Third World Sites Not To Be Missed

     Most travelers are quite familiar with famous places in the West. St. Peters, Notre Dame, the London Tower, the Prado Museum, Red Square and countless other such sites are commonly visited by Westerners. America and Europe offer enough of these to last a lifetime of travel. But what is their equivalent in the Third World? The answer is a plethora of far older and often more magnificent places where man or nature have exercised their creative force. We are all at least cognizant of some of the major Third World Sites. A natural wonder is the magnificent Victoria Falls where the Zambezi River rushes over a mile and a quarter in width and whose torrent in the greatest water flow in the world comparable only to Iguassu Falls of South America. Then there are the Taj Mahal in all its marbled glory, the Great Wall of China, the magnificent Blue Mosque of Istanbul and other places we have some familiarity with. But the Third World contains far more sites of man's historical glory and earth's endless variety.

       Southern Asia offers the greatest collection of amazing tourist sites of any part of the world. The tourist can start in Myanmar with the incredible Disney-like Schwedagon Pagoda in Yangon.  It is not only the holiest Buddhist site in the devout county but it shimmers with gold and diamonds from dozens of stupas large and small some of which contain relics of the Buddha. It is a remarkable experience to circle the site and view the multitude of worship places in this one location. Not too far from Yangon is the city of Bagan which features a vast field dotted with millennium old temples, each more interesting than the next. It is awe-inspiring to think of a civilization that would create such an assemblage of holy sites in a relatively short period of time. Borobudur, another sumptuous Buddhist stupa, is located in the central part of the island of Java in Indonesia. This UNESCO Heritage site  dates from the eighth century and features 72 open stupas each containing a statue of the Buddha. It, too, is one of the great monuments of Buddhist history. In the same area of the world, the neighboring country of Cambodia features relatively intact ruins of several great capitals including Angkor Wat, the one the Western traveler is most likely to know about. The ancient city was a religious and a political center of the Khmer civilization from the 9th to the 12th century and retains it external wall intact as well as many of the temple structures and an amazing collection of art and sculpture. Nearby are impressive remains of other great capitols of the Khmer people. Not far away is the area called "The Killing Fields," one of the most moving monuments to man's cruelty in recent history.

      I mentioned the Taj above but India alone has several of the most incredible sites in the world. Not too far south of the Taj is the town of Khajuraho where a host of beautifully carved erotic temples mark what was once a center of Hindu worship and culture. Still farther south are the Ajanta caves, remnants of ancient Buddhist and Jain temples carved inside granite mountains and decorated with countless paintings and sculptures. Each of these sites is a wonder in itself and makes a trip to India worthwhile. I would add one more amazing building still farther south, namely the Meenakshi Temple in Madurai. Not only is this Hindu monument fascinating with its approximately 2,000,000 carvings, but the ceremonies that take place inside are totally unique. Every night Shiva beds with his consort, Meenakshi, on the opposite side of the temple after an elaborate procession carries him to his pleasure. In Varanasi and Pushkar, one can witness devout ritual bathing in holy waters by endless crowds of worshippers who come to fulfill the dream of their lives.

     When we journey through South and Meso-America we find equivalent delights.  The monumental temples and cities built by the Mayans and the Inca are as impressive as any other sites in the world. One might start at the gigantic pyramids of the Teotihuacan civilization near Mexico City and then trace the Mayan religious centers from Chichen Itza and Uxmal down to Palenque and into Guatemala to Tikal and Honduras to Coban. There are many other such sites but a visit to any of these will give the tourist a good idea of how the Mayans centered their political and religious activities in palatial cities. In South America, Macchu Pichu is probably the most impressive example of Inca culture anywhere and should not be missed. Add in Easter Island and the natural and historic wonders of the Galapagos Islands or the Atacama Desert of Chile or the Amazon River and you have as meaningful and wondrous a trip as can be imagined. 

     There is one more category of travel that the Third World offers exclusively- traditional culture. The Omo Valley of Ethiopia is one of the places in Africa where relatively few white travelers have journeyed. The lip-plate tribes of Mursi and Suri are probably worth the difficult journey alone. There are other tribes all over Africa where one can see rare customs and traditional dress and meet people quite unlike themselves. In Papua New Guinea, one can visit unusual hill tribes like the Huli and see a way of life that will disappear in the near future but remains vibrant enough to provide a great travel experience now. Pockets of traditional life also abound  in the Amazon region and other jungles in South America. Each one of these offers a very unique opportunity for the tourist. More densely populated areas in Vietnam and Indonesia contain small groups of people who still exist as their ancestors did hundreds of years ago. The tribal peoples of India are in this category as well. They merit a journey through their extensive rural habitat.

     If the tourist thinks a visit to the Louvre or a view of Niagara Falls does the trick for him, so be it. If not, there is a great deal more for the traveler's delight. Just wander a bit off the beaten path.

Schwedagon Pagoda, Yangon, Myanmar

Strange Burials in the Third World

     There are seemingly infinite ways to honor ancestors; traveling in the Third World enables the tourist to observe a wide variety of funerary rites and even to occasionally participate in them. I am always amazed at how diverse man's accommodation can be to life's circumstances and to varied cultural beliefs about the nature of the world. Burials are an excellent example of such adaptations. I remember when my first encounter with exotic differences in this custom took place. I was in a Zoroastrian Temple in Mumbai, India. A guide pointed out a tower near the temple and explained that the Zoroastrian burial custom was to lay the corpse of the deceased person out in the open at the top of the tower in order that it be consumed by elements of nature.  We learned that the practitioners of this faith believe that the body becomes impure once the person has died and must not be permitted to contaminate the earth so they expose the body to the sun and to the birds of prey to be returned to nature. As one travels through the less known parts of the world, similarities between customs and beliefs in different and seemingly unrelated places turn up surprisingly. It was many years later on the island of Bali that we encountered an almost identical custom among the early settlers of that island. The Bali Agha, the oldest cultural group there, do virtually the same thing except that the bodies are laid out on the ground and covered with light cloths in order that they be reabsorbed into the earth from which they came. We were able to visit the Bali Agha cemetery in one of the small communities where they live but access was denied to the Zoroastrian Towers. Of course, the rest of the Balinese also observe burial practices which are colorful and interesting and distinctive, filled with dance and music, so those are exceptional as well. One has several choices on that little island alone.

     I have written earlier about the amazing funeral customs of some of the other peoples of Indonesia. The Toraja who live in the central part of the island of Sulawesi conduct perhaps the most elaborate of these ceremonies. If a person is important and/or especially wealthy, at death he or she is placed in a casket and buried in the ground much as one does in most of the world. The family saves its money for a clearly more important subsequent event, however, to which all of the townspeople and the deceased's family and friends and acquaintances are invited. The grand ritual occurs some year or two later. The ceremony may involve hundreds or more visitors from other islands and from neighboring towns who are provided  for in tents, served all kinds of food, and for whom many animals are sacrificed, etc. The expenses incurred by such grand ventures have bankrupted some families and these events are strongly discouraged by the authorities. They go on nonetheless.

     In Tana Toraja (the land of the heavenly kings) where these elaborate ceremonies are held, this event includes the placing of a carved wooden effigy of the deceased on the side of a cave in a lovely rice field covered valley to stand alongside equivalent dignitaries. These effigies are tended by the living relatives of the deceased including a regular changing of the dress on the effigy. The corpses are then interred in the caves behind each of these figures. Walking through that valley is quite a sight. In other places in Indonesia, the grand ceremony is followed by placing the coffin into a finely constructed miniature home that is a replica of those the people live in. Thus, the ancestors of the people have equal comfort in their afterlife. I have had the good fortune to be an honored guest at each kind of ceremony just because I was there to attend. My presence apparently lent additional gravity and importance to the event so I was welcomed with open arms.

     When I visited a small community of Sun Worshippers on the island of New Guinea, I saw another curious version of dealing with dead ancestors. There, on a series of shelves right in the middle of the tiny village, stood skulls of ancestors covering several generations. They had been decorated in the same fashion as the residents of the village do for themselves when they paint their faces to participate in joyful ceremonies. So the skulls are representations of those who lived earlier in the village. Many people in the Third World regard deceased relatives as the living dead, spirits that protect them from on high in the afterlife or guide them in their daily activities. They take care of these spirits out of respect but also out of fear that they could be harmed by them. 

     On the banks of the holy Ganges River in Varanasi, India, one sees many examples of the much more common crematory ceremonies for the dead. But the Hindus start early on these sacred shores. They bring their dying relatives to the riverside, construct pyres or use the ones that stand there and tend their loved ones as one might do in a hospice. After death occurs, the body is placed on the pyre and cremated with the appropriate ceremonial prayers and rituals. This is something many tourists are familiar with. Less well known is something I came across in Ghana in Western Africa. I was introduced to a common variation of burial that exists there- coffins are often carved to represent something of the person's life or the aspirations of the deceased. I have seen airplanes, bibles, books, race cars and other such items created by local carvers for the deceased to spend their eternity in. While I have surely not seen the full range of ceremonies that man has created to honor the dead, I consider myself fortunate to have experienced such a wide range of burial practices in my journeys. Such customs make travel in the Third World captivating, especially because they are so accessible to visitors who are interested in them. Not only can one observe what happens but often the visitor is deemed to underscore and augment the import of the ceremony. Doing well by doing good, I guess.

Boy in Market, Kashgar, China

What Do We Do In Response to Poverty?

     I was lecturing at a library the other day about the Third World and a woman who had been adventurous enough and curious enough to have visited India, my favorite destination, stated that it was dirty there and she was quite discomforted by the poverty. She did not enjoy her visit because of that. At least she had first hand experience because she chose to go there in the first place. Almost all the other folks who attend my lectures use those visceral aversions as reasons not to go. Are there great pockets of poverty in India and Cambodia and Yemen and Africa and many other places? Of course there are. First of all about a third of the world's people earn less than $2.00 a day. That is poverty. At that level most people can barely afford to eat or build themselves decent shelter or clothe themselves for protection against harsh weather. They are constantly in danger from epidemics or turbulent weather or other environmental events they cannot protect themselves against. They surely have little choice about where to live and very few have access to decent education. In some places poor people are more apparent than in others. In India, because of the dense population, poverty is especially visible.

      Yet few of us actually live very far from folks who are poor, who simply scrape by day to day if they are lucky. We usually protect ourselves from confrontation with that phenomenon by zipping past such areas in our car without stopping or by circumventing the "dirty" or "dangerous" streets by riding on expressways to our destination. Poverty is something that we read about but rarely are thrust into the middle of. Not so for the traveler. In areas of Cairo or Mexico City or Mumbai, we are more likely to be walking through neighborhoods where folks live outside or are clearly in need so we have to acknowledge the existence of aspects of life and society we can avoid at home if we are so inclined. As a matter of fact, travel is an opportunity if it is viewed as such. We can more safely and more genuinely interact with folks who are poor than is the case when we are at home. Travel provides a chance to sensitize ourselves to the existence of such life and to ponder the downside of society and its implications for us and others who do not have to endure such hardships. One of my earliest travel experiences and a true epiphany was taking a young woman to her home in the slums of Acapulco and seeing the conditions under which she lived from day to day-the unavailability of clean water, the sewage floating alongside unpaved roads, hungry babies crying under fragile tents. I knew that, from then on, I would work to help such people in any way I could.

     So that is another possible reaction. Maybe we could label it the Mother Teresa Conversion.  Each time I travel to places like rural Burma or some small African village, I become more and more aware of the hardships that some people have to endure just to go on living. We read about AIDS here but there are places where as much as a third or nearly half of the residents are infected; we are conscious of the existence of hunger even in America but distended bellies and skeletal figures abound in parts of the Third World reminding us how common and how painful hunger is; we see multititudes of children and adults living on the streets of overgrown cities in underdeveloped areas and cannot avoid those scenes intruding into our consciousness. These are people just like us, born in a less fortunate place, heirs to less opportunity, subjected to the whims of their weather or economy or cultures and trapped in their circumstances. Such images and experiences have impelled me to reevaluate what I consider important and what I take for granted. Such scenes can make us more human and help us to grow ethically if we allow them to do so. Visiting poverty can be an opportunity but only if the visitor takes as much interest in it as he or she does in the beautiful buildings or colorful costumes or captivating ceremonies one comes across all over the world. More knowledge and greater intimacy with all aspects of human life can have a greater effect on us than the easier aspects of world travel could ever afford. I don't like poverty either, at home or away. That's why I make an effort to diminish it in any way I can. Visits to India help increase my resolve.

                                                         Beggar, Mumbai, India

It's Hard Not to Get Noticed

     Americans and other Western travellers in the Third World have trouble not being noticed. Even if we dress according to local customs, our manners and appearance are generally sure giveaways that we are not from the places we visit. Of course, this fact has consequences in how we are reacted to by the residents of those places. It goes without saying that, in locales where our country is unpopular, we may be avoided or snubbed or leered at at the very least. When I was in Pakistan, even before 9/11, I did not feel especially welcomed by the folks who passed by me. There were no outward signs of hostility evidenced but, except for the children, we were largely ignored by the people we saw along the street or in the buildings we visited. All of the folks I requested to take photos of, however, were quite cooperative and did not mind my doing so. Some groups like the Huli tribe in Papua New Guinea just don't like travellers in their midst. There were other areas of the world where it seemed that tourists in general were not especially welcome but that has been the exception rather than the typical reaction to the presence of Westerners. Responses to us did not usually seem to be related to the economic status of the folks we met as much as to the customs and the political outlook of the people. At the same time, I was always careful not to point my camera at scenes of poverty and have people assume that I was photographing their poorest neighborhoods or other things they may not have been happy to have me record. Red light areas, homes on stilts that were falling down, homeless people on the streets, disabled folks, beggars and the like were sensitive things and, even if I wanted to look at such things and photograph them, I either did so at a distance or very surreptitiously. My travel was not aimed at making people feel worse about themselves.

       But travelers cannot hide. I remember entering the courtyard of a large mosque in Egypt soon after Obama's election. The people were excited by that event and the question that folks there asked me often was whether or not I voted for Obama. When I responded by indicating I was a strong Obama supporter, I received cheers, approbation and even hugs in response. They were very aware of what was going on in the States and saw me as representative of those events whether I wanted to be or not. If we carry a camera or a fanny pack, we also mark ourselves as conspicuous and then we may even be regarded as potential targets, especially for those who have little and for whom our camera may represent a year or more of earnings. I wrote earlier about a robbery setup by a couple of peasant women on a back street in a small town in Bolivia as a clear example of this. There have been several others.

      And then there are the more common positive reactions, some quite heart-warming.  There are places in the world where America is popular and visitors reap the benefits of being associated with the country. People greet the Western traveler in such lands with curiosity and warmth. They want to know about you, they want you to take pictures with them, they even want you to visit their schools or their homes. They are interesting in sharing aspects of their own life to a surprising extent. I remember traveling along the Silk Road in Western China and telling my guide to ask at the homes of a few of the minority groups folks we saw along the way if we could talk with them or visit their houses. The answer was an unqualified yes.  We had worthwhile experiences and saw a lot because of the people we interacted with that day. At markets, folks generally smile at us and regard us with as much curiosity as we do them. There were even instances where we were regarded as special guests. In West Africa, we were often greeted as honored guests and invited to participate in ceremonies of importance to the people. In Indonesia we were asked for our our signatures on several occasions so that the people could collect them. Being famous was new to us but it was nice to sample it for the few moments we were in those places.

     The presence of Westerners in remote parts of the world is often as important to the people who live there as it is to the visitors. Our smiles, our flexibility, our respect for the folks we meet is part of the travel equation. We should be mindful of this. Let people respond to us as they may. We should leave them with the impression that we are there because we want to understand them and because we value them as fellow citizens of the larger world. Spreading good cheer and friendship is not only fun, it is a key ingredient of the traveler's footprint.

Driving Is Not Always Good in Karachi, Pakistan

Stretching Your Limits in the Third World

     One does not need to climb mountains or explore deep caves to test personal limits and increase confidence and independence. Travel in the Third World alone offers the opportunity to check out your capacity for survival if you wander about independently and take some chances. One of the main differences in Third World settings and travel in industrialized areas is how much the traveler is protected by the surrounding environment. To put it simply, the Third World does not take care of visitors to the same extent; you are much more on your own. As I write these words, the first image that comes to my mind is a swaying rope bridge I crossed in a remote area in Southeast Asia. A small group of fellow hikers and I were told there was a lovely waterfall on the other side of the bridge so most of us crossed over, obviously one at a time. One man was afraid of heights but he took a chance and went with us. As we crossed, we became aware of an enormous drop below us where the earth had parted many years earlier. We saw the waterfall and made our way back to the main path. The man who feared heights stood on the other side paralyzed by his discovery of the distance to the ground below the bridge. With encouragement, he finally made his way across and we all went traipsing farther along. His trauma was partly due to the absence of any signs indicating that there was a gorge so far below but we all were nervous crossing the swaying, vine-covered structure. I could not help but think about what the last time might have been when an engineer (or even a local townsperson) inspected the bridge we had just risked our lives to cross for the sake of a waterfall. Rope bridges turn up in lots of Third World settings from treks through the Thai countryside to gaps in jungle trails in Indonesia or South America. One either crosses them or misses the fun or the view on the other side.

     Another similar challenge that I recall was boarding ships in Vietnam, Borneo and other places by walking on an exposed plank over water which was either deep or polluted or infested with some undesired inhabitants. I remember a day on the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea when we arrived at a village we wanted to visit and found a thin, fragile wooden bridge at the entrance which crossed a swamp. It looked very unstable and offered only one rope for balance. One crossed it or did not visit that village. After coming so far and being in such a fascinating place, there was really no choice. On another trip, a ride around a lake in Sumatra presented a similar challenge for us and for our car as well. A bridge consisting of a few loosely connected logs and very shaky side rails appeared before us along the road. We got out of the van while our guide helped the driver stay on the logs and we followed along on foot gripping tightly to the unreliable sides. I recall vividly walking along through rice fields in Bali another time and encountering a large log which connected a gap in the path we were on. It looked a bit too challenging for us initially and we debated retracing our steps until a local woman came along from the other direction carrying a large basket of goods on her head. She walked across the log without hesitation or nervousness at all. That inspired us to do the same although with significantly less certainty. We saved backtracking a couple of miles had we not done so. Such bridges and logs and other hazards exist in the Third World in reasonable numbers. The traveler is certain to encounter such obstacles.

      But there are many other challenges along journeys in out of the way places. We have witnessed stones and boulders blocking our path along "highways" in the mountains of Pakistan. We have driven on unpaved, mile high roads around curves with no markings and no way to discern oncoming traffic. We have come close to running out of gas in deserted rural areas where no one made sure there was a supply available anywhere near where we traveled. Of course all of these challenges exist in countries where the medical facilities are often minimal or absent. Should the traveler sustain injuries, he is on his own. That is just the way it is.

     Yet here I am. My wife and I made it through all those challenges and we are better off for the experience. We know that people can survive and even enjoy themselves without all the protections that customarily surround us to make our lives safer and our health more secure. We do not advise timid friends to follow in our path but we attribute much of our travel satisfaction to the confidence we have gained in surmounting such challenges just like the millions of people do every day who live in such places. We have learned that conquering obstacles is good practice for the daily demands of life and helps to keep our usual challenges in proper perspective.

Valle de la Luna, Bolivia