A New Leaf

I can’t believe I didn’t already know about this: for a few thousand dollars, you can buy a “round the world” ticket that lets you spend a year flying anywhere in the world, as long as it’s fewer than 16 segments and you decide on the cities in advance.

Here’s a sample itinerary:

• San Francisco
• Vancouver
• Washington DC
• Buenos Aires
• Madrid
• Cairo
• Warsaw
• Tashkent
• Beijing
• Honolulu
• Chicago
• San Francisco

This has 16 flight segments (Tashkent adds 3 or 4 by itself, I think) for a total of 34,771 miles of travel and costs only $8,137. Which is a lot of money, but if you are not paying rent and travelling frugally, it’s doesn’t seem so out of reach. Also, consider that this is 16 flights, so the cost per flight is around $500. You can save money by not originating in the North America, or by travelling a smaller number of miles. And you can change the dates of the flights as many times as you want, without any of those service charges they usually hit you with when you change an itinerary.

Also, it looks like the other major “round the world” ticket, from the oneworld airline network, is cheaper and has more straight-forward pricing. The “six continent” economy fare is only $7099.

Where would you go if you had one of these tickets?

Photos from Mumbai and trips to the surrounding countryside in Maharashtra. (The full set is here.)

Whenever I describe my trip to India this past spring, I tell people about visiting the Sikh temple in Delhi. It’s hard to describe in words, but this video does a nice job of summing up what is interesting about these temples: a massive free meal program to people of all faiths, the pool of water, and the pride the Sikhs take in rejecting the Hindu caste system. This is not the temple I visited, but it has many of the same features. Go read about Sikhism on wikipedia.

I finally decided to spend a bit of time putting something in the main http://www.aruguladesigns.com/ page — just a link to this blog and my Linkedin profile, but so much more tasteful than the placeholder page that the web-hosting company posts there by default.

I fly to New York next week for a few days, a day in Boston, then a day or so over the weekend tacked on to spend time with my old college friends in Brooklyn. I also plan to see a production of Richard II on trapeze. My friend Nathan Cohen is doing the music, so in the worst case scenario I get to hear him play for a while. I am optimistic, however.

During my recent visit to India, I was struck by the number of “institutes.” Brand new, under construction, or carved out of a random space in a bustling small-town main street, these schools were almost unanimously technical colleges – post-high school institutions offering courses in computer science, “systems management,” or other similar-sounding disciplines. It was as if they couldn’t build them fast enough. The reason I know what programs were available is that they all used English-language signage and many even went so far as to raise enormous road-side billboards advertising happy and beautiful young backpack-toting Indians taking classes at the “Institution of IT and Management Group of Institutions” or some such convoluted name. (They all sounded alike after a while.) With all of the schools come the school buses – literally clogging the highway between Delhi and Agra.

Seeing the “outsourcing” debate from the US side of the media equation, the complaint is usually: outsourcing costs US jobs and lowers US wages and is therefore bad. I also see some of the inner workings of “outsourcing” in my capacity at a large multi-national firm: we hire more freely in “low cost centers” and think really hard before approving hires in places like the US, where wages are much higher. (The good news is that we are busily hiring on all continents, including North America.) This just makes sense, and has nothing to do with morality or ethics, nor does it involve “sweat shops” or shady practices of that nature. We want smart people, we want to make them happy (by paying and treating them well), and we want to minimize costs. So we are pleased to hire from a pool of very smart people in, among other places, India.

What is often overlooked is the transformative effect these circumstances have on the country where the workers are hired. What I’ll call the “Nike narrative” goes something like this: “Not only are Americans suffering because they lose the outsourced jobs, but the recipients of the jobs are likewise miserable. The only winner is the corporation.” This is certainly true in many cases. Based on my experience with practices in the non-manufacturing industries, however – the service and “knowledge” sectors like software, media, and customer support – employees are very well-paid relative to their peers, and the jobs are very competitive. Oster and Millet (2010) of the University of Chicago report that starting salaries at what they call “IT enabled services” firms is about twice the average per capita income. Think about that. “You can get a 100% raise if you study X instead of Y.” In the US, starting salaries twice the per capita income – about $95,000 per year – are generally available only to people who spend many years in school: doctors or lawyers, for example. (Wall Street professionals are an anomaly, in my opinion: they make out-sized salaries for no apparent reason.)

What Oster and Millet find is that the explosion in these sectors in India – from 56,000 in 1991 to 2.3 million in 2010 – is causing localized effects in the demand for education, specifically English-language education. Every time a new “ITES” firm opens, the nearby English-language schools see a spike in enrollment the next year. Though the paper does not investigate it specifically, the demand for education in India is not only localized around these IT firms: nationwide, the percentage of the population completing primary school has increased from 64% to about 86% over the past two decades. If you believe human progress is not an illusion, I think this would count as a dramatic victory.

It’s taken me a little more than a year to finally get these photos somewhere online for people to see them. It strikes me as unlikely that anyone will see them even now. In any case, here is the photo set on Flickr from our trip to Thailand last April. You’ll see pictures in Bangkok Grand Palace, dinner at the Bed Supper Club, various temples, a train station, and Chiang Dao.

India pictures soon.

At least one night spent in each city in 2009. An asterisk indicates multiple non-contiguous visits.

I have very rudely never shown anyone the photos Greg and I took in Thailand this past spring. I’ll post a few at a time on this blog – keep an eye out.

In this series, Greg and I are at the Grand Palace in Bangkok on our first full day of the trip. Really, our first destination at all. The palace was built in the 18th century when the capital of Thailand was moved to Bangkok. It’s more like a compound than a palace – there are dozens of individual structures. The most interesting object, the Emerald Buddha, cannot be photographed.

I’m doing a little rising from the dead myself today, fighting intense fatigue at the strange hours of my travel east. There’s also something a bit supernatural and/or miraculous about arriving somewhere before you leave.

Yesterday was our last in Bangkok. I insisted on a trip to the Jim Thompson store (no time for the House). I had never heard of him – his story is interesting (it includes a mysterious demise, or I should say concludes) and his merchandise is really quite stunning.

I also insisted on a massage, anticipating this long day of flying. It was also quite stunning, emphasis on stun. Some of it I wouldn’t wish on an enemy.

Now, to pass along some general interest inter-net things for your amusement. First is an infographic from Good Magazine showing you how water consumption can vary widely depending on choices you make like whether to have the steak or chicken. According to my calculations, eating a pound of beef uses as much water as taking a 65-hour shower.

The second is something called Layer Tennis. On Friday afternoons, Coudal Partners (a design firm) gets two talented designers to “compete” using graphics passed back and forth, changing every 15 minutes, posted live as the “volleys” are completed, the whole “match” often using a guest commentator and a twitter feed. See the latest one here. To navigate through the volleys, use the [1] [2] [3]… links just below the image on the right side of the page (where it says “View Match”). It’s not for everyone – the players often make heavy use of internet memes past and present (e.g. the Fail Whale makes an appearance in the lastest match). I think it’s remarkable when you remember that each iteration represents only 15 minutes of work.

That’s all I got for now. To conserve water, I’ll opt for an airport shower instead of Bul Go Gi.

Back in Bangkok.

So, after Tuesday’s delectable dinner we went to bed in our bungalow, resting up for the next day’s tour.

Wednesday

In the morning, breakfast was served – eggs and bacon and so forth. At about 10 am, the two of us hopped in a truck with a European couple and a tour guide. First stop: elephants. The driver took us about 45 minutes into the mountainous forests outside Chiang Dao. On the way, the guide chattered about the various crops people grow in the area (rice, corn, etc.), the trees (teak, rubber, etc.), ecological concerns, and the local mythology of the hill-tribe villagers. I think I understood about half of what he was saying.

We disembarked next to a wooden staircase… to nowhere. About 15 minutes later, two enormous elephants came trundling down a path, driven by two little wirey fellows, each sitting comfortably directly on top of each beasts head. They screamed instructions (go, stop), nudging the animals behind their ears with their bare feet to indicate the direction they wanted them to go. Each pair of tourists climbed the empty staircase to jump into a little bench balanced on a kind of elephant saddle and away we went. “Away we went” has a connotation of speed, with breeze in our hair. The reality was that each elephant seemed inclined to move at their own pace – a ponderous step or so every few seconds, interrupted by as much time as they could negotiate in each shady spot along the trail. The sun was brutally hot. The benches were tiny. At some points on this mountain trail, the elephants were expected to navigate a slanted hairpin turn only a few feet wide, with a steep drop-off to one side. Greg and I commenced strategizing the best way to jump off a falling elephant in such a way that it does not land on us.

Another lovely feature of riding elephants: every minute or two, the elephant expectorates with a loud gurgle and sprays what I can only assume is a water-based liquid on one or both of his ears (presumably to keep cool without sweating). An unfortunate  side effect of this process is that any and all riders are thourougly soaked in his elephant phlegm.

After about 90 minutes of beautiful scenery, that healthy bit of nervous fear, and constant attempts to avoid ingesting too much nose-water, we arrived at a small “hill-tribe” village. We rewarded our mount with a few bunches of bananas (he seemed genuinely excited about it – we have pictures I’ll show you all soon).

Next on the itinerary was a “trek” through the forest to another few villages. All of the villages we visisted were similar in a few ways: their houses were simple wooden structures on stilts, the women and girls surrounded us at every opportunity ,hoping to sell us some handicrafts for a few pennies, and there was some kind of Christian mission. In one village, we encountered a little white girl, maybe 7 or 8 years old, squatting beneath a hut in plain clothes, peering at a chicken. The missions were all engaged in various public works projects: water pipes, building schools, etc.

The trek itself was difficult – we were all at the end of our water bottles and drenched in sweat (on top of the elephant phlegm). As the Lonely Planet quips at some point, “if everything starts to inexplicably suck, you are dehydrated.” That about sums up the trek.

After we made it through the forest and rice fields, then a short bagged lunch, we were carried to the third and final stop – a bamboo raft down a river. It was a pleasant ride – our navigator was a 19-year-old university-bound student working a summer job – but like everything on the tour, just a tad unpleasant. Still, completely worth the boiling sun to see the countryside pass by our raft at a leisurely pace, children swimming and hitching a ride for short streches.

We rested, showered off the muck and grime of the day, had an afternoon beer back at the hotel, then sat down for a Thai dinner. The star of the night was a northern Thai dish – slow-cooked buffalo in a dark, salty broth, served in a heated clay pot. Amazing.

Thursday

The next morning, we checked out and hiked up to the Chiang Dao caves – a deep system of caves near town. The legend of the caves is a that a hermit lived inside for a thousand years. There are many buddha images in the front chambers, but the real experience is going with a guide carrying a gas lantern down into the depths… It was the spookiest thing I’ve ever done. Around our feet scrambled spiders the size of your hand, above our heads flew hundreds of bats, one chasm was 70 meters deep, and the darkness was intense – broken only by a tiny gas flame. We walked 800 meters into the dark maze, sometimes crawling on our bellies to get from one chamber to the next. Not for the faint of heart, or anyone with even an ounce of claustrophobia.

Instead of a bus back to Chiang Mai, we opted for a more expensive back-of-truck ride ($20 for the 80-mile ride instead of $0.50 for the bus). A little more time picking up things at the night market, then we collapsed in our suite, nearing the end of our energy.

Friday

This morning, we made our way to the Chiang Mai airport for a short flight to Bangkok. Tomorrow I think we’ll stop by the Jim Thompson house, and maybe a massage in preparation for my 24-hour trip home.

Greg gave me the several hundred photos of our trip on a memorty stick, so I’ll be posting those before the end of this weekend – stay tuned for that.