Category Archives: Travel

People sometimes take vacations to "get away from it all." A friend just emailed a good litmus test to know when this has happened: When you’ve forgotten what day of the week it is, and you don’t even care. When this moment comes it’s magical and a sign you’ve truly disconnected from real life.

(Picture of my brother and me swimming in a lagoon in Ecuador’s Amazon Jungle.)

Last week, my brother and I spent four days in the Amazon jungle in northeast Ecuador in the Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve, which is a 250,000 acre rainforest with 13 lagoons, 15 species of monkeys, 60 species of orchids, over 500 types of birds, and dozens of swamps and lakes. Few parts of the world have as much biodiversity.

When our canoe pulled up to our camp site of sorts (huts elevated above water by stilts), a guide put out his hand to pull us up to the dock and said, "Welcome to the jungle. Get your stuff ready. We’re going piranha fishing."

And so began several days of getting in the canoe, winding our way through endless primary forest, checking out animals, listening to sounds, watching for freshwater dolphins, hiking through swampy forest, and meeting indigenous people. The color green dominated. The forest was so green that a non-green anything seemed out-of-place. The green forest simmered all the more against a deep blue sky populated by marshmallow-like clouds. Beautiful. I felt like I was in Planet Earth.

We visited an indigenous community. It’s surreal to see an indigenous kid run around, barefoot and dark, wielding a machete to cut up some yucca for dinner. Does he even go to school? What are his days like? Has he ever seen a computer? What would his reaction be if placed in a Wal-Mart?

We visited a Shaman — a healer who uses local plants for medicinal purposes. He had an arrow inserted through his nostrils horizontally.

Jungle living requires certain lifestyle tradeoffs, of course. No electricity in the huts. No hot water. A toilet that struggles to process a flush. Sleep on a mattress underneath a mosquito net. Bugs dead and alive surround you. Bug bites galore — especially when you first wake up.

It feels strange saying this, but one of the most interesting parts of our Jungle stay had nothing to do with nature. Instead, it had to do with meeting and talking with others staying at the Samona Lodge. People from Denmark, Germany, Ecuador, U.S., Russia, Korea, Italy, elsewhere. After we had gotten into bed the last night, we could still hear loud bouts of laughter coming from the common area where after-dinner conversation stretched on. As I lay there, sleep elusive due to the laughter, I pondered what was happening outside: strangers from all over the world sharing their ideas, cultural customs, odd idioms, Jungle stories, political views. The next day, we would depart, and probably never see each other again. But the few moments together reinforced for us all a concept often talked about in travel circles: our common humanity is more remarkable than our cultural differences.

This process was magnified, I think, with the backdrop of the Jungle. We’d all trekked into this remote part of the world, with varying levels of apprehension about the lack of modern-civilization accouterments; but, we survived, shared tips, stories, and food. Common goals bring together uncommon people, and sometimes even teach us how we’re actually not all that uncommon after all.

An outdoor adventure trip was a refreshing change from the usual pattern of visiting big cities and their museums, urban parks, and skyscrapers. I recommend Ecuador. South America intrigues — I’ll be back!

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More informal blow-by-blows and pictures on my travel blog.

I love traveling. I don’t love flying, but I don’t mind it either, mainly because airline travel in the U.S. is so massively screwed up that I’ve moved beyond simple frustration and into the sphere of: a) being amused at nice, calm, guy-next-door personalities who become absolute monsters in airports, and b) being intrigued at why, exactly, flying is such a pain for so many, and whether there are business opportunities to solve these pains.

James Fallows, excellent journalist for the Atlantic and good blogger, recently called this Salon article by Patrick Smith "the most realistic description of the air-travel mess" he’s read in the press. Coming from a pilot and serious aviation follower, I took note and read Smith’s piece carefully. It’s fantastic and I highly recommend any regular traveler read it.

The big takeaway from Smith’s piece is that many of the usual culprits like bad weather or antiquated air traffic control systems are not as important as one might think. Rather, it’s a chronic lack of runways and nutty scheduling systems. Add to this increasing reliance on regional jets, and we have hundreds of planes competing for limited gate space and even more limited taxi area. Smith offers a few suggestions but says he isn’t optimistic that more runways will magically be built, or airlines will start patronizing satellite airports (Oakland instead of SFO, Long Beach instead of LAX). His hope, then, is that airlines consolidate schedules by reducing the number of small regional jets which can take off during peak hours. Read the whole thing.

As Smith says, despite all the complaints, we still have much to be thankful for. Commercial flying is still the safest mode of transit by far (which is why people who drive instead of fly for "safety reasons" are crazy). Anyone who’s flown a Russian airliner, or experienced the decrepitude that is an Air India plane, or tried to form a queue for a China Southern Air flight (queues don’t exist — it’s just one big brawl), knows what I’m talking about.

I expect my interest in travel and business will lead to me to do something in the travel industry. I wonder if there’s an opportunity to build one big community travel web site. Or maybe there’s something that can be done to make Philly or La Guardia airports less of a dump. Or educate TSA staff beyond a 6th grade level. Or invest in air taxis. Who knows.

In the meantime, I’ll keep flying, keep traveling, keep studying flight routes (I love studying how one gets from point A to point B in the sky), keep reading Joe Sharkey, keep studying SeatGuru and other community web sites, and one day, try to contribute to the improvement of an industry which — love it or hate it — will only grow more important in an interconnected, global economy.

Rick Steves, the popular Europe travel expert, has the quote of the day from his interview with the Seattle Times:

I think if the world knew what was good for it, it would establish a fund to pay for Americans all to have a free trip for six weeks, anywhere they wanted around the world upon graduation. It would be the best investment the world could ever make. Because right now an America that is threatened by, fearful of and misunderstands the rest of the world is a costly thing on this planet.

In Russia and Ukraine drivers don’t wear seatbelts. Same holds in many other developing countries.

Assuming cars are equipped with seatbelts (despite not being worn), and that most of the local drivers do not wear them, this scenario is actually ideal for the Western tourist.

You, the rational tourist, promptly buckles up in the taxi. In case there’s a crash, you’ll have some protection. The driver and other drivers, meanwhile, wear no seatbelt, thus reducing the Peltzman Effect which says people respond to safety regulations by acting more recklessly. Drivers who wear seatbelts drive less safely.

So the next time you get in a taxi and the driver says, "Don’t worry, we don’t wear seatbelts here," as the driver said to me in Odessa, Ukraine, just smile and say, "Good". And then buckle up.