I like this photo of Moscow taken Dec. 2009 so much that I want to keep it here. On the right is one long wall of the Kremlin with one of the busiest highways in Moscow between the wall and the Moscow River. On the left is Christ the savior cathedral once torn down by Stalin and rebuilt about a decade ago. All the great church-ey events of Moscow take place there - funerals, visits of Putin etc. There is a hyrdo-electric plant blowing out the steam and the 2nd tower to the right of it is one of the "Seven sisters" apartment buildings built by Stalin to ape U.S. modernism. One has recently been turned into a Hilton Hotel. The photo is taken for Moscow Times newspaper from a bridge I crossed many times while in Moscow. It was right next to my hotel.

Dubai photos

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The Burj Dubai is the giant tower and killer of construction workers. It is about 25% higher than the CN Tower in Toronto and very skinny at the top. Two photos of the Raffle's pyramid hotel. Their proud bar was up in the apex which you can see - but it is closed now. The entire grounds are beautiful. They have a garden with 1,000 plant varieties - many from Egypt. Raffles was certainly my favourite experience in Dubai.

Dubai

Figure this out. If I flew Emirates air from Ft. Kochin via Dubai and on to Toronto the one-way fare as less than $900. But if I just flew Dubai > Toronto, it was more than $1100. I wondered it if was an error of some sort, so when I got home I looked at business class to see what happened. Business class (on the new A380) Dubai > Toronto is over $7000. But if one flies from Kochin via Dubia it is less than $5000. I don't know why that happens.
I have a Nepali friend who works at the Fairmont hotel in Dubai. I was anxious to see him as the last time I saw him was eight years ago in Kathmandu. It happened that I was going into Dubai on the weekend of the big airshow - an airshow to sell military and civilian aircraft being held at the airport. Strangely, all flights were delayed two days in advance as they closed Dubai airport two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon to hold practices. This is insane as it is a very large aiport with most flights coming in vast distances.
Emirates has built a new terminal there mainly for the A380s and it is large beyond all airports you have ever seen. When I lined up at immigration, there were 60 desks of clerks and most of them were occupied.
I think that Emirates air might become a vicitim of the financial crisis in Dubai. They have on order so many huge A380s and other large aircraft that I wonder where they will get the credit to pay for them. I read in the news that already there is talk of Abu Dhabi taking over the airline to preserve it.
My friend in Dubai said "We don't know whether you will like it here as it is all hotels, malls and office space in the desert." He was right. When you see photos of all those buildings in Dubai, you cannot tell than more than half are incomplete. They are overbuilding so rapidly that the NY Times said that in two years half of all office space in Dubai will be empty. It could be worse than that.
That tallest building in the world is scheduled to open in early January. The word around town is that 600 men have died already building it. They had trouble with it as the scaffolding collapsed a lot. There are a lot of sharp curves in the glass and metal sheathing which makes them heavier than normal and hard to handle. The hot sunlight on the materials and men plus the wind made everything harded to deal with than usual.
The City is spread out like LA and traffic is really slow. People who do not have cars take taxis, which are not cheap. The new subways are just being completed in some cases, and just being started in others. There are separate cars for men and women, altho women can also ride in mixed cars if they wish.
One of the places I wanted to see what the Raffles hotel which is built in the shape of a pyramid. I saw only a few photos in the western media when it opened and none of them did justice to the beauty of the structure and area. It is rather a Las Vegas (only better quality) styled concept of Egyptian structures, statues and symbols with a mall attached. The interior of the hotel has more design involved than almost any building I have ever seen. Just the inlaid marble floor must have taken a team of designers a year to figure out.
Probably because the airshow was on, the hotel was busy, but all high end hotels in Dubai have been nearly empty for a year or more. Most telling was the bar in the apex of the pyramid being closed. Every travel publication in the world crowed about the beauty and popularity of that wonderful bar at the tip of the hotel. But they didn't even try to re-open it for all the big shots at the airshow, so I think business was really bad. My Nepali friend had worked there when it first opened and his friends still there admitted that things had been slow, and many people had been laid off.
He had also worked at a Four Seasons Golf Course before and after it opened. Four Seasons owned the huge piece of (desert sand) land, and intended to open a large hotel there. But they 1st wanted to create the ultimate golf course, plus clubhouse and then build the hotel. They built the golf course and clubhouse in one of the most opulent ways imaginable, but then decided against the hotel. Intercontinental took it all over recently. But because Four Seasons is a Toronto company with Toronto interior designers, a lot of tables and stands in the restaurants are made of vertical sawn maple trees. Some of the tables are 16' feet long x about 3-4' wide and a slab of the tree was sliced vertically instead of the usual horizontal manner, then sanded smooth (although the bark is still on some/most edges) and varnished. The podium that guests approach to accept their reservation at the front is an entire tree trunk standing vertically and hollowed out at the rear for the attendant to stand in. The employees really love all of these things, and they are handsome in themselves, but seem wildly out of place and almost tacky in these surroundings and in a desert in the Mideast.
I asked Lalit how the club was doing in rough times and he said that a manager told him that the membership and fees were so immense that if they only had 120 members, they would be profitable. I believe it was something like $200,000 to join and $50,000 a year. He said that when he was there, management was entirely happy with the results.
One of the great surprises to me was the Dhows. I had been interested in these wooden ships that plied the gulf for years. But I had no idea they are the workhorses of the Middle east. I walked into one harbour to have a look. They were really suspicious as I was the only white guy there and had a camera and was asking too many questions. But it was fascinating. At one place, there must have been 30 forty foot and 28' containers that had come off ships and were transferring their cargo to dhows. There were dozens of five and ten ton trucks dropping hundreds of tons on freight on the docks for probably 200 ships being loaded. One of the biggest trucks was loaded only with California almonds. For some reason, California almonds were being promoted in China, Thailand and India. I asked where in the world does all of this go? They said some to Oman, Yemen, but 85% goes to Iran. I take this to mean that the blockade on Iran is penetrated by trans-shipment through Dubai, and I did read that there is some tension between Washington - controller of the planet Earth - and Dubai over it commercial relations with Iran.
The funniest item outgoing was junk cars. On one dock there was a guy haggling over the prices of burned out and damaged vehicles. I learned that he was hauling them to Turkmentistan because spare parts in places like that are hard to get and getch a huge price.
I took a night tour to the desert as I wanted to see the stars. I only saw Venus and Pluto and one guy there said he lived in Dubai three years and had never seen any stars as the pollution is so bad. The desert trip was silly, but now I know that and do not have to do it again.
I cannot imagine (non-Arab)people so vacant-minded that they would go to Dubai for a holiday. But there is a lot of hype about Dubai and I guess the shoppers love to go to the souks for gild, silver and jewels.

Indian photos

If the all-knowing Cassandra had met Henry Ford, she would have said "Mr. Ford, you are not going to believe me when I tell you that in less than 100 yrs., there will be an entire nation of vast populations that will drive your clever motorized invention as though they were all captives of the devil himself. " Ford would have said she was crazy. No matter how bad you have heard the Indians drive, it is far worse. There is no type of motorized insanity that the Indians have not adopted with elan. The fatalities are higher than anywhere else in Asia, and naturally, most of the fatalities are cyclists, pedestrians and tuk-tuk drivers and passengers - because they are always being pushed off the roads and shoulders by car, truck and bus drivers. Not police, not signs, not death and injury stats can alter the behaviour of drivers, but cows can. It is so funny to see traffic have to stop or change lanes when the cows decide to claim a piece of highway. One day I saw four cows and a few goats take over half a road and they were so smug.

My houseboat had two chairs where I said and was served tea and banana chips between meals. Meals were on the little table behind chairs and under the Jesus photo. Behind that wall was my double bedroom with a good mosquito net. Behind the bedroom was nice blue-tiled bathroom with shower. It was a comfortable boat.

India, the monsoon and Kerala

Chennai and Bangalore are neighbouring cities in India that are both celebrated as "tech" centres of India and the world. What that means to you is that when you phone your credit card company, or tech help with the internet, you usually are reaching some cubicle in one of those cities. There was an article in some paper about a U.S. tourist in south India who phoned her bank back home in the U.S. about some problem and reached a customer service person in the same Indian city she was phoning from. But the airport for what formerly was Madras is one of the most tumbledown ones in the world. They are building a new one right in the old one, but it is Indian style and a colossal mess. I arrived at night 48 hours after the monsoon had started, and it had just stopped raining oceans just before my flight arrived. The parking lot was a huge mass of Indians standing around waiting for relatives, taxis in no order at all, deep puddles of water surrounded by lots of mud - and cows.

You have never imagined so many cows in an urban setting - especially at the airport as tho a flight of bulls was about to arrive (in India, that may have been the case). I ws trying to figure out what to do when an airport official with a badge around his neck came to me and said many roads to downtown were flooded. I needed to fly out again in the morning only eight hours from the time I was standing there and he suggested that I should go to his little hotel which was humble but really, really (honest, it is, honest, I mean it) clean. I had to take the chance as there was such chaos at the airport I could not figure out any alternative.

Shortly after I entered his vehicle, the monsoon returned with maximum anger. The rain was tremendous pushed along by a gale force wind. We drove a short distance on a divided four lane highway, and there were some cows out in the crossover area beig soaked and looking forlorn as if there were no taxis available. As we drove through a small, poverty stricken commercial area, there were many cows sheltering in the doorways of the stores and offices.

The hotel was uummm, clean if you can ignore heavy yellow DNA stains in white sheets that have been washed, but are uh, well, I slept with my clothes on.

The next day I flew Air India across the southern tip of India to Fort Cochin, aka Kochin aka Kochi etc., Kerala. Kerala is one of the most populous states in India, and it is famous for having a communist government for a decade or more. It is about to be voted out next year, but locals say it is just because people get tired of the same old - as we do. As you know, India is having a seriously bad times with violent maoists. But Kerala locals say they will only gain a foothold in very poor areas with bad governments. Kerala is well governed and they claim Maoists have no chance there at all.

Cochin has such a remarkable history. It is (together with its near neighbour Ceylon) the story of spice islands. Therefore, the Brits, Dutch and French have all taken turns running the place. There is a little church - the original one - there where Vasco da Gama was buried when he died in the 1600's and his body was later removed to Portugal. The catholics arrived (their own publication claims) in 1298 in the guise of the Syrian Orthodox church - which is there today also - although the Roman catholic church is stronger there now in a voodoo way. The Catholic church says that they were in India before both Hindus and Buddhists and should not be called a western invader. Some claim.

Jews arrived around 1500 probably hoping to open some bagel shops down south there. One family who arrived a few hundred years later were the Koders. They dealt in imported goods, and came to control the liquor business, then fuel business, then the power supply for the region, well you get the idea - everything They became big celebrities that every visiting politican and diplomat had to meet. This plus a great deal of other fine info was printed on the back of the menu of the Koder House restaurant. It is in one of their nice houses and is such a great place I dined there twice. It is not very Jewish. The menu says that the only Koder left is "Queenie" who lives over in Jew town (apologies) which has a Jew Street which every cab driver wants every tourist to visit. I took a pass as the name was discomforting enough.

Ft. Cochin proper is an island on a harbour that handles large ocean going vessel, has a large LNG plant, and is really busy with local fishing vessels and ferries in all directions. The trees are immense. You freeze in your tracks for minutes just to stare at a tree that has a circumference of 26'. It is an important source of shade and contains many other vines, parasites, birds and animals. The buildings are mainly two stories or less so the shade trees help a lot.

There are more goats than cows on Kochin. Driving is so terrible in India and nothing can stop or slowdown the idiot drivers of that nation - except cows. I loved the way traffic is just insane, but when the cows lay down on the road, they win. One day I saw four cows and a few goats who had claimed one lane of a busy road and they were so smug and pleased with themselves.

An odd thing about the place is the crows. There are tens of thousands of crows in the area. They are so vocal that I thought many times ' You are never alone here . A couple or few crows are always very loud and nearby, and then there are the hundreds in the distance which cause a din over the town during daylight hours. Indians honk their vehicle horns constantly because they do not know how to drive. The noise during the day is unspeakable, but at night the traffic diminishes a great deal, and the crows go right to bed at sunset and shut up. They are awakened conveniently (for them) daily at 0500 by the Moslem prayer moaning from speakers all over the city. I asked a guy if any of the moaning aka singing, was real and he said "Are you kidding. They used to have to get up and press a button for a recording to begin, but now it is all on timers, so they just stay in bed and ignore it all."

The locals say the crows come in such numbers becasue people will not handle their garbage correctly. There are also fishermen throwing out fish parts all day too which the crows depend upon. The crows were pretty and amusing to watch, but I think there can be no songbirds at all in the city as the crows would eat their eggs and young.

One of the best things I did on the entire trip was to rent a houseboat for a couple of days. The usual method is to arrange for a boat in Alleppy - a backwater area south of Cochin about 90 minutes drive. I met a guy who said he had houseboats there for 20 years. There used to be 250 when started, and now there are several thousand. In the erstwhile, "rich Indians from up north" only want two storey boats with complete air conditioning. " This means costs have gone way up and at night instead of peace and quiet all you can hear is generators running the AC.

So Mr. Willson found a backwater village and bought two, one storey, two person houseboats and he is the only houseboat guy in the whole area.

I guess my boat was abut $100 for two nights including taxi down and back and all food. It was really attractive and lounge chairs in the front and a little table where the cook served me with tea (or beer) and banana chips all the time. There ws a small table for meals with the required Jesus Christ picture above it. Behind that wall was a nice double bed with excellent mosquito netting and a nice window to view the sunrise over the backwater. There was a pretty bathroom all nicely done in blue/white tiles with a shower and western facilities. Behind that was a galley where the cook worked to prepare meals for my two punters, himself and me.

There was no motorized boat of any kind on all the lakes and canals around me. You really cannot imagine the silence - except for a few birds, cows mooing, and some crows, of course. I think the water was 4-6 feet deep, so the punters poled along with one in bow and another in the stern.

At one point, we entered a long wide canal lined by coconut palms, rice paddies and shrimp farms. It was the very definition of natural beauty. It was what we all travel hoping to find at the end of the rainbow. My bow punter left his post and went aft and I guess they both worked from there just steering and let the current and light breeze propel us ahead in the most serene and perfect hour of my life. Eventually we arrived at a medium sized lake where a canoe - sized local boat (they are all small dugouts or equivalent of same) passed occasionally. My cook prepared lunch for himself and the punters first, then brought lunch for me. While I ate the huge amount of food he prepared, they all slept on the coconut-sisal floor mats in the back.

Later they toured me around some connecting lakes and then headed back - right into a monsoon blast so powerful they had to tie up to a tree and left down the plastic sheets to keep all dry. I loved it. It was so beautiful and natural to the area.

That night they served dinner for me and left me alone. After another trip the next day, I went back to Kochin. From there I went to some tea estates and waterfalls about three hours drive away. Because part of the trip was by motorcycle, I left camera and everything behind except a rain jacket. It ws all very pretty, altho the constant jerking and hard braking of idiot Indian drivers was exhausting.

Photos: I stayed in a 225 yr old heritage hotel which had the oddest bed and chairs. The entire floors, stairs, actually every item of wood was old planks of mahogany or teak. The bed is actually two double beds bolted together. Each bed had two revolving mirrors, pictures, ceramic tiles (12 total) and no end of spindles and decoration. The bed was about 38" off the floor (good for keeping down cobra snakes). In the photo the bed is oddly up against the window. They had some muslim guests who insisted they sleep facing east, so had to move the beds. But one day when I came in the beds had been shifted back to where they belonged and looked better. The chair with the long arms is to allow one to put up his legs and read his paper, and it works just fine. It was a really nice hotel - only about 10 rooms - and I think $50 night. I will put more Kerala photos on the next section.

Pandas and Doughnut Cheeseburger place

Before I leave Chengdu, I must mention the pandas. I had no expectation of liking them at all. I like to take day trips that get me into the countryside or to another village, so I took the panda tour. But I did love the pandas and their park-surroundings. It was one of those places with flag waving guides followed by hordes spilling from large busses, but that was unavoidable. The heaviest bamboo forest I ever encountered made the crowds seemed less troublesome and noisy.

There are nearly a couple hundred pandas in this vast enclosure of which only a handful are on display as they come out to eat their breakfast of about a ton of bamboo. Of the huge amount each one eats daily, only 2% is digested as protein and the rest goes right back out as fibre waste. We had to watch a film ("had to" this is China - You WILL watch our film) which said that male pandas have a very difficult time finding a suitable partner and often take many years to do so (hmm, that seems familiar somehow). Once a partner is found, sexual congress is hardly assurred. Should it happen so successfully that Mrs. is with child, the situation barely improves. Many panda moms have little or no idea of what to do with the kid and it dies. It is probably the most helpless mammal I have ever seen - tiny and naked and cannot even stand up for six months. The prognosis of the "experts" on the film ws essentially that this is a species failure in the Darwinian sense, but you have to wonder then why they flourished for several million years before this failure. While I was there, they had one cub in a human incubator and two in a nursery inside of a human baby crib. It was all terribly beautiful and terribly sad and hopeless and full of hope.

I flew on to Bangkok, a place I have little use for. I went there on business a couple of times, on pleasure once, and stayed in the suburbs twice. I think the traffic in midtown is in the same place it was the last time I was there several years ago. Traffic stands still there as tho ossified.

The air is less dirty than it was even a decade ago, altho I am not sure why. They keep building beautiful high rise condos and office buildings but the sidewalks remain broken, everything is broken or crowded or smelly. It is a giant flea market. I divide visitors to Bangkok into the higher income - who are shoppers - and the low income who are losers. There is more crap for sale in Bangkok than any place in the world, and right now as you read this, there are western women pawing thru some streetside stand looking at the 6,000th purse this week, and 85,000th T-shirt, and 3,875th pair of flip flops that are probably the 34th pair she owns. The sidewalks are probably kind of a standard width, but in the early afternoons, vendors set up their stalls and take up most of the sidewalk, which later have fat butts sticking out bent over from looking into the crap for sale in the stalls. It is hot like the upper level of Hell with maximum humidity, the sidewalks are packed, six guys are chasing you to buy a tour, a watch, a free dinner, a cruise on the river and an engagement with an elephant who wants to meet you, and you are stuck behind some fat butt bent over looking at jewelled flip flops on sale today only. I liked Chang Mai and Chang Rai, but Bangkok is a hole.

To prove it, a small hotel near the one I stayed at has a restaurant with a big photographic sign out front offering the new wildly successful cuisine - that's what their sign says anyway. It is a Doughnut cheeseburger. A big doughnut sliced liked a bagel with a whopping burger and cheese, and mustard or ketchup in the middle, and incredibly, two olives on a toothpick on top. You can't make up this sort of thing. It was for real.

I was settled in an odd, but new, arab hotel which was clean, comfortable and odd. It was near the giant hospital in Bkk which is huge and renowned and is the one the old King is taken to occasionally. It seems some arab nations send a lot of patients to Bkk for treatment and if the number of eye patches I saw around indicates anything, they do a lot of eye surgery. Every airline magazine and billboards coming in from the airport advertised the new hit - medical tourism - get something taken off, reduced, pumped up or added to your old body while you are in town - please.

I had thought I should fly to Calcutta and resume my planned trip Westward across India. But I had been reading of Kerala for along time and decided to go to the southwest tip of India instead. That meant finding a flight to Chennai - which was formerly Madras- and then on to Fort Cochin. The streets of Bkk are packed, and I mean store-to-store with travel agents. But they know nothing - none of them even heard of Chennai, most barely knew of India. When I finally led them thorough the basics (in some cases I just gave up and left hoping to find some intelligent agent -which was a complete failure), they had no idea of anything and as good modern robots just got on the phone and computer to have them tell the robot what to do next.

One agent could generate a ticket after many phone calls, but said that I must have an onward ticket out of India or immigration would not allow me in and I could not get on the flight out of BKK. I said I intended not to obey that and write the ticket anyway. She would not. So I asked for the address of Air India and asked how to use the skytrain (which was a joy),and I went directly to Air India.

When I got there, the phones were ringing non-stop. It was so bad that the employees would not answer the phones because as fast as they set down the received another call came and they could not complete any of their work. I could see it all at once. I asked the agent I was with "Are they all phone calls from those amateur travel agents out on the streets who have no idea of what they are doing?" He sighed, and said "yes, non-stop every minute all day they are calling for everything they ought to know being in the business." We dispensed with the onward ticket problem immediately as he said "if you have $100 cash and some credit cards, there is no problem." I joked "And I am old and white." He laughed and said "That's it for sure."

By and by, the welcome evening came that I boarded a Thai air code share with Air India and flew on to Chennai where the annual monsoon was just waiting for this old white guy to arrive.

What to do - Chengdu

Before I left Canada, I did everything I could to inform myself about entering Tibet and having a pleasant visit there; in fact, I had been doing that several years. It was confusing especially as Tibet had been closed to foreigners only a month before I departed. The usual air entry points to Tibet are Kunming, Chengdu and there had been some weekly flights from Zhongdian. Once I met Dewen, he spent a lot of time with his contacts in travel and travel agencies trying to grease the way for me. Part of the problem was that I intended to visit Tibet for up to two weeks, and the continue on to Nepal. In any other part of the world, this would be 10 minutes work on the internet. Not so in China. First, I was not a group, and had to join a group. Fine, I will do that. But I must stay with the group so now I had to find a group going out to Nepal on the date I wanted. Worse, Air China dominates the flights into and out of Tibet and all the flights to Nepal were full for weeks. Well, no they weren't. Some travel agents buy the seats in hopes of selling them for higher prices and one has to find those agents, but there is no known way of doing so.

The alternative was to go by Land Cruiser right from Deqin for eight beautiful travel days across Tibet for about $1100. The risk is, you are paying in advance for a driver you do not know, in a vehicle you cannot trust for road worthiness going into winter weather, which is going to be packed full with humans you have to put up with for eight days and hotels and food that are unknown, but since you know the Chinese, you can be pretty sure will be crap in both cases. This is fine if you are a backpacker, but at 66 years, you usually have learned to be in control of as many variables in travel as possible or else a potentially nice trip turns into a nightmare.

Ultimately, I was able to find a likely air ticket in, if the permit went through on time (which is might not - 50/50 chance at best), but I would have to go by land to the border of Nepal. That was fine as I wanted to stop at the Tibet side of Everest base camp anyway. But then came the price; to go a couple of hundred miles over two days was $1100. Worse, the weather had turned bad north of Lhasa and it appeared that I could only visit Lhasa city and nowhere else. Finally I said ' Is it worth all this trouble and expense,' and the answer was emphatically "NO.'

But part way through the exercise, I decided to go to Chengdu as that is the place when most agencies are that handle permits and Tibet travel. I flew the 90 minutes northwest to Chengdu, caught a ride with the world's most horriffic taxi driver and went into town. I foolishly paid him before removing my luggage and he drove off with it. I ran down the street and jumped up on the Jetta trunk and shouted and pounded on the car's roof. It caused quite a commotion on the street and he had to stop.

I had an hotel address from Trip advisor I was trying to find and the crazy/angry driver left me in the wrong place. Eventually I found The Zen Hotel, but they were fully booked now. They sent me to another nearby hotel which I think was better because it was quieter. Sometimes we used to read of authors or artists or travellers who find just the right hotel and stay in some city for weeks or months. That is the way I felt in this new hotel with the goofy name Enjoyable stars hotel. It was so comfortable and looked out on a large Hutong (Chinese common courtyard for apartments) which was interesting. Just below my room, some owner let their dog and cat come out each day and walk in an odd and wild roof garden each day. The room was new, pretty, well arranged, quiet, so comfortable and about $50 night. It was also close to the old town. The architecture of the old town is typical of what we westerners think of as old China. The city has erected some really charming concrete statues - which are usually public disasters but these are all very nice. There was one street in the area where the cafes hauled out large wicker easy chairs and tables onto the street and served tea in the mild weather. Some days were smoggy, but warm and a few days were sunny and warm as a nice September day at home.

It was wonderful to sit out there and drink nice tea. Inevitably, some Chinese would stop to speak with me. They never have a gimmick like Thais or Indians. They just want to talk.

Chengdu was the only place I saw interesting shops with things I really wanted to buy - art, figuringes, antiques (undoubtedly all fake repros, but attractive), and oddities. There was also a lot of nice food.

There were two monasteries in the old City. The one for women was about a block square and lovely in every way. It was lovelier then because the inmates were about to celebrate the 100th birthday of their founder - who died only three years before. She had been the first woman to attend Szechuan U., and the first female Buddhist monk in China. The nuns had decorated the place for a whole week and it was rocking with gold and yellow and flowers and ribbons. On the great day, their relatives came for a veg lunch (free, oh-my-Buddha-Lunch was free mama!!! so Chinese!!!!). It was nice to see them all so happy. Their ex-leader's photos all over the place made her look like Yoda. The rest of the women had shaved heads and ugly sacks for clothing, and had potato-shaped bodies, and a cell phone under every sack dress it seemed (who DO they call? Pizza Pizza?). Upstairs in the open windows I could see little girls looking down on the event and I suspect they and many of the nuns are/were orphans. Og bless them whatever the case.

The male monastery (oh, so that's who they phone!) a few blocks away is huge and includes many buildings and the ultimate perfect gardens of trees, water and bridges among peaceful adn beautiful buildings and surroundings inside 12' high walls hundreds of years old. I loved that place. It stands as one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen.

The greatest wonder of Chengdu is Sim's guesthouse. It is a youth hostel with about 200 rooms in a huge building with a large (ugly) courtyard and (failed) garden. It has a great restaurant with many kinds of Western coffee - including expresso- beer and drinks and about 20 internet positions available free for 20 minutes and then only pennies per hour. It also has a travel agency right in the main lobby staffed with six people all of the time, all busy arranging travel into Tibet, the rest of China, and local tours, plus taking in laundry and making international calls and many other things. Sim's is legendary on Lonely Planet and is the mother of all great hostels. It was a bus ride and 15 minute walk from my hotel but I went there daily trying to make the Tibet trip happen, and also to use the internet, eat breakfast and drink coffee at $2.50 a cup. After immense efforts and some linguistic misunderstandings and expensive admin error on their part, it was clear that fate did not want me in Tibet.

Now I had to re-think my whole plan as I had planned to leave Nepal on a flight to Varanasi, India and continue on frm there through north India. But all flights out of Chengdu went the wrong directions - Beijing, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Bangkok. The only solution was to go to Bangkok and probably fly to Calcutta and re-start from there.

The holy Mountain II

Eventually we approached Deqin. About six kilometers before we arrived in the town, I saw Dewen's new Inn 100' above the road, all alone on the front of a low mountain. They deliberately chose that spot because the view of the Holy moutain from there is overwhelming. The Inn looked really attractive although with the amount of scaffolding and construction equipment around, it appeared to still be a ways from completion.

I went into the wretched little town, which oddly fits completely into the crease of a moutainside. I cannot ever recall seeing a town in a mountain valley quite like that. Because the hotel is not finished, Dewen had instructed me to take a taxi out the opposite side of town to another mountain view area where he and his partners owned a bar and coffee house in the midst of a few other restaurants, hotels, and a Buddhist temple. His bar was kind of a 60's hippie dreamland. It was warm and pleasant and his employees were kind to me and helped me to go down (this is the world of steep, and everything was really down, or really up) to a nearby hotel. Dewen had told me - and sent pictures of the bar's monkey, dog and cat. He really loved the monkey, and all cats and dogs love Dewen as he is himself about 10% monkey, 45% do and 45% cat. But by the time I got to Dali, he told me that his partners had said that the monkey had managed to undo its collar and free itself of its chain and vamoose. They claimed that it came back to eat (the dog's food) and that maybe Dewen could catch it when he came back. I think they were just trying to soften the pain for him and that none of that was true because when I got up there, they were just saying the monkey was gone. Unfortunately, some one of them has another tiny, ugly monkey of some sort that is an endangered species. They say they keep it hidden, but when I was there, they showed it to me without hesitation. It is a little bigger than a hand and kept inside peoples' shirts or jackets and sleeps most of the time. This is exactly the kind of contraband that long distance truck drivers pick up and carry around to sell to places like this and I would bet that little money has less than a 1% chance of survival there.

The nearby hotel was the oddest place. It was new or renovated, and as so often is the case in Asia, incomplete. It was about 95% complete, but wires stuck out in odd places, and construction junk was all over, and many things were unfinished. Everything in this remote location has to be trucked in at great expense (Dewen said his cost on a chicken would be $10 and retail far more), and even unfinished hotels charge a much higher rate than a few hundred miles south. The room was large and faced the mountain. The owner had tried - rather too hard - to be avant garde and bought a lot of silly furniture that would only be purchased in No. America by black people. Goofy beds with huge white fake leather headboards, lots of knobs (none working ) for radios and speakers and lights and buzzers, and cheap side tables with chipped mirrors and flashy, tacky junk all over them, wires running on top of the carpet all over the room from misplaced outlets, everything already worn out and shabby even tho it could not have been very old.

Most astonishing was the open lobby. There, in front of a large and dirty picture window intended to showcase the mountain, was a rack of 80 actual French Bordeaux and Beaujolais wines - precisely set to face the brightest sunlight in the world, with necks all vertical. The wine must have been vinegar as it sat there.

I went out for a hike and met an old Dane - my age. He really had travelled a lot and was a great guy to talk with. I felt better about being an older solo traveller after I saw him as he looked like an adventurer who did what he wanted when he wanted. I adjusted well to the altitude, altho hiking took a lot more effort. Dewen's plan for me had been unachievable. He thought I should make a two day hike toward Mt Meili which would require hiking eight hours a day, sleeping in a rough cabin at night, and hiking eight hours back the next day. I told him that I was too old to hike eight hours. Oh no, he said, you don't need to - you will a nice Tibetan guy with a horse, which you will ride and he will walk along with you. The reason is that 5.5 hours of the hike the 1st day is an incline (read steep mountain path). You will ride up the hills on the horse, and then at the top, you lose the horse and just was downhill for 2.5 hours to the cabin. The next day, you only go up for 2.5 hours and then it is downhill all the way back. Simple, and only $100. He did say that, well, actually, often it is not really a horse, but a donkey. The Chinese traditionally speak this way -what is always a Golden tiger to Chinese is always a golden retriever to us.

When I got to the town and saw emaciated, small donkeys walking around everywhere on all the streets, I knew what my horse would be like. I also had recently read a traveller saying how sore his butt was after riding an hour or so on the back of a skinny donkey. It was really cold in Deqin, even with the sun up, and damned cold with the sun hiding. I could even think about my already sore butt (from busses and because I am so skinny there) and aversion to cold and exhaustion due to altitude and decidedly was negative on that adventure. He also thought I should go for a week to "Paradise valley" which is really remote. If it had been summer, I probably would have done both, but instead I settled for some nice local walks.

Mount Meile is nasty. A few years ago a joint Korean and Japanese expedition set out to climb her heights. There was an avalanche and I think 13 or 16 of the Japanese were killed. Some Tibetans said the mountain just doesn't like Japanese and anyway, they should not be climbing a holy mountain. Since that time, it is forbidden to climb Meili.

Eventually, I boarded a huge bus and went back south to Zhongdian and then a nice minibus on to Lijiang again. The trip south was much more beautiful and comfortable than the trip north had been. At one point, the giant, lumbering, noisy bus broke down. We were right at the tree line and it was one of the most beautiful points of the trip. My best mountain shots (some shown here) are thanks to the breakdown of the bus.

Cell phones are a curse. The distances I covered going North and then South were not much more than 100 miles in five and six hours. The changes in China are so vast and rapid that all the highways were newly paved. Some places, off in the distance, we could see the new high speed rail lines that China is building all over the country. The slow pace was due to the steep mountain climbs, up and down, up and down all day, sometimes along the Yangtze and often along the Meekong rivers, always on very tight switchbacks. We would be in many places where the drop was 2,500 ft to the river on a road wide enough for a couple of donkeys where two huge trucks and busses would meet on a point - horrifying - and we would wonder how they could pass. There was seldom any shoulder wider than 24" and almost never the slightest impediment to block an errant driver from going over the edge. We did see wreckers pulling up two vehicles on cables from having gone over the side.

The vehicles were all manual transmissions so shifting was almost non-stop. In the midst of all this, the drivers were often on their cell phones shouting and barking (had to be wife phone calls) while trying to shift, pass other vehicles, navigate 180 degree turns and avoid rockfalls. It was hairy.

The real miracles among all this were the greatest heroes/heroines of the whole trip. Everybody everywhere with a brain was in admiration of the long-haul bicylists. You would see them coming down the mountain passes from Tibet and know for every decline they must have climbed at least as much. I saw one couple - probably in their 50's - twice and they were just plugging along the narrow roads, having lived thru the canyons, the big trucks and busses just brushing by them. The thing about seeing them out there is that a vast amount of this space is uninhabited and once they leave any small town, there is no help, no food, not even much flat space to camp at night. They are committed. People always observe that they are usually alone and I always say that many start out in pairs and trios but always split up because cyclists are such hard headed individualists and of course, on a long haul, physical capabilities are seldom equal. I personally cannot understand how they get enough protein to deal with the physical demands - especially at 10,000 feet against a wind. Everybody I spoke with everywhere was in awe of these supermen and superwomen.

To the Holy Mountain - Heaven and Hell

I have visited my friend Dewen in Hainan, China - the island near Vietnam - a few years ago. Now he is involved with two partners in building a 25 room hotel in Deqin, Yunnan which is right at the northern-most tip of Yunnan, on the border with Tibet. This land was Tibet not long ago until the Chinese forcibly took it back. Naturally, there is nothing voluntarily said about this. But I noticed on a Google map I looked at before I left home, that there was a large cemetery in Zhongdian (now called Shangri-la) for the heros and martyrs. I asked about this and my friends admitted that China lost a lot of soldiers fighting Tibet for this territory 50 years ago. I saw the front of the cemetery when I was in Zhongdian, but my feet were rebelling against walking another mile over to the entrance up a steep hill and nicely out of sight for most Chinese.

I was to meet Dewen in Lijiang as he expected to be there on his monumental task of buying everything needed to build a hotel from pipe and plumbing, to linens, kitchen equipment, all furniture, electronics - a nearly limitless list of items and limitless because when items were broken on the long truck haul up to Deqin, he had to re-buy and re-ship piece by piece. So I went to Lijiang which I had loved when I first went there 11 years ago. It was a small town then, with few shops, no advertising and no hustle for anything at all, and I think I was the tourist for the month then. Now it has become the second most popular tourist spot in China after Beijing. The crowds are massive and the old town has quintupled in size. Curiously, the admin of the City, has required all new buildings in the old town to be built in the old style - and they are. I saw one going up and it shocked me. No nails, all mortice & tendon, old sawing methods, old stone cutting methods, etc. It must cost a fortune in labour and time to complete these places, but they do look nice. But the Chinese-ness of the place is gone. There are a lot of great restaurants and things to look at, but it is kind of a Disney town now.

I walked out of town about a mile along a path right out of a perfect calendar scene in 72 f. weather under a Yuunan perfectly clear sky to a park which is on the cover of every travel book about China. There is a 1,000 moutain out there with steps carved all the way up, and a tiny buddhist temple at the top. I climbed it slowly. Wy do I climb these things? I never am sure, but this one was truly a wonderful break from daily reality and reminded me that I was somewhere special. At about half way, one enters spruce forests, among which there are quite a lot of gravesites just helter-skelter. The sound of the wind in the trees is so comforting, so embracing that one wants to walk slowly or sit for a while and just listen to the wind and the birds. Eventually I arrived at the top and walked to the monument only to be met with lound hip-hop music and screaming teens who were having a good time. The view was wonderful and I thought if I never get to heaven, at least I have been close.

After a couple of days, Dewen announced that he could not get out of Dali yet, and would I go there instead. I took a bus trip of five hours West, almost at the Burma border. It was great to see him again. He spends so much time in Dali that he lives in a hostel there which to all appearances is little different from a small hotel. He has a large room with double beds and as always, he looks out into a pretty courtyard and there is free high speed internet in the common area as well as tea, coffee and books. The owners have a beautiful young collie. It is mostly black/white with some yellow added. Like most collies, it is all personality and fun. It has the habit of visiting rooms. It is fun to watch the collie decide to go up the stairs, then walk the aisles to see who has their room door open and in it goes to visit. I was sitting on the deck of a sunny roof garden when I heard the claws coming up the steel ladder, and sure enough, there was the collie come to visit. I didn't pay attention to how it got down that ladder, and now I wonder how that was done. Some days later, I stayed at a barn-like hostel in Shangri-la. The parents of the collie lived there and were also characters very popular with all guests.

I had also been in Dali 11 years ago and found it noisy and not interesting. Oddly, the city has spent a lot of money there making the city more attractive to tourists, and this time I did rather like it, and there are a lot more tourists - but it is still more of a real Chinese city now that Lijiang is.

Ater a few days in Dali, it was apaprent that Dewen could not leave anytime soon. He suggested that I go on alone to Shangri-la and then Deqin and he would catch up to me. I took a minibus for the 6 hour ride which follows the Meekong river much of the way. Even at that point, so close to its source, the river is 100' - 150' wind, and trapped in between rock cliffs much of the way. It struck me as odd that I never saw one boat, one fishermen (Chinese are obsessive fishers), not one activity on the huge - fast moving - river other than a lot of hydro-electric plants.

Much of the reason I was in China in October and early November was that it usually is the clearest month of the year for viewing the mountains and avoiding rain. It was a pretty time of year. Not as colourful as Ontario, but pretty and a pleasure to be there. There were long vistas of evergreen laden mountains with spots of yellow and orange leafy trees mixed in. The Chinese get very excited about the beauty of this area, but they have never been able to travel to Europe, or Western USA and Canada, so they do not realize how mostely beautiful it is there - but it is still a pleasure to be there.

I arrived in Zhongdian (I prefer the old name to the current Shangri-la) with three hostel recommendations in hand. I didn't like any of them, but I was tired and the sun was about to go down and I stayed in the one like barn. I have never seen a place where the temp drops so remarkably when the sun goes to sleep. It was probably 65 f. during the blinding sunny daytime. Minutes after sunset, it is more like 28 f. A lot of places in China have no heat at all, but if they do have any, it goes on December 15th and not sooner. The Tibetans are human yaks - they always have their windows and doors open and cannot understand the need for heat at all. In the hostel they say 'But we have electric blankets and good comforters, so you will not need heat. But the barn did have nice space heaters available for $3 a night, so I took one and was glad I did. The open air spaces between the ill-fitted windows and doors was easily one-quarter inch and the wind blew in freely. This was one time, I wish I had stayed in a conventional hotel. The only reason I didn't was that the internet was out of date and did not show that there were a couple of four stars hotels in that town.

The old town of Zhongdian was of little interest other than finding something to eat. I went to the large monastery in town, which was interesting. Then I went to the giant one out of town which was worth the trip, but I find it hard to believe that there are many monks in that giant place. It has many temples in the one large complex. I walked up more and more stairs to visit each one. I don't think there were 10 visitors in the whole place and I never saw more than 10 monks in a place made for many hundreds. In one temple, there was a giant seated Buddha about 35' tall, and the usual overwhelm of fabrics, pictures, incense etc. Off to the left was a young woman in her 20's kneeling in front of a seated lama. He was mumbling his prayers and gave her some blessing. She then pointed to a kind of paddle near him as he continued to mumble on. He took the paddle to bless her with that as well. He raised it, she bowed forward, he brought the wooden paddle down to her pate and just exactly as he touched it to her, her cell phone went off. I swear her ring tune was Material girl with Madonna singing something about What a slut I am...etc. The girl did not shut it off, did not answer it until she bowed again, then got up as in a daze, walked over right in front of Buddha himself in all his gold-plated glory, and finally answered her phone. No wonder Buddha is shown smiling so much.

I soon had enough of Zhongdian and decided to catch a frigid early morning 7:15 bus on to Deqin. This was a minibus made for 20 passengers on which they packed 27 people. On Chinese busses, your ticket shows your seat number and Og help you if you fail to sit in the same seat. My seat was in the back row in the middle, so at least my knees were not up against a seat in front of me. I had a stinky fat guy who spat on the floor to my left, and two tiny Tibetan women to my right. I was almost the only non-Tibetan on board (the population of this area that used to formally be Tibet is still 85% Tibetan) except for a couple of Chinese tourists.

We rose slowly off the plateau, among wide pastures of thousands of yaks, up and up into the moutain range. As the sun rose, it was lovely to see the landscape. But then, the Tibetan women began to become motion sick and started vomiting all over the place. As the two to my right were next to a sealed window, they had to jump over me to get to the window on the left in front of me so they could join those two women who were also puking out the window. Sometimes they missed and hit my luggage and the floor and other passengers. Soon more and more people were puking and this continued on for more than five hours. I looked outside and saw heaven while I sat in Hell for all that time. It was the hardest day of the entire trip.