They Paved Paradise and put up a Parking Lot OR Paradise Lost. Pick your favorite cliche and apply it most appropriately to Ko Phi Phi.

We knew something was amiss when the minibus pulled into the ferry carpark, dropping off the nine of us. Dozens of similar minivans and some fifteen large touring buses were busy disgorging pockets of stunned-looking tourists. Several uniformed attendants armed with piercing whistles shepherded the crowd unto a trio of waiting boats. We were distributed according to the color of the stickers we’d been given and off we went.

A swell was running in from the south-west, which made the ship lurch to and fro quite uncomfortably and soon plastic sick bags were being handed around. I don’t get scared too easily on the water, but the seemingly uncontrollable rolling, which sent the unsecured luggage flying around the bottom deck, combined with a total lack of safety measures – we counted eight life vests for 300 hundred odd people on board, which were mysteriously being dumped down the stairwell, perhaps to cushion the suitcases – put the fright in me. Oh yeah, and one of these sank a few years ago.

After an hour and a half of sweaty palms, only enlivened by the highly entertaining auto translated subtitles to the onboard movie,  ‘Very abundantly please”, Ko Phi Phi Leh, the group’s smallest island, came into view. An astoundingly beautiful sight. Sheer limestone cliffs rising vertically from an azure sea, covered in lush green tropical forest, and at the bottom, appearing as if a mirage, the most perfect crescent of clear white sand. Maya Bay.

And then you get closer. And you realise that this is the beach, that beach, from the eponymous movie. How do you know? Well, those twenty odd boats and two hundred people on that beach kinda give it away. We admired the view for a few minutes and the boat pulled away and rounded the island, passing secluded inlets and caves carved out by the slow-pounding surf. Everywhere it was the same. A fleet of speed and longboats ferrying brown-baked foreigners and locals alike to experience the marvelous beauty in a crowd usually reserved for football stadiums.

From Leh we made our way over to Don, the big island, which gave much the same picture. What once must have been the most perfect ishtmus of sparkling sand connecting forming two placid bays, now lay chock-a-block with hotels, souvenir shops and other concrete outcrops, hardly a speck of sand left untouched.

Tourism here is trying to imagine what the tourists before you saw. Those first ones to whom the island was a deserted tropical paradise, uninhabited only twenty years ago.

Today it’s off to the mainland where we’ll be making our way up to Bangkok. (Need to catch up Malaysia still, I know)

Okay, this one is a long time coming, but after a year or so of silence, we’re back and we’re on the road. Before I kick off, let it be known that I haven’t brought the upload cable for my camera, so pictures will arrive late October.

Over the past three weeks we drove a campervan through the astonishingly beautiful country of New Zealand. So blessed it is with rolling green hills, smoky mist-shrouded mountains, dense forest ever so green that were it located anywhere close to anything, it would be one of the world’s top destinations. As it happens, it’s not close to anywhere at all. The first thing that strikes you when flying here is how perfectly isolated and far, far away it really is.

After spending 11 hours couped up in a jet tin can, you’re only half way there. The closest city of any decent size is Sydney, a mere 3.5 hours flight away. It’s so far in fact that were we ever to get that long-promised apocalyptic nuclear war, New Zealand is definitely the place to ride it out. It’s pretty much self-sufficient in anything and who would go through the trouble of bombing it.

The country reminds you a lot of the United States. Driving down the wide streets, directions on green traffic signs, traffic lights raised like an inverted L over junctions, pick-up trucks and 18-ton semis straight out of Convoy; there’s the drive-in restaurants, the motorlodges with parking bays in front of paint-peeling cabins and an outsize sign proclaiming you’ve arrived at Cosy Cottages or the Pinewood Motor Inn; above all there’s the small towns laid out on a two-by-two grid of low-slung bungalows, with wide pavements, yes, but designed primarily for the automobile.

Another thing you notice quickly once you leave Auckland’s high-rises behind is how empty this country is. With a population of only four million, and 270k square kilometers to put them in, it can get lonely out here. Towns are few and far between, sometimes as much as a 100km apart, and ones you pass have an eerie abandoned feel to them. Saturday night in Rotorua with nary a soul in sight. Sunday brunch in Napier, capital of Hawke’s Bay wine district and not a single licensed restaurant is open. You begin to understand why so many young kiwis decide to leave for foreign, more exciting shores.

Speaking of excitement. With such a big place to look after, kiwis decided to entertain themselves by getting active. Starting with the clear skies, from which you can do some rather tame sight-seeing by helicopter or plane, though of course you’d much rather sky-dive (whatever happened to parachute jumping by the way?). Continuing on with the mountains, ideal for skiing, snow-boarding, para- and hangliding or climbing of course. On to bridges and the like, which are just made for bungy-jumping, anywhere from 40 to 130 meters, or the terrifyingly superswings of Queenstown: imagine being tied to a hundred meter long cable and then dropped into the ravine to rocket back and forth. What fun! Rivers are for rafting, kayaking or jetboating. The list goes on…

We drove our reconfigured VW stretch van, which boasted bathroom and shower (tiny, tiny) first along the North Island towards Wellington. Stopping along the way to burn our bums at hot water beach, where literally boiling water bubbles up through the sand and Rotorua, a volcanic hotbed (some of them are still active) of thermal pools and geysers, covered perpetually in rotten egg smelling fog. Then we passed through Napier, a town entirely built in Art Deco after being destroyed by a 1931 earthquake and made our way down to Lord of the Rings central windy welly.

It was here that Peter Jackson based himself for the trilogy’s filming and pretty much everyone has a story to tell. We were staying at the Harcourt Holiday Park, where in the adjacent Harcourt Park the Isengard tree-felling scene was filmed. A piece of the original tree which was brought down so cruelly by Saruman’s orcs adourned a notice board at the reception. The proprietor of the park, after asking if we were at all interested in the movie, launched immediately into a story of the shoot and pointed himself out in a framed copy of the Middle Earth news, a broadsheet that circulated during production.

Taking the ferry across the Cook Straight, we took a tour of the Marlborough wine region, white good – red bad, before heading down to Kaikoura, where we chased and watched whales. An exciting thing, tracked by sonar, jetboats powering through the seas, helicopters and planes circling above. All to capture a glimpse of the leviathan.

Then across the mountains through the old mining towns, through tropical rain forests (rains a lot there), which oddly enough are right next to glaciers and looping back up to Christchurch. Along the way not mentioned yet, we saw dolphins and seals, walked two hours to see some well hidden penguins (too well hidden for us in any case), and experienced the original bungy jump from the observation deck. Still working up my courage for that piece of simulated suicide, though Sujatha was rearing to go. We more or less agreed on a tandem jump one, hopefully far off, day.

Now it’s off to Malaysia!

Living in India for almost a year now, I’ve gotten used to cricket. How could I not? It’s positively everywhere. There’s cricket on TV all day, every day. There are matches in vast arenas and impromptu affairs on the streets and fields in every part of the country. I saw kids playing games in the deserts of Rajasthan and on the banks of the holy river Ganges. I even saw a group of boys in the Himalayan town of Gangtok wack the ball around and that’s dedication for you with streets steep enough to make San Francisco’s look tame.

But in spite of all the cricket there was something missing. You got it. More cricket!

A few weeks ago the Indian Premier League (IPL) launched to much fanfare. They took a page out of the ‘fast guide to ruining your sports by corporate money’-book and decided to go straight to the sell-out. (On the upside, if you ever complained that your own favorite sport is becoming too commercial, you can always catch the IPL to gain some perspective.)

Some examples to prove my point:

• The teams have funky sounding American names. ‘Chennai Super Kings’ or ‘Kolkata Knight Riders’. The latter are symbolised by flaming leg-guards and helmets in a faux-medieaval style. It’s cute.
• Player interviews take place during the game with the help of wireless microphones. It’s quite ingenious, they’ll be asking a fielder one of those inane sporting questions like – How are the conditions out there? – when suddenly a ball whips by and the poor guy tries to chase it down the field. Gee, I wonder why he missed the catch !
• In spite of all the money at stake they couldn’t convince everyone that May was a good time for this whole IPL thing, which means that half the stars will leave the competition in a week or so since they have to go back home and play for Australia. Kinda sad actually…

To be fair the games are pretty enjoyable. It’s Twenty20 after all, the high-scoring, shortest version of the game and it wraps up in a mere 3 hours.

The real killer though is in the broadcasting. I’ve seen quite a bit of commercials in my day – American Idol, anyone? – but the IPL tops it all. I did a quick count. In 5 minutes of watching I saw 3 full length tv ads, 2 half-screen ads that push the actual game aside and come with music and sound effects, and 2 roll-over banners that unfold across the center of the sceen anytime someone hits a big score; they make noise too. On top of that there’s a little 3-d cube ad that flips around every minute or so. In all about 10 ads per 5 minutes, meaning 120 ads per hour or 360 for a full match. And I’m not counting the on-field advertising of course.

Overkill? You might say so. I’ve resorted to switching the sound off for the entire game. I couldn’t be bothered flipping channels anymore and the sound really is the most annoying. I mean after hearing those two brats fighting about the best flavor for their fruit juice (Apple or Orange ??) a few hundred times, you really have to draw the line. By the way, has no one in this league heard of frequency capping?

Anyways, I should wrap this up. There’s a match on. Delhi Daredevils (no sniggering please) vs the Bangalore Royal Challengers. I’m a Deccan Chargers man myself, only managed to win one game so far. Maybe I should buy a shirt before I leave India, hmm.

Playing on the banks of the Ganges – Varanasi

Surfing on Youtube the other day, I came across a documentary on Noam Chomsky entitled Manufacturing Content. It deals with the way media is used to control the people in modern democracies. Even though it was made more than a decade ago, I was hooked, and I spent the entire weekend going through the 17-part opus.

Chomsky argues that every state needs to control its people. Totalitarian states do so by means of violence, but democracies to a large extent do not have that option. Media, and especially the news media, fill that gap. In more honest times, Chomsky states, this was called propaganda, but nowadays media manipulation goes largely unnoticed by the common man.

If you have the time, this documentary is definitely worth a watch. It’s thought provoking, though I feel that it misses when trying to explain how the process works in practice. In a way the documentary doesn’t explain at all. You are just left with an ominous feeling that somewhere there’s a government offical preparing the day’s news brief for the press. I don’t think that’s correct. The state doesn’t control these matters. Instead, I believe that it is largely self-inflicted.

I can give you an example that deals with reporting during the Iraq War. I happened to be living in Paris at the time and got my news from a mixture of French, US and Dutch sources. On the 6th of April 2003, American F-14s accidentaly bombed a Kurdish convoy, seriously injuring a senior Kurdish commander and killing some 18 others.

The incident was reported in all media. In American broadcasting the event was described as a tragic case of friendly fire and a Kurdish spokesman was quoted as saying that an unfortunate mistake was made, but that these things happen in war. The French press stuck with the same story, but concluded it with an op-ed statement by the reporter that in spite of these conciliatory words, it was obvious that US – Kurdish relations would be strained for quite some time. The Dutch media reported the event and left it at that.

The point is that each news outlet was trying to frame the story in a way that was most appetizing for its own consumers. The Americans optimistic, the French pessismistic, the Dutch neutral. It’s consumer behaviour, advertising eyeballs, that control the media manipulation.

No one forced US viewers to switch to Fox in droves, but they did. The fact of the matter is that we like our news to be sanitized, to be made fair and balanced per our pre-existing beliefs. We go to church and sit in the choir expecting nothing but the usual sermon.

The truth will set you free, but freedom isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be, it seems.

Two in the morning and in spite of the late hour the air smells of lingering heat, of bracing summer. An oven briefly switched off. In front of me a sixty-year old man, wearing thick-framed glasses, mutters to his wife to hurry up as she digs through her handbag for the passports. He has one of those loud management books in his hand, “Achieving Success – The Easy 6-Step Program,” or something like that. Indian airports must have the highest density of self-improvement books in the world. Jack Welch and cheap derivatives galore.

Suitcases papered on all sides with a return address fill the arrivals hall. They disappear in the jostling crowd. Outside, the streets are relatively empty as we drive through the western suburbs of the city past nearly completed fly-overs and dimly lit malls. Women appear in the headlights sweeping the road. Dust to dust.

We approach a building about to be demolished and the supervisor forgets to either block traffic or halt work. A fist-sized rock hurtles down and hits the side of the car. We drive on. Not much to do about it anyway.

It’s 2008 and we’re back.

It’s been a while since I last posted. Not because there wasn’t anything going on in my life. (I’ve traveled to the north-eastern states recently, so expect some posts on that briefly.) No, my blogging silence is due a new website I’ve been working on. I spent every waking, post-work, internet hour, polishing up the online presence for a little house I bought in France a few months back and I’m happy to say that it’s up and running.

Right now the site is only available in Dutch – you have to start somewhere after all – but you can still go and take a look at the pretty pics. It’s available for rent as of now :)

Will be back with some new posts soon…

How can you go to Thailand and not immediately think of that song? I went to Bangkok last week and had those lyrics running through my head, at least the few lines I remember: One night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble, and something with despair and ecstasy. It goes well with the madness of the place. I just wikipediad it and the lyrics are actually quite bizar. It’s from a concept album about two chess players and the sordid love triangle they end up in with their female manager. Who knew ?

I don’t see you guys rating
The kind of mate I’m contemplating
I’d let you watch, I would invite you
But the queens we use would not excite you

And no, there’s no double entendre there. But I digress. What I wanted to talk about is not the usual mix of backpackers, fried cockroaches and the way prostitutes work the clubs in packs, always a ‘brother’ present. Maybe I’ll get to that later. I wanted to say something about the wonderful world of Muay Thai or Thai Boxing.

Given the name it’s not surprising that it’s Thailand’s national sport. I saw some matches last Sunday and it’s a fascinating thing. First the fighters come out and perform various ritual prayers, greetings and signs of respect, bowing down deeply. Then they kick the shit out of each other. They do so for 5 rounds at the end of which it’s an utter mystery who won.

Points are awarded for correct and dominating Thai boxing style. I guessed the outcome wrong half the time. You’d think that the guy who was beaten to a bloody pulp for 15 minutes or so is the loser, but you could well be wrong. Points are awarded for defensive style too. It’s confusing. Watch the video below and it seems to be just as confusing to the participants. Can’t tell from their reactions who won.

“A teardrop on the face of eternity…”

From Taj Mahal

It really is that beautiful, the semi-translucent marble of the elegant arches and domes overlooking the river, and that oh so tragic story of its creation: A monument built by a heart-broken emperor for his deceased wife. That same emperor imprisoned by his son, the windows from his palace-cell framing the Taj Mahal in the distance his only reprieve for the eight long years until his death.

That is the first face, the public face, but just like some of the other newly elected wonders of the world, it’s not the only one. Like the Pyramids, which border Cairo’s sprawling suburbs, the Taj Mahal only is peaceful and quiet on its own. Walk five feet out of its entrance gates and you’re in the city of Agra, a dusty conglomeration of a million and a half. Congested, crowded and prone to occasional rioting.

In a way it reminds me of the city of Rome, that was so attractive to fin de siecle travelers. That ruined city where shepherds used the Coloseum as stables and merchants plied their trade from Constantine’s Arch. Myabe a hundred years from now Agra will be modernized, the hovels of Taj Ganj torn down, replaced by a glass-encased Visitor’s Center where tourists arriving on the Delhi bullet train will be whisked through an interactive exhibition on their way to the souvenir shop.

Guns only please…