Last night my friend Mike sent me a CNN article on Chile and the collapse of their electric grid due to excessive summer heat, drought and infrastructure overburdening. Yikes! Seems like Chile is experiencing a combination of California and Texas calamities just as we are heading down to begin our cruise. Mike seemed a bit pensive about it all where I felt like I wanted to take it more in stride. I take some solace in the thought that if I had to be somewhere in Chile while the grid was melting down, I suppose that would be on a floating generator like a Viking cruise ship. I’m sure things will settle down in the 9 days we have before our cruise begins, but clearly the situation needs monitoring over the next week as we chill out and wait to see what unfolds.
I suspect that this sort of travel-related risk is what life is going to be all about for many of us that are in our twilight travel-heavy years. When I took over my bank’s Latin America business (in distress) in 1985, our Vice Chairman (rest his soul) sat me down and explained that for both me and my 500+ people, there were risks on the horizon that needed to be constantly weighed. He told me that there were political risks, criminal risks and biological risks to be considered. His warning was somewhat about me, but really mostly about the burdens of leadership when the lives of people under my command were at risk. The first risk (political) had mostly to do with trying to collect on $4 billion of faltering sovereign debt in lands where repayment meant deprivation. It was not unusual to arrive in places like Brazil to protests against the IMF or the international banking community for demanding debt repayment. I have rarely felt more like Snidely Whiplash. The second risk (criminal) had to do with the lawlessness that prevails in countries that do not have the strength of the rule of law that the United States enjoyed at the time. And the third risk (biological) was about the low value placed on human life in lands where taming the natural world was not yet a high priority for governments dominated by oligarchic greed. It’s funny that of all the places in Latin America that I had to travel to in those days, 40 years ago, the most civilized place on all three spectrums was probably Chile, the very place we are now concerned about. Mexico and Brazil were lawless in the extreme in those days. Getting your hand hacked off for want of your expensive watch was a serious threat in urban jungles like San Paolo or Mexico City. The Andean Pact countries like Peru, Columbia and Venezuela were political hotbeds to be sure with communists still radicalizing the landscape (not to mention a few early-stage powerful drug cartels as well). And the rest of the continent was one big Petrie dish of germs that made deepest darkest Africa seem about normal. Chile was civilized by comparison.
Today, I find myself thinking that the risk playing field has been more globally leveled with foreign lands more modernized in terms of law enforcement and sanitation and our supposedly modern civilization simultaneously coming somewhat undone. Who’s to say where the greatest political, criminal or biological risks lie these days. None of us seem to have any shining cities on a hill any more. Some places like West Africa are still pretty sketchy, but then so is L.A. or D.C. or even Portland on some axis or another. There is also now at least one other dimension of risk, namely climate risk, that factors into the equation. And the political risk element is much more multilateral. That is to say, we, the United States, are generating as much global instability as anyone out there and doing it in a manner that is less predictable than ever. We may all learn the news faster via our smart phones, but it’s very unclear that that news is reliable and truthful given the amount of social media spin that goes on and how little reliable sourcing of facts really exists in our multimedia-driven world.
Our global infrastructure has never been better, but I sense that the velocity of change and the complexity of it all has created vast amounts of uncertainty at any given moment. We think of how adventuresome our forefathers were to travel beyond their horizons, but we have a very different sort of adventurousness now. Now it has to do with the volume of people around us rather than the absence of people when and where we travel. We rely on systems none of us can completely comprehend much less address if there is a problem. If we are down in a Chilean fjord looking at a glacier, there are countless things that could unravel in our world that might well strand us and make it almost impossible to return to life as we know it. And yet, those risks are not even on our radar the way a river that needed crossing in olden days might have presented a more obvious obstacle. We have become immune to risk as we galavant around the globe in our quest to tick off bucket list items before we die.
I have this discussion with Kim quite often, usually in regard to her desire to travel to China. Unlike travel to Iran or Russia, which are pretty much unavailable at this point (note that we went to St. Petersburg in 2017, but cannot really do so now), China is still open to travel even though there exists more universal concern in American politics on both sides of the aisle that China is less and less our friend and more and more our scale-appropriate and philosophical enemy with whom a confrontation looms imminently over the independence of Taiwan. If there were ever an obvious “Winds of War” story, it is that China is diligently preparing for the day when it casts off its sleeping giant persona and becomes the aggressor that its history tells it is its global destiny. There is no if in that supposition, only the proverbial when. I have described going on a trip to China like playing Russian Roulette. You plan these things out so far in advance that official State Department ratings are meaningless. Then you justify going by saying that nothing could happen in this day and age. The next thing you know, you are quarantined in a Shanghai hotel (they still accept American Express nonetheless) and you start having a choice between fish-head soup and chicken feet for dinner. You get to see everything through the eyes of CNN International, but that is little solace as you are politely detained until Donald Trump’s envoy can come and demand that China disgorge 50% of its strategic rare earth minerals. This won’t be a basement in Kharkiv or a tunnel in Gaza, but you won’t like it and will wish you had not had China on your bucket list.
Not everyone thinks of Chile like I do. Some think Allende and Pinochet and student activists getting dragged away never to be seen again. Some see people in wool hats (that’s Peru) and Andean skiing. Some think they have good wines or they think about copper mines. I know Chile as a modern society with a very solid economic foundation and a blend of indigenous and imported culture that make it a lot like the U.S.. I am a travel risk pragmatist and somewhat of a fatalist. I know there are risks and I travel despite the risks. If I had to get marooned somewhere, Robinson Crusoe style, Chile would be as good a place as any. In fact, Robinson Crusoe was a story based on Daniel Defoe’s novel “Robinson Crusoe” (1719), inspired by the real-life story of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who survived alone for over four years (1704-1709) after being marooned on an uninhabited island called Más a Tierra (now known as Robinson Crusoe Island) in the Juan Fernández archipelago off Chile.
So, I’m just spending my last week before our trip chillin’ over Chile.