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In March this year I finally realized my long-dreamed ambition of circling around the globe in one direction. Hereafter are some brief stories from each stop.
London: Air India and British food
To my pleasant surprise, my $244 flight on Air India from Chicago to London Heathrow was on time and very empty, which had not been the case for me before. I was able to lie down on three seats and have a good night of sleep, after a delicious lamb curry dinner.
I had breakfast with my high school friend Xuan at Heathrow, who came all the way from east London to meet me. After a traditional English breakfast, which we could not finish due to its horrible taste, I boarded a Qatar Airways flight to Nairobi via Doha.
Nairobi: Contrast and nature
Another high school friend, Liang, picked me up from the airport. I was shocked by the fact that his company equips him with a car and a designated driver. Liang works for a Chinese telecommunications company in Nairobi, capital of Kenya. He and his colleagues live in a heavily guarded, luxurious apartment complex with some European diplomats at the edge of the city. In his apartment complex there is a gym, a swimming pool, a sauna, and a spa. Besides designated drivers, Liang and his colleagues also have a fitness trainer, an on-site cook, a house cleaner, and a laundry lady.
I would have never imagined the expatriates in sub-Saharan Africa living in this fashion.
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| Standing on a cliff overlooking Lake Nakuru; the pink color in the lake is the flamingos |
Downtown Nairobi looks very fancy. There are skyscrapers, international conference centers, five-star hotels, and casinos. But just blocks away from the elegant city center there are a number of slums, which form a sharp contrast. Locals warned me not to go into the slums because of the glue-sniffing street boys. They said even locals would get robbed there. According to the Associated Press, about a third of Nairobi’s total population, at least 700,000 people, is crammed into a single square mile in Kibera, one of the slums in the outskirt of Nairobi, with little access to running water and other basic services.
I took a daytrip to Lake Nakuru National Park, two hours away from Nairobi. The lake is world famous as the location of the greatest bird spectacle on earth—myriads of fuchsia pink flamingos whose numbers are legion, often more than a million—or even two million. Besides flamingos, I also saw wild zebras, giraffes, baboons, rhinos, waterbucks, and many animals whose names are unknown to me, for the first time in my life. It was an eye-opening day for me.
Arusha and Dar es Salaam: Heaven of peace
I took a five-hour coach from Nairobi to Arusha. The “highway” between these two major cities in East Africa was very bumpy, with frequent checkpoints set up by militants. My great experience in Arusha can be found in my other article: “Newsletter from Tanzania.”
I went with my friend Sarah on a nine-hour bus ride to Dar es Salaam, the largest city in Tanzania, to have a meeting with the director of the Ministry of Social Welfare and Health of Tanzania. It is surprising how easily one can meet with high officials in Tanzania. Alongside the road from Arusha to Dar es Salaam were plenty of the beautiful baobab trees, as well as boys trying to sell everything possible—food, crafts, shoes, etc.—to the bus passengers.
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| Samaki and Zanzibar pizza |
In Arabic, Dar es Salaam means “heaven of peace.” Other than the unpleasant incident Sarah and I had in the central bus terminal of the city, where we were surrounded by more than ten men trying for over an hour to drag us onto their buses to Arusha, and charged 150% of the original price, Dar es Salaam was a peaceful experience. We witnessed a beautiful sunset by the warm Indian Ocean, tasted a wonderful combination of goat meat with pilau, and enjoyed the wake-up music every morning at 5AM from a mosque nearby our hotel.
I would love to end my Tanzania story with a mention of samaki, Swahili for fish. When I first had the grilled samaki and Zanzibar (an island off the coast of Tanzania) pizza with my hands in Arusha, together with a bottle of the local beer, Safari, I thought was in heaven. I went back to heaven again for a few more times during the rest of my stay in Tanzania.
Dubai: The story behind the skyscrapers
I landed in Dubai, the main city in the United Arab Emirates from Nairobi. The first thing that attracted my attention at the airport was the large number of men in traditional Arabic dress—the scarf-like head cover, the black band surrounding the top of the head, and the long-sleeved one-piece dress that covers the whole body. The second thing that attracted my attention were the long lines at the custom, primarily composed of people who look like coming from the Indian subcontinent.
I took a 30-minute taxi ride from the airport. The Pakistani taxi-driver spent the whole time telling me the unfairness he had seen between Arabic workers and those from the Indian subcontinent. His name was Asher. The story began from the taxi stand by the airport. Asher was cut in line by an Arabic taxi-driver. He was very angry: “He thinks he is Arabic and they are better than us!”
From there, Asher started telling me stories behind the booming Dubai economy, stories of the workers from the Indian subcontinent. He pointed to the erecting skyscrapers along the highway, telling me that most workers there are from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, or Bangladesh. They work at dangerous places way above the ground with minimum protections, getting paid only minimum wage.
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| Asher and I at Dubai airport |
He saw a bus passing by, and told me that for the bus driver job, one gets paid at least twice as much if he holds an Arabic passport, such as a Saudi or Lebanese passport, than a driver doing the same job from Pakistan or India. Similarly, for office jobs, even if a local worker only works three hours a day, and uses the rest of his work time speaking to his girlfriend on the phone, he will still get paid three times or even five times higher than a worker doing the same job who works very hard but is from Pakistan or India. The same is true for his profession.
Asher shares a one-bedroom apartment with six other Pakistanis because they cannot afford to stay in the city that they are building otherwise. Asher complains that a 25 UAE dirham (approximately $7) calling card only allows him to call home for 5 minutes. Asher’s dream is to save up enough money so he can go back to Pakistan and open his own mobile phone store.
Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Tokyo: Charm of Asia
From Dubai I flew to Hong Kong, an exciting city even after midnight. There I had a tour of Central, the financial district of Hong Kong, at six in the morning given by my college roommate Calvin. Calvin has a 2:30PM–4:30AM work schedule. He has to follow the business hours of the New York Stock Exchange and London Stock Exchange because he is a stockbroker. From Hong Kong I took a two-hour train to my hometown, Guangzhou, where I grew up and where my parents still live.
I spent five homey days in Guangzhou, eating all the delicious food I was able to accommodate, before I set out to the last stop of my journey, Tokyo. In Ueno, a downtown area of Tokyo, I met with my former roommate of the Cosmopolitan House, Sayuri Koda. That day was Sayuri’s first day of work after college at JICA, Japan International Cooperation Agency. The agency helps regional countries fight poverty and improve education, health, agriculture and the environment. Sayuri will receive training in Tokyo for half a year before she is deployed to work in a third-world country either in Asia or in Africa.
That night, per Sayuri’s recommendation, I stayed in a capsule hotel. Capsule hotels are designed for men who work overtime and thus miss the last train home, or too drunk to go home. I was denied entry at the first capsule hotel because I did not speak any Japanese. I got into the second capsule hotel, and spent the first two hours of my stay exploring its amenities: the sit-down shower, the “toothpasted” toothbrush, the sauna, the vending machines, and the outdoor spa.
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| One floor of capsule hotel | A capsule hotel “room” | Sayuri and I at the capsule hotel |
Each person is required to take off their shoes before entering the hotel, and leave the shoes in a locker whose key is only given back upon successful checkout. Each guest is given another locker on the floor where he stays, where he is expected to change to the bathrobe placed in the locker before he goes to shower or to sleep. Each “room” in the capsule hotel is equipped with a small TV, a radio, and an alarm clock. Accompanied by my neighbors’ snoring, I slept very well that night.
The rest of my stay in Tokyo was short, yet fascinating. It includes one hour and a half of walking around Ueno looking for an ATM machine that would take my MasterCard; it includes eye-witnessing drunk businessmen hitting and laughing at each other on the subway at 11 o’clock at night, and around one third of the subway riders reading or watching something on their mobile phones; it includes unexpectedly running into dozens of homeless people sleeping in paper boxes outside the Ueno train station; it also includes being amused by seeing western travelers looking at the giant, spider-web like Tokyo subway map, which has little Roman characters on it, completely clueless.
I concluded my long-dreamed journal with a greeting of “welcome home” by the custom officer at the Chicago O’Hare airport. Will I do such kind of trip again, seeing more of our gorgeous planet earth, and visiting more international friends in the future? You bet!