It would have been in March, 2001, or thereabouts, that I traveled from Vienna to Bucharest in the company of H, a colleague from the British Embassy. We were there to attend a meeting about migrant smuggling, being hosted by the Romanian government in the giant national palace built by the Communist-era dictator Ceaușescu. Now known as the Palace of Parliament, and said to be the largest government administration building in the world, I recall making a walk of at least fifteen minutes from the main entrance to the meeting room, passing through a seemingly endless labyrinth of gloomy hallways and unfinished rooms with unnecessarily high ceilings.
I don't recall whether I was to give a presentation or merely observe; I do recall there being uniformed representatives of border police from Romania and other former Soviet-bloc countries, and a large number of EU bureaucrats in attendance. Then, as now, migrants were being smuggled from South Asia, Afghanistan, Tran and Iraq through the former Soviet Union along the north shore of the Black Sea, into eastern Europe and on into the EU. The overarching theme was to discuss what Romania was doing to try to counter this, as part of the country's larger preparations to join the EU.
H and I had arrived in the late afternoon the day before the meeting. After ditching our bags at our hotel, made our way to Bucharest's Rahova flower market where, as the name implies, there are large numbers of flower vendors to be found. We found our way into a simple streetside watering hole where the drivers of flower delivery trucks would stop for a beer and a sandwich, deciding to forego the latter in favour of several glasses of the former. There, H told me about a monastery on an island in a lake about an hour outside Bucharest where Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula, is supposedly buried. We hatched a plan to go visit it.
H and I were staying an extra day and a night after the meeting in order to visit security staff at TAROM, the Romanian airline, and review passport inspection procedures. TAROM at that time had direct flights to Montreal, which would occasionally be used to smuggle people into Canada. Our return flight to Vienna was not until late on the 3rd day of our visit, meaning we'd have time to go in search of Dracula.
It was dark by the time we left the cafe at the flower market, but it was a warm evening and we decided to walk back to our hotel. We took a few wrong turns, those being the days before Google Maps, and ended up in a dubious looking industrial area with more stray dogs than streetlights. We wandered in through the open doors of an industrial bakery and, by showing our hotel keys and making the universally understood hand gestures of the hopelessly lost, wheedled out of some amused bakers directions and a couple hot loaves of bread (for we were famished by this point).
Finding our way onto a busy street leading in the direction of our hotel, we decided to step into a newly built establishment that had a neon sign that simply read "bar", in hopes of a beer and a proper bite to eat. This was a very serious mistake. Between us and the bar at the far end of the room all but one of the tables were unoccupied; at the one that was sat the roughest looking bunch of thugs and mobsters I've ever laid eyes on. As either H or I said something to the effect of, "Sorry gentlemen, we've made a mistake, sorry to disturb you", one of the mobsters stood up, smiled, gesticulated for us to come join them, and clapped his hands loudly. Immediately there came flowing down a spiral staircase, in an obscure corner of the room, a number of scantily clad young women. This was no bar, but a brothel, and it would not have been surprising if some of the women had been trafficked into the country by the same organizations that were the subject of the following day's conference. As the beckoning thug walked towards us, we backed out the door and walked away as briskly as we could, the lock in the door clicking loudly as it was turned after us. We made no further stops until we were safely back at our hotel.
On our final morning in Bucharest, we hired a taxi to take us in search of Dracula's grave. The driver spoke reasonably good English, having once been a teacher. It took about an hour to reach the lake in question. There was indeed a small island in the lake, on which we could see a small church-like structure standing. How we were to get there proved to be an unsolvable problem. There was at that time s small resort village along the lakeshore, consisting of simple hotels and restaurants that opened only during the summer season. It being March, they were all closed, and the village was nearly deserted. As we stood on the shore trying to think of a way to reach the island, an older man walked past, and the taxi driver explained what we wanted to do. The man told us to follow him to a nearby public telephone, from which he would call the army.
As it turned out, there was an army barrack not too far away. The man managed to get an officer on the phone, who agreed to bring us a boat to take us to the island for the equivalent of about US$40. About a half hour later, a jeep did indeed turn up with the officer in question, a half dozen soldiers, and a most unseaworthy-looking rowboat. Through our taxi driver-cum-interpreter we explained that we wanted to see if the boat floated before we would pay for our journey. The officer ordered his men to place the boat into the water and hop into it, which they did. As expected, there were several leaks and, although the officer assured us that his men could bale faster than the boat could fill, we nonetheless politely declined the voyage, and gave him $10 for his troubles.
On the return trip to Bucharest, H asked the driver to stop at the former estate of a Romanian prince whose young English wife had been killed during the Second World War, leaving him heartbroken. The driver had never heard of such a story, but drove us to a large park he thought was once a nobleman's estate. This turned out to be more fruitful than our quest for Dracula, for after some wandering we found in an inconspicuous grassy area a lone gravestone for the woman in question.
Our previously chatty and jocular taxi driver was unusually quiet as he returned us to his hotel. He gradually explained that he was embarrassed and upset that two foreigners knew more about his own country's history than did he, a history the dictator Ceaușescu tried to erase from collective memory and replace with his own delusional, paranoid fantasy world. Thank goodness a history cannot be so easily lost.
A Garden Variety Diplomat
My years in the Canadian foreign service, 1990-2002.
Monday, July 17, 2017
Thursday, June 30, 2016
A bicycle trip along the South China Sea to the nuclear plant
When you’re posted to a city in a foreign country, where you don’t know a soul, you’ll try just about anything once. In the foreign service your first social contacts in a new posting tend to be colleagues at work. It’s understood that when a new officer arrives at post, everyone makes an effort to have him or her over for dinner or go out for lunch or do something to help the newbie feel welcome. At a small post where there’s only a few Canadian officers, this can be awkward when it’s clear that you have little in common with one another, but at a post like Delhi or Hong Kong where there’s a couple dozen officers, you usually find at least one or two people who share some of your interests. They become your entry points to creating a social network of your own, whether it be with people at other embassies, with other expats, or locals.
So it was that early in my posting to Kong Kong in 1992 I joined a group of expats on a 2-day cycling tour of the Shenzhen Special Autonomous Region of southern China. We started at the border and rode to the Daya Bay nuclear generating plant and back, following the coastal highway. Had I known what I was getting myself into, I probably would have taken a pass. The distances themselves weren’t great – I think we only rode about 60km or so a day – but the road itself was one long, dusty construction site. There were new factories and buildings going up everywhere, the road had no shoulders, and we were passed by a continuous stream of lorries belching thick black exhaust.
So it was that early in my posting to Kong Kong in 1992 I joined a group of expats on a 2-day cycling tour of the Shenzhen Special Autonomous Region of southern China. We started at the border and rode to the Daya Bay nuclear generating plant and back, following the coastal highway. Had I known what I was getting myself into, I probably would have taken a pass. The distances themselves weren’t great – I think we only rode about 60km or so a day – but the road itself was one long, dusty construction site. There were new factories and buildings going up everywhere, the road had no shoulders, and we were passed by a continuous stream of lorries belching thick black exhaust.
Shenzhen was one of the first areas set
aside by the Chinese government as a place where foreign companies and their
joint-venture Chinese partners could establish businesses for exporting goods
overseas. The People’s Republic was still in the early stages of opening up to
foreign trade, and the idea was that this special autonomous region would
facilitate economic expansion without disrupting the Communist system elsewhere
in the country. Chinese citizens could not enter Shenzhen freely; they needed a
special residency permit that could be obtained only through the sponsorship of
an employer. Many of the workers were young women who came from other parts of
the country to work in garment companies, shoe factories, and similar types of
sweatshop labour. They lived in dormitories and might only get home once a
year, during the Lunar New Year celebration. Wages were high relative to those
available in the rest of China, though still a pittance by Hong Kong standards.
I exaggerated a moment ago when I said that
Shenzhen was one large construction site – it only seemed that way. We did pass
through some older villages, where the farmers still went out each day to tend
their fish ponds, vegetable patches, and rice paddies, and the children looked
after the poultry and livestock. We stopped at an abandoned outdoor athletic
training complex, the parallel bars still standing amidst the weeds. We ended
the day with a swim in the South China Sea, the water being somewhat polluted
but the beach was considerably more litter-free than the ones back in Hong
Kong. We spent the night at a half-completed hotel in a nearby fishing fishing
village where the “fishing” boats consisted of small open craft with large
outboard motors, and sat idly at their docks during the day. After dark, we
heard them roaring out to sea. Smugglers, to be sure, but in what I had no
idea.
Hot, tired and dusty from the ride, I
tumbled into my not-so-clean bed and tried not to notice the roaches. In those
days I never worried about bedbugs; it was understood that if you traveled any
amount in southeast Asia, you were bound to share your bed with insects from
time to time. But roaches made me feel squeamish (they still do). Breakfast in
the hotel dining room the next morning consisted of congee (a rice porridge)
with chunks of liver floating in it and chicken’s feet fried in chili garlic
sauce. I’ve never liked chicken’s feet, nor am I a fan of congee, with or
without the liver. Fortunately someone prevailed upon the restaurant to bring
out some stir fried rice noodles with vegetables.
As you might imagine, we weren’t allowed
inside the nuclear plant. It looked how you’d expect it to look. It had been
built by a French company some years earlier. We rode up to the main gate,
turned around, and rode back to the Hong Kong border, mostly following the same
route we’d come. Although it was not an enjoyable trip, it was a memorable one,
as you can see by the fact I’ve thought to write down something about it. It
provided me an inkling of the great economic transformation that was underway in
China, and which continues to this day.
Tuesday, May 24, 2016
Entering Kosovo at dawn
We had flown into Skopje the night before,
“we” being myself and a junior foreign service officer I was training, who I’ll
just call “D’. We ate a simple latish supper at a street-side café, bought some
black market CDs from a nearby vendor, and returned to the Alexander Hotel for
an early bedtime. It was 2000, and D and I were going to Pristina, the capital
of Kosovo, the following day. NATO troops were occupying Kosovo, and by that
point in time the ethnic cleansing and fighting had ceased, most of the unexploded
roadside bombs had been cleaned up, and daytime travel was generally safe (at
night snipers sometimes took potshots at soldiers and passing vehicles). Just
the same, there were troops everywhere, and lots of armoured vehicles and
military helicopters moving about. We would need to be on the road well before
dawn, so that we could reach the border checkpoint before any of the daily
troop movements in and out of Kosovo began, for the soldiers always took
priority over other travellers. You could easily be stuck there for a few hours
if your timing was unlucky.
Sometime between 4 and 5 am we were picked
up at the hotel in a black Chevy Suburban with bulletproof glass, which makes
it feel as though you’re travelling inside a fishbowl. Our ethnic Albanian driver
was over-caffeinated and manic, and shouted more than spoke profanity-laden English.
I sat in the front passenger seat, D sat in the more dangerous back seat
(bandits or snipers would assume the person sitting in the back was the
important passenger; I’m not sure D was aware of this). After about half an
hour the driver’s incessant chatter was making my head hurt, so I put in a CD
I’d picked up the night before, a bootleg copy of a live Clash album. The Suburban climbed up into the hills as the
sky lightened, the still leafless trees visible but not yet casting shadows.
We arrived at the border in the midst of
‘London Calling’, a fitting soundtrack for the sight that greeted us. The Greek
soldiers manning the checkpoint were wearing respirators in addition to their
helmets and body armour, looking like storm troopers in a dystopian sci-fi
movie. The reason for the respirators was that the border checkpoint was
located near a cement factory that had been destroyed by a NATO-fired cruise
missile some months earlier. A large stockpile of lime at the factory had been
pulverized in the explosion, and there were still elevated concentrations of
lime dust in the air.
We cleared the checkpoint quickly, and made
our way into Kosovo, following the main road along which tens of thousands of
Albanian Kosovars had fled ethnic cleansing for protection in Macedonia. Both
sides of the road the whole way to Pristina were lined with empty plastic bags
and plastic bottles that the refugees had discarded along the way. At one point
we passed a number of mass graves over which stood a pole flying the new flag
of Kosovo. As we drew nearer to Pristina we passed large numbers of newly
constructed low-rise apartment buildings, their walls the terra cotta colour of
unfinished building bricks, each unit with a satellite dish.
The previous year thousands of Kosovo
refugees had been airlifted to Canada with our government’s assistance, and
granted permanent residence. In the haste to flee their homes, many had become
separated from family members and loved ones. Those who had made it to Canada
provided the names of those left behind, and with the help of military and
humanitarian officials the refugee office at the Canadian Embassy in Vienna had
been locating the relatives still in Kosovo. My main reason for going to
Pristina was to interview and process the visa paperwork for a list of people
who had been located.
There was one other unusual thing I had been
instructed to do on my visit. In the New York Times several weeks earlier there
had been a story about a twelve year old girl who had been the only survivor
when she and her family were gathered up for execution by ethnic Serb
paramilitaries. The girl had hidden behind her mother and covered her face with
her hands when the shooting began. Her mother’s body had slowed the momentum of
the bullets enough that the girl’s fingers were broken and her face was
scarred, but she was not killed. Her mother’s body fell on top of her,
concealing her from the murderers who would have otherwise finished her off. A
wealthy Canadian had read the Times story and offered to fly her to Canada for
plastic surgery. A Canadian soldier tracked her down to a relative’s home in a
rural village, and the girl would be brought to my hotel in Pristina so I could
issue her a visa.
The girl was staying in a sector controlled
by the US military. The afternoon of my second day in Kosovo I received a call
saying the girl would be arriving soon, and could I please meet her in front of
the hotel. D and I stood outside and watched as a half-dozen American armoured
vehicles pulled up, the small girl being helped to the ground by a soldier in
full battle gear (the American sector being still unsettled at that moment).
The girl was indeed scarred as described, though not as awfully as I had been
led to believe. She didn’t speak English. She was neither shy nor forthcoming
in answering my questions through the interpreter. Considering what she had
lived through and the situation she was presently in, she was remarkably
composed.
Although I issued the girl a visa, she
never did end up making her way to Canada. As it turned out, a wealthy American
had also read her story and made a similar offer to come to the US, and she and
her guardian decided to go there instead. I often think about that girl, who
would be in her late twenties now. In my mind I can still picture clearly her
face, and her small figure being helped down to the ground amid all those
soldiers and military vehicles. I hope she has had some happiness since then.
Wednesday, May 18, 2016
Red Ants - Guangzhou, 1993
There were between 25 and 30 foreign
service officers at the Canadian mission in Hong Kong back in the early 1990s, but
only three of us had diplomatic accreditation to the People’s Republic of
China, which we simply called ‘the PRC’. Remember that back in those days Hong
Kong was still a British colony, and the PRC was still in the early stages of
opening up to contact with westerners. Foreigners living in Hong Kong needed
visas to cross the border, and once inside China we weren’t supposed to use the
local currency, but were expected instead to buy and use special Foreign
Exchange Certificates sold to us at an unrealistic exchange rate. Fortunately
everyone at that time in southern China wanted Hong Kong dollars, so you’d exchange
only a token amount at the official rate just for sake of appearances.
I held one of the three diplomatic
accreditations so that I could travel up to Guangzhou to issue visas to PRC
citizens being sponsored by family members living in Canada. The work was not especially
difficult, just repetitious. A colleague and I would be dropped off at the
train station in Hong Kong with a half dozen enormous hard-shell suitcases full
of visa files. The trip to Guangzhou took a couple hours, and was usually uncomfortable
but uneventful. The PRC-operated train was quite filthy and infested with
cockroaches. One female colleague I travelled with would bring a tea towel to
place between her head and the seat back for fear of getting head lice.
Guangzhou has an interesting history.
Located in the Pearl River estuary, it was one of the few ports where foreign
countries could trade with China back in the days of the emperors (which lasted
up until the early twentieth century). During the Opium Wars of the 1830s-40s
the British seized Guangzhou (which they called ‘Canton’) from the Chinese, and
operated warehouses and trading facilities. Down by the riverfront where many
of the buildings of the British era still remain is the part of town most
visitors see, and where you’d find the hotels catering to western business
travellers. As you move inland away from the river, you’re confronted by modern
China and all its noise, traffic smog, and concrete high rises.
My preferred place to stay in Guangzhou
back then was a recently built and only partly occupied Ramada hotel located
somewhere out in the urban sprawl. This was so that after a long day of
interviewing visa applicants through an interpreter I could grab dinner in the
hotel’s surprisingly decent restaurant and then shuffle over to the Red Ants
for a bottle or two of Pearl River beer.
The Red Ants was a hole-in-the-wall western
style bar in a nondescript mall, only you’d not see many westerners in it. The
evening clientele was mostly a mix of twenty-something Chinese and African
exchange students. In those days China was still actively cultivating cultural
exchanges with socialist African nations, and through this the adult children
of well-connected Africans would be sponsored to go to Chinese universities.
The Red Ants was the preferred watering hole of many of these students – mostly
men – and their local girlfriends. The DJ catered to his clientele, so the
music was typically pretty good – a few western pop songs interspersed with
King Sunny Ade and Bob Marley. To this day, whenever I hear No Woman/No Cry I
still picture the seats emptying as the couples rose to slow dance at the Red
Ants.
Sidled up to the bar with an oversized
Pearl River bottle in my hand was the closest I ever felt to being a character
in a John Le Carré novel during my foreign service career. Walking in the door
you got the feeling you were doing something just a little subversive, that at
any minute the authorities would be busting in to shut the place down and
incarcerate or deport anyone found inside. Remember, this was only a couple
years removed from the Tiananmen Square protests, where hundreds of
pro-democracy protesters in Beijing were killed by their government. But in
reality the Red Ants was no hotbed of intrigue so far as I know, and if the
authorities had it on some sort of blacklist, they never bothered to take
action any time I was there.
The last time I went in was probably in the
fall of 1995. The Red Ants was looking shabbier than ever, and there weren’t
many people around. A disinterested young woman was randomly plugging worn out
old cassette tapes into the sound system. Bob Marley’s voice warbled and cut
out. Where once it had been unique,
newer western style bars had opened up in more convenient locations, and many
of its denizens had relocated there.
I did a Google search today but could find
no recent references to the Red Ants, only a few notes in a Google book about
an art exhibit held there back in 1993. While China’s opening to the west and
subsequent economic boom was good for many people in southern China, it wasn’t for
the Red Ants. Perhaps it’s just as well.
Monday, May 2, 2016
Temples and tigers - India, 1992 & 1995
Urban India overwhelms the senses. The
noise, the aromas, the heat, the glare, the press of the crowds day and night –
nowhere else on Earth can compare with it. I once caught a train to Jaipur, the
“pink city” of arid Rajasthan state, that left Delhi at four in the morning. A
deliberate choice, since our train car did not have air conditioning, and we
wanted to arrive before the full heat of the day was upon us (“us” being me and
three colleagues from the High Commission). Despite the early hour, the streets
of old Delhi were bustling. Not as congested as they would become a few hours
later, but nonetheless busier than I could have ever imagined. Where the throngs
of people were coming from or going to I could only guess.
Bread to feed the poor at a Sikh temple in Delhi, 1992
I’ve already gotten ahead of myself. Back
to the beginning: in January 1992 I was preparing to be posted out to Hong Kong
in April. In the meantime, the visa section in New Delhi was shorthanded, so I
was sent to India to help out until March. The work was not especially interesting,
mostly just clearing a backlog of family-sponsored visa applications that had
built up. There were a few moments of excitement – I interviewed one elderly man
for about twenty minutes in my claustrophobic office before a registry clerk
dashed in with a medical report saying the old fellow had a serious case of
tuberculosis. I had a fairly straightforward weekday routine: a High Commission
driver would pick me up at my hotel in the morning, I’d interview visa
applicants all morning, have lunch at poolside, do more interviews in the
afternoon, and then be driven back to the hotel to eat, sleep, and repeat.
The High Commission is an enormous walled
compound, containing not only the chancery and visa offices, but also townhouse-style
accommodations for Canadian staff with children, the aforementioned swimming
pool, tennis courts, a clubhouse, and probably a bunch of other facilities I
never made use of. Things were quiet and peaceful inside the compound. Outside
the walls – especially the one that provides access to the visa section – was
India in all its chaos. Crowds of people would be coming and going, vendors
sold snacks and drinks and all manner of other things, untended cattle browsed
through piles of debris. The hotel where I stayed was like the High Commission
compound in miniature; a quiet, walled-in oasis that seemed to be just barely
keeping the rest of India at bay.
On weekends I went off to explore India,
usually with my friend and colleague Joe, who was also on temporary assignment
there. Our first expedition was the same one millions of tourists do each year
– to see the Taj Mahal. Perhaps the only thing more amazing than the Taj itself
is that across the river is the foundation for a second Taj, intended to be a
mirror image of the first but in black marble. Before it could be built, the
Mughal emperor Shah Jahan who had commissioned it was killed by his son, who
rightly feared the empire would be bankrupted by further construction. While in
Agra I also got to visit nearby Fatehpur Sikri, a gorgeous city built in the 16th
century to be capital of the Mughal empire, only to be soon abandoned due to
lack of water.
I’ve already alluded to another weekend
exploration, to Jaipur, like the Taj an important tourist destination. It’s
famous for its pink sandstone buildings, its hilltop fortress, the Palace of
the Winds, and the Jantar Mantar - an amazing astronomical research complex
built in the early 1700s. While in Jaipur I picked up some nasty variety of
giardia or dysentery, probably at a restaurant. The symptoms started to hit me
Monday morning at work, where my colleagues said, “Uh oh, you look like you
have the amoebas”, a generic slang for any serious gastro-intestinal ailment,
typically treated with a strong dose of amoebicide pills obtained from the High
Commission doctor. I spent the next 72 hours in my hotel room. For the first 24
I felt like I was going to die, and wouldn’t have cared had I done so. The next
48 I mostly just slept. For over a year afterwards I would still get periodic
recurrences. In case you’re wondering how one gets “the amoebas”, they’re
transmitted the fecal-oral route. That is, I ate some food that contained
traces of human feces. Yum!
My next trip once I was back on my feet was
the one I was most looking forward to: a visit to Corbett National Park in the
Himalayan foothills to look for tigers. When I was a kid, I was addicted to
nature documentaries, especially Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Seeing a tiger
in the wild was one of my life’s dreams. It came true, but not on that first
visit to India. Joe and I did manage to see a great deal of other wildlife in
the park, but no stripes. We went out in the jungle in jeeps, on elephant back,
and on foot, but the closest we got was a set of pug marks (tracks) made by a
young tigress a few hours before we came along. The Indian jungle was cool and
quiet, the loudest noise coming from the peacocks that lived near the huts
where we stayed. It was a welcome respite from Delhi.
Pug marks of a young tigress, Corbett National Park, 1992
Three years later I returned to India on
holidays, this time with my wife. Having learned my lesson about the amoebas,
we ate only two meals a day, one in the morning, one at night, mainly piping
hot vegetarian curries, and drank only beer and lemon-line soda. We had no tummy
troubles, and the food was fantastic. Speaking of food, in Delhi we visited the
city’s largest Sikh temple and witnessed an amazing sight. Each day volunteers
from the temple feed thousands of hungry people who appear at the gates. They
were fed at long communal tables in shifts of several hundred, each person receiving
a bowl of dal and some homemade flatbread. Our host explained to us that Sikh
temples are obliged by their scriptures to feed and shelter anyone in need. A
New Zealander friend later told me she had once backpacked alone around India
for several weeks, and any time she found herself in a strange town with
nowhere safe to stay she would find the Sikh temple and ask to set up her
bedroll on the floor. She was never refused and was always treated to a hot
meal.
It was on that second visit that I finally
saw my tiger. We went to Sariska National Park, located along the main highway
between Delhi and Jaipur. We had received mixed reports; some people claimed
there were still tigers in the park, others saying the big cats had all been
poached years earlier. We stayed in a former hunting palace inside the park
boundaries. In the early evening a driver took us in an open jeep along dirt
tracks in search of tigers. On a small ridge we passed three men, poor day
labourers walking home to a nearby village. We had driven no more than a few
hundred meters past them when my wife gasped and pointed. An enormous male
tiger was moving quickly through the bushes alongside the track, away from the
men. We followed the red blur in the jeep and it became evident what had
happened. The men had flushed a large male sambur (a type of deer) as they were
walking along, which the tiger – who had been laying up somewhere nearby – was
now stalking. We drove along to a raised spot from which we were able to watch
the tiger dash across the road and confront the sambur in a clearing below us.
After a brief standoff, the sambur turned and fled into the bush, and with a
roar the tiger disappeared after it. The whole encounter lasted less than a
minute, but it was worth the return visit to India. By the end of the 1990s
there were no more tigers left in Sariska; we had seen one of the last ones.
Amusing sign at entrance to Corbett National Park, 1992
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)