Hasta la revolucion siempre

From the jungles...
…to the electoral headquarters
From bottom to top: the three biggest brands in El Salvador: FMLN (the former rebels), Arena (the right-wingers), and Tigo (the cell phone company)

It's been a solid 28 years for the rebels in El Salvador, and they're still going strong. Of course, they've gone through some serious changes over that period, not least of which is a complete and stunning transformation from a group of mountain guerrillas to a modern and perfectly civil political party. The right wing fascists they fought against have become equally subdued -- together, they tell the story of one of the more remarkable peace-making processes in the world.

The civil war in El Salvador, understandable bleeds into the mess of the 1980's conflagrations which paralyzed central America. In Guatemala, Nicaragua, and beyond, the US and the Soviet Union fought a proxy war seething proxy war against each other and against the poor hapless peasants misfortunate enough to live in those countries. El Salvador followed the usual pattern: a right wing, corrupt government and often dictatorial government was about to be overthrown by a reformist popular movement, which initially took action through a democratic process. The outgoing leaders managed to convince the US that the reformers are actually communists, and so they receive license to suspend democracy and aid to combat the inevitably resulting guerrilla movement. The guerrillas, at first, receive support from the peasantry of the country, and later from Cuba and/or the Soviets.

The civil war in El Salvador never quite reached the same epic levels of genocide as happened in neighboring Guatemala, but things were nasty enough. An early masacre in 1981 of 1,000 men, women and children by US-trained government forces at a town called El Mozote was the subject of an excellent book by Mark Danner, which I read on my way to the country. From the story he tells of killings and counter-killings, one would have easily thought that the war could only have ended in a complete victory by one side over the other.

But not so -- the war grinded on for ten more years until the end of the cold war, when the US finally pulled the plug on the right-wing government and forced a set of peace talks which led to mass exonerations and elections in 1992. It's bizarre but, reconciliation seems complete. Elian tells me that its largely the result of the complete lack of any ethnic dimension to the civil war, although I imagine that the fact these poor Salvadoreans were essentially fighting a war that was not theirs for 10 years has something to do with it as well.

A friend of Elian's who I met near her site fought in the national army, against his own brother who was seduced into the rebel camp by a pretty guerrillera. Today they get on just fine -- indeed, he is getting ready to send his kids to join his brother the former communist fighter, who now lives in Virginia.

The rebels, known as the FMLN, simply became a political party, as did the right wing party of the former nationalist government. Their flags, essentially unchanged since the war, hang everywhere as political advertisements.

La Pupusa: World Cuisine

A pupusa, served as usual with a kimchee garnishEl Salvadorean Tortillas
Mother and daughter pupusa team at work

The pupusa, El Salvador's contribution to the culinary world is simple, but hard to describe. It's simply a stuffed tortilla, usually filled with beans and cheese. The tortillas in El Salvador are small (4" diameter) and thick (1/3") to begin with, and are usually cooked on a hot griddle, having been hand-moulded from a batch of freshly ground corn meal. The thickness of the tortillas and their method of cooking makes the result taste more like a grilled cheese sandwich than anything -- though with the delicious taste of fresh corn. Or sometimes rice, since they also often make tortillas from rice flour here, strangely enough.

Pupusas are always served with a pickled cabbage salad, dressed in a tomato sauce. Pickled cabbage with tomato is more commonly known as kimchee, though not in El Salvador.

An important part of the role of a Peace Corps volunteer is living as the locals do. I was thinking that I suppose I could learn to live without the Air Conditioning, and am secretly a little jealous of the absence of the Internet -- but I can see the food might be a major issue. El Salvadoreans, like most people in this world, eat nothing but food -- and what they define as food is quite straightforward: soup, rice, beans, meat, and pupusa. Anything else would not really identify as edible. It's odd to think that a generation ago in the United States, most Americans would have taken a similar view -- our generation is the first to actually see the possible varieties of cuisine as a form of expression and enjoyment more than simply sustenance.

The pupusas are good -- gooey without being greasy and piping hot with just the right mix of filling to dough. They come high on the list of "foods made from meat or cheese wrapped in bread of some sort", which Vivian and I are compiling. The pupusa variety with the rice flour wrapper is an interesting and successful variation on this theme.

Over the past 4 days I've probably eaten 20 pupusas. And while I look forward to searching out an El Salvadorean restaurant back in the US one day, I'm glad that in the intervening months I will have something else to eat.

Peace Corpse

Elian the budding politician

Right now, directly under this fan, it's almost bearable. Several times today I've looked about myself, startled by a blast of heat and looking for the open stove or blast furnace from whence it must have come. But, inevitably, there was none; it's just the El Salvadorean lowlands in December: hot as hell.

It's common knowledge that the Peace Corps, which places Americans in two-year posts around the world is designed to benefit the volunteers as it is the nominal recipients of their aid. I suppose each volunteers journey is unique, but spending time with Elian here it's struck by how powerful the experience of just being here is -- getting to know the ordinary folk of the third world in a way otherwise impossible.

Elian's "site" is Ciudad Dolores, a small town smack in the center of this small country. Her assignment is to engage in "Municipal Development", which as far as I can tell means she sits in the mayors office and finds ways to make herself useful. She talks of being involved in many initiatives in the town and its surrounding farming regions, but the Maritz in me can't help but note that her most visible occupation appears to be pounding the pavement. Together we've traversed the town several times, slowly exchanging warm salutations with the parents sat in the streets and receiving excited smiles and embraces from the packs of children in perpetual orbit. She goes by "Ellie" here, and the name is constantly on the lips of young and old alike. We've been a meal at every house we've stopped into, two when we've stayed long enough.

Being her mother's daughter she gets on well with the folk here, has no end friends, and has already become an integrated enough part of the social fabric here to have been the victim of the rumour mill -- it's been said that she has a second boyfriend in a nearby town, a young man recently returned from the US with a fine pickup. She commiserates with the women in the town about the men who go abroad and don't send back enough money, and she complains with the men about the crooked politicians and the lack of decent jobs. It's just life, and she's part of it.

I've spent some time in my life trying to sell to these people, though the people in question were in Malaysia and I was doing so from the 30th floor of a gleaming tower in Kuala Lumpor, crunching numbers to find the optimal offer and message to try to get them to spend more money on their mobile phones. Yesterday, as we pulled into a gas station, Elian saw a sign announcing "Doble Saldo", an offer to double any deposit ("saldo") she made into her mobile phone account -- exactly the kind of thing I was tasked with coming up with. She hurriedly asked to borrow five bucks, even though she had just borrowed five bucks to put on her phone the day before. Having only her salary of $300 a month to work with, every cent of "saldo" counts.

Elian is supposed to be living the monastic life of a Peace Corps volunteer. As far as I'm concerned, despite her access to cell phone, Internet, and DVDs, she still can claim to have survived the wild due to her surviving here without air conditioning for the better part of a year already. I'm reading a book on Latin America right now which presents an erudite set of explanations as to why the region has steadfastly refused to develop itself despite having every advantage. Sat here sweltering, unable to move, the answer seems painfully obvious.

Tel Aviv Restaurants

This is it -- the end of three months of living the Zionist dream here in Tel Aviv. I haven't quite been farming the fruits of the Jewish earth, but I have been doing my share of consuming them. It took me a while to understand the swing of the culinary scene, but once I did food and eating have managed to reassert themselves as my primary hobbies.

Tel Aviv is very much a city for eating-out. The city is packed with restaurants and cafes, and a good number of those are packed with beautiful people enjoying themselves and their company. The Mediterranean climate and a strong agrarian tradition ensure quality ingredients, and these are often served in largely unadulterated fashion. A wide range of cusiines is available, reflecting Israeli's multiculturalism and wide-ranging travel tastes. Yet, I've found that the food here degrades rapidly with distance from its origin -- Middle Eastern food is absolutely first-rate. Italian is good, French decent. Anything even remotely Mexican or Asian is usually awful (with one or two exceptions).

Service is efficient if not friendly, although there is a bizarre pattern of waiters absolutely disappearing when it comes time to ask for the check. The décor also follows Israeli culture in being, um, rather bold, but there are many cozy spots nonetheless.

Every meal I've eaten over the last three months has been in one sort of restaurant or another, and as such I've managed to develop a few favourites into solid recommendations.

MIDDLE EASTERN

Shemesh. For the best shawarma you can get anywhere, head to Shemesh in Ramat Gan. I wrote a whole blog post on this, so won't expand here.

Abu Hassan. Similarly, you would be remiss to leave Israel without having a good Hummus meal. Personally, I think that the best hummus is at a local spot near my office in Ra'anana, but most people can't be expected to schlep out there. Settle instead for Abu Hassan, an institution of a restaurant whose deserved popularity has caused it to spill out of two storefronts already. Go early because they run out of hummus by lunchtime. 1 Dolphin St, Jaffo (03) 682-0387

 

MEDITERRANEAN

This is where Tel Aviv does best in terms of variety, class and content. As it turns out, all of the restaurants I heartily recommend here are in the Neve Tzedek/Avenue Rothschild area, which happens to be my favorite part of town. This is because all of these restaurants were recommended to me by a man I happened to have met one night in Champa, a bar in the heart of this neighborhood. We talked about how awesome the bar we were in was, establishing his good taste, and so I went on to ask for the other places he liked and frequented. He said that he didn't venture far, but it didn't matter since all the best places were nearby anyway. I trusted, and I verified.

Champa. An "authentic" Spanish Tapas bar with imposing looking legs of ham and coils of sausage hanging from the walls. I don't think anyone from Spain would recognize this as anything remotely spanish, but they do serve Cava, and most of the ham is important from Catalonia, and both are very good. It's a bar, but you can certainly piece together a light meal from what they offer.

Cava is actually the only drink on offer, and the staff does a fine job of upselling to bottles, "the same price as three glasses!" This leads to a rather convivial atmosphere, which as the evening presses on often spills out into the street. The location, and the corner of Nachlat Binyamin and Avenue Rothschild could not be better. Rehov Nahalat Binyamin 52; 077-200-8636

 

Radio Rosco. Just down the street from Champa, my favourite restaurant in Tel Aviv is a casual italian joint, serving what must be the best pizzas this side of Naples. I think it's supposed to be inspired by Italian-American cuisine, but they must have screwed up since there are very, very few Italian restaurants back home that are this good. I've been back four times. Don't worry, I have verified that they only use kosher pork.

The atmosphere is warm and inviting, overcoming the rather bizarre location in the small inner courtyard of a low-rise apartment buildinng. Tables fill the empy space inside the building and occupy a proper indoor space adjacent. You enter through the opening of a Spanish-language Bookshop, so its easy to miss.97 Allenbi St (03) 5600334

 

NG. A fine modern addition to the Jewish tradition of "meat" restaurants (dating from the days when laws of Kashrut forced jews to choose between meat and dairy if they wanted to open a restaurant). The rest of the world would think of this as a steakhouse. It's in a comfortable old house in the heart of the old neighborhood of Neve Tzedek. Service here is actually quite friendly, for a change.

There's not much to the menu, just a few appetizers and a few cuts of steak (porterhouse, fillet, etc). The steaks are good, and seriously prepared. You can't choose your level of "done-ness", but they come out a solid medium (as they should be). If anyone reading this goes to NG, you HAVE to order the eggplant appetizer. In a country which eats a lot of eggplant, this dish is divine. 6 Ehad Ha'am St. (just above Tazza D'oro) (03) 5167888

ETHIOPIAN

Ethiopian. Yes, the name of the restaurant is the same as the name of the genre. Something like 100,000 Ethiopians have immigrated here in the last 20 years, taking advantage of their birthrights as Jews. They haven't assimilated that well, which is bad for their standard of living certainly, but a good thing for the cuisine. This place is an unassuming restaurant on the sea-ward end of Allenby street. Décor is basic, service is in Hebrew or Amharic only, but the food is top-notch.

INDIAN

Tandoori. This small chain of Indian restaurants is run by an Iraqi-Jewish-Indian family and produces very passable South Asian food. I lived on their Dal Bhat (Lentils and rice) for a week when my stomach would accept little else. The kebabs are great too. There are also about 100,000 Indians jews living here in Israel, but their relative economic success has sadly limited their proclivity to run restaurnats. The only other game in town is Indira, which is owned by Romanians now and is awful. Herzliya, 32 St.Maskit 099546702

ASIAN

Sometimes you crave Asian food it happens to most people, and it happens to me quite a lot. Sadly, there's not much in Tel Aviv to hit this spot. I wasn't able to find even a truly decent Thai place, which was surprising given the number of Thais living in Israel and Israelis, living it up in Thailand.

Thus, the only two Asian places I can truly recommend in Tel Aviv are as follows:

Onami. On the popular Rehov Ha'arb'a, seated among the many trendy restaurants, is this highly polished Japanese spot. A large dining bar surrounds a sushi kitchen where friendly Thai chefs joke among themselves as they skilfully slice and dice fish and vegetables alike. Hipster music is piped in (Kinds of Convenience in a japanese restaurant? Ok…), and the crowd is young and affluent, if not sophisticated. Waitstaff are the usual surly Israeli women, though they appear to speak English well. Food was at about the level of a decent New York sushi joint, which is pretty good. This is by far the best of the Sushi bars in Tel Aviv.18 Ha'Arbaa St. Tel: (03) 562-0981

11th floor, Crowne Plaza City Center. This is the restaurant in my hotel. They have a full menu of various "Mediterranean Fusion" offerings, but I have only ever had the Sushi, which is actually pretty good, and reasonably priced. The restaurant endeared myself to me for its complete unpopularity, as it is tucked away on the 11th floor of the hotel and had just opened when I arrived. But over the three months I lived in the Crowne Plaza it was somehow discovered, and by now it is quite packed nightly. Crwone Plaze, Azrieli Center

Orthodox or Catholic?

The road to Mar Saba
The monastery
The nuns praying outside the walls
The Kidron Valley, below Mar Saba
The door-monk coming out to chat with the nuns
Full size pics

"Orthodox or Catholic?"

I blanked, never having been faced with the question in exactly that form. The black robed, black bearded monk stared at me for a moment, then went back to handing out paper icons to the nuns gathered outside the door of the monastery.

"You are Orthodox or Catholic?" He looked at me again, "or Protestant?" There was no clear right answer for me among those choices, so I picked the one most easy to defend if I was to be pressed.

"Protestant," I said and smiled pleasantly.

He looked away. "Closed. Today, monastery closed." He went back to handing out icons, and I simply stood by, in the middle of this crowd of chanting nuns, waiting for an opportune moment to explain that I had come a long way, and very much wanted to visit Mar Saba, this very important Orthodox monastery, home to many of orthodoxy's most famous saints. As I stood waiting, the monk shuffled off.

I was with two co-workers, a man and a woman, and we all just sort of stood by, listening to the not unpleasant chanting of the women, clustered about the small doorway. The monk came back, he probably thought it would be easier just to let us in.

"Ok, you come," he pointed at my male colleague and I. "You, stay," he said to the woman. I already knew that there were no woman allowed in Mar Saba, and none had been since the time of it's founding in the 6th century. Indeed, not that much else had changed in that particular corner of the arid Judean desert over the centuries; I guess that's kind of the point of Orthodoxy.

The Orthodox Church, the main form of Christianity practiced in Greece, Russia, and the Middle East, is the direct descendant of the Byzantine Church founded by the Roman emperor Constantinople in the fourth century when adopting Christianity as the official religion. It survived through the centuries, battling all the while against the myriad heretical groups that tried to fork off on the basis of some or other dogmatic dispute. The most notable of these splits was of course the Roman Catholic church.

From it's earliest years, the Orthodoxy has had in its ranks eremitical (hermit) adherents, rejecting the physical world for isolation, hoping to gain stature in the spiritual one. In ancient times, there were monks who walled themselves up in caves, eating only once a week. There were stylites, a type of hermit that climbed up on to the top of pillars, and never came down. And there were plain old monks who just lived out in monastaries in godforsaken places like the Judean desert.

There could hardly be a better setting for the giving up the world, than the Judean desert, since it hardly resembles the earth at all. Mar Saba is built into a canyon in the middle of the vast, dry wastelands that lie south of Jerusalem alongside the dead sea. I had driven there in a taxi from Bethlehem, and after the sprawl of Arab houses petered out, we passed through mile after mile of moonscape, over a road that crossed back and forth on an attempt to navigate hills and cliffs clearly not meant for hospitality. At one point the car got stuck; we got out to see obstacle, but there was none. We had just gotten stuck on the road itself.

We entered the monastery. We followed the monk down the stairs into a courtyard where another identical black robed, black bearded man was standing. We shook hands and met Father Lazarus, an American hippy who after losing himself in the 1960's San Francisco, re-found himself in Orthodoxy, "with the Russians, " as he put it. He has spent the last twenty years in Mar Saba, thus far upholding a vow never to set foot outside. He showed us St. Sabas's tomb, and then in an adjoining church his body, held in a glass display case. He took care to point out both the un-decomposed state of the body, as well as its sweet smell. I did not go close enough to verify either.

I came to Mar Saba in the footsteps of William Dalrymple, a favourite author of mine I've mentioned here before. Dalrymple spent a few months among the many sects of Christians still extant in the Middle East, and gave special attention to these monks, direct descendants as they are from a historically very important line. He passed through Mar Saba and stayed for a few days, enough to earn the place a chapter in his book.

I asked Fr. Lazarus if he knew Dalrymple. He did, but was dismissive. "I was not that impressed by him. He was trying to write a book, he was not interested in learning about the mysteries of Orthodoxy." Sensing that I was about to earn a lengthy lecture about these mysteries, and knowing that my co-worker was still waiting with the nuns outside, I beat a retreat, though not before accepting a glass of water from the spring which St. Saba had caused to appear 15 centuries earlier. It was quite nice.

In Dalrymple's book, there is a sense of fatalism surrounding these ancient communities. In Turkey, he recounts how the Armenian Christrians, having been more or less forced out of the country, they are now being systematically removed from history as well, as their churches and graveyards being torn down and buried. In Lebanon, he describes the once powerful Maronite Christian community as a group of short-sighted thugs, hellbent on taking the country down with them on their path to self-destruction. In Israel and Palestine, it's a simpler, perhaps sadder story of the Palestinian Christians taking advantage of their relative wealth to simple up and leave.

There are 15 monks in Mar Saba today, down from the thousands of antiquity, down from the 80 of Mark Twain's visit in the 1860's, and down from the 20 that Dalrymple saw ten years ago. Their decline is less stated than that of the majority of Palestine's Christians, the vast majority of which have moved away to less insane parts of the world. One often thinks of the Jews and Muslims at each other's necks in the Holy Land, but in this internecine battle it’s the Christians who have been hear the longest, and have suffered the worst: the population of Jerusalem was over 50% Christian at the time of Israel's independence, today it is less than 2%.

Highways and high explosives

Me and Adam
Me and Orit, eating fruit from the garden
The Ayalon Freeway, the tall buildings at the right are my hotel
The TOW anit-tank missile

This evening, I took an hour's drive north up to my aunt's house for a Shabbat dinner. I cruised in my undersized company car up Highway 6, the main road to the North, easily gliding among the eight empty lanes. It gets dark early here, but the road is flood lit most of the way. The roads were almost empty, and the experience was more like driving across miles and miles of freeze-framed airport runways than anything else. The many overpasses I glided under, each trimmed with Tron-like blue florescent lighting only reinforced the effect. After turning off the main highway and completing the last 30km on an equally luxurious side road, I remained with impression of a road network vastly overbuilt for a country this small.

I suppose Israelis being the least patient race on earth must drive a strong need to build away any threat of traffic jams, but I have a lingering feeling that the construction is more than that. It must be a holdover from the early days of the country, when the Jewish State was only what could be built by the Jews. There was a time, when Israel , though present, was still not quite a reality in the minds of many people, including most of its residents -- the newness and fragility of the country needed a counterbalance in the form of steel and concrete, poured high in the towers of Tel Aviv and wide in the roads that linked the ancient hills and valleys into a modern country.

I arrived at my Aunts house and had dinner in time to have leisurely postprandial hookah smoke with my cousin, back home for a few days from the army, where he's halfway through the three year military service that all Israelis enter upon their 18th birthdays (women, of course do only two years). He's a paratrooper, in an anti-tank unit, trained to blow up the same Syrian tanks that his father, my uncle, fought against 25 years ago in the Lebanon war.

There not being many tanks around these days, he spends most of his time on the border with Gaza, fighting a low-grade war only slightly tempered by the cease fire between Israel and the Hamas government. Missles fly in both directions, the deaths mount up slowly, one here, two there.

A month ago his unit was sent to demolish a house which concealed the endpoint of a smuggler's tunnel from Gaza. The house was mined, and when the armoured bulldozer crosser into the yard it exploded into a massive fireball which knocked down the nearby houses. A friend of his somehow had gotten hold of footage from an unmanned surveillance drone, and I watched the clip twice with him.

He's since managed to get himself enrolled in a course to be an off-road driving instructor. I saw pictures of his training; it looks pretty awesome -- driving Humvees over every possible terrain in light and dark for days one end. His mother, my aunt, confided over dinner that she was pleased that he was going to be now stationed in some school in the interior of the country rather than on the front lines. He gave that "oh, please mom!" look that every young man has to give in the face of a mother's worrying.

I've given that look many times, except the things that I do are only theoretically dangerous. I've never actually come into contact with anything truly dangerous; I've never really been scared. Adam was very nearly blown to bits. It wasn't a big deal, no one was seriously hurt, it's just a rite of passage, I guess.

But the fact remains. Within easy distance of one of these beautiful space-age flood-lit highways, a foreign force detonated a mine as a defence against a military operation. Most Israelis will take the position that the army is not merely a right of passage, it's actually an active fighting force. It's not quaint that Adam has been trained to fight aging Syrian tanks, it's practical. But I have to wonder -- given that the army is such an integrated part of the fabric of society, might it not be perpetuating its own role by engaging in such house-for-bomb exchanges with the Gazans? And might mainstream Israelis be tolerating it because of the secondary benefit of the conflict's institutions turning boys into men?

So if the sweeping highways and new towns still being built serve to the ease the Israeli psyche, let them continue to build. Perhaps soon they will be attractive enough to receed into completely.

Rose red city!

Rose-red city!

Sheikh Ibrahim Ibn Abdallah, AKA Johann Ludwig Burckhardt

Following a recent trip to Petra, the ancient city carved from rock in southern Jordan, I was struck by the entirely inadequate treatment given to the city's discovery in my guidebook. The history of its founders, the Nabateans, was discussed at length, but they were primitive and were only independent for a short while before being absorbed into the regional political systems, starting with the Romans. The Nabateans carved a lot of mountainsides, but they are nowhere near as interesting as the western travellers who braved all kinds of privations and bloodthirsty natives to "discover" the city two thousand years later. I had read briefly about the first one in an unrelated book on Egypt, and wanted to know more.

So on a slow day at work, I decided to consult some of the original sources. I started with the diaries of the first explorer,Johann Ludwig Bruckhardt, a Swiss traveller who had set out from Cairo to find the source of the Niger and ended up way of course, disguised as a wandering holyman. His disguise was so convincing, that he was adopted by the locals as a sort of saint, and his today enshrined in Cairo in a Muslim graveyard. I read his first-hand account of shedding all of his belongings before entering Petra, knowing that what he had would be stolen, only to have his remaining rags of clothing lifted from him in his sleep. My edition of his journals was published in 1829 following Bruckhardt's untimely death by the British "Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior of Africa".

I turned to the fantastical journals written by the New York lawyer John Lloyd Stephens, who for the journey transformed himself into Abdel Hasis, "a respectable Cairo merchant, dressed in flowing robes and armed with a brace of pistols." He describes his entrance through the canyons as "the most extraordinary that Nature, in her wildest freaks, ever framed… it is perhaps the most wonderful object in the world, except the ruins in the city to which it forms the entrance." Stephens, unlike Bruckhardt and other early explorers did not encounter significant resistance from the local Arabs, a point he laments at length.
I even stumbled across a 2nd edition of "Petra", the epic and not very good poem by John Wiliam Burgon where I re-read the famous description of the ruins being "A rose-red city, half as old as time!" The exclamation is Burgon's, one of many he seems to like to use!

So how did I manage to have these classics of exploration literature in my consultant's team room? Why by Google Book Search, of course. I have known about this resource for some time, but I see now that the scope of the books made available online is reached stunning proportions; just about every classic of exploration I can think of: Burton, Shackelton, and even my ultimate hero, Col. F.M. Bailey (who loyal readers will remember from my Uzbekistan posts) are all there in the original editions. The text is all indexed and searchable, and as all these books are long since in the public domain, they can be read at leisure.

The user interface is good, but not great, although it contains a lot of nifty features such as a list of all the references and cross-references made in other books. I was browsing the Google Reader blog, where I learned that they have made a mobile client for the Android platform, which actually may be a compelling reason to buy an Android phone (need to check if there is a good podcast client, like what I have on my Nokia/Symbian phone).

Many of the classics of historical/travel writing genre which I have come to love, such as the books written by William Dalrymple, Alan Moorehead, and of course Peter Hopkirk, were based mostly on the primary sources created by the original wave of explorers themselves, backed up with extensive travel of their own. The digitization of the primary sources makes them accessible to lay travellers such as myself, who can create their own scaled-down works of travel literature, such as... this blog.