Bikes, Beer, and Belgium: A BlackBerry Holiday

Namur, Belgium, taken with my BlackBerry and emailed in almost real time to friends abroad.

Lonely Planet is the bible of choice for backpackers all over the world. My LPs have gotten me around all sorts of places where I didn't speak the local language, didn't have time to wait to ask the locals how often the boat leaves for ___, and have given me the needed direction when faced with thousands of decisions ranging from how do I eat, to what is the best itinerary for 5 days in ___ country.

However, I was finding myself living vicariously through my LP, afraid to venture off its suggested paths, into the unknown world of self-reliant exploration. As a stepping stone away from the Lonely Planet Holiday towards Independant Travel, I have discovered the WikiTravel Holiday, the Google Holiday, and on a trip to Belgium and Holland in June 2008, the BlackBerry Holiday.

Holland's cities are living laboratories of Urban Planning...I had friends to visit in Amsterdam...my brother is a student of homebrew...Belgian beers are our family favourite...a trip to Holland and to Belgium as a 'research' trip...but if we are drinking, we should cycle instead of drive...I'm too busy for Wikitravel and Google research before we get on the plane! And so was born the theme of our trip: Bikes, Beer, and Belgium - on a BlackBerry.

Virtually all of our research including accomodation, cycling distances (but not elevations!!!), people to meet up with, brew pub opening hours, bicycle rentals, and restaurants came from various applications on my blackberry. At historical locations, I could simply wiki the name of the place, and we had an instant self-guided tour full of interesting little tidbits of information to help explain what we were seeing. On the train into a new city, we would search for accomodation, plug the address into google maps, route the path from the train station to the hotel including exact route distance, and organise our hotel choices with all of this in mind. Quite a departure from the usual walking-aimlessly-carrying-6-months-of-gear-on-your-back-looking-for-accommodation ritual that backpackers in Europe can empathise with.

What's dangerous about the convenience of travel is that we have gotten lazy. I rarely prepare anything before a trip these days, I know much less about the place I'm going before I depart, and this has very negative impacts on my depth of experience of new places. I used to have rules: always know how to say 'Please', 'Thank you', 'Excuse me', and 'Hello' in the local language before setting foot in a new country; have some knowledge of the political and social history of a place; it's staple cuisine and traditional dishes; etc. In fact, I have been so laissez-faire with travel in recent years that I have caught myself looking up the significance of places and sites after I've gotten back from a trip, when I finally have time to enquire. I am often so busy before a trip that I don't even have time to print the Wikitravel notes I copied and pasted way back when I had first bought the ticket!

I had an excellent trip to Beirut this summer -- I went with a friend who was from Beirut and with an urban planner colleague of mine in Abu Dhabi. Before I left, I was determined to finish the Heart of Beirut book I had bought the year before -- a book which explores the urban history of a famous square in Beirut through the eyes of the people who had occupied it, and how people and politics have transformed the urban form of Beirut. But in the days before my departure for Beirut, I was still in the book's prologue!

Luckily for me, my roommate's an urban planner...from Beirut...whose last job was working for the urban planning authority in Beirut responsible for the masterplanning and reconstruction of the city's historical downtown. In 1 hour, using the excellent diagrams and maps from my book, she walked me through the layers of the city, the story of what I was about to go see. And my trip to Beirut was one of the richest trips I have had in years. I don't expect the luxury of having a local urban planning expert who speaks perfect English guide me through every travel experience of my future, but it did remind me how important stories are to a landscape, and how they can mould your experience of one.

Will my BlackBerry only make me lazier? Or will it add layers of conventional information, alternative stories, historical reference, and sub-cultures to my experience? Why spend so much money and time traveling when you can't invest those few hours before you leave to learn things that will make your experience exponentially richer? If I depend on GPS all the time, will I entirely lose my good sense of direction? I take pictures with my BlackBerry and immediately in near real-time send them to friends abroad, yet I never get around to putting words to the picture by bringing any depth to the stories of my travels on my blog anymore? Is access to third party (English) information conveniently enabling me to avoid engaging with people right in front of me?

I think I know the easiest solution: a Lonely Planet Application for BlackBerrys.

The scale of authenticity.

Abu Dhabi's an excellent place to have young children, but for an imaginative 20-something, there's little to do except work. And I've been working 10-12 hour days for almost 2 months straight now. Though I really enjoy work right now.

A typical email from me these days reads "No, you have not been removed from 'the list' -- I've been working too much to write lengthy email updates these days." I think the reason my blog was so active while I was in Africa was because I had little else to do at work! But also, I had far more material to work with in Africa than I have here.

Abu Dhabi is a peaceful, island city where activities and places are controlled in order to maintain the peaceful status quo. There are no real spontaneous, organic, cool places to discover, no quirky cafes opening, or room for interpreting public space.

I went to Nepal for an extended long weekend in March, and we spent most of our time hanging out with the owners from our hotel -- an ultra-cool couple from Seattle -- and their ultra-cool friends. The couple met in Seattle and returned to the husband's homeland a few years ago to re-build his childhood home into a guesthouse, and they enjoy hosting their guests as if they are old friends at home, and they have all sorts of funky ex-pat friends who own restaurants and bars around Kathmandu. One evening, we were sitting around a fire at an open roof Korean resto-bar, having drinks with the American Embassy crew, talking about how much we appreciated having all these stylish and interesting places to go to in Kathmandu:

- Yah, but this is not the Kathmandu experience.
- I disagree. This is a Kathmandu experience, and something I have no guilt enjoying, because it's still something I cannot get in Abu Dhabi.
- Yah, but this is not the real Kathmandu.     Look around you -- we're all ex-pats.
- I totally get what you're saying, and if I hadn't just spent half the weekend staying with the family of our tea boy in his village, then I would probably walk away from this long weekend feeling rather empty about my experience in Nepal. But, on the scale of authenticity, sitting on this rooftop in Kathmandu, drinking Black Russians with a bunch of Americans, Koreans, and one Napalese person still ranks many notches higher than anything I've managed to find in inauthentic Abu Dhabi.

I think I spend very little time really "in" Abu Dhabi. It's not a bad place here, in fact, I think it would be heaven to raise small children here. And I hate it when people complain that there's nothing to do, because we have everything we need here, and people leave you in peace on the streets, and we're given space. But the truth is that Abu Dhabi is just too chill, with a focus on families. And 5 months of the year it's too hot to go outside.

Largely because of this simple climatic fact, much of life in Abu Dhabi feels very manufactured. Most urban activities were designed to avoid the reality of the outside world -- air conditioning runs all year round, and they even tore down the old central souk in order to build a 'modern' indoor one (ah, when you build a souk indoors, it's called a 'mall', and there are already plenty in Abu Dhabi!)

Mostly I lead a very domestic life. Topics of conversation revolve around work (almost my entire social circle are people I work with), buying furniture (I'm in the midst of my second move already, and there are always new people coming who inevitably talk about furniture), and cars (I just bought a pimped SUV – the most fuel-efficient SUV available in UAE, by the way). I lead more of a Burnaby life now than I ever lead in Burnaby!

The real world only bullies its way into one's life here when something goes wrong -- such as finding accomodation. My move has been filled with drama -- I was kicked out of my flat by building management because they want new tenants so that they can ask for more bribe money, then the roommate turned on me and displayed her un-humanly selfish and victimized attitude in its full glory, it took 2 months to find a new place to live (which we're paying $50,000 per year in rent for by the way -- Abu Dhabi is ridiculous for housing!!!), and now I'm homeless until the new pad is ready for moving in.

Even in family-oriented Abu Dhabi I seem to find some authentic drama to keep me entertained.

Since when is Jo'burg 6500 km from Cape Town?

Forget half the length of Africa, the final tally of our spontaneous road trip from Johannesburg to Cape Town ended up at 6500 km -- that's about 80% the length of Africa.

Until I have the chance to sit down and properly reflect on the trip, here's the experience in visual form http://www.photobox.co.uk/album/7357675, and here's the experience in point form...

Highlights:
-Victoria Falls -- an absolutely mind-blowing site, impressing me the likes of Machu Picchu
-Fish River Canyon, Namibia -- despite the un-imposing name, it's a stunning canyon, apparently second only to the Grand Canyon in stature
-Highway wildlife in Botswana -- we saw more wildlife along the highway than we did in the National Parks, and it was so refreshing to know that elephants, giraffs, zebras, and lions exist not only in National Parks, but still roam Africa's vast landscapes
-Cape Town -- along with the entire Western Cape, will never fail to inspire me
-People of Zimbabwe -- the glimpses of Zimbabwe we saw through our trip and conversations with emigrants in Botswana have stirred in me an absolute fascination in the country and its people
-Quirky accommodation across the region -- we stayed at everything across the board, and half the fun is chatting with the characters who run the B&B's, camp grounds, backpackers, huts, resorts, and even a camp for orphans!
-Namib dunes -- of course...
-Widely varying landscapes and people -- we had such a variation of landscapes to cross, and colourful personalities from across the region's social spectrum
-Leanne & Guillaume's wedding -- at Kirstenbosch botanical gardens, an event that brought people together from literally every corner of the world
-Reuniting with old friends as if no time has passed...

Lowlights:
-Forgetting my phone at the hotel just 15 km away -- but still in another country!
-Witnessing the circle of life -- such as a rotting elephant on the side of the highway and dozens of vultures capitalising on donkeys' roadside misfortunes
-Driving 6100 km of a 6500 km roadtrip -- though teaching Sara how to drive standard on the left side of the road and the right side of the car was quite a highlight -- go girl!
-Botswana's landscape is really quite boring to drive across, but the coolness of the people makes up for it

We made some amendments to our list of acquired skills along the journey:
-Charming border guards out of paying heavy registration fees to enter their country
-Disinfecting our car and ourselves at dozens of Foot and Mouth disease checkpoints across Botswana
-Avoiding men in military gear carrying riffles, mysteriously exiting and entering the un-fenced National Parks in Zimbabwe
-Off-roading our little VW Polo like a Land Cruiser, and still being the only car in Namibia that didn't get a flat
-Recovering bank cards eaten up by ATMs across Botswana
-Exporting South Africa's extremely polite highway driving to Botswana
-Name that road kill -- we have identified an elephant, donkeys (although it was difficult to identify underneath a dozen vultures), eagles, something that looked like a baby gorilla, and then the usual dogs and cats
-Dodging livestock -and- elephants -- we also shared the road with a giraffe, zebras, dozens of baboons, and other exotic mammals
-BYO-Hotel -- sleeping in the car when we can't find reasonably priced accommodation, and drying our clothes in the car while on the road
-Capitalising on any opportunity for make-shift workouts
-Decorating Marco's windshield (our car) with colourful insects
-Having lively filling station conversations -- our most interesting conversations have mostly been with gas station attendees and chats with various Zimbabwean hawkers at filling stations
-Eating everything but Batswana food in Botswana, including Portugese, Chinese, South African, Lebanese...
-Entertaining eachother -- I think we must have covered every topic of conversation known to man before we reach Cape Town!