts,
And pound them on a stone,
Reducing every button
To shattered bits of bone.

He likes to dip our dusters
In water black as ink,
And change the checked lines in them
From blue to palest pink.

He is a man of wondrous deeds;
He burns, and shrinks, and tears
Our towels, sheets, and tablecloths,
And all the clothes one wears.

I don't know how he does it,
But I think his donkey knows,
For he smiles at me so slyly,
When they call each week for clothes.

[From Verses by F. Mowbray Velte (1893-1962)]

My grandfather, who lived most of his life in India and Pakistan as a university professor of English literature, may have thought his dhobi "funny" when he wrote this doggerel in a letter to his daughter in the USA sometime in the 1930's or 1940's. Attempts at humor aside, I'd like to think he realized that beating wet clothes on a stone slab all day, every day, is hard work.

That's what the racers found out. Unlike most tourists, the racers didn't just send their clothes out to be washed by a dhobi (for a charge of a few rupees per piece), or observe the scene at the "ghat" (river embankment) where the dhobis work. Instead, they had to join in the work, using flatirons heated over coals or a flame to press their share of clean laundry smooth and dry. The irons are red-hot and heavy, and the work proves not only hard but dangerous.

It's a good lesson: Providing services that are inexpensive, and would be simple in our home country (throw the clothes with some detergent in the washing machine, and start the cycle), may involve back-breaking labor in a place where things are done a different way.

There's also a lesson in this episode that when people do things differently, there's usually a reason. "This is a different country, with a different culture", while true, is only a partial explanation. Asking yourself, "Why?", and thinking seriously about the possible answers, can go a long way towards helping you understand not only the behavior that at first seems "strange", but the society in which it is practiced.

In the USA, only about 80% of homes have washing machines, with the percentage varying by income. But almost nobody in the USA washes all their laundry by hand. If you don't have your own washing machine, you go to a laundromat, and pay by the load to use their machines.

So why is there a dhobi ghat in every Indian town?

The obvious answer would be that most Indian families are too poor to afford washing machines in their homes. That's true, but it's not a sufficient explanation. After all, dhobis aren't washing their own clothes; they are washing other people's clothes, for pay. Why can't even the professional laundry-washers afford mechanical labor-saving devices?

Perhaps even full-time laundering doesn't bring in enough money to pay for such expensive "professional tools". But that still doesn't explain why wealthy Indians who could afford a washing machine choose to send their clothes out to a dhobi instead.

Priorities for purchases of appliances and "consumer durables" vary greatly from country to country, depending on culture, climate, and other factors. Is someone more likely to buy a bicycle first, or a television, for example? By some reports in China more than 90% of all urban households now have some sort of washing machine (albeit perhaps only a tiny "semi-automatic" one), while even in rural areas twice as many have a washing machine as a refrigerator. For most people in India a refrigerator comes well before a washing machine, and only among the truly rich are home washing machines as common as they are for ordinary city-dwellers in the new China.

The question remains, "Why?" In part, the comparison with refrigerators simply reflects the difference in climate. Few places in China are as hot as most regions of India. But the penetration of washing machines is still so much lower among comparably-wealthy families in india, as compared with China, as to suggest the existence of additional explanatory factors.

My hypothesis is that one factor is the difference in modern Indian and Chinese attitudes towards servants: upper-class Indians take servants for granted, largely because of their attitudes about caste (I've read that dhobis actually are their own caste in parts of India), while vestiges of Maoism make some Chinese more comfortable spending money on machines to save their own labor than on the labor of other people as servants. Another factor might be different attitudes toward cleanliness, with Indians defining it more in terms of ritual and caste purity compared to more physical and biological Chinese standards of hygiene.

You may have different interpretations of these and other things you see as you travel. Whatever your answers, though, my point is that you can learn a lot by asking yourself "Why?", and playing amateur anthropologist, at least occasionally. While on the scene, you may even be able to ask people for their own explanations of why they do things the way they do. If you can find a way to do so without seeming judgmental, it can be a good way to start a conversation about the local way of life and the culture that determines it. Whatever the reasons for people's actions, it's an anthropologist's axiom that no matter how "strange" they seem to you, there's an explanation for them that makes perfect sense, in its own terms, to the people who are doing them.

"The Practical Nomad" in National Geographic magazines

Exit Strategy: Why You Need a Real Vacation

(by Holly Morris, "National Geographic Adventure", November 2008):

Q. I’ve been at a desk job for eight years and need a change. I want to break away and explore the world but don’t know where to start.

A. Life is meant to be more than a string of brutally long, ergonomically disastrous days. The potent form of liberation I recommend? Leave. Restore your sense of direction by taking a sabbatical, a retreat, or a true pilgrimage. Getting away in a big way, for a long time, is an age-old component of a fully realized life....

If brass tacks are needed to nudge you off the cliff, consult The Practical Nomad by Edward Hasbrouck or peruse Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree Travel Forum online community. Bottom line: As long as your departure doesn’t financially or emotionally cripple any dependents, point toward the unknown and jump.

"Big Brother: Getting Bigger"

(by John Rosenthal, "National Geographic Traveler", July/August 2008):

The latest assault on the freedom to travel is a TSA program known as Secure Flight ....

"We don't know what rules TSA will follow or whether it is following them or not, because it won't tell us what they are, says Edward Hasbrouck, a consultant to the Identity Project , a nonporfit dedicated to civil liberties issues. The TSA's Payne refuses to divulge any details about the watch lists, claiming they are "sensitive security information."...

TSA has spent four years and hundreds of millions of dollars developing the program, but has been unable to devise a system that doesn't violate the 1974 Privacy Act, says Hasbrouck. TSA had hoped to implement Secure Flight as early as April 2005, but Congress has repeatedly sent it back to the drawing board becuase of privacy concerns....

The Amazing Race 13, Episode 5

Te Puke (New Zealand) - Siem Reap (Cambodia) - Angkor Wat (Cambodia)

Should The Amazing Race 13 have gone to Cambodia? And should they have sent the racers to search the vast Angkor Wat complex for a particular temple, on foot, without giving them a landmine awareness briefing first, and requiring that they be accompanied by a guide to keep them on the paths and away from any areas not known to have been cleared of landmines?

I wouldn't think it worth the risk to life and limb, and I don't think it's fair to put the racers in a situation where they had to make their decision while already on the road, with little time or information to go on and a million-dollar prize to tempt them into possible danger.

Cambodia is the most heavily-mined country in the world. Because of the marquee allure of Angkor Wat, it's the only one of the ten or twenty most-mined countries that mainstream tourists would even think of visiting, or where they wouldn't be aware of the risks of war. The wars in Cambodia are over, but mines can kill for decades: people in Europe die every year from unexploded ordnance left from World War I as well as World War II.

If you decide to go to Cambodia, keep two things in mind:

Radio hour today on "Secure Flight"

I'll be on the Katherine Albrecht Show today from 2-3 p.m. Pacific time (5-6 p.m. Eastern Time, 2200-2300 GMT/UTC), talking about the final rules issued yesterday by the USA Transportation Security Administration for the Secure Flight scheme for control and surveillance of passengers on domestic airline flights in the USA.

If you are just tuning in, here are links to some background reading on the issue:

• More details on Secure Flight from the Identity Project
  
  
• My testimony against the Secure Flight proposal at the TSA public hearing last year
  
  
• Detailed comments on the Secure Flight proposal from the Identity Project
  
  
• The Advanced Passenger Information System (APIS) which set the precedent for DHS control and surveillance of passengers on international flights to, from, or via the USA
  
  
• No refund on Northwest Airlines if you won't produce ID
  
  
• Chertoff won't allow judicial review of no-fly decisions and orders
  
  
• Rahinah Ibrahim (Ibrahim vs. DHS) and the right to leave the USA
  
  
• Jaber Ismail and the right of citizens to return to the USA
  
  
• Freedom to travel as a human right

The Katherine Albrecht Show is syndicated nationally on the Genesis Communications Network . You can also listen to the show live online, and we'll be taking listener questions on the air. If you missed the live broadcast, the archive of this hour of the show is available here as a downloadable mp3 podcast.

Secure Flight, "Watch-List Service Providers", and more

Today the TSA and DHS released their final rule for the so-called Secure Flight program to require each would-be airline passenger, even on domestic fligths within the USA, to get individualized per-person, per-flight prior permission from the TSA before they would be "allowed" to board a plane.

The final Secure Flight rule isn't significantly different from the proposal I testified against at the TSA public hearing a year ago, and analyzed in comments submitted on behalf of the Identity Project.

Meanwhile, the TSA is proposing a permisison and surveillance scheme modeled on Secure Flight -- but with the addition to the operational mix of third-party commercial "Watch-List Service Providers" -- for all but the smallest private and all-cargo aircraft, under the somewhat misleading name of the "Large Aircraft Security Program" (LASP).

I've posted more about the Secure Flight final rule and LASP and Watch-List Service Providers today in the Identity Project blog at Papersplease.org . Excerpts:

The TSA claims that Secure Flight will not use data mining or commercial data or assign risk scores to passengers. In fact, the whole point of the Secure Flight program is to mine commercial data about each prospective passenger obtained in advance from airlines, in order to assign each would-be passenger a binary risk score: “cleared” or “not cleared” (with the default, in the absence of any decision by or message from the TSA, being “not cleared”).

The essence of the Secure Flight final rule would be to (1) impose a new, two-stage, requirement for all would-be air travelers to obtain government permisison to fly, first in the form of a discretionary government decision to issue an acceptable form of identification credential and second in the form of a discretionary decision to send the airline a “cleared” message authorizing a specific person to board a specific flight, and (2) require all would-be air travelers to provide identifying information to the airline and the government prior to each flight.

In this respect, Secure Flight is not the watchlist matching program that the government claims: it is a program for enforcing a secret, standardless, nonreviewable administrative “black box” of total control of all air travel within the USA, much as the DHS already controls international air travel to, from, or via the USA under the APIS rules.

The current default of “yes” would change to “no”: Instead of their current obligation as common carriers to transport all passengers willing to pay the fare and comply with the general conditions in their published tariff, airlines would be prohibited from transporting anyone except with the express prior per-flight, per-person permisison of the government, in the form of a “cleared” message.

The ID requirement is being proposed as a necessary a prerequisite to the travel control scheme, but it is also the essential prerequisite for travel surveillance through the identity-based logging and compilation of “travel history” records both by unregulated commerical entities (airlines and computerized reservation systems or CRS's) and the government. The Secure Flight ID requirement will allow the government to construct (or to obtain from airlines or CRSs, through the secret use of National Security Letters, thus evading restictions on the government compiling and maintaining these records itself), logs of our domestic flights and travel reservations similar to the tens of million of illegal dossiers on US citizens’ international journeys that the DHS has already admitted to compiling through the Automated Targeting System , APIS, and related data collection, mining, and aggregation systems.

The Secure Flight "final rule" doesn't specify when the permission and information-collection rules will go into effect, making it impossible for travellers to know what they are actually required to do, or when. Effective dates of the rules for each airline will be communicated to the airlines by the TSA in secret "Security Directives".

Five years ago, when I first predicted that CAPPS-II (the program which was eventually reflagged "Secure Flight") would cost a billion dollars , the government ignored me, and many people outside the travel IT industry were skeptical.

Today, after adding more than US$800 million dollars to its previous estimate in response to airline, travel agency, and CRS comments about costs it had overlooked, the TSA predicts a price tag for Secure Flight of at least US$2 billion. That's in addition to several billion dollars that the government has already estimated travel companies have had to spend to comply with mandates to remake their reservation systems into instruments of surveillance and control. The total cost of Secure Flight and its predecessors -- most of which involved systemic changes that would have been required for Secure Flight if they hadn't already been required by the APIS and PNR access rules -- thus appears likely to exceed US$5 billion.

All of which, of course, ultimately has to be passed on to travellers in higher ticket prices, taxes, and/or "fees". So the next time you're being subjected to "secondary screening", or have to wait to see if you will be "cleared" to board, remember: "Your tax dollars at work."

[Update: Where is Secure Flight headed next? (from the Identity Project)]

5 years of the "Practical Nomad" blog

As of today, I've been blogging here for more than 5 years.

I'm not sure what significance to attach to this, espeically since this blog is far from my first writing or publishing venture. I've been publishing my columns about The Amazing Race on this Web site for more than 7 years, since the first episode of the first season. It's been 11 years since the first edition of The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World hit the bookstores. And it's been more than 15 years since the first version of my FAQ on discounted international airfares (if you want the most updated version, buy my book) was posted to the Usenet newsgroup "rec.travel.air" (shortly after it was created out of "rec.travel").

I've got more ideas than usual in the pipeline for future articles, but I always welcome your suggestions and feedback. If there's something you'd like to see more (or less) of here in the future, or if you just want more in the same vein, please let me know in the comments.

Thanks for coming along for the ride!