[The Practical Nomad Newsletter] Amazing Race 13, Episode 2

[Edward Hasbrouck]

This column with links:
http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/001542.html

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Salvador, Bahia (Brazil) - Fortaleza, Ceara (Brazil)

Last week, "The Amazing Race 13" was all about physical ability: the 
episode came down to a 200 vertical foot climb down a cargo net, followed 
by a run (with loaded packs, of course) along the waterfront to the boats 
to the finish line.

This week the racers had more opportunity to show their travel skills. 
Ken, the former NFL player, carried both his and his wife's luggage to 
victory over Bill and Mark (who dropped one of their packs, and had to go 
back to pick it up) in the final footrace. But the self-described computer-
game geeks had gotten to the front of the pack not just by choosing the 
quicker of two alternative challenges, but also by an approach to their 
task from which other travellers could learn.

>From the start, the "gamers" seem to be taking travel as a game -- not in 
the sense that it isn't real, but in the sense that travel decisions are 
rarely as important as they seem, and don't warrant too much stress. 
That's actually even more true for the cast of "The Amazing Race" than it 
is for independent travellers, since the television producers have 
everything from security guards to medical treatment standing by just out 
of sight, or on call, to protect the racers against most hazards other 
than reckless driving. The consequences of other travel mistakes are 
generally limited to minor delay and discomfort. Travel stress can easily 
lead us to invest travel decisions with much more practical and emotional 
weight than they deserve.

Bill and Mark also note that, as "just friends" rather than family or 
lovers, they have less emotional investment in their relationship than 
most of the other teams in the race. That's probably true for a short 
trip, but there's a catch: After long enough together on the road, the 
relationship between travelling companions who are together 24/7, 
including sharing hotel rooms, becomes as intense as that of many lovers. 
Most of your casual friendships would probably survive 24 hours trapped 
together in a stuck elevator or a jail cell. After a month or so without a 
break (coincidentally, the typical real-world duration of each season of 
"The Amazing Race"), however, small annoyances can become intolerable, 
especially because the situation makes them constant and inescapable. 
We'll see if Bill and Mark can maintain their emotional detachment and 
ability to double-check each others' work without argument as the race 
goes on. 

The gamers seem to approach travel decisions analytically, and like game 
problems. Insight helps, but this isn't just a question of "intelligence". 
We've seen plenty of quick-thinking contestants on "The Amazing Race" over 
the years, and I've seen my share of smart real-world travellers, who've 
made all the wrong travel choices. Success in the sorts of computerized 
simulation and role-playing games that Bill and Mark play requires a 
particular way of thinking about the question, "What should we do now?":

* What's the problem we are trying to solve? (The definition of the 
problem may be less obvious than it seems. A task that seems daunting on 
first impression may prove to be inessential to the actual goal.)

* In what way(s) might this problem be solved?

* What skills and resources (time, knowledge, experience, tools, help from 
others, etc.) will these solutions require?

* What skills and resources do we have to apply to this problem, and which 
might we lack?

* How is this different for our competitors, and where does this give us 
an advantage or disadvantage?

People who are used to relying on being smarter, stronger, or having some 
other advantage over other people often lack an accurate sense of their 
own weaknesses and limitations. But effective gaming, like travel, 
requires an accurate awareness of one's own limits and vulnerabilities. In 
addition, simulation and role-playing games often assume the existence of 
different abilities and forms of personal power, such that players can 
each excel in different aptitudes without it being clear how they will 
fare in competition against each other.

I don't mean to suggest that travel is or should be, in real life, a 
competitive sport. But game-playing can be one way to develop your ability 
to evaluate a situation, think it through, and choose a course of action 
when you have limited understanding of what is happening or what other 
actors intend, and must make choices despite those uncertainties. This is 
what independent travellers have to do every day in a new or strange 
country.

Bill and Mark chose the "needle in a haystack" task, as they put it, of 
finding a particular specified shipping container at Salvador's container 
port. If you thought of Brazil as a Third World country, you may have been 
surprised that their search started with a computerized inventory 
database. That's typical of the country, though: Brazil is unique among 
places I've visited in its mix of low and high technology. 

There are millions of people living as comfortably as typical North 
Americans, but there are also tens of millions of desperately poor people 
(especially in the Northeast where "The Amazing Race" has been this 
season, and in the interior), many of them de facto slaves. Labor is 
cheap, and people who think of themselves as "middle class" routinely have 
live-in servants. In some countries like India, situations like this have 
limited the demand for "labor saving" automation or technologically 
advanced infrastructure. No so in Brazil, and in ways that are obvious to 
visitors. Wireless handheld touchscreen order-taking devices, rare in the 
USA, are routine in Brazilian restaurants. Even second-class Brazilian bus 
companies have computerized reservation, ticketing, and seat-selection 
systems unheard of in the USA.

Brazil has no silicon chip manufacturing and little computer hardware 
industry. (The reasons why are a long story, in which my father played a 
bit part as operations manager in Rio for Digital Equipment Corporation, 
then the world's second largest computer maker, during DEC's attempt to 
start a Brazilian manufacturing subsidiary.) But Brazil has a huge 
programmer and hacker population and a software industry almost as large 
as those of India or China. It's the domestic market that sustains 
Brazilian industries like the manufacture of home appliances, unlike in 
China where they were originally developed solely to serve wealthier 
foreign markets. Similarly, most Brazilian software is written for 
customers within the country -- the automation of Brazilian manufacturing, 
services, and infrastructure -- rather than for foreign customers as in 
India, where local infrastructure and business technology languishes amid 
a software and high-tech services export boom.

The racers ended this episode in Fortaleza, having flown from Recife on 
GOL Linhas Aereas Inteligentes ("The Smart Airline"; choose "other 
countries in the drop-down menu under the Brazilian flag for the English-
language section of their Web site). As I mentioned last week, GOL is the 
only competitor to TAM on most routes in Brazil, and direct flights 
between provincial cities -- without connecting through Sao Paulo, Rio, or 
less often Brasilia) are few. So don't be misled by GOL's lowest 
advertised fares into expecting cheap flights within Brazil to be readily 
available at the last minute: If GOL's few seats at those prices are sold 
out, all other fares can be much higher, and it could be a long wait for 
the next flight or seats may be unavailable at any price, as they almost 
were for the racers.

The finish lines for both episodes of the race race thus far this season 
were at photogenic landmarks, rather than the actual "pit stop" hotels or 
resorts where the racers (and the TV productions crews) spent their time 
between legs. So the only place we know the racers spent a night was in 
the middle of last week's episode, when they were accommodated in tents 
inside the walls of an active army garrison post. There was no mention of 
the ironies: the Northeast was the region of some of the worst human 
rights abuses by the former military dictatorship in Brazil. It was also 
the region of some of the strongest resistance to Brazilian fascism, and 
was the only place in Brazil where we saw public memorials to those 
imprisoned, tortured, and disappeared by the military.

Today, Brazilian attitudes toward the institutions of law enforcement -- 
the military, the police, and the even more numerous private security 
forces -- are complicated, sometimes polarized between races. classes, and 
regions but also often ambivalent or even schizophrenic within individuals 
and communities. Racialized fear of crime is an increasingly dominant 
factor in the shape of the Brazilian built environment and the way 
Brazilians live their lives. But there is also a memory, at least for 
some, of the danger of unchecked military and police power.

One of the most difficult things for a visitor in Brazil or anywhere is to 
figure out how much credence to give to local informants' perceptions of 
danger and crime. When they say, "It's very dangerous", does that mean 
that it is very dangerous compared to my neighborhood back home? Compared 
to a police state (perhaps the one they remember from some past time)? 
Compared to a Hollywood fantasy of of American small-town safety? Or 
compared to a Hollywood fantasy of American urban violence? Until you know 
their frame of reference, it's hard to say. For what it's worth, the U.S. 
Consul who I met thought that crime (and not just fear of crime) was the 
largest obstacle to the expansion of international tourism to the 
Northeast of Brazil (despite great beaches and direct charter flights from 
Europe), or probably the rest of the country.

Brazil is not, of course, alone in any of this. Foreigners are right to be 
concerned about crime in the USA. That's precisely what makes it so 
interesting to see and compare how these issues play out in the Sao Paulo, 
Los Angeles, or Guateng (Soweto/Johannesburg/Pretoria) metropolitan areas, 
among others around the world. If you are interested, I highly recommend 
Teresa P.R. Caldeira's City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship 
in Sao Paulo . Drawing out the comparisons with Los Angeles in particular, 
it's a richly detailed exploration of the way our fears and expectations 
not only shape our perception of a place but can actually reshape the 
place itself. It's intended for anthropologists and urban geographers, not 
tourists, but it provides a useful framework for visits to places where it 
takes an effort to cross the physical boundaries that separate people and 
communities, whether between neighborhoods or between the "upstairs" and 
"downstairs" sections of a house for homeowners and servants.


----------------
Edward Hasbrouck
<edward at hasbrouck.org>
<http://hasbrouck.org>
+1-415-824-0214

"The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World"
(4th edition 2007)
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