Ecotourism is a hot topic globally, but like any “green” trend, the ecotourism label can be more of a marketing scheme than an indicator of sustainability. In China, ecotourism is even more difficult to define. The term implies no particular environmental awareness. It can include rustic backpacking and closely-managed mass tourism complete with buses and paved roads. It may incorporate cultural education, the opportunity to buy local crafts, or merely a view of a lake.

Claiming the eco-tourism mantle in China is as simple as putting a sign up. There are no regulations or even a firm definition of what the term means.

The Road to Ecotourism

In my quest to better understand Chinese ecotourism, I met with Tian Feng, a globally respected ecotourism expert in Western China, at a coffee shop in Chengdu. Mr. Tian consults for the ecotourism branch of Conservation International (CI), a global NGO focused on preserving biodiversity, and is developing a unique ecotourism project in Sichuan Province. A quiet man with narrow, intelligent features and always-moving hands, it’s hard to imagine that he is an international presence, requested to speak at forums all over the world.

Mr. Tian has not always been an ecotourism guru. He started his career as a documentary film producer for a national TV station where, for three years, he directed documentaries about Chinese culture. The job took him all over China and around the world. The more he traveled, the more distressed he became that some of China’s most beautiful natural places were being ruined by poor environmental management and tourism planning.

“The Chinese are linked with their country’s long culture,” he says, “and this culture, in turn, cannot be separated from the land and nature.” He feels the reason China’s environment is in such a sorry state is precisely because Chinese people’s link to nature has been severed. This is due, in part, to the country’s rapid urbanization—today 737 million Chinese live in urban centers and many of them are disconnected from local products.

“People’s happiness is now measured in material benchmarks like money, cars and big houses,” Mr. Tian vaguely gestures at couples in the coffee shop where we sit. “In order to preserve China, it’s important to re-link nature with everyday life.” It’s Tian’s desire to encourage people to reassess what brings them true happiness, to find satisfaction in more natural, sustainable enjoyments.

Mr. Tian started by organizing small group trips to introduce his friends to little-known places, often located in remote parts of China. He also began to write about nature for various Chinese magazines, hoping to pique the interest of city-dwellers cut off from the natural world. He later quit his filmmaking job, and joined the CI tourism development team, convinced that he could make a difference.

According to Mr. Tian, demand for ecotourism (see sidebar for his definition) is growing in China. While tourist agencies are slow to change, he has found that most young Chinese don’t want to join generic mass tours. “Before, tourism was all about eating in hotels and traveling by bus. Now, Chinese tourists want something special.” He sighs. “So there is a potential market, but people still don’t have many options.”

Capitalism drives the Conservation Bandwagon

It will take more than environmental appreciation to change Chinese tourism practices. Due to China’s staggering population and unceasing drive for economic development, many natural sites see huge volumes of visitors but are not carefully preserved or managed. “The worth of nature raises its price,” says Mr. Tian, laughing. “And businessmen start asking themselves ‘How do I make money from nature? How do I get more people in?’”

This is partially the fault of local and municipal governments who measure success by economic growth alone. National targets for ecological and economic sustainability are generally ignored. Western China, where Mr. Tian works, is very poor compared to the glimmering east coast, but it is rich in natural resources. So in order to stimulate the economy, people in the west pick a beautiful natural area and start selling tickets. “Big hotels and parking lots are constructed,” Mr. Tian says. “These companies care little about nature and culture.” This manner of development often destroys the very natural resources that the business relies on. Mr. Tian snorts at the irony. “In order to preserve valuable natural resources,” he continues, “it’s important to change the ideas of both the business owner and the government.”

Unlike many environmental NGO representatives, Mr. Tian believes that business and environmental interests are both vital in the tourism development process. Right now, however, environmental NGOs and organizations charged with stimulating economic development often have competing agendas when it comes to tourism. International environmental NGOs such as the Nature Conservancy try to avoid working with businesses, because they are worried about investing money in a Chinese business venture (as opposed to a solely conservation venture).

These sites fail to create successful ecotourism models because NGOs forget basic economic principles, says Mr. Tian. As a result, sites are rarely able to sustain themselves financially. The lack of collaboration between environmental NGOs and businesses creates a fragmented development process, with institutions working in separate places and often against each other. “Tourism is a business, business is money, and money is driven by the market and economic principles,” Mr. Tian says. To him, sustainable tourism can only come about if environmental and economic organs work together.

Care about who profits

There are no ecotourism sites in China that live up to Mr. Tian’s criteria—yet. Even Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve in northern Sichuan, lauded throughout the country as a prime example of ecotourism, fails in Mr. Tian’s assessment. He concedes that the reserve is “exceptionally managed for mass tourism purposes,” with entrance numbers closely monitored and transport inside limited to the reserve’s buses. However, he points out that when this park was developed in the late 1990s, local industry did not directly benefit from the influx of tourists. In fact, many residents in the reserve boundaries were kicked out and pushed aside to make room for tourism companies and hotel chains.

Mr. Tian hopes the ecotourism sites he’s developing will live up to his own high standards, but it may be years before his vision is realized. “It will be a long process to get everything sorted out,” he says, and looks at his hands. “We have three testing areas in Sichuan province, and have just persuaded the local government to sign a contract saying they will not be involved in the development process. This gives the local population the right to develop their own community.” This is unique in China, and I voice my surprise, wondering out loud how a small community will be able to manage things by themselves. “We are highly involved in giving the locals specialized training to patrol and monitor their land,” he answers, smiling. “When the provincial government tried to manage the land, it couldn’t keep control over it from so far away. Training locals is highly effective and cheap!” CI trains the locals and provides start-up money and materials, but in the end they will have little control over the reserve’s future. When CI leaves, the site will be the sole responsibility of local residents.

Putting development in the hands of locals is important to Mr. Tian because the key point of these testing sites “is using natural resources right”—and that means making sure the local population directly profits. The conversation returns to Mr. Tian’s original epiphany: “If people are connected to their environment and rely on it for income, they are more likely to care for it, not exploit it. It’s easy for NGOs and experts to have ideas, but in the end, the weight of responsibility lies on the people who care about their nature and culture.”

The road to reach a truly sustainable ecotourism model in China looks like a long one. At the end of the interview, I ask Tian Feng my last, deceptively simple question. Is there a future for ecotourism in China? Mr. Tian Feng, who has devoted his life to this cause, pauses for a moment. “There is a future for it here… sometime,” he says quietly, and seems to search for the answer in his coffee dregs.

Monica Liau has lived in China for two years, where she has been a Fulbright Scholar researching ecotourism. Based in both Chengdu and Shanghai, she’s a freelance writer who covers business trends, the urban pulse, mysterious food and kooky happenings. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College with concentrations in Environmental Management, Urban Planning and Chinese.

Venezuela is known for Hugo Chavez, oil exports and its record number of Miss World pageant winners. But if classical music fans had their way, it would also be synonymous with Gustavo Dudamel, its 27-year old star conductor, and El Sistema, the state-sponsored music education system that gave him his start.

Dudamel, with his rousing energy and trademark locks of curly brown hair, burst onto the international classical music scene in 2004 when, at age 23, he won the prestigious Gustav Mahler International Conducting Competition in Bamberg, Germany.

The New York Times has hailed him “one of the hottest—and youngest—conducting properties around” and Berlin Philharmonic music director Simon Rattle has called him “the most astonishingly gifted conductor I have ever come across.” While Dudamel’s ascension to the select club of leading international conductors has been dazzling, he remains surprisingly level-headed.

“My life is so normal. Of course I have to study a lot,” says Dudamel, referring to the musical scores he carries with him everywhere he goes. “And I travel every week to different places to give concerts, but I do the same things as before. I love to be with my friends, to go to the movies… I love wine, I looove to eat and to dance,” says Dudamel in a phone interview from Gothenburg, Sweden, where he is Principal Conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra.

Dudamel is also Music Director of the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra in Venezuela and was appointed Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic—a post that will begin in 2009 and that caused heartbreaks at other symphony orchestras across the U.S. who had hoped to snatch him up first. Though it may seem impossible that one man could manage all these positions simultaneously, he does—and still finds time to appear as a guest conductor with orchestras around the world.

Born in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, Dudamel is now a global nomad whose touring schedule takes him to the world’s most prestigious concert halls. Dudamel lives on airplanes, in fact. He is preparing a tour with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra that will take him to the main halls in Germany, Austria and Spain; he will soon spend two weeks with the Los Angeles Philharmonic; and he will wrap up the year with an Asian tour with the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra that will include concerts in Japan, Korea and China.

Last month, he traveled to Oviedo, Spain with members of the Simon Bolivar Orchestra, where they received the prestigious Principe de Asturias Prize and performed at the awards ceremony.

After a series of concerts in Israel in early November, Dudamel brought the Israel Philharmonic to the U.S., with performances in California, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia. One of the tour’s highlights was a concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall.

Dudamel is proud to be a product of Venezuela’s music education and youth orchestra system, the Fundación del Estado para el Sistema de Orquesta Juvenil e Infantil de Venezuela, better known as “El Sistema.”

El Sistema is a government-sponsored artistic project with a social mission: to save lives through music. Founded in a garage in 1975 by economist and musician Jose Antonio Abreu, El Sistema now boasts 125 youth orchestras across the country containing more than 250,000 kids, most of them from poor socio-economic backgrounds. In addition, it encompasses 30 professional orchestras and 15,000 teachers. The best musicians from El Sistema are channeled into Dudamel’s Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, which is based in Caracas.

“In Venezuela, music is a way to save kids from lives of drugs and crime,” Dudamel explains. “Music has also saved me. I was one of these kids who had a lot of free time, and in America Latina it is difficult to stay away from the terrible things in society.” Although Dudamel comes from a supportive middle-class family, he credits El Sistema with giving him the opportunity to find his passion.

Dudamel’s father was a trombone player in a salsa band, but since Dudamel’s arms were too short for the trombone, he started his musical education at the local “nucleo”—the term for El Sistema’s neighborhood clusters—and took up the violin before moving on to conducting at the age of 15.

Every afternoon, youngsters across Venezuela take music classes and rehearse with their ensembles. El Sistema provides tuition, music materials and organizes workshops in exchange for students’ commitment to the program. In the streets of Venezuela’s poorest neighborhoods, it has created opportunities for thousands of children, proving that music is more than a simple ornament to general education, as it is often perceived in the U.S. and Europe.

“I always say poor in money but rich in the soul. People want to have culture, they want to learn. Music is not only for those who can afford tickets: music—especially classical music—is for everybody.”

Dudamel hopes to bring the El Sistema model to countries around the world, including the United States. In Los Angeles, where he will soon take up his new post, a “Youth Orchestra L.A.” program has already been launched. (In part inspired by El Sistema.) “L.A., where there are a lot of Latinos and a large poor community, has many of the same conditions as Venezuela,” says Dudamel.

Classical music leaders around the world have taken note. Matias Tarnopolsky, artistic director of the New York Philharmonic, went to Caracas a few years ago to learn firsthand about El Sistema. He describes hearing the orchestra and watching the young musicians perform as “a shot in the arm.” “It was one of the most inspiring musical experiences I have encountered,” says Tarnopolsky. “It’s a model of what music education should be, encouraging every child to take up an instrument, practice and play together in ensembles.”

Dudamel’s youth and energy have galvanized audiences around the world. What is most striking, though, is his ability to connect not only with his public—rousing even the most jaded concert-goers—but with the orchestras he conducts. When Dudamel hears that the Finnish conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen has said of him that “he seduces the orchestra into playing for him,” he laughs.

“The time of conductors as dictators is gone. To have a good relationship with an orchestra, it is important for a conductor to be open,” he says.

Dudamel gives numerous interviews and his answers are polished, but when I ask him what he might have been in another life if not a musician, he’s caught off guard. “I don’t know… a philosopher, a lawyer… maybe a politician?” The thought has clearly never crossed his mind. He is a conductor and it could not have been any other way.

Nicole E. Foster is a graduate student at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, focusing on International Media and Communications and the Middle East. She has lived in France, England, Spain and Germany, and worked managing music education projects in the Middle East. She received her BSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics. This is her second article for JANERA.com.

I recently spoke to Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, founder of Women on Waves, the organization that helps women from countries where abortion is illegal, obtain the controversial abortion pill RU-486 on a ship-sailing under the Dutch flag-anchored in international waters in front of the pro-life country’s coast. She is currently campaigning in Valencia, Spain.

As we started our Skype conversation (she’s in Amsterdam, I’m in New York), in Dutch, Gompert’s phone rings and she switches agilely to English. It’s a woman calling from South Africa who’s looking for a local Women On Waves clinic. There isn’t one in South Africa, but Rebecca goes online to find a clinic in Soweto that does abortions and gives the caller its phone number. WOW has only one office, in Amsterdam, but they keep a database of all abortion clinics across the world.

JS: Are all the clinics on your list legal?
RG: It’s a very sensitive subject, but because we know so many people in this field, we can recommend doctors where women can obtain safe abortions. Even if illegal.

JS: Has being born in Suriname, a former Dutch colony that slipped into poverty post-independence, influenced your choices?
RG: I was born in Suriname, where abortion is still illegal, by the way.* My father’s family lived there for many generations. In Suriname, all cultures live adjacent to one another other, Chinese, Indians, Blacks and Dutch. But this happens in Holland too, so no, I don’t think that being born there has consciously influenced my choices. Our family moved to Holland when I was three, my father traveled for work, and as children we would often visit other countries during the holidays, exposing us to many cultures from an early age. The multicultural environment with which I’m familiar may have given me a wider scope, but this has most likely been more sub-conscious. I’ve always felt I’m a global citizen, but also feel very Dutch. Amsterdam is my home.

JS: What is the biggest issue facing women who want to have an abortion?
RG: Women are still being questioned by society on their ability to make an objective, non-emotional, choice. Those are the stereotypes. When a woman decides that she needs to have an abortion, she has most definitely given it much, and serious, thought. She will not take it lightly and will have understood that she is not in the position to really take care of the un-born baby. It should not be necessary for a woman to have to defend her decision to end a pregnancy.

The notion that a woman is not deemed capable of making her own decisions infuriates me (her voice hikes up a few octaves, as her speech increases in speed). It is precisely those women, with an acute sense of responsibility, who know what they can, or cannot, offer a child.

JS: Why did you decide to dedicate your life to this cause, and what do you love about it?
RG: Per year about 70,000 women in the world die unnecessarily because of botched abortions. These could have been avoided by legal and safe abortions. As a doctor I see this as a healthcare issue.

I love what I do because the work allows me to use all of my talents (Gomperts is not only a medical doctor, but also an artist, and a licensed captain of a ship), challenging me to be the best I can. My job also gives me a lot of freedom, allowing me to decide how to spend my time. But the most important motivator is getting women who need help, the resources they require.

JS: Starting a pro-choice movement from a ship and sailing to countries where abortion is illegal (Ireland, Poland, Portugal, up to now) is a challenging proposition. Which, of all the hurdles, has been the most difficult to conquer?
RG: Funding. For the past five years I’ve been working for practically nothing, while investing all my time and energy. I’ve made due with alternative side-jobs and a small stipend from the organization.

It is difficult to find a steady stream of donors given the radicalism of WOW. Offering women the abortion pill in countries where the procedure is illegal, from a ship under Dutch flag, anchored in international waters, taking advantage of a legal loophole, is more confrontational than a traditional pro-choice poster campaign. But the effectiveness of one of our campaigns is much greater than a traditional advocacy campaign. When we embark on a campaign, the awareness created through the press and protests around illegal abortions makes a huge impact on the issue.

WOW receives help from volunteers, mostly American and South American women, though some Dutch too, who also reply to about 4,000 emails per year, giving women in need a place to turn to for information. This service needs donors, but doesn’t get sufficient financial support. And that’s very frustrating. However, becoming a grant-writing institution is not my objective either.

JS: Does your organization suffer from what many entrepreneurial ventures have to deal with when they grow—that the founder is not the right person to take it to the next level?
RG: without money, it would be impossible to hire someone else to do my job. I would gladly take a few steps back, but can’t do this without money.

JS: So what’s next for you?
RG: I’m working on the next WOW campaign and continuing to teach women how to perform abortions themselves through the abortion pill. This is both a global (through the web site) and a local initiative, where volunteers distribute stickers to stick everywhere, on bathroom walls and other public spaces, to create awareness of the abortion pill.

On a personal level, I’m thinking about obtaining a PhD on a topic on the intersection of medicine and society, related to what I’ve been doing. I also want to spend more time with my two children.

*It’s common in post-colonial settings that the old laws from the former rulers are still in place. Suriname gained independence from The Netherlands in 1975, and the Dutch legalized abortion in Holland in 1981.

For more information about the individual campaigns and Gompert’s initial motivations, read the Guardian article.

Also see the trailer of Vessel, the documentary being made about WOW.

As the Frugal Traveler at the New York Times’ Travel section, a position he’s held for over two years, 34-year old Matt Gross has criss-crossed the globe from Bucharest to Taipei. Before scoring this gig, Gross had been a news editor at Foxnews.com and then an assistant editor at New York, a job he left to travel around Cambodia and Vietnam for five months. Now he’s the consummate global nomad, spending three months on the road every summer. This year, he focused on Europe, stopping in 16 countries for a series of articles he called “The New Grand Tour.” Senior Editor Hannah Wallace caught up with Gross last month in Brooklyn.
Hannah: What was the first Frugal Traveler story you wrote for the New York Times?

Matt: Frugal Newport Rhode Island. See, you laugh. That was the whole idea. When my editors explained the Frugal Traveler to me they said the joke has to be in the headline. Frugal, somewhere obviously expensive.

Hannah: But they are not always that way.

Matt: It’s mutated on beyond that. But the goal is still to do an expensive place cheaply or to seek out comfortable luxuries or experiences on a budget wherever you are, still trying to be comfortable but not spend a bunch of money.

Hannah: How many months, on average, are you traveling each year?

Matt: In 2007 I was away for 6 months out of the year. 2006 I was away at least 5. This year I’ve tried to slow down. (Gross and his wife, Jean, are pregnant.) If all goes well, it will be a max of about 4 months.

Hannah: That’s still a lot, but at least it’s not all at once. You come back to Brooklyn in between trips.

Matt: Well there’s this whole three month thing over the summer. It’s always a Grand Tour. I call it the “Epic Summer Mega Trip.”

Hannah: And your budget for this trip is 100 Euros a day?

Matt: That was the ceiling. The idea was to shoot for less than that.

Hannah: How on earth did you do that?

Matt: In some ways it was really difficult and in some ways it was really easy.

Hannah: Some travel magazines would say that’s impossible to do—without sleeping in train stations, that is.

Matt: It’s totally possible but you have to think about what your priorities are, what’s worth spending money on to you. Is having a shmancy hotel room the most important thing to you or is having really excellent meals really important?

Hannah: You never really stayed at luxury hotels, as far as I can tell—or did you? There was the one in Cyprus, but that wasn’t that expensive.

Matt: It was beautiful, but it didn’t cost much at all. I can’t remember the price but I think it was about $60-75 USD a night, which is really not bad for a pristine, isolated, beautiful hotel.

Hannah: I guess word of mouth is key, but also living like a local—which you do really well.

Matt: I went to this Oasis hotel in northern Cyprus because I’d heard about it from a couple different people and I had this hand drawn map that someone had made for me that pointed it out and I thought, OK, well this seems like a good place to try out. I mean all I knew was that it was on this peninsula I was trying to get to, it looked like it was on the beach and I would probably be able to afford it because these people knew that I was hitchhiking and it wasn’t going to be an expensive place. I got there and it’s just gorgeous. It’s eight rooms. The water is heated by solar panels and the food is great and the staff is really lovely and know how to deal with the menagerie of Westerners and Turks and Greeks who pass through. It was lovely. It had a great restaurant and then I discovered it’s the Lonely Planet Cyprus’ writer’s favorite hotel in the entire island.

Hannah: You made a point of not looking at guide books and magazines.

Matt: I made an incidental point of it. It was only towards the end of the trip that I realized I hadn’t brought a guide book with me at all. I never even thought about bringing a guide book.

Hannah: Is that the way you usually travel?

Matt: Sometimes I bring one just to have reference information. If I don’t know where I’m going to wind up, it’s just worth having a list of hotels or something. And then it turns out I never look at it. On my Cross Country Road Trip last year, I brought Road Trip USA and these big guide books and they just stayed at the bottom of my bag…

Hannah: Is that because you find all that stuff anyways through the people that you meet?

Matt: So much of the stuff is just obvious. You go somewhere and some of the sites are just—they’re just there.

Hannah: I’m always afraid I’m going to miss something really crucial and local to the place if I don’t have a guide book or in-depth article, especially if I don’t have a lot of time there.

Matt: I find getting a good map is more important, because it will have some of that stuff marked on it anyway. A good city map, good country map, will have interesting things plotted on it. It’ll mark out cemeteries, hotels. And maps are smaller and lighter and more pleasurable to look at.
You know, I did carry one guide book—the Luxe guide to Paris. They’re great. They’re tiny. They’re the high end, luxurious, chic stuff.

Hannah: What were you doing with those?

Matt: Because I don’t care about what backpackers want to do! I want to have the five-star experience even though I only have a two-star budget so I read through them to see what I can afford.

Hannah: Right. In this recent article you said that you wanted to live the high life. So you never had to stay in a train station, in other words?

Matt: No, I didn’t. I guess I could have, but if I had, it would’ve been because I wanted to, not because I had to. Last year when I was doing the Cross Country Road Trip, I had to sleep in my car once. But I didn’t have to. I just wanted to get that out of the way. Not just to say, “oh yeah I’ve slept in my car.” But to have done it, to know how comfortable the back is, to know how to set my stuff up, to know where to find a place to park. If you have to sleep in your car, where do you park?

Hannah: Where did you park?

Matt: Church parking lot, figuring church people would be less likely to kick me out. It was in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Hannah: Did anything happen to you?

Matt: Nope. I slept—not well. The trick was it was kind of warm. You worry about mosquitoes. But you know, I lived.

Hannah: In the article, you say your m.o. is to ignore travel magazines and guide books and adopt the persona of a local. To me that’s exactly what a global nomad does. Not only do they travel all the time for work, but they seek out the vibrant local cultures of each city. What do you think a global nomad is?

Matt: Someone who accepts and expects that they’re going to live, work and play in different countries and different cities all the time and that it’s not surprising when I get an instant message from a friend who says hey, I’m in Istanbul, too, let’s go meet up.
To me that’s the definition of a global nomad. You take it in stride and you expect to be able to say, OK, I’m going off to Tokyo. I’m going to email all of my friends and at least 4 of them will know people in Tokyo for me to go meet up with. And it’s an acceptance that the world works like this now and that we can use it to our advantage.

Hannah: There’s still this idea that globalization means the homogenization of cultures. Do you see that on your travels? Or are you constantly reminded that no, there are still unique traditions?

Matt: Whenever I hear about globalization, I have to check myself, because I automatically think about the 15th century and 16th century and the globalization that started then. In Asia, you had this sudden outpouring of Chinese all over the rest of Asia, especially into Southeast Asia. And then in the later 15th and into the 16th century, you have Europe suddenly expanding everywhere and a lot of this is just driven by trade. That was globalization back then. It was just a lot slower. And it didn’t make the world a more homogeneous place. It produced all of these weird hybrid cultures that now we try and go out and explore. The Chinese in Malaysia, the Chinese in Indonesia— these hybrid cultures there would not have existed without the trade routes of the 15th century. Colonialism didn’t produce copies of France or Portugal in Vietnam and in Brazil. It produced something totally different.

Hannah: Good point.

Matt: Do people complain that because of globalization everybody drinks tea? Until the globalization waves of the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th century, tea was a localized product and you couldn’t get it outside of the countries where it was grown. And that’s what Coke is. Coke is the tea of the 20th century. And these global products often adapt themselves to the local cultures and local tastes. So you go to Mexico and the Coke is made with sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup, because it’s better tasting to the Mexicans. (It’s probably also a cost thing.) These things that seem very homogeneous are actually not.

Hannah: I remember you telling me about a sake bar in Kyoto that’s run by an Israeli who serves falafel and plays Thelonious Monk. I’ve had a lot of these “global village” moments when I travel: a Thai restaurant in Berlin owned by a Turkish-Mexican couple, a Mexican restaurant in Basel, hearing a cascade of languages as I hiked up Huayna Picchu in Peru. What are some of the most “global village” moments you’ve had?

Matt: I went hiking in central Germany in the Hearts Mountains. Some days I was doing 20 miles, but when I finally came down out of the mountains I had to stop in a small town. There was a big map of the pensiones in this town and I started calling them. I can say “Do you have a room” and if they said no or yes, that was great, but that was the extent of my German. I was really butting up against the language barrier. Finally, I found one place that had a room and when I got where I was supposed to be, I realized that it was not there. I was so frustrated. Where am I going to sleep? I’m tired, I’m hungry, I just want to find a comfortable bed that I can afford.

All of a sudden I see this Asian restaurant with a sign in the window that names the proprietor—and he was Vietnamese. I speak Vietnamese! So I ate and I chatted with the waitress about nothing in particular.

Hannah: You’re a great ambassador for our country, I just wanna say.

Matt: We talked about where I lived in Vietnam, why I speak Vietnamese. It was just so gratifying to be able to communicate that way. It gave me the energy to go back out there and walk a couple more miles through these city streets until I could find a place I could afford.

Hannah: When you have these trips and spend a week or so in these places, have you ever fallen in love with a place and thought, “It’s so nice, I could live there.”

Matt: I could’ve just stopped in Rome and not gone any further.

Hannah: What do you love about it?

Matt: The flow of every day. People just enjoy themselves so much there. For me that was always a good key to knowing a place that would be a good value—that would be a good place for a Frugal Traveler. If people really like to live well and enjoy themselves, they are more likely to give you freebies, try to take care of you. They just want you to have a good time. They want you to eat well. They know you’re going to pay, but having some extravagant price is not what they’re after. They want you to live well because that’s how people live.

Hannah: Yeah, welcome to our country.

Matt: Whereas places that are more frugal, you don’t get as much for your money. Or rather, you get exactly what you pay for.

Hannah: How do you transition so quickly from one culture to the next—do you have any tricks?

Matt: What do you have to change?

Hannah: Language, food, customs. When I travel, I feel that, yeah, globalization has made things common but there are very different personalities or habits—like how in Senegal, toilet paper is a rarity or how in Germany it’s verboten to wear a bathing suit in the sauna—and you don’t really know that until you live there for awhile.

Matt: I try to approach all these places the same way and listen to people and do what they do and just…be open. There’s probably a lot of unconscious mimicry.

Hannah: Weren’t there any moments on your trip where you were like, “Wow, people here are different!?”

Matt: I just noticed the difference between openness in people and closed-offedness. If you get to a country and nobody looks at you, nobody talks to you….

Hannah: Where did you find that?

Matt: A little bit in Poland and Amsterdam. And maybe in England. I spent three nights in Dover which is longer than I think any tourist has ever spent in Dover. Or should.
[Pauses]
Bulgaria. I don’t really want to go back to Bulgaria.

Hannah: Can I quote that?

Matt: I don’t think Bulgaria wants me to come back.

Hannah: Why’s that?

Matt: I wrote an article about snowboarding in Bulgaria that wasn’t terribly positive. (Cackles.) They’re friendly enough, but it’s just not the most entrancing culture for me. The food’s not amazing. The folk music is kind of annoying. It’s just a rough culture.

Hannah: But Lithuania you really liked, right?

Matt: Yeah, Lithuania was so sophisticated. It was surprising just how smooth, functional, and advanced it seemed. How Scandinavian it was. Of course, people coming from the south say that it feels very Scandinavian. When Scandinavians go to Lithuanian they think it’s very Russian. And when Russians go to Lithuania, they think it’s very western and Italian.

Hannah: What’s your preferred mode of communication with friends and family back home?

Matt: E-mail, cell phone, Skype—all of the above. The first thing I do is buy a SIM card. I think it says something about a person as a traveler. Getting a local number makes it so much easier for other people to contact you. To get a SIM card means, “I am spending a little bit of money so that we can be more closely connected.”

Hannah: And it’s not that much.

Matt: In Lithuania it was 4 litas which is, like, $2. But I use Skype a lot as well. I have a “Skype In” number. And so I just forward my U.S. cell phone number to my Skype In number and then tell all calls to Skype Out to the new local cell phone number. It costs me a little, but it’s always cheaper in the end. And it means that people who want to call me from the states can just call my regular number.

Hannah: Wow! That’s a great tip.
I really liked your videocasts for the New York Times—which you did yourself. [See his recap video imbedded here.]

Matt: I had to write a script and everything. Sending the video back was torture, though. Those files are so big. The Internet is everywhere, but that doesn’t mean it’s fast. The worst was in Italy. The slowest Internet.

Hannah: At an Internet café?

Matt: No, it was at the New York Times bureau! (Chuckles.) It’s just Italy—Italy is a third world country.

Hannah: You have to let go of work if you go there.

Matt: It’s the Vietnam of Europe! Deadlines cannot exist. The clock doesn’t exist, the calendar doesn’t exist, deadlines don’t exist.

Hannah: It’s good there’s a place in the world like that. It’s just frustrating if you have to work there.

Matt: Maybe it’s the India of Europe. Except India, I think, has faster broadband. (Laughter.)

Hannah: You send out e-mails before you leave on a trip, asking friends and family if they know anyone in certain cities. But do you also use social networking sites for this purpose?

Matt: I use Facebook all the time. When you’re traveling, it’s essential. I do it as I’m arriving somewhere. Status update: Matt’s in Istanbul, do you know anyone here? Usually someone notices me and is like, “Let’s have coffee at the Grand Bazaar.”

Hannah: So what about other social networking sites?

Matt: MySpace is good. I sign up for all the these sites like to keep up with technology. MySpace doesn’t have the closed-offness that Facebook has—where you have to know somebody and know who they are to read their profile. MySpace doesn’t really have that level of separation, so when I was in Monaco, I don’t know anyone in Monaco, and somehow, none of my friends do either. But I can go on MySpace and search for all users in Monaco.

Hannah: Some people would say you have the perfect job. What do you say to that?

Matt: You know what I say? I say, it’s better than picking grapes. Which is true. Or it’s better than delivering pizza. I’ve done those things, I like doing those. But travel writing is better.

Hannah: There’s nothing bad about it?

Matt: Look, I could complain about it, I could say that it keeps me away from my wife for long stretches of time. I could say that its turned me into a terrible friend. I’m out on the road, making new friends with people in countries that I’m not going to visit again for a very long time, meanwhile, I’m neglecting my friends back home. I could say that it’s stressful, the nights of not knowing where I’m going to sleep, not knowing if I have enough money in the overall budget to cover this meal that I’m having. Wondering if it’s going to take me out of my budget or away from the theme of my story that I’m going to write. It’s incredible stress! I could complain about what I actually get paid by the newspaper. But these are just piddly little complaints. I mean, it is the greatest job that there is!

And when I’m with other travel writers, we’ll complain about these things. But for a regular person—they don’t need to hear that. It is a great job.

Joseph O’Neill does not like pickles on his burgers. Or onions. He is indifferent to the choice of beverages, but his ears prick when lemonade is spotted. He notes the happy accompaniment of fries with the burger, popping the slender brown ribbons into his mouth between sentences. All in all, it is a pleasure to have lunch with Joseph O’Neill.

The former lawyer turned novelist, O’Neill earlier this year issued his fourth book, “Netherland,” which has just been longlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize. He met me for lunch in Chelsea at BRGR, a low-key place where you order at the bar and await the arrival of tight meaty parcels with a long stemmed number on your table.

The day was buttery hot. At the nearby 28th Street Station of the NRW, there had just been a stabbing. The stairs had been cordoned off with pink tape. Angolan men hustled watches and sunglasses. The city heaved. But never mind. At a small table in Chelsea, for just over an hour, I had one of the most formidable writers of the decade opposite me. “Netherland” rocks.

The plot of the book has received much coverage, hailed by the New York Times as the “the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we’ve yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell.” “Netherland” totters about inside the mind of one Hans van den Broek, a financial analyst who’s been disgorged into post-9/11 New York with a cantering sense of unease. His wife has left him, taking the kid with her. His work life is shadowy at best, matched only by the murky dealings of a new set of friends in a local cricket club, most notably its puffy president, Chuck Ramkissoon.

That’s about it. But, in the hands of the astute O’Neill, that’s more than enough. There are long car rides, meanders out to the Floyd Bennett Field where Ramkissoon hopes to create New York’s first true cricket pitch, tentatively titled Bald Eagle Field. There are the ghosts and goblins of the Chelsea Hotel where Hans has taken up residency. But it’s Hans’ internal meditations we’re after, the ones that tell us most about how he navigates the shoal waters of a world in every way made foreign and sharp-edged, “the great subtraction that had lessened my life.”

While observing the white skirt of Hans’ estranged wife that “blazed with roses” and the “misplucked eyebrows” of a straggler, O’Neill paints a portrait of a man disassociated from himself and all that is around him. The result provides artful locution of how we too may similarly negotiate choppy waters, life’s turns for the worst. Or not. Hans’ strategy is no strategy. He doesn’t walk, he “drifts.” But the character, at the very least, gets through this. The same cannot be said of others in “Netherland.”

The burgers arrive. We unwrap their packaging. Drat it all, I’m wearing black and am roasting. O’Neill, by contrast, is easy breezy in a gray t-shirt, khakis and sneakers, a slender man of 44 with thick dark hair and comfortable shoulders. He adjusts his chair to sit at an angle, taking the fast food restaurant in at full tilt. He’s been on his book tour for the past couple of months. This is the who-knows-what number interview he’s done. O’Neill rests his cheek on his hand. “At least I get a burger out of it,” he sighs.

Right. I open my notebook. A fair scrawl of questions had come to mind prior to the interview. Chicken scratchings, all of them. Where to begin? O’Neill raises a half-Turkish half-Irish eyebrow.

Born in Ireland to a Turkish mother and Irish father, O’Neill was raised in Holland and studied law at Cambridge. But letters, not law, are his bag. He came to New York in 1998, taking up with the Staten Island Cricket Club and wedding Vogue editor Sally Singer. The couple has three sons. I am off and running in earnest now, reading back to a him a quote from his family memoir, “Blood Dark Track,” that had stuck in my mind, something on the past and recovered memories and Cork. From this I drum up a haphazard question about the ins and outs of writing fiction verses non-fiction.

“Could you be more specific?” he asks, reaching across the tiny table to read this quote more carefully.

Drat again.

“Hmm… yes, I guess I did write that. Yeah. Ok.” More eyebrows. But then O’Neill sits back. “When you write non-fiction, you become aware of the quicksand of factuality inherent in the work, the bottomless sea of rumors.”

O’Neill pauses, allowing me to catch up with my scribbles. “With ‘Blood Dark Track’ I became aware of the difficulty of establishing any fact at all.”

The slippery-slope nature of things draws O’Neill further towards fiction, where he plans to stay and into which “Netherland” surely falls. “I’m trying to write about contemporary life and l love the linguistic freedom that fiction allows,” he says.

More burgers, more lemonade. I had, I thought, issued my heavy hitting question of the interview. We settle back into an easier rapport.

“Netherland” is spiked with grand little roller coasters of prose, moments of inward listening deliberation that swoop and glide around the curves of the story like cake icing—at once delicious and very necessary to the broader product. One such momentous example comes at the center of the book, as Hans finally lets go and eases his way into the eddies of New York nightlife with Ramkissoon at the tiller. It is the most sublime of benders:

Emboldened, I gave into the situation and its happiness—gave in to the song, to the rums and the Coca-Colas, to Avalon’s smooth skillful butt, to the hilarity of remarks made by Dr. Flavian Seem and Prashanth Ramachandran, to the suggestion that we go on, after the gala, to some further place; and to the crush of hips and legs in Chuck’s stretch limo; and to the idea that we swing by, since we’re all dressed up, the all-fours club down on Utica on the far side of the Great Eastern Parkway, where the speechless all-fours players have been playing all day and signal to partners by picking their ears and rubbing their noses, their women hanging around drinking and eating and very ready to go home; and to persuading some characters from the all-fours club to come out and fete with us at the limo driver’s place down on Remsen and Avenue A; and to stopping on the way there at Ali’s Roti Shop for roti and doubles and stopping at Thrifty Beverages to load up with beer and four bottles of rum and, because there is no limit to our hunger, stopping also at Kahaune Restaurant and Bakery to order a delivery of tripe and beans, patties, and curry goat; and to the invitation, once inside the home of the limo driver, who is named Proverbs, to join in a card game called wapi, and to losing nearly two hundred dollars playing wapi; and to the truth of the remarks “Boy, it have a good wapi there tonight” and “Mankind does be serious about the wapi game, boy”; and to the ephemeral mouth belonging to a girl with a diploma in lifesaving; and to six laughing pairs of hands that picked up my wrecked body and dropped it on a couch; and to water splashed on my face at six in the morning; and finally to the proposition, made by Chuck as we walked behind a gang of boisterous Hasidic boys in the first warmth of the weekend, that we sweat it all off at a banya just a few blocks from his house.

I ask O’Neill where and how he came up with this single sentence, if he was ever swept into the blinding moment of writing’s creation, captured in the lilt and twirl of sentences as they flow and then, once executed, simply sits back and shouts, hot hot hot!

Or whatever he shouts.

“Um, no,” he started.

“Actually, writing ‘Netherland’ was all hard. Nothing about it was easy. I was worried the entire time I was writing it. Four years into the process, I had to rewrite the whole first half. It just didn’t work, was way too plotted. It didn’t flow. I guess I had only one moment when I thought things were going well. It was when I came up with the phrase, ‘invertebrate time.’”

“Even Shakespeare would take that phrase,” he continues.

“Netherland,” he tells me, was conjured in the shadow of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, “The Great Gatsby.”

“Can you believe he was only 28 when he wrote that?” I ask O’Neill. I love posing this question to good writers. It gets them every time.

“Unbelievable,” he says, shaking his head. “Unbelievable! How did someone that young have that much wisdom?”

No idea. But where others, like NPR’s Maureen Corrigan, take “Netherland” as an occasion to rehash the remarkable ease of Fitzgerald’s work, O’Neill takes a different route.

“‘Gatsby’ defies every rule of how to write a novel, right? We’re not sympathetic with Gatsby. We don’t care about Nick. They could all get mowed down, we just wouldn’t care.”

Well, here we are, nestled deep within the “green breast” of old Manhattan and, as “Netherland” winds to a close, the characters similarly defy fictional conventions. Old tensions are lived with or just fizzle. Characters that had been inscrutable, perhaps especially to themselves, remain so. And yet the words haunt, the mood is plain and real. The gaps “Netherland” leaves behind for us to fill in are, perhaps, the gaps of our own lives. We see the ways in which our own failings and miseries fit in and around the speed bumps of the novel.

As a final question, I ask O’Neill if he has any tricks of the trade, peccadilloes, little sleights of hand and superstitions that he engages in to ease the writing along.

“I usually have a golf club handy,” he says. “A putter. I swing it when I’m thinking.”

And that does it. I bow deeply to the writer. He pushes his chair in and shakes my hand. Then, as a parting word, the man compliments my shoes.

A shoe compliment. I walk away, past the Angolans and the bloodstained post-stabbing section of 28th Street, swooning and light and newly confident that I have three things seriously right in the world: A) good shoes B) a great book and C) a mercurial, magical conversation with its author.