Accounts of My Travels: Exploring a World Abroad

By F. Peter Boer

The authors course of business and personal travel has taken him to seven continents and well over a hundred countries in over fifty years, and to some venues many dozens of times. His love of geography and wildlife has led him to explore the Polar Regions, the African savanna, and the Amazon rain forest. His diverse interests in history, archaeology, technology, and the environment have given him an integrated perspective on the nature of our planet and how our present situation came to be. In this volume, he shares his adventures, experiences, and reflections for future generations of travelers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 18, 2010
• ISBN: 9781456830564

F. Peter Boer

Dr. F. Peter Boer has viewed the education process from the perspective of a student, a graduate, a parent, a teacher, and a senior advisor. He has been formally affiliated with seven prestigious universities over a fifty-year career. A Princeton graduate and a Harvard PhD, he is the author of seven books and a hundred papers on science, technology, and finance. He has taught technology finance and environmental engineering at Yale University and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. His real-world experience blends the perspectives of a board director, a top corporate executive, an R&D manager, and a scientific professional.

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Copyright © 2011 by F. Peter Boer.

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Contents

Preface

Time Traveler

Dinosaurs

Human origins

Hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, and agriculturalists

History

Chapter 1 Farewell to Hungary

Perspectives

Chapter 2 Back to Europe

Summer in Germany (1958)

A Grand Tour

My Second Trip to Russia (1966)

Chapter 3 Going Global

Global coordinator

Asia/Pacific

Japan

Hong Kong, Singapore, and Bali

Australia and the way home

India and the Neem Tree

Chapter 4 Cruises

A Dozen Cruises

Greek isles

Galapagos

Turkey and the Sea Cloud (1994)

Circumnavigating Arabia (1996)

The South Seas (1998)

Western Mediterranean (1999)

Baltic (2000)

The Panama Canal (2004)

Belize (2008)

Bahamas—Dearma’s Cruise (2009)

Antarctica (January 2001)

Greenland and Baffin Island (2004)

The Aleutians and Kamchatka (2006)

Alaska Cruise (2007)

Svalbard and the White Sea (2007)

The Polar Bears of Churchill (2008)

Chapter 5 Africa

East Africa (1972)

Southern Africa

The first trip: South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Botswana (1993)

Ellen’s account of the 1993 trip

Namibia, Zimbabwe, Madagascar, and South Africa (1996)

South Africa and Zimbabwe (1997)

South Africa and Botswana (1998)

South Africa and Botswana (1999)

Bash in the Bush (2001)

Film, digital, and the diaries

Sveni and Lion Sands (2005)

The massacre at Singita’s 40K Pan (2009)

Timbuktu, the Niger River, and Casamance (2006)

Morocco

Libya and Tunisia (2006)

Egypt (1983)

Chapter 6 Asia

China (1989)

Tibet and South China (2007)

Mongolia (2008)

Turkestan (2009)

Kazakhstan

Kyrgyzstan

Uzbekistan

Tajikistan

Turkmenistan

Caucasus (2010)

Armenia (2010)

Georgia

Azerbaijan

India (2005)

Japan (1975-2006)

Far Eastern Highlights

Thailand (1991, 1994, 2008)

Laos (2008)

Hong Kong

Taiwan (1992, 1994)

Korea 1994 and 2006

Singapore (1976) and Malaysia (1994)

Vietnam (1994, 2008)

Cambodia (2008)

Israel (1981-2003)

Chapter 7 Europe

Italy (1960-2008)

France (1958-2010)

British Isles (1960-2010)

Scotland (1980)

Ireland (1991-2009)

Germany (1958-2009)

Other European Gems

Spain and Portugal (1972-2009)

Switzerland (1958-2010)

Low Countries (1966-2010)

Russia (1990-2010)

Yugoslavia (1973)

Malta (2009)

Chapter 8 Fabulous Travels Around the World

Choteau, Montana (1998)

Mayas and Incas (1975, 1987, 1990)

Latin America

The Amazon

Australia (1976-2005)

Epilogue

Dedication

Throughout my travels, my partner has been my wife Ellen. She has enriched them immeasurably. My instincts when traveling tend to run to the completeness and the context of the experience. My writing style, as a professional scientist, tends to be concise and dry. Ellen’s contributions have been in two dimensions. She is adept in networking with the people she encounters, sometimes professionals and sometimes random encounters, to enhance our experiences. From our very first trip to Kenya, she found the right guides and the best places through conversations with other travelers. That is how we found our guide/driver Nasser in East Africa, our superb local guide in Luxor, and the aristocratic Indian lady who enriched our first visit to Mumbai.

Ellen has been tireless in finding the better hotels and the best deals in cruise ship and airline travel. In this, we are driven by value, not absolute cost. An approach she has pioneered is to start with the itineraries used by reputable travel organizations: especially university alumni tours and museums. These all rely on local travel organizations, and these are often happy to adapt their group programs to private parties: critical benefits for us have been improved itineraries, better hotels, and the best guides and vehicles. The local agents are usually good because they have been vetted by travel experts, and they know the amount of time visits require, the transportation details, and museum closings. We are free to add value creators based on award miles to improve accommodations, generally difficult in package tours. In a nutshell, she starts with a proven itinerary, works with the best people, and adapts it to our own tastes. This takes time and an abundance of correspondence, which Ellen has contributed in large measure. More recently, it is made easier by the Internet, and by sites such as Travel Advisor, to which she regularly contributes.

Preface

My urge to travel must have been inborn. Even as a young boy, I was conscious that I had somehow been born in Europe, and I was driven to understand it better. I knew I had once spoken the Hungarian language quite fluently. Amazingly, though I had forgotten every word; the benefit of that loss is I speak with no accent. I was unconsciously preparing myself to explore the Old World, learning Latin and French in secondary school and starting Russian in college. These were instincts not shared by every teenager.

Then having earned and saved a modest sum for a summer’s work at Bethlehem Steel, I decided to spend the following summer (1958) in Germany, to add yet another foreign language. Rather quickly, with these basics, other European languages—Dutch, Italian, Polish—became comprehensible. When serious understanding was unrealistic, I would still master enough characters to read street signs and learn a few phrases to try to follow the conversation, as with Greek, Japanese, and Swahili.

I repeated the pattern in 1960, traveling with Princeton classmate Gus Lewis across much of Europe, including my first visit to the Soviet Union. Sputnik, launched in 1958, had been a wake-up call that insularity was not an option for America’s future nor therefore for mine. So these early trips were driven in part by my consciousness of the international nature of science but also by pure curiosity.

Many of the places I visited were outside the cultural horizon of Nichols, the private school in Buffalo where I first encountered history. Indeed, they were even regarded as niche areas out of the mainstream at Princeton University. These trips widened horizons in many other ways, especially the scope of history, the interrelations of different nations, and the beauties and influence of geography, geology, and wildlife. In a sense, I developed the determination that to know the world, I had to see it, and in that context, to study its history and how its people have interacted, say, nominally, for the past four thousand years. That is a big undertaking, far beyond what one can absorb as a college student. It has taken me a half-century or more; it will never be finished, and it has been a tremendous amount of fun.

It started with low-budget travel. Fortunately, I have never minded spartan conditions, and that attitude is still necessary to go to some places. In later years, I developed the option of high-end travel, which also can broaden one’s view about the better things in life. I have taken some risks, though I think foolish risks are foolish. Risk adds stimulus to experience, for the real world is not Disney World.

I told my future wife, Ellen, possibly on a hillside at Mount Holyoke, that if she married me, she would see the world. This promise was certainly not enough to seal the deal, but she was forewarned. She soon traveled with me to Europe and Russia for the first time. She was not then fully converted. As discussed below when I suggested a safari, she dismissed it as too risky, saying that if I wanted to visit zoos, there were plenty closer by. I won that discussion, and she was hooked—back to Africa a dozen times.

She added a dimension to my travels—she liked the best accommodations we could afford. That was a benefit. On the other hand, she passed on two excellent trips because some of the accommodations were primitive. But she is now quite fearless about the unknown and also quite willing to travel on her own, whether in Europe or in Africa.

To be fair, a lifetime of travel has its price. Jet lag, both on the first days of a trip and upon returning home, is a drag. Air travel surprises, security and border bureaucracies, visas, petty theft, and occasional rudeness create a measure of annoyance. But these are made up by the surprising hospitality one receives in most parts of the world. Also, unless one travels with a group, abundant time is required for a well-planned itinerary. (The Internet has made this easier.) Some groups and guides are very good, by the way; and through self-selection, they get better, the more obscure and the more expensive the itinerary. But the weakness of groups is that they too often include people that are not fun to travel with.

Travel grows on one as other interests wane. I find spectator sports and conventional mass entertainment (movies, TV) significantly less interesting than I once did. These forms of content disappear from memory with incredible speed and barely compete for my attention. History, on the other hand, grows richer the more one learns of history itself and the factors that create history such as geography, technology, and economics. And it is more fun to walk into a real tomb in Egypt or China than to watch a Tomb Raider reenactment.

One doesn’t just decide to travel to exotic locations. There is the matter of time, the matter of money, and the matter of common sense. Getting there is only a third of the experience: selecting the site and planning the itinerary is another third. Research, both pretrip and post-trip, to put what one has seen in context, is the most enriching third. Practically speaking, guided tours move much too fast for reflection, for reasons of logistics and because of limited attention spans. Adjust your planning for these realities. Finally, planning must take into account the realities of life cycles. Young people cannot usually afford long periods away from their jobs, or expensive travel budgets. Later in life, the expenses may be less daunting, but time is still an issue. There may be a sweet spot at retirement.

In my case, my work brought me to many new places because it contained an international component. Knowledgeable business colleagues enhance your experience in any foreign city. You can use the weekend to add some culture. Given the costs and time of getting to an international destination, once the initial bill is paid, one should not lightly pass up the opportunity to see what there is to see. The local attractions are not only valuable of themselves; but they synthesize your historical, cultural, and geographic experience.

This book aims at providing the reader a perspective on what the world holds for a curious traveler. There already exists a wonderful notion of seeing the 1,000 best places before you die, popularized in books and websites. My tale of travel begins long before such a checklist was conceived. It covers a significant portion of these sites but attempts to put them in the perspective of modern history, earlier history, technology, economics, and geography. That may help a reader order her/his priorities, but her own research and interests will carry her yet further.

A thousand sites is a lot to cover. At one per week, it requires twenty years. Some sites, like Easter Island, are so remote that the cost/benefit equation is questionable, even if the bragging rights are impressive. Later in life, physical limitations rather than money may become the limiting issue (trekking in the Himalayas cannot be postponed too long). Still, during my travels, I have been impressed by the number of intrepid elderly adventurers soldiering on to see more and more while time remains.

In any case, seeing it all was never my goal. My approach began with trips with a useful purpose and then progressed to trips inspired by curiosity and adventure. This progression[1] through the psychological levels of safety, curiosity, and synthesis has brought me to well more than a hundred countries. It has had some scary moments, but it has been fun.

My emphasis too will be on the unique places and experiences: I see no need to describe essential but well-documented sights such as the Tower of London, the Louvre, Piazza San Marco, the Parthenon, or the Great Wall, spectacular and interesting as they may be. But what are off the beaten track will be my tale: Kwando Labala, Banpo, Elephant Island, Ouzazarte, and Falun—these are worth describing. Some of these places are quite fragile and will never be accessible in the same way. The rich wildlife on the Nile River in Uganda has been obliterated during a period of political chaos. Yemen has joined a substantial number of places where kidnap risk has become an important consideration. Old Buddhist statues in Afghanistan have been demolished by fanatics. There was a time one could walk freely around Stonehenge or the Athenian Acropolis and when Angkor was a remote location; now all these sites have been spoiled by the need for security and crowd control.

In some ways though, travel has become easier and more productive. Infrastructure across the world is improving. Travel specialist firms have expanded itineraries and access to new sites. The Internet in general and Wikipedia in particular can be used to enrich the experience, as well as avoid making poor choices. These sources complement the guides who only have so much time and are constrained by budgets and the reality that clients have different interests and sometimes short attention spans. Digital photography has vastly increased the power of the camera, eliminated all the drawbacks of film, and allows one to print an image or view it on a brilliantly lit screen. One can photo edit the best images and readily publish them in the form of physical or virtual photo albums.

Time Traveler

Traveling back in time is physically impossible but quite possible in imagination. But physical travel is an important part of it because it creates the visual frame in which imagination takes root. Without that concrete element, time travel drifts into fantasy. History, not only the history of war and conquest, but the history of trade, commerce, and technology, are equally important to time travel.

Dinosaurs

Consider time travel to the Mesozoic, the age of dinosaurs. The imaginative part begins with children’s books about this fascinating age. It is soon supplemented by the tangible evidence of fossilized skeletons in the great museum collections of the world—my favorites have been the classic collections at the American Museum of Natural History, or AMNH (New York), and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. But the collections that are very special are the Royal Tyrell Museum in the Alberta Badlands (with great stuff from China); the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana; and Yale’s Peabody Museum, which is redolent of both the great nineteenth-century rivalry[2] of Obadiah Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, and the cutting edge of modern paleontological research.[3]

As preparation for my travels, I studied[4] a tome on vertebrate technology, not that I had the background to completely understand it. My first trip to the field was a museum-sponsored 1998 trip with my daughter Alexa to a rich boneyard, sixty-five million years old, near Choteau, Montana, with a full week in the field. The second, in 2008, was with AMNH and Mark Norrell to see both new discoveries and the 1920s digs of Roy Chapman Andrews in Mongolia. It also gave me a chance to see the small but very interesting natural history museum in Ulan Bator and the modern prep labs there where Philip Currie, a founder of the Royal Tyrell, brought his work to life.

Most work today is not about finding new species or preparing museum exhibits: it is getting clues about dinosaur development and their relationship to other species and to the environment.

This sequence illustrates the principle of time travel: preparation via books and other sources for the visit, travel to the site, dialogue with the experts, and then follow-up on the many still unanswered questions.

Human origins

The physical part of this journey of three million years began inadvertently during our trip to East Africa in 1972. We recognized a name on a map, Olduvai Gorge, connected it to lectures we had heard from Louis Leakey at Harvard in 1965, and decided to explore. There we found Mary Leakey, herself an anthropologist and the discoverer of the fossil Homo habilis, considered the earliest specimen of the Homo genus. We took a second shot at anthropological sites in 2001 when we twice visited the Sterkfontein site near Johannesburg, where six hundred skeletons of a 2.6-million-year-old hominid, Australopithecus africanus, were discovered. We were accompanied by anthropologist Colin Menter.

There are excellent books and frequent articles (especially in Science magazine) on early human origins, not to mention considerable rivalry and controversy among the experts. These provide some of the nonphysical aspects to the time travel, for in truth, a casual look at a skull tells relatively little. These expeditions took us to the beginning of the Pleistocene period. Ironically, among my original motivations to see African game was that the animals like the rhinoceros and the giraffe were relatively primitive and redolent of Pleistocene times. The parallel human aspect came as a bonus.

A quite different time period for human origins is available in limestone caves in southwestern France. The most famous is Lascaux, closed to the public except in facsimile. It dates from about sixteen thousand years ago, late in the last Ice Age. Other nearby caves such as Font de Gaume offer the real thing. Wall paintings of stags, bulls, mammoths, and other game abound. The creators were anatomically modern men, and one must believe they belonged to a society where hunting large game was central to their existence.

Hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, and agriculturalists

The prehistory of the human race must have seen fantastic competition between these three social models, and time travelers can see the gist of it. There are remnants of hunter-gatherer societies today, including San bushmen in Namibia and South Africa, Australian aborigines, and North American Inuits.

Hunter-gatherer societies were low-density affairs, limited by the amount of game and forage that nature served up on a sustainable basis. They obviously were capable of causing extinction of large vulnerable game, such as the mammoth and ground sloth, whose extinction coincided with the arrival of the Clovis culture in North America. The Inuits at least had a tradition of raiding, but warfare was not an automatic part of their society. Hunter-gatherers in general traveled light and were not enamored of large permanent structures or elaborate possessions as agriculturalist societies later on.

History

I have always been a history buff; and for many years, this has been my major source of recreational reading, with an emphasis on military history. It includes some major tomes such as Winston Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples and The Second World War, Samuel Eliot Morison’s fifteen-volume History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I have read most of the Greek sources in the (translated) original: Thucydides, Herodotus, and Xenophon. Recent reading has included detailed histories of the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Mexican War; and on the English side, biographies of Mary, Queen of Scots; Charles II; Marlborough; George III; and Wellington; and accounts of the naval race leading to the battle of Jutland. Norwich’s history of Venice is great, and Frederick II is one of the more intriguing European personalities. More exotically, biographies of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane and a history of the British Raj have illuminated my feel for the turbulent history of Central and South Asia.

Most importantly, history has illuminated my travel experiences, and my travel experiences have illuminated history. Nations have always impacted neighboring nations, for good and ill. How they have done so over millennia is absolutely fascinating; to understand this, one has to learn the chronologies of many parts of the world, but it is well worth doing so. I also look at history from a technological and economic viewpoint. It is important to know what resources people had at a time and place to understand why they behaved as they did.

Chapter 1

Farewell to Hungary

I suppose the most basic reason for travel is survival. So it was with my first trip, which took my mother and me from extreme peril in Hungary to the safety of her family in western New York. The circumstances surrounding that trip were very unique; I have never met anyone with a remotely similar experience. It came as a result of a young family trying to map its future and then caught up in the most momentous political upheaval in the twentieth century. Fortunately all survived, and the experience was very interesting; but there were some very close calls.

To set the scene,[5] my mother, Flora, was to have a very eventful odyssey in her short life. Shortly after she completed her graduate work in chemistry at Ohio State in 1936, she and her mother made a tour of the old country, Hungary (all her family could speak Hungarian—the last generation to do so). It was there while driving along the road that they had an automobile breakdown, and a young physician who assisted them introduced himself to Flora. A brief romance blossomed and continued by letter after Flora and her mother had returned to America. Frank invited her back, and they were married in Hungary in 1937 in a large wedding. They set up an apartment (my first home) in Budapest on Podmanski Street, which was elegant in an art nouveau style. I was born there in November 1940.

At that time, Hungary was still a neutral country but would soon enter World War II as an ally of Nazi Germany. The war soon went badly for Hungary, and their lightly armed army was decimated by the Soviets’ counteroffensive at Voronezh in the summer of 1942, as a prelude to the upcoming German disaster in Stalingrad. My father was recruited into the army as a physician. After the retreat, he essentially walked back to Budapest and owed his survival in part to his ability to prescribe medicine and drugs.

With its liberation by the Russians in December 1944, Budapest briefly became an open city, meaning that all the Allied powers including the Americans theoretically had access to it. Two of my relatives were serving with the American infantry on the western front. Also, my uncle (later Congressman John R. Pillion) was in a position as a New York State assemblyman to exert some influence at home. Somehow, they managed to arrange for my mother, my sister, and me to board an American military plane to Paris in January 1946. Unlike Flora and her two children, who were American citizens, my father was not permitted to leave the country with the family; it would be over a year before we could negotiate his exit.

We stayed in Paris for approximately three months, proceeded to Le Havre, and boarded the Swedish liner Gripsholm. This was one of the last voyages of the Gripsholm as a ship chartered by the U.S. government to return displaced persons to their homes. Shortly thereafter, she returned to Sweden, received extensive renovations, and returned to commercial service as a luxury liner. The ship records show Flora arrived on March 23, 1946, and was thirty-seven years old at the time. We were met by the family in New York harbor and proceeded to my new home in Lackawanna, New York. I recall few details about the trip out of Hungary; most of my memories are that it was cold and I was airsick and seasick.

In modern travel terms, the trip seems almost normal: an airplane flight to Paris, a sojourn in France, and a cruise to New York. It was anything but, fraught with uncertainty and with a rugged transatlantic passage on a tired and overcrowded ship. And in some ways, it was ten years ahead of its time. Until I was in college, I traveled by train or by car, never a commercial airliner; for the jet age was many years off. I would next take a cruise boat ten years later after my freshman college year—a so-called student ship, for the cheaper transatlantic flights were on propeller-driven planes, which made multiple refueling stops in places like Gander, Newfoundland; Reykjavik, Iceland; and Shannon, Ireland.

I don’t remember much about Paris, but I do have vivid memories of war. The Russian tanks that rolled past my grandfather’s house in Nagymaros were covered with mud and frequently had a half dozen or more infantrymen hanging on for the ride. The tanks of the German First Panzer division were immaculately clean. Air raids, often by American bombers, were a dangerous fact of life; and we sought shelter in the basements in Budapest and in caves in the countryside.

Perspectives

In 1984, our family visited Budapest and Nagymaros in Hungary to trace our roots as best we could. We learned that the family homestead in Nagymaros was now below a superhighway, so there was little to see there other than the beautiful Danube. Nagymaros was to be the site of an international controversy with Slovakia over the completion of a major dam, which is still to be resolved.

The apartment building with an art nouveau theme, in which my mother and father lived in the late ’30s and early ’40s in Budapest, is still very much there. The residents were curious whether we were seeking reparations as part of our visit. We stayed at the Budapest Hilton, which offers Roman ruins right in the hotel and a great view of Hungary’s magnificent Houses of Parliament. The Gundel Restaurant was outstanding.

Of course, we got to Hungary via Vienna, a town full of the baroque splendor of the Hapsburg dynasty. It is a great town to walk in, drink local wine, and sample the wonderful treats that are served at the many konditerei.

Near Vienna, in a town now called Bratislava, is the former Hungarian capital of Pressburg. This city was once about half Hungarian and half German but is now predominantly Slovak. I visited it in 2006 to promote one of my books, which had been translated into the Czech language (very similar to Slovak). The Hungarian roots of this town had much to do with Turkish invasions in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. The kingdom of Hungary was defeated by the Ottoman Empire in the Battle of Mohács in 1526. Shortly thereafter, the Siege of Vienna in 1529 marked the first attempt by the Ottoman Empire, then led by Suleiman the Magnificent, to capture the city of Vienna. The Turks also besieged and damaged Pressburg but failed to conquer it.

Owing to Ottoman advances into Hungarian territory, the city was designated the new capital of Hungary in 1536 and became part of the Austrian Habsburg monarchy. The city became a coronation town for the empire and the seat of kings, archbishops (1543), the nobility, and all major organizations and offices.

The Turks would try again in the seventeenth century, led by the Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa. In the battle of Vienna fought on September 12, 1683, the Turkish forces were routed by a less numerous combination of Polish, German, and Austrian forces led by the Polish king, John Sobieski; and their long retreat in the Balkans began. Nonetheless, the legacy of the Ottoman invasions has had a profound effect on Hungary, Greece, and the Slavic countries to the south, once united as Yugoslavia.

What happened to Budapest, the city where I was to be born in 1940? The Ottomans pillaged Buda in 1526, besieged it in 1529, and finally occupied it in 1541. The Turkish occupation lasted for more than 140 years! The unoccupied western part of the country became part of the Habsburg Empire as Royal Hungary. After the second Siege of Vienna, the Holy League forces reconquered Buda; and in the next few years, most of the former Hungarian lands were taken from the Turks, and Hungary was then incorporated into the Habsburg Empire.

One effect of Turkish rule was to shelter Hungary from the Counter-Reformation; and as a result, Calvinism developed strong roots there, especially in the eastern part of the country. The Pillion family, probably of Huguenot origin, belonged to the Hungarian Reformed Church; while the Boers,