Is Amazon Sending UPS Back To Its Roots?

I could've been....a UPS delivery person.

Actually, I was, for about four weeks.  The venerable delivery company hired me one holiday season:  from the day after Thanksgiving until Christmas Eve.  Back then, the company employed a lot of "helpers" during that time of year.  Many of us were students, as I was.  We didn't drive:  We rode the trucks for a minute or two, leaped off, delivered a few packages, leaped back on and repeated a few hundred times.

I don't know whether UPS still hires extra help during that season.  The pay, as I recall, was decent, but as my driver said, "You earn it."  He was right:  Even though I was young and in good condition (mainly from cycling), I was still tired at the end of a shift:  I'd have just enough energy to ride my bike home.  But it was, in some ways, a satisfying job, at least for those few weeks:  People were usually happy to see us, and I got a few tips and gifts.

That driver, and our supervisor, suggested that I might want to get a driver's license and work for them permanently.  Sometimes I wonder whether I should have:  I understand the retirement benefits are good, and I could have retired by now.  Then again, even if I had more desire to drive at all, I'm not sure that I would have wanted to do it all day.

If I'd been born a few decades earlier, I could have been a bike messenger for them.  After all, I later plied the streets of Manhattan on two wheels, delivering everything from slices of pizza to documents pertaining to mergers, divorces and every other proceeding you can think of--and a few small packages with mysterious contents. (Well, at least I wasn't supposed to know what was in them. But, given their destinations, it wasn't hard to tell.)  And UPS was in the bike messenger business.

In fact, that's how it started more than a century ago:  a few young men delivered packages by bicycle and on foot in Seattle.  Now, it seems that UPS is returning to its roots, sort of.

It's partnered with the Seattle Department of Transportation and the University of Washington in a pilot program to make deliveries in the city's downtown area, around the Pike Place Market.  The program will involve e-bikes pulling wagons with detachable cargo trailers.  Those vehicles remind me a bit of the tuk-tuks I rode while in Cambodia and Laos. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the designers were inspired, at least in part, by them:  these containers can carry up to 400 pounds, and four adult humans (of Western size) can ride in the cab of a tuk-tuk.

According to Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, the alliance will "help us better understand how we can ensure the delivery of goods while making space on our streets for transit, bikes and pedestrians."  Seattle, like other American cities, has experienced an increase in motorized traffic in spite of growing numbers of cyclists, pedestrians and people who use mass transit.  

While UPS and other couriers (including the US Postal Service and Fed Ex) can't be blamed for it, one could say they are vehicles (no pun intended) for it:  According to a report from the World Economic Forum and Deloitte, in the decade from 2005 to 2015, the global total number of parcels delivered increased by 128 percent.  Much of this increase, according to researchers, is a result of consumers increasingly having single items shipped at a time.  This trend has been fueled, in large part, by retailers like Amazon and Walmart--who use UPS and the other carriers I've mentioned--who make it easy to order, and offer free shipping on, cheap items.   

If the collaboration between the UPS, the city and the university proves successful, UPS says it will be expanded to other parts of the Emerald City.  It could also be exported to other cities experiencing traffic congestion problems.

Waves Rise, Empires Fall, Temples Remain

Some do it because they must; others do it because they can.  Sometimes it's easy to tell who fits into each category.  Other times, not so much.

I'm thinking now about the folks who live on Tonle Sap, often called Cambodia's "Great Lake".  Like the Great Lakes of North America, it has its own climates and ecosystems.  It also has its own distinct human communities which, for all I know, Ontario, Erie, Huron, Superior and Michigan may also have.  

I took a tuk-tuk to the shore of Tonle Sac, about an hour from my hotel.  The ride took us from an industrial area on the edge of town into expanses of rice paddies and forests.  At times, the pavement on Highway 6 gave way to dirt, which turned to mud when it began to rain.

The road also narrowed, which meant that my tuk-tuk driver had to follow the unwritten, unspoken rule of the road in this country:  You move over for anything that's bigger than what you're driving (or pedaling).  That, at times, meant swerves through potholes of some liquid about the same color as an iced blonde macchiato at Starbuck's.

(Why am I mentioning the Evil Empire of coffee when writing about Cambodia?)

Oh, and all manner of living things cross the road--including oxen and cattle.  One of them might've impaled me on his horns had my driver's reflexes been any slower. 

But he got me to the shore.  I didn't uncross my fingers, though: It seemed that we'd been riding in and out of downpours.  

That tuk-tuk ride was a harbinger of things to come. Or maybe I hadn't "seen nothin' yet".  For all I knew, Tonle Sac might be like an inland sea, with all of its caprices in currents, tides and the like.  

Turns out, I knew more than I realized.  The boat I took could've been built by a Khmer farmer a century or two before any Europeans showed up.  The only difference was that it had an engine.  

The driver of the boat took us through a community of floating houses, which includes the school he attends.  He is 16, he told me, and had been driving the boats since he was 13.  He enjoys it, he said, but he wants to continue his schooling to so he can "help out" his family.

Would "helping them out" mean getting them out of that floating community--or simply finding a way to live better in it?  

One thing I must say for him is this: He isn't stupid.  I asked him to take us out into the open lake, where no land was visible.  There, choppy waves turned into walls of tide that bounced us like a beach ball off the nose of a circus seal.  He told me he could continue if I wanted to, but I could tell that he would have preferred not to.  And I didn't blame him, so we didn't.

But I did get to see fisherman unfurling, fixing and casting their nets; women cooking and cleaning. (On most of those houses, at least two sides are open.

Out in the open lake, all four sides are open--to the wind and storms as well as the decisions made by young captains and their passengers! 

Once back on shore, my tuk-tuk driver suggested two temples about a third of the way back to Siem Reap: Bakong and Preah Ko.  

Bakong, one of the oldest temples, has been called the "Khmer Pyramid" due to its shape.  It also has, perhaps, the steepest stairs to climb.  Like Angkor Wat, it was originally built as a Hindu shrine; other temples constructed for Buddhists tend not to have such steep stairs.  My theory is that Buddism stresses the importance of learning and--in some branches, anyway--an ordinary person is capable of becoming a Buddha, or enlightened one.  Hinduism, as I understand it, is like other theistic religions in that it says people have a long, steep climb to reach the Gods.

Preah Ko was built a bit later than Bakong, but is still one of the oldest Khmer temples.  King Indravarman built it late in the 9th Century CE to honor members of the king's family, whom it relates to the Hindu god Shiva.  Interestingly, it was built from bricks on a sandstone base, in contrast to later temples made from sandstone and lava.

(Note:  Both of these temples are accessible with an Angkor Wat pass.)

Seeing A Thousand Faces Of Buddha

Bike shops need a lot of space.  At least, that's what the prevailing wisdom says.  Many shops in cities like New York have gone out of business or moved because they couldn't afford or find the amount of space they needed.

So, folks in the bike business pride themselves on their creative use of space.  Most of them, though, have nothing on this shop I passed yesterday:

The place is located in a stall along one the main streets--National Highway Number 6--in the town where I woke up yesterday morning.  In a way, Route 6 is a bit like US 1 on the East Coast of the US:  It passes through a number of cities and towns, and takes on different street names.  Some of those streets are, or were, the main commercial strips of their communities.

And so it is here.  That shop is in a stall nestled among others selling everything from fried chicken to cell phones.  One of them is even a mini-bank, complete with a currency exchange.

All right.  So now you know I'm not in the USA.  The funny thing is, when I arrived, I exchanged some greenbacks for the local money but I didn't need to.

No, I am not in a Mexican border town.  In fact, I'm not anywhere in the Americas

or, as you've probably gathered by now, in Europe.  I haven't done any bike riding yet, but I have been transported by someone else on two wheels.  And I was riding on two.

I was brought to the museum by a tuk-tuk driver.  A tuk-tuk is an inimitable form of transportation that provides natural air conditioning but absolutely no cushioning from bumpy roads, which are the majority of byways in this place. Think of a pedicab towed by a motorcycle.

The Museum provides, among other things, detailed information about the history and formation of this area's most famous landmark--one that's been called the "eighth wonder of the world."  It also has exhibits of the people's history, culture and religions, all in halls arranged around a lily pool.

Now if that all doesn't scream "Southeast Asia," I don't know what does.  I am indeed in the heart of it:  Siem Reap, Cambodia.  In the coming days, I will be visiting the landmark--Angkor Wat--as part of a bicycle tour.  I'm sure it won't be my only visit there.  But I'm glad i took the advice of a young woman at the guest house and went to the museum--the Angkor National Museum--first.

This room contains "1000 Faces of Buddha"

I "went native", sort of:  I had noodle soup and a small fruit salad (actually, a few slices of banana and jackfruit) for breakfast.  The  guest house offered that, as well as the "continental breakfast" served by seemingly every other hotel in the world.  The soup actually tasted fresh and succulent with chunks of chicken, broccoli and other vegetables.  I could make a habit of starting my days with it!

Hmm...Might I develop other new habits in this place?