| On the Wings of a Dragon |
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| Part 1 – The Best Laid Plans |
| Mon, July 12, 2010 12:00 am |
| Dear Friends: |
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Go figure. With only 17 countries in the world left to visit, I decided,
last September, to play it safe this summer and knock off the eight
then-most-tranquil of these: Nauru, Kiribati, East Timor, Brunei, Bhutan, Burma,
Mongolia, and North Korea, saving for next year the nine that I most feared
might knock me off.
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But now I believe there might be something to be said against planning too
far in advance…
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After purchasing all 24 (non-refundable) airline tickets and one (30-hour)
train ticket on the Trans-Mongolia Express across the Gobi Desert, things
started to unravel.
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Burma (aka Myanmar) is beset by political unrest as the military regime
seeks sneaky ways to prolong the house arrest of pro-democracy leader Aung San
Suu Kyi before the upcoming election. The election had been scheduled for
February, so I had blithely assumed that all the demonstrations attendant upon
it would be out of the way by the time I arrived there in late September. But
the regime postponed the voting last winter and will probably re-schedule it for
the Orientally auspicious date of October 10, the tenth day of the tenth month
of the tenth (actually the eleventh) year of the new century and, lucky me,
just before I arrive. Things are already heating up; two protestors were killed
by the army there lasts week.
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North Korea decided that this spring was a good time to take some torpedo
practice by sinking a South Korean Navyl ship, causing mutual hostility to erupt
on the Korean peninsula to the highest level in several decades. After catching
a couple of Americans who crossed their northern border without permission, the
North Koreans have tightened the entry requirements and will not grant a visa to
any author or writer (and won’t tell me if I fit into those categories until I
show up at their Embassy in Beijing the day before I am supposed to fly to
Pyongyang.)
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Mongolia is in the midst of its worst drought in some 50 years, with a
loss of seven million livestock, the mainstay of the nation’s diet and economy.
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China, my gateway to Pyongyang and Ulan-Bataar, has gotten more than a bit
miffed by President Obama’s insistence that it raise both the value of its
currency and its respect for human rights, retaliating with a new policy denying
Americans this year the triple-entry visa I need, while charging us triple what
they charge nationals of other countries for an ordinary visa..
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Bangkok, through which I have twelve flights, has unexpectedly erupted
into deadly rebellion and violence between the red-shirted backers of the ousted
prime minister and the itchy-trigger-fingered soldiers who supports the
replacement government while King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the revered 83-year-old
monarch who has held this fractious people together for more than 60 years!, is
so sick he is unable to intercede and may die soon, leaving the throne to his
inept, ham-handed son who is despised by most Thais.
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Even tiny Nauru is acting up, angry at Americans because the U.S. has
(with some justification) recently charged this desperately impoverished island
nation of selling itself for Russian rubles, based on its suspicious behavior of
being one of the only five countries in the world to recognize as new nations
the breakaway Georgian provinces of South Osettia and Abkhazia, the other four
diplomatic first-responders being Russia and three of its puppets.
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East Timor is also a problem, now almost cut off from the rest of the
world. In the euphoria surrounding the birth of this newest nation under the sun
(before Kosovo), three airlines rushed to provide air service, connecting its
capital of Dili with the major transit hubs of Singapore and Hong Kong. But as
East Timor’s financial prospects dimmed, and neither trade nor tourists
materialized, two carriers have flown away, leaving the only connection to the
outside world through Darwin, Australia, a torrid town I have studiously avoided
on my three previous visits Down Under.
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On top of these concerns, I recently and belatedly realized, after almost a
year of planning, that I needed to add two countries in order to satisfy my
criteria for visiting every country in today’s world: Bangladesh (which I had
visited – and come within a minute of being hanged as an Indian spy – back in
1965 when it was called East Pakistan, which no longer exists) and The Socialist
Republic of Vietnam (which is a different political entity than the South
Vietnam I had visited in the 60’s while listening to the artillery shells
thumping in the outskirts of Saigon).
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David Smith, a geographical genius who has been my wise and knowledgeable
counselor-on-countries for the past decade, advised -- in a month-long exchange
of mutually escalatingly argumentative emails replete with analogies ranging
back to Yugoslavia, the German Democratic Republic, the Confederation of Soviet
States, and the lands the U.S. acquired as a result of the Spanish-American War
-- that since I had once set foot in these places, I did not have to return.
Much as I wanted to take this well-reasoned advice, and skip the re-run and the
distant re-play, I felt this would be cheating. Since my goal is to visit every
country, a concept that, to me, carries both a political component as well as a
geographic one, I believe I have to go back because I had never visited these
political entities. The dictionary definitions were confusing, contradictory,
and less than helpful. And, of course, since this entire quest is self-invented,
and the criteria for what is a country somewhat amorphous and a bit ambiguous,
there is no governing body or higher authority which could provide a firm ruling
or even good guidance.
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To squeeze in these two newbies I hastily shaved a day off Myanmar and
also delayed my return to the States four days. Heading home October 2.
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So much for the start of a simple summer sojourn intended to be spent
peacefully harvesting the low-hanging fruit.
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| The only potentially positive pre-trip development has been the
precipitous decline in value of the euro (which is widely used in Asia) against
the dollar. But even that brings me no benefit because -- sagacious soul and
savvy traveler that I profess to be -- I stocked up a year ago on thousands of
euros in anticipation of this trip.
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| Adding a pervasively sad undertone to all this is the poor health of my
dear buddy and boon traveling companion, Harold Stephens, my partner in the
Trans-World Record Expedition 45 young years ago. Steve and I had agreed, back
in 2007, to mesh our schedules for this summer so we could reunite for our last
hurrah together, one final, free-wheeling, 4x4 journey across the steppes and
deserts of Mongolia to visit the places important in the life of the great
Genghis Khan. As ill luck would have it, Steve was seriously injured in
December when a tiger attacked the elephant on which he was riding in the
jungles of northern Thailand. In the course of a long recuperation in a Bangkok
hospital, Steve passed out several times for reasons the Thai physicians found
inexplicable, was emergency air-lifted this April to the VA Hospital in San
Francisco, and there was diagnosed with a massive tumor behind his heart and
Stage 4 lymphoma in many vital organs.
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Knowing Steve as well as I do, I think this inveterate traveler and macho
adventurer would have preferred to die with his boots on. I mean, give me a
break, what better, more memorably fitting, exit could the guy like Steve ask
for – eaten by a tiger that jumped the elephant he was riding through the
jungles of Thailand!!! Now, that’s the way to go…
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Me? I’ve given this mortality matter a lot of thought in recent years and
decided I would prefer to die at about age 96 or so, shot and killed, instantly
and painlessly, from behind, by a jealous young husband while I was making
passionate love to his gorgeous, hard-bodied bride and gaspingly satisfying her
for the umpteenth ecstatic time in a row. At least then, dear friends, you could
truly say: Well, good old Al got his wish; he died with his rubbers on.
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In any case, I will depart, on July 24, with a heavy heart for Steve, a
batch of depreciated euros, some serious questions about whether the political
problems will quiet down or flame up, and whether those dozen irreplaceable
flights in and out of Bangkok will actually get to fly, and whether I will be on
them, combined with some curiosity about how the gang in Pyongyang will react –
assuming they let me in -- to the nifty baseball cap I bought especially for
them at a 99-cent store in Tampa: brilliant white with a large, resplendent
American flag surmounted by a screaming eagle with talons bared, matched, so to
speak, although not in any fashion-forward sense, with a two-dollar, lime green
Tee shirt proclaiming “Born to be Wild, New York.”
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So, sports fans, wish luck to me …and to the four misguided friends who
took me up on my invitation last winter to come along for some parts of this
“peaceful, easy” trip.
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