Misguided

Travelers love to bitch about their guidebooks, despite the fact that most of us would be lost without them. That said, I can't resist commenting on a couple of things that have really bothered me in both the guidebooks we've used so far.

In the Lonely Planet guide to India, readers are well warned about the "hassle" that traveling in India inevitably entails (in a country with so much desperate poverty it's hardly surprising that a lot of people make their living hustling the comparatively rich tourists) but it's not until the patronizing section on "Women Travelers" at the back of the book that the writers even touch on the elevated levels of "hassle" - aka harassment - that women can expect to face. Even then, they start out with this incendiary sentence: "India is a largely conservative country, and the skimpy clothing and culturally inappropriate behavior of a minority of foreign women seems to have had a ripple effect on the perception of foreign women in general."

Having traveled in India for all of seven weeks I'm not claiming to be any kind of an expert on gender relations in the country, but I can say that when being spat on in the street my instinct is not to blame some anonymous foreign woman who once dared to bear her shoulders in a tank top. Also, I have a sneaking suspicion that the sentence "Just be thick skinned and don't let it get to you" was not written by a woman, or at least not one who had spent much time in India. It seems to me that Lonely Planet needs to hire some writers who are willing to take into account gender issues as well as the cultural, religious, and colonial histories that inform social interactions in India instead of casually laying all the blame on foreign women, especially since harassment is clearly not something that only happens to foreigners.

My second issue is with the Rough Guide to South East Asia's stuck up attitude towards the sex industry in Thailand, which seems to be based on the assumption that nobody capable of reading a guidebook could possibly have any interest in hiring a sex worker.

In the section on Bangkok nightlife, the writers display a thinly veiled attitude of disdain, referring to sex businesses as "seedy" and sex shows as "degradations." They then go on to reassure the demure reader that "fortunately Bangkok's nightlife has become more sophisticated and stylish in the last few years." Way to backstab a group of workers whose international reputation brings more tourists into the country than anyone else! Sex workers should be given the credit they deserve for their vital role in Thailand's booming tourist industry, not patronized and insulted by a bunch of snooty travel writers who are supposed to be experts on said industry. Considering the disproportionate number of single men hanging out in the city's backpacker district, I somehow doubt that the distinction between "sex tourist" and plain old tourist is as black and white as the Rough Guide would have you believe.

For an excellent analysis of many otherwise-liberal Westerners' prejudices against Asian sex workers and their farang clients and boyfriends, this article is well worth a read. (Yes, it's also a shameless $pread plug!)

Transportation curiosities, and what we were doing in Sangli

I was expecting to find the traffic in Mumbai terrifying. I don't know if I've just gotten braver over the past few years or if the pace of traffic in Mumbai is nothing compared to Bangkok and Managua but riding around in taxis turned out to be the most thrilling and fascinating part of our three short days in the city. Catching fleeting glimpses of temples, slums, luxury apartment complexes, and street markets all unceremoniously crowded together on the same streets left me constantly straining my neck to see what was going on and wishing we had more time to explore the city. A few extra days probably wouldn't have made much of a difference though--Mumbai seems like the kind of city you have to live in to even start to understand.

It's not just a stereotype that everything in India is colorful, nor is it an exaggeration that the bureaucracy here is insane. We managed to spend practically a whole day booking our train ticket from Mumbai to Sangli, although this was partly because we took a taxi all the way to the station before realizing we needed our ATM cards and had to go all the way back to where we were staying to get them. The reason we needed our ATM cards, despite having enough cash on us to buy the tickets, was that in order to buy tickets as a foreigner you have to prove your foreigner status by showing an ATM receipt for the cash you're using to pay (in addition to showing your passport)! We then had to find the special foreigner ticket window and wait with the other foreigners on a bench marked "foreign tourist only"! We eventually got our tickets, but they were only provisional tickets, meaning we were second and third in line to get seats if people canceled, so we had to go back the next day to confirm that we could actually get on the train. We then had to come back one hour later to find out what seats we had been allocated!

Anyway, it all worked out and we finally got on the sleeper to Sangli, where we had been invited to visit the offices of SANGRAM, an organization that provides outreach, support, community, and services to sex workers in certain regions of Maharastra and Karnataka. I hadn't been on a sleeper since I was a kid and I was so excited that I didn't sleep at all. Every time we stopped at a station the noises coming from outside made it sound like we were at an amusement park instead of a train station. We arrived in Sangli at 5:20am, where we were met by one of SANGRAM's staff members and taken in a rickshaw cab to the SANGRAM office, where we managed to sleep for a couple of hours before being woken at 9:30 for breakfast.

That day, after hearing a brief history of SANGRAM and its sister and brother organizations, VAMP (serving female sex workers) and MUSKAN (serving male sex workers), we talked with some of the women from VAMP and sat in on one of their weekly organizational meetings, where delegates from different regions reported back on outreach they had done that week, issues in each region, and plans for the next few weeks. Some topics of discussion included finding housing for the children of a sex worker who wasn't able to take care of them and reaching out to home-based sex workers who are reluctant to visit drop in centers. I had heard all about how huge and wide-reaching Indian sex worker organizations are but you have to see them in action to really understand what that means. I've never seen such a practical, focused and well-organized meeting and I was left wondering why it's so difficult to organize sex workers in the US (and other Western countries). I was also inspired to start thinking a lot more about plans for organizing after we get back home.


After the meeting we visited the offices of MUSKAN, where some of the boys from the group performed in drag, carrying out a traditional fertility ritual which involved handing out vegetables and putting tumeric on our foreheads (see picture!). The entertainment continued with dancing and acting out various well-known (apparently) scenes from Bollywood movies.

We then repaid SANGRAM for all their hospitality by running off to Goa with their only set of office keys, which then had to be couriered back to Sangli (at least eight hours by road I think) at top speed before they could get back into their offices for work. Yeah, we're still feeling pretty guilty about that.