Heat

Sitting around in Costa Rica gives you a chance to unwind, relax, and sip Pina Coladas while watching the world go by. It also gives you a chance to sweat.

Heat is a funny thing. Like water, human beings love it. We flock to it when winter comes, can't wait to strip down and bathe in it over Christmas break, long to lie in it until we are crispy brown or lobster pink. Sun and surf are all that comes to mind when daydreaming behind the snow shovel.

It's a relatively new phenomenon, this love of heat. For one thing, vacations are a fairly recent concept. Nobody got a vacation until the last century, and even if they did, there was no way to get to St. Bart's and back within a week. Ships helped, but still took too long. Then airplanes arrived, but they were too expensive.

Nowadays, it's amazing how blase we are about the ability to leave a cold February in Toronto on a Thursday night, hit the beach in Barbados on Friday morning, then be back in the office by Monday at nine. Sixty years ago, that would have been an HG Wells fairy tale. Thanks to expedia.com and their ilk, you now hear it all the time from the dude in the next cubicle.

I have spent years in the world's hot spots and amongst the tourists they attract. Tourists are a funny bunch. Anyone that tells you they travel in order to learn about 'culture' are full of baloney. After sailing, flying, and hitchhiking around various parts of the earth, I have come to the firm conclusion that nobody wants to learn anything about anybody. At least, not anybody that is alive. People might fly to Italy, but they don't do it so they can rent an apartment in some Palermo craphole and learn the culture of getting mugged. No, they fly to Italy to check into a hotel, look at David's genitals, take a stroll around the Colosseum, then have a pizza at an 'authentic' restaurant.

Let's dissect that for a moment. First, David's privates aren't as big as they look on the postcards, though he's doing all right. But that's isn't the point. The point is, his balls are old. There may be a few dames out there that fly to Italy to look at real Italian balls, but for the most part, tourists want to look at things that were built by dead people. Living people don't interest them in the least.

Take the Colosseum. There's all kinds of modern buildings standing around in Italy, but everyone wants to go to some old joint where people were butchered by the thousands. Invariably the tourists can be heard to say something like, "It's smaller than it was in Gladiator." I shudder at the thought that one day, Auschwitz might attract people with cameras dangling from their necks and zinc oxide plastered to their noses. When you get down to it, what is the difference between the two, besides the fact that one's in Poland and the other's in Rome?

As for the pizza, don't believe the hype. I have eaten about 20 pizzas in Italy. They all sucked. I'm sorry, but it's true. Every single travelling friend of mine tells me that they love 'real Italian pizza.' I was on a two month tour there once, and if I heard the words, 'real Italian pizza' one more time, I was going to butcher someone in the Colosseum.

Italian pizza is flatter than a pancake, has maybe three pieces of pepperoni on it, and cheese that makes you wonder what cheese is made out of. Italian pizza blows. But no matter: if you're in Italy, the pizza must be great, just as when you are in China, the Peking Duck must be good (even though it's always served lukewarm and tastes like a Goodyear tire). The bottom line is, I have yet to find a pizza anywhere in the world that is as good as the Pizza Hut two blocks from where I grew up.

No, culture is not that big a deal to a tourist, though they think it is. Recently graduated college chicks are always carrying on about how they love to hike around mountains and cities and immerse themselves in culture (ever notice they're always 'taking a year off'; how can you be taking a year off when you haven't started anything yet? Who, exactly, is missing you in the workforce? Certainly they're not taking a year off from their dad's wallet). Anyway, their love of culture is cute. I'd even believe it, were it not for them bitching that their hair dryer doesn't work in the 220 outlet when they get back to the hotel.

I've seen a lot of culture. My first experience with culture was when I was 5, and my mom took me to kindergarten. I learned how to say the ABC's while sitting in a formation called circle. Another experience was going to Star Wars with my dad and eating popcorn. Everyone was facing a large, bright rectangle, and we giggled at moving pictures. Another time, my dad took me to a funny game called baseball, and we sat and made loud noises when men hit round objects with a stick....

Oh, wait. You mean culture-culture? Oops. I forgot that culture only counts if it has a different language, or if it's found in a faraway place. My mistake.

And, of course, that's where the culture thing breaks down completely. I don't have much time for the backpacking crowd. I did it myself for a while, but it was too depressing listening to pot smoking losers talk about culture when they didn't even know what the word meant.

Culture, in a word, is anything. It doesn't matter if it's downtown Toronto, East LA, or Mozambique. If you're sitting in a room right now and are completely alone, look around you. There's your evidence of culture (if it makes you feel better, the stereo may have been made in Taiwan). If you're on your laptop at Starbucks, check out the people in line. There's culture.

Culture is not about differences. Culture is about being. That simple. You do not need to go to Tibet to find culture, nor Paris. Go downtown, get on a bus, and take a half-hour ride. Do it for two weeks. Take notes. Congratulations. You've done an in-depth study and are now ready to begin your thesis. If you fill it with enough mumbo-jumbo and make it long enough (over 3000 words should cut it), then you can call what you've written an ethnography. Anthropologists do it all the time. Hurray.

So culture is not what people are after. What they're after is something cool. They're also after it in a hot place. No lover of culture seems to study it when it's cold outside. I hear all kinds of people tell me they love England, and it's history and culture, but they follow that up with, "Don't go in January, it's too damn miserable."

Yes, the heat is where it's at. And what spoiled brats we are, too, to be able to enjoy these hot places without the minor drawback of dying. The Panama Canal attracts tens of thousands of visitors every year. I'm going to see it for the tenth time next week. It really is a modern wonder of the world. It's also hotter than hell.

I mean hot. A heat that drives you to your knees and makes you sweat endlessly. Then you go inside and have another margarita. Then you go back outside and sweat some more, and curse the heat. So you go back inside and get a blast from the air conditioner, then go back outside and sweat some more.

Sounds miserable, doesn't it? Of course, not. We've all been to hot places, and we bear with them because we have margaritas, and cold beer, and ice, and air conditioning. But it is sobering to think of the guys that built the Panama Canal, and the Pyramids, and other big things in hot places. No ice or AC for them.

The Panama Canal claimed tens of thousands of lives. From the heat, from yellow fever, from malaria. For the French, it was the jaws of death and they gave up building the thing before it wiped out too many more men (over 20, 000 Frenchmen succumbed in the disastrous attempt to build a sea-level canal across Panama between 1881-1889). For the Americans, it was a good dose of hell, but better hygiene, equipment, and the theory that mosquitoes spread disease saved many.

Yes, that pesky mosquito, the bringer of death. Malaria kills scores of people each year, and he keeps right on humming (or rather, she does. It's the female mosquito that causes so much havoc). The numbers are hard to nail down, but it's estimated that 1 to 3 million people buy the farm every year from malaria, with more than three hundred million infections annually. DDT did a good job wiping them out in the more impoverished parts of the world. But hey, DDT might be bad for the environment, so the WHO told everyone to stop using it and the impoverished people could go back to doing what they do best: dying while we don't care.

In any event, while we sip tropical drinks and enjoy the sun, it's well to remember the people that hated the heat and ultimately died from it. A vacation to Panama would have seemed a laugh to any of the 27, 000 that died there building the canal. I'm sure the slaves that built the Pyramids would feel the same. Nobody will ever know how many of them perished in the desert, but the number must be extreme. Think about that the next time you're at the McDonald's gazing out at the Pyramids and eating a McFlurry.

Heat and culture. Two good reasons to take off early on a Friday and enjoy some rays. While you enjoy them, just try to remember who you're standing on. Literally.