TravelStream™ news feed for member eadamson on TravelPod's free travel blogs service http://www.travelpod.com/syndication/rss/eadamson en-us Copyright ©2009 TravelPod.com Tue, 11 Mar 2008 02:44:46 -0400 http://www.travelpod.com http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/eadamson/everywhere/1205213940/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/eadamson/everywhere/1205213940/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/eadamson/everywhere/1205213940/tpod.html Tue, 11 Mar 2008 02:44:46 -0400 Going lots of places.

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Saratoga, California, United States

Did you know? I got back from my trip more than a month ago. This is the last entry. I feel the need to complete it. What follows are some random thoughts serving as a hodgepodge conclusion. Maybe the feeling will come through.

When I created this thing, it asked me for a name. So I typed "everywhere." As in, that's where I was going. The map above used to (and may still) give a percentage of the world you have visited, based on your country count. People do that, you know. They count the countries they have seen, and they tell other people that's how many countries they have seen. As if you could, one day, say, "I've been to every country in the world" and have it mean that you knew anything about anything at all.

Well, anyway, my country count put me somewhere around 10-15%. Another map on facebook.com somehow put me at around 22%.

That's great. I only have between 78% and 90% of the world left to see and then I'll have seen everything.

"What a small world" is the silliest phrase I know, and I'm not fond of superlatives.

What was my favorite place? Nope. Not going to answer that.

I didn't write much once I got to Australia. I wrote less in my journal and I wrote no blogs at all. I guess I felt like this blog was my giving permission for you to learn a little about what I was thinking and what I thought about the things around me. Once I was around family, I wasn't as sure they would give the same permission - telling the internet what I thought about me and them and their lives. Maybe I was tired of having myself exposed. Or I got lazy, that could be it too.

What did I learn? I don't know. I guess if I learned anything, it's that I don't really know. I am pretty good at guessing at stuff, but I don't see how you can know anything about anything what with the world being the size it is. Plus, what you know might be completely opposite of what someone else knows.

Vonnegut wrote about this in The Sirens of Titan. There were places in the universe called chrono-synclastic infundibuli, and indeed there was one in our solar system. In these places, all those different truths in the world that disagree would suddenly all fit together perfectly. A man who knew for certain one set of things could stand next to a woman who knew for certain the opposite set of things, and they would see how they were both right after all.

Vonnegut always wrote with a backbone of delicate sarcasm. It makes the lips smack.

I'm going to go back and read the first two entries of this thing and then react to that in the next paragraph.

[...]

Wow. How any of you read that crap is beyond me. I will probably think the same thing about this entry the next time I read it. I certainly got more verbose and more emo as the trip went on. That, or I just let you guys in on my inner emo verbosity instead of filtering it HARD whenever I hit a computer. I guess the latter.

One more thing. A year is not a short time. Years do not fly by. Next time you say that last year flew by or it seemed like just yesterday, stop yourself. Years do not fly by. Years do not fly by. Years do not fly by.

Life goes on. I'm doing my dad's taxes and eating bowls of cereal every morning and trying to get in shape by doing 2 by 20 minutes on the erg, or at least one 20' and 10'-20' of intervals or something else to keep me breathing. Every once in a while, it strikes me as strange that I just passed five cars whose values could each have bought multiple properties in many places I saw. When I read the news, I can sometimes say, "oh, I've been there." I think about lots of things that I probably don't want to tell you about right now. Isn't it the same coming back the other way?

So that was my life for a year. A long year. That's it. And now it keeps going.
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Uluru, Australia


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Perth, Australia


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Huhehaote / Hohhot, China

I've got a bit of quiet time here in Sydney so I'm going to write a post about the time I went to Inner Mongolia in another life wherein I was a lone traveler with long hair. You see, I'm in Sydney now, and I'm doing all these family things and eating all these family dinners and sporting a neat haircut and taking showers every day and what happened just a few weeks ago to just a few months ago seems like it never was. It has all boiled down to some photos on a hard drive, some chicken scratch in a journal, and some truncated, deficient dinnertime stories.

I went to Inner Mongolia in that bygone life to meet Tim, a former student of my late grandmother. She passed recently while I was in Kolkata - the day I had to travel West across India to wait to travel East over India to Thailand and then to Hong Kong in one day. That was a long and quiet day. When you are isolated from a death of a loved one, from the death, the loved one, and your other loved ones, you don't get immersion in your emotions. Instead you reach a stressed stasis. Maybe emotions are a large tangle of rope. A big mass of twiny strands of complexity. Maybe when you are alone and in survival mode, instead of unravelling them to examine each strand one by one, you just tighten it all up really hard so you don't have to worry about any loose ends snagging on a jagged corner of the jagged world around you.

Tim was a bit of an enigma. Somehow he knew Granny and somehow her death was very difficult for him. I had no idea of the relationship other than the fact that Granny, being an adventurous woman during her life, had gone to China to teach English at some point in the last 30 years. Tim was one of her students - that's all I knew.

Tim was a student then and is now an Organic Chemistry professor at the University of Inner Mongolia. Inner Mongolia, of course, is China, but is very close to Mongolia - North and West of Beijing. My grandmother had gone on an adventure to teach English in the 80's when China opened up to things like expatriate English teachers. She was one of two expatriates in all of Inner Mongolia, a region probably as big as Texas.

Guess what? I just accidentally lost a bunch of heartfelt things that I had written about my time in Huhehaote and it got deleted. Man I hate Travelpod sometimes. These blogs are a pain in the face. Did I ever mention that I never liked the word Blog? That I loathe it?

Enough anger. Look. China is intense. You've read my other posts, maybe. Huhehaote is a huge 1 million person industrial and commercial city with large fluorescent buildings and a bunch of middle class type folks. A lot of folks riding bikes around. Crazy crazy driving, since people were really only allowed to own personal cars since something like 15 years ago. The city is proud of its Mongolian heritage enough that it has a number of high quality Mongolian museums, and many buildings sport Mongolian writing alongside the Simplified Mandarin Chinese characters. Plus kitschy "Mongolian architectural" elements included in various residential buildings. That being said, this is China, and not Mongolia. There is a 10-15% population of non-Han-Chinese people there, and while everyone seems to be proud of their "special administrative region" status, it doesn't seem to change all that much in the grand scheme.

Inner Mongolia itself is a resource-rich area full of coal and various other rare earth materials. It is also the location of China's strengthening space program. So there's a whole lot going on in Huhehaote, a place once known only for the vast grasslands stretching north and westward towards the Gobi Desert. There are hills north of the city where, if climbed, you can see the thick yellow band in the sky that blankets the city, and the rapid transition to blue sky at around two miles elevation. It is winter in China, and China needs to warm its buildings, transport its goods and citizens, dig its mines, power its factories.

Tim and I talked a fair amount about a lot of different things. Tim showed me photos of my Granny and told me stories about my Granny. We discussed the ridiculous immigration laws that wouldn't allow a thrice former exchange student in Australia to obtain a tourist visa for a three day visit because he would obviously "overstay [his] welcome and cause the government great burden."

Tim's family took me in for dinner both nights and, while we barely could communicate, treated me wonderfully.

Tim praised Granny and referred to her as his "Australian Mom." He had kept in touch with her almost weekly over the past ten years. We talked about her bravery and her sharpness. My tangle of rope stayed tight and no loose ends snagged on any jagged edges in the jagged world. That's good, right? Feel free to ask yourself similar questions.

After Huhehaote I went back to Beijing. Sam and I chatted about lots of interesting things. If you know Sam or I you may be able to guess at our topics, which ranged from political to personal but always held significant weight. On Thanksgiving we shared our gratitude over chocolate shakes at Grandma's Kitchen, obviously. Various Americans were also present, as we went to the branch near the US Embassy.

After Beijing I went to Singapore and nothing noteworthy happened except for some huge mosquito bites. Good riddance, Singapore. I was already looking into the future, looking to Australia to fill some emptiness which really can never be filled.

Australia next. But not many more BLOGS from here on out. Everything is winding down and like Legos, pieces of my life are snapping back into place. Great?
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Beijing, China

NOTE: I've been in Perth, Australia since Nov. 26 but I have been spacing out the posts because I think everyone is about 1 month or more behind in reading. I guess you won't read this until the New Year, probably.

Okay, let's detail my adventures in Beijing (by the way, don't pronounce a soft "J"... It's "Bei Jing," not "beige-ing." It's a pet peeve of many folks to mispronounce thusly). These are the best adventures but there were others, maybe just not as spicy.

The Beginning
The very night I arrived and met up with Sam at the Grand Hyatt, I knew China was going to surprise me. First, at the Grand Hyatt, there was a lounge cover band who ruined "Got To Get You Into My Life" by the Beatles but then absolutely nailed "La Isla Bonita" by Madonna. Props. After that, Sam and I decided to head out to a live music bar and just grab a brew dog or two whilst catching up.

We were in for a treat.

Death Metal
It was metal night, and as we entered, the speakers were playing recordings of Black Sabbath. So that was already a good start, but there were also stagehands setting up for the next band. And what a band.

They came on in total darkness. With a slow, pounding beat, the drummer began the ceremonies. And ceremonious it was, as he also began Mongolian throat-singing in a deep satanic lull. The lead singer was dressed in traditional Mongolian garb which regardless looked a whole lot like a Pocahontas costume to Sam and I, there was a dude sitting next to the drums playing a traditional 2-stringed instrument (don't know the name), and the guitarist and bassist were standing completely rigid as they picked out the haunting first minutes of the song. It was a long, slow, dramatic build. Oh, by the way - the bassist was dressed as a bloody mummy and the guitarist was, I think, a deranged psychopath ghost who murdered with his mouth (costume). He was wearing a bloody white smock ripped at the knee, his face was painted white, and his mouth was bloody and the blood had sprayed everywhere. By the way, I thought he was a woman until after the show when we met him - slight build. This was absolutely nuts.

So there are a bunch of people onstage. A traditional violinist guy is sitting and calmly playing his violin, the lead singer is chanting in traditional melodic mongolian style, the bassist and guitarist are rigid and expressionless whilst dressed as hellish creatures, and the drummer is pounding out a deep throb whilst throat singing. This was ... awesome. Sam and I discussed that the guitarists would either remain completely stiff the whole concert, or would go absolutely crazy once the song broke out of the long intro build.

Sure enough, the drums broke, the lights came on. The singer began absolutely wretching his life out into the microphone. Deathly, hellish noises. The bassist's body was springing all over the place to the beat, and the guitarist had splayed his feet out and was just ripping on the guitar, while his open, grimacing mouth displayed bloody teeth to the crowd as he stared at them. The whole concert, this was what he did. He either was standing rigid and expressionless, corpselike, or he was staring at the audience with a teeth-baring crazyman face.

The throatsinging was unbelievable. The violin guy did not stop playing, the same pace, the entire time. Between songs he would keep stroking. Our faces were melted off with the intensity of this band, and then they melted our faces even harder by covering Bob Marley's "Get up, Stand up" in Death Metal style. Right after, they covered Marilyn Manson/Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams, which already was hard rock enough with Manson, but they upped it even more.

The band was nuts. We walked out to the front not knowing what to think, really. This was my first impression of Beijing. Later we met the dudes because one of Sam's friends has a crush on the guitarist - that's how I found out he's a dude. They are a really lazy band and don't have a webpage or an email or a recorded CD, so I couldn't buy one, but rest assured I'm going to be keeping track somehow.

Summer Palace
A few days after arriving, Bill guided Brad and I to the Summer Palace in the northwest of the city. A huge parky complex whose name is explanation for its purpose. Lots of nifty cool temples and hallways and such, and a huge artificial lake. I was totally off my travel game for the first time in my whole trip - I was feeling a bit worn out and also had my guard down for whatever reasons. I lost $10 to a ticketwoman who didn't give me change, and I almost left my beanie in the taxi twice. I count myself lucky that these are the things I complain about on this trip, but I still felt like a doofus.

Vance's Chinese Friend and Maggie's
Vance, a former Sierra Camp counselor of Brad and I (and maybe even Sam), also lives in Beijing. Brad and I went to his apartment to take showers and hang out until he finished work. We went to delicious dumplings, and then to a really ritzy bar to meet up with Sam's Chinese friend. Having actual Chinese friends is hard for expats to do - the two "communities" don't really interact much. Or, more accurately, the expat community is both exclusive and excluded. Vance is really enthusiastic about cultivating this relationship, and so we went to The World of Suzie Wong's Club, a posh and notorious establishment. It was ladies' night, so ladies get to do whatnot in the lower bar and at 11pm there is a cattle stampede downstairs to join them.

So Brad and I were with Vance, and we met up with Vance's friend, who had purchased a bottle of gin for himself and his friend. Chinese drinking culture is among the most structured in the world, I think. Maybe a little less intense than Japan, but certainly more strict than America. When offered a toast, you cannot refuse. You also must pay attention to where your glass contacts the other person's - a lower glass denotes respect and lesser status/age. This sometimes leads to ridiculous scenes where people will have plunging toasts that bash into tables or reach knees (this only happens with nervous or jokey expats). Also, you must drink at least as long as the oldest or highest status person. When people offer toasts constantly, this gets a bit rough. So Brad and I were offered Gin and sodas and were forced to drink them rather quickly. We were all walking on cultural eggshells, Vance not the least. Was it okay to bring friends, and how much booze should they drink, because obviously they'll offer more even if they're upset that we are drinking it, but also maybe it's hospitality, and if we have beers too is that disrespectful after they bought us a drink, etcetera. Probably a bit too much concern. This has been a thick paragraph.

Let's cut to the chase. We got a little drunk (Brad and I) and watched a prostitute pick up a guy and visa versa from the dancefloor balcony. An old businessman guy who was running game on her like he had done it before. She was dancing and giggling and flirting and all this stuff that was hilarious and ridiculous. Brad and I were awestruck. It's really fun to watch and also rather saddening.

We then went downstairs to the ladies' club. Some stuff happened, nothing that exciting. Vance's friend bought another bottle of gin, barely drank any of it, and then just peaced out of Suzie Wong's. We similarly peaced, although Sam and Vance's roommate had also shown up for a bit of hangout. On the way back to Vance's in the cab, we made a wonderful decision.

Maggie's. The reputed biggest prostitute bar in Beijing. Vance wanted to show us how ridiculous this place was. Full of Mongolian immigrants who are all for sale. Basically every woman inside is for sale and every man is either a "sexpat" or kids like us who go for the amusement. Urban legend has it that the guy running the New York style hot dog stand at the entrance is the gatekeeper/pimp for the place. Girls pay 100 kwai to enter and don't get it back if they leave with a man. We later corroborated this legend as fact with direct observation. The hot dogs also were very good.

So we entered Maggie's, and eyes were on us immediately. Brad's nuts got grabbed as we walked to the empty dancefloor, and Vance and I started dancing there by ourselves to the decent music. 50 Cent's In The Club came on, and as many of you might know, that's my jam. So we were going nuts, but basically as we went nuts Vance said he saw all the prostitutes kind of mentally scratch us off the target list. This slight defeat was mitigated by the victory of bringing no less than six couples of sexpats and prostitutes on the floor for a bit of boogeying. Once we left, the floor cleared within a song. And when we went back again, the floor similarly filled and then cleared. With men paying women for sex.

Let me be clear. This is a big club. There were at least 50 women in there and maybe 100. At least 30 were paired with sexpats already and there were probably 40 other men on the prowl or curious like us. We had a contest - who could pick up a prostitute the fastest? Various strategies like looking melancholy didn't work. I couldn't work up the courage to open my mouth. I would make eye contact and shift my eyes away. It was too funny, or I was too scared, or I felt bad that maybe I was taking them away from their job because I obviously was not going to give them business, or I felt bad that I couldn't humanize them. Surprising how complicated and serious prostitutes can get - we ended up having pretty heated discussions about it on the drive home.

Anyway, Vance's roommate won the contest by shifting strategies. He went from being lonely and forlorn looking with a beer to leery and lecherous with a beer, and within 3 minutes there were as many prostitutes around him. Interesting conversations ensued. We got tired and felt weird and left, but it was a hell of an experience. Every woman was for sale. Weird. And many of them were being bought. Weird. Men were buying them. Yikes.

Tiananmen Square and the Flag Ceremony
Brad and I went exploring one day after a characteristic sleep in. We went to Tiananmen Square, the heart of the city, but no longer the emotional and spiritual heart, as the government is trying very hard to keep it sterile after what happened in 1989. Remember that picture of the one dude in front of 4 tanks? And the related reports of 3000 deaths and such? Today, Tiananmen is bugged out the wazoo and if you sit down cross-legged, you'll be in the back of a van in about 25 seconds.

Brad and I saw soldiers gathering, so we waited. After a while, traffic was slowed on the huge road to the north of the square, and there were soldiers in a perimeter around the main flagpole. That's where we were, and after a while a huge column of sharp marching soldiers came out from under Chairman Mao's portrait across the street. Lots of marching and gun-movement and pomp etcetera, and the flag was lowered, wrapped and tied with flourish, and marched back across the road. Pretty cool actually. Then the lights popped on and the square glowed in the evening "fog." A really cool experience.

The Great Wall of China
Sam, Brad, and I took a day to explore the Great Wall at a place that was less touristy than most. It wasn't a fully overgrown site (like many - the wall is not continuous, but a ton of fragments all over the place, and you can visit so, so many of them). Instead, it was a partially restored site which ruggedly traced a ridgeline all the way up to rocky peaks.

We immediately got hounded by women selling postcards upon exiting the cab, and 5 minutes later a local attempted extortion of $0.30 from each of us, which we refused on principle. However, in refusing and climbing by him we also climbed our way to the Mongolian side of the wall - you know, the side that was meant to keep invaders out. So we had to backtrack all the way back down past the extortioner and his local friend who Sam said was cursing us to death because we refused to pay a nonsense fee.

We went down and across a river and then across again on a bridge and paid the extortion fee for the bridge keeper, but then 2 minutes later we were approached by a crazy old woman with a huge sickle on the path. She explained (in Mandarin) that she had created the path and thus we also owed her money. This was a troublesome pattern and we all were not pleased with being extorted. So we climbed up through sharp brambles to a place where we could climb over more sharp brambles onto the wall. We successfully invaded, all while the woman screamed at us that there was no way and got a bunch of Chinese tourists to try to translate that for us as well. She brandished an enormous sickle, which haunted our thoughts for the next 3 hours.

We climbed way up the wall and got great views and great exercise. Great success, Great wall, crumbly and renovated, all kinds of cool. The woman with the sickle was probably the highlight for storytelling, but just the views of the wall stretching to the horizon along ridgetops, plus the crispness and cleanliness of the air far away from Beijing center, were enough to bring contentment.

Grandma's Kitchen
No adventure, but this place had DELICIOUS pancakes and milkshakes. Sam has a frequent diner card.

Forbidden City
An ancient place that has buildings once burned and renovated and burned and renovated and renovated again ten times. The largest buildings were under scaffolding when I visited. 2008 demands much of the nation's treasures. The city is enormous, nearly 1km square. The architectural principles of the dynasty Chinese ellicit awe. Even if it's not your style, it's impressive. The imperial garden had all sorts of random types of wood, sculptures, pieces of sea coral, things like that. A big hodgepodge of interesting things in nature to contemplate. And in wintertime, expats and local Chinese play pickup hockey on the Forbidden City's frozen moat. How great is that?

Miscellaneous
Hanging out with friends, watching DVD's of Harry Potter and Ratatouille (a great movie!). Drinking lots of beer and then not drinking as much. Eating a ton of variations on Chinese - Hot Pot, Sichuan, Taiwanese, Peking Duck. Eating pizza in expat pizza places. 80's night at Alfa, a.k.a. expats dancing to 90's music, and then later going to a real Chinese club where the music was awesome and the people were smoky but lots of fun. Watching Brad and Bill get matching leisure suits tailored. Shopping for contraband. Learning small amounts of Chinese. Having long discussions about serious issues. Having long discussions about silly mistranslated English, or "Chinglish." Eating milkshakes, again and again.

For a healthy supply of mistranslated/hilarious English by Japanese/Chinese, go to engrish.com. There's a section for Chinglish and you can try to get where we were coming from in about 50% of our jokes with each other.
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Beijing, China

SO after my Hong Kong Frosted Flakes Extravaganza I went to REAL China. Like where it isn't just one of the richest most capitalistic cities in the world kind-of-overseen by China. Actually to the place where you can't sit down in the most famous square in the nation without being hard-tackled and rushed away in a van. And other such things.

I got to China on November 9, so as you can see by looking at a calendar, I'm pretty far behind in posting. That's because I didn't want to say anything too crazy when I'm using China's super-regulated internet. Who knows how good their eavesdropping software is. There's a running expat joke about the Great Firewall of China. That's a comment on the fact that many sites are surreptitiously blocked, mysteriously unavailable for the masses of Chinese who just blame bad interwebnet connections. Blocked in Beijing: Wikipedia, BBC.co.uk, others that I can't remember.

So, this is how I'm going to summarize the last few weeks. This post will be a hodgepodge of opinions and observations and some events, while the next Beijing post will be a fun action-packed adventures run-down. And believe me, there were adventures. F--- Yeah!

To begin, let me say this: Beijing lives up to the hype. Lives up to the Olympics hype, to the pollution hype, to the emergent superpower hype. To the oblivious masses whose informations are controlled hype. It was impressive and a little unsettling all at once. Things look really rosy for Chinese folks right now, and they looked similarly rosy for me until I got to more free-press countries. The control is stunning. Whether or not you call them bureaucrats or totalitarian paper pushers or communists (which they are most certainly not), you have to give it to them - they have a lot of control over what's going on, or at least what their citizenry ends up thinking is going on.

There is a ton going on in Beijing. Tons of people lining the streets, tons of things being built. Tons of streets and structures oriented on the points of a compass (Chinese people love ordered cities - good for the feng shui). Lots of "old" China that has, maybe, possibly, been rebuilt, or is currently being rebuilt, so that it is no longer old but a shiny simulacrum of history and tradition. Plus they'll rename whatever it is something like "Grand Palace of the Martyrs for Harmonious Governing of the Country."

It's not fair to continue without mentioning the four friends I had in Beijing. My time with them was probably as impactful as my exposure to China itself. Sam, Bill, and Vance all live there and are quite proficient to highly proficient at speaking Chinese. Brad was visiting Bill and Vance and Sam, coincidentally at the same time that I was visiting Sam and Bill (but had forgotten about Vance). We had many adventures (next post), but also we had a great time catching up, barfing out old Sierra Camp stories and anecdotes, and generally being Stanford kids in modern industrial China.

I stayed mostly with Sam, my old friend who is marketing for a Chinese business school - trying to promote their executive MBA program overseas or some such broad mandate. He lives in prime real estate - the first street to the east of the Forbidden City, a cool seven minute stride to Tiananmen Square and Mao's smirking portrait. The area is built up like a traditional Beijingese Hutong, but of course it is only around 15-20 years old or so. Sam calls it a "Disney Hutong." Hutongs are alleys but I think people use the word to refer to the grey sloping rooftop neighborhoods as well.

Right nearby Sam's place is a restaurant called Grandma's Kitchen. This place is a chain, legendarily founded by an American Grannie in Shanghai. The food is as American as I can imagine it anywhere outside a real Yankee greasepit. At any time of day, there will be numerous expats dropping in for comfort food, or numerous travellers too nervous or disinterested to eat the local food. The milkshakes are the best I've had since being on the road - the spoon stands up. So needless to say, we went there from time to time, although I ate more than my fair share of the many types of Chinese foods.

People simply do not speak very good English in China. This is fact. At high end places, of course, like the Grand Hyatt, the staff will speak well pronounced English, but may have trouble understanding complicated requests. At Grandma's Kitchen, staff can speak good basic restaurant English, but at other expat joints, you'd be surprised at how little they can speak. Taxi drivers - don't bother. Even if they're supposed to be "taking English courses" in the Olympics run-up, we only met one single cabbie in two weeks who spoke a single word. And that guy just wouldn't shut up, in Chinese or learning English.

The problem, of course, is that the systems are ridiculously divergent. Characters represent words, pronounced with five different tones so that there are almost always 4 "homonyms" for whatever syllable you're saying, meaning wholly different things. Another level of complexity emerges when you start combining these characters. Many have heard the claim that to read a Chinese newspaper requires a knowledge of 15,000-20,000 characters. You just can't appreciate the depth of difference until you go, or until you study the language. I'm going to take some classes when I get home.

Across from Sam's apartment was a brand new club or something. Mystery surrounded it. Just a bright red traditional door and grey stone doorframe inlaid in the large grey compound walls of the hutong. Occasionally this door is lit up and various official-looking militiamen, in their spiffy black tinted luxury sedans and sharp military dress, show up and enter. Maybe it's a high class brothel for the movers and shakers. It's a bit shady. That's the overriding feeling a Westerner can get in Beijing, the seat of political power in China. Something nefarious is afoot behind the well-manicured lawns, wide leafy streets, and clean reflective glass of the bulky boxy buildings all throughout the center of town.

Beijing is huge. The subway lines are affordable and manageable, if crowded. But regardless of their decency, it took us around 45 minutes to get from Bill's place up north near Tsinghua University to Sam's place in the heart of cultural Beijing. A comparable trip in the Bay Area would be seen as an odyssey. Bill lives outside the fourth ring road - there are six in total, the first being the walls of the Forbidden City, the second being a tidy loop around the heart of the city, and moving outwards andsoforth on blah blah. There are 18 million people and they are spread around a huge area. Six ring roads, denoting an enormous urban space along the lines of Los Angeles, but with more order. The traffic is horrible at some hours.

And because of this traffic, and because of the coal used to heat homes and buildings during a brisk Chinese winter, the pollution is thick. The pollution is more than a yellow blanket. On nominally bad days, you can actually see the air. The pollution is like a mist, hanging almost insidiously in between buildings, certainly insidiously for the Chinese who know no different. Brad and I made numerous jokes about the ludicrousness of the statement, "look at the air." By the end of such bad days, you could feel the particles coating your lungs. It's like smoking a couple cigarettes at least.

And smoking is popular, too. Uncorroborated fact from Vance: 60% of Chinese men and 3% of Chinese women smoke regularly. Aside from the interesting gender gap, I wouldn't be surprised if the 60% male figure is correct. A big difference from India where smoking is only something that the "cool rebel kids" do to emulate Shah Rukh Khan, sexy muscle badboy of Bollywood.

What else about China? How about the thing in which everyone in Beijing is completely engrossed? The Olympics of 2008. It's the beating pulse of the city. Everything is about getting ready for them, how great they'll be, how proud China is. Outside the controlled national press, questions are being launched such as, "how will you control the traffic, how will you control the pollution, how this and how that." Most people who live here, including expats, believe that Beijing will magically transform into a pollution-free, traffic-free, happy city for 2 weeks before returning to its current state. The control is high enough that they'll just force it so. For example, the government uses cloud-seeding techniques, to a high level of accuracy, in order to force the sky clean on certain important days.

And that segues nicely into what may be my last random thought of this post. Everything in China might, could be fake. DVD's are fake and cost $1.50 - stores line the streets with them. Entire shopping malls are filled with faked goods - Nike shoes, watches, jewelry, designer handbags and dresses, socks, anything. There is even a Nike store which is actually an entirely fake Nike store. A national brand called Li Ning blatantly rips off Nike's logo and somewhat blatantly rips off Adidas's slogan. "Impossible is Nothing" changes to "Anything is Possible." Sometimes in bars, patrons will receive drinks with obviously fake alcohol - as in horrible, distasteful crap that isn't the Jack Daniels & Coke that William Chase Anderson ordered. The bartenders will then claim that they actually receive cases of Jack which contain maybe 2 or 3 bottles of fake Jack. The bottlers are faking it to bolster the bottom line. Either they're lying and the bars are faking the booze, or the whole faking thing goes pretty deep. Sometimes on the street, even the Coca Cola is fake.

All this being said, China still seems poised to gain power as the century proceeds. The people are ambitious, aggressively so, and want nothing more than worldwide success. The government is allowing capitalism to take hold a bit, even if it is far from free-market. The country is resource rich, large, and obviously has a massive population. But people shouldn't be praying for the day when America becomes #2 to China, as I am not so sure they would make the best world caretakers. Let's all hope for a healthy, friendly balance between multiple poles.

Next will be about adventures in Beijing, and after that, my trip to Hohhot/Huhehaote to meet one of my late Grandmother's ex-students who is now a Chemistry Professor at a university.
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Hong Kong, China

Wow, it feels like ages since I've written one of these. And really, it has been over 2 weeks, so that makes sense.

The last time I posted, it was about time in the mountains. After that, I spent a whirlwind few days in Kolkata and half a day in Mumbai. The Swiss couple and I hung out the night before we both had flights, and shared a cab in the morning. We went to a hole in the wall cheapie place on the street, had some similarly cheap chai on the street as well, and then went to the top of a tower and ordered mocktails at a really chic bar. There was a nice view to the nighttime haze of downtown Calcutta. India's disparities illustrated.

The next day was flying to Mumbai to wait to fly to Hong Kong. I arrived in Mumbai at 1pm and had 16 hours before my flight left at 5am next morning. I don't remember what I did. My brain rotted I guess. But for dinner I walked a ways to the local supernice Maratha Sheraton. Located there is one of the world's best Indian restaurants, or so they proclaim, but I believe them. I treated myself to a beautiful and extremely large meal. Skewered lamb and chicken kebabs marinated in all sorts of fancy things, plus a dal (lentil stew) that simmers for over a day or something, plus amazing naan bread.

For dessert I had gulab jamun, which are basically milkdough balls fried and then soaked in syrup. They are delicious on the street for 12.5 cents each... but these little guys cost $5 each. And I asked myself... are these really 40 times more delicious than the street Gulab Jamun? Am I 4000% happier? I concluded that it was very, very close. Those things were amazing. Everything about the meal was perfect. The tastes weren't crazy exotic, and it isn't now my favorite restaurant in the world. But everything was perfect - in proportion, in intensity. Even the ambience. A very nice experience to end my India adventure.

Okay. I went next to Hong Kong. Unfortunately my friend Sam was, on short notice, sent away to Japan, Korea, and the US on a two week business trip. I was going to be hanging out in his apartment during my stay, but with no Sam.

Arriving in Hong Kong was shocking. Not so much because of where I arrived but from whence I came. Hong Kong is so amazingly quiet. So convenient. So, so clean. I didn't know what to do with myself. It was reverse culture shock. I'm sure psychology has a silly word for it.

Sam's apartment is really, really nice. Small, but the things inside are very nice and clean. I spent the first few days doing things like: eating as many bowls of frosted flakes as I wanted, cooking breakfast and dinner for myself, walking around Central in Hong Kong, watching comedy DVD's. Just detoxing after India, really.

Hong Kong's materialistic consumer culture bled into me and I flirted with the ideas of brand new cameras and laptops. But I never went to bed with them.

I did, however, go through with the idea of tailoring myself a suit. It's a lumberjack suit. I'm not sure all of you have the same sense of humor as I do, or the same fashion sense, but I tell you, this suit fits me like it was painted on me and I will be able to wear it to so many parties and holidays that I won't know what to do with myself. I included a picture of the suit and of the crazy facial hair I had just before I shaved off my beard. I think this is one of the best pictures I have ever taken, and I am not one for spouting superlatives.

Hong Kong. It's an international city. It's bustling with a ton of expats and a ton of educated Hong Kongers. It's part of China but nothing like China. The area near where my friend lives is called SoHo and is filled with high class dining and drinking establishments, as well as old familiars like Krispy Kreme. There are a billion McDonald's and I go there every once in a while to get a milkshake. That may change since I just watched SuperSize Me, but I still love milkshakes.

Kowloon, across the bay, is very touristy in the "lots of stuff to buy" sense. There are ritzy hotels. There are apparently also really crappy dive hotels. And this is where the made-to-measure tailoring industry is centered. During my two days of research leading up to purchase, I gained a bit of notoriety what with my beard and hair and outlandish suit request. Up to a week after buying the suit, I was being told "lucky man" by passing Indian salesmen who had heard that Raja of Raja Fashions gave me a huge discount. Kind of hilarious. Minor celebrity. Also Raja Fashions is a world renowned bespoke tailoring shop. I inadvertently picked the best tailor in the area. I can even get a mail-order suit since they recorded all my intricate measurements.

I went out one night in Hong Kong with my friend Sam's expatriate friends. A nice house party, relaxed with a few drinks. But too loud for the residents of the adjacent highrise, who decided to drop a bag of water, from 15 stories up, onto our rooftop in protest. That was kind of scary. Then the cops showed up in a high-school moment and told us to pipe down too. Really, it wasn't that loud. I had about 3 beers all night because I didn't know these people and I have no tolerance right now.

Afterwards we went out to an outdoor bar. The people in Hong Kong stay up later than anyone in the world besides the Portuguese, apparently. This bar was filled mostly with expatriates as well. Mostly very drunk expatriates, as drinking is the preferred extracurricular here. A formally dressed girl slumped over at the bar, passed out, supported by her suit-wearing friend. The girl later puked all over her own knees and started crying. One of Sam's friends describes the Hong Kong expat scene as "freshman year of college, with money." It did appear to me that many people aged 23-45 were behaving like 19 year olds, but in designer suits.

The highlight of the night was a drunk Australian guy, mid to late thirties, barrel-chested and an obvious ex-rugby player, leathery tanned skin, notorious for belligerence and picking fights, who, by 1am, had his white dress shirt tied around his neck like a cape. I was watching this man who was so drunk that he was slurring his slurs. I was thinking, isn't it amazing that 12 hours ago, this man was being taken very seriously by a lot of people? A few minutes later, somehow he saw our small group, and he slurred some stuff over at us and dropped his elbow down on a table, hand up, ready for an arm wrestle. His body rolled about the elbow, bumping into chairs and people. His elbow was like a tie-down for a dinghy on rough seas. We tried to tell him that we knew he would beat us and so didn't want to wrestle.

Somehow, even though I was at the back of the group, he singled me out. Maybe it was the hair, but good thing I didn't also have a beard. He started looking and pointing at me while making noises. I approached him to try to placate him - "hey, you're from Australia, so is my family, where are you from?" Bad for me - everyone around us laughed. I wasn't trying to be funny and I didn't like that they laughed.

The guy was too drunk to be communicating with words. He was at that drunk point where he couldn't hear anything anyone else said and didn't really know what he himself was saying, but could still try to read the situation. And with everyone else's laughter, and with me standing in front of him, he read the situation that I was the funny man, trying to say something funny to get laughs. He told me so. Something something funny guy. Then he said, "yeughr at? Ikuld brick nows like this" (you know what? I could break your nose like this) and grabbed my hair. Then he mimed (thankfully) a swift knee-strike to the face and emphatically pronounced, "BOOM!," and then stepped back, looked contented, and said, "like that."

Somehow nobody else had noticed this happening, and I was then able to sidle up to him without laughter and get through enough body language to show that I wasn't challenging his alpha male gorilla dominance over the bar. Once I made him feel like the big man, he said, (made clear here), "you guys are alright. Just as long as you remember who's the man." I told him again that he was the man, and he hung his gorilla arm around my shoulders. Then he said, "you guys should come to my place. I've got a bag of coke this big [shapes large bag in his hands] up there."

I made myself scarce and discussed the issue with a couple friends of Sam's at another side of the bar. Thankfully we had no further run-ins with the Aussie for the rest of the night, and indeed, the night was basically over for me. I know his name now but I choose not to publish it. He has picked fights before in the same bar.

Right, well, this post is getting long, and nothing much else exciting happened in Hong Kong. I was comfortable and had a really nice time but no super adventures, really. I ate at a place called TACO LOCO which actually had respectable Mexican food. I read a few books, watched a lot of Bloomberg TV (one of three English channels), watched the Enron movie. Hong Kong is filled with awesome looking buildings and is an amazing sight at night, so check the pictures for those things.
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Kolkata (Calcutta), India

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Mumbai (Bombay), India

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Yuksom, India

Okay, the real deal. I signed up for a 7-day, 88km trip into the Himalayas, starting at 1750m and ascending to a 4940m pass on the 5th day. The trip was to take us to the base of Khangchendzonga, a very, very large pile of rock. I was getting porters (although I carried my
own stuff), meals, a sleeping bag, and a guide, for $30 a day. Boom. For those keeping track in Standard measurements, that's still 7 days, around 55 miles, starting at around 5700ft, gaining to aruond 16,300ft, and coming back down.

That paragraph was basically for Dad and other data lovers. I have no doubt that many of you, Mom included, will probably breeze through that without really caring about the exact numbers, and good on you. That was a feeling I had, too, in these mountains, especially when we would be at viewpoints and people would be arguing about which peak is named what.

The mountains don't care what we call them or in what scale we measure them. They just exist, and they grow slightly or shrink slightly every year. They existed before history mattered and will exist for longer than history will endure. And yet one day long ago they were just ripples on a plain, and one day long from now they will be just eroded piles of rock, or some other crazy geological formation due to the way they were formed and continue to form. It's all on a scale so much larger than us, so much larger than names like India and America. And these are among the youngest mountains on the planet!

A brief aside of amateur geology. The Himalayas are formed because the flat Indian subcontinent is made of harder rock (basalt? granite?) than the softer Asiatic continent (granite? basalt?), and so as it drifts northward it pushes the softer rock together forming massive stone ripples of hills and jagged peaks. Pretty awesome. Apparently the mountains are still growing at 8mm a year. But I was often thinking about what we know about mountains before the Himalayas. What used to be the biggest mountain before Everest? What's the biggest mountain that our planet's wandering plates ever created? There are so many spectacular mountain ranges in the world to see - I wonder what spectacles used to exist, or what will exist beyond humanity's frail reign.

Enough musings. Let's talk about my co-trekkers.

One was Ben from London, a really nice guy who takes his 2 weeks of vacation per year every year and goes on crazy mountain treks. Ben is a classically trained trumpet player but makes his living selling and then managing orchestral international tours around the world. The broader firm also manages individual talent in the classical music world. Just before India, he was touring a European orchestra in China. His hobby is skydiving, and he has accumulated 185 jumps.

Thomas and Conny are a Swiss German couple from Basel. Thomas works for a prestigious architecture firm (the one that designed the Beijing Olympic Stadium, e.g.) and Conny works in design and trends of consumer goods, such as fashion wear and also kitchen/home amenity styles, for a big firm, I think. They're twenty-somethings, a cute couple, and pretty hilarious.

And then there is Norbert. Norbert, with whom Ben spent an entire 5 hour taxi ride before I met either of them, and of whom Ben warned me by saying, "just letting you know, Norbert talks a whole lot." Norbert, a 70 year old German pensioner, a lifetime bachelor, ex accountant, current eccentric. Norbert of thick glasses, a squat face and body, and of interminable and repetitive old-man conversation. We enjoyed Norbert as much as he exasperated us.

Norbert has been traveling on and off since he was 40, and thus has a thousand travel stories, of which he selects around 15 to tell over and over again in response to the natural flow of the conversation. He punctuates every sentence with a thickly accented "you know" that sounds more like "yeu knao," and very rarely stops talking. It was amazing sometimes to just let him go. He would talk about anything. When one of our party had a bit of digestive trouble, Norbert regaled me with a 10 minute dissertation on his digestion rhythms and habits, past and immediate present, as well as projected.

Initially it was Ben, Norbert, and I. We later joined up with the swiss couple, and basically became five.

Our guide was slightly more than worthless. His name was Vikass, which I didn't know until the last day when I was writing his evaluation. He barely spoke any English, and was probably a really nice guy but just couldn't really help us with much. The Swiss couple's guide was Victor, a 40-something habitual marijuana smoker with two kids, a 14 year old girl and 5 year old boy, who both routinely wet the bed. I wasn't such a fan of Victor but we warmed up to each other at the end, kind of.

Our porters, likewise, just blurred in and out of the picture. There was a big group of tourists which kind of tracked itself up the trek, matching distances and days, staying at the same mountain camps. So, the porters and cooks kind of blended into each other to form one great staff serving one great population of trekkers. It was a bit weird. At the end of the trek, we could recognize our porters and cook, but never knew their names.

Day One. We tramped through "cloud forest" or whatever you call it, a lot of jungly greenery on the slopes of steep hills, for 6 hours. First 5 were slowly uphill following the path of a cool river whitewatering its way through the ages. A couple rickety suspension bridges. The final hour and a half was a steep ascent to 2900m. I passed a slaughtered animal hanging on a fence and a cat waiting in a cabbage patch like a scene from Peter Rabbit. Then we reached our first stop, Tsokha, a town that only exists during trekking season, to sell overpriced Coca Colas and Beers. Tsokha is the first and last night's stop on the trek. Norbert highlight day 1: he decided that he needed to change his trousers, and did so in the middle of Yuksom, the town where we began. White undies and all.

Tsokha was cold, but at night our little room in the wooden trekker's hut was quite warm. The next day we ascended through mossy high-altitude forest to Dzongri, at 3950m or so. Norbert hikes all the time at the same exact pace, a trekking pole in his right hand, his left wrist dug into his left hip, hand hanging, like some aristocrat promenading downtown on a chilly Autumn eve in Vienna. We stopped and had fried bits of dough and fried other things for a brief snack. It was a pretty steep ascent but I felt really good, and just like the first day, decided to push just a little to see how my body responded to altitude. Norbert highlight of day 2: he walked purposefully to the open door of the trekkers hut, placed arms akimbo, looked out to the land, and farted loudly.

Day three was an acclimatization day in Dzongri. We awoke at 4am and hiked an hour to the peak above the campsite, Dzongri Top, at 4200m. A nice panorama of the adjacent range to the Northeast, Khangchendzonga hiding behind another range to the North, and the ridge beyond which is Nepal, to the West. Very cold, very cool. The land was frosted over and was rolling white as far as you could see. Later in the day, we had a breakfast of toast, pancakes, and potatoes (this was the standard breakfast with a few adjustments). We then walked 2 hours up to Dzongri La, which was supposed to be at 4550m but was actually around 4350m, according to one Indian trekker's spiffy altimeter watch.

A brief aside about the trekkers outside my own small group. There was a large group of highly successful Indian men. The altimeter watch guy was an Ears, Nose, Throat surgeon, there was an Arizona State-educated employee of Intel, and two dudes who worked for Linux Red Hat in India. Some of their older brothers accompanied them but these four were those with whom I interacted most. They were all pretty funny, certainly nice, and very intelligent/successful. A marked difference from the poor, uneducated Nepalese/Indian porter children who skip school to hike up mountains carrying baskets of stuff, and then gamble their tip money away on cards or weed for smoking. India is a diverse country in many ways.

There were also a number of English couples, a few Americans, a couple Austrians almost as eccentric as Norbert, and a large Romanian group who didn't speak much English but were pretty fast hikers.

Back to Day 3 at Dzongri. After we got to the pass and came back through the fog and rocky sparse tundra, we had a long afternoon to kill. It was freezing as hell up there so we climbed into our sleeping bags and had a long, long, long wait until noodle soup and unleavened bread dinner. Sometimes fried rice or fried noodles too. This time it was fried noodles and I went to bed a bit ill, just as it started snowing on us. That was a bad sign. What happened if it dumped 2 feet overnight? I didn't have any real snowgear or anything. Norbert highlight of Day 3 was the aforementioned digestion discussion which went something like this for 10 minutes: "well yeu knao, usually I can pass in the mahrning and it is better like that yeu knao but even if not then at least in the aftahnoon yeu knao, but right now even nothing is coming and even the aftahnoon would be nice yeu knao, when before in Mussoorie it was the other way and everything was coming out but then yeu knao I just take a carbon pill yeu knao and it's all better but now it is the opposite, yeu knao, and usually I can go in the mahrning but yeu knao at least in the aftahnoon but we will see, yeu knao."

Day 4 came, and it had just snowed around 4 inches. It was beautiful. The land was blanketed. The mountains renewed with a fresh sheen. The clouds were ethereal, but are they ever anything else? Literally, of course, no. But they were just thin enough to give us a massive view of the Pandim range, which stood up above us to the right as we walked across the wet mountain-ripple hills. It was an awesome day as we walked to a valley just below this enormous Pandim range and holed up in a tinier, colder trekker's hut at around the same altitude of 3900m.

That afternoon we played UNO with one of our porters, the Swiss-German couple of Thomas and Conny, and an English couple also awaiting the next day. It was rollicking good fun. Lots of schadenfreude and retaliation to go with the sweet taste of victory and the sick bitterness of defeat. The afternoon passed quite quickly, but we also played too much UNO and never played again after that one mammoth session. No Norbert highlight from this day, since he doesn't play cards and just slept all day. But Norbert sleeping is no joke. He snores, but not like a wood saw. Norbert snores like a dying animal. It is unbelievable the noises that come out of his head.

Day 5 was the real highlight, the pinnacle, the trek to Goecha La pass. We awoke at 3am. Well, I awoke then. Ben had woken up at 2am like we were all supposed to, and had awaited his morning tea until he figured something was up by 3. Our guides and porters were fast asleep and without Ben's initiative we probably would have lost our one and only shot at seeing these mountains, the highlight and purpose of the whole trek.

After Ben rounded everyone up and we had hasty tea and biscuits (but no breakfast), we finally got going, an hour late, at 3:45am. Wow, it was cold. The stars were beautiful in between the black holes that were clouds floating past. We had a few river crossings which were pretty difficult in the dark and the cold. I escaped albeit with a wet shoe. After 4 hours of ascending we made it to the Goecha La viewpoint (but not the pass), at an altitude of 4600m. It was crystal clear, and the mountains shot up all around us to over 6000m. The Khangchendzonga range in front of us, catching the sunlight, dramatically spiking up. And behind us, still in the blue darkness as it was obscuring the sun, was Pandim, 6691m, piercing the sky. Awesome, absolutely awesome. Best mountain views I have ever experienced. I ate a white powdery Snickers in frozen celebration.

Then it was decision time. I was debating whether to go to the actual Goecha La pass or not, some 300m above us and a fair distance away. Our guide told me it was 4 hours one way, 8 round trip. This infuriated me because we had heard reliably that it was more like 3 hours round trip. After some encouragement from Ben, and after this fiasco with the guide's estimation, I was well motivated to hit the final stretch as hard as I could. I made it to the pass in around 1:15 to 1:30 hours. My guide couldn't keep up and I didn't really feel that bad. Although, to be honest, I think he just was struggling with his English a bit, and he was kind of new.

At any rate, I met a nice Scottish guy on the way up and we busted through beautiful valleys of stark blacks and whites in the morning snow. Massive mountains so big that they seemed to arch over us as we walked under them. And later I ran into a really fun mixed group of trekkers, mostly from the UK, who ended up having some real Italian Parmesan cheese when we got to the top of the pass. It was unbelievable. It was so good.

The pass itself was awesome, but not any better for views than the viewpoint earlier. Rather, it was the remoteness of it, and the journey to it, that was so spectacular. I also confirmed that my body loves high altitude. I felt great at 4940m while others were struggling a bit. So it wasn't just a fluke in Peru, I think.

After my guide came and rested a bit, we really tore downhill to get back for lunch. Man, were my knees sore. It was about a 6-8 mile downhill I think, and we made it in 2 hours. I ate a lunch, rested, and then descended a further 400m to our next camp. In total, I had ascended 1300m and then descended 1700m in one day. A lot of altitude change. Knees took a few days to recover, feet still stink.

So after arriving we had another long afternoon of waiting, but this time we were not into UNO, and we just hung out in our sleeping bags until dinner. Norbert highlight of day 5: truthfully, I don't remember because I was exhausted, but he probably said something really hilarious about the guides not speaking English.

The next morning we got to "sleep in" until 6, and then we took 4.5 hours to sludge downhill to Tsokha, the place where we first stayed. The scenery was slight glimpses of the mountains behind and to the left of us, through mossy and muddy forest. It was kind of taxing and boring. Lots of time to reflect, to feel like we were going away from somewhere we wish we had spent more time, to feel like we were going towards something to which we didn't yet want to return.

At Tsokha, we watched the freshfaced new hikers arrive on their first day. We felt strong, wise, experienced, grizzly. We endured, the entire day, the awkward charms of the porters and guides trying to vie for a better tip, which apparently was expected that evening. They made a stunning dinner and not one but two banana nut cakes, of which we ate only a combined one-half a cake. Then, the awkward tipping ceremony began. They didn't seem all that pleased, or at least were a bit disappointed we didn't give them exorbitant sums.

I contributed $10. Our guide was barely there other than meal coordination, our porters were nice but somewhat anonymous and didn't carry any of my stuff, and our cook made just okay food. Plus, I didn't feel like supporting a culture of porter/guiding where school dropouts gamble money all night on a card game where pots frequently reach $15-$20, or where the money is spent on smoking cigarettes and weed. Not when Vijay Poverty is working his ass off in school so he can get a job down in the city. Norbert highlight of day 6 was when he called Conny a "pudgy Heidi" when she woke up with a swollen face.

On day 7, we just made the long and picturesque hike back down the mountain, through the same jungly forest we had passed through previously. It was a fun time. A closing chapter on our great trek. We had fun snapping pictures of each other with Ben's flashy Nikon D80. I looked at a picture of myself for the first time in over a week and it was hilarious. I looked like a disheveled lion, which is pretty cool. I am in turns proud and ashamed of my hair gnarliness right now.

Thomas and I shared a 24oz bottle of 8% SUPER STRONG HIT beer. The altitude, the exhaustion, and the fact that I hadn't drank a drop of booze since Uganda meant that the 12oz of liquid had me buzzing all afternoon. Norbert highlight of the day was the discussion he and I had about troubled countries in Africa and how they are different now versus 20-30 years ago. Plus his misguided views on Apartheid which I strongly disagreed with but nevertheless let pass.

And that was basically that for the trek. It was well worth it. There are tons of things that I have left out or forgotten but here is one fun random tidbit.

There were many pack animals to carry various things. Horses and otherwise. The otherwise are called Dzo (Jho), and they are mule-like sterile halfbreeds of Cow and Yak. Yaks can't descend below 3000m or so, and Cows can't ascend above 2500m, so the halfbreed bastards can span the gap and hit every altitude on the trek. They are kind looking animals, with bushy yak-tails but cow bodies, and large horns. Since they are treated like absolute shit, they are ornery fellows if you get nearby, and twice I had to wrestle Dzo-heads by grabbing their horns and moving around them.

That's it. There are a ton of photos in the photo place.
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