This one caught our attention anyway.
The Cabinet Of Curiosities: Collecting The Wonders Of The World
Before there was the museum, there was the cabinet of curiosities. Starting in the 16th century as Europe expanded its horizons during the Age of Exploration, the rich and powerful began to collect curios and display them. Their collections were eclectic – everything from strange weapons from distant islands to beautiful coral formations.
The objects were all put together in no particular order in one room or cabinet, which was sometimes called a Wunderkammer (“Wonder Room”). This blending of natural history and anthropology with no accounting for geography or time period allowed the viewer to see the world as a whole in all its rich diversity. Many of these collections became the nuclei for later museums that are still around today, while others are still preserved in their original state.
Ambras Castle in Austria has the Chamber of Art and Curiosities, a collection most famous for its many portraits of “miracles of nature”, mostly people suffering from deformities, plus this guy who managed to survive a lance being stuck through his head. There’s also a suit of samurai armor, silk artwork, mechanical toys and plenty more.
The Augsberg Art Cabinet in the Museum Gustavianum in Uppsala is a beautiful little piece with all sorts of panels and drawers devoted to various themes such as life, death and religion. Click on the first link for a cool interactive exhibit.
The tradition of the Wunderkammer is kept alive by some museums. The British Museum in London has the Enlightenment Gallery, which is jam-packed with busts, fossils, Greek vases, rare books, weapons, and Asian religious statues. The Museum der Dinge (“Museum of Things”) in Berlin is a fascinating if somewhat random collection of, well, things.
%Gallery-186870%In Los Angeles there’s the Museum of Jurassic Technology, a bizarre collection of sculptures made from single human hairs and displays of dubious cures from the days before modern medicine. Strecker’s Cabinets of Curiosities in Waco, Texas, proudly displays its prize item, a humpback whale skull measuring 19 feet long and weighing 3,000 pounds. An Iron Age jug sits nearby. Random associations are what Cabinets of Curiosities are all about.
But why not start your own? A bit of travel or rummaging through yard sales can get you a constantly growing collection that will become the envy of your friends. You can even open it up to the public like the owners of Trundle Manor in Pittsburgh.
[Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons]
VIDEO: Nima Market In Accra, Ghana
Accra, the capital of Ghana, is an established point on the African tourism trail thanks to its good flight and cruise connections, its Anglophone accessibility, its beautiful beaches and the stability of the nation.
Less often seen, however, is Nima Market. Located in one of the poorest areas of the city and home to many migrants from rural Ghana and nearby countries coming to the big city in search of work, it is the heartbeat of the neighborhood. This video takes us on a slow walk through the stalls.
The best thing about this video is that the cameraman uses a lot of close-ups, giving us a shopper’s-eye view of all the food for sale, from the delicious-looking tomatoes to the humongous snails. There are also a lot of fruits and vegetables most Westerners would have trouble naming.
While the produce and the clothing are colorful, you can see that all is not well in Nima. Many of the people have a careworn look, and the man selling shoes only wears a pair of battered flip-flops on his own feet. This blog post by Ghanean blogger and journalist Zainabu Issah highlights some of the challenges the vendors at Nima Market face.
The harder side of life is a part of travel that we can’t shut our eyes to, and witnessing the struggles of people in other cultures can open our own minds. It’s these insights that are often the most important part of our trip.
Condé Nast Traveler’s ‘Hot List’: Too Rich For My Blood
Condé Nast Traveler (CNT) released its annual “Hot List” of the world’s “best new hotels” this week, featuring 154 newish properties in 57 countries around the world. CNT boasts that 62 of these hotels have room rates that start at $300 per night or less but is that really a realistic threshold for separating expensive hotels from affordable ones? I’ve been traveling the world for more than 20 years and I very rarely spend more than half that on accommodation.
Obviously there’s a huge difference between what $300 a night buys in New York compared to Buffalo, or Tokyo compared to Saigon, but in most places around the world I can usually find a pretty nice place to stay for $100 per night or less – sometimes much less. And I’d rather take a 12-day trip and spend $100 per night on hotels than a four-day trip where I spend $300 per night on accommodations.
I went through CNT’s Hot List and was dismayed but not surprised to see just one hotel – the Tantalo Hotel in Panama City, Panama – where room rates start at $100 per night or less. The introduction to the list explains that CNT staff and stringers anonymously evaluated more than 1,000 properties and whittled the list down to 154 of the very best new hotels.But in their ten months of research they could find only one place where room rates start at $100 or less? Meanwhile there are 32 listings for hotels with room rates between $501-$999 per night and seven listings with room rates of $1,000 per night or more? My guess is that for every one traveler who wants to spend $1,000 per night on a hotel room, there are about a million who want to spend close to $100.
I have no doubt that most of the hotels that made their list are delightful places, but many of the recommendations are useless for everyone but the 1 percent. For example, just one hotel in Greece made their list, and it’s the Amanzo’e, where room rates start at the low, low price of just $1,450 per night. The reviewer also mentioned that the place isn’t on the beach (they do have a Mercedes SUV shuttle to one though) and notes that the service could be better.
I spent six weeks in the Greek Islands last year and wrote about a host of very nice hotels, all with room rates starting at $100 per night or less, (see here and here). At Lila’s Guesthouse on the island of Syros, for example, the owners picked us up at the ferry terminal at 2:30 a.m. and did our laundry for us, both free of charge. And at the Palazzo Duca, (see photo) a beautiful yet affordable new boutique hotel in Chania, on Crete, the nice family who runs the place bent over backwards to help us. So if you’re going to recommend just one new hotel in a country, why pick one that has poor service and charges nearly $1,500 per night?
I guess none of this should be surprising for a publication that in March featured an article on how the .01 percent travel (“How to Vacation Like a Billionaire“) in which the author lounged around on a private island near Grenada that can be rented for a cool $165,000 per night.
“Though the price may seem a little astonishing,” the author writes, “there are quite a few ultra-affluent travelers who can afford it – and their ranks are growing. Last year, more than 2,000 people on earth were worth $1 billion or more, 185 more than in 2011…lower the bar to include people worth $30 million or more…and there are 187,000.”
In the warped world of travel media, 187,000 people in a planet that has more than 6 billion seems like a lot, I suppose. Hell, even I’m convinced, pretty soon we’re all going to be renting out our own private islands!
The truth is that luxury hotels are good potential advertisers and most have P.R. companies that know how to get their properties on the radar screen of writers and editors at all the right publications. It’s perfectly legitimate for P.R. firms to do what they do, and many of the places they promote are terrific, but the reality is that the hotel recommendations you read in the glossy magazines and even in some websites and newspapers might be right down the street from places with no P.R. muscle that are just as good but half the price.
To be fair, CNT is a great magazine and their focus on high-end travel is the rule not the exception in the travel industry. Last March, I analyzed the hotel recommendations of a variety of glossy travel magazines, including CNT and concluded that most but not all of the publications I looked at were catering more to the 1 percent than to the rest of us. Based on what I see in CNT’s Hot List this year, it looks like business as usual.
Of the 154 new hotels on the list, 25 percent have room rates starting at $501 per night or more, 13 percent have a base rate between $401-$500, 21 percent range from $301-$400, 21 percent are at $201-$300, and 19 percent of their selections ranged from $101-$200 per night. (The lone $99 entry represented .06 percent of the sample) 60 percent of CNT’s selections have room rates starting at $301 per night or higher; and nearly 40 percent have base rates of $501 per night or more. Of their 62 listings that weigh in at $300 or less, 27 of them have no review – just a listing. (And remember that these are base rates, so a place that has rooms starting at $300 might typically charge much more).
Maybe I need to hobnob with a ritzier social circle but I don’t know anyone who spends $500 per night on a hotel room, even on a special occasion. I read publications like Afar and Condé Nast Traveler because they both offer high quality features writing and beautiful photography. And leafing through their pages can be like a little vacation in and of itself, but I’d love to see more realistic recommendations for places I can actually afford. And I sincerely hope that $300 per night isn’t the new affordability threshold for hotels, because in my book, that’s still a lot of dough.
[Photo credits: Nelson Theroux]
Mucking About: Stepping Into The Unknown On The Banks Of The Ganges
Stair-stepped ghats hug the western shore of the Ganges River like a string of very old pearls, one after the other, fused together by faith and history and mud. The stairs link the mucky dung-spattered streets on land to the murky brown water of the holy river below, with riotous colors of fabric and flowers between.
I was expecting more dead bodies in Varanasi – really, burning bodies everywhere – for this is the place Hindus come to die, hoping for instant liberation from the cycle of birth and rebirth. But instead I discover that only two of the dozens of ghats are “burning ghats,” stacked with wood and smoldering funeral pyres. Most everywhere else, people are just very busy living. Some do cremate their loved ones here, but most engage in more quotidian tasks.
They wash dishes, wash clothes, wash their bodies. Mothers cook, feeding twigs into compact wood cook stoves and food into hungry mouths. People sell things; they buy things. They pray and dunk themselves in the water vigorously, jumping up and down as they fulfill a lifelong Hindu requirement to bathe in the waters of the Ganges. Others light candles and incense and circumambulate the grand broad-leafed pipul trees where I’m sure all these deliciously pagan-disguised-as-Hindu rituals originated, the idea of God and greater things tumbling from the branches like dappled sunlight.
While children string garlands of radiant marigold flowers, sadhus do yoga. Young boys fly kites and launch their lithe bodies into the river, flailing skinny arms and legs before they land with a splash. Men sit in circles playing cards. They squat and shit in not-so-discreet places and urinate anywhere. (Women find ways to be private in these matters.) Straightedge razors glide across chins and scalps, sometimes in preparation for a ritual and sometimes just to clean up. Come nightfall, bodies slumber, covered head-to-toe with thin blankets. In the past week, I have seen humans performing almost every act that fills a human life except the one that makes more life. For that, my eyes drift, just for a moment, to the stray dogs and randy bulls that roam the narrow alleyways.
I’m staying on the southern end of the series of ghats, at the Assi Ghat, named for the river that once flowed into the Ganges at this spot. The river is no longer here because city planners and civil engineers decided to move it south a few years back, part of a complex plan to Save the Ganga that has gone terribly awry at every juncture over the last 25 years. The Holy Ganga – the goddess whose fall from the sky was broken when Lord Shiva caught her in his locks of hair – is now thick with heavy metals, pesticides, human waste and industrial effluent. All attempts to clean her sullied waters have failed. But to bathe in her waters is to tick a checkbox on the to-do list for achieving moksha, final release from the interminable cycle of samsara in which we humans are trapped, lives sentenced to deaths that only lead to more lives and more deaths.
Remnants of Hindu blood pass through my veins, but this river is not holy to me. My father’s family, from South India, has traveled here for pilgrimage. My grandparents came once, a long while back, though they died in the South, their ashes spread in a river a thousand miles from here. Aunts and uncles and cousins have been more recently.
My father hasn’t made it to the Ganges, though; his own pilgrimage was a one-way journey to the United States in 1959, a young engineer in search of a PhD. The only relic of Hinduism he carried was a small wood-framed image of Saraswati, the goddess of education and knowledge. In an Indiana college campus chapel, he married a midwestern woman who had outgrown the Jesus of her childhood, just as he had removed his sacred Brahmin thread. Together they raised me in a seaside town, where I found my own holy ways in the waters of the pond behind my house and the rivers that drained into the crashing surf of the Atlantic Ocean just a few miles away.
All that liquid life created my own desire for communion with water, which I seek out wherever I travel. Yet I feel no such pull toward these polluted waters. Last week, I made one tentative dip of a finger into the river while on a boat ride (just to say that I had), but that was enough contact for me. I am a science journalist traveling in India as I write a book about the environment. I have read too many bleak studies. A billion liters of raw sewage seep into the Ganges each day, causing cholera outbreaks and virulent E. coli strains. Lead, cadmium and other heavy metals, along with PCBs and organochlorine pesticides all swirl in her eddies. And now that I’m here, the anecdotes back up the science. One local tells me he rubs his body with mustard oil before taking his daily Hindu ablution and washes again at home afterwards, to reduce the rashes.
Yet for most Hindus, the Ganges remains inviolably sacrosanct. Vendors sell plastic water bottles to pilgrims so they can carry her water home to share with others unable to make the journey. Five years ago, I watched in horror as my father, recovering from surgery in a hospital in South India, was offered a vial of the grey Gangetic water to drink, a blessing from a kind friend to aid my father’s healing. (He politely refused.) One can view something as so sacred that no foul substance should ever be allowed to defile it. Or one can believe that something is so sacred that nothing, absolutely nothing, could ever desecrate it, no matter how toxic or dirty.
The moving of the river Assi has not helped clean the water one bit. Instead it left a deluge of silt on the shores. I’m told that while mud has always washed over the ghats with each monsoon season, it’s even worse after the river relocation. The clay is 15 feet deep at Assi Ghat, and every day men with fire hoses force the dirt back into the water to continue its passage downstream, along with human remains and Durga statue sacrifices and offerings of flowers still trapped in plastic bags.
It’s here on this clay deposit that I’ve decided to take a wander one morning at dawn, as a fiery sun rises through the smoke and haze. A group of men are rolling what appears to be a dead cow toward the river when it suddenly kicks and tries to stand up, startling them all in a Monty Python moment. Broad wooden boats cluster at the shore, unloading passengers and awaiting others. I pause by two men sitting on the clay that has hardened and cracked like the surface of a desert, watching as they paint lovely soft-hued watercolors of the buildings along the shore, glowing with the dawn light. The clanging of morning puja bells emanates from the small temple under a pipul tree up by the sidewalk, where men sit drinking chai tea, and I head toward them. And then, with one step, my right foot vanishes. In retrospect, my next step should have been back, not forward – but forward I go, and the lower half of my left leg vanishes completely.
What trouble have I gotten myself into now? It was more than a morning wander that sucked me into this muck. It was a pull to roam that has greater control over me than I like to admit. Such insistent desires are why I’ve left my home, my garden, my love, to travel solo across India, doing research for a book, for months on end. And while South India is a place where I have homelands of the heart, places where there is family who will welcome me and nourish my body and soul, I have not made time for such destinations in my itinerary. I have sought out the unfamiliarity of the North, where the Hindi language is nothing more than sounds whirling in my ears. I let the stories I seek take me where they will. And each time I arrive in a new place, still the urge to wander more fidgets in my feet and I am up at dawn, trying to figure out where to roam next. On prior walks in other unknown towns, I’ve ended up on desolate roads with leering men. I’ve explored hidden nooks in a fortress wall … and stumbled upon couples fully engaged in private affairs. Now, I seem to have found quicksand.
Somehow, I’m able to pull my right foot out, my sandal completely smeared with the colorless clay. But my other leg is lost. There is no bottom to press my sole against, and so I freeze and look up. Because this is India (population 1 billion and counting), I am not alone. The two chai-sipping men sitting under the tree (which seemed so close a moment ago and now is an achingly long 50 feet away) see my predicament. “Go back!” one calls out, while the other, waving his arms, motions me to retreat. But I can’t move at all. I shrug and shake my head.
A visit to India, and Varanasi in particular, is always met with warnings of “touts,” a word we seldom use back home though we, too, are besieged with advertising from every direction, imploring us to purchase something we may or may not need. Somehow we’re more troubled by an individual wanting to sell us peanuts or a boat ride than a barrage of car and drug ads booming from our television sets. But the India I have often experienced is one where more people want to help than harangue. Ask one man a question and four will appear like iron filings to a magnet to proffer an answer, maybe even based in a smidgeon of truth. When one cycle rickshaw driver left me far from my destination a few days earlier, a random passerby stepped in to assist me.
So I am not surprised when the men set down their tea and rush to my rescue, traveling on the hardened path amid the quicksand, the safe passage that I had missed. The two men each reach out their hands and I clasp them, abandoning the shoe as my leg slides out with a loud sucking sound. They call over a small boy who carries a wicker basket with delicate cups of marigolds and candles, which he sells for river offerings to pilgrims and tourists. Someone holds the basket while his tiny frame floats atop the clay that my weight sank into, and he sticks his thin arm down the bottomless hole to fish out my sandal.
As quickly as they came and before I can even utter dhanyavad in thanks, the men vanish. The boy, Raju – the only hero whose name I get – and two other children with their baskets of flowers are now leading me back down a hundred feet to the water’s edge. Sticky as glue under my bare feet, the clay is the same color as the warm water of the Ganges that we use to wash away the mud, the difference merely a matter of concentration. But with enough splashing, the silt slips away into the river. I give Raju some rupees for saving my left shoe, and me, and then I squish my way back in my soggy sandals to my guesthouse, intact but for a humbling dose of humiliation. Only later do I learn that just a week ago another woman slipped into the same mire … and it took a crew of people, including one man stuck up to his neck, three hours to get her out.
Belatedly, back at the guesthouse, I suddenly realize I have taken my requisite Hindu bath in the Holy Ganges. I think my grandparents would be happy, that is if their souls weren’t already busy living new lives, or, perhaps, tripping the light fantastic of moksha. What they would think of my solo wanderings around India, I’m less certain. But just as they were dedicated to the recurring rituals of their daily faith, I am hooked to inching my toes into the unknown muck of unexplored horizons. My pilgrimage has no endpoint, no set destination ordained by the gods. The peregrinations themselves are the purpose, and the stories of the people I meet along the way carry as much weight to me as Lord Shiva must have felt when he caught the heft of the tumbling goddess Ganga.
For my grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, Varanasi is the place where Shiva whispers his secret “mantra of the crossing” to whisk you at death to spiritual liberation. It is where the Ganges concentrates the energy of the Great Goddess that courses through India, and through their own veins. For me, this city and this river mark the sacred site where Raju and a cohort of strangers saved me from sinking, releasing me so I could continue on my own wayward sacred journey, in search of other stories.
[Photo Credit: Flickr user martinvogt]