Festival Of Colors: New York City

by Elizabeth Seward on

It’s the weekend of one of New York City’s Holi Festival of Colors and spring is just beginning to appear in the cloudless and bright blue sky. This particular event is being held outdoors in an elusive location in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. The address was only released a few days ago and it seems attractively random. The nearest subway train is a mile from the fenced parking lot that will set the stage for the night. I know little of what to expect because although Holi is traditionally a Hindu celebration held for the sake of spring and oneness, this isn’t an exclusively Hindu event and I suspect a lot of people will probably be on drugs, and with that in mind, I don’t think I’ve ever been to a religious event like this one before – even if only tangentially religious.

A crowded lineup of bands, rappers and DJs was announced on the event’s Facebook page this week. Since the festival is being held in a parking lot in a neighborhood relatively deep into Brooklyn, I assume that at least part of the motivation behind the location is to do with the sonic roster and sound ordinances. Each ticket comes with a bag of colored powder and the biggest ice breaker of the night is that people get to throw the powder on strangers without making any sort of prior acquaintance. This bend on common courtesy appeals to me. Attendees have been instructed to wear clothing that could be, but probably won’t be, ruined. With temperatures hovering around 50 degrees tonight, I’m not sure I have a coat I am willing to even possibly destroy so I layer up old sweatshirts and leggings instead.

%Gallery-186285%I’m in line for the security check when I realize I might run into trouble. The search is one of the most thorough I have experienced only to be compared with the Colombian airport where I was pulled aside and asked to open factory-sealed bags of coffee. I have prescription medication with me, but I don’t have the prescription itself in hand. This has never been a problem for me before – not even at the Colombian airport. But it’s a problem tonight. Security wanted to throw my medication away. I pleaded with two of the workers, explaining that since I don’t have health insurance, the medicine would be expensive to replace. One of the women working security fortunately offers to hold my medicine until I leave. I’m frustrated and trembling from the confrontation, but I understand it all the same. They don’t know that it’s not an illegal drug I have in my possession. If there’s any sort of scalability for which kinds of events are better-suited for recreational drug users than others, this kind of event would surely fall low in the rankings from a security standpoint. No one is spending the night in this parking lot tonight – everyone must find their own way home, whether they walk to the distant train, try to find a taxi, or drive themselves. It’s best to be vigilant, I suppose.

I finally make it through the security checkpoint and into the festival itself. The area is enclosed and seems small, but there’s more than enough room for the hundreds of people already present. A couple of food trucks and a bar are to my right. A handful of portable toilets crowning the head of a winding snake of a line are straight ahead. A makeshift stage hosting a dynamic punk band are to the left. I wish I didn’t have to, but I immediately head toward the harrowing bathroom line with urgency and wait.

I’m a lousy chameleon in this colorful landscape. The powders have been thrown; the colors have blended. Everyone else is a rainbow and I am a sore thumb until my husband surprises me with a hefty splash of red color to my face. My mouth is unluckily open and I spend the next 10 minutes spitting up red that looks like blood although it isn’t but maybe might as well be for the scene I’m causing. I repay him when he’s least expecting it later in the night. But that’s how the Festival of Colors is.

“I think you could use a little more purple,” says a girl within a swarm of girls behind me. She punts her purple powder my way.

“And more green!” adds her friend, wiping hers along my leg.

It’s difficult not to begin a conversation after an interaction like this. One of the girls calls me pretty and makes me blush, but luckily she can’t see the flush of my embarrassment beneath my splattered face. She asks to take a photo of me and I feel flattered and suddenly young. This is how it pans out the rest of the night. Strangers find clever ways to paint the innocent passerby and usually a smile is exchanged and sometimes a familiarity with one another is forged. I don’t normally find it easy to introduce myself to people I don’t know at events like this, so I like this. Beneath the masks of Holi powder, we are all ourselves, weighted with whatever we might be carrying. With the color unifying us all in appearance, our barriers have broken. These barriers are superficial and remarkably easy to eliminate. They are cemented into the changeable – like the logo of a brand, the smoothness of skin, or the shine of hair. We might not even notice them until they’re gone. Once our surveillance cameras have been covered, what happens next is lovely: we all just get along.

When the punk band exits the stage, a DJ begins. He throws us all back a decade or so with songs from Blackstreet and Destiny’s Child. We dance. The party is still going when I leave and attempt to find the security officer who told me she would hold my medicine. She said she would be here, but I can’t find her and I almost give up hope. She probably just threw my medicine away. But before I become too convinced, I’m pointed in her direction. She empties her pockets and gives me my medicine back, which is folded into my paper ticket for the event. I thank her and walk to my car. With the visible invisible, it’s fascinating how quickly we all become equals.

Vagabond Tales: Fear And Loathing In San Felipe

by Kyle Ellison on

The strip clubs in San Felipe, Mexico, aren’t open on Tuesdays.

For most travelers to Baja, this isn’t overly concerning. After all, with all of the surfing, fishing, diving and fish taco eating that can easily consumer your entire day, the fact that strip clubs are closed for one day of the week shouldn’t be a point of concern.

If, however, you’ve descended upon San Felipe after three days of camping in the desert with a reclusive, one-legged hermit (a story for a different time), and it happens to be a bachelor party, the fact that it’s a Tuesday suddenly becomes an issue.

This, however, is not a tale about strip clubs or hermits. It’s a tale about safety, and how the road to bad decisions can be a very gradual slope.

As I’ve mentioned before in the “2013 International Adventure Guide to Baja” and articles such as “I Traveled to Mexico and Came Back Alive“, the only way you’re going to get in trouble as a visitor to Baja is if you do something stupid like engage in drug deals in a back alley of a border town with unsavory characters in the middle of the night.

This isn’t a Mexico thing, mind you; this is an everywhere thing. Whether you’re in Mexico or Chicago, back alleys at 2 a.m. are potential staging areas for the next morning’s headlines. When you hear a report that two tourists were stabbed or robbed, and then find out that it was in a back alley of a border town at 2 a.m., a small part of you thinks they had it coming.

Just like no one plans on an accident, however, you don’t always plan on ending up in a back alley of a border town-sometimes it just happens. While you would never jump from Point A (land of good decisions) directly to Point D (land of horrendous decisions), sometimes the smaller jumps from A to B and B to C put you in striking range of Point D, the slippery slope of how you got there blurred by the casual descent.

Throw in a Mexican army general and a moonlighting prostitute, and you’ve created a mezcal-flavored cocktail for disaster.With regards to the San Felipe situation, one thing you should never do in a border town is publicly complain. (For the record, San Felipe is not officially classified as a border town. It’s actually two and half hours south of the border on the Sea of Cortez, but as a popular weekend destination it can come with its share of tourist town perils).

The problem with complaining in a budget international tourist town is there is a buck to be made in “solving the problem”. If you’re piecing the breadcrumbs together, when someone offers to “solve the problem” of a closed strip club it can only lead to bad places.

Which, as it turns out, is exactly how we met Emilio.

Casually seated on a motorcycle whose best miles were clearly behind it, Emilio told us he could help with our apparent dilemma.

“You need girls?” he asked, the words rolling off his mustachioed upper lip with the class of a human trafficker.

Despite the fact that half of our troupe soberly recoiled at the offer, two of our them, presumably spurred on by breakfast beers which are a staple of Mexican bachelor parties, decided to run with the offer to see how it would play out.

After a cryptic conversation which contained far too much dirty laughter, it was determined we would meet Emilio at 8 p.m. that evening at a bar that tourists don’t normally frequent. He asked for a deposit. We declined. Shockingly, he never showed.

Having been stood up by Emilio, I slid some crumpled pesos across a bar of even worse shape and ordered a round of Tecate’s for the table. In the dingy atmosphere of the poorly-lit cantina there was an aura of two parts disappointment and three parts relief. We never had any real plans about what we would actually do with Emilio and whoever walked through the door with him, and his failure to appear at the agreed upon destination was probably for the best.

The problem, however, is that seven American men in a seedy local establishment can draw a fair bit of attention. In our case, that attention happened to manifest itself in the form of a 250 lb. Mexican army general named Miguel who was in town on leave before returning back to active service. Or so he said.

Miguel joined our table, and by the time the sticky plastic square on legs could fit no more empty cans, shot glasses, or broken dreams, three things had become hazily apparent: Miguel “had our back”, he was taking us to another bar, and he’d made a call about some “girls”.

Following Miguel into the dark recesses of San Felipe, three wrong turns and numerous back alleyways led to a place no visitor should ever go. This place had no music. This place had no windows. This place was not the place to be. Ever. Luckily, we were cruising with a Mexican army general, so we would be fine. Right?

Settling uncomfortably into the den of sorrows, matters only became compounded when a shy and husky twenty-something female entered the den and sat at our table. This was curious, of course, because no one knew this woman, nor did she seem to have any plans of engaging in conversation.

Apparently the only one who knew what was happening was Miguel, and he couldn’t have been more pleased at the situation he had arranged.

It was then that we realized that there in that cartel-controlled (not a fact), disease-infested (potentially a fact), parlor of illicit underworld, a Mexican army general had made some phone calls and actually ordered us a prostitute (unfortunately, fact).

This, it should go without saying, is not where you want to find yourself.

With the next round of beers also came the terms: There was a motel across the street. The room would be $20. The remaining price was to be negotiable upon services. After an awkward and tequila-induced back and forth of potential costs, it was collectively determined that we had to get the hell out of Dodge.

One by one we made our escape, the fear of letting down Miguel blending with the fear of being shanked with a rusty fork the moment we stepped outside. The last we saw of our female companion she was sitting at a bus stop with a forlorn sense of failure. She had left when she realized the night was going nowhere, and my heart goes out to that girl at the bus stop wherever she might be today.

Thankfully, all seven of us would wake up in the tent-less, sandy campground we had opted to call home for the night. In an evening that could have gone any number of disastrous directions, the only direction we wanted to go was home.

Five hours and two taco shops later, we would cross the border into San Diego definitively worse for the wear but happy we weren’t a headline.

Besides, we had other problems to worry about now, like how to pay for the $8,000 in damages we had caused to the rental cars.

Want more travel stories? Read the rest of the “Vagabond Tales” over here.

[Photo Credits: Kyle Ellison]

Think Your Job Is Tough? Take A Tour Of The Beckley Coal Mine In West Virginia For A Reality Check

by Dave Seminara on

If you want to feel better about your job, take a tour of the Beckley Exhibition Coal Mine in Beckley, West Virginia. On a recent tour of the vintage mine we learned about the extreme dangers and hardships miners faced a century ago when hundreds of thousands of people in Appalachia eked out a living mining coal underground.

On a brilliant Saturday morning in March, I took a seat next to my wife and two small boys, ages 3 and 5, in an open-air tram referred to as a “man car” for our tour and our guide, Marvin Turner, a retired coal miner, noticed that my sons had scowls on their faces.

“They’re mad that we didn’t buy them replica coal miners helmets in the gift shop,” I explained.

“Uh-oh,” he said. “There’s nothin’ worse than dealin’ with angry coal miners.”

Marvin asked our group of about 30 people if there were any coal miners on board and when no hands went up, he said, “Good, then if I don’t know the answer to your question, I’ll just make somethin’ up.”
As we descended down into the dark, wet cave-like tunnel on rail tracks Marvin told us a little about the mine, speaking deliberately in his endearing, twangy Appalachian accent. The mine was a small, family run operation that opened in the 1890s and provided coal to heat homes and schools in the area until it was closed in 1910. The city of Beckley had the bright idea to buy it in 1960 and two years later they opened it for public tours. Since then, the city has opened a reconstructed coal camp with a school, church and superintendent and miner’s residences to give visitors an idea of what it was like to live and work at a turn of the century mine.

Marvin explained that the city expanded the size of the mineshaft in order to make it suitable for tours, so when the mine was still functioning it was far more claustrophobic than what we were experiencing.

“Miners spent their whole day in here on their hands and knees,” Marvin said.

He explained that the mine was infested with hundreds of rats, so miners used secure metal lunch pails with sturdy lids to protect their food.

“Here’s the pie pan,” he said, taking the lid off of a pail for our inspection. “Now a miner would know, if he opened the dessert tray and there was nothing there, his wife was mad at him. But they’d be sure to get a nice piece of freshly baked cake or pie on Thursdays, because that was payday.”

Miners would light fuses, shout, “FIRE, FIRE, FIRE IN THE HOLE!” and then run for their lives as up to four tons of coal would come crashing down, coating everyone in a thick dust that would stick in a miner’s mouth and eyes and make his hair itch like crazy. Around the turn of the 20th Century, miners were paid about 20 cents per ton of coal produced, which worked out to about a dollar per day.

But as we learned when we toured the coal camp above ground, their take home pay after expenses often came to practically nothing because they had to buy or rent their own tools, pay rent and buy everything they needed from the company store. Miners were actually paid with a sort of coal currency called scrip, which one could only use within the coal camp. Those who insisted on being paid in hard currency were often expendable.

In the coal camp, we saw a 1937 paystub from a mine in the area that detailed all of the following deductions for one miner.

Pay- $74.14
Store purchases- $15
Rent- $4
Coal- $2.50
Doctor- .75
Hospital- .75
Burial Fund- .30
Smithing- .37
Old Age Pension- .74
Hauling- $1.50

And there were a host of other expenses that were illegible but at the bottom there was the grim reality of the actual take home pay of this particular miner: “Due Employee: $1.68.”

Marvin told us that boys as young as 16 were employed at the mine but fathers often brought boys as young as 8 or 9 in as unpaid apprentices and no one seemed to mind. There was no real safety monitoring in the mine, so miners bought their own canaries and carried them around in little cages.

“If their canary died, they knew they needed to go above ground to get some fresh air,” Marvin said, as droplets of water intermittently plopped down on my notebook in the mine, where it is always 58 degrees.

The fact that mining is still a dangerous occupation was driven home for us after our mine tour by a guide at the coal camp’s schoolhouse who said that local authorities in nearby Whitesville had just erected a memorial to mark the 3 year anniversary of a mine disaster there that killed 29 miners at the Upper Big Branch Mine. According to press reports, there were several safety violations at the mine and two former mine officials are behind bars in connection to the explosion with a criminal investigation still unfolding.

A man in the group asked Marvin about how much coal miners earn these days and he said that in Boone County, West Virginia, a miner could make about $400 per day.

“But they’ve laid off so many people that it’s hard to find work,” said Marvin, who was a coal miner at Mt. Coal #7 just west of Beckley for 24 years before becoming a tour guide in 2008.

West Virginia is the second biggest coal producing state in the country behind Wyoming, but with over 13,000 coal miners working below ground in the state (compared to just 128 in Wyoming) there are more underground miners in West Virginia than any other state. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, there were more than 700,000 coal miners in the U.S. in 1923 but just 88,000 by 2011.

As our man car emerged above ground, the brilliant afternoon sunlight felt like an unexpected gift. We were only below ground for 45 minutes but it was long enough to make the warmth of the sun feel glorious. Since our angry little coal miners behaved reasonably well on the tour, we bought them their replica miner’s helmets and before leaving my wife asked Marvin if he would recommend the coal mining profession for our kids.

“Not at all,” he said. “Go to college and become President or somethin’, but don’t do this.”

IF YOU GO: Tickets for the coal mine tour are $20 for adults and $12 for children ages 4-17. (Free for kids under 4) There are a variety of national chain hotels within a few miles of the mine, including a newish Courtyard Marriott, where we stayed, a Holiday Inn, a Hampton Inn, and several others. Less than a mile away from the mine, there’s a Tudor’s Biscuit World location that offers all you can eat biscuits and gravy for $3.19. That alone is a good reason to make the trip to Beckley, which is an hour south of the state capital, Charleston and about a four and a half hour drive from Washington, D.C.

[Photo credit: Dave Seminara]

A Traveler In The Foreign Service: Tribute To Slain Diplomat Anne Smedinghoff

by Dave Seminara on

The Foreign Service lost one of its own on Saturday when a suicide bomber detonated explosives that killed 25-year-old Foreign Service Officer Anne Smedinghoff and four other Americans, three soldiers and one civilian Department of Defense employee in Afghanistan. Smedinghoff was a second-tour public diplomacy officer who was part of a convoy that was delivering donated books to a new school in Zabul Province. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, which also killed three Afghans and wounded four State Department employees. (Another American died in a separate incident and 18 Afghans, including a Taliban commander and women and children were also killed in a U.S. airstrike over the weekend.) She is the first State Department Foreign Service Officer (FSO) to be killed in Afghanistan. (A USAID FSO was killed in August in a suicide bombing.)

A devastating loss like this one reverberates throughout the Foreign Service community. I never met Anne but a former colleague who served with her at the embassy in Kabul and also taught a course she took in Washington said she was “heartbreakingly young, and a nice, lovely person.”

Just last week they took part in a quiz night at the embassy with questions revolving around events that happened on or near Anne’s birthday. I lived in River Forest, the beautiful town just west of Chicago where Anne grew up for three years, and after reading about her life and career, I feel certain that we lost someone who epitomized all that is good about the Foreign Service.She joined the Service right out of college and volunteered to serve in Kabul after a tour in Venezuela. According to press reports, she wasn’t the type of person who wanted to remain in the safety of the compound. She looked forward to opportunities like the one that presented itself on Saturday and hoped to make a real impact during her year in the country, which was nearly over. Reporters praised her as someone who was responsive and easy to work with.

FSOs who serve in danger posts like Kabul and Baghdad often get plumb follow-on assignments to cushy posts but Anne actively bid on Algiers, despite the tenuous security situation there and the lack of creature comforts. According to a friend who was quoted in the Chicago Tribune, she felt that the places she was needed the most were the “scary” and “dangerous” places, not the posh ones.

She had a taste for adventure. Smedinghoff biked across the U.S. (to raise money for cancer research), Australia and from the Dead Sea to the Red Sea and she loved to travel. Her neighbors in River Forest have lined the block with white ribbons and American flags to honor her and her smiling face graced the front page of both the Chicago Sun Times and the Chicago Tribune Monday. The stories are a fitting tribute to her but it’s a shame that diplomats usually only make the news under tragic circumstances.

Most Americans have at least some awareness of the tremendous sacrifices that our soldiers and their families make for their country but comparatively few are familiar with the Foreign Service and the sacrifices that FSOs and their families make. People might imagine that diplomats spend the bulk of their careers mingling at cocktail parties in Tokyo or Paris but that isn’t the reality of today’s Foreign Service. Most officers spend the bulk of their careers in places most Americans wouldn’t dream of visiting, even on a brief trip, and these days, many are also being sent unarmed into war zones, where they are separated from friends and family members for a year.

I hope that the press coverage of Anne’s life and death somehow serves to remind Americans of the sacrifices that FSOs make for their country and I hope that it inspires, rather than scares off, other young Americans who might be interested in the Foreign Service because our country needs bright, adventurous, patriotic people like Anne representing us overseas.

Inevitably, her death will lead to more debate on whether unarmed diplomats should be serving in war zones, and FSOs in danger spots around the world will now be under even greater security restrictions, making it more difficult for them to be effective. And the security officials at the embassy who approved this trip will unfortunately have to live with the consequences, which will be a very heavy burden for them to carry.

But this isn’t a time for second-guessing; it’s a time for all of Anne’s friends, family members, colleagues and the entire Foreign Service community to grieve the loss of a bright star. The Foreign Service can be something of a dysfunctional bureaucracy but when tragedies like this happen, it unites everyone who has served, past and present. God bless Anne and her family and all those who are serving their country.

On Tuesday, the military identified the three soldiers killed in the same incident as Anne Smedinghoff as 24-year-old Staff Sgt. Christopher M. Ward of Oak Ridge, Tenn.; 25-year-old Spc. Wilbel A. Robles-Santa of Juncos, Puerto Rico; and 24-year-old Spc. Delfin M. Santos Jr. of San Jose, Calif. They were deployed with the 5th Squadron, 7th Cavalry Regiment of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division.

Read more from “A Traveler In the Foreign Service“


Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/04/09/5328844/3-ga-based-soldiers-killed-in.html#storylink=cpy

[Photo credit: Anne Smedinghoff’s Twitter]

Trekking Couple Circles Planet Three Times In 424 Days

by Chris Owen on

They started trekking the planet more than a year ago, promising to travel the globe bringing children in classrooms from around the world with them, virtually, as they visited scores of countries and continents. Now their journey is complete and Darren and Sandy Van Soye are back to tell about it.

The story begins in February 2012, when the couple from Southern California started on a global adventure to raise awareness about world geography and make the subject more accessible to children. Hoping to visit 50 countries on six continents in 424 days, they planned to share the journey with more than 700 classrooms representing 50,000 students.

“Our dream is to educate children about geography and world cultures so we’ve planned the ultimate trek around the world to do just that,” Sandy Van Soye told Gadling when they began. In January of this year after passing the 50,000 mile mark, they had stopped in 40 countries with another dozen or so to go before returning to the United Sates. At the time, they had already beaten their own projections with 850 classrooms in 20 countries following their journey online.

Now with their world trek complete, the Van Soyes have traveled a total of 77,000 miles or the equivalent of three times around the earth at its equator. Their trek is an impressive amount of travel in such a short period of time for sure. But how they went about it is even more interesting.Starting on January 28, 2012, the journey began aboard a cruise ship, Princess Cruises‘ Pacific Princess, a small ship, which proved to be an efficient mode of transportation.

“We used cruise ships to get us between continents so that we could see more of the world,” said Sandy Van Soye. Spending 97 days of the nearly 500-day trek at sea the couple racked up 35 ports in 18 countries. An impressive number but travel via cruise ship is not the fastest way to be sure. From San Diego, it took 29 days to reach Sydney Australia, normally a 16- or 17-hour flight. But along the way, they visited Hawaii, American Samoa, Fiji and New Zealand.

After a seven-day trek in Tasmania, the team boarded another cruise ship, Ocean Princess to travel near Australia’s eastern coast, along the way visiting the Great Barrier Reef, the city of Darwin, Bali, Indonesia, and Ko Samui, Thailand, before arriving in Singapore. At each stop, they selected travel plans that would show students following along the natural beauty and unique people they encountered.

On land for the next eight months via a series of multiple day hikes, they visited 27 more countries in Asia, Europe and Africa before boarding the Pacific Princess in Rome. That Mediterranean sailing crossed the Atlantic Ocean, sailing up the Amazon River all the way to Manaus, Brazil.

Two months on land took them through 4,600 miles of South America before the final leg of their trek a voyage on Star Princess in Valparaíso, Chile, for their fifth and final cruise home.

Of all the places they went, which was their favorite? Kenya because of its rich culture and natural beauty

“It is a place that kids (have) heard of, so it was a pleasure to go there and talk more about it,” said Sandy of their visit to three Kenyan schools, one in the Maasai Mara and two in the Samburu region.

The biggest surprise along the way? Riga, Latvia

“There was just so much to see and do here and, though it is a capital city, it was relatively inexpensive,” said Sandy.

In addition to a lifetime of memories, the Van Soye’s trek produced a library of 60 four-page education modules for teachers available as supplements to existing classroom materials.
Also, their Trekking the Planet website contains free articles, quizzes, more than 70 documentary videos and a summary infographic: “Trekking The Planet: By The Numbers.“

So is that the end of the road for this couple? Hardly.

Driven by the fact that nearly a third of U.S. young adults cannot locate the Pacific Ocean on a map, Trekking the Planet hopes to help educators change these statistics with future geography-oriented projects.


[Photo credit – TrekkingThePlanet]