My March posting “Cayman - warts and all” argued in favour of telling the truth about one’s homeland. Why hide the bad bits? Inviting prospective residents to come to Cayman on false premises is futile, when you think about it. Tell them there’s no crime, and they won’t take precautions. Tell them the Police are efficient, and they’ll be all the angrier when they come face to face with the reality. Tell them how welcome they’ll be, and they’ll be disillusioned when they discover the xenophobia that pervades our little society, fostered by the Immigration authorities.
Our rulers have never in recent decades felt comfortable when people tell the truth about Cayman. I remember the late 1980s, when the Department of Tourism’s brochures suppressed the fact that most Caymanians had African ancestors, lest American tourists be put off visiting. The ancestral lands were given as England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. What were the visitors to think when they saw all the dark faces – remnants of the famous “Black Irish”?
It was all part and parcel of the official policy of censorship in these Islands. At around the same time, the local newspaper was discouraged from publicising any criminal activities here. Cayman was advertised as being “crime-free” right up to the 1990s. The Police denied the existence of criminal gangs in the schools until the 2000s. As a result, criminality and gangs flourished. After all, why protect a society and its visitors against a problem that doesn’t exist?
The Cayman News Service website this last Tuesday reported that there have been forty-three murders over the past eight years, of which seventeen have not yet been solved. This, on an Island of 50,000! Each ethnic group in our society keeps its secrets, naturally, but each knows its secrets, too. Those seventeen unsolved murders were not committed by criminal masterminds but by young tearaways. Are the guilty parties being protected by persons of influence? That would go some way to explaining why the Police aren’t trusted.
Our Immigration Monster is the chosen instrument for the suppression of critics. Expat residents can be – and sometimes are – deported for breaking the unwritten rules of censorship. I’ve covered the matter in several past blogs, but it bears repeating. Virtually every native Caymanian has the power to deport virtually any expat, for pretty much any reason. The vague accusation “he’s anti-Caymanian” is sometimes enough, and always has been.
Even anonymous denunciations are acceptable as evidence. Occasionally, someone in authority will deny that, but the denial is never meant to be taken seriously. “Anti-Caymanian” can mean anything from criticism by a middle-class expat of government's protectionist policies, to a protest by an expat domestic servant against his or her employer’s refusal to pay wages owed.
When I blog about such things, does it damage Cayman? Am I letting the side down by washing our dirty linen in public? Is it treason? No, none of those things. If the facts themselves don’t damage the Islands, then the reporting of them can do no harm.
According to Google’s statistics, two thirds of all visits to my blog come from outside of Cayman. Almost all of those visitors are expatriates living in other countries, I would think; I contribute to several international forums for expats. The grand total for the blog is only a thousand or so a month, at the moment. The numbers are inching up, but it’s a gradual business. I look forward to the day when they reach ten times the present total. By then, hopefully, there won’t be as many bad things to write about.
Thursday, May 17, 2012
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Perception and reality (austerity in Cayman)
Chancellor Angela Merkel is so ordinary-looking that she is not recognised by a Greek Immigration officer. “Nationality?” “German.” “Occupation?” “No, no, just for a few days.”
Those of us who follow the financial news (just to check on how much of our retirement money has been stolen by the banksters each week) know that most European nations are heading for bankruptcy, beginning with the desperately over-borrowed nations of the south. German banks are Greece’s main creditors, and are bitterly blamed for the austerity-measures levied by the last Greek Government. Hence the anti-German rioters, warning that “the Germans” are planning to come down in force to collect the money owed.
The Greeks’ perception is that German banks forced Greek politicians to borrow more than could comfortably be repaid out of tax revenues. The reality is that Greece’s corrupt politicians voluntarily borrowed all the money, in full awareness that it could not be comfortably repaid; the German banks no doubt bribed the crooks, but that’s what banks do. Much of the borrowed money was spent on weapons of war, manufactured by German companies. Sigh. We’ve been here before, haven’t we?
Whatever goes wrong is always somebody else’s fault, politicians say; and they sell that perception to their constituents. Here in Cayman our recent ruling cliques have borrowed beyond the limits of comfort, while craftily keeping unfunded Civil Service pensions obligations off the Territory’s Balance Sheet, and making no provision for them in the annual Expenditure Budgets. That way, they can pretend Cayman is not insolvent; where could they have gotten that idea from, but news reports from Europe?
When austerity comes to us – and come it must – who will be blamed? The opposition politicians, naturally, and the British FCO clerks as well. When the Civil Service layoffs come, and the pension-defaults, and when the taxes increase, it will be everybody’s fault but the rulers of the day. Those rulers will not blame themselves for the shambles; they will hope to sell us the perception that the fault lies elsewhere.
We (the general public) perceive the extravagances and waste all right, but we aren’t always sure precisely whose fault they are. After all, we haven’t seen audited Government Financial Statements since 2004, so how can we know? Is it all our politicians’ fault? Well, yes and no. It’s our perception that they make all the decisions. But what many of us fail to recognise is that our British colonial constitution strictly limits our elected MLAs’ authority to borrow. In effect, our MLAs are Britain’s indentured servants – and we all know how that works...
The FCO can suspend any part of our Constitution at any time, and can block any borrowing attempt by our MLAs. The MLAs are headstrong and wilful, but they aren’t in any position to bully the British Government. Our MLAs see themselves as the leaders of our little community, but what they are is representatives, not leaders. The reality is that we don’t need leaders. (Check this blog’s archives for my post on this topic in December 2010 called “Leaders and followers”.)
Britain has made a rod for its own back by encouraging our representatives to perceive themselves as important. Our “leader” – a parish-council chairman in any other context – is called a Premier, for goodness sake. He has a full-time bodyguard and a chef and a Protocol Office with a staff of ten, and gets free First Class travel to anywhere in the world. The FCO clerks in Whitehall consented to the creation of our comic-book Ruritania, so they can’t pretend the fault isn’t theirs.
However... incompetent as the FCO clerks have been in the administration of Cayman, an independent Cayman might be fifty times worse. Let’s cling to that thought, when times get tough.
Those of us who follow the financial news (just to check on how much of our retirement money has been stolen by the banksters each week) know that most European nations are heading for bankruptcy, beginning with the desperately over-borrowed nations of the south. German banks are Greece’s main creditors, and are bitterly blamed for the austerity-measures levied by the last Greek Government. Hence the anti-German rioters, warning that “the Germans” are planning to come down in force to collect the money owed.
The Greeks’ perception is that German banks forced Greek politicians to borrow more than could comfortably be repaid out of tax revenues. The reality is that Greece’s corrupt politicians voluntarily borrowed all the money, in full awareness that it could not be comfortably repaid; the German banks no doubt bribed the crooks, but that’s what banks do. Much of the borrowed money was spent on weapons of war, manufactured by German companies. Sigh. We’ve been here before, haven’t we?
Whatever goes wrong is always somebody else’s fault, politicians say; and they sell that perception to their constituents. Here in Cayman our recent ruling cliques have borrowed beyond the limits of comfort, while craftily keeping unfunded Civil Service pensions obligations off the Territory’s Balance Sheet, and making no provision for them in the annual Expenditure Budgets. That way, they can pretend Cayman is not insolvent; where could they have gotten that idea from, but news reports from Europe?
When austerity comes to us – and come it must – who will be blamed? The opposition politicians, naturally, and the British FCO clerks as well. When the Civil Service layoffs come, and the pension-defaults, and when the taxes increase, it will be everybody’s fault but the rulers of the day. Those rulers will not blame themselves for the shambles; they will hope to sell us the perception that the fault lies elsewhere.
We (the general public) perceive the extravagances and waste all right, but we aren’t always sure precisely whose fault they are. After all, we haven’t seen audited Government Financial Statements since 2004, so how can we know? Is it all our politicians’ fault? Well, yes and no. It’s our perception that they make all the decisions. But what many of us fail to recognise is that our British colonial constitution strictly limits our elected MLAs’ authority to borrow. In effect, our MLAs are Britain’s indentured servants – and we all know how that works...
The FCO can suspend any part of our Constitution at any time, and can block any borrowing attempt by our MLAs. The MLAs are headstrong and wilful, but they aren’t in any position to bully the British Government. Our MLAs see themselves as the leaders of our little community, but what they are is representatives, not leaders. The reality is that we don’t need leaders. (Check this blog’s archives for my post on this topic in December 2010 called “Leaders and followers”.)
Britain has made a rod for its own back by encouraging our representatives to perceive themselves as important. Our “leader” – a parish-council chairman in any other context – is called a Premier, for goodness sake. He has a full-time bodyguard and a chef and a Protocol Office with a staff of ten, and gets free First Class travel to anywhere in the world. The FCO clerks in Whitehall consented to the creation of our comic-book Ruritania, so they can’t pretend the fault isn’t theirs.
However... incompetent as the FCO clerks have been in the administration of Cayman, an independent Cayman might be fifty times worse. Let’s cling to that thought, when times get tough.
Monday, May 7, 2012
“International Man” (an expat website)
A little while ago I came across a Web forum called International Man (dot com), contributors to which are mainly US expats and intending expats. A minority of them already live outside the US, and are happy to advertise the virtues of their new homes; others are unhappy in them and are looking for somewhere else. Some are retired, others have jobs or businesses. In total, there are hundreds of posts asking or telling about the pros and cons of living in this country or that. **** see footnote
What a shame Cayman’s authorities don’t welcome foreign businessmen or retirees. It would help our economy, if they did. Unfortunately, a change would require a 180-degree turn in our rulers’ immigration policy, and that’s not going to happen without one political Team or the other adopting an openly pro-expat platform.
Latin America is the region of choice for US citizens. Uruguay seems to be losing its appeal in favour of Paraguay and Chile; Panama and Dominican Republic are preferred to Costa Rica and eastern Mexico. Belize is the most praised of English-speaking territories. A surprising number favour South-East Asian nations: Thailand, Cambodia and Singapore. New Zealand is well thought of, but not Australia (on this particular site).Of the small Pacific territories, Vanuatu and Cook Islands receive honourable mentions. Few Caribbean islands make the list, except Nevis and DR for second-passports.
The site’s basic purpose is to encourage its readers to become “international men” – to slough off their tribal loyalties as best they can and embrace a world-view of – uh, well, of the world, I suppose. More and more thinking Americans are becoming disenchanted with their nation’s behaviour both internationally and domestically. Some have found it hard to abandon trust in their government’s good faith – not least about the alleged existentialist threat of the world’s entire stock of Moslems.
The thinkers are perceptive enough to realise that Moslems (“rag-heads”, “hajjis”) are simply the new “niggers”. The new hatred of Islam (among those who do hate people not like themselves) merely displaced an existing hatred of Blacks. Probably, all of today’s Moslem-haters were yesterday’s racists. If I were a Black or Jewish or Hispanic or homosexual American, I would stay well clear of the verbal attacks on Moslems, in the certain knowledge that “my” people will always be the backup victims – in the future, as they were in the past.
International Man is a relatively new site, and most of its members are new to the idea of leaving their homes in the USA. A large percentage would like to acquire second-passports. They expect that one day they will be forbidden from renouncing their citizenship, and be subjected to exchange-controls on the expatriation of private assets. Would the US ever do such a thing? Surely not! Surely that sort of action went out with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Surely America is not bent on a 1984-type empire, sustained by permanent warfare. Well, who knows...?
More and more Americans are losing faith in their nation’s future as a democracy. Some of them believe that moving to a foreign domicile will protect their freedoms – and that a foreign passport will guarantee their freedom to travel. Others, less trusting, just want to slip out from under the US radar.
The International Man site has plenty to interest Cayman’s expats, at least those who are skilled or have a healthy retirement package put away and are on the lookout for overseas bolt-holes. Unskilled expats, unfortunately, don’t have the option of going anywhere except home, if our economy turns turtle. Native-born Caymanians (in general) aren’t receptive to the notion of ever leaving Cayman, whatever the economic circumstances. They believe their politicians will protect them from poverty as long as the tax-haven lasts, which in practice means as long as our status as a British colony lasts. They’re probably right. But I wonder how long that will be, in years.
**** Since this piece was posted, International Man has scrapped its Members' forum, and now offers little of value.
What a shame Cayman’s authorities don’t welcome foreign businessmen or retirees. It would help our economy, if they did. Unfortunately, a change would require a 180-degree turn in our rulers’ immigration policy, and that’s not going to happen without one political Team or the other adopting an openly pro-expat platform.
Latin America is the region of choice for US citizens. Uruguay seems to be losing its appeal in favour of Paraguay and Chile; Panama and Dominican Republic are preferred to Costa Rica and eastern Mexico. Belize is the most praised of English-speaking territories. A surprising number favour South-East Asian nations: Thailand, Cambodia and Singapore. New Zealand is well thought of, but not Australia (on this particular site).Of the small Pacific territories, Vanuatu and Cook Islands receive honourable mentions. Few Caribbean islands make the list, except Nevis and DR for second-passports.
The site’s basic purpose is to encourage its readers to become “international men” – to slough off their tribal loyalties as best they can and embrace a world-view of – uh, well, of the world, I suppose. More and more thinking Americans are becoming disenchanted with their nation’s behaviour both internationally and domestically. Some have found it hard to abandon trust in their government’s good faith – not least about the alleged existentialist threat of the world’s entire stock of Moslems.
The thinkers are perceptive enough to realise that Moslems (“rag-heads”, “hajjis”) are simply the new “niggers”. The new hatred of Islam (among those who do hate people not like themselves) merely displaced an existing hatred of Blacks. Probably, all of today’s Moslem-haters were yesterday’s racists. If I were a Black or Jewish or Hispanic or homosexual American, I would stay well clear of the verbal attacks on Moslems, in the certain knowledge that “my” people will always be the backup victims – in the future, as they were in the past.
International Man is a relatively new site, and most of its members are new to the idea of leaving their homes in the USA. A large percentage would like to acquire second-passports. They expect that one day they will be forbidden from renouncing their citizenship, and be subjected to exchange-controls on the expatriation of private assets. Would the US ever do such a thing? Surely not! Surely that sort of action went out with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Surely America is not bent on a 1984-type empire, sustained by permanent warfare. Well, who knows...?
More and more Americans are losing faith in their nation’s future as a democracy. Some of them believe that moving to a foreign domicile will protect their freedoms – and that a foreign passport will guarantee their freedom to travel. Others, less trusting, just want to slip out from under the US radar.
The International Man site has plenty to interest Cayman’s expats, at least those who are skilled or have a healthy retirement package put away and are on the lookout for overseas bolt-holes. Unskilled expats, unfortunately, don’t have the option of going anywhere except home, if our economy turns turtle. Native-born Caymanians (in general) aren’t receptive to the notion of ever leaving Cayman, whatever the economic circumstances. They believe their politicians will protect them from poverty as long as the tax-haven lasts, which in practice means as long as our status as a British colony lasts. They’re probably right. But I wonder how long that will be, in years.
**** Since this piece was posted, International Man has scrapped its Members' forum, and now offers little of value.
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
The German lesson (T 8 - Austria 1960s)
(Eighth traveller’s tale – April 1965)
The Youth Hostel wasn’t where it was supposed to be, so we pulled up beside an inn, in this small town in Austria. I rehearsed a little speech in German and asked the girl behind the bar for directions. She in turn asked the customers at large, and while they were reaching a consensus a man at the back called out, in German, “Give him a room; I’ll pay for it.”
I ignored the call, but she repeated his words in English. What to do? He and his female companion, both in their forties, were well dressed and appeared respectable, but who knows? In German I told him, “My girlfriend is waiting in the car, but thank you.” The offer was immediately extended to my girlfriend. There was no polite way out, and the waitress nodded her assurance that the couple posed no danger to our virtue, so Linda and I hustled our basic luggage upstairs, washed and brushed, and came down to thank our host.
For the next ninety minutes, though it was probably only twenty, I told him our life stories and answered his questions in the most brutally mutilated German grammar he and his wife could ever have heard. Linda always supplied words that I couldn’t call to mind, in any language, but I had a better feel for pronunciation, so most of the dog work was mine. The couple were patient, and the wife sometimes supplied words that Linda didn’t know. When I finally stumbled to a halt from mental exhaustion, he said fluently, “We can speak English, if you like.”
The bastard! Why had he let me stammer on so pathetically for so long? “It was good practice for you,” he smiled; “Your German’s not all that bad.” Why was he paying for our room, so kindly? “Somebody did it for me, once, when I was about your age and travelling around Europe. I’m passing on the favour.” We ate and drank and enjoyed each other’s company until the bar closed; we never saw them again.
In the places we’d been before then, German was not a popular language, though a lot of older people remembered it from the wartime occupations. We had used it from time to time, from Turkey up through Bulgaria, Rumania and Czechoslovakia. Our German number-plates misled people, so every conversation with a stranger began, in the local language, “We are not German; we are English.” Only then, could I speak my ungrammatical German without fear of rejection. I had permitted a mechanic in Rumania to rip the car apart and replace the differential ball-bearings, because I happened to know that German kugel meant “ball”, and I figured out the rest of it from his gestures.
The only other time the car needed attention was months afterwards in Minsk, in what is now Belarus. Fed up with pumping up the tyres every morning, we decided to get them fixed by an expert. (My January blog post titled “Ararat” told how they had gotten so soft.) A young Intourist translator drove with us to the city’s sole car-repair shop – a vast yard that catered for every car in the entire country, it seemed. Well! All the workers rushed over to inspect our tubeless tyres. No tubes? Impossible! What keeps the air inside? Ah, well, that was the present problem...
In the end they cheerfully put tubes inside the hitherto tubeless tyres, and I tipped them generously with our illegal roubles (“Russian Roulette”, March blog), and Linda made the girl cry by giving her a new pair of nylons, carried unopened since London. (Nylon stockings in the USSR were as rare as tubeless tyres.) Did we speak English or German with her? I honestly can’t recall. If German, we would no doubt have taken a quiet moment to salute the efforts of our mentor back at the Austrian inn.
The Youth Hostel wasn’t where it was supposed to be, so we pulled up beside an inn, in this small town in Austria. I rehearsed a little speech in German and asked the girl behind the bar for directions. She in turn asked the customers at large, and while they were reaching a consensus a man at the back called out, in German, “Give him a room; I’ll pay for it.”
I ignored the call, but she repeated his words in English. What to do? He and his female companion, both in their forties, were well dressed and appeared respectable, but who knows? In German I told him, “My girlfriend is waiting in the car, but thank you.” The offer was immediately extended to my girlfriend. There was no polite way out, and the waitress nodded her assurance that the couple posed no danger to our virtue, so Linda and I hustled our basic luggage upstairs, washed and brushed, and came down to thank our host.
For the next ninety minutes, though it was probably only twenty, I told him our life stories and answered his questions in the most brutally mutilated German grammar he and his wife could ever have heard. Linda always supplied words that I couldn’t call to mind, in any language, but I had a better feel for pronunciation, so most of the dog work was mine. The couple were patient, and the wife sometimes supplied words that Linda didn’t know. When I finally stumbled to a halt from mental exhaustion, he said fluently, “We can speak English, if you like.”
The bastard! Why had he let me stammer on so pathetically for so long? “It was good practice for you,” he smiled; “Your German’s not all that bad.” Why was he paying for our room, so kindly? “Somebody did it for me, once, when I was about your age and travelling around Europe. I’m passing on the favour.” We ate and drank and enjoyed each other’s company until the bar closed; we never saw them again.
In the places we’d been before then, German was not a popular language, though a lot of older people remembered it from the wartime occupations. We had used it from time to time, from Turkey up through Bulgaria, Rumania and Czechoslovakia. Our German number-plates misled people, so every conversation with a stranger began, in the local language, “We are not German; we are English.” Only then, could I speak my ungrammatical German without fear of rejection. I had permitted a mechanic in Rumania to rip the car apart and replace the differential ball-bearings, because I happened to know that German kugel meant “ball”, and I figured out the rest of it from his gestures.
The only other time the car needed attention was months afterwards in Minsk, in what is now Belarus. Fed up with pumping up the tyres every morning, we decided to get them fixed by an expert. (My January blog post titled “Ararat” told how they had gotten so soft.) A young Intourist translator drove with us to the city’s sole car-repair shop – a vast yard that catered for every car in the entire country, it seemed. Well! All the workers rushed over to inspect our tubeless tyres. No tubes? Impossible! What keeps the air inside? Ah, well, that was the present problem...
In the end they cheerfully put tubes inside the hitherto tubeless tyres, and I tipped them generously with our illegal roubles (“Russian Roulette”, March blog), and Linda made the girl cry by giving her a new pair of nylons, carried unopened since London. (Nylon stockings in the USSR were as rare as tubeless tyres.) Did we speak English or German with her? I honestly can’t recall. If German, we would no doubt have taken a quiet moment to salute the efforts of our mentor back at the Austrian inn.
Friday, April 27, 2012
Cold and impersonal (Cayman's Immigration Monster)
Besides writing my blogs once or twice a week, I also post brief informational items in several Web forums about aspects of life in Cayman – employment in Cayman, healthcare in Cayman, censorship in Cayman, starting a business in Cayman, all that sort of thing. I give prospective residents (and whoever else reads them) a true picture of Cayman, the bad with the good, so that they have a realistic basis on which to make further enquiries. I explained that in a February blog “Cayman – warts and all”.
The main bad news I have for readers is that new residents won’t be made welcome by the authorities. Our Immigration Monster – the law, the policies, the bureaucrats and the enforcers (political-crony Boards and Committees) – goes out of its way to keep expats in a box, as it has done since the early '80s. Before then, a person could come to Cayman on spec, find a job one day and start it the following Monday if not sooner.
The whole society benefitted from that informality. Employers didn’t have to waste time and effort jumping through hoops of flame; new expats hit the ground running; native Caymanians enjoyed giving hospitality to strangers. No Caymanian was disadvantaged. On the contrary, the economic boom opened up new opportunities for a community whose economy had for centuries been limited to fishing, dirt-farming and a bit of rope-thatching. Cayman’s message to the world was one of laid-back friendliness. Expats were welcome, then. And so they should have been. After all, the native Caymanians were all descended from immigrants; there were never any indigenous people.
But the welcome faded away as our numbers grew. Today, two thirds of the whole population were born in some foreign land. Today, the Work Permit process is cold and impersonal. For most private-sector employers, it involves a frustrating battle with a bureaucracy whose terms of reference require it to micro-manage all personnel deployments in the private sector. Bloodline Caymanians must be hired and promoted with little regard for their ability or aptitude compared with expat applicants'.
Besides the inefficiencies inherent in such a system, the process encourages doubt as to the abilities of all Caymanians who occupy high positions in any field. Protectionism pays political dividends, but it causes expats in general to have little respect for Caymanians at managerial level or above. The Immigration juggernaut is designed to assuage the anti-expat resentment that flourishes in the hearts of a regrettably large proportion of the native-Caymanian population. In my second-ever posting on this blog, in November 2010, I described a “cargo cult” mentality. Any overseas reader (or local reader, come to that) trying to understand the local xenophobia will gain by reading it.
The good news about Cayman is that once expats are living here, and working for a good boss, life is very good. Who wouldn’t like living here? Wages are excellent except for the domestic help, and the expat community is so diverse that it provides something for everybody. Expats of all nationalities and classes (including the domestic help) like the place so much that the native-born have erected barriers to residence beyond seven years. After that period one must leave the Islands for twelve months, in order to break the continuity period. This “rollover” policy was covered by a blog of mine this last June. That’s worth checking out, if you’re looking for a long-term job here.
Life is good for foreign retirees here, too, as long as they don’t mind leaving the islands every few months. Permanent domicile is available for billionaires, but there probably won’t be all that many of them reading these words. Warren, you can give me a call and I’ll see what I can do for you; but please, nobody else.
The main bad news I have for readers is that new residents won’t be made welcome by the authorities. Our Immigration Monster – the law, the policies, the bureaucrats and the enforcers (political-crony Boards and Committees) – goes out of its way to keep expats in a box, as it has done since the early '80s. Before then, a person could come to Cayman on spec, find a job one day and start it the following Monday if not sooner.
The whole society benefitted from that informality. Employers didn’t have to waste time and effort jumping through hoops of flame; new expats hit the ground running; native Caymanians enjoyed giving hospitality to strangers. No Caymanian was disadvantaged. On the contrary, the economic boom opened up new opportunities for a community whose economy had for centuries been limited to fishing, dirt-farming and a bit of rope-thatching. Cayman’s message to the world was one of laid-back friendliness. Expats were welcome, then. And so they should have been. After all, the native Caymanians were all descended from immigrants; there were never any indigenous people.
But the welcome faded away as our numbers grew. Today, two thirds of the whole population were born in some foreign land. Today, the Work Permit process is cold and impersonal. For most private-sector employers, it involves a frustrating battle with a bureaucracy whose terms of reference require it to micro-manage all personnel deployments in the private sector. Bloodline Caymanians must be hired and promoted with little regard for their ability or aptitude compared with expat applicants'.
Besides the inefficiencies inherent in such a system, the process encourages doubt as to the abilities of all Caymanians who occupy high positions in any field. Protectionism pays political dividends, but it causes expats in general to have little respect for Caymanians at managerial level or above. The Immigration juggernaut is designed to assuage the anti-expat resentment that flourishes in the hearts of a regrettably large proportion of the native-Caymanian population. In my second-ever posting on this blog, in November 2010, I described a “cargo cult” mentality. Any overseas reader (or local reader, come to that) trying to understand the local xenophobia will gain by reading it.
The good news about Cayman is that once expats are living here, and working for a good boss, life is very good. Who wouldn’t like living here? Wages are excellent except for the domestic help, and the expat community is so diverse that it provides something for everybody. Expats of all nationalities and classes (including the domestic help) like the place so much that the native-born have erected barriers to residence beyond seven years. After that period one must leave the Islands for twelve months, in order to break the continuity period. This “rollover” policy was covered by a blog of mine this last June. That’s worth checking out, if you’re looking for a long-term job here.
Life is good for foreign retirees here, too, as long as they don’t mind leaving the islands every few months. Permanent domicile is available for billionaires, but there probably won’t be all that many of them reading these words. Warren, you can give me a call and I’ll see what I can do for you; but please, nobody else.
Sunday, April 22, 2012
Lies and statistics (illiteracy in Cayman)
According to the World Bank’s database, Cayman’s literacy rate is 98.87%, for residents aged fifteen and over. At least that was the rate in 2007, and there has been no change in the published data since then. Only 1.13% illiteracy? Hey, I think I know that family!
So much for published statistics. I guess we shouldn’t give our local Stats Office a hard time, if the World Bank’s figures are so dodgy. Or could it be that our Office didn’t fill the form in properly in 2007, or didn’t check the figures it was given by the Education Department? Or didn’t care.
What idiot would ever claim that 99% of our population was literate? I’m not sure 99% of our College graduates are literate – never mind our unemployables, or our unskilled migrant labourers. I suspect that what happened in 2007 is that somebody in government service wanted Cayman to look good. After all, everybody tells small lies, right? So where’s the harm?
Cayman also had 87 cases of TB in 2010, the World Bank reports. Huh? Who knew? Does it count as a lie to hide that sort of information from us locals? Remember how our authorities covered up the incidence of AIDS in its early days, because our tourism officials didn’t want to frighten prospective tourists?
When I opened the Chamber of Commerce Office in 1986, the Tourism Department’s brochures identified Caymanians’ ancestral blood as English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish. I was told that American tourists wouldn’t come if they knew there were people of African descent here. The officials were lying in a good cause: it was a white lie, in a manner of speaking. The Chamber had to put out its own brochures until the word “African” was added to the other. Later, we got the lie that Cayman was crime-free, lest tourists be put off by the truth.
Cayman is insignificant in the World Bank’s eyes. The Bank couldn’t care less what it publishes about our literacy rate or TB rate. Other international organisations and agencies care – not about our government statistics, but about our lies. The classic lie from our Offshore sector is that Cayman is not a tax haven. Oh, please!
An Offshore tax haven is a place (a foreign haven) where people set up trusts and companies that avoid domestic taxes. We ARE a tax haven. Our government receives a lot of revenue from tax-haven clients. That’s why we can afford not to have a local Income Tax.
From reports in the free media (not in the mainstream media, of course) it seems that just about every powerful and well-connected organisation in the world has been corrupted to the point where lies and corruption are now the very basis of their methods of operation.
The OECD pretends to care about tax-dodging, although its officials are careful to minimise their own personal taxes. The CIA pretends to care about terrorism, while sponsoring its own terrorism. The IMF pretends to care about the world’s economies, while conniving to destroy them. NATO pretends to care about human rights and democracy, while shooting unarmed villagers in their homes and pissing on their bodies.
We in Cayman know what censorship is. Investigative reporting is not a tradition here, so official lies have rarely been questioned. The Immigration Monster makes sure of that. Cayman News Service questions the lies, but they don’t have the staff to hire investigative reporters. Can you see the Immigration authorities granting a Work Permit for an investigative reporter? Me neither.
98.87% literacy; no gangs in schools; tough regulation of the tax-haven; employers held to account for stealing from their employees; no TB or AIDS; no human-rights abuses; and, best of all, “there is no censorship”. Lies, lies, lies.
So much for published statistics. I guess we shouldn’t give our local Stats Office a hard time, if the World Bank’s figures are so dodgy. Or could it be that our Office didn’t fill the form in properly in 2007, or didn’t check the figures it was given by the Education Department? Or didn’t care.
What idiot would ever claim that 99% of our population was literate? I’m not sure 99% of our College graduates are literate – never mind our unemployables, or our unskilled migrant labourers. I suspect that what happened in 2007 is that somebody in government service wanted Cayman to look good. After all, everybody tells small lies, right? So where’s the harm?
Cayman also had 87 cases of TB in 2010, the World Bank reports. Huh? Who knew? Does it count as a lie to hide that sort of information from us locals? Remember how our authorities covered up the incidence of AIDS in its early days, because our tourism officials didn’t want to frighten prospective tourists?
When I opened the Chamber of Commerce Office in 1986, the Tourism Department’s brochures identified Caymanians’ ancestral blood as English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish. I was told that American tourists wouldn’t come if they knew there were people of African descent here. The officials were lying in a good cause: it was a white lie, in a manner of speaking. The Chamber had to put out its own brochures until the word “African” was added to the other. Later, we got the lie that Cayman was crime-free, lest tourists be put off by the truth.
Cayman is insignificant in the World Bank’s eyes. The Bank couldn’t care less what it publishes about our literacy rate or TB rate. Other international organisations and agencies care – not about our government statistics, but about our lies. The classic lie from our Offshore sector is that Cayman is not a tax haven. Oh, please!
An Offshore tax haven is a place (a foreign haven) where people set up trusts and companies that avoid domestic taxes. We ARE a tax haven. Our government receives a lot of revenue from tax-haven clients. That’s why we can afford not to have a local Income Tax.
From reports in the free media (not in the mainstream media, of course) it seems that just about every powerful and well-connected organisation in the world has been corrupted to the point where lies and corruption are now the very basis of their methods of operation.
The OECD pretends to care about tax-dodging, although its officials are careful to minimise their own personal taxes. The CIA pretends to care about terrorism, while sponsoring its own terrorism. The IMF pretends to care about the world’s economies, while conniving to destroy them. NATO pretends to care about human rights and democracy, while shooting unarmed villagers in their homes and pissing on their bodies.
We in Cayman know what censorship is. Investigative reporting is not a tradition here, so official lies have rarely been questioned. The Immigration Monster makes sure of that. Cayman News Service questions the lies, but they don’t have the staff to hire investigative reporters. Can you see the Immigration authorities granting a Work Permit for an investigative reporter? Me neither.
98.87% literacy; no gangs in schools; tough regulation of the tax-haven; employers held to account for stealing from their employees; no TB or AIDS; no human-rights abuses; and, best of all, “there is no censorship”. Lies, lies, lies.
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Virtues & vices (Cayman's expats)
I’ve been putting Cayman’s name out there, lately, on a few Internet forums. There’s not all that much name-recognition, to be honest. We tend to forget that our Islands are little known outside the context of tax-dodging and money-laundering. Anyway, I post for my pleasure in getting the truth out about Cayman – warts and all, as they say.
It irritates me that so many lies and half-truths are told about us – not by overseas observers so much as by our own residents and defenders. With 34 years’ residence under my belt, I believe that Cayman’s virtues and vices are much more closely balanced than our defenders concede or than our critics claim. Neither party should be telling lies about the place. If I didn’t believe that the virtues out-weighed the vices, I wouldn’t still be here.
Most medium-term and long-term residents are aware that I’ve had to fight the political establishment off and on for the past 24 years to remain here. The real battle began in 1988 when I was selected as the expat patsy (“expatsy”?) to be punished for the Chamber of Commerce’s victory over the then-Government’s Social Security proposal, and the Chamber’s narrow failure to defeat the draft Labour Law – which latter we described as “a lurch towards socialism” in an age when socialism was a very dirty word in Cayman. The Chamber was categorised as “a seditious organisation” in the Legislative Assembly; private-sector opposition to the ruling party’s desires was considered treason, no less. What was said about the Chamber’s Manager doesn’t bear repeating.
That’s all ancient history, now, but the tales are worth the telling because government treatment of its critics hasn’t changed a bit. Expats are still at the mercy of native-Caymanian politicians and their friends. Without fair warning, new expats might innocently sign their names to public criticism of some government policy in letters to newspapers or postings on the Cayman News Service forum. The next thing they would know is that their Work Permits were not renewed at the end of their current 12-months period. Migrants in menial jobs might find their Permits cancelled in mid-term.
Even protesting against short-payment of wages warrants cancellation, for the latter class. Plenty of housemaids are sent back to Jamaica without all their back wages, and some find themselves forbidden to return to Cayman in other jobs, at the instigation of vengeful employers. Caymanian employers have what amounts to carte blanche to steal their employees’ pensions contributions. A couple of years ago the Pensions Office identified 670 employers guilty of that crime; I think only two or three of them were prosecuted in court. In all the other cases, the employees were back in their homelands and not available to testify. This sort of practice explains the ongoing tensions between the native-Caymanian community and the expat communities. Just about any native Caymanian can arrange the deportation of just about any Work Permit expat for just about any reason.
Nevertheless, expats make up two thirds of the Islands’ population, and we are all here by choice. We middle-class expats – mostly white – can identify to some extent with the whites of the American South in the days before the Civil War. Our very comfortable lives owe a heck of a lot to the availability of low-wage domestic helpers, gardeners, labourers, waiters, shop-assistants, etc. What are low wages in Cayman are high wages in Jamaica and the other Caribbean islands, Central America, Philippines, and the Indian sub-continent. Despite an indentured-service system that lends itself to exploitation, it is worth the risk and effort for migrants who would be unemployed at home.
Liberal-minded employers can and do pay more than the going rates or add to the wages of migrants hired from agencies. Guilty consciences, no doubt; but being filthy rich by the servants’ standards does carry moral obligations.
It irritates me that so many lies and half-truths are told about us – not by overseas observers so much as by our own residents and defenders. With 34 years’ residence under my belt, I believe that Cayman’s virtues and vices are much more closely balanced than our defenders concede or than our critics claim. Neither party should be telling lies about the place. If I didn’t believe that the virtues out-weighed the vices, I wouldn’t still be here.
Most medium-term and long-term residents are aware that I’ve had to fight the political establishment off and on for the past 24 years to remain here. The real battle began in 1988 when I was selected as the expat patsy (“expatsy”?) to be punished for the Chamber of Commerce’s victory over the then-Government’s Social Security proposal, and the Chamber’s narrow failure to defeat the draft Labour Law – which latter we described as “a lurch towards socialism” in an age when socialism was a very dirty word in Cayman. The Chamber was categorised as “a seditious organisation” in the Legislative Assembly; private-sector opposition to the ruling party’s desires was considered treason, no less. What was said about the Chamber’s Manager doesn’t bear repeating.
That’s all ancient history, now, but the tales are worth the telling because government treatment of its critics hasn’t changed a bit. Expats are still at the mercy of native-Caymanian politicians and their friends. Without fair warning, new expats might innocently sign their names to public criticism of some government policy in letters to newspapers or postings on the Cayman News Service forum. The next thing they would know is that their Work Permits were not renewed at the end of their current 12-months period. Migrants in menial jobs might find their Permits cancelled in mid-term.
Even protesting against short-payment of wages warrants cancellation, for the latter class. Plenty of housemaids are sent back to Jamaica without all their back wages, and some find themselves forbidden to return to Cayman in other jobs, at the instigation of vengeful employers. Caymanian employers have what amounts to carte blanche to steal their employees’ pensions contributions. A couple of years ago the Pensions Office identified 670 employers guilty of that crime; I think only two or three of them were prosecuted in court. In all the other cases, the employees were back in their homelands and not available to testify. This sort of practice explains the ongoing tensions between the native-Caymanian community and the expat communities. Just about any native Caymanian can arrange the deportation of just about any Work Permit expat for just about any reason.
Nevertheless, expats make up two thirds of the Islands’ population, and we are all here by choice. We middle-class expats – mostly white – can identify to some extent with the whites of the American South in the days before the Civil War. Our very comfortable lives owe a heck of a lot to the availability of low-wage domestic helpers, gardeners, labourers, waiters, shop-assistants, etc. What are low wages in Cayman are high wages in Jamaica and the other Caribbean islands, Central America, Philippines, and the Indian sub-continent. Despite an indentured-service system that lends itself to exploitation, it is worth the risk and effort for migrants who would be unemployed at home.
Liberal-minded employers can and do pay more than the going rates or add to the wages of migrants hired from agencies. Guilty consciences, no doubt; but being filthy rich by the servants’ standards does carry moral obligations.
Thursday, April 12, 2012
One man, one vote
For a voter in George Town, it’s been nice to have had four votes in general elections all these years. I understand that as the proposed Elections Law currently reads, we will have six each next time. Wow. The only real problem is, what will we do with six new fridges? I rather regret the prospect of being limited to a single vote, as some killjoys want. Only one vote per person? It’s the end of democracy!
I also regret that our lives will be managed (i.e. micro-managed) by eighteen elected MLAs, three more than we have now. For 15,000 voters? Amazing! What can have possessed the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) in London to approve such an obvious jobs-for-cronies idea?
Sometimes it’s hard to remember that the FCO has absolute authority over all our Laws and practices. Yet the FCO’s clerks are Cayman’s colonial masters; constitutionally, we are merely their serfs. Their apathy simply encourages our local politicians to act as though the opposite were true, and that the pollies are the masters of their own destiny, and ours. How is that good for Cayman?
It’s only a few months ago that the FCO mustered the courage to chastise our MLAs for their woeful fiscal management. The message was loud and clear: Don’t do all the stupid things Britain has done, or you’ll find yourselves in as big a mess – excessive borrowing, bloated Civil Service, more waste than you could shake a stick at, shameless over-governance, and not a clue what to do about any of it. Yet, now, just these few months later, there has been no follow-up to the warnings. Our local rulers have given the FCO the finger, and the clerks have backed down.
That is irresponsible colonial governance, and short-sighted. As an Offshore tax-haven, Cayman is very valuable to the FCO and its intelligence agency (MI6, the British equivalent of the CIA). We are MI6’s major money-conduit, after London. Yes, our local politicians’ busy little hands are kept well away from tax-haven operations, but that’s not enough to protect British interests worldwide. Offshore tax-havens succeed or fail on their reputation for competence and integrity. By kow-towing to our parish-councillor-level MLAs, the FCO has compromised the credibility of its whole regional base of operations.
Our “international finance centre” loses a bit more credibility with every unchallenged political initiative. It’s silly enough that our leader of government business was re-titled “Premier” – as though our collection of small-island villages were on a standing with a Canadian Province or an Australian State. It’s silly that our Constitutional Bill of Rights, approved by 7500 unsophisticated dopes, outranks every International and European Convention relating to civil and human rights.
It’s hugely silly to exempt (as the FCO has done) our parish bookkeepers’ ledgers from professional audit since 2004, and to exclude our Civil Service pensions liability from the official Public Debt. It is sheer negligence to allow hundreds of millions of dollars of Public Revenue to continue to be frittered away and replaced by borrowed money. I sat on the Accountable Government Committee of the Vision-2008 exercise in 1998, and we came up with infinitely better recommendations than that!
The latest irresponsibility is for new government-owned cruise-ship piers to be financed by diverting budgeted Public Revenue to the piers’ builders. It doesn’t take an accounting genius to know that any disappearing tax has to be matched by either cuts in Public Expenditure or increased taxes somewhere else. Since government payrolls are untouchable, we are doomed to either higher taxes (Import Duty, for example) or new taxes (on Income or Property). Why doesn’t anybody protest about that?
I also regret that our lives will be managed (i.e. micro-managed) by eighteen elected MLAs, three more than we have now. For 15,000 voters? Amazing! What can have possessed the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) in London to approve such an obvious jobs-for-cronies idea?
Sometimes it’s hard to remember that the FCO has absolute authority over all our Laws and practices. Yet the FCO’s clerks are Cayman’s colonial masters; constitutionally, we are merely their serfs. Their apathy simply encourages our local politicians to act as though the opposite were true, and that the pollies are the masters of their own destiny, and ours. How is that good for Cayman?
It’s only a few months ago that the FCO mustered the courage to chastise our MLAs for their woeful fiscal management. The message was loud and clear: Don’t do all the stupid things Britain has done, or you’ll find yourselves in as big a mess – excessive borrowing, bloated Civil Service, more waste than you could shake a stick at, shameless over-governance, and not a clue what to do about any of it. Yet, now, just these few months later, there has been no follow-up to the warnings. Our local rulers have given the FCO the finger, and the clerks have backed down.
That is irresponsible colonial governance, and short-sighted. As an Offshore tax-haven, Cayman is very valuable to the FCO and its intelligence agency (MI6, the British equivalent of the CIA). We are MI6’s major money-conduit, after London. Yes, our local politicians’ busy little hands are kept well away from tax-haven operations, but that’s not enough to protect British interests worldwide. Offshore tax-havens succeed or fail on their reputation for competence and integrity. By kow-towing to our parish-councillor-level MLAs, the FCO has compromised the credibility of its whole regional base of operations.
Our “international finance centre” loses a bit more credibility with every unchallenged political initiative. It’s silly enough that our leader of government business was re-titled “Premier” – as though our collection of small-island villages were on a standing with a Canadian Province or an Australian State. It’s silly that our Constitutional Bill of Rights, approved by 7500 unsophisticated dopes, outranks every International and European Convention relating to civil and human rights.
It’s hugely silly to exempt (as the FCO has done) our parish bookkeepers’ ledgers from professional audit since 2004, and to exclude our Civil Service pensions liability from the official Public Debt. It is sheer negligence to allow hundreds of millions of dollars of Public Revenue to continue to be frittered away and replaced by borrowed money. I sat on the Accountable Government Committee of the Vision-2008 exercise in 1998, and we came up with infinitely better recommendations than that!
The latest irresponsibility is for new government-owned cruise-ship piers to be financed by diverting budgeted Public Revenue to the piers’ builders. It doesn’t take an accounting genius to know that any disappearing tax has to be matched by either cuts in Public Expenditure or increased taxes somewhere else. Since government payrolls are untouchable, we are doomed to either higher taxes (Import Duty, for example) or new taxes (on Income or Property). Why doesn’t anybody protest about that?
Friday, April 6, 2012
One man’s meat... (religious intolerance)
For as far back as I can remember into the 1940s, a newspaper photo of Winston Churchill was stuck to the door of the kitchen fridge on our sheep farm in Queensland. I’m not sure where my Dad stood on the matter, but Mr Churchill was my mother’s pin-up boy during The War and for a long time after. She exonerated him from any responsibility for betraying eastern Europe to the Soviet Empire, and even for stripping Australia of the troops it needed to defend itself from invasion by Japan. The British Empire was A Good Thing, and his defence of Britain’s own interests was The Right Thing at all times.
In later years, she became more objective. Three months with me in my Kombi van driving from Corfu to London opened her eyes to a small part of the non-British world. It put into perspective my report to her (in a letter home, years before) that Mr Churchill was regarded by Palestinians as a War Criminal, because he connived with Zionists to dispossess the natives. Linda & I gleaned that morsel of intelligence over Christmas dinner in the shabby flat of a refugee family in Kuwait in 1965. I wasn’t around to see Mum’s reaction to my report. Just as well, probably.
One man’s meat is another man’s poison. Personal reverence for a tribal hero rarely survives a change of tribal loyalties – or of tribal ethics and traditions. “Citizens of the world” know this – people who have renounced allegiance to the tribes (nations, communities) of their birth in favour of a broad loyalty to mankind. Ethics that apply to the whole of mankind are called “human rights”, although “entitlements” would be a better word than “rights”.
As a concept, human rights purport to extend every group’s or family’s or nation’s ideals to everybody in the world. The idea is a pious dream – hopelessly impractical, since it opposes every natural prejudice that human communities of any size possess. Why do we bother with it? Well, in practice, we don’t bother with it. Human-rights observance has never gotten off the ground, and is already defunct as an ideal. After all, it requires tolerance of other groups, families, nations and cultures, and no society in the world is ready to do that. Especially, no religious group. Religious prejudices seem to be the hardest of all to let go of.
We in the West are continually assured that Christianity is a tolerant religion; and it is true that Christian communities in general do allow non-Christians to adhere to their own faiths. Actually, most religion-oriented nations tolerate the observance of other faiths, even such ones as Saudi Arabia and Israel, and Japan. However, religious extremists always screw things up, and the secret of religious tolerance is to keep control out of the extremists’ hands.
Here in Cayman, local Christian extremists would like to send all the local gays to prison and to deport the foreign ones. Christian fanatics in other places openly endorse the slaughter and mutilations of Moslems by the millions. There is a nasty cult in Israel that urges the killing of non-Jewish babies, on the grounds that those babies might grow up to oppose Jews. The cult’s fans in the national Army wear T-shirts showing a pregnant Palestinian woman in cross-hairs, with the slogan “One shot, two kills”. Fanatical Moslem priests in country districts of their nations stone to death Moslems who abandon their faith.
All the extremists decry the intolerance of other religions, while ignoring those of their own. Such hypocrisy attracts the contempt of moderates, but it endures. We of the West in general, and of Cayman in particular, have a tendency to claim an ethical superiority we just don’t have.
In later years, she became more objective. Three months with me in my Kombi van driving from Corfu to London opened her eyes to a small part of the non-British world. It put into perspective my report to her (in a letter home, years before) that Mr Churchill was regarded by Palestinians as a War Criminal, because he connived with Zionists to dispossess the natives. Linda & I gleaned that morsel of intelligence over Christmas dinner in the shabby flat of a refugee family in Kuwait in 1965. I wasn’t around to see Mum’s reaction to my report. Just as well, probably.
One man’s meat is another man’s poison. Personal reverence for a tribal hero rarely survives a change of tribal loyalties – or of tribal ethics and traditions. “Citizens of the world” know this – people who have renounced allegiance to the tribes (nations, communities) of their birth in favour of a broad loyalty to mankind. Ethics that apply to the whole of mankind are called “human rights”, although “entitlements” would be a better word than “rights”.
As a concept, human rights purport to extend every group’s or family’s or nation’s ideals to everybody in the world. The idea is a pious dream – hopelessly impractical, since it opposes every natural prejudice that human communities of any size possess. Why do we bother with it? Well, in practice, we don’t bother with it. Human-rights observance has never gotten off the ground, and is already defunct as an ideal. After all, it requires tolerance of other groups, families, nations and cultures, and no society in the world is ready to do that. Especially, no religious group. Religious prejudices seem to be the hardest of all to let go of.
We in the West are continually assured that Christianity is a tolerant religion; and it is true that Christian communities in general do allow non-Christians to adhere to their own faiths. Actually, most religion-oriented nations tolerate the observance of other faiths, even such ones as Saudi Arabia and Israel, and Japan. However, religious extremists always screw things up, and the secret of religious tolerance is to keep control out of the extremists’ hands.
Here in Cayman, local Christian extremists would like to send all the local gays to prison and to deport the foreign ones. Christian fanatics in other places openly endorse the slaughter and mutilations of Moslems by the millions. There is a nasty cult in Israel that urges the killing of non-Jewish babies, on the grounds that those babies might grow up to oppose Jews. The cult’s fans in the national Army wear T-shirts showing a pregnant Palestinian woman in cross-hairs, with the slogan “One shot, two kills”. Fanatical Moslem priests in country districts of their nations stone to death Moslems who abandon their faith.
All the extremists decry the intolerance of other religions, while ignoring those of their own. Such hypocrisy attracts the contempt of moderates, but it endures. We of the West in general, and of Cayman in particular, have a tendency to claim an ethical superiority we just don’t have.
Monday, April 2, 2012
Cattle Class to Kuwait (T 7 - Iran 1965)
Seventh travelogue for the granddaughters – December 1964
In the middle of winter, well out of the tourist season, we were just about the only strangers in town. The shopkeepers were anxious that we stay around and buy something, and pressed free drinks on us. But midway through some heavy negotiations, a higher duty called. There was another pair of hitch-hikers in town, and watching foreigners meet and gabble away in their weird languages was an entertainment never to be missed. "You really must come!" This way! This way!
We allowed ourselves to be dragged off to the other side of the town centre, into the shop where the others were. As it happened, we surpassed our escort’s hopes. “Hullo,” I said; “I thought you’d be in Japan by now.” “Yeah, we got caught up in Lebanon”, Graham said. He was an old schoolmate of mine who had left London long before I had, yet here he was in Shiraz, Iran, still half a world away from whichever place in Japan his friend Yoshi came from. We delayed their departure for thirty minutes with idle chit-chat, then they hit the road again. It wasn’t till many years later that I met up with Graham in Brisbane and learned all his news. He signed my Passport application form, then, and we marvelled at how long we’d known each other.
Shiraz was out of the way for Linda and me, but I had wanted to see Persepolis, the ancient capital of Darius’s Persian Empire. At high school I had been wonderfully impressed with the poem Ozymandias:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert...
...Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Persepolis lived up to my expectations, despite the fact that the poem was set in Egypt. You can’t have everything. After taking our few pennies’ entrance money, the ticket-seller disappeared, trusting us not to steal any of the ancient stones. We inspected the ruins at leisure, but once the snow began to fall, we disappeared too, jumping on the first truck headed south. The day after the others left us, we walked to the western edge of town and flagged down a bus to the nearest port to find a ferry to Kuwait. There were no ferries, for some reason, so we haggled for a passage on a boat carrying cattle.
Quite a contrast to our arrival in Iran. At the Turkish border we had fallen in with a convoy of returning expats in almost-new Mercedes Benzes driven down from Germany for resale. Two days further on, one of the drivers nearly drove off a cliff, so he was fired in favour of the team’s new emergency backup. We two drove into Tehran in as grand a style as a couple of young travel bums ever did. The cattle-boat was a bit of a comedown.
A vivid memory of mine from the voyage is the flash of a pearly white bottom as Linda perched warily on the pooping seat way above the poop deck (what else?) before I joined the five crewmen and faced the bow until we got the all-clear. It was a rough sea, and I’ve never known how she managed. If she’d fallen off, it might have been five minutes before any of us discovered the loss. Inch’Allah, we all muttered – “It’s in the hands of God”.
We got in at three in the morning, and slept on the porch outside the Immigration shed until the men arrived for work. Those were early days for Kuwait. The arrival-procedures have probably been brought up to speed since then.
In the middle of winter, well out of the tourist season, we were just about the only strangers in town. The shopkeepers were anxious that we stay around and buy something, and pressed free drinks on us. But midway through some heavy negotiations, a higher duty called. There was another pair of hitch-hikers in town, and watching foreigners meet and gabble away in their weird languages was an entertainment never to be missed. "You really must come!" This way! This way!
We allowed ourselves to be dragged off to the other side of the town centre, into the shop where the others were. As it happened, we surpassed our escort’s hopes. “Hullo,” I said; “I thought you’d be in Japan by now.” “Yeah, we got caught up in Lebanon”, Graham said. He was an old schoolmate of mine who had left London long before I had, yet here he was in Shiraz, Iran, still half a world away from whichever place in Japan his friend Yoshi came from. We delayed their departure for thirty minutes with idle chit-chat, then they hit the road again. It wasn’t till many years later that I met up with Graham in Brisbane and learned all his news. He signed my Passport application form, then, and we marvelled at how long we’d known each other.
Shiraz was out of the way for Linda and me, but I had wanted to see Persepolis, the ancient capital of Darius’s Persian Empire. At high school I had been wonderfully impressed with the poem Ozymandias:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert...
...Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Persepolis lived up to my expectations, despite the fact that the poem was set in Egypt. You can’t have everything. After taking our few pennies’ entrance money, the ticket-seller disappeared, trusting us not to steal any of the ancient stones. We inspected the ruins at leisure, but once the snow began to fall, we disappeared too, jumping on the first truck headed south. The day after the others left us, we walked to the western edge of town and flagged down a bus to the nearest port to find a ferry to Kuwait. There were no ferries, for some reason, so we haggled for a passage on a boat carrying cattle.
Quite a contrast to our arrival in Iran. At the Turkish border we had fallen in with a convoy of returning expats in almost-new Mercedes Benzes driven down from Germany for resale. Two days further on, one of the drivers nearly drove off a cliff, so he was fired in favour of the team’s new emergency backup. We two drove into Tehran in as grand a style as a couple of young travel bums ever did. The cattle-boat was a bit of a comedown.
A vivid memory of mine from the voyage is the flash of a pearly white bottom as Linda perched warily on the pooping seat way above the poop deck (what else?) before I joined the five crewmen and faced the bow until we got the all-clear. It was a rough sea, and I’ve never known how she managed. If she’d fallen off, it might have been five minutes before any of us discovered the loss. Inch’Allah, we all muttered – “It’s in the hands of God”.
We got in at three in the morning, and slept on the porch outside the Immigration shed until the men arrived for work. Those were early days for Kuwait. The arrival-procedures have probably been brought up to speed since then.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)