Canada

Upon my recent return from Trinidad, I flew on an Air Canada flight that went to Toronto from Port of Spain, Trinidad via Caracas, Venezuela. We spent a total of 45 minutes on the ground in Caracas, and they didn’t even let us off the plane, so unlike Danny Glover, I didn’t get an opportunity to visit with Hugo Chavez.

After spending the night flying over the Caribbean Ocean and the United States of America, the plane landed in Toronto at 6 in the morning. I sleepily approached the Canadian customs booth with my completed Canadian Customs Form.

After pursuing the form, the pretty, blonde customs agent asked, “Where are you coming from?”

“Port of Spain, Trinidad.”

“That flight comes through Caracas, correct?”

“Yes, it does.”

“Did you disembark in Caracas?”

“No, they didn’t even let us off the plane"

“Hmm,” she said, looking down again, and circling in red marker the area where I had written that I had $0 worth of good coming back with me. “You didn’t buy anything?” she asked.

“No,” I replied.

“Why did you go to Trinidad?” she asked. I said that I had gone down for vacation, and there was a line of questioning regarding why I had chosen Trinidad (because the flights worked out for my week vacation), if I knew anyone there (no), and again if I had bought anything.

“Do you have any checked luggage to pick up?” she asked. I replied that all I had was my backpack. “You went away for a week with just that small bag?” she asked.

“A bathing suit, a towel and a couple pairs of t-shirts and shorts don’t take up much room.”

“Hmm,” she said again, and wrote down some cryptic red numbers on the back of my form. They always write down red numbers on the back of the forms when entering Canada. It is, apparently, some sort of code to indicate if a secondary screening was required, and apparently today it was determined that I should be screened.

A second customs agent questioned me again before I passed by the baggage claim area, where I was waved into a separate room for a check by a third set of agents. They unpacked my bag and looked at all I had which amounted to a bathing suit, a towel, a couple pairs of t-shirts and shorts, some toiletries, a hat, a flashlight (never actually used) and a camera. They asked more questions about why I travelled to Trinidad, how often I travelled and why I travelled. Eventually I was waved on and got to walk outside into the cold of Canada.

I understand completely the suspicion I aroused. A single traveller with no bags and nothing to declare flying through a couple countries where drug and money trafficking is an issue, so I probably would have pulled me aside too. I was treated well, so no hard feelings with the Canadian customs.

All three sets of agents asked me, “You didn’t buy anything?” This of course makes sense because that’s their job, however there was something more in the tone of their voice. The tone suggested that more than just ensuring I was following the rules of Canadian custom laws, they seemed surprised that anyone would go away and return with nothing at all.

I know it’s strange that I tend to return from most of my trips with nothing to declare. Most people seem to return from travelling with stuff they’ve bought. When I was in France in 2005, a few people asked me what I had bought in the great shopping city of Paris. “Umm, nothing,” I replied. Frankly, I can’t stand crowds in malls and most everything in Paris was pricier than back home, mostly due to the exchange rate between the Euro and the Canadian Dollar. Returning from Beijing, China, I brought back no knock-off bags, pirated DVDs or works of Chinese art.

I don’t return empty handed, exactly, though. I do bring back something from every trip, and strangely, it’s something that I left home with. It’s my shoes. More than any product purchased abroad, or even photo of a place, just looking at my shoes reminds me of the great trips I’ve taken. The mud dried on my shoes may be free to pick up, but it feels priceless to me.

In 2002, in preparation for my trip down to South America, I went out and purchased a pair of waterproof, Gortex covered day hikers made by Solomon. The next day, it rained, and so I went out and splashed around like a 6 year-old, testing the waterproofness of my boots (they were). Those boots took me throughout South America, trips to the USA, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, France, the Netherlands and three-quarters of the way up Mount Kilimanjaro, where my lungs gave out but my shoes were ready to keep going.

I loved those Solomon shoes, and was ready to travel the entire world with them. I had hoped that I would be able to stand on all 7 continents with those shoes on my feet, and managed to stand atop 4 continents with them on. I grew very attached to those shoes. They were like a security blanket. Wearing them made me feel outdoorsy and worldly. However, even the sturdiest shoes aren’t built to last forever, and soon I had worn a hole in the sole, which ruined both the waterproof benefit and any support for my foot.

In 2005, I replaced my Solomons with a pair of Vasque shoes that had many of the same qualities as the Solomons, like being waterproof, and providing both high ankle support and good arch support. Those shoes saw me from France to Hong Kong, a few stops in Central America, a bunch of trips in Canada and the USA. While wearing the shoes in Trinidad however, I could feel the bottoms getting mushy and I could tell it was only a matter of time until the ball of my foot wore a hole in the sole. With the support fading from the shoe, I started to feel pain in the balls of my feet, which after my previous experience with Metatarsalgia (an inflammation of the balls of the feet that comes from over-use, especially if one is wearing shoes without adequate arch support), I knew it was time for some new shoes.

I’m sad to see my old Vasques go. Like the Solomons, I’d grown unusually attached to them. I always felt like a traveller when I put them on. They provided more than just physical comfort. They were emotional comfort as well. I always felt I could face anything that came my way when in a nice comfortable pair of shoes.

So today, I went out and bought myself a new pair of shoes. Unlike the experience of replacing my Solomons in 2005, when I was unable to find any Solomon shoes that were like my old ones, I managed to find the exact same “model” of shoe. The only difference is that instead of yellow stripes on the fabric eyelets for the laces, there are orange stripes.

So I have a new pair of shoes, and after a short period to break them in, I am sure I will feel ready, both emotionally and physically to take on new adventures in this big world.

Since early November, I have been taking the very first flight leaving Toronto, a 6:05 am flight to Houston, Texas. Interestingly, no plane is allowed to take off from Toronto's Lester B. Pearson airport before 6:30 am, but Continental is so excited about getting me down to Texas as early as possible, they load up the plane 25 minutes early, giving them time to get de-iced and head out to the runway to be sure they are right there, at the edge of the runway, ready to go when the minute hand reaches the bottom of the clock.

This week, instead of travelling down to Houston for the usual Monday through Thursday work schedule, I’m doing two days in Norfolk, Virginia then heading down to Houston for a couple days before heading home for the last time this year. As my flight to Norfolk was leaving Toronto on Monday afternoon, I actually got to sleep in on Monday morning!

Now, I should explain what I mean by sleeping in, because I actually got up this morning at 8:00 am. But usually on Monday mornings, I am turning off the alarm at 4:00am, before grabbing a quick shower and heading out of my apartment and into the awaiting cold taxi for the ride to the airport.

And unlike most Monday mornings, I was actually woken by my alarm clock this morning, even though it went off a full 4 hours later than it usually would. On the nights before I have those 6:05 am flights to catch, I never really sleep all that well. There is this nagging fear that grips me all night that I am going to sleep through my alarm and miss my flight, and so I never really am able to fall asleep. Ocasionally I'll drift into a fitful few minutes sleep, only to awake with a start and a feeling of dread that I've slept through my alarm. My heart will start racing and adrenaline will pump through my body. I'll look over at the alarm clock, only to see that I still have a good 2 hours before the horrible buzzing claxen of the alarm clock.

photo courtsey of Imageafter.com

The only real rest I get Sunday nights or Monday mornings is once the flight attendent closes the main cabin door on the plane, and I can sink myself into my airplane seat and finally shut my eyes, confident that I didn't miss my plane.

I'm not alone in this malady. Many of my fellow road warriors, business travellers who hit the road many times a year, describe a similar problem, the inability to sleep on those nights before early morning flights. I've tried a million things to try and sleep better - getting up early on Sunday morning so I'll be more tired on Sunday night, warm milk, booze (warm or cold), stretching exercises, counting backwards from 100, but so far nothing has eased the fear of missing that flight.

So this weekend was a blessing, and I'm doubly blessed when I think about the fact that come Friday I will be arriving at home and hanging up the laptop bag and black dress shoes for a full TWO WEEKS of not doing any business travel. I haven't even planned any big trips for my vacation, instead choosing to stay close to home, visiting with friends and family, hanging around the house drinking tea and watching DVDs and most importantly, sleeping in, especially on Monday mornings.

Bad weekend to be English.

I just finished watching the Brazilian Grand Prix, where F1 rookie sensation Lewis Hamilton suffered both a wide corner and motor trouble, and couldn’t close out his campaign to be the first black driver to win the F1 series, and the first English driver to win the F1 title since Nigel Mansell back in 1992.

Yesterday the final for the Rugby World Cup was held in Paris, France. The South African Springboks ended up beating the English side 15 points to 6. I don’t know much about Rugby, having my only exposure to it during a week long lesson during grade 12 gym class back in high school. Despite that, I paid $20 to watch the game at Scallywag’s, a bar down the street from my apartment and renowned in Toronto for showing “European” sports, especially on Saturday mornings when the premiership soccer is being played.

The bar was packed. I arrived at 12:20 for a game that wasn’t going to start until 3:00, and couldn’t get a seat. About 20 minutes after I arrived the bar locked the doors, already at capacity. The crowd was a good mix of English and South African fans. I couldn’t help but notice that the South African fans were much younger and more rambunctious than the older, staid English fans, but that probably says a lot more about immigration patterns in Canada than any knock against the English for being overly reserved.

Interestingly, watching South Africa during the game yesterday got me thinking about Burma. Obviously Burma has been in the news a lot recently, and I have recently been reading a book called The Trouser People: A Story of Burma in the Shadow of the Empire by Andrew Marshall. It details Mr. Marshall’s tour through the country, and while I’m not done it yet, it is a very interesting read.

The question that it raises is what to do about Burma, of course. Since 1962 the country of Burma has been under undemocratic military rule. In 1989 the military junta ruling the country “changed” the name of the country to Mynamar, though many international governments have refused to recognize this name as being official. In 1990, the country held democratic elections which led to the overwhelming election of the National League for Democracy (NLD), the party of Aung San Suu Kyi. The SLORC (State Law and Order Restoration Council) annulled the results and maintained power.

The international community is against the military rule in Burma, and the recent protests and resulting crack-down by the junta has been widely condemned. The USA has had sanctions in place against the junta since 2003, and those coupled with European sanctions have resulted in the withdrawal from Burma of most U.S. and many European companies. However, trade is limited between Europe, the USA and Burma, and the two largest trading partners of Burma are China and India, who at present still have close relations and no economic embargos against the country.

Embargos, of course, were a large measure of the actions that the rest of the world took against South Africa back when apartheid was in force. Even the sporting community didn’t participate with South Africa. The National Rugby team of South Africa was banned for playing International Rugby from 1981 until the end of apartheid. Reinstated in 1992, the Springboks were defeated 27-24 by New Zealand on 15th August of that year in their first game back after their readmission.

The question faced to those who travel, of course, is should I travel to Burma? Reaction has been mixed, with some saying that we should boycott the country while others have said travel will be a good thing for those who live in the country.

I am not sure how to feel about calls for sanctions and embargos. I'm not sure how to feel about sanctions. Certainly it seems that we shouldn't do things that support abusive governments, however sanctions against countries like Cuba or South Africa apparently did little to stem remove the governments there. In addition, the question remains whether my buying $2 worth of street food while in a country is the same as French oil company Total S.A. operating the Yadana natural gas pipeline from Burma.

In fact, Sanctions may have the opposite effect, in slowing down change. In a 2004 speech delivered by Dave Steward on behalf of former South African President FW de Klerk to the Institut Choiseul in Paris, it is stated that, "Economic growth and international cultural influences are often powerful forces for change. It accordingly makes little sense to try to cripple the economies of targeted states or to isolate their citizens from positive cultural influences. To the extent that economic sanctions retarded economic growth and development in South Africa they also served to slow down powerful underlying forces that were in fact already changing the country. The cultural and academic sanctions that were imposed against South Africa also served only to inhibit one of the most powerful forces for change in the country."

The speech concludes that while "sanctions were certainly a factor that the South African government had to consider very carefully when considering its options," that they were ultimately "not by any means the main factor in our decision to embark on fundamental reform and often undermined the real forces for change." "few governments are likely to bow to sanctions that they believe will lead to their destruction," the report says, stating that it is "essential to identify the reasonable interests of targeted governments and to devise approaches to reassure them that such interests will not be jeopardised," i.e. working with the government to elict change, rather than just using sanctions as a "blunt weapon."

I'm certainly against supporting the Junta, but I'm not certain that sanctions are the right route. Certainly any sort of sanctions without China or India on board seem pointless, as the amount of trade other countries have with Burma is so small.

And as was stated in the de Klerk speech, there may be benefit to exposing citizens to "positive cultural influences," which could come with increased international traffic in the country.

I recently read the book Brandenburg Gate by Henry Porter, which is a spy thriller set during the fall of the Berlin Wall in East Germany. While a fiction novel, Mr. Porter took pains to ensure that the conditions inside East Germany were portrayed accurately during the time. While pressure from the west and Russia to be more open were certainly part of what brought down the East German government, and led eventually to even mother Russia giving up communism, much of the pressure to bring down the wall came from inside the country. The people of East Germany had had enough, and they protested in increasing numbers until the government couldn’t resist any longer.

It got me thinking whether any change comes from outside of the country, or if revolution has to start from within. Does revolution demand that a critical mass of people rise up and demand change that the government can no longer ignore it. It appears that it was internal pressures that brought down the Berlin Wall and that ended apartheid in South Africa. Cuba has resisted change for years because there is little internal pressure for change, though that could change once Castro dies.

As Peter Gabriel sings in the song Biko, “you can blow out a candle but you can’t blow out a fire, once the flame begins to catch the winds only take it higher.”

If change needs to come from within, then what is the best way for us on the outside to effect that change? Should we stay away from Burma, or are we better off to go there and experience it for ourselves, and in the visit perhaps influence those inside the country to rise up?

What is the best way for those of us here to make change?

I love nature. One of the great things about Toronto is the number of ravines in the city, because in most cases those ravines have been left wild. I can walk out of my apartment building, which is less than 2 minutes walk from the subway and has more than 20 restaurants and pubs within a 5 minutes walk, and be at the bottom of a natural ravine in less time than it would take me to get my first pint at the local sports bar.

The great thing about these walks is that in many cases, even though there are roads, railway tracks and highways running along the edges of the ravines, you seldom can see them, and often can’t even hear them. In my walks, I have encountered numerous wild critters, most often squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons and various birds, but also larger and more impressive creatures like deer, foxes and the occasionally coyote.

The preservation of this nature is one of the reasons why I am a regular contributor to the Nature Conservancy of Canada, an organization that buys and preserves natural lands within Canada. It is also why I often write to my elected representatives in the city of Toronto, the province of Ontario and the nation of Canada to voice my support for higher density housing, more money for transit and support of climate change initiatives like the Kyoto Accord.

In my personal life, I try as best I can to live a life that leaves as little impact on the world. In some places I have excelled. I no longer own a car. I keep my heating and air conditioning turned off unless absolutely needed. I don’t take bags at the grocery store, and have started to look at the places my food is from to determine if I can buy local produce to reduce the amount of carbon it took to get the food to my table. And I have stopped all but a few of the companies I do business with from sending me paper bills, electing to read and pay my bills online every month, saving both the paper and hopefully a few grams of carbon from the lighter load the mail truck has to haul.

I’ve always grown up with conservation as well. My parents used to save up bottles and newspapers in the garage, and my father and I would drive 30 minutes to an old barn north of the city I grew up in to drop them off at a recycling depot, long before blue box, curb-side recycling was introduced here in Canada. My father was also a stickler for turning off the lights and not standing around with the fridge door open. Of course, that may have been driven by equal parts wanting to save the planet and keeping the monthly hydro bill low.

In other ways, though, I’m not as good a conservationist as I wish I could be. I still eat meat, and probably eat more than I should (both for the environmental impact, but also for my health). I eat out a lot, and there you have no control over the ingredients to know if they buy local or have lamb shipped to them from New Zealand. I wish I could compost, but my building doesn’t provide it and it’s hard to put a compositor out on your balcony.

The area, though, where I stray furthest from my conversationalist tendencies is the amount I fly. I fly a lot for work, and when I vacation I tend to get on a plane and fly somewhere as well. Today I’ll be getting on a plane to fly down to Austin, and by the time my return flight lands in Toronto on Sunday, I’ll have flown a total of 59,461 miles and 63 flights this year.

According to the Carbon Footprint Calculator at the Carbon Reduction Institute in Australia, that works out to about 22 tonnes of carbon that have been released into the atmosphere because of me.

Al Gore, who was the narrator of the film “An Inconvenient Truth” about global warming and climate change has come under some criticism of late for his supposed contradictory behavior, flying on private jets and living in a energy gobbling home while preaching to others to change their behavior. I feel for him, because I know what it’s like to struggle with the same issue.

I love travelling. I get antsy if I am in the same place for too long. I have wanderlust, and I have it bad.

I’d love to fulfill that wanderlust in an environmentally friendly way. I’d love to take trains or buses. I’d love to slow down the travel I do to a nice, easy pace. But at the same time, I have to pay the bills. I could take a year off and travel the world, but I’d need to come back to work eventually. My job allows me to fulfill my wanderlust while still making the money that I need to survive, and hopefully save enough up that I can retire early and do that slow method of travel for the rest of my life.

I realize, too, that the above paragraph is nothing but a thinly veiled justification, and re-reading it rings hollow to me. I guess the real truth, as inconvenient as it is, is that I am not strong enough in my convictions to give up what I love.

So I continue to struggle.

I’ve tried to be better about the way I fly. Try and schedule trips to the same place for multiple weeks, so can stay in the same city over the weekends, saving extra and unnecessary flights.

I also, earlier this year, purchased carbon credits for my flights from 2006 and 2007 from
Zerofootprint.net, which is a Canadian company that plants trees to take CO2 out of the atmosphere. By spending enough money to plant enough trees, presumably the amount of carbon that I released into the atmosphere during flying will be gobbled back up by those trees. The total carbon released into the atmosphere will be 0.

I have problems with offsets, though. The carbon from flying is released high into the atmosphere where it can do more damage, and the trees are pulling in the atmosphere down at ground level. As well, I question whether purchasing the offset really plants trees that wouldn’t be planted anyway, or if even without the offsets areas would get forested and reforested anyway.

My biggest issue with offsets, though, is that what I am doing is paying someone else because I am too lazy or stubborn to change my lifestyle. In the Middle Ages, some within the Catholic Church sold Indulgences. An Indulgence allows a sinner to “serve” their punishment for the sins they have committed, thereby clearing themselves of the sins and ensuring that they don’t need to spend time in purgatory after death waiting for the sin to be “purged.” If you’ve ever gone to confession, after you’ve been forgiven for the sin you’ve been given an indulgence – the priests command to say “6 Hail Marys and 5 Our Fathers.”

Back in the Middle Ages though, some unscrupulous priests would exchange indulgences for cash, thereby “purging” the sin without making the sinner do anything to serve their sentence for the sin. It was this in part that led to the Protestant Reformation lead by Martin Luther.

Offsets feel to me like those sold indulgences, a purging of the sin without doing anything to actual deserve it. It’s me saying that I am too important to change, and therefore someone else can by living greener than I am. If someone else does my dirty work, then I don’t have to. A commenter on TV once said that buying offsets is a little like buying a man a hat after forcibly shaving his head, and thinking that everything is alright.

So I continue to struggle.

I’d love to have a conclusion to this entry. I’d love to wrap it all up in a nice little bow. I’d love to either be able to commit to the large scale changes that I would need to make to be a better climate warrior, or at least be able to justify in a real and reasonable way my lifestyle. I can’t do either of those, though.

Instead, I can only close with a quote by someone smarter than I am. Sir William Empson, English poet and literary critic from the 20th century who said, “life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that cannot be solved by analysis.”

So I continue to struggle, and hopefully continue to maintain myself between the contradictions.

Labour Day is a holiday in North America on the first Monday in September to celebrate the "working man," much as May Day is celebrated in Europe. This Monday is Labour Day, and while I should probably be marching in a parade to glorify unions or increase the visibility of the Communist Party of Canada, I instead find myself sitting outside on a patio enjoying a pint of Canadian made beer. At the very least, I'm drinking local, right?

Labour Day is also the unofficial end of summer here in Canada and the USA. All the high school and university students will be back at school on Tuesday (or pretty soon after), and all their parents, who might have taken extended vacations in August, will be back at the office, ready to blow out the remainder of their 2007 budgets before the 2008 fiscal year starts.

So, my pretty lazy August, with 2 weeks of vacay in Europe and two weeks of catching up on adminstrative duties, is pretty soon to come to an end. I'll be back on the road and back working hard before you know it. So I thought I would take a few moments to catch you all up on a few travel stories and other stories of interest I've run across the past few weeks.

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My recent trip to Europe is over, and what started with me waxing poetic about bears and how I felt like a were-bear in London ended with me receiving a bear. In Amsterdam, myself and my friends ended up staying at the Renaissance Amsterdam, which is part of the Marriott Chain, and therefore willing to treat me like a VIP for all my business travel. As a gift, they gave me a nice little stuffed toy. And what exactly was that stuffed toy...

A bear, of course.

I see a bad moon rising.

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Firstly, those who are regulary readers may realize that I suffered a small bit on my attempt to climb Africa's highest mountain, Mount Kilimanjaro back in 2005. Brought down by High Altitude Pulmonary Edeme (HAPE), new research is suggesting I could have had another ally against this scourge. Specifically, the little blue pill that is engorging bank CEOs and making bank CEO's wives around the world sweat - Viagra. The CDC, among others, is reporting that Viagra can"selectively lower pulmonary artery pressure, with less effect on systemic blood pressure. Preliminary studies suggest that this class of drug may prove useful in prevention and treatment of HAPE." However, a correspondent for Outside Magazine, Nick Heil reported that the effects of the Viagra on his, ummm, netherlands, created more discomfort than the altitude did. It's hard to climb to base came three when you already are carrying a tent with you, I suppose.

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In case you are looking for something more interesting to read than me talking about bears and Viagra, you might want to check out the "travel carnival" at Travel Minx. They post weekly "carnivals" of the best of travel blogging, and my entry on getting away from it all in Tanzania was recently featured in one of their weekly submissions. It looks like it may be a few weeks before I get on the road again, so hopefully this will keep any travel story reading addicts calm and composed until I can provide something interesting to read soon.

Cheers,
Greg