Day 11:

Boris Yeltsin died two days ago. I asked my teenage friends what sort of national mood that news lead to. They said that it wasn't a big deal. Most young people, the said, are largely indifferent to politics. Old people, when they think about politics, are mostly nostalgic for the Soviet Union. Poor people now have no help, while back then everyone was taken care of, in a fashion.

I noted how powerful those images of Yeltsin standing on a tank, standing up to the Russian military remain in the western world. Still, my friends insisted, his death was not a big deal to the average Russian man.

Still on the train, right now. In the book I'm reading, Robert Kaplan quotes Paul Fussell on the art of travelling:

"the explorer seeks the undiscovered, the traveler that which has been discovered by the mind working in history, the tourist that which has been discovered for him by entrepreneurship and prepared for him by the arts of mass publicity (185)."

furthermore, he says that travel is a lot of work:

"Etymologically, a traveller is one who suffers 'travail,' a Latin word deriving in its turn from Latin 'tripalium,' a torture instrument consisting of three stakes designed to rack the body. Before the development on tourism, travel was concieved to be like study, and it fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of judgement. (185-86)"

Meanwhile, Kaplan disagrees a little bit:

"I have learned as much as a tourist as I have as a so-called traveller. In the 1970s, I knew young people travelling along who could put up with the cheapest hotels and the most arduous conditions, yet who were less concerned with learning about the local culture than finding a place to buy hashish; even as I met senior citizens in large groups, staying at antiseptic hotels, who were walking encyclopedias of archaeological sites (186)."

Kaplan's observation brings to mind a quote (paraphrased) from the travel novel "Are you Experienced" that sums up my feeling about much of South East Asian travel:

"Anyone who says that he wants to expand his mind and then goes off to Thailand for three months is talking out of his arse-hole."