Common Sense and Whiskey

A Week at the Airport

Great, great, lyrical book for those of us who have a weak spot for getting from here to there. Fine, light summer reading.

Check it out.

Where to Go, Why, and What to Read.

Travel ferociously. Get out there. Engage people. Witness events. Explore the world. Bust a move. See all you can see. But when you’re at home and calm, sanguine and reflective, back in the part of the house where people don’t come unless you invite them, in that one little spot where only you rule, that’s where you can see most clearly.

Back there in that room, I saw our trip to Sarajevo as a conceit. We decided we’d go and see the aftermath of war and then we would think about it. And we saw the burned out houses on the airport road. We saw children at play beneath a hand-painted sign warning of “snijper” fire over there, in that direction.

We stood on a hill above town with an old woman and her little granddaughter and a vast field of Muslim graves behind them. We took pictures of SFOR soldiers (NATO’s ‘Stabilization Force’) taking pictures. And in the end, we didn’t really understand it any better. Or at least, we didn’t Glean Wisdom.

I read and read, before and after Sarajevo, and we went to see it, and we had a view of the bombed out parliament building from the Holiday Inn hotel, where we paid in advance, in cash, in Deutschmarks, right up front, for our entire stay.

The parliament building from the Holiday Inn, Sarajevo.

The elevator opened to carpet ripped by gunfire.

The main reconstruction work in Sarajevo was in busting down curbs and rebuilding them with wheelchair ramps.

We walked up and down the open air Markale market where a random, direct shelling killed 68, wounded two hundred on a rainy Saturday in February, 1994 – the bloodiest attack in the then twenty-two month long conflict. We saw bricks and mortar blasted from the side of the hotel next door. People bustled about the market that day, selling flowers, buying fruit, and we took it all in, but still we didn’t Glean Wisdom.

The Journey Ahead

We're battening down the farm now to head toward Walvis Bay, Namibia, which is the point of African land on the map.

En route we'll stop in Switzerland and Italy, then on 1 January, 2010 we'll fly JNB - Walvis Bay to board the RMS St. Helena and sail to the islands of St. Helena and Ascension.

We'll be posting our thoughts here on CS&W and our photos here on EarthPhotos.com. Please come along with us.

In the meantime, you can read up on the local news in:

- Coastal Namibia: The Namib Times

- St. Helena: The Independent

- Ascension Island: The Islander

And here's "The Pierhead Webcam" live from Ascension, updating every five minutes. Looks tropical.

South Atlantic Ocean Reading List

In a little over two weeks time, we'll walk aboard the world's last working Royal Mail Ship, the RMS St. Helena, for a trip to two of the world's most inaccessible spots: The islands of St. Helena (the place of Napoleon's final exile) and Ascension.

Should you ever find yourself sailing the south Atlantic Ocean, you will of course want to read up on it ahead of time. Please help yourself to our reading list. As we get ready to hit the road, here's the best we've found:

Napoleon by Paul Johnson - a tight, 187 page summary by an acclaimed historian.
Waterloo by Andrew Roberts - same kind of summary, in 132 pages.
The Osprey military histories - numerous volumes.
Rites of Peace by Adam Zamoyski - dry, academic history, including more about philandering early 19th century royals than anybody should know. Still, more than you knew.
Napoleon & St. Helena by Johannes Willms - niche thing you'd only seek out if you were going to St. Helena,  or if you just had to read everything in the world about Napoleon.
The Emporer's Last Island by Julia Blackburn - quirky story of the author's own journey to St. Helena - on the same ship we're traveling on.
Turtle Island by Sergio Ghione - nicely written tale of a month on Ascension Island.
Island Base by Captain Bob McQueen - how Ascension was transformed into a staging place for the Falklands War.
The Sun Never Sets by Simon Winchester - Winchester travels to the remaining outposts of the British empire. Simon Winchester's great.
Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum - scant coverage of St. Helena, which Slocum visited on his 1895 - 98 voyage.

We like the Bradt Guides, because they dare to go where other tour book publishers don't. And in this case it's a good thing, because The Bradt Guide to Ascension, St. Helena and Tristan de Cunha is about your only guide.

News sources on the web:

The St. Helena Independent - a newsweekly, new every Friday.
South Atlantic News - from the South Atlantic Remote Territories Media Association. You know them. Don't you?

I've been stymied in my search for a really god map. Maybe out there on the road....

Bookmark this page and check for photo coverage on EarthPhotos.com.

On Airport Security, Jeffrey Goldberg and Matryoshka Dolls

Photo from EarthPhotos.com

In the current Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg writes about his adventures thwarting the Transportation Safety Administration. He uses fake boarding passes, carries banned items aboard aircraft and such, and for the most part depicts a hapless, inept TSA.

This is not news to anyone who has flown domestically since 2001. Part of the (relative) pleasure of flying point to point outside the United States is that you're largely treated as a grown up. But if an inept TSA is a problem, and Mr. Goldberg tells us it is, it seems to me the irreverent, wisecracking tone of the article diminishes that point.

Have to agree with Mr. Goldberg (here, on his Atlantic blog) though, that TSA Administrator Kip Hawley responded tepidly on the portentiously named TSA blog, Evolution of Security.

The photo above, by the way is from the long, urbane pedestrian plaza called “Traders Street”  in Baku, Azerbaijan. We bought  an Osama matryoshka doll, with the Biggest Terrorists Of All Time inside, and carried it home with us just like Jeffrey Goldberg did with Hezbollah flags, knives and books about jihad.

See more photos from Azerbaijan at EarthPhotos.com.

Puzzling Article from an Admired Author

We have two friends about to leave for China to work on the Olympic TV broadcasts. Both are quite excited as neither has been there before. We've all been reading around the web and referring one another to pertinent posts. In poking around, I came across an article titled Beijing's Olympic Makeover written by William Langewiesche for Vanity Fair back in April.

Langewiesche is talented and graceful. Amazon suggests he's written six books and I have read and enjoyed three. But his Vanity Fair article is petty, sarcastic and, well, mean.

From the very start he means not to like China.

First he levels on the Chinese civil airline industry, with side shots at passengers and Chinese drivers.

The last few times we've flown in China have been on sparkling new airplanes. Compare and contrast with the U.S.

Langewische doesn't like Air China or the new Beijing airport terminal, which gets a slam bang review in Vanity Fair's current issue (in the article From Mao to Wow!)

Langewiesche points out that Air China carried the Olympic torch, then tattles that the torch relay "was first cooked up by Nazi propagandists." As if every other Olympics hasn't had its own torch relay.

Travel Books and Bookstores

We've written about Parag Khanna's The Second World here before. He's up on World Hum with an article about his approach to travel.

Speaking of books, on Perceptive Travel's blog there's a list of great bookstores around the world. It's disappointing to report we've only ever visited one, Powell's in Portland, Oregon. We'd nominate the fabulous, cavernous Blackwell's in Oxford, England.

See also Rolf Potts' list on NatGeo's Intelligent Travel.

RTW Planning

It can be daunting to know where to start planning a Round the World trip. There are resources on the web, of course, and planning, really, is a big part of the fun.

In 1995 we did the big, proper three month Round the World adventure, heading west through the Pacific, Asia, the Himalayas, the subcontinent, out into the Indian Ocean, from Madagascar to East Africa, Southern Africa and up the west coast, ending at Madrid. Web planning wasn't what it is today, and somewhere there's a picture of the stack of airline tickets we left home with, several inches high.

In 1997 we made a three week trip in the other direction on our honeymoon, and we have subsequently made one more Round the World trip, the heart of which was the Trans-Siberian railroad, which I've written about here.

When starting to think about a RTW trip,

Early Summer Reading List

Parag Khanna received a not so kind review of his new book The Second World in Foreign Affairs, but we'd guess he's one of not so many authors who takes the time to actually travel off the map to places like Kyrgyzstan before writing about them. Sort of reminiscent of Robert Kaplan's early writing about the Balkans. Here's a piece by Khanna on World Hum.

Also on the current reading list:

Two "great sweep of history" books, Strobe Talbott's The Great Experiment and A Splendid Exchange by William J. Bernstein.

Anything by Fareed Zakaria is worth a look. His latest is The Post-American World.

As has been written elsewhere, Robin Wright's Dreams and Shadows presents a damning indictment of the Bush administration's venture into Iraq. It's worth the price of the book to read that last section alone.

We have to recommend anything by the brilliant Amy Chua.

Also on the list is Phillip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, about the genocide in Rwanda, as we'll be traveling there in August.