The best thing showing lately on my TV has been Michael Palin's "Sahara" and "Himalaya"

I've just finished watching the 2004 film of Michael P's epic 2003 journey through the Himalaya and surrounding regions. The map above should be intelligible enough (you should be able to click to enlarge it) to suggest the scope of the journey, except that the copy of the book covers over the early segments in Pakistan and India.

by Ken

I've written about my excitement at rediscovering the early Michael Palin travel-trek series on British DVDs. (Even now that they're actually readily available in U.S. editions, the U.K. ones are still way cheaper.) Of course you have to have a multi system DVD player, but there's an advantage there as well: For HD, my Panasonics (I bought a second one during my recent medically induced hiatus) up-convert from the higher-lined PAL versions, and look pretty darned good on my first HD TV, another product of that hiatus.

And I had the new TV just in time to go back and rewatch the first episode or two of Michael's grand Himalaya series, where the scenery is so mind-boggling. I mean, the show starts in the Khyber Pass! I mean, I never dreamt I would ever see the Khyber pass, and now here it is (video below), with Michael P standing right there talking about it, on my own TV!

Confession: I got stalled with the Palin videos some time back, when I ran into Hemingway Adventure. Even if one doesn't share that "thing" for Hemingway that Michael is far from alone in possessing, you'd think that locales like Key West and late-revolutionary Cuba would be interesting enough in their own right to get me through. And maybe someday I'll go back and find them so, but as presented, as reflections of this or that part of Hemingway's journey through existence, they drove me crazy.

And in this case, the accompanying book didn't help, because it's still imbued with Michael's Hemingway "thing." I find that not many people, even Palin fans, know about or understand the books that have been written and published to supplement each of his travel series. The books, based on his obsessively detailed diaries, are his own re-creations of the making of the journeys. Naturally there's overlap with the edited TV series, but usually even when the same visit or interview is present in both film and book form, there's information or perspective from one that amplifies the other. And there's a great deal in the books that doesn't appear in the edited series.

When I finally restarted my Palin-viewing habit, with Sahara, I was surprised to find that I hadn't acquired the book -- I thought I had them all waiting for me. But I found a really gorgeous hard-cover copy dirt-cheap on Amazon, and had it in time to supplement my televiewings, still on my old 31-inch Panasonic CRT TV, of course. (And the hard-cover version is definitely a plus. I've got paperback versions of some of the others, but for Basil Pao's photos, you want the better reproduction of the hard-cover.)

And Sahara is a fabulous journey. I had seen parts of an episode or two of the series way back when on the Travel Channel, but not enough to make sense of it. The series encompasses a staggering range of terrains and cultures, starting north of the Sahara -- starting in Gibraltar, where happily for us Michael had never been, then proceeding by ferry from Algeciras across the Strait of Gibraltar to Morocco, then across the mountains and finally encountering the Sahara (it fascinated Michael that this vast little-known terrain existed so close to Europe), spending time with the exiled Polisario rebels from Western Sahara and on southward, then swinging east and finally heading north through Algeria and Libya before Michael revisited the once place he'd been before: Tunisia, where Life of Brian was filmed, then across the then-still-highly dangerous northern coastal region of Algeria and eventually back to Spain.

As always with a Palin journey, the primary focus is on the people encountered along the way. The locals hired or pressed into service as guides are almost always fascinating, and nearly always Michael's own cultural openness and curiosity leads to glimmerings of contact with and understanding of people who live lives that seem, and sometimes really are, so different from our own. The people, however, aren't so different. And one couldn't ask for a better travel companion (or surrogate) than Michael, with all that gentle humor to go along with the insatiable curiosity about people.

When I finished Sahara, I was all primed for Himalaya, but despite the shock and delight at finding myself transported straightaway to the legendary Khyber Pass, I wasn't initially enchanted by the first couple of episodes. I mean, a grand gathering of locals from two fairly distant villages in, as I recall, the Pakistani Karakoram, for a no-holds-barred polo match? (The play without rules.) And then there was cricket -- or was it rugby, or soccer? Whatever the hell it was, who cares?

I applied a double rescue strategy. First, as noted, I now had the new TV in place, a perfect excuse to double back. But also, since I indeed already had the accompanying book (also in hard-cover!), and now I had the idea of reading the book ahead of watching the film, and I have to say, it did seem to give me a more involving sense of who the people encountered were and why we might care about them and their ways of life. And with the book under my belt, I was also happy to encounter a number of the "Extended Scenes" that are offered for each of the six episodes.

Indeed, I came to think that Himalaya represents such an enormous journey, encompassing not just the mountains to the west of the stupendous Himalaya, the Hindu Kush and the Karakoram, but a significant chunk of lowland Pakistan and India, and the pretty much the whole of the Himalaya range (with significant coverage of Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan), and the previously unknown-to-me far-eastern stretch of India bordering Myanmar (Burma), called Nagaland, leading naturally into the lowlands of Assam, and finally lowest-land Bangladesh, where such great waters of the Himalaya as the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers wash not just the water but the rock and soil of the mountains into the plain and delta emptying into the Bay of Bengal.

(In Bangladesh, the former East Pakistan, by the way, we get a vivid sense of how different the Bengalis are in their Muslim identity from their various Pakistani coreligionists. I should add that differences of and conflicts in religion and politics, which were rife in this region in 2003, when the journey was made, and of course still are, are handled with breathtaking evenhandedness and sensitivity.)

Do I have to add that virtually all of these are places I never imagined seeing? Tibet! (Everest is actually seen, not from the familiar south side in Nepal but from the far less known northern face.) And not just the Tibet Autonomous Region, as the former country has been known since it was annexed by the People's Republic of China, but additional portions of the massive Tibetan plateau in the PRC itself. It's such an immense journey that boiling it down to six hours of TV must have been agony.

It may seem contradictory to suggest that at the same time an awful lot of the people and places visited aren't all that memorable, and yet have to be represented to fill out the picture of the travel path -- and again the combination of book, film, and DVD extended scenes proves immensely helpful. One common thread is that in countries that are heavily Muslim, heavily Hindu, and heavily Buddhist, there is an enormous amount of religion, about which Michael is magnificently tolerant and inquiring, but a viewer may be a lot less sympathetic. The thought of visiting one more temple or one more monastery becomes all but unbearable. Ditto the assortment of pointless festivals we partake in along the trek. It is, of course, what people do to fill out their lives, and I don't mean to suggest that their versions of these things are less meaningful than ours. Quite the contrary. But it does take its toll on one's armchair-travel stamina.

In the course of watching these six packed hours I did a lot of backtracking, but I suspect that the whole thing may look very different the next time through, and the next. There is, by the way, an extended interview added to the special features on the third DVD in which Michael talks about the whole journey, including the story (also told in the book) of how they managed the final shot of Michael sailing off in a tiny boat into the sunset on the Bay of Bengal.

Already in Himalaya, filmed in 2003, Michael displayed a keen awareness of having turned 60, and of the group aging of his entire little travel family -- after all, by then he had been traveling and working with largely the same production team for decades, and none of them were getting younger. I'm cheered by the thought that still ahead for me is one more Palin journey, New Europe.

Do I have to add that it's unimaginable that American TV would ever undertake anything remotely like these journeys? There is, after all, no obvious commercial payoff to any of them. The BBC, however, has garnered not only strong audience response to these series, but continued income from sales of the books and now the DVDs. It's not the kind of money that would impress a Hollywood mogul. Luckily that's not the standard at the BBC.

India, Pakistan, Mali, Maine... You Know... Everywhere

When I got to India the first time, having driven my VW van across Asia, I was just getting out of my teens. I entered in the Punjab, drove to Delphi, Bombay, Goa, through Kerala, took the ferry across to Ceylon for a few months, then drove to Pondicherry, Madras, north through Andhra Pradessh and Orissa (where Tom Wolf, probably the next governor of Pennsylvania was serving in the Peace Corps at the time), on to Calcutta, Benares and up into Nepal for a couple months, Oh, and what fun it was! I'll spare you the unsavory details of what the Kabul Runs entails, but I can still remember the first time I realized that the slab of dead animal hanging from a hook in every (unrefrigerated) marketplace across Asia was black because it was covered in flies.

Around a decade later, one of my closest friends, at least in part inspired by my stories of India, the painter Eveline Pommier, traveled to India, contracted cholera and died, not yet 30. India has never been-- and never will be-- at least not in our lifetimes-- a walk in the park. Anyone who forgets this a trip to India is a serious undertaking, vacation, business trip, spiritual pilgrimage or what-- is putting their health and even their life in jeopardy.

Years later, Roland and I were driving around Rajasthan when we stopped for dinner at a high-end restaurant in Jaipur. Yum, yum. Afterwards we were walking around town and we wound up back behind the restaurant, where we saw some small boys filling up the bottled water they had been serving from a hose. I keep traveling to the Third World-- we were back in India last Christmas, for example-- and the hygiene everywhere is... spotty. On our way to a wonderful restaurant in Bamako a few years ago, perhaps the only really "wonderful" restaurant in the whole country, we counted a number of people using the public sidewalk to squat down and... well... #2. You get used to it. Or you go to Disneyland or, maybe, London and Paris, instead.

A couple days ago I was driving around L.A. listening to Terry Gross interview Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid about his new book, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Hamid isn't some Pakistani bumpkin or, despite his previous book, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a fundamentalist, a movie version of which opens next month. He spent a lot of his childhood in Palo Alto and earned degrees from Princeton and Harvard. How to Get Filthy Rich seems to be set in his hometown (and where he lives now), Lahore, a city I first visited in 1969 (when it had a million people; today it has 10 million). Wonderful place!

The main character in Filthy Rich, which is actually written like a weird How-To book, feels his best way to get rich is through a series of scams, a tried and true tradition across cultures, as we've seen in the History Channel series, The Men Who Built America. Hamid's character doesn't seem all that foreign when he takes goods that have expired and makes labels for them with longer shelf lives. Eventually he strikes it rich by boiling tap water and selling it as expensive mineral water. When I mentioned it to Roland, he seemed relieved. "At least," he said, "he was boiling it."

"[T]he marketization of water, the sort of application of a kind of uber-capitalism that you see really all over the world and certainly in Pakistan, is in some senses you can see it most clearly in water because water used to be almost free. You could get water, you know, from a river, from a canal, from a well, from wherever. And now, of course, we're running out of clean water in most of Asia and much of Africa and much of Latin America. And so people don't have clean drinking water. And we can live for a month without food, but we can't last more than a couple of days without water. So people are selling water, and both at the luxury level, where you have these high-end mineral waters and also at the level of just poor people needing something to drink. So his scam is to take mineral water bottles that have been consumed at high-end restaurants, buy the empties, take tap water, boil it a little bit, pour it into these mineral water bottles and reseal it so it looks like it's an authentic water bottle and sell it back to the exact same restaurants, who probably suspect that it's a scam product, but because it's so much cheaper than the water they buy normally are happy to take it on." The book, Gross explains in her introduction "is both a satire of self-help books and an examination of life in an Asian city with a growing middle class and an infrastructure that can't support it, except for the crime infrastructure, which is thriving."

This book is a self-help book. Its objective, as it says on the cover, is to show you how to get filthy rich in rising Asia, and to do that, it has to find you huddled, shivering on the packed earth under your mother's cot one cold, dewy morning... I originally didn't want to write it as a self-help book. I was trying to write this as a straight novel, and as usually happens with me, I did that for a couple of years and failed and eventually stumbled across this self-help book form. And what I liked about the self-help book form was I started to realize that in a way I actually do write novels to help myself.

...I think it's a story that is a type of story that is common in Pakistan, but more than Pakistan in the entire world, because something like half the world's people now live in cities for the first time in human history. But in the course of the next generation, 25, 30 years, that number is going to go to 80 or 90 percent, which means a couple billion people are going to move to cities in Asia and Africa and Latin America, all over the world. And I think there's a lot of similarity between going from a poor countryside to a Third World megacity, which is a journey that these billions of people are on. So in a sense this is a story of that mass migration in Pakistan but also elsewhere.

Gross mentions the rotting water pipes and how "the contents of underground water mains and sewers mingling with the result that taps in locales rich and poor alike disgorge liquids that while for the most part clear and often odorless reliably contain trace levels of feces and microorganisms capable of causing diarrhea, hepatitis, dysentery and typhoid." Hamid's wife was diagnosed with hepatitis the day after their wedding. "And it was the second time she had had it," he said. "Virtually everybody in my family has had either hepatitis or typhoid or something of that sort. You know, water-borne illness is everywhere. It affects the poor, and it also affects the affluent in a place like Pakistan... [Y]ou get it from either drinking water, you know, brushing your teeth with tap water, or perhaps somebody prepared your food, and they had washed their hands in that water or touched the water or hadn't washed their hands at all. I mean it's-- the mode of transmission is what's called oral-fecal, and that sort of unsavory term really sums up how you get it." His character, the bottled water scammer millionaire had hepatitis too.

[H]e has it as a boy, and so many of us had it, and it's a strange situation. You know, living in America, where in most cities you can drink tap water, and even so, people do have bottled water, but the tap water is perfectly safe to drink almost all the time, there is an enormous difference in a society where you can do that and a society where you cannot do that. And most of the world actually you cannot do that. So the government, the state, hasn't performed the basic, basic service of taking this most common of all commodities that we use and making it safe for everybody to drink as they please.

Not even in Poland Springs, Maine.

Low wage workers at the Poland Springs Bottling Plant in Maine, which is owned by Nestl�, are so angry with the way the company treats them that they're doing pretty disgusting things to pollute the water-- not that Nestl� gives a damn. Nestl� settled a law suit accusing it of using water under a former trash and refuse dump, and below an illegal disposal site where human sewage was sprayed as fertilizer for many years. Nestl� paid $10 million in the settlement but continues to sell the same Maine water under the Poland Spring name.

And they make a lot of money selling that crap too. People are trying to get their hands on money now... everywhere. And many will do anything to get it.

The Failed States Of South Asia-- India's Unhappy Neighborhood

In some ways India and its neighborhood is about as different from the U.S. as you can possibly be. I've been writing about that since I first went there in 1969. But, viewed from Kathmandu-- where the tourist scene these days is almost all Indian and where the English language TV channels are all Indian-- India is very much like the U.S. Oh, not that India... the other one, the 21st Century one. That one watches Glee, How I Met Your Mother, HBO and Indian TV shows that display a culture so disgustingly celebrity-oriented that it even puts our own to shame... well almost. I don't know what they call Madison Avenue in Mumbai but, God do these guys ever run the show.

I just watched an episode of a popular show, India's Most Desirable. I don't recommend it... but go ahead:



India has (another) problem. It's surrounded by the world's most failed states Africa's worse. Somalia's #1. Chad, Sudan, Nigeria, and the Congo, Zimbabwe, Central African Republic, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Niger, Burundi, Kenya, Guinea Bissau, even Ethiopia are right up there among the world's most vulnerable countries. But none of those places are as much like our country as India is. And India's neighbor's... every single one of them is high on the list of the most failed states index:

#7- Afghanistan
#12- nuclear-armed Pakistan
#18- Myanmar
#25- Bangladesh
#27- Nepal
#29- Sri Lanka
#50- Bhutan

India doesn't have any other neighbors-- except Tibet, which isn't considered a country, but a region of China. But the occupation forces there apparently feel there's a problem. They just pulled all foreigners' visas for a month. I know. I was supposed to be there now.

On Pakistan, the report said, "Pakistan has long been dubbed the world's most dangerous country in Washington policy circles" and "yet Pakistan isn't just dangerous for the West-- it's often a danger to its own people."

On Bangladesh, the report said, two of five Bangladeshis live under the poverty line. Any improvements will also be fighting the environmental clock. If sea levels rise just by 1 metre, scientists warn, 17 per cent of the country could be submerged.

"Nepal is the poorest country in South Asia, according to the United Nations, and that's unlikely to change until the peace process is implemented and security restored. There are signs that the Maoists may be losing patience-- and thinking about going back to the trenches to fight for more," the report said.

On Sri Lanka, it said, "The government's final push against the rebels relied on the shelling of civilians and other atrocities, according to a 2010 report by the International Crisis Group.

"The most recent statistics from last year indicate that some 327,000 are still displaced from the conflict."

"Despite the pronounced fractures still lingering, the Sinhalese-dominated government in Colombo seems eager to forget the past," it added.

I've visited almost all these countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan in 1969 and 1972; Nepal 3 times, Sri Lanka in 1970 and again in 1997, Myanmar in 2007. I tried getting into Bhutan this month but it was so complicated and bothersome-- and the monsoon is so awful-- that we decided to go to Nepal and Tibet instead-- a bad idea (at least the Tibet part) because China was able to pull the rug out from under us suddenly after a year of planning. Do I feel like I'm in a failed state when I'm visiting these places? HELL YEAH! They're all unsafe on one level or another, usually more than one level. Some I affectionately refer to as hellholes. Even if we don't wind up in an airplane mishap here or get caught in the crossfire between the Maoists and garden variety Communists, Roland is certain we're taking a year off our lives just by breathing the air in Kathmandu.

Pakistan's Hottest Tourist Destination?

The fabulous Ilyasi Mosque in Abbottabad

Right after the extra-judicial execution of Osama bin-Laden (ex-post facto sanctioned by retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens), DownWithTyranny, my other blog, ran a post that mentioned Pakistan was considering obliterating the bin-Laden hide-out in Abbottabad to keep it from becoming a shrine. It looks like there's an equal likelihood it could become an amusement park. Forget for a moment that the slimy corporate whores at Disney have taken it upon themselves to trademark Seal Team 6, Pakistani attorney Rashid-ul-Haq Qazi, who visited the compound, had a suggestion of his own: charge people to look inside. "It would be wiser to print some tickets and charge an entry fee," he said.

Now as we now, Pakistan isn't a safe tourist destination for Americans even in the best of times. And this is pretty much the worst of times. That said, Abbottabad has always been a domestic tourist destination and the locals see a pot of gold for themselves in bin-Laden's recent demise in their fair town. I missed it when I drove, in 1969. from the Khyber Pass to Peshawar, Rawalpindi, the Islamabad building site, Gujrat, and Lahore and onward to Amritsar and New Delhi, but Pakistani tourists treasure it as a base for trips to the beautiful Kaghan Valley and the Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation recommends as "places worth visiting in and around Abbottabad" the Ilyasi mosque with its water spring (photo above), the Shimla view point and Thandiani hill resort.

Pakistani hoteliers in the now notorious town where Osama bin Laden was killed by elite US forces are praying the views and balmy weather still reel in bumper tourist numbers this year.

Considered one of the quietest towns in the northwest, nestled in pine-dotted hills and popular with day-trippers from the capital, Abbottabad is listed on Pakistan's official tourism website as a "popular summer resort."

...Officials say the bin Laden episode might not dampen the inflow of tourists, since the peace of the city was barely disturbed and business has continued as usual. Indeed, said one, it might even be a bonus.

"I believe that tourism will not be impacted-- rather, more people are coming to see the place where the incident happened," provincial secretary for tourism and culture Azam Khan told AFP... Hoteliers were upbeat, saying prospects for this summer were good.

"Praise be to God, we are doing good business and expect a full season," Hummayun Khan, manager of the Alpine hotel, told AFP.

"I don't think the recent incident will have a negative impact, because the city is still normal and peaceful and people are doing business without any fear."

Jibran Mirza, a manager at Gilani's guest house, said some people may this year prefer to go to Murree, another resort town north of Islamabad, but he did "not see any downslide" in business.

"Murree is overcrowded, so families prefer Abbottabad," he added.

I can even see an HGTV House Hunters International featuring charming Abbottabad, which "is popular not just with visitors but with those looking to relocate. Its weather, peaceful reputation and the perceived security of a garrison have drawn many from other cities to work or educate their children."

Pakistani tourists are lining up to get their pictures taken in front of the nondescript walls that hid bin-Laden for 5 years. International tourists haven't flocked to it yet but curious families from Islamabad, Lahore and even Karachi have. Next up will be tourists from the Gulf states.

Is Pakistan Safe For Tourists?

Are you kidding? Most travelers would rank Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan as the most dangerous places to visit on earth. The British government advises it's citizens to avoid all travel to parts of Pakistan because "[t]here is a high threat from terrorism and sectarian violence throughout Pakistan. Attacks could be indiscriminate including at places frequented by expatriates and foreign travelers." And they get very specific:

� 25 January 2011 marks Arba�een (Chehlum) which commemorates the martyrdom of Husayn bin Ali, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, at the battle of Karbala.  Shi�a Muslims observe the day by holding large processions to signify the end of the 40 day period of mourning.  In the past Sunni Islamic extremist elements have targeted these processions and it is anticipated that there may be an increase in terrorist attacks against minority communities in Pakistan over this period.  You should remain vigilant and avoid any processions, public gatherings and crowded areas.

� We advise against all travel to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and much of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, including the areas of Peshawar, Kohat, Tank, Bannu, Lakki and Dera Ismail Khan. We advise against travel to the city of Peshawar and districts south of the city. The Pakistani military is conducting ongoing operations against militants across Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa (K-P) and Federally Adminstered Tribal Areas (FATA) .

� We advise against all travel to Northern and Western Balochistan and advise against all but essential travel to Quetta and parts of Interior Sindh to the north of Nawabshah.

� We advise against all travel to Swat, Buner, and Lower Dir, including travel on the Peshawar to Chitral road via the Lowari Pass. In these areas there are ongoing reports of military or militant activity.  Localised curfews may be imposed at short notice.

� We advise against all but essential travel to the Kalesh Valley, the Bamoboret Valley and Arandu District to the south and west of Chitral in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. These areas have seen an increase in militant activity recently which has included abductions, violent armed robbery and murder.

� We advise against all but essential travel to Lahore, due to the recent increase in terrorist attacks in the city. Staff at the British High Commission in Islamabad and the British Deputy High Commission in Karachi are not allowed to travel to Lahore for recreational purposes.

� There is a high threat from terrorism and sectarian violence throughout Pakistan. See Safety and Security - Terrorism & Sectarian Violence.

� The Pakistani authorities are also concerned about the threat to foreigners of kidnapping.

� If you are intending to travel to Pakistan, even if you are a regular visitor with family links, you should follow the developing situation in the news media and consult FCO Travel Advice regularly. You should also register with the British High Commission and take out comprehensive travel and medical insurance before travelling.

The U.S. State Department put Pakistan on it's list of countries to avoid in July and emphasizes the presence of Al-Qaida, Taliban elements, and indigenous militant sectarian groups that pose a potential danger to U.S. citizens throughout Pakistan, especially in the western border regions of the country.

Terrorists and their sympathizers regularly attack civilian, government, and foreign targets, particularly in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPk) province. The Government of Pakistan has heightened security measures, particularly in the major cities. Threat reporting indicates terrorist groups continue to seek opportunities to attack locations where U.S. citizens and Westerners are known to congregate or visit, such as shopping areas, hotels, clubs and restaurants, places of worship, schools, or outdoor recreation events. In recent incidents, terrorists have disguised themselves as Pakistani security forces personnel to gain access to targeted areas. Some media reports have recently falsely identified U.S. diplomats-- and to a lesser extent U.S. journalists and NGO workers-- as being intelligence operatives or private security personnel.

I drove through the Khyber Pass from Afghanistan into Pakistan in 1969 and back the other way two years later. I didn't like the vibe and I couldn't wait to get to India so I drove through as fast as I could and saw very little of the country. Pakistan has been, for as long as I can remember, tourism's "next big thing." But I never really gave it a chance and I now consider that as a missed opportunity. Because I'm sure as hell not thinking about going back any time in this lifetime. Lonely Planet tries to paint an alluring picture without actually misleading anyone:

It�s a destination that has so much to offer visitors; drive the Karakoram Highway through the endless peaks of the Karakoram Mountains, or wander through the architectural glories of the former Mughal capital Lahore, the ancient bazaars of Quetta or the cosmopolitan streets of Karachi. But every time the country seems to be gearing up to refresh the palates of travellers jaded with last year�s hip destination, world media headlines send things off the rails � again. No matter the attractions, tourism in Pakistan has always been something of a hard sell. A glance at the map shows the country living in a pretty difficult region: always-unruly Afghanistan to one side, Iran to another, and a border with India running through the 60-year-old fault line of Kashmir. But since the events of 9/11, Western pundits have increasingly been wondering if Pakistan isn�t just living in a tough neighbourhood, it is the tough neighbourhood.

Yesterday I wrote at length about the similarities between the murder of Punjab Governor Salaam Taseer and the tragic massacre in Tucson around the attempted assassination of Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords within days of each other. Both inspired by violent, primitive, extremist factional leaders, Qari Hanif Qureshi in Pakistan and Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin in the U.S.

The Global Peace Index ranks 149 countries in terms of safety from New Zealand, Iceland, Japan, Austria and Norway as the top 5 and Pakistan, Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq as the bottom five. Although Arizona isn't ranked, the U.S. overall is considered far safer than Pakistan at this point. The U.S. comes in at #85, less safe than Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Laos, Greece, Sierra Leone, Morocco, for example, but safer than Bangladesh, Uganda, Mexico, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Armenia, North Korea, Haiti or Serbia.



UPDATE: Now Isn't The Time To Visit Pakistan

Right after the U.S. operation in Abbottabad, the State Department put Pakistan on their Travel Advisory List, where it had already been anyway since February. There's likely to be a tremendous backlash against any American unfortunate enough to fall in fall into the hands of Islamist extremists. In fact, I'd just skip that whole part of the world entirely for a while.

Time For The Two Year Update

Short version: less safe than ever... if you're unlucky. And Saturday night 10 foreign tourists ran out of luck completely. The ten tourists-- three Ukrainians, two Slovakians, two Chinese, one Lithuanian, one Nepalese and an American-- plus their Pakistani guide were climbing Nanga Parbat, the world's 9th highest peak, in remote Gilgit-Baltistan when they were captured, robbed, beaten and eventually gunned down by 15 Taliban militants disguised as policemen.

The Taliban was looking for revenge for a dead comrade who died in a drone attack last month and their spokesperson said that "by killing foreigners, we wanted to give a message to the world to play their role in bringing an end to the drone attacks."

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who wants to pursue peace talks with militants threatening his country, has insisted the U.S. stop the drone strikes, saying they violate Pakistan's sovereignty and are counterproductive because they often kill innocent civilians and stoke anti-U.S. sentiment in this nation of 180 million people.

Sharif responded to the attack on the camp by vowing "such acts of cruelty and inhumanity would not be tolerated and every effort would be made to make Pakistan a safe place for tourists."

Officials expressed fear the attack would deal a serious blow to Pakistan's tourism industry, already struggling because of the high level of violence in the country.

The interior minister promised to take all measures to ensure the safety of tourists as he addressed the National Assembly, which passed a resolution condemning the attack.

"A lot of tourists come to this area in the summer, and our local people work to earn money from these people," said Syed Mehdi Shah, the chief minister of Gilgit-Baltistan. "This will not only affect our area, but will adversely affect all of Pakistan."

The Least Expensive Cities In The World

Karakoram Highway, the world's highest, sort of Pakistan's Route 66, except you don't wind up in L.A.

Today's L.A. Times has a photo essay on the least expensive cities in the world to visit. I'm always on the lookout for a good bargain but I've never considered looking for a vacation spot because it's one of the 10 cheapest places to go. That said, between Roland and I, we've been to most of these places. They are inexpensive-- but not always the most memorable. Cheapest of all is Karachi, the biggest city in Pakistan, a virtual hellhole and someplace I wouldn't go to if someone paid me. In fact, I was in Pakistan twice and managed to avoid Karachi both times. Crowded, seething with discontent and misery, Karachi is on no one's list of places to visit-- not even Pakistan's It's dangerous and offers nothing much in return. I loved visiting Lahore, the country's cultural capital, and Peshawar, a veritable arms bazaar in the wild, untamed west, and I was in Islamabad-- third cheapest in today's list-- when it was being built and found it interesting in a theoretical way I always find cities built from scratch specifically to be a national capital. The main attraction is the giant Faisal Mosque, once the largest in the world (now the 4th largest) that holds around 300,000 people. It was built in 1986 and paid for by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. That said, according to a recent Guardian, the best places to visit in Pakistan for an average tourist (so, not counting climbing a Himalaya) are ancient Taxila, Lahore, the Karakoram Highway (the world's highest), Karimabad in the Hunza Valley, and Lake Saiful Muluk. None are on the list; all are incredibly inexpensive if you want them to be.

Roland's a big fan of Latin America and he's been to both Managua in Nicaragua (second cheapest) and La Paz, Bolivia (4th cheapest) and loved them both. He was especially unimpressed by La Paz's Mercado de las Brujas, the witch's market, which specializes in dried frogs, llama fetuses and all kind of aphrodisiacs.

Other than my extended stays in Afghanistan in the '60s and '70s neither of us has been to the Stans, although Alan Grayson, who has, assures me they are well worth the efforts. They're on the list. Today's Times essay lists Ashkhabad in Turkmenistan as the 5th cheapest place to visit and Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan as the 6th cheapest. Turkmenistan is almost all a giant desert and is sparsely populated. A normal person thinking of traveling there might read the Bradt travel guide to Turkmenistan; I'd recommend Ken Silverstein's hilarious novel, where takes place entirely in Washington, DC, Turkmeniscam: How Lobbyists Fought To Flack For A Stalinist Dictatorship. I might add, that aside from North Korea, Turkmenistan is the world's only remaining Stalinist dictatorship. I always wanted to go there to see some of the old Silk Road towns, like Ashkhabad, but there isn't really much left to see after you've taken a gander at the Ashgabat Flagpole (the world's tallest freestanding flagpole). Instead, there's the Darvaza Flaming Crater which is where, 40 years ago, n oil rig collapsed into a huge cavern of natural gas, creating a fire-filled crater. It's still burning and is hyped as the Gates of Hell.

We've both been to Calcutta many a few times-- Roland again this year-- and that's certainly worth a visit for it's old architecture from the days it was capital of the Raj. It's one of the places where it is inexpensive and filled with plenty of value including wonderful hotels and restaurants.

Roland is really jonesin' for a trip to Ethiopia, and Addis Ababa is the 7th cheapest in the world. But it doesn't have much allure for me and I'm holding out for Madagascar and South Africa. I'm not a big fan of Ethiopia's very distinctive cuisine-- which is available in great abundance on Fairfax Avenue in L.A.-- but Addis Ababa boats lots of colonial monuments and Lucy, humankind's 3-million-year-old ancestor, can be found at the National Museum there.

Numbers 9 and 10 are Tegucigalpa, Honduras and Windhoek, Namibia, neither of which I expect to visit any time soon, regardless of the cheap prices. Well... maybe Tegucigalpa if it's on the way someplace nice.

No Reservations Needed In Mexico During The Swine Flu Epidemic

El Z�calo, the heart of Mexico City's historic center, is generally packed

I wonder if PIA has reduced the number of flights into the Swat Valley's Saidu Sharif Airport this week. I suspect hotel rooms are going begging-- unless the Taliban militia has requisitioned them all. They don't need to though. Thousands of residents have been fleeing in every direction as the Pakistani Army prepares for a decisive military confrontation just a few hours northwest of the country's capital. Now Mexico is also in a touristic pickle. (The Swat Valley was one of Pakistan's most beloved tourist sites until the Taliban took it over and started brutalizing, raping and beheading women without head scarves and men without beards.)

In the midst of the drug-related violence and the swine flue epidemic, American Airlines is following the rest of the airline industry reducing the number of flights into Mexico. The tourist industry there is also in bad shape. Starting Friday and for the entire month of May and early June, American will reduce daily roundtrip flights from 42 to 31, citing "weaker demand." Continental is still flying, just using smaller planes and United is cutting its 64 weekly flights between the U.S. and Mexico to 24.

Generally flights to Mexico have been empty and flights back to the U.S. have been full, although today's NY Times is reporting that things are kind a/sorta getting back to normal-- if you think calling off Cinco de Mayo has anything to do with normal.

The authorities have been seeking to strike a balance between the health risk of widespread shutdowns and the economic cost of keeping parts of the economy shuttered. In Mexico, the nationwide impact on industries, including tourism, has cost about $2.3 billion, or between 0.3 percent and 0.5 percent of gross domestic product, Finance Minister Agustin Carstens said Tuesday.

The BBC reported this morning that there virtually is no tourism industry functioning in Mexico City right now. And its nearly as bad in the rest of the country. There are no foreign tourists at all and cruise lines have been canceling stops there.

Walk into the crisp, modernist lobby of the Camino Real hotel in the upmarket district of Polanco, and you will be treated as a bit of a novelty. Guests are far outnumbered by staff. The hotel has over 700 rooms. Less than 40 are occupied. The World Health Organization is the only regular customer these days.

...The closure of restaurants and other entertainment areas in the capital alone is costing as much as 100 million US dollars a day.

The Mexican economy, already devastated by a drop off in remittances from Mexican workers in the U.S., the second biggest source of income (between oil and tourists), is absolutely devastated now. This positively just kills the millions of low wage service workers involved with tourism-- waiters, musicians, maids, cooks, etc-- and it's spreading through the entire economy, which was already weakened by falling petroleum prices. The hotel occupancy rate in Mexico City is around 5%. That's also the estimated percentage that the economy is likely to contract by. Bloomberg is reporting that the swine flu epidemic is costing the Mexican economy about $145 million a day in gross domestic product. It's estimated that Mexico�s tourism revenue could fall 43 percent to $7.58 billion.

The World's Most Dangerous Countries

Not much tourism going on in Somalia

I'm putting the finishing touches on my return to Bali. I booked a flight from L.A. to Bangkok and then a hotel for one night in Bangkok, followed by a flight the next day to Bali, where I booked a beautiful villa on the outskirts of Ubud, far from the horrific tourist beaches down south. Last time I went to Bali-- about 3 years ago-- people were still frightened because of the 2005 suicide bombings in Jimbaran and Kuta, two congested and commercialized tourist areas.

I avoid places like Jimbaran and Kuta not because of terrorism but because they're filled with noisy partying tourists, mostly from Australia and Singapore but from everywhere. Bali has so much to offer and the southern tourist ghetto is a blight on everything good about the place. On the other hand, there are places I would avoid because of political danger. And last month's Forbes had a handy guide to the worst of the lot.

You'd probably guess that the worst of the lot, even beyond the tourist-unfriendly piracy, is Somalia. Most of the most dangerous states on earth are either Muslim or African. Somalia is both-- as well as a desperately poor failed state. The others in the top three are Afghanistan (one of the places I visited, in less unsettled times-- 1969 and 1972-- that I liked most) and Iraq. Also way up there are the Congo, Sudan, Pakistan, Yemen, Georgia (in the Caucasus, not the one in the U.S.), Nigeria, Algeria, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Sri Lanka (another place I've loved visiting, both before and even during the civil war), Palestine, Zimbabwe. And then there's parts of Mexico, although not the parts that tourists normally go to visit (unless you want to count swine flu as a danger). I don't usually care what officials say about what's too dangerous to visit and what isn't. They tend to be overly cautious. But not always. The U.S. State Dept. advises against Timbuktu but they're wrong about it. It's very safe. If, on the other hand you're reading about civil war and terrorism in the newspapers, it's better to stay away.


UPDATE: I'd Stay Away From Pakistan

Turns out Dick Cheney didn't order the hit on Benazir Bhutto after all. Still, you have to be a real pollyanna to go anywhere near Pakistan these days.

THE PAKISTANI EQUIVALENT OF STONEWALL? PROBABLY NOT

The first time I went to an Afghani wedding something very much astounded me-- well, more than something, many things. It was 1969 and it was in a small city southwest of Kabul, Ghazni. I was staying with some college pals who were living and working there and we all got invited to a wedding. The first thing I noticed was a total separation of the sexes. The women-- including the bride, the groom's mother and sisters, etc.-- were in a different part of the house and we never saw them. So the wedding was kind of like a bachelor's party or maybe two bachelor's parties, one for men and another for women-- although not seperate-but-equal. The men were served a sumptuous feast. Servants and dogs were fed after we were done and then leftovers were sent to the women. That was all pretty shocking-- and I know that less than 30 years later our clueless commander in chief thinks he's building a pluralistic, democratic, secular society there (on the cheap... and fast) which is safe for women. That's called arrogance, cultural imperialism and hubris.

But what I saw as the inequality-- and even abuse-- for the women wasn't even the most shocking aspect of the wedding. After dinner the entertainment commenced. There was a small band that had been hired-- and a troupe of young drag queens. The band played traditional music and the drag queens danced. They were pretty bawdy. And many of them were pretty young. Everyone was smoking some powerful opium-laced hashish from Mazar-i-Sharif but many of the guests seemed genuinely disturbed when the groom's grandfather grabbed one of the young boys and dragged him behind a building and had his way with him. Later the boy, straightening his disheveled garb, came back and danced some more.

When I first saw this headline online-- After Drag Queens Are Beaten Up... Villagers Attack Taliban-- my immediate thought was some kind of incident between transvestites and Muslim fundamentalists in NY's Greenwich Village. But it turns out to be a report on an incident in a small town near the village of Adbulkhel, Pakistan, not far from Afghanistan.

The culture of the Pathan tribes on either side of the Afghan-Pakistan border are identical. The border is a colonial construct that has no relevance to their lives except as a sometimes annoyance. When Taliban religionist zealots beat up the local drag queens, shaved their heads and took away their instruments-- they react to nonconformity and music the same way, albeit usually more violently, western religionist zealots do-- the villagers got into a pitched battle, using heavy weapons and rockets, with the Taliban extremists.

The Afghan-Pakistan tribal regions seem like an utterly different world-- or millennium-- from Pakistan's big cities. And, in fact, the central government is engaged in a fierce and probably unwinnable war-- a very bloody one-- against the tribal areas right now. Karachi has different tribes, different cultures, different mores than the traditional-- and very primitive-- northwest. Small town, traditional hijras are very different from drag queens in the westernized big cities.