Chengdu & the pandas

Chengdu is a city of 11 million. Few would accuse it of being handsome, although it has a nice new airport. It seems odd that there are beautiful new buildings right next to some of the worst slum buildings in the city. The Holiday Inn Express is a nice looking new one with two really horrible, mold covered wrecks on the opposite two corners.

But it has an old section that is the nicest heritage site I have seen in China. The architetcure is pleasant and one a couple of streets, the tea houses put out chairs and tables and on nice days, a lot of people stop to play games and drink tea. Some of the (only) most interesting stores I saw on the whole trip were in the old part of Chengdu. There are two large monasteries (one for the boys, one for the girls; old boys, old girls). They are both really beautiful and serene. The largest is the one for men which has huge gardens and pools with a lot of old shade trees. The one for the women is more compact and has no garden, but is very attractive. While I was there, they were celebrating the 100th birthday of their founder. She was 97 years when she died three years ago, and was the first woman to attend Szechuan U., and the first Monk(ette) in China. Most religion is confusing at best, but these nuns were mainly elderly, with shaved heads, utterly shapeless bodies, sacks for clothing, and apparently quite happy there. It appeared in the upper windows, that they had taken in little orphan girls. Their families had come to visit on the big day, and there was a free veg lunch and it was a pleasure to see people enjoying themselves so much. I thought it funny that these nuns would constantly reach under their sacks and pull out a cell phone and answer it. Chengdu is more famous for earthquakes and pandas. I didn't really see much damage from the huge earthquake a year ago and the earth was quiet while I was there. I had not expected to be captivated by the pandas, but they are fascinating. They are kept in a large park, and the public sees on a few of the large numbers kept there for breeding purposes. There are many signs around abjuring visitors to be quiet while there, but the loudest person there was a tour guide waving his flag and shouting and giggling. All the groups were noisy. The Pandas are let out early in the a.m. when the help have placed the giant bouquets of bamboo in the right places. The pandas lumber out and eat voraciously. No wonder; of all the bamboo they eat, so much is fiber only that they only get 2% nutrition. A film we had to watch said that male pandas have a hard time finding just the right mate; they are fussy and it can take many years (hmm, sounds familiar somehow). Once they do find a mate, procreation is not even very likely. Worse, the mothers often do a poor task of handling the kid which is beyond delicate - it is entirely helpless for six months and I cannot imagine how any survive at all. While we were there, one was in an incubator, and two were in a baby crib. The scientists there seem to have little or no hope that they will ever recover in the wild - even tho they had survived 4 million years previously. It all sounded like a Darwinist specie failure. The stands of bamboo in the park were really spectacular and China has devoted a lot of resources to dealing with these beings and their comforts.

Beijing with photos

On October 17, 2009 I flew on an Air Canada B-777 to Beijing. I think went over the North Pole, but the questions was way too complex for the Stewardesses to know. But I did see massive snowstorms and really wild blizzard winds whipping up huge drifts below us. Arriving at the beautiful new airport in Beijing, officials were scanning the temperatures of all arriving passengers due to flu concerns. One five star hotel downtown was also scanning every person who passed through the hotel lobby. I wondered what they planned to do with them if they came up swine flu radioactive?

I took the airport express bus downtown to Sidan Square where it was supposed to cost $2.20 to go from there to my hostel. But, of course, the first cab wanted $15., the next $7.50, and the next 6.00. Finally I walked a block away and got one at the correct price. This set the pattern of negotiating everything for the next four weeks.

I was staying right next to a wall of the Forbidden city (FC) and it was my first visit. I have avoided Beijing for years as I thought it was just another big city, but I was wrong. The FC is colossal and the only thing bigger are the crowds waiting to get in. Years ago when I first went to China, foreigners were the tourists, but now they are mostly Chinese - who suddenly have enough money and leisure to visit places like the Capitol. But the immensity of the visitors is overwhelming. They mainly are in groups which are always led by a person waving a triangular flag and holding a bullhorn. There are wave upon wave of these batallions crossing in many directions with bullhorns challenging each other. As a solo traveller, I was like a fly among herds of buffalo. The charge to get into the FC is about $10 and I estimated that between that and the Temple of heaven, they must take in $1 million before noon each day.

The FC was impressive and chilly. I was glad to get to the rear area where there is a beautiful garden which includes places that offer hot tea. The trees are old and their limbs are almost all held up by crutches - which you can see in one photo above. My photos are very sharp and lively, but for some reason washed out here. Hmm, they are also stacking backwards so the FC photos are now at the bottom of all the photos and the Tiananmen Sq (TS) photos are above them.
The Square is of course, monumental. But it is so vast that it is impossible to grasp without being there. There is a security scanner to get on to the square. But this place is so popular with Chinese that it is almost full of people all hours of the day and night. The battalions of flag-led tours cross in every direction late in the day. But early in the day, they all head to Mao's mausoleum (Mao's oleum?). This box of a building (shown above with statues) is criticized as breaking up the once grand square and offending the traditional buildings near it. In the morning, Mao's body rises mechanically from a refrigerator under the floor and truly incredible numbers of the faithful line up outside. The lines are about four-wide and go on for blocks. Inside (I did not go in), the guards hurry the armies though because Mao can only deal with about six hours a day of this exhausting exposure and he settles back down for the night, leaving the tardy to line up again on the morrow.

Not far from TS is The Egg. This is the performing arts centre built for the olympics. There are many critics of its odd appearance. But I think that after the disaster of Mao's tomb, this understated anti-style fits nicely into the neighbourhood. Bj sits in the midst of a desert and there is a question of how they will ever keep this thing clean, but it was sparkling while I was there. I had intended to hear a German Radio Orchestra (Rundfunk) there, but the cost was remarkably high and I had walked more than eight hours and was way too tired. Part of my exhaustion was five hours of difficult chasing and fighting to get an air ticket to my next destination for the next day. When I finally achieved that, I arrived at the Egg to find that Kiri te Kanawa was making one of her farewell recitals there the next night and tickets at a reasonable price (I recall about $70) were available. But I could not imagine going back and trying to alter that air ticket, so I had to pass on a performance I would have loved to attend as I had seen/heard her in New York before and it was a great evening. I think there are four different performance halls in the Egg and she was in the largest.

I think the Temple of Heaven is remakably more beautiful than the FC. I am sure that can be attributed to its being in a park setting which I believe is more than 200 Hectares. Surely this is one of the most beautiful places in all of China. The park is packed with beautiful trees, and where there are not trees, there are Chinese playing many games, dancing, exercising (in troops of course), playing music and flying kites among other things. It is such a lively place. It was a place the emperor went before certain religious holidays to purify himself with prayer and abstinence (how very Catholic). Curiously, this was a religious place, but to my eyes, every vestige, even references in travel guides, do not indcate which religion it was. It probably was Buddhist, but I am not sure whether Taoism was important then. I did see a couple of people kneel and pray in front of a historical stone tablet and I suspected they were Buddhist.

In any case, the architecture, use of colour and height is pleasing to the eye and the whole place is a great experience.

One misconception about Bj is that it flows with bikes. Not so. With the completion of the beautiful and efficient subway, which costs .12, and the vast and great bus system, which costs .06, bikes are irrelevant. More so because of the electric motorbikes which are popular there - although not to the level that bikes were formerly. More surprising to me was the very high level of the autos in Bj. Every Communist party government (high) functionary has his own black Audi with darktinted windows and often with a driver and sometimes with blue/red flashing lights. Apparently, the next flunky down gets a huge Buick - top of the line, usually dark blue and very Tiger Woods. I have never seen so many Buicks in one place in my life. Next, some level gets Jettas and there are a lot of them. But outside of government cars, the general run of cars on the streets are not the cheap brands/levels I usually see in Asia.

One of the joys of China is that if a Chinese person speaks to a foreigner, it is because he/she wants to. In every other place on this trip, as in Bangkok and India, people only spoke because they had a gimmick. But most of the Chinese were really nice and they were by far the happiest population I saw on this trip. Yes, you do feel in Bj that you are looking at the massive new office towers and seeing the tail that is wagging the dog of DC, and that these are ultimately the new bosses of the USA. The thought cannot be overlooked either that not only are they taking over the world, but they are at present a very happy people. They adore being loud, and joining a party, and drinking and gambling, oh and being louder than anybody else, and eating and being loud.

I used the busses and subway freely and it worked pretty well. One of the things I had to see was Big Underwear. This is the CC Tv ultra-modern building in the main financial district. The odd shaped building was about completed near some public holiday about a year ago, and some enthusiastic CCtv employees decided to use company money to buy fireworks to celebrate - despite being told not to (allegedly) by the company. They didn't just buy fireworks, but rockets. They shot them off in the street and some landed on the new Sahngri-la hotel and convention centre which is also a part of the CCTv project. That hotel was so close to occupancy that they were loading in the furniture by the time the rockets landed on the roof of the convention centre and burned down the whole place in a spectacular fire which was ever so much more fun for the Chinese. Now, they seem not to know just what to do with the cadaver. It is huge, and looks to me to be mortally wounded, but it is probably a quandry as to how to get it down - and of course how all the corrupt officials involved can profit from the tear down.

Dubai last day

Hi, The flight on Emirates to Dubai was on a B-777 which had a seatng config of 3 -4 3 but had a lot more leg room than Air Canada's 777. There were 11 cabin crew which offered service in 11 languages. We came into Emirates own new terminal built for 380s which is breathtaking in it beauty. Dubai is pretty breathtaking in an odd way. What is going on here is remarkable in every way, but not necessarily too interesting. They have 100's of empty and half empty hotels and are in the process of building 68 more. This place is a revolving wheel - the sheiks have all the money and control all industries and finance and govt. So it is the govt building everything . A guide told me that if you buy a home here, you boroow money from a bank owned by a sheik to pay for the home built by the sheik who built it with a string of companies he owns as his own vertical supplier. That, sir, is the main reason this small place is so apparently wealthy.
They are insanely proud of their endless glam malls, but there is a chinese one on the way out to the desert - Dragon Mall - which is a one storey, pretty ugly mall almost one mile long with 1,000 stores.
Last night I went out to the desert from 4 to midnight mainly to see the stars which failed to show up - just Venus and Pluto, apparently because of the pollution. But they had entertainment which I thought I would dislike and I liked it a lot. The belly dancers were v. good and the whirling dirvishes were astonishing. There were parts of the adventure I disliked a good deal, but I don't want to even think about that.
Today is my last day and my friedn Lalit cannot get off work until afternoon so he wants me to go his five star restaurant for lunch and then we will leave and go meet some of his Nepali friends here. His restaurant is in a five star hotel 9they are starting to build 7 and 8 star hotels here which I cannot understand at all), where the minimum room rate is $1,100 night. He manages 22 employees and some days they do not have even one customer. They are not part of the hotel, just a really fancy place that rents space there and they would have to close except that the umbrella co that owns it has two nightclubs that are doing just fine and enable his place to continue operating.
Lalit is a great guy, which is the reason I stopped here. He just had to show me about 300 photos of his extended family on his laptop and I noticed that in addtn to his three yr old boy, there was a little older boy too. He said that his wife's family had been caring for the orphaned boy in their village and everytime they went there, the could see that altho the boy is very intelligent, nothing is happening for his as they cannot afford to send him to school out there. Lalit and his wife decided that they had to bring the boy to Kathmandu and put him in school even tho they are just scraping by all the time to make ends meet for the three of them.
During the late portion f the Maoist rebel period in Nepal, they boy's father was killed, and later they came back and killed his mother. Lalit said it was all too gruesome to speak of - which almost always means, at minimum, that the parents' heads were cut off - often with saws - in front of the kids and left in the street for a week to frighten other villagers. Since they came back and killed the mother later, the boy probably saw both killings and the heads in the street for the weeks. They may acutally have done worse things to them as well. The Great Creeps are alleged Maoists there to help these poor oppressed peasants. Imagine.
I noticed in the photos that the boy often had a blank look in his eyes and I think they might as well have killed him as well, because they did. But, since he is alive, he could not have had better luck than Lalit and his wife taking him in. There is not a person in the world who coul d be a better mentor and father to the boy than Lalit, and already he speaks of him as tho he is a natural son. This is truly heroic in a society that shuns such people.
Lalit and his parents are so loyal to me because when he developed a waterborne illness in the rainy season after I left there in '01, I bought the medication that kept him alive and made hs recivery possible. I also gave him some money to get to Dubai and work, and after that as my own income declined and he was working, I sent little or no money. But it would be such a disaster if he fell on harder times and had to give up the now 8 year old boy - for Lalit and his wife not to mention the kid - that I now have to start scheduling some money a couple of times a yr to help them out.
That is the powerful punch in the psyche of travel; you read the stats and listen to the news, but it is hard to see real people there. Out here, you feel it. You cannot imagine the number of guys here from Iran, Iraq, Afg, Pakistan, etc. all fleeing their own deaths. One pak taxi driver lost his two brothers to a suicide bomber, another his mother, father, sister and her three kids. They came as taxi drivers to Abu Dhabi and were ok there until recently an Arab govt official cancelled the permits of 800 of them when they found out that they were here because they hate the Tailban. This is bad news as the govt only found that out by some connection to Taliban in their home areas. Now, the govt is starting to cancel their visas here in Dubai and they tell the straight out, "You should support the Taliban at home. They are the good Muslims."
No matter what< I will be on that 380 out of here tom'rw. Hope you are fine. Kevin

Ft.Cochin, last day

Hi, This is so typical of travel. When I ued to go a lot to Mexico, my driver or someone else would often say "Oh, there was a Maria here from Canada just last week. Do you know her - she was from Canada too." Yesterday one Indian said that to me about some woman who had been here - and why not, there is a 1/36million chance I might know her. The reverse of that is a young man I heard in a cafe saying he telephoned his mother back home and she said "I read there was a train crash in India, are you OK?"
This morning is sunny and not too hot yet, but by noon the big clouds will come in and we will have heavy rains. They are so powerful that several times a day, after the storms, there is water everywhere.
Tourism is way down here - 40-50% and the fancy, expensive hotels (all over $200 night) are empty. I had a very nice dinner at a four month old restaurant owned by an Errol Flynn lookalike - I couldn't help but smile a lot as he looked as tho he stepped right out of some 40's or 50's film set. He is young and smart and said that Indian tourism had been doing well until it dropped off a cliff and things have been tough here -and everywhere in India. The young are still travelling, altho they spend a lot less than working older adults. The newspaper here was lamenting that Lonely Planet had changed its rating of Kerala and Cochin from reasonable to expensive. They feel it will damage tourism a lot.
I have to say that the travelling population I have met this trip is exceptional. I know you hear a lot of negative things in the u.s. hypermedia anxious for sensational news, but I never, ever meet or see or hear of other travellers with interest other then nature, history, people etc. Being a man alone, years ago offers would often come across the street, but no more - but I might have heard of the more disreputable levels because of that - but I never. Ok there were always at least three women in front of the Starbucks in Bkk., and one day there were 10 in a line. Not one of them will ever see the south side of 30 years again, and only a U.S. evangelist or talk show host, could turn them into young girls. I meet a lot of Germans here and get to struggle along with a my degenerating German. They take travel seriously - as you would expect.
In the morning, i fly to Dubai for a few days and on Monday the 16th, I board an Emirates A380-200 for a 13 hours flight to Old Crusty arriving there late afternoon.
I hate to stop this trip, but one does tire of eating other's food, sleeping in other's beds, petting other's cats, and admiring other's kid goats - sorry I forgot I don't have a goat. One German said to me that the A380 will be interesting on take-off and landing just to see if it can actually do both and inbetween will be uninteresting. Leave it to a Deustcher to get it said right.
Kevin

Kerala Backwaters houseboat serenity

Hi, This must have been the two most peacful days of my entire life. There is nothing I have encountered like one's own personal houseboat with staff in a paradisical setting. Honestly, it is impossible to imagine that 60 minutes south by car, from urban India, there is such a setting. The backwaters are low lying areas of lake and canals with impoverished houses and tiny villages along the way. I thnk the boat was 30 ft and had slothful deck chairs on the front, with a dining table behind them, and a large bedroom w/good mosquito netting and a fan, and a lagre bathroom with blue tiles all over. Behind that was the kitchen where my cook prepared three meals a day, all way too big. I had two punters - men with long bamboo poles to propel the barge along - the sole source of power with one aft and fore.
The villages - really often just 2-3 houses near each other in bewteen lakes or canals - are pretty quite and once you leave them, there is silence - except for the birds which are mainly egrets, sea eagles, and a few loud mouth crows (good news, there are both cows and crows in the country, altho less of each than in the cities), and the breeze thru the palms. The punters are silent, no stupid music, occasional cel phone calls aft but not noisy, and occasionally a large military helicopter passng over head. Otherwise it is the most smooth and effortless and peaceful situation that could ever happen. At one point we were on a straight canal, with a soft tail wind, headed for a lake. The forward punter went aft and stayed there about an hour. Maybe they tillered it from the rear, but it went like magic softly down an aisle of palms in ater about 80' wide. It was nearly transcendental. Om the water, the temp was cooler and nearly perfect. Occasionally, the cook came with tea and banana chips and then stayed out of the way. He must have been the handsomest new U. grad in all of India - 21, said he is Latin Catholic & must marry a girl of the same brand, very tall and athletic and dark as January with immense and perfect whitest possible teeth that always flashed a smile. He was the only one who spoke english and made the voyage so comfortable.
Later in the day, it began to rain a little. After lunch they dropped anchor and my entire staff laid upon the palm sisal floor at the back and slept for 90 minutes. In the meantime, the wind came up and the rain was more constant and the slowly trolleda round showing me things, and then started to head back. But shortly the monsoon let loose and we had to tie up to the shore and sit it out as it was tremendous. When it eased, the men took off everything but their neighbor's table cloth and went back to punting in the gentler rain. More food, then sleep (they went to their homes and I was alone with the many geckos on board - cute, but none will ever be pals). In the morning they took me on another journey and at noon, the var came to get me.
The big houseboats are a little more south and the owner of the one I was on, said he operated a couple boats in Alleppy for 20 years, but the rich indians from the North now want complete a/c and TV and sometimes a pool and always motorized 2 deckers. What use dto be a 300 boat industry there has become a 2,000 boat place and he said now all you can see are other boats and hear the sound of generators and a/c running. He found a new village area, bought two two passenger boats and now has his own area. I never another houseboat as he sends hsi boats on opposite directions each morning. It was so nice. If I were QEII I would have said "I was very happy to have been there," but I am not and then I am. Now I have one more destination and then will buy a ticket home as the monsoon is to last two more weeks and it does limit what one can do. Kevin

Ft. Cochin

This is a different place. Getting out of the city was messy after the heavy rains. You would think there would be men all over to carry the luggage of old men - not so - even taxi drivers point to the trunk and lift nothing. This morning it was hard as there was a lot of construction at the jetty docks and 100's of feet of puddles and so much red mud. Once on the primitive ferry, it all was easier. I had grabbed three guesthouse (homestays) rec'd by Travel adviser and went by tuk-tuk to two which I did not like and a 3rd that was full before the driver took me to one inn he said I would surely like. He was right. The open lobby has a Rajastan granite floor, but everything else in the place is 225 yr old mahogany - the front desk, stairs, plank floors, double room doors, bed, etc. Really pretty. The bed is a giant king sized carved deal which is a good meter off the floor (36"), includes about 6 mirrors set in moveable frames, 12 ceramic tiles, and a lot of decorative knobs and rails. It doesn't sound nice, but it is India 100%. The room is large with AC and a ceilign fan and also has a gaint armoire which is so beautiful. It has a chair I have never seen anywhere - a low slung almost "U" shaped with very extended arms that shoot out so you can put your legs up and read your paper. The seat-back material is open weave for coolness. It is such a prize room for $50 a night. It is the ballard bungalows and maybe they show the rooms on cochinballard.com. It is right across the st. from the v. expensive (most expensive here I think) Brunton boatyard - which the status minded overspenders adore. I walked thru there to look and there were fat brits covered in tatoos by the pool. Much rather be at the Ballard.
The owner sat with me about an hour this a.m. trying to figure out a route for me to travel in Kerala and the depart. It appears that I can leave for Dubai on Emirates right from Cochin and avoid the expense of Mumbai - he says it is just another noisy and overpriced ugly city with no known reason for going there. But Kerala has some considerable charm and the country is very nice and attractive for much visiting. Trouble is as usual that I need 2 people to make it work with a car and driver etc. So this a.m. I decided to walk along the "beach" and talk to all likely humans who might want to go inland overnight. 1st I met some sniffy Germans who didn't want to talk, but sometimes I like to force them to as a game. Turned out they were very nice and like so many Canadians have trouble being nice, but secretly are capable of same. They are East Berliners just old enough to have survived in both regimes and so thrilled they can travel as they wish. They were horrified at the challenges of my own trip as all but the very young seem to be.
I met some other people, but too many were from a large cruise ship doing a 21 day "Singapore sling" trip out of Dubai, which had docked here in the morning as my ferry was driving by. One guy was interesting. He was blonde, in his 20's, and had that bright, athletic look of one of those famous swimmers or runners or cyclists. It was obvious he was gay and with his partner, but the handsome althletic one had the big personality and talked freely and was interesting. he turned out to be a Croat, educated in London, with excellent English and ever so much to say about the cruise and how much fun he was having.
It is sunday here and on the ferry over and along the beach, the women were in beautiful saris - really so nice to see. The men wear a kind of short skirt that was somebody's tablecloth until recently, and they are v. dark is So. india. At the jetty ticket office, there is a line for "ladies' and another for "gents." This morning two gents were standing in the wrong place and a v. grand lady in the finest head-to-foot sari deal walked up and pointed to the ground and the men moved immediately. It is so nice to be back in a place where people have manners. Although this was my best ever trip to china and I loved it (and don't need to go back), it would be wrong to say that the Chinese have bad manners, when in fact, they have no manners.
I walked over to the St. Francis church, so old that Vasco da Gama was buried there when he died and his body later taken back to Portugal. It started as a Catholic church, and burned now and then until they rebuit it in masonary, and since about 1779 it has remained Anglican. There was a rehearsal of the choir with the organist and listened a while and it was thrilling. Such great organ playing and singing from such a humble crowd. There is a church in zip 55337 that ought to fly over some of its musicians to learn from these people - of course they would learn Anglican hymns, but the congregation back home would never know. I was attracted to listen because they fine organ in that small church sounded so much like a Wurlitzer - unbelievable.
The richest people on this island were Jews, and it may seem unlikely they bought a wurlitzer for an Anglican church. I had lunch today in a beautiflu restaurant called The menorah." It is the Koder house. This place is said to have many religions, but the basics are 45% Hindu, 20% Muslim, and 20% Christian, but I mainly see Christian schools and churches. There is no mention of how many Jews are here (well, except for Queenie Hallegua, who I will get to) and I have failed to see any good candidates, but there are synagogues, and there is a Jew Street and other things named that, so there must be some somewhere.
The Koders came here penniless hundreds of years ago and eventually they were the richest people here and controlled everything (includng booze imports of course). They were a celebrated family through generations and now their original house is a higher end restaurant
(the only thing I could id as Jewish was something listed as a local Jewish dessert). The menu story said that one of the only descendants of the original Koder family is Queenie Hallegua ("oh, that Queenie Hallegua - of course we know her") who now lives in Jew town on the next island over. Imagine saying that in North America.
One of the curious things travelling like this is what people read along the way. There are surplus books all over because people drop them off as they travel. Because so many on these routes are educated and students the level tends to be high, and I was amazed in hostels that I saw Chas. Dickens works in so many languages. By far the most popular was Bleak house, which everybody must read at sometime and esp. as there are so many lawyers underfoot today. But here in India and cochin, it is Coehello that is everywhere. Perfect fit.
I think I will be home about nine days from now. It could be 11, or 13, or even 45 if I can figure out how to keep going, but probably 9-10 seems likely. My apologies for such a long winded entry. Oh, before I go, I must say it is hot, steamy humid hot. There are so many monster trees, some must by 8' around. there are not many cows underfoot here, but a lot of goats and they are cute and funny. There are quite a lot of cats and men are generally nasty to them. It is nice to be here.

Cochin, India & moonsoon

The monsoon and I arrived in southern India at about the same time. It had been pouring rain here for two days before I arrived. Last night, our delayed Thai air flt came into Chennai after midnight and the downtown was so flooded that it was going to be hard to get to. The people here use too many of those fine - I think it is 2 mm - plastic bags and they throw them around like everything else, and when the monsoon arrives, it washes the bags into the catch basins plugging them and flooding the area. I had to stay in the most humble of places, and on the way over there were cows everywhere attempting to shelter from the rain - mainly in the doorwys of shops. I can never understand why so many cows are in a city instead of out where the grass is. I did see one forlorn cow standing in the middle of a 4-lane road looking as tho she might be glad to find the country someday.
The rain is scheduled to last at least thru tomo'rw. It really throws a spike in plans as it is hard to do much of anything in the powerful downpours. I am staying in central Cochin, which is a dump, and hope to move out to Ft. Cochin tom'rw. It is much more expensive out there (as in $125 a night) but I am not here to be miserable in order to save money just now.
My stomach is all better for the moment. I had five days of difficulty and low energy I think fro some hot food I got on my last night in China. Oddly, the repair for it was to eat mild indian food in Bangkok. Must go, Kevin

Bangkok, Last Day Friday Nov. 6th

For those of you just joining, I could not make Tibet - and hence, Nepal - work, and I took a flight to Bangkok as a means of continuing on to India. Yesterday, exhausted with the noisy and crowded city, I took the end of the line Mo chit - whatever that means. There is a v. large park there with some nice birds who have not yet succumbed to the foul air here. Just give me a nice little finch to look at and my whole day is better. There is a moat there with a lot of quite large turtles. There are also a lot of really beautiful trees. It allows one to kind of feel what Bkk must have been like before the utter destruction caused by autos overwhelming a space.
Bkk is one huge flea market. In addition to millions of stores, there are sidewalks stalls packed in on the sidewalks so that there is little place to walk. The sheer volume of dreck here is hard to comprehend. I think if all the crap being sold here was stacked in equal piles, there would be about 20 mountains and each would dwarf Everest. There is at least one part of the City where stalls have been cleared and sidewalks repaired - which is called Siam Square. Yesterday there I saw two Christmas displays. One inside a mall and another in the square. The one in the square is a giant Xmas tree which must be the most striking one I have ever seen. I have to go back this a.m. and photograph it. It is no wonder they put it up Nov 1st as the effort to build it must have been immense.
The Siam sq. mall is a really high end, quite handsome and giant mall of all the famous brands that Asians love to ape - D&G, Channel, etc., but even the big money like piaget and all the famous jewellery co's. The place was pretty empty except oddly Breitling had three different male customers looking at their $100,000 watches - watches so huge that you need a medical wrist enlargment just to carry around the time and month with you.
Tonight will be hard as my flight does not depart until 9 p.m. and gets into Chennai near midnight and I leave again in the a.m. at 9. But once that is done, I will try to be tropical in Indian and take it easy again for a few days.