Flying to the Far East

Somewhere over Iowa (May 19, 2016)

When I was a student in Pisa, I spent countless hours watching the world pass by, from the window of the intercity train that would ferry me back and forth between the city where I was studying, and the one where my family lived in the North of Italy. It seemed a very long trip at the time (about 200 miles that the train would cover in 4 hours), even though in my current midwestern frame of reference it is but around the corner. I relished watching the life of strangers pass-by from the second class window, like an unscripted movie pasted together by a director not quite awake from a surrealist dream. A way to suspend one's own thoughts by borrowing fleeting moments of other people's life.

Des Moines Airport

Since I came to the US, trains ceased to be my main method of transportation. The distances here are much larger than in Europe, and the trains themselves are just a shadow of their past glory, when they opened the Frontier to civilization (our particular variant of it) and genocide (of the people that had already civilized these wanted lands). In the US you either move by car, (the mechanical overlords that control America's suburbia commuters' life) or you fly. I started to fly a lot. To the observatories on top of remote desert mountains where I would use giant pieces of glass to pierce the sky (or, most often than not, the hated clouds) in invisible light. To far away cities where I would meet like-minded astro-obsessed individual, where we would discuss in conference the mysteries found in these observations. Even though the pace of my travel has decreased since moving to a University (teaching commitments) and since I started to use space telescopes (you don't really have to travel to space to use them), I still fly a lot. In about a decade I clicked over three quarters of a million miles, on just one of the many airlines that had been ferrying me around. This is more than 4 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

The next few posts will be about one of such trips. Mid-May this summer, as soon as the classes ended and the students were given to know their fate after the final exam, I packed my carry-on luggage and drove to the Des Moines airport, ready to fly to Beijing via Chicago. This was my first time in China, a country I had been always curious about, but never visited before. As I was traveling light, I made the objectionable choice of leaving my DSLR camera home. All the photos you will see in this series, including the ones in this post, were therefore shot as JPEG with an iPhone 6, and subsequently processed with Lightroom on my computer. In the next posts I will talk about the conference, and the places and people I visited in the trip. I hope you will enjoy coming along!

Chicago O'Hare Airport (May 19, 2016)

Leaving New Zealand

Auckland, New Zealand (Jun 7, 2008)

The trip finally arrived to its end. The last day our friends accompanied us to the Auckland Museum, where we saw the Maori exhibition and the Natural History collections. The museum has a large and nice kids section, which Tycho, Lenya and Halen are quite enthusiastic about.

Auckland

The night before, between the beach and Kendra’s parents, we went with Greg on top of the Sky Tower. The ride on the elevator to the observing deck is quite impressive, as the elevator has glass walls and one can see the structure of the tower (and the full drop). We even got a discount for the entrance fee, because the nice lady at the booth liked us and decided to give us the student discount even after we said that we were not students. Being New Zealand even going to the Sky Tower can be yet another occasion for extreme sport. The tower, 328 meters tall (1,076 feet), is the tallest free standing structure of the southern hemisphere. From its observation deck it is possible to practice the “Sky Walk”, which consists in walking on a wire metal platform outside the windows (without rail or balcony), tethered to the structure but otherwise exposed to the elements. Or one can jump to the ground (tethered to a cable that slows down the descent just enough so that you arrive at the bottom alive and perhaps willing to try a second ride). If you are not so adventurous you can still experience the height by standing on top of a glass ceiling, watching the ant-sized people walking on the street 300 meters below.

This is the last post of the trip. We took the plane back to Los Angeles, where Mayli got her connection to Chicago (she was going to a meeting in Minnesota), and I got harassed yet again at immigration because at some point my record with the homeland security database got screwed up. They know is their mistake (and a very obvious one), but apparently nobody knew how to correct it, so I had to go through this hassle every time I reentered the country, until it was finally resolved a few trips later. After the usual 45 minute delay I finally got on my plane to Boston... and arrived home.

If you have landed to this page and you want to read all this from the beginning, jump back to the first post or the cover page here.

Auckland, New Zealand (Jun 7, 2008)

A New Zealand Glacier

New Zealand (May 26, 2008)

The flight from Sydney to Christchurch turned out to be a real treat. As the New Zealand coast was approaching, the snowy peaks of the Southern Alps arose from the Tasman sea. The day was very clear, and the view was quite majestic. I could clearly see Mt. Cook, and several glaciers, one of which is shown in the posted photo. I spent a good couple of hours in Google Earth trying to figure out the name of this glacier, but so far no luck. It is not the Fox Glacier, or the Franz Joseph Glacier, because these are much longer, and they are closer to Mt. Cook, which I already passed 10 minutes before. This one is more to the North. Anybody has any idea of which glacier is this?

A glacial valley

The landing in Christchurch was uneventful. The airport is small and cozy, and the people there are nice. I did immigration (uneventful, as it should be), and then custom, where they only asked me if I had hiking boots to clean them up. New Zealand is trying hard to avoid the accidental introduction of alien pests or parasites, so even the dirt attached to used boots is removed and the boots disinfected before being allowed to enter the country. My boots were quite new and clean, so the nice lady at custom let me in without the need of brushing them. I then got a taxi to the hotel, downtown Christchurch, where Mayli had arrived a few days earlier when her conference started. The taxi driver was very keen in talking, and as he was driving gave me his very opinionated description of the city. He was particularly upset by the fact that the historical buildings at the center of the city were not being preserved, and were gradually replaced by high-rise apartment building causing the city to lose its character. There were other things he was upset about (student drinking too much at night and then driving too fast in their parent’s car, foreigners buying all the nice villas in the city outskirts and then renaming them with silly names coming out from some Hollywood movie, the rising cost of gasoline, the road traffic and of course the US using the airport to send stuff to the outposts in Antarctica... he went on and on and on), but all in all it was an interesting (one way, mostly) conversation.

Arrived at the hotel my temptation was to just go to sleep, which of course would have been a mistake (given that it was only early afternoon, local time, even though it was way past bed-time in my personal time-zone). So I got my camera out, found a map of the city (the taxi driver left me one) and walked out to have a look around, while waiting to join Mayli during her next coffee break. But this is a story for another day...

New Zealand (May 26, 2008)

Cosmological Inflation

From the summit of Mount Hopkins, Arizona (February 5, 2007)

Tomorrow (Monday) a major press conference is scheduled in the main auditorium of my old institution, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. It is widely rumored that the event will concern ground-breaking results from the BICEP2 experiment. Ok, so... what will this be all about?

It is a long story, going back all the way to the birth of the Universe, 13.82 billions years ago. That's the time when the Universe was born, starting from a very dense and hot state where radiation and matter were coupled together in a very thick soup. As the universe aged, it expanded. As it stretched, it cooled. Almost 380,000 years later, the Universe became cold enough to form the first atoms in a process that we call recombination. That was a momentous change: at recombination, when most charged particles condensed into forming hydrogen and helium atoms, light was suddenly free to move around without being continuously absorbed. The Universe suddenly became transparent to the electromagnetic radiation.

After recombination, the Universe entered an era dominated by matter, that still lasts today. The newly formed atoms, helped by other mysterious neutral particles that we call dark matter, were pulled together by the force of gravity to form the first galaxies, then the first stars (let there be light), then planets and life as we know it. The primordial light, liberated by the yoke of matter, started to freely move around the Universe, stretched by the expansion of the Cosmos like a long forgotten echo in an enormous cathedral. This faint echo formed billions of years ago was accidentally found by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, two physicists working on a prototype microwave antenna built at the Bell Labs in New Jersey. This echo is what we call the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR).

A nice property of the CMBR is that it is exactly the same, anywhere you look in the sky. That should not be a surprise: the background radiation was generated by the cosmic soup at the time of recombination, when the Universe had expanded to a specific density and temperature. If the Universe was homogeneous and isotropic at that time, the CMBR should reflect that. Small anisotropies (less than 1 part in 100,000) are still found in the CMBR, the consequence of small statistical fluctuations in the distribution of the hot gas that emerged from the primordial soup. These fluctuations, that acted as seeds for the gravitational collapse from which galaxies formed, are the holy grail to understand the details of the Universe expansion and to measure its fundamental parameters. The 13.8 billion years age of the Universe I mentioned above, for example, was determined by the European Space Agency and NASA Planck telescope, precisely by measuring the CMBR fluctuations from space.

Tucson, Arizona

The extreme isotropy of the CMBR, however, is also a huge problem. When we measure the background radiation from opposite directions in the sky, we are observing light that traveled, at the speed of light, for almost 14 billions years (from the time of recombination) until it reached us. Since the CMBR looks identical in these two opposite directions, the thermostat of the primordial soup in these two opposite areas of the Universe must have been set at exactly the same temperature. For this to happen, the two regions must have been able to communicate one with the other, in order to agree on their common temperature set point. This is a problem, because any form of physical communication is limited by the speed of light, and these two regions are now almost 2 x 14 = 28 billion light-years apart. Any communication among them would require a time twice the age of the Universe. In other words, the CMBR coming from opposite regions in the sky was produced by parts of the Cosmos that after the Big Bang somehow managed to get separated from any possible causal connection, incapable of communicating the common temperature that is however apparent in the CMBR. How could that be?

The solution to this paradox was proposed in 1980 by Alan Guth, a physicist at Cornell University (and now at MIT). Guth proposed that shortly after the Big Bang (0.0000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds after the Big Bang, to be precise) the Universe underwent a dramatic expansion, at a rate that left even light behind. This expansion "froze" the conditions in the primordial soup as space was stretched almost instantly by many orders of magnitude. Regions of the Universe that at the Big Bang were next to each other, capable to communicate within the limit of the speed of light, suddenly found themselves separated at distances where communication became impossible. Still they retained the common conditions from before this expansion, leading to identical temperatures when the CMBR was finally released. This process, which is analogous to a sudden phase transition like that of suddenly freezing supercooled water, is called inflation.

Inflation is a pillar of modern cosmology, yet it remains a very plausible, but not fully demonstrated, hypothesis. The detailed processes that caused this sudden expansion are largely undetermined, and many different models of inflation have been proposed to date. A direct proof that inflation existed, and a way to discriminate between these different models has so far eluded science. The most promising place to look for guidance, once more, is the CMBR itself.

Any process involving stretching and compressing space (like banging two very heavy masses together) leads to ripples in the space-time known as gravitational waves. Predicted by Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, gravitational waves have never been directly observed. We have however very strong indirect evidences of their existence. Binary pulsars are pairs of very heavy stellar remnants orbiting each other, that dissipate gravitational energy at the rate corresponding to their predicted production of gravitational waves. If gravitational waves do exists, they must have been produced in droves in such a cataclysmic event as the Big Bang, and must have been amplified even more at the time of inflation when space was stretched at an exponential rate. These primordial gravitational waves, propagating all the way to the time of recombination, must have left their own peculiar imprint in the CMBR, a trace that could have survived until today. This is what the BICEP2 experiment is about.

BICEP2 is a small telescope located at the South Pole, designed to measure with great sensitivity the intensity and polarization of the small fluctuations in the CMBR. The polarization of the CMBR is the key to find the footprints of inflation in the background radiation: the so-called polarization B-mode is a unique orientation in the CMBR light that could have only resulted from the perturbation of the primordial gravitational waves as they crossed the cosmological soup emerging from recombination. It is a unique feature that would prove the occurrence of inflation, at the same time restricting the number of possible inflation models. The detection of a signal in the B-mode polarization of the CMBR would be a Nobel-prize discovery, and open the door for studying the unknown physics that happened at the very first instants after the Big Bang.

For more details, tune-in to the Center for Astrophysics press release web site at 12PM EDT Monday, when the press conference will start. A nice article about the discovery with more details about the CMBR B-mode polarization is also available on the Sky and Telescope magazine.

---

Today's photos have nothing to do with BICEP2 and the CMBR. The telescope responsible for the discovery is at the South Pole, and unfortunately I have never been there. The main photo above, however, is yet another view from the road to the summit of Mount Hopkins, where the MMT telescope is located. The view is looking south-west towards Mexico. The small image on the left, and the image below are instead taken from a plane flying over southern Arizona. It is indeed time to fly north, leaving the mountains of the US southwest, towards the rockies of Colorado. This will be the destination for the next photoblog post.

Snow-capped mountains in southern Arizona (January 19, 2005)

The Southern Alps

New Zealand (May 26, 2008)

You are all probably familiar with Hithaeglir (Misty Mountains), the majestic chain of tall mountains crossing Middle Earth from Mount Gundabad in the far north to Methedras in the south. You also probably know that the cinematic representation of this mountains in the Lord of The Rings and Hobbit movies is based on real mountains in New Zealand South Island: the Southern Alps. This is where we are going next.

Southern Alps

The Southern Alps are the "spine" of New Zealand South Island: 450 km longs they divide the narrow coast land on the West from the broad and green plains of the East. These are majestic mountains, covered by glaciers and crossed by long glacial valleys. We visited New Zealand in 2008, after a meeting Mayli had in Christchurch, and spent a couple of weeks driving around in the South Island. The photos in this page were all taken as I was approaching Christchurch from Sydney. Since Christchurch is on the eastern coast, flying from Australia means crossing the island above the mountains and its glaciers. The Southern Alps have 3,155 glaciers with an area larger than one hectare, the longer of which (the Tasman glacier) is 29 km in length. The mountains themselves are nothing to joke about: the tallest peak, Mount Cook (Aoraki), is 3,754 m high, one of sixteen peaks higher than 3,000 meters on the sea level. In the next few posts I will dwell on the mountain photos that I took during that trip.

New Zealand (May 26, 2008)

Mount St. Helens

Mount St. Helens, USA (January 11, 2007)

There was a mountain in North America that was as beautiful as Fuji-san in Japan. It was a perfect cone with a snow-white tip, raising to the sky amid lush forests and crowned by silvery rivers. That mountain was sacred to the people living in its vicinity.

Washington State, USA

Wikipedia tells us that Tyhee Saghalie, the chief of all the gods of the Klickitat people, traveled down the Columbia river from the ancestral lands in the north. He was with his two sons, Pahto and Wy'east, searching for a new land to settle. After much wandering they found a land so beautiful that both brothers wanted it for themselves. To resolve the dispute, their father used his magic bow to shoot two arrows in opposite directions. Patho followed the arrow that went north; Wy'east went instead south. Their father then built the Bridge of the Gods to connect the two lands, so that they could periodically have their family reunions.

For some time everything was well and dandy, until a fateful day the two brothers met a beautiful maiden whose name was Loowit. They both fell in love and started quarreling again, while Loowit could not choose between the two of them. In their fight, they buried villages and razed forests, shaking the earth so violently that the bridge of the God fell into the river (creating the Columbia River Gorge). Saghalie was very upset by all this devastation, and decided to punish the quarreling lovers. He struck down his two sons and transformed them into mountains: Patho became what is known now as Mount Adams while Wy'east became Mount Hood. And Loowit? She became the fairest mountain of all, Louwala-Clough (fire mountain) which we now call Mount St. Helens.

I have seen Mount St. Helens once, even though I didn't know it at the time. I only recognized the mountain of fire much later, when I finally started to work on the photos I took from a plane that was bringing me home from Seattle. It is the photo above, where you can see the huge crater of the volcano, and the plume of steam still rising from it. What you cannot see is the picture-perfect cone that, like Fuji-san, stands high above the forests and the river covered in snow.

The reason why the beautiful cone is missing is that Mount St. Helens top, at the 8:32AM PDT of May 18, 1980, blew up, in the course of the most destructive volcanic event recorded in the United States. The eruption cut 400 meters from the height of the mountain, killing 57 people, flattening 250 homes, felling 47 bridges, and destroying 15 miles of railways and 185 miles of highways. It became one of the most famous volcanic eruptions in the history of North America. You can still see, even in my foto, the huge scar left behind by the explosion. The north side of the mountain is missing, crushed by the explosion into an enormous avalanche of almost 3 km cube of debris. When President Jimmy Carter visited the devastation shortly after the eruption, he commented that "Someone said this area looked like a moonscape. But the moon looks more like a golf course compared to what's up there."

The area around the mountain was designated in 1982 by President Reagan and the US Congress (when it was still doing something) as a national Monument. As such it is granted protection that has allowed scientists to study how the environment can naturally recover from the disturbance caused by such cataclysmic events.

Taking off from Seattle Tacoma, USA (January 11, 2007)

Flying over the Alps

Somewhere over the Alps (February 4, 2005)

Almost 6% of the surface of Earth is mountains. This corresponds to 20% of all available land (once you take out the oceans). As much as I like Italian mountains, it is time to move on. Let's take a plane and fly over the Alps. This route I have taken many many times, from west to east when visiting my family in Italy, and from East to West when getting back to the US. Hop on a plane and fly. Piece of cake, right?

Well, maybe not so easy, after all. In fact, in my brief jet-flying career (700,000 miles so far) I have already suffered two emergency landings as I was crossing the Alps.

Somewhere over the Alps

The first time was almost uneventful, thanks for my cluelessness. This was one of those planes with the little screen attached to the seat in front, showing the live map with the plane route. Well, at some point I noticed that the plane was making an unexpected U-turn, as to get back to Paris. People on the plane were kind of agitated but I could not understand what was going on. Then the pilot announced that we were getting back because, "as you may have noticed" there was a strong smell in the main cabin, which he was positive it wasn't gourmet cheese, and we were getting back to investigate. So we landed on a separate runway with the fire trucks ready to intervene... and intervene they did, as the reason of the smell was that one of our engines has gotten on fire mid-flight, and the smoke was already entering the cabin (so much for being pressurized). Of course, due to my anosmia, I didn't notice anything, but it must have been terrifying for the passengers that could see the right wing of the plane with its trail of smoke.

The second time was in fact more directly connected to the mountain crossing (which appropriate given that I am running this series about mountains). The flight was between Torino and Paris. As soon as we got over the Alps we started to feel very strong vibrations at the back of the plane. Horrible noise and shaking, like the worst turbulence I have even gone through. We did an emergency landing at Lion, nearest airport at that point, just on the other side of the mountains. No fire trucks, that time, but as soon as we landed one of these service trucks with the elevator cart approached our plane. We could not get out, but from the window we saw that the service crew was looking very carefully at the tail section of our plane. Nothing... we were stuck on the plane and these people were just looking and looking. As the passengers and the flight crew were getting just a little too nervous, one of the workers outside grabbed the tail of the plane, hanging to it, as to see if he could pull it out! As that happened the pilot, that by then was in the main cabin looking outside as everybody else, became red, said something like "that's it" and declared that he would not have flown that plane ever again. That was it indeed. We disembarked, managed to get to Paris with another plane before nightfall, and then took yet a different plane the next day, to get back to the US. All this happened a few months before a plane of the same model crashed in Queens (New York) because, you guess it, the tail section snapped due to excessive turbulence.

Despite all this, I still like the experience of flying (and I would not mind flying to space, if it was economically feasible). And that's nothing compared with what happened to a friend of mine that crashed twice with a helicopter, the same day, in the middle of the Amazon jungle. But that's a story for another day.

Somewhere over the Alps (February 4, 2005)

Farewell to Venezuela

La Guaira, Venezuela (Dec 29. 2004)

--- Originally published on December 29, 2004 ---

The last day has finally arrived. We had packed everything the night before, and at 6:30 AM we were ready for the radio taxi we had reserved to go to the airport of Caracas in La Guaira (photo, from the airplane). Getting a taxi in Caracas can be an interesting experience. The easy and expensive way is to call a radio-taxi. They arrive at your house with large black SUV, and you are taken where you want to go without troubles in an aseptic vehicle with darkened windows and air conditioning that physically isolates you from the world outside (the highway passes in the middle of the "ranchitos" of Caracas, see photo below). For all appearances, you may as well be in New York. This kind of transportation is useful if you have to go to the airport early in the morning, because you are sure to have the taxi waiting for you at the requested hour. The 30-40 min trip to the airport from Caracas costs 40,000 bolivares which is about $20 at the official rate, ok for us but quite expensive for the average venezuelan.

There are of course other options. The more affordable other way is walk down to the closest taxi station or stop a taxi in the street (taxis in Caracas do stop, like in New York, and differently from Boston). The only problem is that you need to figure out if you the driver can be trusted or not. Things are usually ok if the taxi has some “official” sign, but most of the taxis are now living in a semi-legal status after a liberalization promoted by the government. Many of the taxi drivers do not have a license, they put a fake TAXI sign on the top of their patched cars and start driving around (instant taxi!). For the taxis hired in the street it is advisable to ask beforehand the price of the ride, to avoid being ripped off. We had taken such a taxi a couple of times, like when we went to the Universidad Simon Bolivar for the second day of Mayli’s conference, paying a few thousand bolivares for a ride that had costed Mayli many times more the day before with an “official” black SUV taxi.

Anyway, the ride was smooth and we arrived at the airport in time,checked-in, pass through the first of the many security checks of the day, and soon we were on our way to Miami. In Miami we had the first disappointment of our return to the US: we couldn’t find a decent place to have lunch in the gate areas, and we had to resort to a Pizza Uno. Ugh, welcome back to the famous US cuisine.

The second (expected) disappointment was when landing to Boston (with one hour delay because the plane cleaning crew in Miami didn’t show up in time): everything was covered by a white mantle of snow. This was expected because we received the city email snow advisory, but the hard reality of returning to winter after 20 days of summer still hit us hard.

Once at home we had the final blow: as a consequence of the snow emergency declared by the city, we got three fines for a total of $90, because of parking on the wrong side of the road, and not moving the snow-submerged car within 48 hours. So we spent the first hour back home shoveling the snow to avoid getting more 48 hours fines... Welcome Back to Boston!

This is the last post of my Venezuelan diary. It was quite an effort keeping up with the posting while traveling, but I did enjoy fixing my thoughts and travel impressions at the end of each day. And it also forced me to start screening my photos right away, rather than leaving them for weeks after returning from a trip. I hope you also enjoyed the reading and the photos as much as I liked posting them. In the next few days I’ll resume the regular posting of the blog: I took several hundred pictures during this trip, from the beaches of Los Roques to the mountains of Merida; many of them are just crap, but there will be some worthy to be published, and I’ll post them in the weeks to come.

--- Updates (October 20, 2013) ---

This was the last post of my 2004 Venezuelan travel diary. I remember it being quite an effort, keeping up with posting while traveling, but it was also a good exercise rethinking all that happened at the end of each day. It also forced me to start screening my photos right away, rather than leaving them untouched for weeks after returning from a trip, which is what I usually do. Much has changed since 2004. Chavez is gone, but the Chavismo is still alive. The years of innocence, when Venezuela was the darling of the international left, have been replaced by the harsh reality of yet another corrupt, incompetent and populist government using ideology as an excuse to maintain its power. The open question is now for how long the little chavistas that have replaced Chavez will manage to keep their hold on power, now that "El Comandante" and his enormous charisma are gone forever.

Thanks for reading this far. If you happened to hit this page and want to know what is this all about, you can jump to the beginning of my Venezuela travel diary HERE. You may also enjoy my other travel diary published here: the Japan travel diary.

Ranchitos de Caracas (December 28, 2004)

Back to Caracas

Merida, Venezuela (Dec 28, 2004)

--- Originally published on December 28, 2004 ---

Merida, Venezuela (Dec 28, 2004)

Inevitably, our vacations are getting to their end. This morning we left Merida directed to Caracas, where we will stay for just one day before flying back to freezing Boston. We flew again with one of the small propeller planes that serve the route between Merida and Caracas. These planes actually land in the Merida airport. Landing in Merida is quite an experience. The city is on a valley between very high mountains (the Pico Bolivar is over 5,000m), and the airport is right in the middle of the city. Until a few years ago large jets were authorized to land, but only especially trained pilots were able to do the frightening maneuver of diving through the peaks and stopping on the short runway (the runway is really short, to the point that the bakery near the airport had to pull down its shutters at the time of the daily jet flight). Now only small planes are authorized to land, and the situation has somewhat improved, even though the landing stage can still provide quite an adrenaline rush, and the probability of getting in town the same day as your luggage are slim. Despite the clouds and being again seated on the same side of the sun, we were treated by a wonderful view and I was able to do a few nice shots, like the one above. We will spend the night in caracas, and tomorrow morning we will suffer another early wake up to get back to the airport for our return flight to the US. This time we didn't lose our luggage, which is good given that we would have had otherwise to arrive in Boston with our summer clothes on.

--- Updates (October 18, 2013) ---

As mentioned in this other post, the airport in Merida is closed due to a fatal accident, and is now necessary to fly to El Vigia, a very inconvenient airport down in the plain.

--- Updates (October 20, 2013) ---

David left this comment on Facebook:

"Es bastante increible lo pertinente de esta foto: Estoy 95% seguro q esas lagunas las conocimos Javier y yo la única vez q acampamos juntos... Nos quedamos al lado de la más grande, la del medio. Se llega subiendo por la Musuy, y una de ellas se llama La Carbonera... nunca había llegado a ver esta foto.. Espectacular!!!"

It turns out I have a couple other photographs taken about at the same time from the plane, that show the lakes in more details, and the nearby area. I am adding them here.

Back to Caracas

Los Roques, Venezuela (December 13, 2004)

--- Originally published on December 14, 2004 ---

We are back in Caracas. Since I still didn’t take my camera out in the street of Caracas I am posting a photo of Los Roques that I took yesterday from the airplane. A kind of “au revoire” to Los Roques and the incredible colors of its water.

Los Roques aerial

We spent the whole morning at the headquarter of a foundation that provides loans for Venezuelan students that want to get a degree abroad (Mayli had one of such loans). The mechanism is simple and perverse. The loans are paid in the foreign currency of the place where the student is going to stay, converted into bolivares (the venezuelan currency) after each payment, and finally paid back in bolivares once the contract is closed. The loan has an interest rate tied to the venezuelan currency, which in recent years has been devalued by a large factor (it is currently 14% but has been even higher at some point). The end result is that a loan can increase to a very large amount by the time the student gets the diploma and closes the contract, especially in the case of a Ph.D. degree that typically takes many years to finish. In this case the monthly installments that a student may have to pay can be much higher than the average stipend of a venezuelan university professor. The consequence is that the debt can be practically impossible to pay, following the scheme of high interest loans that the World Bank forces down the throats of Developing World countries. To make sure that the loan is recovered, the foundation asks “fiadores” to co-sign the contract (third persons that will assume the responsibility of repaying the debt and the penalties in case the student is not solvent). To qualify as a fiador one needs to have enough money to be in the upper few percent of venezuelan society, e.g. even upper middle class citizens typically do not qualify. As a consequence, only people whose family already has the money to send its children abroad to study qualify for the loan, which complete the perversity of the system (Mayli’s parents didn’t qualify and she had to ask her uncle to sign the contract). The stated goal of the foundation is to promote higher education in the country, and considers a “failure” the case of students that do not come back in Venezuela after completing their degrees. Students that come back have a discount in their payments while students that do not return have penalties (in some cases they are required to pay back twice as much as the total loan). Apart from this, there are difficulties to overcome in order to get a new visa for the US after completing the program with the foundation.

I think this attitude is completely wrong. First of all, given that this is a loan and not a fellowship, it is an unfair burden to require the students to give the money back, and also forcibly return). One should also discuss the rationale for forcing people to live in a country not necessarily able to offer the kind of employment for which the person pursued the degree. Mayli is an high energy physicist. She is working at Harvard University on a neutrino experiment at Fermilab and in Minnesota. In Venezuela there is not a single high energy experimental physicist. Venezuela has so many other priorities that spending large amounts of money in high energy physics experiments would be simply outrageous (most of the money the government is spending in education goes to basic literacy programs, and professional courses, and this is the right thing to do in a country where a large segment of the population is illiterate). If she (and the other few venezuelan high energy physicists I know) were forced to return in Venezuela, she would be essentially wasted. My take is that she is much more useful to venezuelan society by working abroad. Having a contact in a prestigious scholarly institution is essential for venezuelan universities, because it allows exchanges (in term of studentships, research grant money in hard currencies, collaboration) which are indispensable for the growth of venezuelan scientific research. Returning home to be unemployed or hired with a low wage salary not even sufficient to pay the student loan does not seem a very clever scheme to me.

We spent the rest of the day home relaxing, and reading the email that have accumulated in the last few days (over 150 non-spam emails). The good news is that a project on which I am working on has been selected for a press release in the next American Astronomical Society meeting in San Diego. You may read about my scientific work in your local newspaper in January The bad news is that the research is all but ready for publication, so I will have to work while here. Damn!

--- Updates (September 8, 2013) ---

After a long, expensive and complicated process, a few years later we managed to pay Mayli's student loan in full. We were probably the last (only?) people to ever repay the debt in full: shortly after we managed to pay and to get the release letter Mayli needed for her US Green Card, the program was reformed and the debt waived. It seems now to be more accessible (it is now a true fellowship), and the requirement to return to Venezuela to work for 3 years minimum in some government or social program has been strengthened. At least this is what I can figure out from their website; the practice in Venezuela is not necessarily what it looks like in theory. If this is truly a fellowship based on merit, the requirement of social work is not without merit: not much different than the GI bill in US (even though in that case service came before the benefits). Still I would not advise it for professions that would require working abroad, like physics, especially since in physics you can be admitted to graduate programs, based on merit, that include tuition, salary and health insurance: the salary is not very high, but you don't need to get a loan to do a Ph.D. in Physics.

Interesting side note: the program now allows postgraduate studies only in selected institutions, which are available in all continents except North America. This may have to do with the new stated mission of the foundation: "Formando Para el Socialismo". I guess the States don't do very well in terms of Socialist education.

Marbled

Arizona (October 11, 2009)

You may find it hard to believe, but I never took a plane until I was in my second year in graduate school. The fact is that people in Italy don't travel very much. My family, for example, never went to a vacation abroad. Not even France, that is just a few kilometers across the border from where they live. When I was in college, I traveled mostly within Italy, and exclusively by train (the only medium I could afford). Only when I started graduate school I begin going to conferences and observation trips, and that enlarged significantly my travel horizon. The first air trip I made was to attend a conference to the Canary Islands. I still remember the feeling of exhilaration when the plane took off and I was pressed against my seat, with the ground receding away at a sharp angle. I can only imagine what it must be, feeling the power of a rocket headed to Earth orbit: well, that first flight could as well have been directed to the Moon. Since then, I never stopped flying. Being an astronomer certainly helped in finding exotic locations to go: we have this thing for deserts and volcanos, so the best telescopes are placed in the highlands of Chile, the american Southwest or the tropical Hawaii. The advent of space astronomy, and the internet allowing remote operation of telescopes, have somewhat reduced this need for physical travel. Teaching commitments also limit my ability to travel when I have classes. Still it is rare for me not having a few flights booked at any given time.

So it is quite exceptional that is being almost one year since my last flight. That after a crazy 2012 summer when I didn't stay for more than a week at home in between continuous back-to-back trips: San Francisco, D.C., Japan, Anchorage, Rome (3 days, without even being able to visit my parents), D.C. again, Baltimore. Then, since last August, nothing that required taking a plane. One of the reasons is the sequestration (the insane idea that the US government has to cut everything by a blanket 10%), that forced NASA to cancel a meeting where I was supposed to speak and converted three panel reviews I was supposed to attend in person into remote teleconferencing event (cheaper, yes, but not as efficient). So there you go, my four air trips of the summer canceled by the US Congress. The flying drought has finally ended, as I have now in schedule at least 3 new work trips in the US and Europe, but it has been an unusually long stretch in which I had been with my feet firmly planted on firm ground.

There are two things I like most when traveling (that is true for both trains and planes). The first one is that for the time I am in my seat I don't have to make any decision. Somebody else is driving. I sometimes suffer from decision overload, and a brief time in which I can just seat back and relax is like the best vacation. The second thing is related to the first: as I seat back I can tilt my head towards the window, and look at the world passing by. Trains give a more intimate view of the outside world, like watching TV. At least in Italy and US the trains are slow enough, especially when crossing cities, that you can see people living out their everyday life. Sometimes you pass close enough to house blocks that you can actually have a short voyeuristic glimpse of their private life. And then you leave the cities and immerse yourself in the landscape scrolling outside, like an alive hypnotizing screensaver. This is all lost when you are on a plane, tens of thousands of feet above the ground, isolated from the world below by a curtain of clouds. But if the clouds dissipate, then the landscape comes back with a vengeance and is converted by distance into pure abstract art. That's when I take out my camera.

The photo above was taken somewhere during a flight between Boston and Los Angeles. I am not sure where, but it was probably after flying over Arizona. It could be a closeup of a slab of marble, if it weren't for the thin wavy road crossing the flood plains coming down from the mountains on the right. It could be Mars. It has the colors and the dryness. I am left wondering what it would be like driving along that road, under the baking Sun on Earth, or the thin poisonous air of Mars freezing in the distant Sun.