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.
Friday, April 27, 2012
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.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Leaving home (international travel)
Linda and I sometimes wonder what will happen to our house when we’re gone. Our son will inherit it, and his children after him if he leaves a proper Will. We both come from unsentimental families, where homes are concerned, so we don’t expect our Cayman one to become any kind of ancestral shrine.
Our respective childhood homes were long ago sold to strangers. So were our parents’ childhood homes – except my father’s, which his brother inherited and still lives in; his children live 10,000 miles away; they won’t want it. Our respective ancestors never had any ancestral homes worth venerating; the families shifted around within the British Isles until they emigrated. There is a lot of restlessness in our blood and in our son’s and grandchildren’s. In Norway, the girls’ father lives in a rented forest-cottage (and owns a second, bought for refurbishment and sale), and their mother lives in another.
Ross once bought a strip of hillside in Guatemala (total area 6000 sq ft), with a big tree in the middle and a fabulous view of Lake Atitlan. He and some of the local Mayans built a basic shack in the tree, and his little family lived there for a time. But last time I checked, Guatemala had no central land-registry, so how much validity could his document of title have? Anyway, a tree-house hardly qualifies as an ancestral home. Linda and I once bought a town-lot in the New Hebrides in the South Pacific, before it went independent as Vanuatu. The new government promptly stole all foreign-owned land that hadn’t been built on. Ah well, that’s what a lot of newly independent countries do.
Most young Caymanians can’t comprehend the absence of mental attachment to a home or to a settled community. They don’t realise what their commitment to their island-home costs them, in terms of opportunities. Actually, it’s a very recent cultural development. Caymanians of the same generations as my father and his father (born in the 1910s and the 1880s, respectively) were as adventurous as other British peoples scattered around the world. Unfortunately, the adventurous Caymanian spirit seems to have exhausted itself, since. And, yes, I do mean “unfortunately”.
There is much virtue in experimenting with new homes, and passing up a life of safety. Two of my Grandpa Barlow’s brothers died in their twenties while adventuring far from home. I don’t mean that dying in one’s twenties is something to aim for; I’m reasonably sure they didn’t aim for it. But one was killed by aborigines, panning for gold in the wild north of Queensland; the other died of malaria, working on a farm in Madagascar – and those were adventurous things. Plenty of Caymanians must have died of yellow fever in Panama in their twenties while digging the canal, and others in unrecorded hurricanes fishing off Cuba and Nicaragua. Not everybody’s luck is good luck.
Young Caymanian men who are trapped today under glass ceilings, or are unemployed, would get more sympathy if they brought some proof of initiative to the interview room, instead of relying on their birthright entitlement to a safe job in a safe place with a safe pension fifty years from now. I have long urged that every Caymanian school-leaver be given $1000 and a backpack and a 12-months ticket round the world. It’s a great idea.
There ought to be zero unemployment among young Caymanians – and there could be, if they were half the men their seafaring forebears were. And they would honour those forebears a whole lot more by emulating their spirit of adventure, than by staying home waiting for jobs to fall into their laps. If our MLAs had the welfare of our Islands at heart, they would tell our unemployed youth the same thing: get off your assets and go to where the jobs are.
Our respective childhood homes were long ago sold to strangers. So were our parents’ childhood homes – except my father’s, which his brother inherited and still lives in; his children live 10,000 miles away; they won’t want it. Our respective ancestors never had any ancestral homes worth venerating; the families shifted around within the British Isles until they emigrated. There is a lot of restlessness in our blood and in our son’s and grandchildren’s. In Norway, the girls’ father lives in a rented forest-cottage (and owns a second, bought for refurbishment and sale), and their mother lives in another.
Ross once bought a strip of hillside in Guatemala (total area 6000 sq ft), with a big tree in the middle and a fabulous view of Lake Atitlan. He and some of the local Mayans built a basic shack in the tree, and his little family lived there for a time. But last time I checked, Guatemala had no central land-registry, so how much validity could his document of title have? Anyway, a tree-house hardly qualifies as an ancestral home. Linda and I once bought a town-lot in the New Hebrides in the South Pacific, before it went independent as Vanuatu. The new government promptly stole all foreign-owned land that hadn’t been built on. Ah well, that’s what a lot of newly independent countries do.
Most young Caymanians can’t comprehend the absence of mental attachment to a home or to a settled community. They don’t realise what their commitment to their island-home costs them, in terms of opportunities. Actually, it’s a very recent cultural development. Caymanians of the same generations as my father and his father (born in the 1910s and the 1880s, respectively) were as adventurous as other British peoples scattered around the world. Unfortunately, the adventurous Caymanian spirit seems to have exhausted itself, since. And, yes, I do mean “unfortunately”.
There is much virtue in experimenting with new homes, and passing up a life of safety. Two of my Grandpa Barlow’s brothers died in their twenties while adventuring far from home. I don’t mean that dying in one’s twenties is something to aim for; I’m reasonably sure they didn’t aim for it. But one was killed by aborigines, panning for gold in the wild north of Queensland; the other died of malaria, working on a farm in Madagascar – and those were adventurous things. Plenty of Caymanians must have died of yellow fever in Panama in their twenties while digging the canal, and others in unrecorded hurricanes fishing off Cuba and Nicaragua. Not everybody’s luck is good luck.
Young Caymanian men who are trapped today under glass ceilings, or are unemployed, would get more sympathy if they brought some proof of initiative to the interview room, instead of relying on their birthright entitlement to a safe job in a safe place with a safe pension fifty years from now. I have long urged that every Caymanian school-leaver be given $1000 and a backpack and a 12-months ticket round the world. It’s a great idea.
There ought to be zero unemployment among young Caymanians – and there could be, if they were half the men their seafaring forebears were. And they would honour those forebears a whole lot more by emulating their spirit of adventure, than by staying home waiting for jobs to fall into their laps. If our MLAs had the welfare of our Islands at heart, they would tell our unemployed youth the same thing: get off your assets and go to where the jobs are.
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Gold, and other currencies
It’s common practice for governments (national, provincial, municipal, parish) to pledge their expected future revenues as security for borrowings. Fair enough. The loans have to be repaid out of children’s and grandchildren’s taxes, but that’s okay. After all, each generation benefits from all the governmental infrastructure it inherits from its predecessors.
A problem arises only when future revenues fall short of expectations. Then, responsible governments hustle around and cut their expenditure, by discontinuing some services and reducing others. Irresponsible governments simply borrow more money. By that measure, Cayman’s rulers (politicians, senior Civil Servants and the British FCO) are irresponsible, as are Greece’s rulers and the other PIIGS’, and indeed every European nation’s government, and America’s.
National governments that find themselves over-borrowed against future tax revenues must watch their chickens coming home to roost. Their national currencies become unstable, as their state revenues steadily decline because of economic recessions. Sooner or later, Greece will be forced out of the Euro and will default on all its debts. The cost of imported goods will rise out of sight. All the other PIIGS will meet the same fate, unless they reduce the scope of government. What about Cayman and the Cayman Islands Dollar? Well, why would different rules apply to them?
Might the Euro fall in value, and/or the Pound Sterling and/or the US Dollar? Not all at once, of course, but in some kind of progressive slippage? The logical question, rarely answered satisfactorily, is: What might they fall in value against? My personal belief is that, in time, they will all be measured against a brand-new international currency based on the prices of certain commodities (selected by the corrupt banksters, who else?). “Commodities” covers all kinds of tradable raw materials: metals, crops, land, meat, even water; the viability of the imagined new currency will depend on which commodities are selected.
In the present absence of such a currency, many financial commentators use an ounce of pure gold as the standard by which they assess the values of national currencies. In 1971 an ounce of gold could be exchanged for US$35, today it is “worth” $1700, give or take. Now, EITHER the price of gold has risen to nearly fifty times its value of forty years ago OR the US currency has fallen to a fiftieth of its former value. Which is it? Well, an ounce of gold buys about the same today as it did back then, which means that its value has remained constant. It’s the paper currency whose value has deteriorated.
Imagine a new-born baby being given a $35 gift certificate in 1971 and his twin given a one-ounce gold coin. Guess which of them would be the most pleased today. The one with the coin could today buy almost fifty times as much stuff as his brother could, with the gift. I can hear my grand-daughters now, “Grandpa, thanks for the $1700 birthday gift certificate (as if...!), but could we please have a gold coin instead?”
Gold isn’t the answer to all the world’s problems. It’s just another currency, and it pays no dividends. But an ounce of it was a better gift than $35 cash in 1971, and most years since then. In forty years from now it might be worth – well, actually, it would be worth the same as it is now. Its value remains pretty constant. But dollar-bills might be worth a whole lot less. That coin might sell for $85,000 (fifty times $1700) in grossly devalued paper currency, when my girls are approaching retirement age.
Of course their pension funds may contain some shares of even higher value (weapons-manufacturers are bound to do well between now and then), but will the fund-managers be shrewd enough to have a diverse portfolio that includes some gold coins? I certainly hope so.
A problem arises only when future revenues fall short of expectations. Then, responsible governments hustle around and cut their expenditure, by discontinuing some services and reducing others. Irresponsible governments simply borrow more money. By that measure, Cayman’s rulers (politicians, senior Civil Servants and the British FCO) are irresponsible, as are Greece’s rulers and the other PIIGS’, and indeed every European nation’s government, and America’s.
National governments that find themselves over-borrowed against future tax revenues must watch their chickens coming home to roost. Their national currencies become unstable, as their state revenues steadily decline because of economic recessions. Sooner or later, Greece will be forced out of the Euro and will default on all its debts. The cost of imported goods will rise out of sight. All the other PIIGS will meet the same fate, unless they reduce the scope of government. What about Cayman and the Cayman Islands Dollar? Well, why would different rules apply to them?
Might the Euro fall in value, and/or the Pound Sterling and/or the US Dollar? Not all at once, of course, but in some kind of progressive slippage? The logical question, rarely answered satisfactorily, is: What might they fall in value against? My personal belief is that, in time, they will all be measured against a brand-new international currency based on the prices of certain commodities (selected by the corrupt banksters, who else?). “Commodities” covers all kinds of tradable raw materials: metals, crops, land, meat, even water; the viability of the imagined new currency will depend on which commodities are selected.
In the present absence of such a currency, many financial commentators use an ounce of pure gold as the standard by which they assess the values of national currencies. In 1971 an ounce of gold could be exchanged for US$35, today it is “worth” $1700, give or take. Now, EITHER the price of gold has risen to nearly fifty times its value of forty years ago OR the US currency has fallen to a fiftieth of its former value. Which is it? Well, an ounce of gold buys about the same today as it did back then, which means that its value has remained constant. It’s the paper currency whose value has deteriorated.
Imagine a new-born baby being given a $35 gift certificate in 1971 and his twin given a one-ounce gold coin. Guess which of them would be the most pleased today. The one with the coin could today buy almost fifty times as much stuff as his brother could, with the gift. I can hear my grand-daughters now, “Grandpa, thanks for the $1700 birthday gift certificate (as if...!), but could we please have a gold coin instead?”
Gold isn’t the answer to all the world’s problems. It’s just another currency, and it pays no dividends. But an ounce of it was a better gift than $35 cash in 1971, and most years since then. In forty years from now it might be worth – well, actually, it would be worth the same as it is now. Its value remains pretty constant. But dollar-bills might be worth a whole lot less. That coin might sell for $85,000 (fifty times $1700) in grossly devalued paper currency, when my girls are approaching retirement age.
Of course their pension funds may contain some shares of even higher value (weapons-manufacturers are bound to do well between now and then), but will the fund-managers be shrewd enough to have a diverse portfolio that includes some gold coins? I certainly hope so.
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Investing for retirement
Everybody saves for retirement, some more carefully than others. Some of us rely on government pensions to sustain us in our retirement, some on company pensions, some on private Pension Funds to which we have contributed. We trust the Pensions managers not to steal our money, and we trust them to invest it sensibly – in blue-chip bonds and shares denominated in reputable currencies.
If we want to gamble on dodgy nickel-miners or Third World bonds, we’ll do it with our play-money, thank you. We certainly don’t want anybody to gamble with our retirement savings. If they lost it, what would we do when we’re too old to work?
It’s a bit disconcerting to observe the shaky status of the Euro, the European currency that is used by a ragged assortment of seventeen nations – including what are charmingly called the PIIGS, pronounced “pigs” – Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain. Greece is the Western banksters’ chosen practice ground, where they experiment with how far a nation can be degraded before it collapses into a Police state.
Bankster is a new word combining the words “banker” and “gangster”. Banker in this usage refers to an investment-banker (merchant-banker, in England) – not a traditional, respected, straight-as-a-die clerk like the nice man or woman who stamps your deposit-slips.
Many of us are uncertain whether the world’s politicians and senior Civil Servants – in general – are too corrupt and irresponsible to be trusted. We need have little doubt with regard to those in the five PIIGS. There, corrupt banksters have bribed or bullied corrupt officials into pledging their governments’ future tax revenues as security for unnecessary loans.
The loans are (as often as not) spent on weapons to ward off imagined enemies. And, as often as not, the corrupt banksters own the weapons-manufacturers. And even more often than not, all the corrupt bribers and bullies get together and persuade the victim-nations to go to war by even more bribing and bullying, so that the weapons actually get used and have to be replaced with new ones. It’s a sweet deal.
Sometimes the loan-money is passed directly to the weapons-makers. Greece, poor and bankrupt, spent the whole of one of its recent bailout-tranches on new army tanks and other equipment. It doesn’t even have an enemy at the moment! Well, never mind, the banksters will find them one. Stand by for a false-flag attack by some CIA-sponsored gang based in Turkey.
The relevance of all this is that some of our own retirement-savings are invested (indirectly, at least) in PIIGS government bonds, some of which have no likelihood of being repaid except in grossly devalued currencies.
A few years ago I attended a couple of AGMs of one local Pension Fund, just to see what it was doing with my son’s savings. What a bunch of innocents its Directors and Investment Managers were. They didn’t have much of a clue about the outside world. As long as their portfolios were beating “the benchmark” (which they themselves had set), they were happy. Never mind if the US Dollar was going up or down; they had no idea at all how that might impact their members’ retirement savings.
All our local Pension Funds’ investments are governed by the Pensions Law, passed by our local parish-councillors, which permits some specified kinds of investments and forbids others. Last time I checked, it permitted Greek government bonds and forbade gold bullion. Sigh.
Friday, March 16, 2012
A back road to Bulgaria (T 6 - 1964/5)
(The sixth in my series of travel stories for the granddaughters – November 1964)
The old peasant woman, comfortable in the passenger seat, gabbled away at me off and on for miles. I replied as civilly as I could, and asked her to tell me when we reached the turn-off to Bulgaria. Her side of the story, for her family that night, would be: “This young foreign man in his car (a car! My dear!) didn’t know where he was or why, or what I was telling him. I had to shout at him to make him stop where I wanted to get off. At that point, he didn’t know whether to go north or south!” She was relieved to be back on her feet again; I was annoyed in case I had missed the turn-off.
It was an unpaved back road that didn’t even show up on my map of Yugoslavia. The only car on the road was mine, and the old woman the only pedestrian – plodding along to who knew where for who knew how many miles. Common decency required that I stop and offer her a lift; common decency probably required that she accept. Whatever language she spoke, it wasn’t the Serbo-Croat of my dictionary. Wikipedia reckons it was a Macedonian dialect of Bulgarian, but I didn’t know that then.
I had indeed missed the turn-off. I recalled passing a weather-beaten wooden signpost with weird lettering, which probably didn’t spell “Bulgaria” anyway. Ah well, what can you do? The back road ended at the Greek border, so I crossed there and travelled for the next four months with a slowly expiring Bulgarian visa. That night I pulled up at the Youth Hostel in Thessaloniki, and the next night drank coffee on the roof with fellow-hostellers after watching the movie Zorba the Greek. I wrote about all that in January, though without mentioning the wretched old peasant woman who was responsible for the trouble and strife (Cockney slang) in my life ever since.
It’s hard to remember, now, why I had bothered to get a Bulgarian visa, back in London. Nobody ever deliberately headed for Bulgaria, except on the way through to somewhere else. Entering Bulgaria with Linda four months later was simplicity itself, with a visa from Istanbul. Leaving the country was rather more memorable, occurring on yet another back road. Yet again, my car was the only traffic for miles around – the only vehicle wanting to cross into Romania at this godforsaken spot, at least.
My side of the conversation went something like this, in pidgin German interspersed with occasional words from my Bulgarian-English dictionary. “It has been a pleasant stay in your beautiful country. Now please change our unspent local currency into Romanian currency. Oh, well, any currency will do. Well, if you don’t have any foreign currency, never mind; we will exchange it at the Romanian post just over there (a hundred yards across a bridge). What?! It’s illegal to take Bulgarian currency out of the country? Never mind, we’ll go back to the petrol pump a few miles back and spend it there. What do you mean you’ve already stamped us out of Bulgaria? Well, stamp us back in again, please. We would need another visa for that? And you aren’t authorised to issue visas? Sheesh. Tell you what, you keep our passports and we will drive back and get the petrol. Oh dear. We can’t travel in Bulgaria without a passport. So we must just give you the money, and you will give us a receipt? Hmm. I don’t think so.”
I demanded to speak with the Ministry of Tourism, then Foreign Affairs, then Internal Affairs, then the Prime Minister’s Office; oh, and the British Embassy. Please. Pronto. The phone rang hot for the next three hours, while we sulked in the car and wondered if we might have to stay in it all night.
In the end the Romanians changed the money for us without a fuss. It wasn’t illegal for them, which was just as well, I guess.
The old peasant woman, comfortable in the passenger seat, gabbled away at me off and on for miles. I replied as civilly as I could, and asked her to tell me when we reached the turn-off to Bulgaria. Her side of the story, for her family that night, would be: “This young foreign man in his car (a car! My dear!) didn’t know where he was or why, or what I was telling him. I had to shout at him to make him stop where I wanted to get off. At that point, he didn’t know whether to go north or south!” She was relieved to be back on her feet again; I was annoyed in case I had missed the turn-off.
It was an unpaved back road that didn’t even show up on my map of Yugoslavia. The only car on the road was mine, and the old woman the only pedestrian – plodding along to who knew where for who knew how many miles. Common decency required that I stop and offer her a lift; common decency probably required that she accept. Whatever language she spoke, it wasn’t the Serbo-Croat of my dictionary. Wikipedia reckons it was a Macedonian dialect of Bulgarian, but I didn’t know that then.
I had indeed missed the turn-off. I recalled passing a weather-beaten wooden signpost with weird lettering, which probably didn’t spell “Bulgaria” anyway. Ah well, what can you do? The back road ended at the Greek border, so I crossed there and travelled for the next four months with a slowly expiring Bulgarian visa. That night I pulled up at the Youth Hostel in Thessaloniki, and the next night drank coffee on the roof with fellow-hostellers after watching the movie Zorba the Greek. I wrote about all that in January, though without mentioning the wretched old peasant woman who was responsible for the trouble and strife (Cockney slang) in my life ever since.
It’s hard to remember, now, why I had bothered to get a Bulgarian visa, back in London. Nobody ever deliberately headed for Bulgaria, except on the way through to somewhere else. Entering Bulgaria with Linda four months later was simplicity itself, with a visa from Istanbul. Leaving the country was rather more memorable, occurring on yet another back road. Yet again, my car was the only traffic for miles around – the only vehicle wanting to cross into Romania at this godforsaken spot, at least.
My side of the conversation went something like this, in pidgin German interspersed with occasional words from my Bulgarian-English dictionary. “It has been a pleasant stay in your beautiful country. Now please change our unspent local currency into Romanian currency. Oh, well, any currency will do. Well, if you don’t have any foreign currency, never mind; we will exchange it at the Romanian post just over there (a hundred yards across a bridge). What?! It’s illegal to take Bulgarian currency out of the country? Never mind, we’ll go back to the petrol pump a few miles back and spend it there. What do you mean you’ve already stamped us out of Bulgaria? Well, stamp us back in again, please. We would need another visa for that? And you aren’t authorised to issue visas? Sheesh. Tell you what, you keep our passports and we will drive back and get the petrol. Oh dear. We can’t travel in Bulgaria without a passport. So we must just give you the money, and you will give us a receipt? Hmm. I don’t think so.”
I demanded to speak with the Ministry of Tourism, then Foreign Affairs, then Internal Affairs, then the Prime Minister’s Office; oh, and the British Embassy. Please. Pronto. The phone rang hot for the next three hours, while we sulked in the car and wondered if we might have to stay in it all night.
In the end the Romanians changed the money for us without a fuss. It wasn’t illegal for them, which was just as well, I guess.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)