The Best Martini in All of Africa

My friend, Paul Tuhus, is an independent tour director. He has chosen to do this for a living. From where I sit that would be like someone choosing to be the dummy in a crash test facility. To each his own.

Like Hambone in the Bill Haley song, Paul has been around the world and is going again. Often he brings home a little something to remember the trip. Here he and I are on the same page. Thanks to Paul I once brought home a framed icon of Jesus Christ. Paul had spotted it for sale outside a Coptic church in Cairo. Luckily the seller had two. The picture was a typical crucifixion scene. The thing was that the cross was rimmed with tiny little white lights that flashed on and off like a sign on an all night diner. I wore mine out. I hope Paul’s still works.

Given Paul’s predilection for the oddball gift, my wife, Nancy, once passed on to him a calendar she received in the mail. It was a Monk of the Month calendar. We were partial to April. Its Monk had earned the title because he was very adept at carving little wooden statues of nuns. The picture showed him surrounded by a slew of them.

Well, Paul just sent me an article that appeared in the Valley News, a newspaper that covers the upper valley of New Hampshire and Vermont. It had been reprinted from the LA Times. Susan Spano, a travel writer, was bemoaning the disappearance of the martini outside of the United States.

It was a typical Paul Tuhus gift. He knows I only drink vodka martinis and that I use them as tranquilizers when I travel. I used to drink gin martinis until my dentist told me that gin had chemicals in it that could be harmful to my health, things like ketones. Ketones are ubiquitously used as industrial solvents. I dropped the gin martini like a hot potato.

My dentist, by the way, knew whereof he spoke. He was a connoisseur. I remember one day sitting in his chair benumbed by Novocain. I asked him if my taste buds would revive by 6pm. I was due at dinner and I was to bring the wine.

“What are you having for dinner?” he asked poking away at his excavation in tooth number 18.

“Uh, aving, oster,” I said.

“Lobster?”

I nodded.

“Have you decided on a wine?”

I shook my head.

He finished working on my tooth, put in a temporary gizmo and told me to stay put.

He returned five minutes later with a bottle of chilled white wine.

“Try this,” he said handing me a bottle of Groth Chardonnay. I don’t remember the year.

My taste buds came to in time for dinner. The wine was perfect. That was why when he told me to step away from the gin, I did as I was told.

Susan Spano ends her article with a nostalgic nod toward the bar at the Grand Hotel et Des Palmes in Palermo and the time when she had had the perfect martini “at the last American bar” in town. It had, of course, been made from vodka.

The story put me in mind of the bar at the Hotel Kasbah Xaluca Maadid in Erfoud, Morocco. We had arrived at the hotel after an exhausting day riding a van around the Dades Valley. I badly needed a drink.

“One very dry vodka martini, please,” I asked at the hotel bar.

I knew I was taking my life in my hands. Whenever I ordered a martini outside the U.S., more often than not I got vodka and vermouth in a one-to-one ratio. Still, I was desperate.

The bartender greeted me with a pained expression. “I don’t know how to make one.”

I lit up.

“May I show you?” I asked.

He was delighted. Out came the vodka, the vermouth, a lemon, several cubes of ice and a cocktail shaker. I poured myself a double shot and half a capful of vermouth. I’m not one of those wave-the-bottle-over-the-glassers. I leave that to the Ricky Hollywoods of the world. I placed several ice cubes in the shaker, poured in the mixture and stirred gently, all the while explaining that a British study had shown that stirred martinis have more anti-oxidants that shaken ones.

I poured the mixture into a glass as chilled as it could be in the few minutes granted me. I sliced a strip of rind off the lemon, rubbed it yellow-side down around the edge of the glass, twisted the rind over the surface of the liquid to squeeze out the remaining oil and, with a flourish, dropped it in the drink.

After a moment of quiet thanks, I took my first sip.

Then I saluted the bartender.

“This,” I said. “Is the best martini I have ever had in all of Africa.”

Click here to listen to this entry in audio.

Why My Wife Travels

Whenever I ask travelers why they travel, the talk is always about new cultures, marvelous views, different ways of seeing the world. But whenever I ask travelers about a specific trip, the emphasis is very different. Here’s an example.

In 1981 my wife—I didn’t know her then—went hiking in the foothills of the Himalayas, the Annapurna region. She flew into Pokhara, Nepal, was driven a half hour out of town where she and her hiking companion, Dena, were put into the hands of six Sherpas.

She had read about such treks in a 1952 book by William O. Douglas, Associate Supreme Court Justice. The book was called Beyond the High Himalayas. His account attracted her. She picked the Nepalese big C. It was to be an eight-day c-shaped trek that skirted the bottom of the world’s highest mountain range.

The first night was miserable. By the time they reached their first campsite it had been raining yaks and dogs. Her Sherpas had chosen an open field next to a pigsty. That first night it rained so hard Nancy’s and Dena’s tent caved in. Everything was soaked. Her duffle bag with its load of once dry clothing utterly failed the waterproof test.

The second day dawned sunny. Nancy put on her wet clothes and followed the fateful C to their second campsite. It was only a four-hour walk. She lay out her clothes on the ground to dry, turned in early and prepared herself for the trek of a lifetime, the trek to Poon Hill and its view of the marvelous Himalayas.

The third day the sun shone as brightly as it had the day before. It was also the day Nancy got sick. It was a bad day to be sick. For one thing the hike was eight hours long. For another, it was not eight hours of level walking. It was down one mountainside to a river a thousand feet below and then another thousand feet back up on the other side.

Ordinarily this might not have developed into the catastrophe that it turned into. After all, she had drugs. This was something she had learned from the Douglas book. Take a hefty supply of drugs with you because the villagers you brush up against along the way will assume you are a doctor. They will come to you with headaches, leg aches, backaches, boils, and sores, an olio of ailments straight out of Job. To their everlasting consternation Nancy and Dena each thought the medical supplies were the other’s responsibility. Consequently what little they brought had been given away by the time Nancy fell ill. All that was left was one Sudafed. Not even an aspirin.

Now she had to face eight hours of relentless down and up trekking. She had a fever. Her limbs were shaking. And the tree on the other side of the valley, the one that marked their campsite for the third night, seemed to recede with each trembling step.

“This is the worst day of my life,” she thought as she fingered the lone pill in her pocket. Then she thought, “But tomorrow might be even worse. I’d better save the Sudafed until tomorrow.” In the end she left Nepal with that pill still in her pocket. She had anticipated that each subsequent day would be worse than the last.

She told me that as the morning wore on she hoped she would slip off the edge of the trail, coming to rest in a spot so remote there would be no hope of rescue. She literally felt like dying.

At the bottom of the valley they stopped for lunch. Nancy couldn’t eat what the Sherpas had prepared. In their attempts at mimicking American fare, they had managed to mingle the worst of both cuisines, American and Nepalese, pancakes that tore potholes in their stomachs.

Among Nancy’s most vibrant memories of that trip is a plate of spaghetti. It had been served to two strangers at one of the rest stops along the way. Nancy stared at it with such intensity that even today, twenty years later, she remembers wanting to kill for it. She settled for potatoes, rice and a Coca Cola. The coke, she said, was a godsend. She credits it with getting her up the other side of the mountain before she collapsed into her bedroll for the night.

When I ask about her eight-day trip in Nepal, what I get back is a litany of catastrophes, not a paean to the glories of nature. Why is that? She told me that her climb up Poon Hill to see the panorama of the Himalayas was breath-taking, but she didn’t say it with half the enthusiasm she put into climbing up out of the valley of Death with a 102º fever.

At the end of the trip as she came around the last bend in the Nepalese C, suddenly she saw the Landover waiting to drive her back to Pokhara and the plane home. She raised both arms in a victory salute.

“We made it,” she cried. Perhaps that is why she travels.

Click here to listen to this entry in audio.

My Wife Loves India. I Love My Wife. Therefore...

My wife loves India. She spent a month there thirty years ago. And then another month the following year. Now she wants to go again. She wants me to go with her.

I asked her about those early visits. She said that she spent the first three days crying her eyes out.

“Why?”

“Everything was so overwhelming; the smell of garbage in the street, the raw sewage running in the gutters, the traffic fumes, the incessant honking of car horns during the day, and at night the never ending barking of dogs. I couldn’t sleep. My nerves were frazzled. It was terrible.”

“It sounds terrible,” I said sympathetically.

“I’ll never forget the river in Benares,” she went on. “Dead bodies were floating in it. I remember seeing one corpse with a vulture perched on its chest eating away at the open stomach.”

“It sounds horrible. Why didn’t you just leave?”

“I don’t know. On the morning of the fourth day I somehow managed not to see those things. Instead I smelled the jasmine flowers and the spices from the market place and everything changed.”

“What were the people like?” I asked wanting to get away from the corpses and the sewage.

She thought for a minute and then told me this story. She had hired a rickshaw driver to take her around the city of New Dehli. She asked how much it would cost for the day.

“Whatever you want to pay,” he said.

She pressed him, but he insisted. “Whatever you want to pay, madam,” his head bouncing back and forth like a bobble-headed doll.

Back at the hotel at the end of the day, it was time to settle up. She asked the driver to wait while she went inside. She asked the receptionist, the concierge and someone waiting in the lobby what a reasonable price would be. They all came up with a figure within a couple of dollars of one another. She added five dollars to the highest estimate, an enormous tip in those days, and offered the money to the driver.

“Is this all you are going to pay me?” he yelled.

“You said whatever I wanted to pay you would be fine,” she replied.

“But this is ridiculous,” he said.

She told him how she had arrived at the figure. By then a crowd of thirty people, all men, had gathered to listen. As the argument went on, the men joined in. They took sides, splitting evenly, fifteen on one side, fifteen on the other. Every now and then someone would come over to Nancy’s side and someone would go over to the driver’s side. The sides were always perfectly balanced.

The concierge and the hotel manager had come out to see what the fuss was about. Now the driver was in a bind. He could not back down without losing face. On the other hand this is the place where he worked. Nancy judged that he was trying to cheat her, but she also knew that he couldn’t lose face without losing his job.

She needed to find a way out, one in which he saved face but didn’t cost her an arm and a leg. She came up with the solution.

“I need to go to the airport,” she said. “I’ll pay you this much more if you’ll take me.”

He jumped at the offer.

The ride to the airport in an open-air rickshaw was uncomfortable. She was coated with dust from the roads to say nothing of breathing in the dirty air.

On the plane back to America the first symptoms of shigella showed themselves. She was sick as a dog for a week.

Now she wants me to go back to India with her.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Click here to listen to this entry in audio.

Live and Let Live

During my recent visit to the Balkans (see my previous blog entry) I learned of a peculiar fact about World War II. The Nazis were able to mount a native SS Division in Kosovo but not in Albania even though the majority population in both places was Albanian. Why were the Nazis able to organize Kosovon Albanians but not Albanian Albanians?

One commentator on my blog, Auron Tare, suggests that the reason is to be found in religion. The Albanian Muslims of Kosovo were apparently far stricter than those in Albania. I have no knowledge of the Albanians in Kosovo, but from my brief experience with those in Albania, I can certainly see what Mr. Tare is driving at. In Tirana I didn’t see a single woman in a burka and only one school child wearing a headscarf. That was in the National Museum. She was in a group of about twenty school children. She chatted easily with her classmates. I remember thinking how nice it was that the other children didn’t seem to care one way or the other that her head was covered.

I asked our guide, Kela, what it what like being a Muslim in Albania. She said people were pretty laid back about it, that in Albania everyone drinks and smokes, Muslim or no. My correspondent, Auron Tare, seems to concur, “Albanians have been very relaxed when it comes to religion.”

Perhaps Mr. Tare is right. Perhaps in World War II the stricter one was religiously, the more likely one was to respond to the call to join a Nazi SS Division. At any rate things don't seemed to have changed much in Albania. I am told that Al Quaeda tried for three years to recruit Albanians for its jihad against America. They were forced to throw in the towel. The Albanians preferred a cigarette and another beer to, say, an exploding vest.

In the just released (and first rate) Belgian film by the Dardenne Brothers, Lorna’s Silence, the heroine is faced with a tough moral choice. In the end she opts for “live and let live.” It is not surprising that in the script she is from Albania.

A Little Learning Is a Dangerous Thing

I just came back from a trip to the Balkans. As always I wrote about it and Nancy took photographs. You can download our photo-journal from either of these websites:

http://travelblog.zeco.com/2009/06/16/a-reluctant-traveler-in-the-adriatic

http://www.google.com/search?q=mulling+the+balkans&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Just click on Mulling the Balkans to download a .pdf file.

In the course of the trip I learned that, during World War II, the Nazis had succeeded in forming an SS division in Kosovo. It was called the SS Skanderbeg Division. At the time Kosovo was 70% Albanian, the remainder mostly Serbian. The curious thing was that the Nazis were successful in Kosovo, but failed miserably in Albania. Why should that have been?

I put the question to one of the lecturers on the trip. Maybe, he guessed, it was because the Albanians in Albania were divided into separate clans and that there was a natural inclination to keep the the playing field level. If the Nazis succeeded in organizing one clan, another would contrive to assassinate that clan’s Albanian commandant. Perhaps, the lecturer mused, this was a servomechanism that kept the clans on equal footing.

Not so, said a recent commentator on Mulling the Balkans. His name is Auron Tare. An Albanian, he was one of the founders of Butrint National Park and for several years was its director. This is just one of his many achievements on behalf of Albania. For more, check out his entry in Wikipedia. I have summarized his comments here so that readers of Mulling the Balkans might also benefit from Mr. Tare’s insight:

To understand what happened in Kosovo, you need to know that Germany was instrumental in freeing the Albanians from Serbian persecution. The Austro-Hungarian Empire had supported the Albanians in their conflict with the Slavs. Germany had continued those policies when the Austro-Hungarian Empire crumbled. He adds that the pro-German factions in Kosovo were drawn largely from the Albanian aristocracy. They associated Serbs with Communism and Communism with Russia, the historical enemy of the Albanians.

Mr. Tare notes that the SS Skanderbeg Division did not fight in support of the Germans. Rather—and Mr. Tare’s source for this next statement is the memoirs of the German Army Commander of the SS Skanderbeg Division—the Albanians joined the division so that they might acquire arms to use against the Serbs when the latter moved to retake Kosovo for themselves. In his words, “all the recruits left as soon as they got weapons.”

There were other Albanian political factions in Kosovo that supported the Germans. Many of these ended up as immigrants to America where, because of their anti-Communist stance, they were welcomed.

The picture that Mr. Tare paints is of a hydra head of conflicting Balkan political and ethnic loyalties involving Germans, Albanians, Serbs and Russians. Mr. Tare’s account strikes me as far more reasonable than the one I reported in my journal. I am grateful to him for setting me straight. But I don’t want the discussion to end there. Mr. Tare’s account, I believe, fits rather well with what I have gleaned from my readings, however meager, into Balkan history writ large. In a passage quoted in Mark Mazower’s Balkans: A Short History, the author quotes Arnold Toynbee as saying:

The introduction of the Western formula [of the principle of nationalism] among these peoples has resulted in massacre . . . Such massacres are only the extreme form of a national struggle between mutually indispensable neighbors, instigated by this fatal Western idea.

Mazower expands on Toynbee’s point:

“Ethnic cleansing” – whether in the Balkans in 1912-1913, in Anatolia in 1912-1922 or in erstwhile Yugoslavia in 1991-1995 – was not, then, the spontaneous eruption of primeval hatreds but the deliberate use of organized violence against civilians by paramilitary squads and army units; it represented the extreme force required by nationalists to break apart a society that was otherwise capable of ignoring the mundane fractures of class and ethnicity.

To quote from my own journal, Mulling the Balkans:

In other words, according to Toynbee/Mazower, the Balkan Peninsula was the Africa of southeastern Europe. Just as the great powers of Europe descended on the Dark Continent during the so-called “scramble for Africa” of the 19th century and arbitrarily divided up the spoils of a land unhampered by national boundaries to the vast detriment of tribal boundaries, so, too, did they force national boundaries on the Balkans, opening the way for the bloody and fractured history that we have come to know from a distance during our own lifetimes.

Human beings have always been inclined to balkanization. Homo sapiens’ early history is a history of tribe against tribe exacerbated by later history’s tendency to force tribes into the procrustean bed of nation/states. The 19^th century’s introduction of nationalism has been rather like contracting bubonic plague on top of small pox. I suppose one might argue that nation/states have actually bridled tribal aggression. Maybe. But I’m not betting on it.

"But what evil have I done? Whom have I killed?"

Last night I had a panic attack. I felt my pulse going up. It’s usually around 58 beats per minute. Now it was higher. I could feel the throbbing in my chest. I was watching the Yankees beat the hell out of the Red Sox. At first I put it down to that. No, it couldn’t be that. Smoltz was pitching and, as everyone knows, he’s a work in progress. I didn’t expect the Sox to win.

It was a Thursday night. O.K. Work on that, I thought. What happened to me on Thursday night a week ago? When I remembered, my pulse jumped up another notch. I was at George and Gaby Whitehouse’s home listening to Mahmoud Khodier talk to twenty prospective travelers about the trip he wants to lead into Egypt and Libya. Nancy wanted to go just to see. She said I didn’t have to come. But I couldn’t see how I could stay home. It was a five-minute walk from our house to theirs. They are friends. They know Nancy and I always do things together. If I had stayed home, it would have made a statement. I wasn’t in a statement-making mood. Of course, I went.

Mahmoud Khodier is a tour guide. George and Gaby touted him as one of the best they have ever encountered, not idle praise coming from a couple who have been in the travel business for thirty five years.

The slide show Mahmoud put on was impressive. He punctuated the trip into Egypt with stunning photographs of Abu Simbel, the Valley of the Whales, the Dakhla and Kharga Oases, and, of course, Luxor.

In the darkened room I pictured the tour as an anti-Moses trip. Moses led the Jews out of Egypt. Mahmoud leads them back in. He also intends to visit Tripoli and Leptis Magna in Libya.

Nancy fell for it hook, line and sinker, of course. But she’d fall for a trip anywhere in Africa. Well, maybe not Zimbabwe.

“Do you want to go?” she turned to me.

Like in the E.F. Dutton commercial everyone in the room stopped talking and turned to listen.

So that was it. The evening was a setup. If I had said no, she would have said, “Well, I’m definitely going.”

I would have had to back down in front of all those people.

If I said yes, it would have been a lie.

So I said, “It’s up to you, sweetheart.”

Nancy turned and gave Gaby thumbs up.

Later in the evening Mahmoud leaned over to me and whispered in my ear, “You are very diplomatic.”

So is he. He knows as well as I do that I’m a puppy, a wuss, a combination of the two. I’ll let you figure out what that is.

Egypt, I’m told, is safe. But when I ask my friends about Libya, they shrug their shoulders. What the hell is that supposed to mean? How I wish I could just stay home and out of harms way.

Ever since the gathering at George and Gaby’s, Nancy has had enough sense not to push it. She hasn’t mentioned Egypt or Libya once. She doesn’t have to. She knows she is going and that I won’t be able to stay back.

She goes about her business as if the meeting with Mahmoud never happened. But she can’t hide her elation at another trip in the offing even if it might end up offing me. She has stopped biting her nails. She has turned the patio into a flower garden. She placed little vases with suction cups on the French doors that lead to the patio. She has filled them with black-eyed susans, geraniums, alstroemeria, zinnias and tuberous begonias.

While an upcoming trip has a salutary effect on the décor of our patio, I suffer my panic attacks in silence. I drown them in a wineglass. Every time my heart bangs its head against my thorax, I take a swallow and hope for the best.

There is a consolation. Septimius Severus was born in Leptis Magna. (This photograph of the Roman Theater was taken by Luca Galuzzi; http://www.galuzzi.it.) Marcus Aurelius named him senator in 172. In 193 he was named Emperor after hurrying to Rome to crush the Praetorian Guard who had sold the Emperorship to Didius Julianus. Julianus was, mutatis mutandis, the first "Queen for a Day." 25,000 sesterces had bought him sixty-six days of Emperorian glory. But no sooner did Septimius Severus step foot back in Rome than the Roman Senate crowned him Emperor--the Praetorian Guard be damned--and in virtually the same breath condemned foolish Julianus to death. His last words were reported to have been, "But what evil have I done? Whom have I killed?"

Doomed to follow Mahmoud into Egypt, I know how he must have felt.

It will be amusing to see the place where Septimius Severus was born and raised. I only hope that, like him, I will get out of there alive.

(I’ve written a bit about Septimius' awful offspring elsewhere in this blog. You can check it out: http://travelreluctantly.blogspot.com/2007/08/occasionally-when-i-travel-i-experience.html.)

Click here to listen to this entry in audio

Riverboating from Budapest to Amsterdam

October 3, 2006

Our boat is a riverboat. It is called the Swiss Pearl. I have been on ships before. This is my first riverboat. I notice the difference immediately. Ships are vessels you have to walk up into. Riverboats are vessels you walk down into. They are like swimming pools. Above the water line they are more glass than steel. On a riverboat a rough sea is merely a description of poor penmanship. I checked with the man on the bridge to see how deep the Danube was. He said just now it was 6 feet deep. We were a few kilometers out of Budapest. If we sank, everyone would go to the upper deck and wait for a taxi.

Our riverboat is thirteen years old. It was renovated three years ago. Painted in black letters on the superstructure just above the entrance are the symbols L110, B11, Pass 123. I think of bingo. It is shorthand for dimensions. The Swiss Pearl is 110 meters long, 11 meters wide and holds 123 passengers. On this trip it is holding 104 of us. This is something else that separates a riverboat from a ship. Aboard a ship, one can find volumes of technical information, mostly about the engines. Ship lines are proud of their engines. One can easily learn how many screws there are and how many blades on each screw. The horsepower of each engine is common knowledge and the engine builders are treated like literary giants. On a riverboat the technical information focuses on your mini-bar and the power supply in your cabin. If you want to know how many blades are on the spare propeller, you have to count them for yourself. (The Swiss Pearl propellers are seven bladers.) In short, on a riverboat there is not the slightest nod toward “man against the sea.” I like that. It is like taking a stretch limo to Amsterdam.

Brad Bates, a long time traveling friend from MIT—he majored in Electrical Engineering in 1959—informed me at breakfast that the boat's bridge actually moves up and down like an elevator. He tells me that all the masts fold down and that the railings fold in. On the river the perils are not from rogue waves but from low bridges. If you are on the top deck and a low bridge is in the offing, duck or the bridge will be offing you.

The Swiss Pearl is anchored on the Belgrade Rakpart (quay). Across the river and up on Gellert hill is Liberation Monument. Sculpted by Zigmond Strobl, it depicts a woman holding an object high over her head. The statue was originally intended to honor the memory of Istvan Horthy, son of Hungary’s pre-war and World War II dictator. In that version the woman was holding an airplane propeller. When the Russians liberated Budapest, to commemorate that liberation a slightly different version of the statue was substituted. In this one the woman holds up a palm leaf. When the communist regime ended in 1989, the figure of a Russian soldier at the foot of the monument was removed and the monument, commemorated yet another liberation; obviously, an all-purpose monument.

Click here to listen to this entry in audio