New film about Kashmir: "Jashn-e-Azadi"

One of the best consequences of travel is a sense of connectedness with other places, or at least an awareness of their existence, that can linger or reassert itself long after you come home. I see a place name in in the news, and it conjures up sights, sounds, smells, smiles, conversations, and events. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, I find myself flashing on the thought that at this very moment people are, among billions of other things, jostling for places in the crowds boarding Bosphorus ferries in Istanbul, or waking up in tiny villages in Bolivia to the sound of the wind scouring the altiplano. Young mothers and fathers are lining up outside the offices of "labor brokers" in the Philippines, while those Filipinos and Filipinas who have been lucky enough to find jobs through them in the past are washing dishes in Doha, and caring for other people's children as nannies in Hong Kong.

Empathy and awareness of others are, pretty unequivocally, a good thing. Decsions we make have consequences for other people and in other places around the world. Those are often out of our sight, but they shouldn't be out of mind. (We also should recognize their limits, of course. In particular, a place we have visited once in our life tends to be fixed in our mind as it was, or as we saw it, at that moment, regardless of how it has changed. When we compare, in our minds, two places we visited a few years apart, can we really tell which of the differences in what we saw are really differences of place, and which of time?)

One of the places that has retained that sense of connectedness for me, from souvenirs and stories and watercolor images from my grandparents' many extened visits as well as memories and snapshots of my own brief time there, is the Kashmir Valley.

Recently I got a chance to see a new documentary film about Kashmir, Jashn-e-Azadi (How We Celebrate Freedom), at a screening organized by U.C. Berkeley's Center for South Asia Stuudies in conjunction with a visit by the director, Sanjay Kak. The film is also available from a U.S. distributor on DVD or as a download.

Kak is himself a Kashmiri, although not from the majority community (his family are Hindu "Pandits") and no longer living in Kashmir. Kak's purpose in the film isn't to tell his own story. He's actually been criticized by Hindu fundamentalists and Indian ultra-nationalists (who are often, but not always, the same) for not talking enough in the film about why almost all the Pandits had to leave the Kashmir Valley.

But Kak's point is to let Kashmiris tell their own stories, and I think he has been remarkably successful. He also lets the Indian occupation forces in Kashmir tell their own story (they assumed that as a Pandit he was on their side, and would protray them favorably), and supplements his own recent interviews and documentary footage with anonymous "home video" documenting times, especially in the 1990's, and events no journalists were allowed to see or film.

It angers me when Kashmir is depicted in the news as the cause or site of a conflict "between India and Pakistan", as though it weren't a place and a people with their own culture(s), their own traditions, their own past and present, and their own desires for the future. If there is one precondition for peace in Kashmir, it is that Kashmiris themselves must not be pawns in a geostrategic game, but must have a central role in making the decisions about their homeland. Kak's film is an important contribution towards wider understanding of that imperative.

OFAC, banks, and Syria travel sanctions

A year ago today, my travelling companion and I were en route from Rome to Damascus. It took us all day to get there: Travel agencies in the USA aren't able to sell tickets on the direct flight on Syrian Arab Airlines, so we went way out of our way on the next-cheapest route on Qatar Airways, with a long layover in Doha. (That's me, bored, in the airport, in the photo here .)

We thought that awkward flight routing would be the end of our problems with US sanctions against travel to Syria. Unfortunately, it was only the beginning.

We spent most of January 2008 in Syria -- longer than we had planned, even though it required a certain amount of extra time and effort to extend our visas after we arrived. Getting our original visas, while not difficult (as long as we could truthfully state that we had never visited "Occupied Palestine", and had nothing in our passports that might suggest that wasn't true) had required a detour through Washington, DC to get our visas last thing before we left the USA. As is the practice with some other countries like China , visas to Syria for US citizens are issued only in the USA.

It was worth the minor visa and flight hassles, in too many ways to list here. I don't know anyone who has been to Syria who does not count it among the most welcoming -- for me, perhaps the most welcoming -- countries they have ever visited. (There's a lot more I could say about the experience of travel in Syria, but that's not the point of this article.)

There's a catch, though, one that isn't mentioned in any of the major English-language guidebooks to Syria (from Bradt, Rough Guides, and Lonely Planet) and that our bank didn't warn us about, even when we told them in advance that we would be going to Syria.

Here's what you need to know, if you are planning to travel to Syria:

• There are USA government economic sanctions against exports from the USA to Syria (not agaist imports from Syria to the USA), against the Syrian government , and against and certain specified Syrian people and entities. Additional sanctions were imposed in early 2008.
  
  
• Under these sanctions, it has been and remains legal for citizens and residents of the USA to travel to Syria as tourists, and to spend money in Syria. The USA sanctions related to Syria are very different from those against, for example, travel to Cuba.
  
  
• But some banks and financial services providers in the USA have imposed their own private corporate sanctions, not disclosed to their customers, and not just against those entities designated by the USA government, but against anyone and everyone who travels to Syria, regardless of whether they do anything that violates the government sanctions.
  
  
• Don't rely on your bank to disclose their practices. To avoid possible problems, get enough cash (US dollars or Euros) before you arrive in Syria to cover the costs of your stay. Don't use credit or ATM cards (virtually all of which are affiliated with US-based financial networks) in Syria. Don't visit Web sites of US-based banks or other financial institutions or make phone calls to such institutions while you are in Syria. None of this is required by law, but it might keep you away from serious problems such as those I had.

We were careful to avoid running afoul of the Syria sanctions administered by the Office of Foreign Assets Contol (OFAC) of the US Treasury. But since we had no way of knowing about the broader corporate sanctions policy of our bank -- our bank ddin't tell us about it, even when we told them we would be travelling in Syria -- we got caught unawares.

China rolls back the worst of its visa rule changes

Earlier this year, I reported on a variety of changes made by the government of China, in the runup to the Olympics in Beijing, in its rules for foreign visitors.

The most restrictive of those new rules, in its affect on independent tourists, has been rolled back: At least in San Francisco, ordinary tourist visas to China are once again generally being issued to U.S. citizens without the need to show tour vouchers or evidence of reservations for accommodations.

I learned of the change from a representative of the Consulate General of the PRC in San Francisco , when I asked why I -- a writer about independent travel -- had been invited to a China tourism promotion event when independent travellers without reservations weren't being issued visas to China. There has been no official announcment of the change, but neither was there any official announcement of the earlier imposition of the requirement for tours or prearranged accommodations.

The consular official stressed that despite the change in general practice, China's government -- like that of the USA -- reserves the right to ask any questions, require any documentation, and issue or not issue any visa, in its sole discretion and sovereignty, without having to disclose its criteria to the applicant or give any reason for its decision. He also pointed out that, unlike the USA, China refunds the visa fee if a visa application is denied. (A Chinese citizen whose application for a visa to the USA is denied forfeits the application fee of US$130, a non-trival amount even in the USA, much less in China.)

With hotels in China having fared badly during the Olympics, and doing even worse today (as are hotels elsewhere in the world), China is an even better bargain than ever. For travellers looking for comfort and amenities on a budget, it's a standout.

Of the other new rules imposed earlier this year, the most problematic for independent travellers is the refusal of the visa office in Hong Kong to accept applications for tourist visas form anyone except citizens or residetns of Hong Kong. No tourist visas are available on arrival in China (except for limited entry to the Hong Kong and Macau Special Administrative regions) or at the borders, and Hong Kong had been the only exception ot the general rule that Chines embassies and consulates will issue visas only to citizens and residents of the countries in which they are located. As a result, the unavailability of visas for nonresidents in Hong Kong makes it impossible to decide to visit China (via Hong Kong) in mid-trip, after you have left your own country, or as part of an extended trip in which you will have been out of your home country too long, before reaching China, to get a visa to China before leaving home.

The Web site for the Chinese visa office in Hong Kong still states that no applications will be accepted except from citizens and residents of Hong Kong, and that all others must apply in their country of citizenship or residence. I suspect that visa offices are now being givien slightly more local discretion, so it might be possible for a foreign tourist to get a visa application accepted in Hong Kong, especially if you go through a travel agency and book a tour or hotel stay in conjunction with paying them for visa services. If you try it, please let me know how it goes. But I wouldn't count on it: If you go to Hong Kong hoping to get a visa there to travel on into more of China, make sure you have a plan B.

It also seems like multiple-entry and long-stay visas are once again being issued as before, although as before with an unpredictable degree of scrutiny and documentary requirements.

So far as I know, the rest of the changes made earlier this year in China's visa rules remain in effect. (See my original article for the details.)

"The Practical Nomad Guide to the Online Travel Marketplace"

I've been informed today by my publisher, Avalon Travel , that one of my books, The Practical Nomad Guide to the Online Travel Marketplace (published in 2001), has been deemed officially out of print.

Fortunately, that may be a good thing for would-be readers, and for me. The book got rave reviews, not just as a guide to the online travel marketplace but for its elucidation of general guidance for online shoppers for other products and services. But it never sold well in print.

Despite the success of a few Internet-related how-to books, Internet users look for advice mainly online, not in books. Equally importantly, many travellers have been conned into believing that the Internet is a substitute for travel knowledge, rather than a tool for do-it-yourself travel agents, the optimal use of which depends on understanding something of the work of professional travel consultants. A recent survey, for example, found that the majority of respondents erroneously believe that the Web sites of online travel agencies like Orbitz, Expedia, or Travelocity are required to show you the lowest available fare -- rather than, like any other salesperson, showing you whichever choices they believe will make it most likely that you will buy whatever brings them the largest profit. Clicking "buy" on whatever one of these agencies first suggests is like buying the first thing any saleperson shows you.

Now that the book is out of print, though, the rights to the text have reverted to me. It may take some time to update the content and figure out how best to format it for the Web, but I plan to put as much as possible of the book online on this site in the future.

In the meantime, there are a few brief excerpts from "The Practical Nomad Guide to the Online Travel Marketplace" already on this Web site. And if you want a printed copy, used copies are usually available through the Advanced Book Exchange (ABEbooks.com), a consolidated listing service for independent bookstores throughout the USA and around the world. (I'll be updating the links to the book throughout this site to point there, but it may take a little while.) I'm currently trying to find out if there are any remaining copies in the publisher's and/or distributors' warehouses; if so, I'll get hold of them and make them available directly.

And of course, my other book, the latest edition of "The Practical Nomad: How To Travel Around the World" (4th edition, 2007) remains in print and available from your local bookstore (if they don't have it in stock, they can order you a copy) and all the other usual sources .

Crossposting at PapersPlease.org

I'm continuing to work with the Identity Project as a technical expert, policy analyst, and consultant on travel-related civil liberties and human rights issues. I've often posted pointers here to the Identity Project blog and Web site at www.PapersPlease.org , and will probably continue to do so occasionally. But I'd like to cut down on repetitive postings to both blogs.

So if you are interested in these issues, i encourage you to follow what's happening on the PapersPlease.org blog. (Yes, there's an RSS feed, as there is to this blog, if you prefer to follow it that way.) I've also added links in the sidebar of this blog (if you scroll down far enough) to the most recent articles from the IDP blog.

Can you really see what records are kept about your travel?

One of the big differences between American and European attitudes is that people in the USA tend to be much less willing to trust that the government is doing its job in accordance with the law. Many Europeans have told me this, and it's also what I've observed in the feedback and reactions to my work on issues of privacy, surveillance, and control of travellers.

European debate has focused on rules and policies, and has paid little attention to practices. Europeans seem to have trusted that travel compnaies and the government will comply with whatever rules are adopted, and that their public statements accurately describe what they really do, such as what records they keep about travellers and how they use those records.

As a suspicious, mistrustful American, I pay much more attention than my European friends to compliance, enforcement, and oversight mechanisms. Based on years of insider experience with travel companies, and a lifetime of experience with government agencies in the USA, I don't trust either type of organization (governments or corporations) to police themselves.

I believe that I can do something when I have actually tried it and have succeeded in doing it, not when some law says that I am supposed to be allowed to do it. As a litigious American (actually, I've never sued anyone, nor been sued), I think it's essential for people to be able to enforce their own rights through private action, not to have to rely on the government for protection -- especially when when it comes to protection against the excesses and abuses of governments themselves.

As a result of these (typically American) attitudes, I've been part of the most extensive set of private tests of what rights travellers actually have, in practice, to see what records travel companies and governments are keeping about our movements. These tests have been much more extensive -- even with respect to rights supposedly guaranteed to Europeans and under European law -- than any undertaken by Europeans themselves.

The results are significant for Americans, Europeans, and anyone concerned about the right to travel in the face of a growing surveillance state (corporate and/or governmental):

More travel "reality" on primetime television

Throughout the seven years since the premiere of its first season on 5 September 2001, The Amazing Race has been the only travel program on primetime national broadcast television in the USA. Perhaps that's not surprisng: after 11 September 2001, the second episode of "The Amazing Race" was postponed for a week while the network debated whether to cancel the series. CBS decided to go on with the show, but drastically cut back on its marketing and promotion, and had a hard time getting advertisers to sponsor it.

As it turned out, there was more interest in international travel by people in the USA after 11 September 2001 than there had been before (albeit coupled with more and different fears), and "The Aamzing Race" eventually found a growing audience of armchair as well as real-world travellers.

But perhaps it's also no surprise that the first new primetime travel TV show since then, while also a "reality" show, is about the fears and the changes, rather than the joy, of travel after 11 September 2001: Homeland Security USA premieres Tuesday night, 6 January 2009 (8-9 p.m. ET/PT. 7-8 p/m. CT/MT) on ABC.

The concept for the new show in the USA was franchised from the producers of the hit Australian "reality" television show, Border Security . Watching broadcasts produced in other countries is a great way to learn about other countries, and the original Australian version of "Border Security" was one of the programs (along with the Al-Jazeera English ) that made the strongest impression on us form our trip around the world. We saw the Australian show first on cable TV in a hotel in Hong Kong, and later throughout our six weeks in Australia. It features immigration inspectors' back-room interviews with visitors, in which they try to get them to admit that they are really just tourists, but intend to seek work in Australia, as well as scens of of cargo and luggage being poked, squeezed, x-rayed, sniffed by dogs, and in some cases smashed open to look for drugs and other contraband during customs inspections. And then there are the Australians returning from Asia with forbidden foods and flowers.

The US version will be broader in scope, and less specifically focsued on travel, since it will cover the whole range of DHS activites. (Although it probbly won't show the warrantless wiretapping and Internet snooping, or the people nominating names for the watchlists or reviewing the "derogatory" information to decide who to allow to travel, and who not to.) Since the show depends on the cooperation of the DHS to allow them to film, it also can't be expected to portray the DHS unfavorably -- even it wanted to do so, we presume that the television producers gave the DHS the right to review and approve the content before it is broadcast. On the other hand, an argument could be made that since the DHS allowed this TV show to be filmed, they have opened their operations as a public forum, and are required to allow content-neutral access to the same operational areas for documentary filmmakers.

[Addendum: The Department of Homeland Security in Action. Will this be the DHS reality they show on TV?]

TSA to require bar-coded boarding passes

Buried in the notice of the final rules for the Secure Flight airline passenger ID, surveillance, and control scheme is notice that the USA Transportation Security Administrations (TSA) intends to require airlines to add machine-readable codes to all boarding passes for flights in the USA:

To ensure the integrity of the boarding pass printing results and to prevent use of fraudulent boarding passes, TSA will also provide instructions for placing bar codes on the boarding passes in the future. TSA may provide instructions to the covered aircraft operators through an amendment to their security programs.

The Secure Flight rules themselves would obligate airlines to comply with TSA instructions for bar codes or any other TSA-mandated boarding pass coding for machine readability. Those instructions would be included in the TSA "user guide" for Secure Flight, which is to be provided to airlines but kept secret from travelers:

The covered aircraft operator must place a code on the boarding pass or authorization to enter the sterile area that meets the requirements described in the Consolidated User Guide.

Old-style ATB boarding passes, which were printed on individually numbered, controlled ticket forms (travel agencies were held liable for any tickets issued on stock numbers issued to them) that contained numerous physical security features, were much more secure than any "print at home" boarding passes or boarding passes sent to mobile phones by SMS message -- with or without two-dimensional bar codes. Every previous form of machine-readable travel document, including the encrypted storage of personal data on RFID chips in passports, has been cracked. Now that bar-coded boarding passes (BCBP) are "in the wild" at more and more airports, we don't expect it to take long before the the algorithm is cracked, so that anyone can generate their own boarding pass, with a valid two-dimensional bar code, and print it out or send it to the display of their mobile phone. Machine-readable travel documents won't make us more safe or secure, and in many ways will make us less so.

But that's not all that's wrong with this part of the Secure Flight scheme, or the larger pattern of which it is a part: the ongoing deep integration of government surveillance and control into the commercial infrastructure of movement of people.

The Amazing Race 13, Episode 11

Moscow (Russia) - Portland, OR (USA) - Newberg, OR (USA) - Cascade Locks, OR (USA) - Portland, OR (USA)

As is often the case with a real-life trip around the world, the final episode of The Amazing Race 13 was a bit of a let-down. The scenery on a sunny summer day in the Columbia River Gorge was as dramatically beautiful as anywhere the racers had been, but it's the cultural differences, and the knowledge that at any moment something completely unexpected might appear, that gives travel abroad its extra thrill. It's a relief to be able to relax your alertness when you get back to your own country, and (think you) know what to expect, but there can also be a subtle emotional downside to the loss of that extra edge of low-level but long-sustained heightened awareness brought on by travel in strange-seeming lands. Even travellers who don't think of themselves as "adrenaline junkies" and haven't engaged in anything as physically stressful as the challenges faced by the cast of "The Amazing Race" can still find it hard, when they come home, to come down from their addiction to world travel's continuous rush of the exotic and unpredictable. Perhaps that addiction to travel -- the one that so often brings people home already planning their next trip around the world -- really does have a physical/psychopharmalogical component.

At the same time, following an extended stay abroad with travel in your home country, before you actually settle back in at home, can be a good way to minimize "re-entry shock" and an excellent way to learn more from your trip. After my latest year-long trip around the world, I spent another six weeks on a road trip across North America and back. I had been hesitant to do so much more driving, especially after almost 10,000 km in Australia. But it was a deeply rewarding part of our world journey, reinforcing what I've called the "Heisenberg uncertainty principle of travel": You can't travel without changing both the places you visit and yourself. When you come back, what looks different than it did before you left? Which of those things look different because they have changed while you were abroad, and which look different because your perspective has been changed by your trip? And what do you understand about your homeland, that you didn't notice or that didn't make sense before, now that you can interpret it in the context of things you've seen in other countries? Reflections on these questions filled our hours on highways and byways of the USA and Canada, and continue even months after our homecoming.

The most interesting task for the racers involved an array of 150 photos of sites that they had visited in the course of their month-long trip around the world, which they had to identify from memory. This being "The Amazing Race", the photographs were in individual "clue boxes" spread out on a grassy lawn on Thunder Island upstream from Portland, which the racers reached by a zip-line ride from the deck of the Bridge of the Gods .

Sorting photos and trying to match them with memories, places, and dates is actually a typical task for the end of a trip. For the racers, it was made more difficult by the fact that these were someone else's photos, not ones they had taken themselves, and thus ones that wouldn't necessarily match the point of view of any of their own photographic memories. Have you ever been sent a bunch of photos taken by a travelling companion, or someone you met on an excursion, and puzzled at the mental transformations needed to map them to the images in your mind? ("Oh, they must have been looking at that from the other side.")

The photos the racers had to identify were also limited, of course, to the parts of the race that we, the television audience, had been shown. That's typical in real life, too: Such is the power of the image that, in hindsight, our memories come to be shaped by which moments we "captured" on film or digital media.

What shows up on TV from the race, however, like what shows up in my snapshots from my trip around the world, is far from a random or representative sampling. For a variety of reasons, there were many places and types of situations where I took no pictures at all: out of fear of crime in some places, out of fear (for myself or others) of the secret police in others, or out of a desire not to be instantly identified as a tourist. Since all tourists are expected to have cameras, and to be using them, a person who doesn't have a camera is frequently assumed, on that basis alone, to be something else -- an expat, perhaps, if not a local.

During the parts of the racers' trips that that are shown on TV, they have very few chances to talk with anyone other than their partners, or about anything other than, "How do I get to ...?" Most of their opportunities for personal interaction are with fellow guests at the "pit stop" hotels and resorts, in airports and waiting rooms, and on planes and long-distance trains and buses. These are the parts that aren't filmed at all, or that are deemed unlikely to interest TV viewers and shown only in the briefest snippets. But who's to say whether these are interludes between episodes of the "real" race, or whether the televised challenges (or the iconic sights and sites that ordinary travellers make sure they photograph to prove that they've "been there") are merely interruptions in the sequence of meetings with real-life people and places encountered and experienced along the way. If we had no photos to refresh our recollection, are the things we took pictures of really the things we would remember best, or that we think of as having been the most important? I tend to doubt it.

If you need another travel fix, now that this season of "reality" television is over, tune in on Sunday, 15 February 2009, for the start of "The Amazing Race 14". Or get a copy of The Practical Nomad: How to Travel Around the World and do it yourself!

Bon voyage!

The Amazing Race 13, Episode 10

Moscow (Russia)

The travellers on The Amazing Race 13 continued to struggle this week, making mistakes and showing a surprising lack of basic travel skills for teams that made it to the penultimate leg of the race around the world.

Cyrillic is both one of the easiest (along with Greek) and the most widely useful second alphabet for a speaker of English or any other language written in Latin letters. You don't have to learn what the words mean in Russian (or any of the other languages written in Cyrillic) to learn to sound out the Cyrillic letters, and it doesn't take most people more than a single lesson and a day of practice to be able to match written signs to words in written or spoken destination names or directions.

The racers don't know for sure where they are going to go -- the television producers get them a certain number of "decoy" visas in addition to the ones they will actually need. But they knew in advance, when they saw the Russian visas in their passports, that Russia was on the "short list" of possible destinations. And after three consecutive legs of the race in countries whose languages are written in Cyrillic, I can't imagine why none of the racers had gotten someone at one of the "pit stops" to teach them the alphabet.

Three of the four teams also picked what they should have known was the more difficult mode of transportation for a foreigner to navigate, choosing to travel by trolleybus ("trackless trolley" in Bostonian usage) rather than by Metro ("subway" in USA usage). Starr and Nick, who rode the subway, easily and quite predictably came in ahead of the other teams who rode the buses.

It's understandable that some of the racers didn't know what was meant by a "trolleybus", and confused it with a diesel bus and/or a trolley ("light rail vehicle" or "streetcar" in the USA, "tram" in Europe). For those who don't know, a trolleybus is propelled by motors powered by electricity drawn from a pair of wires strung overhead along the street, but rides on rubber tires on ordinary streets and roads, not on steel wheels on rails. Trolleybuses are found on limited routes in a few North American cities, but only in San Francisco (where the steep streets and unusually short typical distances between bus stops maximize their advantages, and the city and county had cheap electricity available from the Hetch Hetchy dam) are a large proportion of the buses and bus routes electrified. [Correction, thanks to the comment from Paul Schlienz: Also in Seattle and Vancouver, where conditions are similar.]

Most high-traffic bus routes can benefit from electrification. Trolleybuses themselves cost a little more than diesel buses (although much less than rail vehicles), but last many times longer with much less maintenance because of the inherent simplicity of the electric drive. Electric motors produce full power almost instantly, even from a standing start, obviating the need for a gearbox or complicated transmission and making them perfect in stop-and-go traffic. Stringing overhead power wires costs a fraction of the price, and takes only a fraction of the time, of laying rails for streetcars. Unlike streetcars, trolleybuses can change lanes to pass other vehicles, making it easier for them to share lanes with other traffic. They are virtually silent, produce no emissions at the vehicle, and the electricity to power them can be generated from renewable and less polluting sources. As oil gets more expensive (and if concern for global warming begins to have any effect on transportation planning), one the first changes we are likely to notice is a resurgence of trolleybuses . Indeed, an immediate start on conversion of some of their idle SUV and other car and light truck production capacity to trolleybus production should be part of the terms of any government financial aid for automobile manufacturers .

But that's another story. The issue in "The Amazing Race" -- and for you, dear reader, as a traveller -- is how much easier it is to find your way on almost any rail transit system (streetcar, subway, or commuter train) than on most buses, particularly if you don't speak a locally-understood language. Bus stop signage, when bus stops are signed at all, is often cryptic, and even if someone tells you to catch a bus "at" a particular intersection, that still falls short of specifying exactly where at that intersection you board: On which of the intersecting streets? Before or after the intersection? On which side of the street, or at a center island? Then you have to figure out where to get off -- not too difficult if you can ask someone (in words or by pointing to a map or the written destination) to tell you where to get off, but hard if you can't communicate, are on your own, the bus is crowded so you can't see out, you don't have a sufficiently detailed map to tell where along the bus route you are, and/or you don't know where along that route, or at what intervals, the bus will stop.

On a subway, the platforms or stops are usually well demarcated. And as New Yorkers Starr and Nick demonstrate, once you have plotted your route on a map (or gotten someone to show you, drawing or writing or counting the stations on their fingers if there is no common spoken language), you can navigate by counting stations or stops without the need to rely on station signage -- although there are more likely to be visible signs identifying subway stations than identifying each stop on a bus route.

Streetcars, where they are an option, are intermediate between buses and subways in ease of navigation, depending mainly on whether they have a dedicated right-of-way with specified and marked "stations", platforms, or stopping places, or whether they share the same lane on the street with other vehicles and stop at unmarked and uncounted spots along the route.

Of the teams that took the trolleybus, mother and son Toni and Dallas fell further behind and lost the race by losing their passports. They blamed only themselves for leaving the waist-pouch with their passports in a taxi. But unless it was a categorical imperative of the race rules, they should never have put their passports someplace where it was possible for them to be separated from their bodies. Any item of luggage, bag, or purse can be lost or stolen, especially a waist-pouch worn outside your clothes that fairly shouts that it contains your valuables. It can be snatched in an instant by someone who slashes the strap, even from behind or the side (or while confederates hem you in), and a waist-pouch will be the second thing (after your cell phone) that a thief demands that you hand over.

Take a lesson from this week's eliminated racers: Don't put your passport at risk of loss or theft. Carry it somewhere secure inside your clothes, such as in a "secret" inside pocket or a pouch worn inside your clothes.You or a tailor can add a passport-sized pocket in all sorts of places in different garments (including undergarments). After you clear customs and immigration, stop and put your passport away before you go out into the scrum of people meeting arriving passengers. Don't get it out again until you are inside your hotel, at the front desk, and need it to check in.

There will inevitably be discussion about whether, had they not been eliminated, Toni and Dallas would have been able to leave Russia and return to the USA without passports. It's an interesting question: The law is clear, but what would actually happen is not.

Under Article 12 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country." That right is near-absolute, and not dependant on possession of a passport or other documentation. But the USA has begun trying to enforce a requirement for citizens to have a passport in order to return home to the USA

Both Russia and the USA have ratified and are legally obligated to comply with the ICCPR, and under the Constitution it is "the highest law of the land". But in the USA, Congress has created no mechanism to enforce the rights guaranteed by the ICCPR. What's needed is a simple law to create a Federal cause of action for violations of the ICCPR, and to give the Federal courts jurisdiction over such cases. This would be a meaningful demonstration of commitment by the USA to honor its international obligations, without the need to submit to any sort of international jurisdiction -- such cases would be heard within the existing Federal courts. This is part of the Identity Project Agenda for the Obama Administration on the Right to Travel that I'll be discussing with Congressional staffers in meetings this week in Washington.

The finish line for this week's leg of the race was at "VDNK Park". Formerly the home of a permanent Exhibition of Soviet Economic Achievements, it now hosts temporary exhibitions of capitalist economic achievements, also known as trade fairs. But the "VDNK" acronym remains as the name of the Metro station, as does the upward-sweeping tapered titanium pillar, visible in the background of several scenes in the race, that honors the (quite genuine) achievements of the cosmonauts and other participants in the Soviet manned space program.