The Travel Matrix ®

In our blog posts to date, we admittedly sometimes have over-simplified some of the complex context concerning the individual countries to enhance readability – some would consider that stereotyping. Yet, the worst stereotyping is about to come in the present post. If you read through this and feel personally offended because your favourite (or home) country has been misrepresented, you can either terminate your friendship or family ties with us (if you ever had them), or write a mean comment below. But be warned: the following data has been compiled in an extremely scientific & objective manner – it's not simply the result of several beer-based discussions. Well, maybe a little. And in case you are wondering - yes, this is what happens when former consultants get bored: they start drawing matrices.

Travelling through 11 countries on this trip to date, and having done a bit of travelling before, Judith & I couldn't help but to start categorising travel destinations. We did so along two dimensions: the first one is how much of a challenge it is to travel in a country, and the second one concerns the age of the travellers/ backpackers/ foreigners visiting. The result is the beautifully coloured matrix below. 

The first dimension, travel challenge, is of course made up of a number of factors, including:

• Language: spoken - is it related to a familiar language? How difficult is the pronunciation? - and written (Latin script vs. strange signs?)
• Transport: how accessible is the country? Do they have decent public transport? Are they familiar with the concept of roads (unlike in Northern Mozambique or Western Mongolia)?
• Safety: is the worst you can expect pub fights (like in New Zealand) or being shot/ abducted  (South Africa, Colombia, Brazil)? Are there any military generals in the country likely to stage a coup while you are there?
• Health & hygiene: can spoiled sissy stomachs cope with the food? How rampant are Malaria & Co? How about dangerous animals? Would there be backup local medical care in case of an emergency?

The second dimension, age, is based on our perception of how old the typical traveller/ backpacker or other foreigner (e.g. expat) is. Of course, age is likely to be correlated to travel experience, but from merely looking at fellow travellers from our bar stool (which is what we did), it's easier to estimate their rough age than to guess the amount of travelling they have done.

You might have noticed that we've excluded monetary considerations – i.e. how expensive is it to travel – since that would make our pseudo-analysis even messier. It's bad enough as it is.
 
In the matrix, you will see that we've given a name to each of the four quadrants to make it appear clever.

1. The first quadrant, “Freshman backpackers” (low challenge, young), is where the travel bug first bites you. Classic examples include InterRailing in Western Europe or “doing” the Australian East Coast. The basic staple on trips like this is made out of water, hop, & barley.
2. Once people have gotten a taste of travelling, they aim for countries which may be considered less common travel destinations (high challenge, young). We think a lot of Latin America would fall into this category. Many people extend their stays in those places to do e.g. volunteer work or language courses.
3. A totally different animal are the classic expat countries (low challenge, old) – people are of course more senior since they often go there to do 'real' work (not fruit-picking), but the countries are highly developed (think Hong Kong). However, there are some outliers such as Cuba, which falls into the quadrant in terms of dimensions but clearly isn't an expat destination. I don't think Fidel would want those 'capitalist swines' in his country.
4. Finally, we got the “Been there, done that” quadrant (high challenge, old). Travelling in those countries often requires more preparation and can be more tedious. Typical conversations between backpackers (including us) in this quadrant may convey an air of travel arrogance as in “what, you've only been travelling for 7 months?”. Also, you often find very dedicated religious people such as missionaries (this, now, doesn't include us) in these places.

So what are we trying to tell you with this? Hmmm. Judith thinks it's a good basis for discussion. Right. The fact I wanted to point out is that travel challenge and age/experience are not necessarily highly correlated – otherwise we'd see a straight line as opposed to the scattered potato salad we have here. 

In our next post, we will return to our regular type of travel post – with beautiful Laos. Apologies for today and bis denne.

The new Thailand...

… for backpackers is in fact Vietnam, or 'Nam, as war veterans and wannabe-funny bloggers call it. Before getting to 'Nam, Judith & I didn't quite know what to expect of the country in terms of economic development and politics. Similar to China, 'Nam had opened up its economy to capitalism several years back, with the autocratic political system remaining in place. From an economic perspective, we quickly realised that 'Nam is in fact a lot more developed than we ignorant foreigners had anticipated*. The very low labour costs in 'Nam nowadays make it a favourite target for foreign direct investments from both the West and Asia. Even many Chinese companies have now moved production there since their home turf had become too expensive - globalisation at its best. Progress has been far less pronounced from a political perspective. Seeing the many hammer & sickle flags and Ho Chi Minh portraits all over the country seemed a bit out of place, and out of time. 

Anyway, we arrived in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), formerly known as Saigon, from Hong Kong some 3 weeks ago. HCMC nowadays is a bustling metropolis with 7 million inhabitants, and what feels like 7 million motor scooters. The constant flow of scooters makes crossing the streets in the city centre either quite exciting or life-threatening, depending on your point of view. There aren't a lot of sights in HCMC, but the War Remnants Museum turned out to be interesting. While the museum does provide a sensible overview of the war, the propaganda-infused descriptions give it an unintended ironic touch.

After some days in the city, we booked an organised tour through the Mekong delta. At US$ 22 a head for two days including meals, accommodation, transport, and a guide, we thought we couldn't go terribly wrong. And the things we got to see actually were interesting: the Mekong towns, a  floating market, some of the omnipresent Buddha statues you find everywhere in South-East Asia... it was all fine. However, Judith & I shared our trip with some 50 other tourists in our tour group. I think cattle herded to a slaughterhouse must feel like this. Rather than doing an organised mega-tour like this again, I shall hit myself in the face really, really hard.

Leaving HCMC, we continued North to Dalat, a medium-sized town in the cooler highlands, which thrives on agriculture. We hired some very friendly guides on motorbikes, and did a nice tour in the surroundings of the city, visiting a shockingly old-fashioned silk factory and a distillery on the way. Besides veggies, Dalatians (?) grow a lot of coffee, reminding us of our time in Central America. A long time local favourite is Weasel Coffee - you'd  be surprised at the excellent taste of a coffee bean which has passed through the digestive system of a weasel. Seriously. Rounding off our pleasant time in Dalat was the happiest Buddha statue we had ever come across (see above) – I don't know what Buddha did before posing for this statue, but he certainly seems a very happy trooper.
 

Having travelled at a relatively high speed for months, both Judith & I felt that it was time to relax and stay in one place for a longer time than usual. We did so at Doc Let, a beach in central 'Nam, staying at a cheap beach resort owned by a 84-years-old Croatian-French with an 8-years-old Croatian-French-Vietnamese son. Despite the 'interesting' family setup, the place was excellent and we enjoyed kicking back for a few days.

The next two stops on our tour,  Hoian & Hué, were somewhat of a downer. The Monsoon, our stomachs, and the fact that every freaking tourist in 'Nam (including us of course) seemed to do the exact same tour kind of limited our appreciation of those two otherwise attractive cities. Subsequently, we even decided to avoid  'Nam's most famous tourist destination, Halong Bay. 'Nuff herding for our liking. I believe the geography of 'Nam (it's long and thin, shaped like my, um, index finger) is partly to blame – there really is only one main route through the country.

Our last stop in 'Nam was Hanoi, which is smaller and a lot more laid back than HCMC. It's a nice city, with good food, cheap massage parlours for the backpacking crowd, and less scooters than its Southern rival. An interesting feature of Hanoi is the huge number of illegal copycat hotels, restaurants, and travel agents. Sinh Café, a popular tour operator, probably has been copied the most. Even though there only is one official branch in the city, we saw at least three dozen other travel agents posing as Sinh Café. One even claimed to be “The Sinh Café opposite the real Sinh Café”. That 'real' Sinh Café was of course fake, too.

Overall, we did enjoy 'Nam. The people are friendly, the food is great, it's dirt cheap, it features a good tourist infrastructure, and it provides a nice introduction to South-East Asia for first-timers. Kind of like Thailand for backpackers some 10 years ago. However, in order to experience the country off the beaten track, you need more time than we had, or limit yourself to one region only. We'll save that for next time.

As mentioned in an earlier post, we decided to leave 'Nam by bus – a short overnight/ overday 22-hour ride from Hanoi to Vientiane, the capital of Laos. Being the bus experts that we are by now, the tour actually wasn't that bad. 

Right now, we are staying in Northern Laos, enjoying the advantages of having air-conditioning, a real bed, and a hot shower! Not that we use hot showers at 33° C outside temperature, but it's nice to know that we could. Folks, that's it for today. We shall return in the foreseeable future with our update on Laos, as well as with observations about travelling and travellers in general. Khorp Jai.
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* OK, the economic development didn't really come as that big a surprise – I had actually invested in the Vietnamese stock index from 2005-2008, making a very lucky but handsome profit at the time. Sorry for bragging. 

The food - Part 3

First of all - have you noticed the fancy NEW AUTOMATIC TRANSLATION button on the right hand side? Try it, it's hilarious.

We are currently in Hanoi, where we are forced to stay in our hostel unless we want to go play with the Monsoon rain. Unfortunately for you, this gives Judith & me time to update our blog. Having raced through Latin American (The food - Part 1) and Japanese (The food - Part 2) cuisines before, we would like to give you a quick taste (ha!) of our culinary experiences in Mongolia and China as well. Over the past few days, Judith & I have both recovered from our first serious stomach bug on our tour to date* – what a timing for this post! 

In an earlier note, I had already alluded to the fact that Mongolian nomad cuisine is, well, special. Nomad food really is not created to taste nice or to be a pleasure visually, it's just an honest provider of calories for survival in a hostile environment. Mongolian cuisine is highly seasonal, even more so than in other places. The harsh climate only allows for dairy production in summer - well, the two months of the year they call summer anyway. In winter, the nomads usually eat the animals which in the previous season have been nice enough to provide them with milk. Life can be tough.

As we stayed with different nomad families during summer, we got to eat tons of dairy products. For breakfast, we usually had yoghurt with sugar, milk rice, or urum (the brother-in-law of butter) with some bread. To prepare for the cold season, most of the cheese production was dried outside or in the tent. The tent is also where all the cooking takes place, always on a single stove fuelled with dried cow dung. Yes, it burns.  

For lunch, we often had home-made noodles, sometimes prepared in a  - surprise, surprise - milk-based soup, accompanied by some parts of animal fat & the odd piece of mutton. Dinner essentially was the same. Being nomads in an environment such as Mongolia, the chefs neither add any spices, nor do they include a lot of veggies. Nomads don't grow anything which doesn't have four hooves. No wheat, no rice, no corn, no spices, no green veggies, nothing. The few veggies they do use are bought on markets, a lot of it imported from China.

For drinking, people mostly resort to milk tea, consisting of hot water, milk, salt (!), and a bit of the leftovers of the Chinese tea production. To party, they throw in some “vodka“ made of  goat milk (only about 15-20% alcoholic content), which really tastes like vodka with a goat having drowned in it. An all time Mongolian favourite is Airag, or fermented mare's milk. It tastes like regular milk gone bad (the one that comes out of the carton in little pieces as you try to pour it over your cornflakes), with a lovely hint of horse. Mmmh.

To conclude, the food described above may sound horrible. However, if there's nothing else to eat, Mongolian nomad cuisine can actually be OK. Just try for yourself. 

After several weeks in milky wonderland, Judith & I were happy to return to China. Chinese food is simply great. And it has nothing to do with “number 54 sweet & sour for take-away, please” which until now I had thought was Chinese. The biggest surprise about Chinese cuisine was its immense variety. Every region in China has developed its own recipes, using distinct ingredients & spices. Beijing as the capital is said to be the best place to sample different regional restaurants. And sample we did. Central Asian Chinese food (depicted above) from the Xinjiang region, for example, features very distinct Mid-Eastern flavours. The Northern food generally is more salty in that they use a lot of soy sauce. The further South-West you go (Yunnan, Sichuan), the hotter & spicier (and more delicious) it gets. Conversely, the food in the  South-East (e.g. Hong Kong) is a lot milder again. Of course, being in Beijing, we sampled fabulous Peking Duck. In addition, hotpot (see below), a pan-Asian favourite, not only sounds funny but also tastes nice.

Last but not least, both Judith & I decided to try some of the shock-food as well, just to make our travel stories more exciting. While we didn't have snake (even though I thought I'd do anything to free our planet from these beasts), we did try fried scorpions. They're actually not half bad: once you put salt on them they taste like Pringles Original. Who knows what P&G put into Pringles, anyway. 

With this silly remark, I shall close this post for today. We're heading from Vietnam to Laos tomorrow on a lovely 22-hour bus ride, so I'd appreciate some compassion for our backs. Gude appo. 
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*) This is what happens when you get overconfident. We caught this stomach bug eating at a rather unclean food stall at a market in Vietnam – bragging to each other about how well our stomachs had coped with the food so far. If we'd get through this unscathed, we thought we could get away with anything. Well, as it turned out, we're sissies after all.

The Chinese cities

Hello again. This blog post will cover our experiences in – you wouldn't have guessed it – Chinese cities. Beijing & Hong Kong to be precise. We actually stayed in Beijing twice (before and after our trip to Mongolia) before flying to fabulous Hong Kong.

Beijing probably is the location where our first impression (bad) and our final opinion (very cool) of the city differed the most out of all the places we've seen. Here is why:

Having spent one month amongst extremely polite Japanese, arriving in Beijing at first came as a proper culture shock. The average Beijinger is a lot more “direct” than people in many other places. That, coming from a German, means a lot. For example, when queuing, people in Beijing literally get their elbows out and push their way forward. I prefer queuing in London. Moreover, foreigners are prone to fall victim to one of the many tourist scams. There's a popular list of 60 well-known tourist scams in Beijing alone. We managed to avoid 59 of them. The one we did have to deal with was the rickshaw-driver-overcharging-rich-foreigners-scam. We had to call the police before the bastard finally gave up. Another factor adding to our hesitant embrace of Beijing was that the effects of the public education programme leading up to the Olympics (among others telling locals not to spit on the streets) have worn off. Last but not least, pollution in Beijing is so strong that seeing the blue sky is as likely as Mario Gomez scoring a goal. So, considering the above, you might understand why we didn't exactly fall in love with Beijing right away.

After a while, however, we learned to deal with the initial deterrents. For example, it didn't take Judith and me long to sharpen our elbows while queuing and do as the Romans do. Payback time. The main reason while eventually we ended up very much liking Beijing is that we were able to stay with Leti (who had studied with me in my undergrad studies) & her boyfriend Jon. Leti is Spanish, but grew up, studied, and worked in many countries. With her love for Asia, she considers herself an “egg” - white on the outside, yellow on the inside. Jon first moved to Beijing some 15 years ago, and thus must be considered one of the grand seigneurs when it comes to foreigners in town. The two of them now live in a really cool traditional Chinese home with a nice courtyard (and an inflatable jacuzzi!!). 

Their house is in a Hutong – one of the old Beijing streets/ quarters constantly under threat of being bulldozed to make way for new property developments. Life in the Hutong is great in that you can experience the normal way of life outside the fancy new glass & steel structures, with regular Chinese sitting outside on small plastic chairs, playing cards, and sipping a beer.

Besides providing us with a lot of tips and background on Beijing, Leti & Jon turned out to be true experts when it comes to local night-life. Going out with them and their outgoing group of friends made us appreciate the diversity and liveliness of this 20+ million mega-city. We went for dinner virtually every night to sample one of the very delicious regional cuisines of China.... check out our upcoming “The Food – Part 3“ (I promise to post it soon, it's just that the beach here in Vietnam makes it so, so tough to sit down in front of our laptop). Besides eating and partying, we somehow managed to fit in some sightseeing, too. The world famous sights like the Tienanmen Square, the Forbidden City, and the Great Wall are quite impressive, but be prepared to share your time there with tens of thousands of other tourists. 

Beijing, and with it of course much of China, has developed at an amazing speed over the last few years. Just look at the huge number of modern buildings everywhere (admittedly, many of which are empty as a result of the property bubble), and you see what I mean. From a Western perspective, many things might not seem right yet - economically, socially, environmentally, and politically - but keep in mind where China has come from. What the Chinese have achieved over the past 15 years took the Western world 150 years to do. If they continue to work as hard as they do right now, it's only fair that the Chinese get a bigger share of the global wealth and power pie, with the saturated West having to accept a smaller slice.

OK, enough, back to the light-hearted story-telling. We eventually left Leti, Jon, and Beijing after some ten days with a very positive image in mind, and, again, a hangover. We didn't even sleep before flying out to Hong Kong. Will we ever learn? Only time (and this blog) will tell... 

Few places in the world have impressed me as much as Hong Kong has. If you're looking for a proof that capitalism works, go to this allegedly economically most libertarian country/ city in the world. From being a mere fishing village a century ago, HK has benefited massively from its use of free capitalism, its geo-strategical location, opium-trade (OK, that was a while ago) and many (cheap but voluntary) immigrants from all over the world. Today, HK is a global commercial powerhouse, whose inhabitants on average (both mean and median) are a lot more wealthy than any of their counterparts in the neighbouring countries. 

HK in large parts consists of rather small, mountainous, tropical islands. If you want to fit 7 million people into a place like this, you can either dig massive subterranean lairs (rather unlikely) or build many skyscrapers. As a result, HK is the most “vertical” city Judith & I have ever visited, both regarding residential and commercial buildings. Nevertheless, the tropical vegetation is abundant in the mountains and parks and gives the city a pleasant, exotic feel. HK is so small that I ran into two people I know more or less by accident. One was a former client of mine, and the second one was Ayako, who had studied with me in my undergrad programme and who showed us a great dinner place.  

On Sundays, there are thousands of Philippine women, many of whom work as maids for the rich & powerful, occupying the central sites around the HSBC building. It's fun to watch them as they sit on their blankets, pick-nick, and chat away.

After only four pleasant days in HK, it was time for Judith & me to move on again. Some ten days ago, we flew to Ho Chi Minh City, this time without a hangover. Right now, we are in our little bungalow 5 meters away from the beach and enjoy the sun burning onto our bellies. I've certainly had worse. Our next post will cover food, followed by an update about 'Nam. Hasta luego.