Category: Travails of a Guidebook Author

Counterintuitive Travel Tip #2: Ugly Places

Continuing my series of cranky travel tips, many of which have to do with how to plan your itinerary. This one’s related to Tip #1, but in the bigger picture.

Go to the ugly places.

I’ve argued this before, specifically about Cancun. But it has a broader application.

Any indie traveler worth his backpack shuns the place with concrete hotels, nor do most people go where there are zero landmarks. But you can learn a lot about a local culture in some random “ugly” city, more than you can at some remote beach where there’s exactly one local, who’s selling you weed and cooking your fish dinner however you like it. Cancun is very, very Mexican if you know where to look—and how to look at it.

Perfectly authentic Mexican sweets in supposedly soulless Cancun.

Another example: Pattaya, in Thailand, typically considered ground zero for hotel towers and prostitution. But to quote a guy I met in Bangkok: “It was great! There were Indian package tourists, and they were posing for photos with ladyboys on the beach!”

C’mon! How is that not heartwarming? I’m not saying you should go for a week, but one night can be fun. The nice thing about supposedly ugly, over-touristed places is that you will probably not be the tackiest person there, and you can gawp all you want–at prostitutes, at sunburned Brits in gold chains, at whatever.

The same logic applies to under-touristed spots with no major attractions. This summer, Peter and I took an exceptionally great trip to Thrace, the eastern fringe of Greece. According to guidebooks, and even most Greeks, there’s “nothing there.” That means no ancient Greek ruins–but there are very interesting Greek-Turkish towns and more recent history. One town–New Orestiada–is definitely un-charming: it looks like a midsize Midwestern town, with blockier apartment blocks. It was built from scratch on a grid system. But the very reason it’s that way is what makes it interesting.

Greece like you've never seen it before: New Orestiada.

Even if you don’t buy my argument, please take a moment to thank me — because every time I get held up in some ugly place, gawking and eating and laughing, I’m not making it to that pristine, off-the-radar beach. I’m one less person ruining the fringes. And the world could use a little more of that.

Counterintuitive Travel Tip #1: The Bad Part of Town

Guidebook writing has been my bread and butter for a decade, but a lot of what I’ve learned about how to travel–how to ensure a good trip, or salvage a seemingly bad one–has no place in a guide.

This is my collected wisdom (or at least the contrarian part of it). It’s looking like I’ve got about eight of these bad boys for you. Enjoy–and travel well!

Go to the bad part of town.

Right, you don’t want to get pistol-whipped in some ghetto in Caracas. But in most parts of the world, the neighborhood your guidebook warns you against is actually not terribly crime-ridden, and it’s the most interesting part.

Rich parts of cities all look the same—Gucci and Vuitton and ladies-who-lunch. Hipsterized areas, with their Edison bulbs and wood paneling and handmade this-and-that, are a little better, but still suffer a bit of sameness.

Bad parts are where the variations really come in. Who are the immigrants to this city? Do people drink in the middle of the day? What’s that song blaring from all the corner stores? Are the nice things a culture says about itself still true?

The mean streets of the Bijlmer, southern fringes of Amsterdam.

“Bad” is relative, of course. Amsterdam’s “bad” part—the Bijlmer—is absurdly nice, a ghastly Le Corbusier-inspired mini-city that’s been rehabbed. Its history reveals some inconsistencies with the Dutch regard for tolerance, but it also shows the practical, problem-solving side of the culture.

Cairo’s “bad” neighborhood of Shubra is just very shabby—but not terribly dangerous. The threatening-sounding City of the Dead is really a surprisingly mellow place, with un-dead stuff like a post office and power lines.

If you’re worried about crime, take the relative view. If you’re an American reading this, you probably already deal with crime rates the rest of the world thinks are intolerable. And you’re less likely to be a victim of touristy crime (pickpocketing, scams, etc) if you go where the tourists aren’t.

“Not to get into salt-of-the-earth cliches,” Peter chimes in, “but you meet nicer people in middle-class and poor areas.” And the point of travel is to meet people, right?

America in an Arab Mirror

When I was in Dubai in the spring, I ran into my first-year Arabic professor, Kamal Abdel-Malek. He’s the man who had us marching around the room doing “Arabic aerobics” to learn our numbers–fun and effective and, according to his wife, still part of his teaching repertoire!

It doesn’t surprise me that he’s also put together a fun but instructive anthology of Arab travel writing, America in an Arab Mirror. It should be required reading for American travel writers, and anyone who intends to write about another culture.

Honestly, you really could read any book about America written by a foreigner and learn a lot about the pitfalls of travel writing: the broad generalizations, the hasty conclusions, the not-quite-right facts (one writer in this book mentions how famous Colorado is for its oranges!).

In a decade of work as a travel writer, I’m embarrassed to say this is the first time I’ve intentionally read a book like this. I wish I’d done it years ago–I would’ve been far more conscious of how easy it is to go off the rails. I mean, I know you’re not supposed to extrapolate a whole culture from a single conversation with your taxi driver, but it’s not clear how bad it sounds until you read a half-baked theory about your own culture based on a similar one-off chat.

This makes it sound like the writing in this book is terrible. That isn’t true. Most of the writers take great pains to say that, for instance, a rewarding talk with a Catholic priest on an airplane of course can’t represent a country as diverse or huge as America.

Some of the older excerpts, from texts from the early 1900s, however, have a broader, happy-to-generalize tone, and one of the wackiest is Sayyid Qutb’s. He’s notorious for having come to study in the U.S. and been so alienated that he went back to Egypt and rallied the Muslim Brotherhood. In the excerpts of his writing in America in an Arab Mirror, he’s shocked at how casually Americans seem to treat death–laughing at a wake, for instance, or discussing life-insurance details just days after a death. But where Qutb sees only the harshness of life here, other visitors come to entirely different, kinder conclusions.

But this book is remarkable even if you’re not a travel writer. Much of it is a sweet reminder of the image America holds in the rest of the world. Arabs are awed by America’s wilderness, diversity and kind-hearted people.

They’re also intrigued–and a pit put off–by details we barely even notice. Shafiq Jabri, a Syrian author, says Americans live a “boiled” life, similar to the boiled food we eat–cooked fast, with not much concern for flavor. Egyptian Karima Kamal, who presumably has dealt with crowds in Cairo, describes a day out at Taste of Chicago, and wonders why people would subject themselves to such a horrible mob scene. Saudi politician Ghazi Abd al-Rahman al-Qusaybi deconstructs American TV ads, pointing out how one will promote cheese-covered food and the next will tout Slim Fast.

Some of this can seem like quite heated criticism of America–but it’s also a way to see what Arabs value in their own culture by contrast. Journalist Jadhibiyya Sidqi is shocked at how Americans let their parents waste away alone in retirement homes. Reading the statement “Arabs value family” is abstract; reading Sidqi’s chagrin and sincere sadness makes it more concrete.

Not every excerpt is gripping, and occasionally the translations are stilted–shout-out to Dima Reda, a fellow CASA student, whose translations are some of the best. (In one dopier move, a writer goes to the striptease bars in a town south of Chicago called Kaloomeet. I’d laugh harder at this misspelling, if this weren’t the story of my Arabic-reading life, sounding out words that I think are Arabic, only to find out they’re some English proper noun.)

But ultimately all the pieces in the book–even the cranky and misinformed ones–work together to show an image of Arabs as well. And when we see how easy it is for a visitor to get the wrong impression when visiting the U.S., it’s wise to consider just what might be wrong with our image of the Middle East. The mirror of the title works both ways.

(Here’s a good review of the book and interview with Kamal, with a hilarious end anecdote, in the New York Times.)

Have you read travel writing about your own country? Do you have other books to recommend? I’d love to hear about them.

Egypt: On the Market

Ah, just as the blog was almost happening in real time, I found this in my Drafts folder. A little treat from the winter Egypt trip. It all makes me a bit nostalgic. They have bad taxidermy here in Beirut, but not so much of the other attractions.

Downtown Cairo is one of the world’s more nonsensical shopping districts. Every other store is selling shoes. The ones that aren’t selling shoes are selling either lavishly embroidered galabiyyas or somewhat shocking lingerie. If you wander off the main streets, you wind up in an area where all the shops sell prosthetic limbs.

I didn’t want to take a picture of the lingerie, because it seemed like too much of an obvious conversation-starter for any random dude on the sidewalk, but here’s something nice for the gentlemen:

A romantic gift for your new husband!

It’s gotten a little crazier since the revolution, as the police aren’t out to keep the sidewalk vendors in line. They’ve gone nuts downtown. It makes it very hard to walk, but I have to give props to the guys who sell men’s clothing on Talaat Harb at night. I saw one stand in the middle of traffic, forcing cars to stop, while he unpacked a bale of made-in-China Versice jeans. Occupy for ad-hoc capitalism!

More prosaically, it’s easier than ever to buy a headscarf. And women are wearing them double- and triple-ply, carefully selected to match their outfits. Haven’t seen such color-coordinating since middle school. Or felt so totally uncool.

The guy next to this was selling wigs. I am not kidding.

Competition has forced shop displays to get more outlandish. Or at least that’s how I’m rationalizing something like this:

I finally escaped from that Monty Python set...only to get trapped in Cairo.

And this:

And this might be explained by the fact that it was getting close to Halloween. Or maybe not.

Totally ripped.

I read a while ago (I believe in Max Rodenbeck’s great Cairo: The City Victorious) that when Cairo was at its peak in the early 20th century, the most elite downtown shops would display, for instance, a single perfect shoe. Now the strategy is reversed. When in doubt, put as much out on display as possible.

No, you can't win these bears by shooting balloons with a BB gun.

But when a shop is so bursting with love, as this one is, how can you not love it back? Same goes for Cairo, you see.

Doha, the Rest of the Story

For spending about 72 hours in a country, I sure managed to collect a lot of photos and deep thoughts. I think the short time in Qatar made it that much easier to distill the whole visit.

Meanwhile, all my driving around the Emirates is all loose and floppy in my head, and I’m still fiddling with what I got out of it (aside from some funny pictures).

I’ll just throw a few more Doha photos at you to finish off this clutch of posts about the Persian, ahem, Arabian Gulf.

Doha: Food at Souq Waqif

I think I cottoned to Doha for one huge reason: street food.

A while back, Anissa Helou posted something on her blog about take-away food at Souq Waqif in Doha. On my Emirates trip, I’d been snooping around for traditional Emirati food, but it’s a little hard to find done well. People don’t go out for it at restaurants typically. So when I went to Doha, I went straight over to the Souq Waqif after visiting the Museum of Islamic Art.

I didn’t see the souq before they redid it, and some people say it’s too slick now, but I can handle a discreetly signed Haagen-Dazs store if the place still seems like locals use it more than be-fanny-packed tourists. I saw a lot of nice cafes and restaurants, and I was already giddy from that, since I hadn’t seen such a casual hangout space in Dubai or Abu Dhabi. And I saw lots of spices, blinged-out fabrics and even some little colored chicks for sale.

But then I rounded a corner on the far side of the market and SHAZAM!

Ragag, like a crepe complete, minus the ham...and with mayo
Homemade pickles and chutney thingies

I bellied up to one of the tables and asked to see what was in the pots. I wound up with a big container of hisw, a seed that had been boiled to jelly, and seasoned with sugar, ghee, saffron and black pepper. Then scrambled eggs were stirred in. Dude.

Better than it looks. And sounds.

I went back to those ladies and got great stuff from them all three nights I was in Doha.

Deep down, I admit I’d been feeling a little suspicious of the Emirates because there was no street food–I just couldn’t wrap my head around a place like that. To be fair, there are perfectly good reasons why you might not want to be eating food on the street, and why no one would want to sell it to you: namely, every degree of heat over 100, which is quite common.

So why does it flourish in Doha (perhaps only in this one spot in the whole country, but still), and not the Emirates? Those ladies were freezing their butts off the nights I was there. I don’t know what happens in the summer. I did read something in passing about a Qatari program to teach traditional foods–maybe that also encourages the food-sellers here?

And that’s not to say there aren’t amazingly good things to eat in the Emirates–they’re just indoors. Check out I Live in a Frying Pan, and the post she wrote for Serious Eats about Dubai eats. I got to eat lunch with Arva at a Rajasthani restaurant that filled my ghee quota for the decade.

In both places, I was happily surprised about the food. It just made me a tiny bit nervous in the Emirates to have to really plan to find it. And I would totally recommend a trip to Doha just for the Souq Waqif.

Museum of Islamic Art, Doha

I love getting on a plane with no luggage. It has happened only a couple of times in my life. I feel ridonkulously jet-set. This time, I packed just a tote bag to fly from Dubai to Doha overnight. I was going to meet some excellent smart people, and to see the Museum of Islamic Art. Doha was so great that I went back again for a few more days at the end of my trip.

I went straight from the plane to the museum, in one of Doha’s adorable Tiffany’s-blue taxis, where the West African cabbie was playing American R&B.

Looks a tiny bit like Boba Fett, right?

The museum is beautiful. Seriously, drop dead. The building is lovely.

The collection is amazing, and gorgeously arranged, all carefully spotlit in black rooms.

Screens from clay water jars
Astrolabes. Like I said, they're everywhere.

They even solved the astrolabe problem (ie, what to do with 800 of them). Nice presentation, right?

Even the food is fantastic. Alain Ducasse is on the case.

Lentil salad, egg, some kind of savory biscotti-bit, tangy sauce.

And, y’know, just to be extra-classy, they have free wi-fi.

But…I wish it said more. All the things I learned about Islamic art on this trip, I learned at the dowdier Museum of Islamic Civilization in Sharjah the day before. At that museum, many of the objects were somewhat crude replicas. But the signage told me all about calligraphy styles, the embroidery on the kiswa at the Kaaba and that elephant clock I’d seen at the Ibn Battuta Mall.

I think this is a bit of a trend in museum-ing, to just let objects speak for themselves, no interpretation. And perhaps that’s more extreme in this case, where the aim may have been to separate the objects from all this messy Islam business and the complicated past and just look at things as incredibly gorgeous works of art. Which they are.

The contrast was even more dramatic when I came back on my next visit and went to the Takashi Murakami exhibit and the Cai Gui-Qiang show at Mathaf. Both of these shows were amazing, in part because they were presented in a distinctly didactic way. “Hello, meet Takashi Murakami. He’s famous for X, Y and Z, and to appreciate him, you should know 1, 2 and 3.”

Inflatable Murakami

I admit I hadn’t appreciated Murakami before. At this show (where you can’t take pics inside), I could get up close and see the layers of acrylic paint. I saw the change in his style. And the enormous Arhat installation, huge panels in part a reaction to the Japan tsunami (here’s a detail), got me in the gut the way his glossier stuff never has.

Over at Mathaf, I learned all about this Chinese guy (who, der, is quite famous and has been doing things in NYC for ages and I’ve totally missed). The space showed work he’d created specifically for Mathaf–smart stuff showing the connection between where he’s from in China and the Gulf–along with footage of his previous pyrotechnic works and some of his wonderful early oil paintings of explosions.

Stones from Quanzhou, carved with inscriptions from the Muslim cemetery there

I even learned a ton of weird stuff about Arabian horse breeding, from a video he produced. Again, a very educational, meet-the-artist approach.

I love that Qatar is investing so heavily in art. I just want to see the next step in the Museum of Islamic Art. The absence of interpretation there seems like a waste. “Explaining” art–giving more historical background, translating some of the calligraphy–shouldn’t hurt at all. The museum could use some of the same exuberant let-us-tell-you-about-this-amazing-stuff! spirit in the other two exhibits.

For now, the most exuberant thing is the food.

Under Construction in the Emirates

During my trip to the Emirates, one of the main things I wanted to do was drive out into the desert and see the dunes. I grew up in a desert, and I’ve traveled around the deserts in Egypt a bit, but they’re not the same. I still had never seen that super-duney, English Patient kind of desert up close.

Abu Dhabi is the largest of the United Arab Emirates, and in addition to being a pretty slick and functioning city proper, it stretches way out west into the desert, up to the undefined border with Saudi Arabia.

So I drove way out to Liwa, which is a little cluster of settlements along some oases. And because even when I’m not working on a guidebook, I’m pretty curious about fancy hotels, I decided I’d drop in to the Anantara Qasr al-Sarab resort for lunch.

There are only, like, three roads in Abu Dhabi, but I managed to get lost. My Google GPS told me to turn down a dirt road, and I did. Just about the time I was realizing that a rustic approach to a luxury hotel was one thing, but this road was clearly not right, I passed a ghost town.

A mirage on the horizon

I parked my car and hiked down to the trailers. Just like in a good Western, there was a door blowing in the wind, creaking and slapping against the tinny side of a double-wide.

That was spooky enough, but then I heard the faint sound of voices. As I got closer, I realized it was a radio or a TV. Somehow, an inhabited ghost town is even creepier than an empty one.

But it was just one guard, watching TV to pass the time. He said it was fine if I took some photos.

Toilets. Lots of toilets.

Click to see full-size, for the drawing on the wall.

The trusty guard. The only other living thing around was a bird, also yellow.

Virtually everything in the Emirates has been built by guest laborers. Thousands of people can work on a major construction project–the Burj Khalifa in Dubai employed some 10,000 people. This often calls for an independent workers’ town, with bare-bones housing and other services. Smaller projects still often have an adjoining workers’ camp.

This is what I’d driven past, on this wrong road. The guard confirmed my guess–this had been the workers’ camp for the Qasr al-Sarab, which was just over a couple of dunes ahead. It was slowly being dismantled–the good parts, like the toilets, salvaged, and the trailers carted away on trucks.

I said thanks, and then drove off back down the washboarded road and back to the highway. One kilometer farther along was the proper entrance to the resort, with a perfectly smooth black surface curving through the dunes. No eyesore trailers to be seen. The resort, when I got there, was astoundingly beautiful. The construction workers did a fantastic job.

The entrance.

Every construction project in the Emirates has its own ghost town, a negative form that’s destroyed once the real sculpture is created.