THERE ARE STILL JEWS IN YANGON, MYANMAR!

I travel with my pal Roland a lot and he loves going to strange and exotic places, as I do. He also likes checking out weird scenes like synagogues in bizarre countries. Recently I wrote a post about the remnants of the Jewish community in Cochin in Kerala, India. In 1991 we were traipsing around Egypt and Roland talked me into getting on a Sinai bus for a dusty drive to see the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and the Church of the Nativity on Christmas Eve in Bethlehem. A few years later he even managed to find an Iraqi synagogue in Singapore and 3 days before it was blown up, a synagogue in Istanbul. He's an atheist whose distant ancestors he thinks were Catholic (he's unsure).

Anyway, now we're in Yangon (formerly Rangoon), Myanmar (formerly Burma) and a less "Jewish place" you could never imagine. I thought about looking into it and thought, "Nah; not a chance." I was wrong. We were wandering around in a squalid Muslim neighborhood this morning when all of a sudden we see a star of David and Hebrew writing on a building.

It isn't "officially" a synagogue any longer. There are only 8 Jewish families left in town, most of them having fled when the Japanese took over in 1942 and the rest when the nationalistic socialists got control in the early 50s. The last rabbi left in 1963. So officially the synagogue is a museum and community center. There's a trustee instead of a rabbi, Moses Samuels, who helps keep the joint going and he has a son in NYC, Sammy who graduated from Yeshiva University and says he plans to return to Yangon and run it after his father. The official name is Musmeah Yeshua Synagogue and it' on 26th Street, not that far from the Bogyoke Market.

There weren't any Jews around, just a Burmese caretaker. Later a Canadian Jewish tourist from Thunder Bay wandered by. We saw pictures of Sammy Samuels and he looks Burmese. Outside I asked a couple of guys lounging on the street who looked like Al-Qaeda recruits if they were Jews and they giggled.

THE DELHI AIRPORT EXPERIENCE

Flying out of Delhi's international terminal is, to put it mildly, stressful-- even more stressful than air travel has become in general-- and chaotic. Not only is it the most aggressively anarchistic place I've ever been in, at least 75% of the passengers look like they could be featured in a Watch For Terrorists ad-- if not an al-Qaeda recruitment poster. An American profiler would short circuit.

There may be, on an office flow chart in someone's desk somewhere, a schematic for how it's all supposed to work... but I doubt it. At every step along the way, among the pushing, shoving crowds-- many of whom seem to have never been confronted with the concept of "a line" before-- there is something designed specifically to hold up the process and make you return to Go. If you ever thought getting to the airport two hours before your departure was too big a waste of time, let me assure that they must have had Delhi in mind when they made that rule of thumb... and they were being optimistic.

The first nightmare involves getting the bags you intend to check into a great big cavernous black box and collecting it on the other side. Somewhere along the arduous quest for departure someone is bound to tell you about this-- usually the man at the end of the 30 minute line in front of the check-in counter. Black box first, check in after. But once you get through the crowds to the black box and figure out vaguely what's supposed to happen and how, you need to confront several hundred Osama bin-Laden look-alikes jostling in front of and all around it. I thought I was at the Kaaba. Nothing really seems to happen-- just a tremendous amount of seemingly unfocused kinetic energy but no discernable movement towards any goal. I knew I'd be OK eventually but I couldn't help wondering if the fragile looking elderly ladies lurking apprehensively on the outskirts of the melee would wind up stuck at the airport forever.

Eventually you find someone with an airport smock, slip him 10 rupees (like a quarter) and he shoves your bag into the box, gets a security string tied around it and you're good to go-- back to the boarding pass counter line. It was worth the 10 rupees because he alerted me about the need for a security stamp or some kind before you can get your boarding pass that allows you to proceed to the security check. I'm sure regular Delhi Airport commuters are well aware of this quirk.

Once you pass through security, it's less chaotic-- but just a little less. There are families (or tribal groups) camped out on the floors, apparently not having chairs as part of their culture. (Later, on the Air India jet, I realized some of my fellow passengers were among the 700,000,000 Indians I wrote about at DownWithTyranny a few days ago who have no access to sanitary facilities. Besides explaining seat belts and oxygen masks, the flight video does a tutorial about how to use a toilet.) But first I had to find a gate for my flight. There were just 3 question marks where a gate number should have been on my boarding pass and the loudspeaker announcements were so garbled and so unintelligible that it was impossible to tell if they were in Hindi, English or something else. Eventually some airport employee started walking around the terminal shouting "Bangkok flight, Gate 11." That worked. I won't have to brave this nightmare again for another month. And in a couple of years this will place will be left to domestic passengers since India is building a new international airport on the other side of Delhi. I only hope it is as well-planned as the brand new Bangkok international airport.

EATING IN DELHI

I've always loved Indian food and I've spent enough months in India since 1969 to not need a getting-used-to-it period when I get here. Now, I know it sounds a little trite, but you know what they say about how the best food in any country is what people prepare in their homes? Well, it's even more true in India than anywhere else I've ever been. But that isn't only because the home cooking is so good-- which it is-- but because the restaurant culture is so, surprisingly, stunted and undeveloped.

A few nights ago I went to see an operatic presentation sponsored by the Italian embassy at Delhi's 16th century Purana Qila (Old Fort) with my friend Daleep, his mom and cousin. By the time we got back to their house, around 9pm, we were all starving but no one much fancied a restaurant. As we walked up the stairs, Daleep's cousin mentioned that he had a hankering for brains; I mentioned that I'm a vegetarian. By 10 we were eating a sumputous 7 course feast-- including brain curry and lots of vegetable preparations. [I passed on the brain curry of course, but as always in India there was plenty for non-brain eaters to feast on.] Of course, it helps to have lots of good help. I only wish, though, that Delhi restaurants were nearly as good.

The problem-- and a silver lining-- is well-illustrated by 2 very different Connaught Place eateries within a minute of two from each other, Veda and Vega. Ask any concierge at a top hotel where to go eat and they will invariably mention Bukhara (more on that later) and Veda. Most of the top restaurants, like Bukhara, are in hotels. Veda isn't. It's a trendy, transnational Indian fusion restaurant catering to the call center crowd and to tourists daring enough to eat outside the hotel scene-- but only so far outside. The food isn't bad; it just isn't exceptional, although the prices are. Basically the food is kind of Indian and kind of arty/trendy... but not really Indian, just arty/trendy.

Down Connaught Circle a block or so is Vega, a vegetarian restaurant no one will ever call in-crowd. Vega is just behind the lobby of a small, modest hotel, the Alka. It's the next best thing to home cooking I've found in Delhi. And they just keep bringing heaps of delicious food until you absolutely insist that they stop. I ordered a thali and it included any and every kind of bread as well as every Indian veggie dish you ever heard of although just the normal, traditional ones, all cooked without onions and garlic. And the bill came to about a tenth of what the fancy places-- like Veda up the street-- cost.

Park Balluchi advertises that it has been voted the #1 best restaurant in India year after year. They're mixing up "best" either with "popular" or "richest food." The setting, in Hauz Khas' Deer Park, is lovely, the service is fine and the plates are gargantuan. The mewa paneer tukra (grilled balls of soft "cheese" stuffed with nuts, raisins, mushrooms and cream) was opulent and over-the-top. I managed to eat almost half an order.

Bukhara, in the Sheraton, makes the Park Balluchi seem like a soup kitchen by comparison. If being around trendy people turns you off, skip this place but it really is "the best" restaurant in town, at least from the international, cosmopolitan perspective. They started with 17 items on the menu when they first opened and they've never changed anything. Daleep's cousin works in mangement at the hotel and he told me that the ratio between lentils and butter in their famous dal makhrani (black lentils simmered for 12 hours in tomatoes, ginger and garlic) is one to one! It's impossible to get in without a reservation.

The Imperial Hotel-- the best in town unless you don't like traditional places-- has a whole slew of top restaurants, from a sumptuous All-India epicurian festival, Daniell's Tavern, to the hipsterish Spice Route, a pan-Asian (mostly Thai-oriented) extravagenza in one of the most gorgeous rooms in the city. They've also got the best Italian restaurant in Delhi, San Gimignano. Three other hotel restaurants of note are Masala Art at the Taj Palace, Dum Pukht at the Sheraton, both over-the-top, and the more reasonable Chor Bizarre, a Kashmiri restaurant in the Broadway Hotel.

I tried a couple of South Indian places I liked a lot, Swagath, which serves the unique seafood-and-coconut based cuisine of Mangalore (in Defense Colony Market) and Sarvana Bhawan, part of a very reasonably-priced, respectable chain. My advice is to stick to the free-standing places that non-trendy, middle class Indians eat in and to avoid the over-the-top (mostly hotel-based) joints that will be as bad for your health as they are for your wallet.

HOW SAFE IS DELHI-- WITH ALL THE MONKEYS?

I'm a firm believer in traveling as light as possible. For one thing I hate checking luggage. "One in every 138 checked bags was lost during the first nine months of this year, compared with one in 155 bags a year earlier." Now that statistic is for U.S. carriers, which are much worse than reputable international carriers, like British Air, which is what I'm flying on to India. Nevertheless, I don't want to bring anything extra or check anything. So the weather becomes a problem. In Delhi, my first stop, the temperature dips down into the 40s and it cane get colder. That means I need a jacket. In Yangon and Bangkok it never gets below the mid-70s and is as likely to be in the low-90s; no jacket needed. Maybe I can just bring one I hate and leave it in Delhi when I fly to Bangkok.

But what about the monkeys? Do I bring monkey food? Or pick it up when I get there? Are you supposed to feed the monkeys. The ones I've run into in Nepal in 1970 were pretty nasty and aggressive. When I returned 20 some odd years later they had replaced them with tame, friendly docile monkeys. I hear the ones infesting Delhi this year are neither tame, friendly nor docile. They're eating people's small pets, attacking people and trying to steal babies. Does it sound like a Hitchcock movie with simians instead of birds?

Troupes of monkeys are out of control in India's northeast, stealing mobile phones and breaking into homes to steal soft drinks from refrigerators, lawmakers in the region have complained.
"Monkeys are wreaking havoc in my constituency by taking away mobile phones, toothpastes, sipping coke after opening the refrigerators," Hiren Das told Assam state's assembly Saturday.

He said the primates were "even slapping women who try to chase them."

"It is a cause of serious concern in my area, with more than 1,000 such simians turning aggressive by the day," fumed Goneswar Das, another legislator representing Raha in eastern Assam.

And last month the deputy mayor of Delhi died when he fell off his balcony defending himself against a monkey attack. Another bunch broke into Sonia Gandhi's daughter's apartment and wrecked it, while others have been ransacking hospitals and attacking patients. They're out of control but devout Hindus believe they're the incarnation of Hanuman and can't be killed.

The problems stems from humans displacing monkeys from their natural habitat. Tens of thousands of them have moved into Delhi... where the livin' is easy. Gee, and I though all the danger on this trip was going to be in Myanmar.

EXPENSIVE JUNK TO AVOID-- TODAY AND FOREVER

One of the things Roland loves doing when we go to Bangkok, something that basically makes no sense to me at all, is to buy fake Rolex watches and other brand name tokens to the excesses of consumerism. I like buying jade Buddha heads and traditional art. Last night we were pouring over tour books and planning out our trip to Burma and Roland blurted out, "Oh, I bet they have some cheap Rolexes at the Bogyoke Aung San Market or at the Theingyi Zei" (which is even cheaper and offers another Roland specialty that goes right over my head: a snake section that features the fresh blood and organs of various snakes; some live ones are disemboweled on the spot for medicinal consumption). Let a psychiatrist deal with the snake thing. I want to talk about the fake Rolexes. Actually, what I really want to talk about is a story in today's NY Times by Dana Thomas, author of Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster.

Ms Thomas deals with luxury items made in China and other places that are neither Italy nor France, but not the illegal counterfeits Roland craves, the super-expensive, authorized ones that have become a mainstay of the "democratized," newly middle class, luxury industry. "For more than a century, the luxury fashion business was made up of small family companies that produced beautiful items of the finest materials. It was a niche business for a niche clientele. But in the late 1980s, business tycoons began to buy up these companies and turn them into billion-dollar global brands producing millions of logo-covered items for the middle market. The executives labeled this rollout the 'democratization' of luxury, which is now a $157-billion-a-year industry."
Maybe this is where Bush gets his ideas about democratizing Iraq and the Middle east and any country he doesn't like. This is mostly bait-and-switch production, with the newly corporatized-- rather than democratized-- name brands outright lying, or just deceiving, about where and how their overpriced consumer garbage is made. Example: "To please customers looking for the 'Made in Italy' label, several luxury companies now have their goods made in Italy by illegal Chinese laborers. Today, the Tuscan town of Prato, just outside of Florence and long the center for leather-goods production for brands like Gucci and Prada, has the second-largest population of Chinese in Europe, after Paris. More than half of the 4,200 factories in Prato are owned by Chinese entrepreneurs, some of whom pay their Chinese workers as little as two Euros ($3) an hour."

Luxury brand executives who declare that their items can be made only in Western Europe because Western European artisans are the only people who know what true luxury is are being not only hypocritical but also xenophobic. They are not selling �dreams,� as they like to suggest; they are hawking low-cost, high-profit items wrapped in logos. Consumers should keep in mind that luxury brands are capable of producing real quality at a reasonable price. They know better, and so should we.

I avoid that stuff. Two days ago I noticed my Levys were precariously hanging together in a few sensitive areas by some threads so I braved Roland's scorn, drove over to a K-Mart and plunked down $15 for a new pair of Levys, which I intend to wear 'til they get drafty. And today, like I said earlier, is a Buy Nothing Day at my pad.

LOST LUGGAGE STILL PLAGUING U.S. CARRIERS-- AND CONSUMERS

I left home when I was 13, but only temporarily. I hitchhiked from New York to Florida. I only got as far as New Jersey when I was arrested on the Turnpike. The police called my father and made him come pick me up. He was pissed but he gave me the bus fare to get to Miami Beach. It wasn't until later in my teenage years that I left home for real-- this time to go to Tonga, a small island between New Zealand and Hawaii. I hitchhiked all the way to California before being arrested this time-- having stowed away on a ship in San Pedro. After that I discovered airplanes. I had never been on one and they were incredibly convenient. I mean, compared to hitchhiking... they got you there so fast.

It wasn't long before I also discovered that you are better off not checking bags. My primary motivation was getting out of the airport fast and the baggage carousel was always a place I didn't like hanging around. And on top of that checked bags get lost-- a lot. It's easy for me; I travel light. After nearly 7 years living overseas I came back to America with 2 bags; no need to check anything.

Today's NY Times published a story on the worsening checked luggage situation in the U.S. (I never noticed it overseas and I usually feel far more confident checking luggage on foreign carriers. When I fly overseas I never use U.S. carriers, always British Air if I can or another foreign carrier if there's no B.A. flight. "One in every 138 checked bags was lost during the first nine months of this year, compared with one in 155 bags a year earlier."

Holiday travelers can expect to feel the effects of six years of airline downsizing in one way or another. About 27 million passengers are expected to fly during the 12 days surrounding Thanksgiving, 4 percent more than last year, the Air Transport Association said.

But there are fewer airline employees to look after them, and their bags. And to squeeze more flights out of the day, planes are sitting on the ground for shorter periods between flights. So predictably, more bags fail to join their owners, particularly on connecting flights.

�There�s a lot of opportunity for failure,� said Hans Hauck, manager of baggage operations at American�s headquarters in Fort Worth. Since Mr. Hauck started his job in September 2006, American has not met its bag-handling goal in any month. As of late last week, though, Mr. Hauck remained optimistic that he would make his November number. A look at American�s bag-handling operation, which is the biggest of all United States carriers, shows it is making lots of little improvements but still losing ground. American misplaced 7.44 bags for every thousand passengers through Sept. 30, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics reported, up from 6.04 for every thousand a year earlier. (All but a tiny fraction of misplaced bags are ultimately reunited with their owners.)

And American isn't the only U.S. carrier that can't do the job. Actually none of them can. Anecdotal evidence shows Delta being the airline most poorly run, although supposedly statistics show that the small regional airlines do even worse than Delta when it comes to lost bags and American Eagle was the worst of the worst.

Two of the biggest problems are downsizing, with fewer employees to do more work, and an inability for the system to read at least 10% of the bar codes on checked bags.

About 2 percent are misread and dropped onto the wrong pier. Then, it is up to a worker stacking the bags on carts to notice the mistake. �He better,� said Ms. Wilewski, the baggage manager.

American and other domestic airlines have resisted investing in radio frequency identification tags, which are used by big retailers to track inventory and are far more accurate. The tags cost about 20 cents each so it would cost $50,000 a day for American�s 250,000 bags, plus the cost of hardware to read them at each step in the process.

�We don�t lose enough bags to justify that investment,� said Mark Mitchell, American�s managing director of customer experience.

IS THIS A GOOD TIME TO VISIT MYANMAR? REALLY... WHAT ABOUT BURMA?

Ten years ago Roland and I arrived in Egypt just as everyone was leaving. The airport was packed with tourists and they were all headed out. Sixty or so tourists had been slaughtered at the temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor by some Islamic extremists from al-Gamaa al-Islamiya. Not only did we have the temple of Hatshepsut to ourselves, and not only did we have the Luxor region to ourselves, we pretty much had all of touristic Egypt to ourselves. We also had an entire luxury ship cruising the Nile to ourselves... well it was Roland and I plus 2 elderly Brits on their way home to England after a lifetime of foreign service on the Arabian Peninsula. Four of us. It was the best. Not for the 60 dead tourists who were chased through the ruins and chopped up with scimitars... but for us, the following weeks.

Anyway, when the military regime in Myanmar started responding to peaceful protests from monks in Yangon by wholesale slaughter Roland suggested that this might be a perfect opportunity to visit. I mean not that week but after the troubles died down. We were planning on spending most of December in Thailand anyway.

The only really great hotel in Yangon is The Strand, an old colonial Victorian palace in the heart of the city. It's a small, opulent hotel with only 32 suites, all with lavish, up-to-date amenities. And prices to match. But they're not fools either and when I pointed out that foreign tourists would probably be passing on Myanmar this season, I was able to get a drastically reduced rate. (According to today's NY Times "up to 90 percent of bookings by tourists have been canceled," since the unrest. And Reuters is reporting that "the military junta's ruthless and bloody crackdown have hit tourism hard, with some hotels slashing prices by 80 percent to try to attract visitors," which are still largely empty.)

I got a little nervous yesterday when I saw that Bush had slapped more sanctions on the military dictatorship there, but this morning I saw that the regime (theirs) has lifted the curfew and the ban on public gatherings. The regime (ours) is still grousing about this and that but it doesn't look like they will do anything to ruin our trip-- or do as much damage to the already damaged country as they have to Pakistan with their misguided, DC-centric, foolish policies.

That isn't to say that the whole enterprise-- for Roland and I-- isn't a little hairy. Every other day one of us asks the other if we're making a mistake going.

An ominous calm has settled here, less than a month after the military junta crushed an uprising for democracy led by the nation�s revered monks. People have quietly returned to the squalor and inflation that brought them to the streets in protest. There are even suggestions of peace: young couples embracing under trees around scenic Kandawgyi Lake; music from a restaurant drifting across the placid water.

But beneath the surface, anger, uncertainty, hopelessness-- and above all, fear of the junta-- prevail.

...After the government shut down Internet access and denied visas for outside journalists, keeping much of the world at bay, terror continued to rage through Yangon, the main city, for days, according to witnesses and dissidents here. Soldiers raided homes and monasteries to arrest demonstrators, witnesses said, using pictures taken by government informers during the protests.

Even back when the Times Travel Section did a big feature on Myanmar in 2006, tourists were grappling with the morality of traveling to the country. On the one hand, "As Southeast Asia modernizes rapidly-- Starbucks appears to be colonizing Thailand-- Myanmar, as Burma is now called, remains the last country in the region preserved in amber... Western influences are almost nowhere to be found." On the other hand, the reasons aren't because the people are charmed by the quaintness of yesteryear.

There's a reason for this sensation of being stuck in time, of course. Decades of rule by one of the world's harshest military regimes have left the country isolated and its economy a shambles, discouraging tourist arrivals, putting modern amenities out of many people's reach, and keeping the Burmese wedded to traditional life. (In 2005, Myanmar received some 660,000 foreign visitors, according to the government, compared with the more than 11 million in Thailand in 2004, as reported by the Tourism Authority of Thailand.) "There's only one destination where we won't market holidays, and that's Burma," said Justin Francis of Responsible Travel, a British travel agent promoting socially responsible trips. "We'll market trips anywhere else where we think it'll benefit local people-- even Zimbabwe."

...Like Responsible Travel, and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy opposition leader, many Myanmar-oriented human rights groups support a boycott of tourism, which they see as endorsing the government. The groups draw up "dirty" lists of travel agencies that send tourists there, blast publishers of Myanmar guidebooks, and try to shame celebrities who visit, like Mick Jagger. "It's na�ve to say you can help as a tourist," said Tricia Barnett, director of Tourism Concern, a British group advocating responsible tourism, who believes that most of the tourist infrastructure remains closely linked to the regime.

For other travelers, convinced their tourism dollars will help average Burmese, the appeal of the last truly Asian place in Southeast Asia is exactly the reason to come. "When I was in Burma, I've never met anyone who said that I shouldn't be there," said Andrew Gray, founder of Voices for Burma, another advocacy group. Mr. Gray argues that educated tourists can spend money on local businesses without government links and help average people in one of Asia's poorest nations.

The call for a boycott has sparked fierce debate on Web sites and in hotels across the Asian backpacker trail. "I don't know of any debate that's as vocal as this one," said Brice Gosnell, a regional publisher at Lonely Planet. That's not necessarily bad. The debate educates potential visitors, and many independent travelers I've encountered have waded through political tomes before choosing to go.