2 months, 3 continents, Taj Mahal and a new posting

Was just sitting updating my blog and realized that I had not had time to actually finalize and post the story about my trip to Fiji and that was 2 months ago even though it was written. It just shows how consuming our work and travels can be. The below story is a compilation of what has happened during the two months after that trip.

After arriving back to Dubai from Fiji/Australia I was in Dubai 2 weeks only to plan my trips to Delhi, India to and then from there straight to Derby, UK. Both trips of one week each and then I went back to Dubai for my last 2 weeks there.

As I have been posted in Dubai for 6 years I was up for re-assignment within WFP, an exercise which can make you very happy or very unhappy, for sure it will affect your life. The final agreeement was just done for my move while I stepped onboard the plane to India. It was agreed that I would take up a new posting in Rome at our Head Quarter and due to the project I would need to move within one month.

I just arrived in Rome last Sunday and quickly found an apartment about 800 meters away from Colosseum through one of my colleagues. I dropped my bags in the apartment and started work Monday morning. Then ofcourse Easter came up as I was back in Europe so I booked a seat on the last flights to head over to Copenhagen so I could get back to my parents to celebrate Easter. So here I am now on Easter Friday in Sweden. Something I have not even thought about doing for the last 6 years while being based in the middle east. Meanwhile my wife and son is still in Dubai :-(

This is the typical life working with the most dynamic UN organisation there is. To work and keep moving like this is not possible unless you really have the passion for the work you do and have a family that will put up with the constant travels and moves that happen. It is always stressful on the family life.

Luckily for me, my wife met me while I was travelling like this already so it is probably harder on me than her as I dont want to miss the little new things our baby does every day of his life.

While handing over my duties in Delhi and saying goodbye to the 25 superb staff I was supervising there, Pawan, the supervisor for the offshored global ICT servicedesk that I had been asked to set up, offered to take me to Agra to see the Taj Mahal but also a place called Fatepu Sikri, this on my last day in India. Over the last one and a half year I have been in India for work numerous times but had actually never been outside the office or hotel to see any of the sites including Taj Mahal, yet it was only 3 hours drive from Delhi.

Pawan and his wife's driver picked me up in the morning and we started the very interesting journey out to Agra. Even though we were driving on a proper highway with serious barriers between cars going in our direction and the others going back toward Delhi we had to be careful. It seemed like a national sport to go against the traffic also on a main highway. No one wanted to go an extra 200 meters to find the proper entry to the road so jsut go against traffic was the norm.

I think it took about 20 miniutes for both me and Pawan to figure out that our driver was not really of a higher caliber either. If he could speed up and hit the break just before hitting the guy infront he seemed happy and if there was no traffic for miles then he would slow down way below the speed limit, well that is if there was one as we never saw a sign.

After one hour Pawan swapped with the driver and I could finally release my foot from the imaginary brake I had been pushing. Telling me to remind him to tell his wife to fire the driver on our return.

McDonalds dont serve beef in India!
We stopped at several local places to get some coffee but neither of us thought that they looked very inviting so we continued until we saw a McDonalds. We ordered some coffee and I was just looking at the menu and to my surprise I did not see Big Mac. Hmm, but ofcourse no Big Mac.. That would have been an insult in a country were all cows are holy. I then remembered my first mission to India. We had been so busy going between potential offices that we had just stopped to get a quick snack and it happened to be a McDonalds. As I was busy in a telephone conference while driving I had just asked them to get me a bigmac. When the burger arrived I took a bite and it did not taste like what I had ordered. I did not think more of it at the time except that it seemed someone had not heard what I wanted. Now I was reading the menu on my last day in India and it just struck me how crazy it must have sounded the first time. Learning about the cultures we visit is a very interesting part as well as important part of what we need to do in our work.

Then I was thinking to myself, why on earth even put up an McDonalds in a country that dont even eat beef. There is so much good food with such a variety in India.

We continued our very interesting journey and first visited Fatepu Sikri.

It was a very nice old palace area with a very interesting history. To cut it very short the basic story was that there was this very rich guy and ruler of the are who about 500 years ago first married a Muslim woman. He built here a small house of one room. She never gave him any sons. Later on he married a Christian woman and she neither gave him a son but he built her a bigger house, which even had and upstairs area. then finally he married a Hindu woman and she gave him a son so he built her a palace whihc was about the double size of his own palace.. Infact he built her two just opposite of eachother one for the winter with less windows and one for the summer with many windows.

What was very interesting is that in all the houses/palaces all the religious signs and markings are prevailant from all religions in all the places. Now considering that this is built 500 years ago means that this man was way ahead of his time. We in this "so called modern" world can not even tear down the walls between the religions in this way. Its rather the opposite and it scars me that there can be so many religious fanatics in any and all the religions when infact most of the documented history somehow links together anyway.

Anyway then we continued to Taj Mahal. I have heard so many stories about this wonder of the world. Nothing could though have prepared me for the beauty of seeing it through the arch as we entered into the courtyard were it is located. It is the most amazing building I have ever seen and I have by now travelled quite some. The attention to detail is just overwhelming when you stand there infront of it. One thing which is very interesting is what most people are not told. All the 20,000 some workers who worked on the Taj Mahal all had their hands chopped off so they could not replicate or build something similar ever again. Talk about sacrifice for a wonder of the world.

Here I was several hundred years later trying to imagine what it must have looked like in those old days. Me, Pawan and many thousands more people. For sure it is a wonder and no one going to India should miss it.

We enjoyed the sunset out by the Taj Mahal and then headed back to Delhi.. Almost 4 hours night driving. We arrived at my hotel and just had time to do the final packing and just check out heading straight to the airport. I slept all the way to Dubai dreaming of the history days relaizing how lucky I am to still be travelling and working in these places.

The sad part is that it was also the last trip for me to India for some time. For now, my job is done there. I have set up 3 offshored units which all have very good people who for the most part would never hear that they are superb staff. Just for the simple reason that offshoring by default is a bad word as it means people in another place potentially lost their jobs as it could be done equally or in some cases better, but far cheaper in another location around the globe. While this offshoring might be sad it also shows that UN can save money for the real benficiaries.

46 days, 16 Countries and 37 flights later...

When 9/11 hit, Peter was based in Islamabad-Pakistan, and stood with one leg in a plane, ready to leave for a long assessment mission to Central and South America.. As we all knew it was going to be busy time in Central Asia for the next six months, Peter cancelled his trip, called me on the phone and asked me to fill in. This was the story I wrote about the trip. A typical story of "us being on the road the whole time"...
This story was first published on Peters blog and I have added in more details as well as pictures from the trip to the story in this annotated version.

Dear all,

I am on the final stage of my mission through our Central and South America offices in eleven countries: Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru and Cuba.

This mission was organised in less than a week following the Sep 11th bombing in the US. I was on my way to West Africa for another assessment mission when I got a call from HQ to re-prioritize, with departure... euh.. immediately.

I have been away for 46 days now. During those 46 days I have taken 37 different flights. I have checked in and out of hotels 20 times. In several places I woke up in the morning not recognising the hotel room, wondering what country I was in, not a nice feeling.



I have been travelling through a total of 16 countries to asses 11 of them and visited 20 different offices. 70% of the flights were before 07:30 AM, just to make sure I did not enjoy a full night's sleep or breakfast. Especially if you know that most airlines here require you to check in three hours before take-off. I guess I am now an instant "Frequent Flyer Gold Status" on TACA-airlines !

In Miami I spent 5 hours going through 3 different security checks with my luggage as all passenger traffic had been rerouted to one location. Explaining to 4 guys how come I had so many stamps from various African countries who would for sure be on a terrorist list. When I finally was ready to board the plane, the automatic boarding pass machine spit out my boarding pass one more time which meant I had to once more open all my luggage as well as go through yet one more x-ray machine. Despite 5 hours in the airport I actually never even had a chance to sit down and have a coffee. That after already having travelled for 20 hours since leaving Kampala, Uganda.

On one occasion in Honduras I flew for 30 minutes, take-off at 0600 in the morning to arrive in San Pedro Sula to immediately continue in a car for 4 hours to reach Santa Cruz Copan. We stayed there about 30 minutes while I did the assesment and then drove straight back to San Pedro Sula. The morning after I was back in the air heading back to Tegucigalpa. At 6 AM.

In the Dominican Republic I had a whole weekend for myself.. "Great", I thought.. Until I turned on the TV and found a hurricane was heading straight at us... So I got locked up in the hotel room the whole of Saturday!

In Dominican Republic there was no flight to Port-au-Prince as the airline was grounded due to insurance problems. So I ended up going by road from Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic to Cap Haitien, Haiti, a trip of about 6 hours total. Crossing the border between the two countries was like being instantly teleported back to Africa. The next day at 0700 I flew out of Cap Haitien to Port-au-Prince on a local airline. The morning after I was out of Haiti heading to Columbia.

In Colombia I flew to Apartado via Medellin. In Medellin you land at one airport and you have to transfer to another airport to take a small plane to get to Apartado (Apartado = far away!). Well, these airports are one hours drive apart(ado). The area is more known as the FARC controlled areas in Colombia.
Up on the mountain above Bogota.

As they were warming up for the Miss Colombia beauty contest and had just selected the local beautyqueen the same day I arrived, I had the fortune of being kissed farewell by Miss Apartado at the Airport when leaving.

I lost my seat on the overbooked morning flight to Quito.. All my tickets got cancelled as I showed up as a no-show passenger on their computer... on the flight from Santo Domingo which THEY cancelled... I spent nine hours at the airport as the evening flight was delayed. Technical problems! When things go wrong they go WRONG! I could have gone back to the office but I had to spend almost two hours getting my booking for seats back on the remaining 15 flights I had on that ticket.

The Courtyard in Potosi, Bolivia. Once the capital of the Spanish conquistadors in S. America.


Heading out of Peru en route to Cuba via Panama the plane ended up doing an emergency landing in Quito as a passenger in business class had a fatal heart attack.

In Cuba I arrived with no visa.. Usually that is not a problem since I have both a UNLP [a UN passport] and a Swedish passport... But not in Cuba! Either you have a visa or you spend two hours waiting with no clue about what is going on... And they will make sure the people waiting for you in the arrivals hall do not know you are there...

In Cuba they changed back to winter time during my stay.. Well I didn't find out until almost a day later. No wonder there were no people in the restaurant at 0800 on Sunday for breakfast.. Because it was only 0700 for all the others?!

Once back in Managua it all ended up in a bit of a chaos as there were presidential elections and the security team decided to escalate the security precautions, demanding all non-essential staff to stay put.

A second Hurricane showed up during this final stage of the mission, killing at least four in Honduras before heading full speed for Cuba.

One day before my departure day out of the region I got the news that Sabena has filed for chapter 11 and Brussels Airport was on strike. Straight on my return flight route, of course! So all my return flights had to be changed to a different routing with yet one more ticket... That makes a total of 16 tickets. My travel expense claim will be interesting..

Yours Sincerely,
Mats
(in an airport somewhere)