Five local customs we just can’t follow

by Sean McLachlan on

Travelers are a pretty tolerant bunch. Travel actually breeds tolerance because it gets rid of the ignorance on which tolerance is based. There are times, however, when we can’t bring ourselves to follow certain local customs. Here are five things a lot of people find a bit too hard to swallow, in one case literally.

Using your hand as toilet paper
Using the left hand to wipe your posterior is a time-honored tradition in many parts of the world. It’s probably more common than toilet paper, and is certainly more ecologically sensitive and effective. With a bit of finger work and some water, your bum will be sparkly clean. As a Pakistani friend explained to me, “Imagine you were covered in shit. Which would you rather have me do–wipe you down with paper towels or hose you off?” Impeccable logic. I’m still not going to do it.

Eating dogs, cats, and rats
Exotic dining is one of the great pleasures of adventure travel, but sometimes it can get too exotic. We’ve been trained since birth that certain animals are food, and certain animals are cute and cuddly and should be named Pookums. It’s hard to rewire the brain after such training. I’ve never been offered dog, although considering some of the places I’ve eaten I may have had it without knowing, but I’d have some trouble downing a Doberman or chomping on a Corgi. There are other animals we’ve been taught are unclean, like rats and insects, yet rats and insects are popular food in many cultures. I’ve tried pureed ants. Not bad, but I’ll skip the rat soup. User heyduke2009 over at Gadling’s flickr pool was brave enough to order it, but his photo doesn’t show any bite marks!

Disrespecting women
Call me politically correct, but I happen to think women are equal to men and should be treated accordingly. Some cultures think of women as property or sex objects. While parts of the Middle East can be bad with this, northern India consistently ranks at the top of the list of places where women travelers are harassed. One favorite trick is to “accidentally” brush against a woman in a crowd. Women can expect to be felt up on a regular basis, like once every few minutes in some places. This treatment isn’t just reserved for Western women either. I complained about how my wife was being treated to a female Indian friend and she just sighed and said, “Yeah, it started happening to me when I was about ten.” Strangely, when my wife went to southern India for three weeks, it didn’t happen once!
And yes, our culture has a way to go too, but at least in the West a woman can go shopping without getting groped.


Mentioning God every other sentence
This is an annoying custom we find right here in the good old U S of A. “I’d like to thank God for helping me make that touchdown.” “I missed my bus and it was in an accident. God saved me!” “This can won’t open. God damn it!”
OK, assuming there’s an all-knowing, all-powerful being who created the universe, I really doubt it (not “he”, there is no Celestial Penis) gives two hoots about some football game. Yet we constantly bring God into the most trivial aspects of our lives, and the not-so-trivial too. Good luck getting elected to public office if you don’t mention God in your campaign speeches. The only other place I’ve seen this custom get so rampant is the Middle East. There should be a survey of political speeches of Arab and American politicians to find out which ones invoke God more often. Much of the rest of the world, especially Europe, finds this habit of ours weird and a wee bit creepy.

Talking during movies
Spain is my adopted home. I love the Spanish–they’re attractive, funny, and know how to party, but they commit one cardinal sin–THEY TALK DURING MOVIES!!! Why would you plunk down good money to go to the cinema and then not pay attention to the film!? A friend of mine who likes opera says they do it there too, so this isn’t a class thing. Once some people sitting near her got into such a loud argument that she couldn’t hear the singer, yet nobody told them to shut up. It’s considered completely normal. This noise pollution is made worse by the fact that when Spaniards are in a group they all yammer away at the same time, only half listening to everyone else.

Are there any local customs you just can’t follow? Gripe about them in the comments section!

Uganda defies terrorists and remains open for business

by Sean McLachlan on

Way to go, Uganda.

A week after a bomb ripped through a crowd watching the World Cup, Uganda has thumbed its nose at the terrorists and declared it is open for business.

The country’s tourism minister says they’ve beefed up security at public gatherings and are checking public places such as bars and restaurants to improve day-to-day security. Serapio Rukundo, the tourism and wildlife minister, said in a recent statement that the terrorist attacks in the capital Kampala were “meant to scare and discourage visitors.”

Al-Shabaab, a Somali Islamist group, has claimed responsibility for the bombing. Uganda is one of several nations in the region supporting the Transitional Federal Government in Mogadishu, which is fighting Al-Shabaab.

This weekend Uganda hosts the African Union summit, so security will be a key issue. It’s a key issue at any time, because Uganda has a thriving tourist industry based on its teeming wildlife and beautiful landscape. One Ugandan newspaper recently reported there has been no reduction in reservations for safaris, an indication that tourists are thumbing their noses at the terrorists too.

Another tourism official, Edwin Muzahura, said, “These scares happen anywhere and tourists cannot stop to come because two bombs are detonated in some parts of Kampala. . .People out there understand that there are security concerns in America, Europe, Asia and everywhere.”

While the death toll from terrorism keeps rising, its impact may actually be on the wane. As Mr. Muzahura points out, terrorism can now happen anywhere. Nowhere is totally safe, therefore there is no compelling reason to avoid certain areas. I even had a safe and enjoyable trip to Somaliland, the northern breakaway region of Somalia, where I found the Somali people to be warm and welcoming, certainly not the image Al-Shabaab wants to project. The terrorists may be losing some of their ability to assert terror.

I wish I had the money to go to Uganda right now.


Image courtesy user dog blue via Gadling’s flickr stream. Check out dog blue’s excellent Uganda series for more reasons to visit this beautiful African county.

More Egyptian pyramids to open to the public

by Sean McLachlan on


Visitors to Egypt have always flocked to the pyramids of Giza and Saqqara. Many people don’t realize, however, that these are only the most famous of more than a hundred pyramids in the country. In fact, there’s a whole “pyramid field” to the west of Cairo that includes Giza, Saqqara, and numerous other groupings across a long swath of desert. Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities is now opening some of them to visitors for the first time.

At Dahshur, more than a dozen pyramids give an interesting lesson in pyramid construction. The largest of these were built in the Fourth Dynasty (c. 2613 to 2494 BC) just prior to those at Giza. The founder of this dynasty, the Pharaoh Sneferu, was quite the pyramid builder. His first attempt was at Meidum, 100 km (62 miles) south of Cairo. It collapsed, and he moved his workmen to Dahshur for his next try.

This was the famous Bent Pyramid, pictured above in a photo from Jon Bodsworth’s excellent collection at the Egypt Archive. Check out the gallery below for more of his work. The architects started building the pyramid at a 55 degree angle, but when the structure showed signs of weakness they chickened out and built the rest at a more stable angle of 43 degrees. This gives the pyramid unique appearance. The pyramid’s two interior passages will open for the first time to visitors in December. A third passage leads 25 meters (82 ft) to a nearby smaller pyramid of Sneferu’s queen so the two could have conjugal visits in the afterlife. His third try was the Red Pyramid, built at the safer 43 degree angle. It held up nicely and is the third largest pyramid in Egypt at 104 meters (345 ft) tall.

Other pyramids at Dahshur include smaller examples from later dynasties. They aren’t nearly as grandiose as the earlier ones, perhaps because later rulers couldn’t command as much authority or they simply had other things they needed to spend their money on. The Black Pyramid of Amenemhat III (c. 1860-1814 BC) makes for an odd photo. To save money, the architects only used stone on the outside, and when later generations stole it for other building projects, the mud brick interior was revealed. This has been weathering away for the last four thousand years and now looks a bit deflated, although it’s still impressive.

%Gallery-97617%Between Giza and Saqqara lies the royal necropolis of Abusir, home to 14 pyramids that will open to the public this month. The necropolis on the outskirts of modern-day Cairo was started in the fifth dynasty (c. 2494 to 2345 BC) after the previous dynasty had filled up Giza with pyramids and temples. Abusir’s pyramids are smaller than those at Giza, and some have all but disappeared after millennia of weathering, but the site is still worth visiting. Most are step pyramids like the famous one at Saqqara, not flat-sided “true” pyramids like those at Giza. Some have smaller pyramids next to them to house the pharaoh’s queens.

One pyramid, that of the pharaoh Neferefre, was never finished, and has given archaeologists a glimpse at the construction techniques that went into building these behemoths. Some people like to think the pyramids were built by aliens or people from Atlantis, but archaeological evidence and the Egyptians’ own written records prove they built the pyramids themselves.

These “new” pyramids are just a few of the large number of Egyptian attractions opening in the next three years. Several museums are under construction, and the area around the Pyramids of Giza has been cleaned up. This month the famous Avenue of Sphinxes between the temples of Luxor and Karnak is opening, with about 900 statues and a recently excavated Roman-era village nearby.

Note to budding Egyptologists: this article is way too short to cover all the various theories and discoveries at Abusir and Dahshur. You need a few books to cover all of them! A good start are the works of Miroslav Verner, including The Pyramids: The Mystery, Culture, and Science of Egypt´s Great Monuments and Abusir: The Realm of Osiris.

World’s tallest tent opens in Kazakhstan

by Sean McLachlan on


When you think of Kazakhstan you probably think of nomads living in tents, but today’s Kazakhstan is rapidly modernizing thanks to an oil boom, so it’s appropriate that the Central Asian nation is now home to the world’s tallest tent.

Technically, it’s the world’s largest “tensile structure”, meaning something held up by poles and cables. A tent, in other words. At 150 meters (492 feet), it’s the also the tallest building in the capital Astana. It encloses more than 100,000 square meters, including a park, cafes, restaurants, 700 parking spots, shopping areas, even an artificial beach.

Called the Khan Shatyr, it’s a unique architectural wonder. One of the challenges of building it was Astana’s rough weather. The Khan Shatyr’s website proclaims, “What do you feel like doing everyday at Astana? It is -30C outside.”

Not the best slogan, but certainly realistic. Astana has the distinction of being the second coldest capital in the world (after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia), with freezing temperatures six months of the year and winter temperatures that have been measured as low as −40 °C (−40 °F). In the summer it can get up to 35 °C (95 °F). The tent’s skin is made from a special plastic that allows sunlight in while still acting as an insulator. Air vents keep ice from forming on the surfaces and keep the interior at a constant temperature.

Kazakhstan has large oil reserves and the government has been riding a wave of petrodollars that it has used to fund a massive building campaign in the capital. Astana is said to be the biggest construction project in the world, and taking a look at the huge structures in the gallery photos it certainly is a strong contender. The city is the brainchild of President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has ruled Kazakhstan since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The Khan Shatyr was opened on President Nazarbayev’s 70th birthday.

The government has been trying to sell Kazakhstan’s capital as a tourist destination, and marvels like this will go a long way towards compensating visitors for the weather. With rugged scenery, Baikonur Cosmodrome (where Yuri Gagarin launched into orbit to become the first man in space), ancient mosques, medieval walled cities, and traditional folk who live in much smaller tents, Kazakhstan is a good choice for the adventure traveler.

Image courtesy Nigel Young/Foster + Partners.

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Sailor makes epic 1,152 day voyage without touching land

by Sean McLachlan on

American sailor Reid Stowe just finished an endurance test that beats pretty much anything on the high seas.

He set off in a sailboat on April 21, 2007 and didn’t touch land again until he returned to port in Manhattan on Tuesday. That’s 1,152 days at sea.

His girlfriend Soanya Ahmad, who had no previous open ocean sailing experience, joined him for the expedition but had to return to land after ten months because she was feeling seasick. That “seasickness” turned out to be morning sickness, and the first thing Stowe got to do once getting home was to greet his 23-month old son Darshen. Ms. Ahmad says she and Stowe agreed that he would continue the trip. Ahmad told the BBC that he would have gone back to sea sooner or later anyway.

That’s one understanding woman, Stowe. You better keep her.

Stowe had to fight hard to make his dream come true. He originally wanted to leave in 1992, but he had trouble finding funding. One of the reasons for the expedition was to simulate the isolation and stress of a Mars mission, which would take a similar amount of time. The original plan called for a crew of six to eight, the number generally agreed upon to make an effective interplanetary team. It seems Reid had trouble convincing others to join him so he set off with only his girlfriend. Reid kept his sanity by practicing yoga and writing a book. Maintaining a ship for that long without refitting took a major effort too.

The Guinness Book of World Records is checking his claim and if verified, he’ll certainly become a new entry. Considering that he was tracked by GPS, things are looking good for Mr. Stowe.