Allemansrätten and the land of infinites
There is an inexplicable sense of freedom when you drive your car on holiday. It’s an open book, it can get you anywhere. A van epitomises this kind of traveling, a tool for the eternal road trip.
My first vanlife exploration brought me to unknown parts of Germany and Scandinavia, concretely Denmark and Sweden. In 18 days enjoying the pleasures of Ohfy, a middle aged but healthy VW T4, Freya and I had a blast through the great natures of the North. Oh, the North.
Robert, a danish friend I met in Vietnam’s Cat Ba, texted me I was about to enjoy the summer of a lifetime. So, in a sense, I cheated the true Scandinavan experience, none other than cold and rain. Lucky me, lucky us.
The first days were exciting; sleeping in the middle of Leipzig, a small version of Berlin, hiding from neighbours and Police, but truly exploiting what having a van with a bed means. I discovered the immense pleasure to have a house on wheels. Potentially, a very cheap option of traveling to the grueling lands of Northern Europe, the rich and expensive nations for southerners like me, a Spanish guy and, adding to it, an active globetrotter.
The excitement of breaking the rules –without bad intentions– was intense those two nights. Then it dissipated and gave way to the problem with van roaming in most Western countries. You’re not allowed to roam free, and you’re quickly robbed from your idea of the ideal road trip. Most European countries won’t allow you to freely enjoy an essential feature of your van: sleep in it.
What? That’s not fun!
Luckily, it wasn’t difficult to respectfully skip the rules in Denmark (sorry?), where there’s not much control on campers on most of the country –overnight sleep is tolerated in rastplats (rest areas). In Sweden, a place where Allemansrätten is not only respected but enhanced, it wasn’t an issue at all. Allemansrätten is a principle of ´freedom to roam’ that applies to everyone and gives us the capacity to freely enjoy the land.
Bam!, that’s what I was looking for.
Now I quote the Swedish tourist board: “Sweden has no Eiffel Towers. No Niagara Falls or Big Bens. Not even a little Sphinx. Sweden has something else – the freedom to roam. This is our monument”. Indeed, it is a great monument to something we are mistreating repeatedly: nature.
With less than 12 basic rules you must follow, all of them common sense, the Swedes actually offer what a road trip needs best: no boundaries, no limitations except the ones covered by respect and common sense. And needless to say, the Swedish do take nature and environment quite seriously. Not by banning or restricting, rather doing the opposite, they grow an environmental consciousness like no other.
Driving through Sweden I got to feel very small. The long straight lines, the majestuous forests endlessly expanding on each side of the van. There you never felt a need to rush, and with the passing of every day, with our little mobile home getting us to a new place, the awareness of how pure nature was in those lands overtook me. How precious this land is, I thought.
By being able to go anywhere, to step on any hill and swim on any lake, my respect for nature and wildlife grew significantly. And that was in only two weeks. I never saw plastic bottles floating in the water or papers laying on the floor. In more than nine months, three continents and fifteen countries, this was never the case. So the benefits of these policies seem clear to me.
Driving back to Germany, I reflected on reasons why the Swedish case is almost an exception. First one, easy: privatization rules the world today; every acre of land is exploitable. Giving freedom to roam can mess with this basic mantra of Capitalism. Other reasons such as the massification of tourism, scarcity of space or our general lack of respect for nature do play a role. Ultimately, I think it all resides in a question of culture and education.
If everyone would consider their own environment how Swedish do, thanks to this massive culture promoted by the Allemansrätten, we would benefit from a cleaner and healthier version of humanity. We would really share the land, and thus, we’d care more about what we do to it and how we do it.
It makes me sad to think I can’t camp anywhere I want back home. It’s banned, but really, someone can tell me why? I’m not planning to bother anyone nor messing with nature, my plan is to go my own way, enjoy the environment I was born in. Never lit a fire, never drive off-road, never litter the land. With common sense, there is no reason to actually deny me or others that right.
Unfortunately, what I felt in Sweden you can feel in a very few countries nowadays. And it’s a restriction that hurts, because it’s ours as all others, man-made.
Seaweed is killing the Caribbean
It’s another sunny day in the Caribbean. Everything is how it should be, how the pictures show you in the travel magazines and people tell you after their dream holidays. There are no clouds in the sky, the vegetation is rich and colourful; the Mango trees provide you with a natural and healthy breakfast. You put on your swim shorts and flip flops, get the car keys and sunscreen. You’re ready to go.
The air is warm and rich, and through the open window it flows. The palm trees look majestic on the roadside. You close in to the beach, but something is off. The idyllic setting is broken by a clenching stench, like if a big invisible sewer is hidden somewhere in there. The car takes a left, starts to progress up the cliff and the beach appears in the wing mirror.
It’s not white and shiny anymore, and the water is the opposite of crystal clear. Where’s the Caribbean turquoise trademark? Instead of the ocean blue, a big brownish mantle covers the beach. That mantle, formed by seaweed, is the origin of the striking smell. It’s not only ugly and smelly, it’s a danger for the people and the environment.
The Sargassum invasion
What covers the beautiful beaches in Guadeloupe, a small island in the French Antilles, is an algae species known as Sargassum. This species shouldn’t be in the hot waters of the Caribbean, but mysterious factors have made this phenomenon a recurrent problem since 2011. Scientists are still figuring out why this is happening, but they already know the issues posed to the local population and fauna.
I’ve been surfing in Le Petit Havre, a gorgeous beach close to my friend’s house, for a week now. Due to its location and the ocean currents, the Sargassum doesn’t strike as bad. It’s still present, floating through the lefts rising from the reef bottom. On a bad day, they tangle on your leash and you have to swim through a bunch of them to go on the lineup. They even become itchy after a long period of contact with the skin.
There are several risks when this algae accumulate in the sea and also once they reach the shore. Because they tangle together and form big brownish floating masses that stay captured by currents, certain reefs of the Caribbean Sea lose the sunlight that brings them to life. Sea turtles, for example, have been reported dead after stumbling with these foreign invaders.
Once inland, when it washes ashore, the Sargassum starts a process of fertilization that causes the most visible consequences to the population. “The algae will ferment for a week or so, depending on the weather. During that time, a mix of three gases will be released: about half is methane, which is non-toxic and odorless, the other half is ammoniac, which is also non-toxic, and 0.6% is hydrogen sulfide. H2S is very poisonous, even in small quantities. It attacks the eyes and nose, and stinks of rotten egg”, explains Didier Roux, of the Health and Environment department at the Agence Régionale de la Santé (ARS) in Guadeloupe, to Ocean71 magazine.
The smell and the brownish seaweed concentration that kills the views are just a warning of a bigger environmental issue. The phenomenon is believed to have its origins in the Amazon River estuary, where the heavy industry polluted waters clash with the Atlantic ocean. This discharge serves as the main nutrient for the growth of the Sargassum seaweed, a species only believed to exist in the Sargasso Sea.
The problem then swims away from Brazil to the Caribbean by the natural course of the currents, and the governments either can’t face the size of the issue or directly don’t want to put resources in it. The later is the case of the French Antilles and Guadeloupe. Paris doesn’t want to recognize the algae arrivals as natural disaster, which would force a straightforward intervention.
In Sainte-Anne, the main tourist spot in Guadeloupe, the houses in front of the sea boast of beautiful views and idyllic hammocks to take a siesta under the palmtrees. Walking around town though one cannot stand the foul smell of the Sargassum that amasses in the beaches. In the island, more than 50 cases of hospitalization have been registered due to the effects of toxic gas inhalation. It’s not only disgusting, it’s actually toxic.
The tourist focused economy, obviously, has also taken a hit in the last years. “An expert report updated in March 2017 by the French National Health Security Agency (ANSES) notes that in Guadeloupe, in 2015, several restaurants closed during the last seaweed invasion and that hotels have lost up to 50% of their annual turnover”, reports Repeating Islands, a website specialized in Caribbean news.
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Si vous vous interrogiez sur l’ampleur du phénomène #Sargasses en Martinique... (précisons qu’en plus de la largeur, il y a la profondeur du banc d’algues toxiques... le truc marronnasse là...) pic.twitter.com/m1FP70ClD0
— Audrey PULVAR (@AudreyPulvar) June 6, 2018
I wake up early in the morning, one last time, to say goodbye to the waves in Petit-Havre. It’s a good session among friends and seaweed, still present like every other day. After a quick shower and feeling rejuvenated by the ocean water, I head to the airport. I’m flying back to Europe via Martinique, another island in the region. Through the small plane windows, I gaze at the ocean and see lines and more lines of dark green and brown colour. A lot of them. The seaweed just keeps coming, and through a bird’s eye perspective, seems a task too big to be tackled only by the islanders.
Who’s gonna solve this problem?
P.S. The Sargassum seaweed personally didn’t affect my experience in the island. In a lot of the beaches, their presence is not as bad as it sounds. There are still good spots to enjoy the Caribbean lifestyle without smelling the rotten egg odour. In my opinion, this disaster shouldn’t kill the economy. Visiting Guadeloupe is still worth it, like the rest of the French Antilles and the Caribbean, I’m positive. Maybe you’ll skip some beaches, stay less in a certain town. It’s also good to see it in person and understand what human activity is doing to our ocean and to our world.
Osaka, a darker approach to Japan
It’s very very early in Namba Station. My legs are rustling after a seven hour incarceration in a night bus. It’s the only option to cross Japan on a budget, getting an overnight ride crowded by students. Like elsewhere, like us, they’re also tight on their pockets. Osaka welcomes us with clear weather, mild temperatures and a giant train station that requires more than 15 minutes of underground walk in order to cross it.
We resurface with our heavy backpacks near the Shinsekai area. We only have a five minute walk to our shared house. It is enough to be shocked by the unthinkable amount of homeless men on the streets. There’s a lot of them, and they seem to be concentrating in the neighbourhood, a dirty place with a lot of businesses, most of them showing signs of absolute desertion and closed blinds.
These men contemplate the new visitors without shame. Most of them speak English and blurt nonsense to us, probably looking for money or spare food to get by. Maybe they don’t even look for that, they’re just bored to sit on the sidewalks with nothing else to do than figure out how to get on with the day, a whisky or a beer their only valuables in their hands. It’s 7:30 AM, remember. The concentration of this middle-aged/old men –because there are notably no women around–, is truly remarkable. I’ve been to many places and never been shocked like that. We resume our path and get to our place, a traditional but modern lodge that has nothing to do with the rest of the neighbourhood.
Awakening in Kamagasaki
A bit of research and context situate us in the place where the most prominent Yakuza family was born –the Yamaguchi-gumi come from neighbouring Kobe–. This mafia area has now the cheapest housing on the city and, therefore, concentrates its poverty and most low key characters. At night, the pimps go around the avenues with the loudspeakers banging in their cars. The street indigents gather themselves in the 24h supermarket to make a meal out of whatever coins their pockets can produce.
As a tourist in Japan, and after five days of unblemished and beautiful Tokyo sightseeing, the shock lasts for a while. It’s still there, roughly a month after visiting Japan, when I’m writing these lines. Tokyo, a city that strikes for the lack of chaos in a 35 million people metropolitan area, projects an image of modernity, efficiency and perfection. A commonplace for Japan. Most European and American cities would crave to have the services that the government offers in the capital, but…
Osaka is an awakening for anyone who actually sets foot in it. Probably you would also need to land in the less favoured neighbourhoods to discover this veiled place of Japanese reality. Why are there so many elders piling in the streets of Kamagasaki? What’s going on with all the Mafia run businesses? Where are the neat metro stations and the spotless restaurants that can be seen all around gigantic Tokyo?
Well, in Osaka the answer is a complex one. It’s the city with the second highest unemployment rate in Japan, but it is only a ridiculous 4%. The statistic doesn’t explain why I see a concentration of a hundred homeless men in a park next to the supermarket nor why everyday I walk back to our place, an ambulance is assisting a comatose elder lying in the middle of the road. The sirens ring throughout the day. Are the stats for real?
Nope. There are more than 10 000 homeless people in Osaka, according to unofficial statistics that are currently outdated. An article on The Guardian sheds some light on this dark corner of the Japanese miracle:
“You hardly ever see women or children around here”, says Masaharu Takezawa, a former homeless man who is acting as the Guardian’s guide and unofficial minder as we pass groups of thin, weather-beaten men drinking cheap sake and occasionally hurling abuse at passing police cars. “It’s a man’s world. All they have to look forward to is an evening meal of cheap grilled meat and plenty to drink… and the freedom to sleep it off where they drop”, he says.
Drinking habits in Osaka seem stronger than in Tokyo. Bars are filled up and karaoke extravaganza conforms the daily tones of dusk. It is very interesting to see how Japan turns from the perfection of soon to be Olympic Tokyo to the depressed and murky streets and ambience of Osaka. It’s important to note that we’re in the second biggest city of the country.
The mafia won’t help
We have forgotten about the yakuza, an old organization that is indeed very contemporary and active. Here’s a bit of context extracted from another news article:
“The yakuza make the bulk of their money from extortion, real estate fraud, blackmail, insider trading, loan sharking, entertainment business management, drugs, and illegal gambling. They have powerful political connections, including Japan’s former minister of education, and there have been allegations, denied, that the vice president of Japan’s Olympic Committee has associated with them. The Yamaguchi-gumi, however, does say it bans dealing or using drugs”
We learn that the awesome Ramen shop we’re sitting in could easily be a mafia business. Lately, the yakuza have been profiting from the arcade craze and also from real state, which puts our surprisingly affordable accommodation into the same bag. It could be yakuza owned for all we know. The police don’t/can’t do much, and the mafia more or less wander around untouched. There is not much information around, it’s like waking up slowly to a reality hidden in plain sight.
There’s one last realization. It comes when I’m fully naked in one of Osaka’s famous spas. Nobody around has tattoos, and these are in fact forbidden in all facilities like that. Why? Because in Japan, tattooed people are related, mainly, with yakuza families. These are their marks, their pride. Spas avoid any problems by banning inked people inside, so mafia business and violence stays out of one of the favourite Japanese pastimes. Because its members are not there, one grasps how real the yakuza is.
So it is true, Japan is not so perfect whatever big data says. The gathering of more than a hundred homeless and drunkards that day opened our eyes. Osaka, and the lesser favoured neighbourhoods there –which never felt dangerous, it’s important to say–, are just a big wake up call for the curious visitor who wants to go beyond the tourist headlines.
P.S. The excellent work of Shiho Fukada gives a great visual insight of all explained here. I wasn’t able to capture what my eyes saw with the camera, something I now regret. Luckily, there are a lot of great photographers out there that have the actual guts to portray these sad realities.
Elemental lessons of a man on the move
Adventure requires courage. Travelling requires guts. Doing just that for a living is a precious treasure and a massive load. Although travelling is mostly leisure, at least for most people in the first world, it can also represent an obligation or a job.
Both merge into the figure of Sebstião Salgado, an economist turned into a world-acclaimed photographer that is also, above all, an excellent human being. There are a lot of critics, as usual, to his work. Of all this critics, most haven’t even moved a finger to tackle some of the issues of human condition and nature that Salgado has tackled over more than three decades of magnificent photography. So, no time to waste with them for now.
Salgado has been a man on the move for all his life, a soul adventurer with such sensibility that he turned his interest in photography as a mirror for us, modern societies, to look at all our collective embarrassment. The only way to that was to travel a lot, to get to remote places and all of those spots where most of us wouldn’t even dare to take a step. Nor acknowledge that these spaces conform a part in our reality. Wars, famines, death, slavery, that’s what he talks about.
There’s no explanation for it, but Salgado is an excellent storyteller. And he tells the most important stories, the ones we don’t hear about everyday. Those that remain hidden. I’m sure he only got so good at it because he gave up on his comfort zone when he was young to picture his peculiar travels. His eyes, and his words, even if just in his biopic ‘Le sel de la terre’, become a fast reminder of all human misery and, thankfully, hopefulness.
Let’s hear him a bit, now.
“They were not slaves, they were only slaves to the idea of getting rich. Everyone who touches gold never leaves it”, he says about a group of gold miners in Brazil. But then things get more serious, and he gets to a point where he no longer believes in our species.
“We humans are a ferocious animal, a terrible thing. We are ruled by extreme violence. Our history is the history of war. A neverending history, a crazy history, a history of repression”. In here, he is reflecting on his experiences in Africa or even closer to ‘home’, to western civilization, like the Balkans. Salgado, after a trip to Rwanda, was done with all of it.
“I was sick, but not with an infectious disease, my soul was sick”, he reflects, with his eyes moisted. “I retired after that (Rwanda), I didn’t think anyone deserved living”. After that, he didn’t get back into social photography, at least not directly.
At this point, we could be faced with a total morale meltdown. Fuck it, we have no remedy. But he found otherwise turning his attention into nature, into Genesis. Most places on Earth, he found out the next several years, were still untouched and remained the same they were centuries, millenniums ago.
Salgado has such a sensibility for nature and animals, and his poetic and canvas worthy pictures –which gained him a lot of criticisim in the social area–, conform a virtuous circle that makes the viewer turn all the negativity into positivity. We could still be different, we could still save the planet.
And one relevant thing. He leads by the example with his project at Instituto Terra, which has reforested a great area of his natal town in Brazil. We can undo the damage, we can still be humans. The best way to learn this is to travel and get to know other places, understand cultures and environments, challenge all your knowledge and doubt of all your actions.
The film director says that a photographer is someone who writes with light. I would dare to say that, a good one, is the one that also sheds some light. Like Sebastião Salgado.
South Korea, when modernity still surprises you
It’s a marvelous thing to feel a cold breeze after six months in Southeast Asia. The idyllic warm and sunny paradise vacations soon become a burden for most backpackers that will travel for more than the regular two/three week holidays. The snow, in my case, was very welcome.
South Korea was to me an unknown box full of surprises, a vague assort of ideas in my head. It was, I don’t know, expectation of weird and incomprehensible encounters. From Bangkok to Seoul, a six hour flight, the temperatures dropped from 35ºC to 0ºC. It was refreshing. Until now I didn’t realize that you can actually miss winter even when you’re hopping through tropical islands.
I think there are few countries that can lure you like South Korea can. It’s still not a mass tourist destination, although tourist facilities and accessibility are top-notch. They are ready, but most of the Western world hasn’t realized it yet. The greatest thing about South Korea and its capital, Seoul, is that it still has the capability to surprise you. There are few modern cities that will do that nowadays, since everything has been normalized through layers and layers of globalization.
My first sight of Seoul was unique, since I just landed in time to see the old stone palaces under a soft shower of snow. Snow! How cool is that? The mixture of old and new, under the flakes, made me realize how great my stay was gonna be. And it was.
Fast and convenient –and expensive but not so much as European capital, the States or the neighbouring Japan–, Seoul could be presented as one of the great megalopolis of the 21st century. As all big cities, it revolves around curious sights, food delights and shopping frenzy. Not as most big cities, it boasts of more than 25 million inhabitants in its urban area.
South Korea is, besides this globalization, very unique and almost completely homogeneous. This means that all population identifies as ethnically korean, with few foreigners living in the country. Still, if compared to Japan, English is more common amongst the citizens, who are also rather shy. They do have curiosity for languages, since a lot of them tried their best Hola’s when they knew where I came from.
Seoul’s skyline can boast of beautiful contrasts. The colourfulness of the imperial temples (most of them rebuilt after bombings and wars) and the greens of the public parks give room to breathe in between the skyscrapers and the overcrowded walls full of neon lights. Against all odds, feeling stuffed in this metropolis can be avoided when observing the efficiency, punctuality and immaculate appearance of all public services.
The spotless streets though, offer another ration of opposites in a few meters. The Gwanjedung Market, the citiy main street food hub, is a mess of fresh seafood pilling in the tiny stalls, flies gathering around the bright lights and the neighbours feet removing the dirt all around. The food there, needless to say, looks nasty but is as delicious and definitely more authentic than any ordinary restaurant.
Another unmissable trait of Koreans is their passion for technology. It seems to me that in every country I travel, people is even more focused only at what happens in their smartphone. The geekiness also provides room for the slot machines and funny prizes scams all around. It’s a good way to spend an hour or two, just looking at locals trying their luck to get a giant teddy bear for their sweethearts.
If I would put a snag to my first Korean experience it would be that I didn’t have more time to explore outside the big city. And five days for the big one weren’t that much at all. I’m probably missing some great insights, but it reflects how hectic my visit was. I got a sense of all that was promised, but still failed to grasp what so great about this country. I don’t truly know, but the beaches and mountains look utterly promising too, so I’ll keep them on my bucket list!
P.S. Absolutely fell in love with South Korea’s cuisine. Very unique and with little to envy to neighbouring and famed Japan.
They used to call me Pineapple
There are several ways of travelling and scarce ways of remaining in a nation’s conscience. But I did for more than 45 years. Here’s my story.
They used to call me Pineapple because of my looks, but names don’t matter once you hit the ground. Then you become a sad statistic, another failed project. That’s what I thought when my impact was not heard nor felt. I didn’t know where I was or what I was doing there, and nobody really knows even today.
I know I was blind and idle for almost five decades. I only had a fraction of a second to see the light, the bright spark and the loud bang I produced, the splash of soil and the trickle of blood. That was the day I died and served my original purpose, to take a life.
My real name is BLU-3. I was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in one of the many factories that served the purpose of feeding American wars. I was not a single child, oh no, but I couldn’t even begin to tell how many brothers and sisters I had. It is said that we were more than two hundred million, at least where I laid all those long years in the dark.
I hit the ground in 1967 in Ban Phuong, a tiny town in Savannaket province, in the South East of Laos. In there I stayed waiting all these years after a swift journey of 13.000 km in the guts of a bombardier. At first just the US knew about our existence. Well, the US and the Laotians. Because I stayed quiet, but many of my relatives provoked chaos between 1965 and 1973. The greatest fault of the people of Laos was to be in between Cold War politics and also in a place where the Vietnamese could feed their military through the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Their greatest fault, as in all wars, was to be at the mercy of the powerful elites and their biased interests.
The US decided, then, that they should use preventive measures to reassure their minds. And boom, me and my sisters were dropped all over the country. Now you would think I was lonely all these years, but you couldn’t be more wrong. Our higher purpose, at least in the minds of those who brought us to life, was to remain a hidden threat. Me and 80 million relatives stayed unexploded and underground. 80 million!
It’s been more than four decades from that. But today I finally came back with a bang. 43 years after being dropped in a secret airstrike, I took Khamkhen’s arm. The poor kid was looking for metal scraps to sell and help his family out. And his axe found me. My story is just another one of thousands, and there still are 76 million more bombies awaiting underground.
People often think that war is like a blood stain. With two thorough handwashes it’ll wash away. But no, war is forever, its tentacles, like me, being able to kill innocent people from day one until, well, whenever there are no bombs nor guns in this planet. And that will never happen, as far as humans are concerned. So war kills and will continue to do so with no expiration date.
In Laos, this has shaped generations of fear and misery. You could still be walking in the beautiful countryside, enjoying the warmth of the sun and the smell of the greenery… and suddenly, stop being as a whole. I was made for this, so I won’t apologize. But I tell you, I’m not the problem.
The problem is you.
Cluster bombs, or bombies, have killed more than 20.000 Laotians between 1974 and today. No war has been fought since that date. These bombs have also maimed another 20.000 innocent citizens of this beautiful yet tragically hit country. COPE is a NGO that helps the wounded and raises awareness of the UXO issue both in a local and international scale.