Travels with David: Asia, Africa and The Balkans

Central Asia frequent flier

When the Soviet Union broke up, its national airline Aeroflot suffered the same fate.  The governments of cash-strapped new republics seized the aircraft sitting on the tarmac, repainted them in the new national colors and hoped they could round up enough spare parts to keep them flying.  National airlines have since modernized their fleets, adding Boeings and Airbuses for long-haul flights, but Soviet-era planes are still the standard on most domestic and regional flights. Although “foreigners” prices and entrances have mostly disappeared, travelers still struggle with ling lines and bureaucracy at ticket offices and airports.

Camping Indoors, Soviet style

Provincial Soviet-era hotels reflect the ostentatious public architecture of the Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras. The impressive facades often conceal dark and drab interiors, with poor heating and ventilation, dangerous wiring, and leaky pipes. Even small cities boasted establishments with several hundred rooms. Of course, the number bore no relation to the expected number of guests. In an economy based on artificial production quotas, not on demand for products and services, there was no place for market research. Hotel occupancy rates may still be a state secret in some former Soviet republics, but my guess is that most government hotels in provincial centers don't fill more than 20 percent of rooms most of the time. And without guests, they don't have the money to modernize. These hotels have one saving grace—the dezhurnayas, the floor ladies.  Remember to tip her.
 

Shanghaied

It was a classic Catch-22. I did not have a confirmed itinerary or a China transit visa. The Malaysian Airlines agent in Kuala Lumpur could have refused to rebook me, but he realized that the problem was not of my making. “Here’s your boarding card,” he said. “I’m just not sure what will happen in Shanghai.” The arrival of an itinerary-less, visa-less traveler threw Chinese immigration control into temporary confusion.
 

Bangladesh: The barrels of Barishal

Since the Mughal era, Barishal has been the commercial gateway to the southwest delta. It’s been whimsically described as the “Venice of Bengal.” although if you’re just counting waterways, almost any large town in southwestern Bangladesh is a Venice. At its commercial dock, brightly colored barges were drawn up on the muddy, litter-strewn beach, with gangplanks connecting them to wooden jetties. The river port is second only to the capital Dhaka for the volume of passenger traffic. On the other side of the passenger ferry terminal is what I’ll call the shared taxi station. Here, flat-bottomed nouka, powered by outboard motors or poled by boatmen, provide short-haul service to villages. A nouka departs when it’s full, or when the boatman figures he has enough fares to make the trip worth making. No nouka advertises its destination. You just know that Faisal goes to one village, Mamun to another, and that Amit will make sure your children get to school on time.

Bangladesh: Land of rivers

For a small country, Bangladesh has a lot of rivers, around 700 according to most estimates. Roughly 10 percent of its total area is water, a high proportion considering that it has no large lakes. In other words, most of that water is moving. For the rural population, the rivers are interwoven with every aspect of their lives. They sustain agriculture and are the main highways for commerce. In many places, you need to travel by river to reach the school, the health clinic, or the government office. When the Himalayan snows melt, they wash earth from the mountain slopes into the river. Downstream in Bangladesh floodwaters submerge farmland and leave thousands of people trapped on levees and narrow spits of land. Yet when the muddy waters subside they leave behind rich, alluvial soil that makes the country one of the most fertile regions in Asia.
 

The $2.50 phone bill

Even for those with good language skills, getting things done in Kyrgyzstan in the mid-1990s was a challenge. A seemingly straightforward task, such as banking or paying a utility bill, often turned out to be a complex, time-consuming activity that required visiting several offices, filling out forms and slips of paper, and obtaining signatures and stamps. Sometimes, it involved waiting around for the only person authorized to conduct the transaction to return from lunch. A case in point was our phone bill.           

India-Bangladesh: The world's craziest border

The 1947 partition of British India into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan created artificial borders that are still hotly disputed today. In Bengal, the zigzagging border with East Pakistan (and from 1971, Bangladesh) was dotted with enclaves—little islands of one country surrounded by the territory of the other. In total, there were 162 chitmahals, ranging in size from ten square miles to less than an acre. For more than half a century, their residents were essentially stateless, unable to legally travel within their own country and lacking schools, health services, electricity, police and courts. Even after a historic land swap agreement in 2015 straightened out the border, most people stayed where they were; they did not want to abandon the land their families had farmed for generations.
 

South Africa: Allemand right to Elsburg

I drive out to a Johannesburg suburb for a church dinner and barn dance and find myself deep in Afrikaner country. Descendants of the Boers who trekked north from the Cape from the 1830s settled on the High Veld, a plateau region of grassland and scrub bushes. More than 4,000 feet above sea level, it resembles the High Plains of Montana or Wyoming. This is cattle country, where Afrikaner cowboys drove their herds, cooked pork ‘n beans on campfires and slept out under the stars. Later generations moved from ranches to ranch-style homes, but these suburban cowboys dressed in jeans, fancy leather belts, boots, cowboy hats and plaid shirts still muster a pretty good yee-haw, especially after a drink or two.
 

South Africa: The borders of Johannesburg

It tells you something about how South Africa has changed that the sprawling townships of Soweto outside Johannesburg are now on the tourist bus routes. Soweto came to world attention in 1976, when police opened fire on 10,000 secondary school students marching to protest the policy of enforcing Afrikaans as the only language of instruction in schools, killing at least 176. Worldwide reaction increased pressure for economic sanctions and some historians regard the massacre as the beginning of the end for apartheid. Since the end of apartheid in 1991, the urban slum of Soweto has been transformed. Today, people actually move there from other districts because the housing is affordable, municipal services have improved, and the crime rate has dropped to close to the average for the city. There are malls, mega-churches, new highways and two huge soccer stadiums built for the 2010 World Cup.
 

Malawi: The bus to Blantyre

The main north-south highway from Malawi’s capital, Lilongwe, to Blantyre, the commercial capital, passes through a dry, flat landscape of scrub grass and small trees, broken by cultivated fields, with goats and cattle wandering close to the road and groups of men squatting under trees. The bus passed roadside stalls selling fruits, vegetables, household goods and auto parts, and piles of bricks and crushed stone for construction. Most villages consisted of small round huts of mud bricks with thatched roofs and a store built of brick or concrete. The bus passengers who were not sleeping were watching slickly produced Nollywood videos featuring rap artists and scantily clothed women alternating with locally produced videos of fully clothed church choirs swaying to the religious beat with cutaways of ministers in white suits preaching up a storm and scenes pirated from Hollywood religious epics. The contrast—in both the amount of exposed skin and social message—was striking.