2albatrosses

September in China

2011-09-18T16:39:00.000+09:30

Come early September it was time to return to China for my next classes, this time a week in each of Beijing, Nanjing and Shanghai. With no wider travel planned this visit, the month passed quickly and I was in Shanghai in what seemed no time at all for the final class, this one in the modern suburb of Songjiang on the city’s outskirts.

On our day off we visited Qibao Ancient Town, originally established a thousand years ago in the Song Dynasty, and now absorbed within the Shanghai metropolitan sprawl about 20 km south-west of the city centre. These days Qibao is a tourist haunt with the usual myriad of trinket, tea, clothing and food snack stalls. We later strolled through the nearby Long Hua Buddhist temple complex, its location marked by an equally impressive tall pagoda opposite the entrance.

But it wasn’t a pleasant day for walking in the heat and humidity, and after returning to the hotel we waited until after dark before venturing out onto the streets again for a return visit to the excellent cafe strip with great Chinese food at prices that would please the most tight-fisted Finance Director, a 30 minute walk away past a lakeside plaza on which hundreds of people were doing their nightly “ballroom” dancing.

Down Memory Lane …

2011-07-16T11:44:00.000+09:30

Memorable photos	Memorable destinations (click to view)	Coming up
View Full Album	* Bryce Canyon, Utah, USA * Yuanyang Rice Terraces, Yunnan, China * Livestock market, Kashgar, Xinjiang, China * Emei Shan, Sichuan, China * Isle of Berneray, Outer Hebrides, Scotland * Karakoram Highway, Xinjiang, China * Demilitarized Zone, North/South Korea * Temples of Angkor, Siem Reap, Cambodia * Monument Valley, Arizona, USA * Tiger Leaping Gorge, Yunnan, China * Sarawak, Borneo, Malaysia * Villages of Guizhou, China * Mormon Choir, Salt Lake, Utah, USA	September 2011 – China October 2011 – West Coast fishing March 2012 - China April 2012 – Taiwan September 2012 – China Search this blog

Paris, France

2011-07-06T10:28:00.000+09:30

We arrived at Berlin’s Tegel Airport a week ago to discover that our Air France flight to Paris was cancelled due to a computer malfunction. We joined the long, glacial queue to get a replacement flight and got to the service desk five hours later! By this time all direct flights to Paris were full, but thankfully two tickets on Lufthansa via Dusseldorf were found for us. In the event we arrived in Paris a few minutes before midnight, much later than planned, but at least on the same day.

We had a fairly lazy week in Paris but made good use of the subway, and our feet, to wander around the city centre and along the banks of the Seine to see the sights and feel the atmosphere. As I did nine years ago, then with our kids in tow, I climbed to the top of the Arc de Triomphe for the great view down Champs Elysees and across to the Eiffel Tower.

We spent Saturday in hilly Montmatre in north Paris. After a look through the imposing Sacre Coeur Basilica we walked up and down the cafe-lined streets, nipping in and out of patisseries to check the offerings. We finally settled on the crunchy bread rolls, hams and tarts from Le Grenier a Pain, and along with a bottle of French wine and a paper bag of Provence apricots from Le Verger Saint Denis (“A Votre Service Depuis 1947”) near our hotel on Bonne Nouvelle Boulevard, we had the makings of a divine picnic lunch / siesta combo. Not much work was done that afternoon.

We saw two very different concerts in Paris. The first was a violin recital in 13th century Sainte-Chapelle built by Louis IX, a beautiful building with walls almost entirely of stained glass. The second was a Cyndi Lauper concert at Olympia Theatre on Boulevard des Capucines. We may not ordinarily have gone to a Cyndi Lauper concert but we were intrigued to read that Charlie Musselwhite was in her band, and that she had recently won Billboard’s Blues Album of the Year Award for 2010. It seems that Cyndi has made one of the more surprising personal reinventions. The concert was great, the crowd was wild for Cyndi, and as always, Charlie’s harmonica was smokin’.

When the curtain finally fell, it fell not just on the concert, but on our trip too, for this was our last night in Paris and the last night of our trip generally, before heading for home on Singapore Airlines. We stopped en route in Singapore for a day to visit Lee Tuan’s relatives, and had dinner outside by the beach in warm, balmy air while looking out onto the harbour twinkling with the lights from more large freight ships than you could ever imagine could be anchored in the one harbour at the same time. Singapore food is the best – we had the mixed satays with peanut sauce, grilled stingray, Singapore noodles, Hainan chicken with rice, and fresh whole coconuts. After saying our goodbyes we headed for the airport, flying out at midnight and arriving in Adelaide at 8am, happy to be home after four months away but less so at crossing paths with Winter.

Berlin, Germany

2011-06-30T07:46:00.000+09:30

From the Harz we had a trouble-free run in to Berlin although we did delay ourselves nearly an hour due to an unfortunate unintended ausfahrt early on, resulting in a not unenjoyable drive through rolling German farmland while finding our way back onto the autobahn. After one final challenge, Berlin traffic on a Friday afternoon, we found the city-centre Avis agency and dropped off the mini Merc we’d picked up in Dresden. It’s always a relief to return a hire car unscathed after driving through unfamiliar territory on the wrong side of the road. From there we caught a tram to our hotel on Frankfurter Allee in the grungy suburb of Friedrichshain where graffiti seems still to be socially acceptable.

On Saturday we walked through the Brandenburg Gate, surrounded at the time by tents set up for the Gay Pride Day celebrations, and on past the Reichstag, the enormous German parliament building that’s been through a lot in its time. Not surprisingly, many of Berlin’s tourist attractions are related to its World War II and subsequent Cold War histories. We walked over the cleared block once the location of the Nazi Gestapo and SS Headquarters, and spent a long time in the excellent, though exhausting and unsettling, Topographie des Terrors Museum, now located on the site. Suitably outraged at what we’d seen and read there, we went straight around the corner to Hitler’s bunker, but apparently he heard we were on the way and shot himself. We ended our day with a wander through the strange, excellent Holocaust Memorial, a grid of 2,700 differently shaped dark concrete columns set on two hectares of sloping ground.

Berlin became a divided city in 1961 after the communist-controlled east saw the need to erect a wall to prevent its own citizens from fleeing to the west, nearly three million of whom had already voted with their feet. The wall finally came down in November 1989 – it doesn’t seem that long ago does it? Only a few small sections remain as historical monuments – the longest is the so-called East Side Gallery that was adorned with paintings in the months after the Wall was breached. We walked the 1.3 km length of the Gallery on Sunday after wandering through a flea market set up on a disused graffiti-covered industrial site near the Spree River. A few kilometres on is well-known “Checkpoint Charlie”, one of the crossing points in the days of divided Berlin, and scene of a tense Cold War standoff between Soviet and US army tanks in October 1961.

We ended our time in Berlin on Tuesday night at Friedrichstadt Palast where we saw the sold-out blockbuster show Yma that wouldn’t have been out of place in Las Vegas. It ran hot and cold but there were some excellent segments, all performed on an amazingly versatile stage.

Zellerfeld, Harz Mountains, Germany

2011-06-25T17:56:00.000+09:30

Four hours on the autobahn north of Bamberg brought us to the Hartz Mountains in Lower Saxony, in the heart of Germany. The mountains cover an area 90 km long and 30 km wide and straddle what was previously the border between East and West Germany. Mining for copper, silver and lead began here more than a thousand years ago with one of the principal mining centres being the twin town of Clausthal-Zellerfeld. But this is just one of many small towns in the Harz region now cocooned within spruce forests and inter-connected by winding forest roads. Two of the towns, Goslar and Quedlinburg, have been World Heritage listed due to their magnificent historical old town centres, their ancient “half-timbered” houses, and their nationally significant castles and palaces dating from the era when current day Germany was a collection of separate principalities ruled by Kings and Princes.

We based ourselves in the old-fashioned resort town of Bad Grund and spent a few days touring around the Harz. We had a particular interest in Zellerfeld and returned there several times. In the late 1840s the local mining industry fell on hard economic times; its underground mines had reached such depths that the costs of production were high and uncompetitive, at a time when world oversupply had depressed metal prices. Zellerfeld was then within the Kingdom of Hanover and the Hanoverian authorities encouraged and assisted mining families to leave the Harz and emigrate overseas, particularly to South Australia. One of those families was Heinrich and Friederike Spohr and their seven children. It was obviously a huge, emotionally wrenching time in their lives – they knew when they set out that they would never see Zellerfeld or the Harz again, and their welfare in the new world was far from assured. But it was certainly good for me that they did make the voyage, for had they not, I would never have been born. Heinrich and Friederike were my great-great grandparents. Along with 260 other emigrants, the family set sail from Hamburg on 5 October 1854 on the sailing ship Johann Cesar and arrived at Port Adelaide 84 days later on 1 January 1855.

We spent a couple of hours inspecting the excellent Zellerfeld mining museum (“Oberharzer Bergwerksmuseum”), and on our last day in the Harz, chanced upon the Thursday night famers’ market underway in Zellerfeld as we passed through on our way back to Bad Grand after spending the day in Quedlinburg. We stopped for awhile to mingle with the friendly Zellerfeld crowd and to try the roast pork and herb rolls, beer and apple strudel while listening to the enthusiastic nostalgia band performing in front of the museum.

Bamberg, Bavaria, Germany

2011-06-20T08:43:00.000+09:30

Saturday morning in Dresden we picked up a Merc A160 and hit the Autobahn. There were no speed limits but even this was too slow for many of the drivers who drove like there was no tomorrow, which for one or two of them I suspect there won’t be. We were happy to let ourselves become “stuck” behind the slower vehicles in the inner lanes and move along at a more sedate 120. Early on it seemed like there were many towns in Germany named ‘Ausfahrt’, but then we realized that must be German for ‘Exit’. The road surface and signage were excellent, leading to a pleasant atmosphere inside the car, and we never once found ourselves Ausfahrting when we shouldn’t have.

We left the Autobahn after about three hours and motored into the perfect little medieval town of Bamberg in Bavaria, about 300 km south-west of Dresden. The town centre is World Heritage listed, and deservedly so we thought. The imposing ecclesiastical buildings and old palace are all in good repair, despite being centuries old. The Cathedral of St Peter and St George dates from 1012 AD and contains the tomb of Clemens II, the Pope in Rome in 1046/47. Although not German, he loved Bamberg and wanted to be buried here.

The streets of Bamberg are beautiful too, with neat characterful terrace houses decorated with window boxes full of colourful early summer flowers. We spent the afternoon wandering around the town centre, looking around and in the buildings, before getting lost on the way back to our hotel with the result that our walk back was a few kilometres longer than it should have been. But in the winding, elegant streets of Bamberg that didn’t matter.

Dresden, Saxony, Germany

2011-06-18T08:45:00.000+09:30

Leaving Prague wasn’t as straightforward as we expected. We’d bought train tickets to Dresden, Germany, a few days before but when we arrived at the Prague railway station on Thursday morning we discovered a train strike had been called and all trains for the day were cancelled! This wasn’t what we wanted to hear – it was warm and humid and we were lugging backpacks. We spent the morning looking for alternatives and finally at the international bus station secured the last two tickets on a bus from Budapest scheduled to stop in Prague at 5pm on its way to Berlin via Dresden. That gave us time for one last wander through Prague’s fantastic old town centre before returning to the bus station and ultimately getting into Dresden at 9.30pm, by which time we were both more than ready for a shower and lie down.

The famous baroque centre of Dresden was controversially destroyed by Allied bombing in the final months of World War II, but extensive rebuilding in the decades since has restored much of the city centre to its former magnificence. We started our day in Dresden with a walk through the 1728 fortress Zwinger, then past the Semperoper (Opera House) to the Schloss, a huge palace now containing museums. We inspected only one of the latter; Grunes Gewolbe (the Green Vault) filled with one of the world’s finest collections of jewel-encrusted objects including the world’s largest green diamond. Outside we walked along the impressive Furstenzug, a 102 metre long tiled mural depicting a royal procession, before inspecting the interior of the Church of Our Lady, one of Germany’s greatest protestant churches. Out the front there’s a large statue of Martin Luther.

There was quite a crowd of tourists in Dresden and we joined many of them for lunch along the cafe-lined streets running along the Elbe River that cuts Dresden in two, the old town centre to the south, the new town to the north.

Prague, Czech Republic

2011-06-16T08:41:00.000+09:30

All the hype is justified – Prague is perhaps the most beautiful city in the world. Our five days here rushed by as we went back and forth across the Vltava River to see the sights and experience some of what Prague has to offer. We saw the usual tourist attractions like the enormous Castle complex that towers over the city, the fantastic old town square, and block after block of ornate, well-preserved buildings. And there’s no shortage of things to do after dark too. We saw a hot blues band in the grungy Pop Museum, the classy Prague Big Band at the Reduta Jazz Club, the show Black Box at the Image black light Theatre, and a classical music concert at the Spanish Synagogue in the Jewish Quarter. Perhaps the best of the museums was the Convent of St Agnes dating from the 13th century, now housing the Czech National Gallery’s fabulous collection of Bohemian and Central European medieval art from the 13th to mid-16th centuries.

Olomouc, Moravia, Czech Republic

2011-06-11T09:10:00.000+09:30

These days centuries-old Olomouc in eastern Czech Republic is a laidback city of 100,000, home to the country’s second-oldest university and with an old town centre that rivals that in the capital Prague. No matter in what direction you look, it’s beautiful – there’s none of the usual city ugliness to be seen.

Once a major religious centre, the city is dotted with huge cathedrals and seminaries from which art treasures up to 800 years old have been collected for safe-keeping and displayed at the magnificent Archdiocesan Museum located in what was the early 12th century Premysl Palace in Vaclavske Square. The senior religious officials of old weren’t your usual modest suburban clerics; rather, they were affluent, powerful men, well-connected to the country’s royalty and no doubt with a well-developed sense of their own importance. That much is clear from the painting hung in the museum depicting the celebratory arrival of Cardinal Ferdinand Julius Troyer von Troyerstein in Olomouc in 1783. In the picture below, Cardinal Troyer is the man in the ostentatious gold coach passing Holy Trinity Column and headed towards the Town Hall. Troyer’s Coach itself has been beautifully preserved and is displayed in the museum too.

We spent two days wandering around the attractive streets and winding alleyways leading off the town square, stopping here and there for a few minutes to listen to a few of the good street musicians. On the first day we stood with umbrellas in the drizzle awaiting the performance of the small figures that emerge hourly from the Town Hall’s astronomical clock. Later we poked our noses into a few of the cathedrals but tarried longer in St Moritz Cathedral to listen to an organ recital that by chance was underway as we walked past. It was a big, powerful organ that’s used every September for an International Organ Festival and the organist was really putting it through its paces; only the audience’s gripping of the pews prevented the organ, and cathedral, from taking off.

In September 1767, eleven year old child prodigy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was brought to Olomouc by his parents hoping to avoid the smallpox epidemic in Vienna. But the journey was in vain: Mozart had already caught the potentially fatal infection and became seriously ill in Olomouc. Hearing about it, Dean Leopold Podstatsky insisted that the Mozart family check out of the smoky Black Eagle Inn where they were staying and move into his own, much more upmarket residence. The young Mozart was treated by the Bishop’s personal physician and after several weeks made a full recovery. Part of that residence is now a restaurant, Hanacka Hospoda, with a reputation for its excellent Moravian meals. We had dinner there on Friday, our last night in wonderful Olomouc.

By the way, although recuperating from a near-fatal dose of smallpox, 11 year old Mozart found the energy and motivation to make up a tune while he was laid up in Olomouc. Mozart’s 6th Symphony!!! Does the kid irritate you a bit too?

Wroclaw, Silesia, Poland

2011-06-08T08:41:00.000+09:30

Like Krakow, Wroclaw boasts a beautiful town square that packs in the tourists, but unlike Krakow’s, it’s a re-creation after the near-total destruction of World War 2. Before 1945 this was the German town of Breslau, but post-war border realignment resulted in the city becoming Polish territory. The German residents were expelled and the city renamed Wroclaw; it was then re-populated with Polish people dispossessed by the Russians who had taken Polish territory in the East.

The town centre itself is reason enough to visit Wroclaw but we saw another sight which definitely makes the city a must-see destination if you’re in this part of the country. When the dispossessed Polish people came from the East after the War, they brought with them a massive painting, the Panorama of Raclawicka, depicting the 1794 defeat of Russian forces by the Polish peasant army. Measuring 114 metres long and 15 metres high, the 360 degree painting was finally displayed in 1985, following decades of refusal by the communist authorities for it to be seen by the public (given that it involved a Russian defeat at the hands of the Poles). It’s now beautifully installed in a purpose-built circular hall in Wroclaw and to say that it’s stunning is perhaps an understatement. Photographs don’t do it justice – you need to be there to appreciate the feeling of immersion in the countryside surrounded by the battle. We’ve seen nothing more impactful on our trip. Definitely don’t miss this if you visit Wroclaw.

One of the striking images travelling through Poland is the sight of the cemeteries. Everywhere they’re covered with fresh, bright flowers – hence a profusion of flower markets as well.

Auschwitz-Birkenau, Poland

2011-06-04T10:17:00.000+09:30

Yesterday we went to Auschwitz. Oh my.

Krakow, Malopolska, Poland

2011-06-03T04:28:00.000+09:30

In Budapest we said our goodbyes to our friend Susan who had joined us in Amsterdam – she headed to the airport while we boarded an international bus that took us north through scenic Slovakia and into the city of Krakow in southern Poland.

And then we were bussed to the salt mines. That may not sound all that dandy but it was a whole lot better than where more than a million people from across Europe were taken immediately on their arrival in the early 1940s – to nearby Auschwitz.

Mining for rock salt began in the region around 700 years ago, and one of the mines, Wieliczka, about 15 km south-east of Krakow, has become famous, receiving thousands of visitors a day. The reason is not salt per se, but that over the centuries, deep underground, the devoutly religious miners have carved religious figures and scenes out of the rock salt. Their piece de resistance is a complete church, the Chapel of the Blessed Kinga, measuring 54m by 17m by 12m high. Construction took 30 years and required the removal by hand of 20,000 tonnes of rock salt. The mine is now included on Unesco’s World Heritage Register.

Krakow was very fortunate to escape major destruction in World War II and it boasts the largest surviving medieval town square in Europe, along with other centuries-old complexes and buildings. It’s now Poland’s No. 1 tourist town and there were thousands of others strolling around or sitting in the perimeter cafes when we wandered through the old town square and made our way more than once to Mama Mia’s for what the Krakow Times restaurant reviewer credibly claims is the best pizza and pasta in town.

Budapest, Hungary

2011-06-01T18:38:00.000+09:30

Budapest has been on our “to visit” list for a long time and we weren’t disappointed. It’s a clean, green city with characterful buildings down every street and some truly great ones like the Parliament buildings, and St Stephen’s Basilica with the most astonishing interior of any church we’ve ever seen.

The twin city Buda and Pest has an excellent, unified public transport system that we must have nearly bankrupted with our extensive use of the 7-day Transport Card we bought soon after our hydrofoil docked just downstream from Parliament. Our journey down the Danube from Vienna, with an overnight stop in Bratislava, the small capital city of Slovakia, was much less grand than those of the big river cruise boats that ply these waters, but it had the advantage of speed.

From our apartment in Erzsebet Street in central Pest we took the modern trams and underground to see the sights of the city, including Buda Castle with its panoramic views from Fisherman’s Bastion. We returned to the Castle in the evening to attend a classical music performance at St Matthias, after enjoying so much the one we’d attended the previous night at St Michael’s across the river in Pest. And for something different we saw Giselle at the Hungarian State Opera House on Saturday night.

Hungary suffered badly from the two 20th century World Wars and the decades-long Soviet occupation that ended only relatively recently. Now Hungarians are free to tell their story and some of the tragedy is chronicled at the atmospheric Terra Haza (Terror House), the former headquarters of the Nazi, and later the Communist, secret police, and now a memorial to the hundreds of thousands of victims of the Nazi and Soviet dictatorships. It’s an excellent museum with many relics and sounds of the eras setting the scene. Our visit over, we adjourned to a nearby pub and ordered hamburgers for lunch – they were so awful they would surely have shocked the sensibilities of even the most hardened Cold War apologist.

On a related theme to Terror House, Memento Park in the Buda Hills on the edge of the city was established to display the large but silly statues removed from the streets of Budapest following the collapse of the Soviet Union. A display in the nearby barracks tells the story of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and screens a video containing actual excerpts from Secret Police training films of the era that would be comedic had their implications not been so tragic. Segments include “Where to plant the bug?” and “Introduction to Raiding a House”. We had to cut short our walk past all the statues when a lightning storm blew in from nowhere – I didn’t fancy standing at the base of large structures with so much high voltage electricity crackling about, and I certainly wasn’t going to let Lenin have the Last Laugh.

Vienna, Austria

2011-05-25T03:44:00.000+09:30

Think Wien (Vienna) – think Grand. The home of Mozart, and of the biggest and best wiener schnitzels you’re likely to see anywhere. For a city of its relatively small size it certainly packs a cultural punch, with many world-class art museums, music concert halls, and stately buildings dating from the centuries-long Habsburg reign when Austria was a major European power.

We began our time in Vienna by looking through imposing Stephansdom, the huge 13th century Gothic masterpiece St Stephen’s Cathedral, returning later for the sell-out evening performance by a visiting Swedish choir. A little further on is sprawling Hofburg, the Habsburgs’ former city centre base. There’s a lot to see here but in the time available we contented ourselves with a look through Schatzkammer (the Treasury), containing many wonders including the 10th century Imperial Crown and a 3,000 or so carat Columbian emerald.

On Sunday at the Belvedere Museum a few kilometres out of the city centre we admired the collection of paintings by Gustav Klimt including his masterpiece The Kiss, before heading across the road for what turned out to be a large, long and enjoyable banquet lunch at a Greek Cafe, presided over by a master of upselling. We later saw other Klimt paintings at the Albertina and the Leopold – Klimt was obviously a popular artist and understandably so.

No first visit to Vienna would be complete without some attention to Mozart, possibly Vienna’s favourite son. We had our own Mozart in Vienna experience on Monday night at the opulent Musikverein concert hall (the unofficial home of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra where the city’s New Year’s Concert is performed and recorded each year), after enjoying our last dinner in Vienna at the Hotel Imperial just around the corner.

And then our time in this great city was over, almost as soon as it had begun, or so it seemed. We boarded our boat and sailed away down the Danube, bound for Bratislava.

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

2011-05-21T02:09:00.000+09:30

Laidback Amsterdam seems to have something for everyone, in what surely must be one of the most physically attractive, pedestrian-friendly environments anywhere. We’ve never seen so many bicyclists outside China, here whizzing along the tree-lined canal streets and across the city squares.

Our home for four days was an apartment above a shop in Rembrandt Square, a great vantage point for watching people coming and going and whiling away the time in the cafes lining the perimeter. Of course we took a boat trip through the city canals that give Amsterdam its unique character, and visited Van Gogh Museum to see some of the output of one of the Netherland’s most famous sons. Its collection is impressive, including the well-known Starry Night, Sunflowers and Almond Blossoms.

At the other end of the cultural spectrum we took a stroll through Amsterdam’s small red light district where prostitution is not hidden behind a veil as it is elsewhere. The women pouting (or looking a little bored) in the windows were mainly from Eastern Europe we were told. Business seemed quiet in the late afternoon but no doubt things pick up after the sun sets.

Pot smoking is legal too in Amsterdam, and there was plenty of it going on judging by the smell in the air at various places. It may have got up our noses but like Clinton, we never inhaled. Seeds for home propagating are freely and openly available, and for those who can’t wait that long there are plenty of cafes around town where one can light up immediately after selecting one’s joint of choice from a printed menu. Not that we did – smoking grass holds no interest for us, and in any case, Amsterdam must be one of the last places on Earth where one would feel any need to be transported to a different state of consciousness. But each to his/her own – that’s the nice thing about Amsterdam.

To Edinburgh, Scotland

2011-05-16T16:21:00.000+09:30

From Dunnet Head we drove south, stopping for two nights in the Cairngorm mountains. The weather was cold, wet and misty, not encouraging for walking, but we put on all the winter clothes we could muster and walked to the top of Mount Cairngorm near the village of Aviemore where we were staying. There was a crowd at the top, nearly all of whom had ascended in the funicular, which we used to go back down to the base station where our car was parked. The Cairngorms are a colourful mountain range, very popular with serious long distance walkers (not us) who undertake hikes of several days duration through these parts. And in winter it’s the UK’s premier skiing destination.

We left the Cairngorms on Sunday morning, travelling to Stonehaven on the east coast where we spent an hour inspecting the atmospheric ruins of the near-impregnable 16th century Dunnottar Castle almost entirely surrounded by plunging cliffs. It was here in 1651 where a small garrison of Scots famously held out for eight months against the might of Cromwell’s army and saved the Scottish crown jewels, now displayed in Edinburgh castle. Human residents have long since gone from Dunnottar but it continues to be home to thousands of seabirds that nest in the cliff faces and look out to sea from the tops of the ruin walls - a birdwatcher’s paradise.

From Dunnottar it was a short two and a half hour drive south to Edinburgh where we dropped the Vauxhall off at the airport and caught a bus into the city centre. Edinburgh Castle was glowing in the last of the day’s sunlight when we walked past it and on up the road to the Black Rose Tavern for our last meal in Scotland – an Angas beef burger with chips.

Scotland was everything we hoped for, and more. It’s scenic, very clean, and easy to get around. The food’s excellent and the people are friendly and helpful. And double all that for the Hebrides.

To Dunnet Head & John o’Groats, Scotland

2011-05-14T04:44:00.001+09:30

We rose early on Wednesday to join the long queue of vehicles waiting at the Stornoway dock to board the 7am ferry back to the Scottish mainland. We docked in Ullapool shortly before 10 and headed north along the coast, turning in now and again to check out some of the seaside villages along the way. We also stopped briefly to inspect the roadside ruin of the 15th century Ardvreck Castle, the scene of much violence throughout its life with murders, executions and sieges by both traditional enemies and quarrelsome branches of the MacLeod clan. Not surprisingly the place is now comprehensively haunted, most notably by the weeping daughter of a MacLeod chief who drowned in Loch Assynt after marrying the Devil in a pact to save her father’s castle. Or so the story goes.

Eventually we came to the north-west tip of the mainland and turned right to traverse the width of Scotland, reaching the east coast at around 6 pm after a long day in the car. The distances weren’t so large but the road was often single-lane and winding, and in a couple of places we had to cut back on ourselves for many miles to get past some long and skinny lochs.

Our destination for the day was Dunnet Head, the most northerly point on the UK mainland, and only a few miles from John o’Groats on the east coast. Looking out to sea, all that was between us and Iceland now was Scotland’s Orkney Islands, clearly visible just a few miles offshore. We checked into Windhaven Cottage on the Head, glad to be off the roads now awash with water from the bucketing rain of the last hour, and made dinner of the oak-smoked Scottish salmon we’d bought at a roadside stall earlier.

Thursday was for walking and we began with a four hour hike along the beach from John o’Groats to the Duncansby Head lighthouse, then along the cliff tops past the impressive Duncansby sea stacks, home to hundreds of nesting sea birds. It was an atmospheric walk, what with the wind, the strong smell of the seaweed, the soaring squawking birds and the menacing-looking waters of Pentland Firth that rush around the coast at this corner of the UK mainland. We crossed some heather-covered countryside and ambled past a sheep farm, home to some very friendly lambs that insisted on trotting with us along the fence line, bleating endearingly as we went. They seemed to be having great fun.

We took a second cliff top walk later, this time shortly before sunset at Dunnet Head. We hoped to see Atlantic Puffins, comical looking birds with brightly coloured orange legs and bill, but proficient flyers and operators on the plunging cliffs along the coast here. Our patience was rewarded just as we were about to give up when we finally spotted a small group of them fly in from the sea and land on a grassy knoll hugging a cliff face. It was a pity they weren’t closer but even at that distance they were unmistakably puffins.

Isles of Harris & Lewis, Outer Hebrides, Scotland

2011-05-12T01:49:00.000+09:30

The wind was howling and the sea rolling after we boarded Monday morning’s ocean ferry from Berneray, bound for the next most northerly island in the Hebridean chain, the Isle of Harris (of Harris Tweed fame). We docked an hour and a half later at Leverburgh on Harris’ south coast and first motored to nearby Rodel to see the 16th century Church of St Clement, built by Alexander “Hunchback” MacLeod of Harris and Dunvegan (the nickname the result of a heinous sword wound that would have completely immobilized a lesser man than Alex).

It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast of landscape than that existing between the east and west coasts of South Harris, so we did a circuit to see the difference. The east coast is all rock and lunar-like while the west coast is fertile, grassy and with iridescent beaches that might make the Thais envious (Lonely Planet calls this coast “paradise refrigerated” – not a bad description). Of course we stopped in at a few of the small-scale establishments that still make the famous Harris Tweed, lightly dyed fabric of hand-woven Scottish sheep’s wool, and tried on an assortment of beautiful creations.

After an overnight stop at the beachside village of Drinishader, we headed north to the Isle of Lewis (Harris and Lewis are not really separate islands, but are connected by a narrow neck of land between two lochs, so it’s possible to drive a car from one to the other). Lewis has several nationally significant pre-historic sights; for example, the Standing Stones of Calanais (Callanish), an alignment in the form of a Celtic cross with an inner circle of 13 stones enclosing a central monolith over 12 feet tall. The amazing thing is that this structure was built around 5,000 years ago (older than Stonehenge) by Neolithic farmers and survives today. Being buried for a few centuries by peat that enveloped the area no doubt helped its survival. Nobody really knows what was the significance of the structure to the people who built it, though current-day theories abound.

We later stopped by Dun Charlabhaigh (Carloway) Broch, the ruins of a 2,000 year old roundhouse with great views across Loch Carloway to the sea beyond. Ancient houses like these were built by the wealthy and important during the Iron Age to impress and defend; obviously surviving ruins of such houses are extremely rare today.

And finally we came to Stornoway, Lewis’ main town where our Outer Hebridean adventure would end. But not before a fascinating hour in the Museum nan Eilean in Stornoway to see the fabulous Lewis Chessmen. Almost two hundred years ago, several incomplete sets of chessmen were unearthed on a Lewis beach. They were soon identified as Scandinavian in origin, dating from the 12th century when the Vikings ruled the region. The pieces were elaborately carved from walrus tusk ivory and whales’ teeth from Iceland. Most of the pieces found their way into the British Museum in London where to the chagrin of many Scots, they still “live” today. But in a fortunate coincidence for us, the British Museum has loaned several of the pieces for a temporary exhibition on Lewis in 2011, resulting in both the chessmen and us being in Stornoway on Tuesday.

Isle of Berneray (Bearnaraigh), Outer Hebrides, Scotland

2011-05-10T05:54:00.000+09:30

From Uig on the north coast of the Isle of Skye it’s about a two hour sailing west into the Atlantic Ocean on a Caledonian MacBrayne ship to reach the Outer Hebrides. This 130 mile long island chain consists of about 200 islands, only 10 of them inhabited. We docked in Lochmaddy on North Uist, one of the larger islands but semi-submerged in a landscape of peat bogs and fresh water lochs. We headed north immediately and across the short causeway connecting the tiny, atmospheric island of Berneray (Bearnaraigh), population 130, just 3 miles long and a mile and a half wide.

Berneray had its heyday in the early 1800s when the island was intensively cultivated for potatoes and grain, and the processing of kelp to make potash for the soap and glass industries provided a lot of employment. But ruinous economic times arrived in the mid 1800s when potato blight came to the island, coinciding with the decline of the kelp industry. At the same time, the Island’s land owner saw the opportunity to make better profits from sheep farming than from the unreliable rents collected from poor, struggling tenant farmers. The outcome was the clearance of many residents from the island, similar to what was happening across the Scottish Highlands generally. Through a combination of intimidation and inducement, 22 families were cleared from the Borve crofts on Berneray in mid 1855 and their passage paid to Australia on the sailing ship Royal Albert that docked on 1 December 1855 in Port Adelaide, South Australia, after a four month voyage half way round the world. One of those families was Donald and Effie McCuspie and their four daughters; Flora, Catherine, Marion and Mary. It was obviously a huge, emotionally wrenching time in their lives – they knew when they set out that they would never see Berneray or Scotland again, and their welfare in the New World was far from assured. But it was certainly good for me that they did make the voyage, for had they not, I would never have been born. Donald and Effie were my great-great grandparents and Flora my great-grandmother.

We spent a couple of hours in the Berneray Historical Society rooms housed in the old Nurse’s Cottage. Berneray residents speak Gaelic as well as English and have a strong interest in genealogy. With a few clicks of the keyboard of the Society’s computer, Mrs Wilson (who came to Berneray from England on holiday many years ago, fell in love with the place, and returned to live here) was able to locate information on the McCuspie family, back to the 1600s! And there was now another lead I was also interested to follow. Back at the giant Angus MacAskill museum on the Isle of Skye, Angus’ family tree was displayed and I was intrigued to see on it some names and dates I recognized. With a few more clicks, Mrs Wilson confirmed what I now suspected: Angus and I are cousins! More precisely, Angus MacAskill and Donald McCuspie were first cousins, which makes Angus and me first cousins four times removed. It certainly came as a surprise to learn I was related to the largest ever recorded man in the world, although our shared genes obviously don’t include those that gave Angus his colossal stature. Still, this new knowledge seemed to promise an added measure of future protection from everyday travails, and I thought for a moment about the verbal fisticuffs I sometimes have with a friend when we’re arguing about our different political opinions. “Kristos won’t dare mess with me now” I chuckled as I lumbered out of the cottage, taking care as I imagine all close relatives of giants do, not to hit my head on the top of the door frame as I went out.

We spent a couple of days walking and driving around Berneray to absorb the remote but friendly atmosphere of this charming isle, and to see a few interesting historical sights. Like the standing stone Clach Mhor at the top of Beinn a’Chlaidh, and nearby traces of a temple dating from 1,800 BC, believed to have been used by Sun worshippers. We also located the ruins of Donald and Effie’s house, now just a pile of stones, and the place on Berneray’s south coast where my cousin Angus, the giant MacAskill, was born in 1825. And on Saturday we drove south to see three other islands connected by causeways; North Uist, Benbecula and South Uist. That’s as far as we could go in the Vauxhall – the next most southerly isle is Barra and an ocean ferry is needed to go there.

The Quiraing & Dunvegan, Isle of Skye, Scotland

2011-05-06T14:36:00.000+09:30

We’d yet to see the north of Skye, so we motored through Skye’s largest town, Portree, and on up the Trotternish Peninsula to the coastal village of Staffin. We passed two heavily laden backpackers on foot and stopped to ask them where they were headed. “To the Quiraing”, they said. This is a spectacular rock formation caused by massive landslides millions of years ago – we intended to go there sometime, so we offered to take them now. They were a French couple from Lyon intending to camp and walk in the Quiraing for several days, and they were well-equipped with some very heavy duty cameras and lenses.

We said goodbye in the car park at the top of a long, steep, winding road and set out on our own walk for a couple of hours amongst the fantastic landforms perched high above the ocean. Later, at Kilmuir on the other side of the peninsula, we inspected the memorial to the brave Flora MacDonald who risked her own life in the early 1700s to help Bonnie Prince Charlie escape from the pursuing English, and some old Scottish crofter houses displayed at the interesting Museum of Island Life.

The following day we drove around the Waternish Peninsula, passing Dunvegan Castle, the home of the Chiefs of the MacLeod clan for 800 years. In Dunvegan village we looked through the museum devoted to the life and exploits of Angus MacAskill, the world’s largest recorded healthy, non-obese, man. Angus was born on the island of Berneray in the Outer Hebrides in 1825 and grew into a giant, seven feet nine inches tall, weighing 425 pounds and with a chest measurement of 80 inches. He was extremely strong and his feats of strength became legendary in Cape Breton, Canada, where the family had emigrated when Angus was six years old. In his mid twenties he embarked on a five year theatrical tour throughout North America to display his colossal stature, a venture that made him an affluent man. Although quiet by nature and a devout Presbyterian, Angus enjoyed the occasional tipple and once jokingly walked into a tavern, picked up a 140 gallon whisky barrel, and drank through the bung hole. We ended the day with our own wee dram of single malt at the Talisker distillery near Carbost in central Skye, following an interesting tour of the whisky production process.

Loch Coruisk, Isle of Skye, Scotland

2011-05-05T16:54:00.000+09:30

We came to the beautiful coastal village of Elgol in southern Skye and bought tickets for Misty Isle bound for Loch Coruisk across the bay. While waiting for the boat to arrive we had our regulation picnic lunch in another idyllic spot.

Misty Isle was crewed by father and son team Seamus and Stuart – more polite and proficient service providers you could never hope to meet. Once across the bay we scrambled over the rocks to be greeted with an exquisite view of the Loch framed by the craggy Black Cuillin peaks.

It was an exhilarated group that returned to Misty Isle after an hour of exploring the Loch, and we got under way again for the return voyage just as soon as Seamus and Stuart had dispensed hot tea and shortbread to the passengers, under the watchful gaze of the seals lolling in the sunshine on the rocky outcrops.

Over the Sea to Skye, Scotland

2011-05-04T06:20:00.000+09:30

Speed bonnie boat like a bird on the wing
‘Onward’ the sailors cry.
Carry the lad that’s born to be King
Over the sea to Skye.

Unlike Bonnie Prince Charlie who came over the sea to Skye in a rowboat, it was a Caledonian MacBrayne ocean ferry that brought us over the sea to Skye on Monday. We made an early start from Fort William for the hour’s drive to Mallaig on the coast where we set sail for the famed Isle – a wonderfully scenic, quaint place with winding, single-lane roads punctuated every 100 metres or so with passing turnouts, its hills dotted with attractive bright white Scottish cottages. And sheep. Many sheep. Sheep with white faces and sheep with black faces.

Leaving the ferry terminal at Armadale in south Skye, we were soon greeted by the imposing skyline of the Cuillin Mountains. And with the weather unusually excellent with bright sunshine bathing the blue sky, there would be no better time for walking. So we parked the Vauxhall and set out towards the black peaks in the distance.

Fort William, Scotland

2011-05-03T03:50:00.000+09:30

We reached Fort William in the Scottish Highlands after two overnight stops from London; the first at Kendal in the Lakes District in northern England and the second in the Scottish village of Taynuilt in Argyll District. Fort William is an ideal place to spend a few days – Ben Nevis keeps watch over the town, and there are some great sights close by. We spent Saturday driving along the shore of Loch Ness to Inverness, stopping along the way to see the ruins of Urquhart Castle perched above the water. We made a picnic lunch in an Inverness park and saw a newly married bride and her kilt-clad groom emerge from a church to the strains of loud, melodious bagpipe music. There was no mistaking that we were now in Scotland.

On Sunday we drove through grand, dramatic Glen Coe to the south-east of Fort William, and the smaller but equally impressive Glen Etive. Many hikers and campers were out and about enjoying the sunshine and spectacular scenery. We made a detour around Loch Leven and came across a hard-to-beat picnic spot overlooking the Loch towards the peaks of Glen Coe.

It was all sweetness and light on Sunday, but this place was the site of one of the darker chapters in Scottish history – the infamous February 1692 Massacre of Glencoe. The MacDonald clan had been tardy in swearing allegiance to the English King who, miffed, decided that they needed to be taught a lesson. The Campbells were enlisted to do the dirty deed, and on the morning of the 13th, after enjoying the MacDonald’s hospitality, turned on their hosts after breakfast, murdering 38 and ultimately causing the deaths of others who fled into the wintry hills of Glen Coe. Charming. I wonder how anyone with the surname Campbell fares finding a B&B in these parts today.

The Cotswolds, England

2011-04-29T17:56:00.000+09:30

We left London in our hired Vauxhall, passing Big Ben as we crossed the Thames River. Five minutes later, to our surprise, we found ourselves passing Big Ben again as we crossed the Thames a second time, over the same bridge. And then a third, 15 minutes later! The tension in the car was rising but we didn’t make the same mistake again, and within two hours after jaunts along the M4, M25 & M40, we arrived in the Cotswolds region to the north west of Oxford.

Think English storybook village scenes – think the Cotswolds. Few places on Earth are as beautiful as these timeless centuries-old villages, most of which sport intriguingly quaint names like Chipping Sodbury, Upper Slaughter, The Rissingtons, and Moreton in Marsh.

We checked into the excellent Over the Bridge B&B in the serenest village of them all, Bourton-on-the-Water, through which the shallow River Windrush silently glides to the satisfaction of the local ducks and trout. Fortified the next morning with a large hot English breakfast, we set out to see and stroll in a few of the nearby towns and villages. Our favourites were Chipping Camden, Broadway, Stow on the Wold, Lower Slaughter and Bourton-on-the-Water. But they’re all beautiful, each possessing its own unique character.

We stopped for a late picnic lunch in the characterful graveyard surrounding the 13th century Saint Eadburgha’s Church at Snowshill above Broadway. From there it was a short journey along narrow tree-lined roads back to Bourton, the last of the day’s sun rays flashing between the hedges. But there was no need to look out for kangaroos, and the Vauxhall was more than a match for any pheasant thinking of making a dash.

London, England

2011-04-26T17:14:00.000+09:30

Ah London. Is there a more interesting city anywhere? - we doubt it. And with Will & Kate’s nuptials looming too, who could resist? So we hot-tailed it from Qingdao, stopping en-route for a night or two in Hangzhou and Kuala Lumpur. In London we settled into a hotel in Westminster and began to ready ourselves for the big day. But with time to spare we also took in a few of the sights and experiences of the city. The highlights for us were the eclectic treasures of the Victoria & Albert Museum, the National Gallery, paella and beer for lunch at the Covent Garden Sunday market, strolling around the boating lake in Regent’s Park on a sunny afternoon, and seeing Blood Brothers at the Phoenix in Soho.

Coincidentally it was Easter when we were in London and while this added a lot to the holiday atmosphere across town, there was a downside – many of the shops were closed, with the result that come Monday Lee Tuan still had “nothing to wear” for the big day. And for my part, the prospect of rubbing shoulders with Posh, Thorpedo and Lionel Ritchie was losing its sparkle.

“The wedding’s off!”, we agreed, and headed for Scotland.

Qingdao (Tsingtao), Shandong, China

2011-04-18T19:55:00.000+09:30

We flew to Qingdao for the weekend, mercifully not long before an onshore wind swept in to clear away the thick air pollution that had graced our arrival and left us with sore eyes and throats for a day. A prosperous east coast city between Shanghai and Beijing, Qingdao was the location of the 2008 Olympic Games’ yachting events. But it’s much better known for its colonial German heritage and as the associated birthplace of China’s favourite beer, Tsingtao.

The Germans muscled their way into Tsingtao in 1898 following the killing of two German missionaries in the area, and stayed until World War 1. During their time here they built a substantial German town, many of whose buildings survive today in varying states of repair, and China’s first beer brewery. Modern day Qingdao is pleased with its German heritage and promotes it heavily in its tourism marketing.

We checked into the Oceanwide Elite Hotel on the Qingdao waterfront, next door to the former Prince Heinrich Hotel, and from our 3rd floor window watched hundreds of people walk up and down the Zhan Pier, and at the end, around the Huilan Pavilion whose image appears on the Tsingtao beer bottle.

It was easy to spend a couple of days strolling around the old German quarter, and the newer, modern city centre a few kilometres to the East. Between them are several excellent sandy beaches lapped by clean ocean water, and along the esplanade, wide promenades busy with families out for a walk, a spot of fishing, or to fly their kites.

Feet up in Shanghai, China

2011-04-14T19:23:00.000+09:30

We stayed a week in Hangzhou, then flew on to Guangzhou in Guangdong province in the far south of China for my third and final class this visit. The class was actually held in Qingyuan, a green sub-tropical city 50 km to the north, just above the Pearl River Delta that drains into the South China Sea. Much of the taxi service in Qingyuan is provided by men on motorbikes, so we soon found ourselves criss-crossing the city centre as pillion passengers on bikes weaving adeptly through the traffic, delivering us to Cantonese restaurants much more quickly than would otherwise have been possible. After class one day we visited the “Golden Phoenix”, the new Qingyuan People’s Hospital. It was a huge, modern complex with the latest equipment – the Outpatient Department alone occupied a floor area of five hectares! Another evening the class chartered a multi-deck sightseeing boat to take us all down the Bei Jiang (“North River”) – the anchor was dropped midstream at sunset and we enjoyed a dinner of fish, eel, shrimps, chicken and vegetables, all caught or grown within a stone’s throw of here. At one point we passed under a high, narrow concrete bridge as the 350 km per hour fast train to Wuhan streaked overhead.

While I was teaching in Qingyuan, Lee Tuan took a train to Hong Kong for the weekend to visit her cousin and new baby, and other relatives who had flown in from Singapore for the baby’s one month old “Mua Guek” celebration. We met again at the Guangzhou International Airport on Monday morning, my work now completed, and from there we flew north to Shanghai to take a few days’ rest.

Shanghai was at its best. The sky was unusually blue and bright and the air perfect for walking. Since our previous visit to this most vibrant of Chinese cities, the subway system has been extended to both the Pudong International and Hongqiao Airports. From the latter, where we arrived from Guangzhou, it was only a short 30 minute ride on Subway Line 2 to the West Nanjing Road stop in the city centre, close to the JC Mandarin Hotel where we checked in for a few days. At night we walked along the recently redeveloped Bund, the riverside precinct along the Huangpu River and location of the 2010 Shanghai International Expo. It’s a great place for an after-dark stroll – the Pudong skyscrapers sparkling along the river’s eastern bank, the old restored British colonial-era buildings glowing on the west.

Ningbo, Zhejiang, China

2011-03-30T22:56:00.000+10:30

The Chinese have a penchant for monster civil works projects, like the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze, and the Qinghai to Tibet railway line. And that’s without even mentioning the Great Wall, which I now have. And now there’s another to add to the impressive list, at Ningbo in Zhejiang province near China’s east coast, a couple of hundred kilometres south of Shanghai. There the coastline cuts a long way inland, forming the huge Hangzhou Bay. Previously the large volume of freight traffic moving between Ningbo and Shanghai had to take the tortuously slow journey around the bay, but the Chinese fixed that by building the longest sea bridge in the world, 36 km long, that cuts across the sea and takes two hours off the trip. After a five year construction period during which several large-scale engineering innovations had to be nutted out, the bridge opened in mid 2008, designed to last for a hundred years and to withstand the typhoons that whip the Bay into a wild frenzy in the wet season.

Fortunately it was merely windy when we crossed the bridge today in a circuit from Hangzhou to Ningbo, across the Bay, and then back to Hangzhou. It was my day off before my second teaching stint beginning tomorrow in Hangzhou. My first was last week in Wuxi, in Jiangsu province, about two hours inland from Shanghai. Wuxi is a prosperous city, much of it undergoing redevelopment, and with pleasant lakeside parks and gardens. Pity about the air pollution though. Only a few historical remnants remain, along the “Grand Canal” that once cut across China from Beijing to Hangzhou. Wuxi’s also home to one of China’s largest Buddhist complexes at nearby Lingshan. We’ve never seen such grand Buddhist buildings and structures – though the place has a definite theme park feel to it. But bravely resisting any kitsch makeovers is a 1,400 year old gingko tree near Xiangfu Temple, now propped up by the arboreal equivalent of a walking frame.

When it came time to move on to Hangzhou, that didn’t take long on the shiny fast train we boarded. It scooted along at 340 km per hour.

Tokyo, Japan

2010-11-26T21:58:00.000+10:30

We loved Tokyo. It’s enormous, modern, clean and interesting. It’s actually several cities fused into one giant metropolis, home to 36 million people within its 35,000 square kilometres of urban conurbation.

We arrived Sunday on a bullet train from Hiroshima and checked into the Gracery in the heart of Ginza, one of Tokyo’s quieter and more sedate districts. Nearby Chuo Dori was wall to wall designer stores with more Tiffanies and Hermes than you could poke a credit card at. Not that we did – window shopping was strictly the order of the day here with women’s dresses on sale for a heart-stopping $5,000 each, and more.

The excellent Tokyo subway with a dozen or so intersecting lines is the best means of getting around (under) the city quickly and inexpensively. We spent a week crisscrossing the city to enjoy a few of Tokyo’s sights and experiences.

The controversial Yasakuni war shrine was more interesting than we expected. A memorial to the country’s 2.5 million war dead, including, unfortunately, several nasty war criminals, the shrine grounds also contain a war museum that gives a surprising perspective on Japan’s military battles of the 20th century. It was fascinating but shocking to see and read the degree to which the museum downplays and misrepresents Japan’s actions and behaviour in China and South-East Asia before and during World War II.

More uplifting was the Tokyo National Museum, housing the largest collection of Japanese art in the world, including paintings, potteries, ceramics and textiles. From there we moved on to the Ota Museum at Harajuku to see its stunning collection of exquisite ukiyo-e (wood-block prints), including works by masters of the art such as Hiroshige. Considering how these are made, the fine detail in the images was amazing.

Not far from our hotel, on the edge of Tokyo Bay, is the famous Tsukiji Fish Market, the world’s largest. The wholesale tuna auction begins each morning at an ungodly hour, so we were happy to stroll around the giant complex, dodging the swarms of whizzing forklifts, at around 9 by which time the last of the day’s tuna was being cut up or loaded whole in ice boxes onto trucks. But there’s much more here than just tuna. If it lives in the sea, it’s here for sale.

Shibuya Crossing, a wide-open five road intersection surrounded by blazing high-rise neon similar to New York’s Times Square, is one of Tokyo’s more popular and stunning night views. So we made time to be here after dusk and join the surge of humanity crossing the road when the lights turned green. Shibuya was the setting for the excellent movie Lost in Translation.

And we saw a lot more besides. Overall we were very impressed with Japan. It’s a highly developed, orderly, stylish, and very clean country. The Japanese people we met and spoke with were welcoming, helpful and refined. The world could learn a lot from them.

Mt Fuji, Japan

2010-11-19T20:43:00.000+10:30

A good place in Autumn to view Mt Fuji is the colourful, mountainous Hakone area 80 km west of Tokyo. We took a bullet train out of Tokyo to Odawara, then a mountain train up into the foothills. There we changed again to a smaller train that slowly zigzagged its way up the mountainside, eventually reaching Gora where we made another transfer; to a funicular that climbed even more steeply to Soun-zan. Yet another change of vehicle was required at this point; the Hakone ropeway (gondola) across a steep valley and on up to Owakudani where we disembarked, intending to stop for an hour before taking another gondola ride, followed by a boat ride on Togendai Lake and then a bus trip back to Odawara.

The day started well; the Tokyo morning sky was sunny with plenty of blue when we streaked out of town on the shinkansen. But as we ascended the mountain, the weather deteriorated rapidly and shortly after reaching Owakudani a storm swept in, blanketing the view in all directions with thick cloud, and dumping sleet and snow to the accompaniment of loud thunder claps. Needless to say there was no sight of Mt Fuji. Owakudani is a geothermal area with steam and sulphurous gases seeping from the ground and the occasional boiling water pool. A signboard warns visitors not to tarry near the poisonous gas oozing pools, and another notes that this area “was once covered with tall trees, but now you can find only the species which have been able to survive such things as Volcanic eruption.” Indeed.

Then lightning struck the gondola line.

Unfortunately this disabled the system making forward, or backward, travel impossible. The only way off the mountain was a long winding bus ride but with so many marooned visitors and so few buses, a long wait in a cold, snowy queue was a prerequisite to even getting on a bus. We eventually made our way to lower altitudes where another two trips on the slow mountain train were needed before we finally arrived back at the shinkansen station in Odawara; cold, damp and frustrated at not getting even a glimpse of Mt Fuji.

We sank back into the comfortable chairs of the bullet train and a minute later we were launched into our return streak to Tokyo. As we sped away from Odawara I glanced out the window and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Rising majestically from the plain was the unmistakable profile of . . . . snow-covered Mt Fuji.

YES, MOUNT F. . . . . . FUJI !!!

Nobel Peace Summit, Hiroshima, Japan

2010-11-15T11:16:00.000+10:30

Few physical traces remain of the August 1945 destruction of Hiroshima by atomic bombing. Apart from the bombed-out dome of the former Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, deliberately left as a memorial, the city is totally rebuilt and looks as pleasant and prosperous as any other in Japan. No doubt the mental scars are a different matter.

We arrived in Hiroshima on Friday after our first shinkansen (Japanese bullet train) trip, from Kyoto. It was a pleasant two hour ride; smooth and fast in a clean, comfortable carriage. Ours was a “silence” car, meaning that passengers were not supposed to speak, and certainly not use mobile phones, so as to provide a restful journey for all on board. The train staff were immaculately attired in snappy uniforms and bowed respectfully to all passengers. There wasn’t a speck of litter or scuff mark in the train or on the platforms, and signage inside was clear, and duplicated in Braille (not that we needed the latter although at times it was a case of the blind leading the blind). We disembarked mightily impressed by the bullet train system, and the demonstration that public transport can be a refined, quality experience without trash, grime, graffiti or delay.

In Hiroshima we discovered that coincidentally the city was this weekend hosting the annual Nobel Peace Laureate Summit, the first time this annual Summit was being held outside Europe. So we decided to reschedule our time in Hiroshima and stay for the closing ceremony on Sunday. In the meantime we visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in Peace Park just across the road from our hotel. The museum provides a comprehensive, fairly balanced, and of course inevitably gut-wrenching account of the events leading up to, and the aftermath of the bombing on the morning of 6 August 1945. We strolled around the Park to look at the various other memorials and gave the Peace Bell a good gong as we walked past.

We returned to the Park on Sunday morning for the Peace Summit closing ceremony, hoping to see and hear from some of the Laureates expected to attend, like Lech Walesa, FW De Klerk, Mikhail Gorbachev and the Dalai Lama. It proved to be a “star-studded” cast and we heard from FW De Klerk and the Dalai, amongst others. The speeches were a mix of idealism, inspiration and a call to action. It’s a great pity that those who most need to heed what was said are those least likely to.

While in Hiroshima we also took a ferry to the nearby island of Miyajima, a popular destination with Japanese travellers. It was a pleasant enough place with plenty of Autumn colour about, and wild deer from the nearby forests mingling with the large crowd, seeking, and snatching, morsels to eat.

Kyoto, Japan

2010-11-13T22:53:00.000+10:30

Kyoto was Japan’s capital for several hundred years, and while no longer so, it remains the country’s (and one of the world’s) most culturally rich cities, home to 17 UNESCO World Heritage sites and more than 1,600 Buddhist temples and 400 Shinto shrines.

After meeting up in Osaka with our friend Susan who had arrived from Hong Kong, we took a train to Kyoto where we spent the next three days crisscrossing the city to see as much as possible in the available time. Kyoto is a modern, pleasant city but unlike some other repositories of historical and cultural treasures, its jewels are spread wide throughout the city and surrounds, not concentrated in the central core. As a result it takes some effort to see a range of what Kyoto offers, but it’s worth every minute for Kyoto surely deserves its reputation as Japan’s top tourist destination, receiving a staggering 50 million visitors a year!

We crammed a lot into the three days, including:

* Nijo-jo, the castle built in 1603 as the official Kyoto residence of the shogun Ieyasu;

* Kinkaku-ji, Kyoto’s famed “Golden Pavilion” built in 1397 as a retirement villa for Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu and later converted by his son into a temple;

* An all-day walking tour through the Southern Higashiyama district that took us not only to some great sights, but also to the limits of our endurance. We began after breakfast and it was dusk when we walked wearily from the giant orange gate of the Heian-Jingu shrine to look for a subway station to return to our hotel in north-west Kyoto.

* A picnic lunch followed by a long walk in Arashiyama at the base of Kyoto’s western mountains. The highlights of this day were the beautiful temple of Tenryu-ji surrounded by its 14th century Zen garden, the nearby Arashiyama bamboo groves, and the stunning garden at Okochi Sanso, the former home of a famous Japanese actor of the silent movie era. We all agreed that this was the most exquisite garden we’d seen in the whole of Kyoto, and quite possibly anywhere;

* The Geisha district of Gion, and restaurant strip of Pontocho where each small eatery has its own unique, minimalist but beautiful, Japanese-style entrance.

Most of these places are located in, or surrounded by, magnificent gardens now at their Autumn best. And Kyoto is a shopper’s paradise too with all the brand-name boutiques as well as the large Department stores like Isetan, Daimaru and Takashimaya. The basements of the latter three are packed with fresh, prepared food ready for eating, ideal for travellers on the move. We made several excellent meals from the goodies we collected here on our way “home” after a busy day’s templing (is there such a word? – there is now!).

You could easily spend several weeks in Kyoto exploring its world-class sights, but visitor fatigue would set in long before the list were exhausted. Much better to live here and slowly work your way through the offerings over months or years.

“It’s Saturday again – what World Heritage site should we visit this weekend?” might be a frequently asked question in Kyoto households. What a great city.

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Osaka, Japan

2010-11-08T18:53:00.000+10:30

We steamed out of Busan (and Korea) on Thursday afternoon on the Panstar Dream, bound for Osaka, Japan. The overnight crossing of the Korea Strait was smooth enough, and we berthed in Osaka Harbour at 10.30 am on Friday morning after steaming for several hours along the Japanese coast and passing under some long bridges, including the Akashi-Kaikyo suspension bridge near Kobe.

We had only two days available for Osaka which we spent wandering around the shopping and entertainment districts of Shinsaibashi, Dotombori and Namba. The area is packed with shopping malls that stretch forever, and traditional small Japanese eateries, each with their own unique identity. A novel sight for us was the numerous pachinko parlours; crowded and extremely noisy gaming arcades containing hundreds of machines that appeared to be a cross between a slot poker machine and video game. It looked and sounded like pokies on LSD. The combination of gambling, the incredible din and the flashing lights must be mesmerizing, and addictive. At opening time early in the morning we saw long queues of people waiting to get in. We couldn’t believe the noise level inside and we wondered how the patrons, many of them older people, could tolerate such a din for more than a minute or two. But many seemed to be in there for hours. Pachinko parlours must create a lot of work for Japanese audiologists and ENT doctors (and no doubt gambling therapists too).

On Sunday we took a subway to Yodoyabashi to see the fabulous Museum of Oriental Ceramics near the Osaka Central Public Hall, the latter a handsome building being sketched by numerous artists seated in the park across the road. The oriental ceramics museum houses a large collection of Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Persian ceramic objects varying in age between 300 and 2,000 years. There were some fantastic pieces, including two small objects officially declared as National Treasures of Japan. Unfortunately, by the time I came to these, I had seen a No photography sign and felt compelled to put the camera away. So all I have to show you is an 11th century Song Dynasty celadon ewer.

Busan (Pusan), South Korea

2010-11-04T11:34:00.000+10:30

Holy mackerel! We’ve seen some big seafood markets before but never anything on the scale of the Jagalchi fish market in the harbour city of Busan on South Korea’s south-east coast. Line after line of live, fresh, frozen and dried seafood of every description stretch to the limits of visibility down the gleaming market, and outside in the streets and alleyways the piscatorial extravaganza continues in every direction. How can the people of Busan eat all this seafood?

Mid afternoon yesterday we took a subway to Shinsegae Centum City, Busan’s (and the world’s) biggest shopping complex with nearly six million square feet of floor space. Every brand name boutique is here, along with floor after floor of quality merchandise and entertainment options: cinemas, ice skating rink, spas, a golf driving range, gym, art gallery and restaurants. We spent some time in the dazzling Food Hall bulging (the Hall, not us) with specialty products from the four corners of the globe (if a globe can have four corners). There’s certainly an air of affluence in Busan and South Korea generally.

By sunset we were standing on the sand at Gwangan Beach, one of Busan’s pleasant seaside suburbs, and we watched the coloured lights on the bridge flicker into life as we ate our Australian beef burgers, a welcome change from kimchi. From there it was a dozen or so stops on the subway back to our hotel in downtown Busan. We’ve never seen cleaner subways – we couldn’t spot a speck of litter or scuff mark on the floors.

Down on the waterfront today a woman was hot smoking mackerel on a grill over smouldering charcoal. We ordered two plump fish that melted in our mouths while we watched some older guys with extremely long, tapered, fishing rods flick their baits into the water off the pier just out from our table. Behind them, Busan carried on with its eclectic business.

Hahoe Village, Andong, South Korea

2010-11-01T17:41:00.000+10:30

We took a bus from Seoul to Busan on Korea’s south-east coast, breaking the journey for one night at Andong. The main visitor attraction here is the historical village of Hahoe an hour to the west. Originally established in the 15th century, it still has many remarkably preserved and renovated buildings dating from the Joseon Dynasty period. We passed by the 600 year old zelkova tree and wandered along the paths winding between the residences, admiring the different perspectives, the structures complemented perfectly by the late autumn austerity of the persimmon, quince and pear.

Seoul, South Korea

2010-10-31T23:49:00.000+10:30

Seoul was a pleasant surprise – we didn’t expect such a green, clean, stylish even, pedestrian-friendly city. Sure, it’s a giant, modern metropolis of over 10 million people with high rise for kilometres in every direction, but it manages to make space, and pleasant space at that, for people making their way around the city on foot.

We visited two of Seoul’s old palaces, watching the changing of the guard at one of them, before strolling for an hour in beautiful Secret Garden behind Changdeokgung Palace, now in its full autumn glory. From there we took a subway and bus to Seoul Tower to see millions of twinkling electric lights slowly take over from the sun the task of illuminating the city.

Seoulites have discovered coffee and pastries in a big way – we’ve never seen so many nice coffee shops in a city, and it surely must have more patisseries than Paris. We stayed at a guesthouse in the Hongik University District and ate at Korean cafes in the surrounding streets. But it wasn’t all beef and kimchi - we patronized a nearby bakery more times than we should have, leaving each night with assorted pastries (for tomorrow’s breakfast we told ourselves with little conviction). Hongik has become trendy, particularly with young people, and on weekends it throngs with visitors and reverberates to the sounds of excellent street bands and performers, several of whom we saw oozing X-Factor for the enthusiastic crowds watching. Everyone seemed to be having a great time – Seoulites have obviously reached their own personal accommodations with the craziness and dangers from across the border 60 km to the north, and that was great to see too.

Demilitarized Zone, North/South Korea

2010-10-29T22:39:00.000+10:30

We flew from Beijing to Seoul, South Korea, from where I travelled north to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) to brief the Generals. The DMZ is only 60 km north of Seoul and the highway is lined all the way with multiple coils of razor wire and crossed at several points with mined tank traps that can be detonated at very short notice to block the road to impede an attack from the north. There are also regularly spaced military lookouts and several lines of control on the way; the first is the civilian line of control that marks the end point for free travel by the South Korean general public. Further north the 4 km wide DMZ begins, down the centre of which runs the military demarcation line (MDL) approximately following the 38th parallel and effectively the current border between North and South Korea.

After passing through several security checkpoints manned by South Korean soldiers, we reached Camp Bonifas in the UN Joint Security Area to hear a rapid-fire briefing on the history of the DMZ from a US soldier, before proceeding to the United Nations Military Armistice Commission conference building within the DMZ for a sticky beak around. This room is used for meetings of representatives of North and South Korea, and/or the UN. It was a strange and slightly eerie place. The MDL runs through the middle of the meeting room, bisecting the large polished wooden conference table. Outside, ever since the notorious 1976 axe murder incident, each side must stay on its respective side of the MDL, marked by a concrete strip on the ground. But inside, while the room was “ours”, we were free to move around as we pleased, crossing at will between South Korean and North Korean territory. This was achieved simply by walking around to the other side of the conference table – in this way I made three or four short visits into North Korea. Armed South Korean soldiers manned the doors to prevent anyone defecting to the North (nobody seemed to be contemplating this – most of the group I was with were US ex-army guys) and to prevent anyone entering from the North’s side. We were under strict instructions not to stand too close to the South Korean soldiers in the room who, we were twice warned, were martial arts experts under orders to lash out without warning at anyone approaching too closely. But we were allowed to photograph them.

Outside the room, blue-uniformed South Korean soldiers and brown-uniformed North Korean soldiers stared impassively at each other from their respective sides of the MDL, only a few metres apart. We were permitted to photograph the North side but again were under strict instructions not to stare, gesture, speak or interact in any way with the North Korean soldiers. And of course, definitely not to step across the MDL. A Soviet defector from the North side did just that some time ago and the North Korean soldiers opened fire on him. Several soldiers from both sides were killed in the ensuing fire fight but the defector miraculously survived and eventually found refuge in a third country.

We then moved on to inspect the actual site of the axe murder incident and the Bridge of No Return. The latter was used following the 1953 ceasefire agreement for repatriating prisoners of both sides. Each prisoner was given the choice of crossing the bridge to return to his homeland or to remain where he was. Once made, the decision was irreversible – if he crossed the bridge he could never return.

Our final stop for the day was at Imjingak near the civilian line of control just south of the DMZ. Here, elderly citizens of both the North and South, separated for decades from their relatives on the other side, only recently began to have short reunification meetings with each other. A fence at the nearby Bridge of Freedom is covered with ribbons and messages expressing the pain, hopes and solidarity of people from around the world at the tragedy of separation endured by the people of Korea for the past 60 years, and still with no resolution in sight.

A slightly bizarre day’s experience for a visitor - a lifetime of heartbreak for many Koreans. With that thought in mind I made my own irreversible decision, heading back south to be reunited with my own Dear Leader who had preferred to spend the day shopping in downtown Seoul.

Beijing, China

2010-10-28T21:36:00.000+10:30

A fast overnight train from Nanjing brought us back to Beijing when my class was finished in Kunshan. It was time to relax a bit after the all-day lectures and nightly banquets, and we spent a couple of days walking in central Beijing. The centuries old imperial classical garden in Beihai Park just north of the Forbidden City is worth a few hours, and from there we strolled along the winding paths through the touristy but nice Houhai Lake area and back to our hotel in Dongcheng. Just down the street is Beijing’s famous Guo Jie restaurant strip, almost a kilometre long with hundreds of wall to wall restaurants on both sides of the red-lantern illuminated road. We dined there each night after a wait in a queue to get a table. The wait was worth it - the spicy food was great. The cold has finally come to Beijing and the spruikers outside were dressed in heavy fur coats; inside, the heaters were on full blast to create the environment the Chinese like best – hot. Their winters are much more extreme than Australia’s, and they seem to overcompensate for the cold by generating uncomfortably hot environments inside buildings. At least that’s how it seems to us.

Today we browsed the shops in Wangfujing Mall, Beijing’s premier shopping strip. We were last here a little over a year ago and the fast-growing affluence is plain to see. There’s no better way to get around Beijing than by its fantastic subway system. But claustrophobics would do well to avoid rush hour when the surging crowds almost overwhelm the system. The crush on board the trains has to be seen and felt to be believed. Passengers don’t merely brush against each other; they are pressed hard together in a way that would normally be unthinkable between strangers. And don’t even think about breakdowns or fire in the tunnel.

Kunshan & Zhouzhuang, Jiangsu, China

2010-10-25T23:26:00.000+10:30

After Haerbin it was time to go to work, and we returned on an overnight train to Beijing where I conducted the first of my week-long classes. 70 students from Beijing and surrounds attended, with the class held at the Peking University Hospital. We stayed at the nearby Vision Plaza Hotel built for the 2008 Olympics, and little more distant than a gold medallist’s javelin throw to the “Bird’s Nest” Olympic Stadium.

When the week was over we travelled 1,100 km further south to Kunshan on the Yangtze River delta in Jiangsu province, midway between Shanghai and Suzhou, where my second class was held. Kunshan is a major manufacturing centre and the most prosperous city in China. Companies from 60 countries have set up over 4,000 offices and factories in Kunshan, churning out electronic goods, solar cells, automotive manufactures and a host of other products. 40% of the world’s laptop computers, 20% of its digital cameras, and a significant percentage of its mobile phones are made in Kunshan. And with over 180 research and development centres located in the city, its future seems bright too.

But this is not why my class was held in Kunshan – hairy crabs are the reason for that. Nearby Yangcheng Lake, lit up at night like a mini Las Vegas, is famous for its hairy-legged crab, a delicious crustacean that brings thousands of gourmands to Kunshan each Autumn. This is why my class was held in Kunshan and not in Nanjing as would normally be the case. And judging from the incredible nightly banquets we enjoyed, it seems that my students are every bit as keen gourmands as they are committed doctors.

An hour’s drive from Kunshan are several small ancient “water towns”, complete with cobblestone walkways and arched stone bridges winding along and crossing the canals that flow through. We took the opportunity before the class began to visit one of these, Zhouzhuang. So too did hordes of other visitors on day bus trips from Shanghai.

Siberian Tiger Park, Haerbin, Heilongjiang, China

2010-10-13T00:11:00.000+10:30

The Siberian tiger (also known as the Manchurian tiger) is seriously endangered with only an estimated several hundred surviving in eastern Russia, northern China and North Korea. A significant percentage of these are located at the Manchurian Tiger Park about 10 km north of Haerbin. The stated aim of this sanctuary is to breed and ultimately release tigers back into the wild. No doubt in several respects the practices at this sanctuary might not conform with western ideals of endangered wild species management. Some of the animals are housed in concrete-floored cages with little space to exercise, or apparent opportunity ever to roam more freely. More unsettling to western sensibilities and, one would think, counter to the objective of ultimately releasing animals back into the wild, is the fact that visitors can purchase meat and poke it through the cages to feed the big cats.

On the positive side, a large part of the sanctuary is free-range with many tigers roaming amongst the trees and bushes. We joined a safari in a truck with steel mesh sides to ride through the park and see the big cats up close. And I mean UP CLOSE. Again, visitors were encouraged to buy chunks of meat and poke them through the mesh. The tigers were well-conditioned and leapt and lunged at the truck to take the offerings. They were enormous creatures – standing vertical, their paws could reach on to the roof of the truck. Anyone concentrating too carefully on their photographs, and not enough on the approaching paws, claws and teeth, could easily have lost fingers, and I wondered whether the occasional human hand might end up blended in with the meal. There’s no way we’d ever be allowed to see such animals at such close quarters in an Australian zoo or sanctuary, and while conscious of the undesirable conservation implications of some of what we were seeing, we had to admit that it was a thrilling experience. The tigers’ raw power and feeding vigour left no-one in any doubt that if they were stupid enough to get out of the truck, they’d only have a few seconds left to live. Fortunately, no-one on board did, or for that matter, took up the option of purchasing a live animal and seeing it released into the big cats’ domain. The price of a sheep for this purpose was 600 Yuan, a cow 2,000.

The tigers roamed freely around the sides of the truck and in the surrounding bush, providing great photo opportunities. The setting was a bit Jurassic Park like, with high fences and electrically-operated sliding gates that opened and shut as we toured the park amongst the tigers. There must have been about 200 of them.

Back at park headquarters, we admired the other species of big cats on display here. There were cheetahs, white tigers, leopards, jaguars, and even a few rare ligers, a cross between a male lion and female tiger. It’s a fascinating place, despite its undesirable features.

Haerbin, Heilongjiang province, China

2010-10-12T18:26:00.000+10:30

An overnight 1,000 km journey East on a crowded, cigarette smoke polluted train brought us from Manzhouli to Haerbin, the capital city of Heilongjiang province, part of the region once known as Manchuria. The area is no stranger to foreign influences having been controlled variously over history by China, Russia and Japan. And following the Russian Revolution of 1917, a large number of refugees flooded into Haerbin, giving the city a partly Russian character that it retains today in its historical buildings and Russian shops in the old town centre, now renovated and turned into pleasant pedestrian malls popular with Chinese and Russian tourists.

We strolled at dusk down the long, tree-lined mall on Zhongyang Dajie, and dined at Tatoc, an atmospheric Russian restaurant that opened its doors in Haerbin for the first time in 1901. We had the Bortsch, prawn hotpot, vegetable salad, and Russian sausage pizza with icy cold Haerbin beer. It was all excellent, and well after dark when we tottered up the steps from the Tatoc to take a taxi back to the Wang Jiang Hotel down past Stalin Plaza, but first stopping for a block of Ukrainian chocolate to have later with our coffees (Traveller’s tip: don’t buy Ukrainian chocolate – it’s not good).

Possibly the most impressive historical building in Haerbin is the beautifully restored Russian Orthodox Church of Saint Sophia, originally built in 1907. The unrestored interior houses the Haerbin Architecture Arts Centre, featuring the history of Haerbin in a large display of black and white photographs. We admired the Church from all directions, then sat in the surrounding plaza for half an hour to people-watch and listen to the pleasant Russian orchestral music wafting down on the warm breeze from the loudspeakers mounted in the spires above. As darkness descended we moved on to Tatoc for another excellent dinner, this time ordering the cabbage rolls stuffed with minced pork and the mixed stewed vegetable hotpot.

Haerbin is bounded to the north-west by the wide Songhua River; on the other side is the sprawling, pleasant 3,800 hectare Sun Island Park. We spent Saturday afternoon there, wandering along the paths winding between lawns and trees now sporting their finest autumn colours. We chanced upon a small village of old, authentic Russian cottages, originally the 1950s dachas (summer houses) of Russian businessmen working and living in Haerbin at the time. The river dock was only a short stroll away, and from there we caught a ferry across the Songhua back into central Haerbin. We disembarked in Stalin Park, crowded with visitors strolling along the wide riverside boulevard still decorated with hundreds of fluttering Chinese flags put up for the recent national holiday week celebrations. And from there, with dusk approaching again, it was just around the corner to Tatoc ….

Manzhouli, Inner Mongolia, China

2010-10-08T16:27:00.000+10:30

Tucked away in a far corner of China, 2,000 km north-east of Hohhot, is the booming border town of Manzhouli. 60% of China’s trade with Russia passes through the international border crossing on the outskirts of the city, and it’s here where the Trans Siberian Beijing to Moscow train rumbles across the border every Monday. During “revolutionary” times, the Chinese and Soviet leaders sped through here on their special trains to confer with their comrades and allies across the border.

We went to the crossing yesterday for a look. Just a few more steps would have taken us into Russia, and to the west, we could have fired an arrow into Mongolia. But having neither visas nor an archery set, we had to content ourselves with surveying the brown countryside to the horizon. Trains loaded with Siberian timber chugged into China, and Russian and Chinese visitors passed over the line to browse in each other’s shops. There were many blonde-haired Russians walking on the streets of Manzhouli that has a Russian feel about it and sports much Russian signage.

I soon discovered that if you’re not Chinese here, it’s assumed you are Russian, and many times shop-keepers attempted to strike up a conversation in Russian and were bemused at my inability to respond, except in another strange language.

We took a bus yesterday to the city of Haila’er three hours to the east, and from there a taxi to the Jinzhanghan Grassland, also brown at this time of year. But the sweeping vistas were interesting nevertheless; it would certainly be an impressive sight in the green season. But it was now hay harvesting time, and all around the district farmers were loading dried hay from the plains onto trucks for transport back to villages where it was stored in large piles within fenced compounds.

It was hot during the day but very cold after the sun set when we arrived back in Manzhouli. Russian women strolled along the streets in their thick fur coats and we braced against the chill and made our way once again to the Kopyma (or letters to that effect), an excellent Russian restaurant just around the corner from our hotel. I ordered a bowl of hearty Bortsch, grilled salmon topped with herbs, and pickled cabbage. Lee Tuan had the pea and potato soup, chicken rolls stuffed with mushrooms, and the beet and prune salad. All washed down with hot, unsweetened tea. Then it was time to turn in for the night and sleep, despite the incessant distant noise of the shunting timber trains readying for their long journeys south.

Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China

2010-10-06T23:03:00.000+10:30

We landed in Beijing early Wednesday after an overnight flight from Kuala Lumpur and took a shuttle to the Beijing Railway station where we planned to board a train to Datong in Shanxi province. But we hadn’t counted on the Chinese national holiday week starting the next day. The massive crowd inside the ticket hall didn’t augur well, and after waiting an eternity in a hot queue we learned that every one of the several trains to Datong that day was completely booked out. The attendant told us that more trains were leaving from the Beijing West railway station and possibly we might get tickets for one of those. A taxi trip across Beijing and another long wait in a queue later, the news was even worse. There were no tickets on any of those trains today, or tomorrow, or the day after that! This was not what we wanted to hear, and already hot and jaded, we checked into a hotel near the station to review our plight. Airflights were heavily booked too but that night a few cancellations appeared on the internet and we swooped on two tickets direct to Hohhot on Friday. The time in Beijing passed quickly and late Friday night we touched down in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, bypassing Datong.

Hohhot was founded in the 16th century by Altan Khan, about 300 years after Genghis Khan and his Mongolian calvary unleashed one of the greatest conquests the world has ever seen, subjugating much of Asia, Persia and Eastern Europe. The Chinese finally drove the Mongols out in the 17th century, in the process taking half of the Mongolian homeland too. Today this is the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia (not to be confused with the sovereign country of Mongolia to the north). Little of the Mongolian heritage remains in the Hohhot of today, that is essentially a booming, pleasant-enough Han Chinese city with new construction and renovation going on everywhere. Only a few buildings feature Mongolian-style decoration; the rest are modern concrete and glass high-rise edifices.

We wandered through the impressive Da Zhao temple that features a Buddha figure carved from a single 20 tonne block of Burma jade - the signboard claims that the cassock over the Buddha’s shoulder is inlaid with 41 rubies and 7,000 diamonds. We later took a local bus two hours out of town to the Xilamuren Grassland. Apparently this is vivid green from June to August, but with winter approaching is now drab brown. We hired a couple of small Mongolian horses from one of the great Khan’s descendants and rode along a ridge overlooking the plain. Our horses seemed to be descended from a more genteel line than those ridden by Genghis and his men - only once did we break into a sufficiently fast trot to entertain fleeting thoughts of a second invasion of Hungary.

Port Julia, Yorke Peninsula, South Australia

2010-06-16T11:18:00.000+09:30

A year has flashed by since our enjoyable fishing trip to Eyre Peninsula on South Australia’s far west coast last June and we decided to do it again this year. As before we stayed a few days in a cottage on a sheep station near wild Locks Well and Sheringa beaches, before heading north to Venus Bay. Additionally this year we ended the trip with several days at Port Julia on Yorke Peninsula, closer to Adelaide.

We fished mainly off the ocean surf beaches but also had access to a small dinghy for use in the more sheltered waters of Venus Bay and in St Vincent’s Gulf out from Port Julia. Like last year, the fish didn’t disappoint and we caught plenty of Australian salmon, mullet, tommy ruffs, King George whiting, and a few squid that fell for our prawn-like lures. Lee Tuan also hooked a metre-long shark that we got to the side of the boat and hauled partly out of the water before the line snapped. Winter’s a good time to fish here – the fish are plump and plentiful, and there’s nothing like eating fish fresh from the ocean, on the plate within two or three hours of being caught. But we didn’t have the appetite this year for 15 consecutive fish meals and so we used a fish smoker to preserve some of it for later.

We love fishing - the invigorating sights, sounds and salty smells of the ocean, the strenuous exercise, the fresh air, the excitement of the hunt, and of course the final catch to take back to the kitchen. So much so that we’re now measuring up the garage to see how large a boat we could squeeze in behind the car.

Krabi, Thailand

2010-04-27T16:38:00.014+09:30

What better way to unwind after 10 hectic weeks in India than 10 relaxing days in Thailand. From Calcutta we stopped off for three nights in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia where we caught up with Lee Tuan’s sisters, nieces and nephews, then headed on to Krabi in southern Thailand.

We stayed at Ao Nang Beach and went out on day boat trips to snorkel, swim and sightsee around the small islands lolling in the emerald Andaman Sea. Ao Nang is touristy but still pleasant, not tacky like Phuket across the water has become. For the younger set there’s plenty of nightlife around and even we managed to take in a concert or two. Ever since he fled the USA in the mid 70s, Elvis Presley has been living the quiet life here, doing the occasional gig up and down the coast. We saw him Tuesday night live in concert at The Irish Rover. His voice is as good as ever though it seems he’s been eating too much good Thai food, admittedly a hard trap not to fall into. It’s so fresh, fragrant and fantastic.

We’ve been eating mostly at the roadside food stalls run by Thai Muslims just outside our hotel. The women inside the tiny mobile cooking booths are very skilful, turning out varied excellent dishes in stunningly quick order. When their night’s work is done they pack up and head home on their shiny new motor scooters. Business must be going well. They have a great product - food doesn’t come any better than Thai. And beaches don’t come any better than Maya Bay (setting for the movie "The Beach") on Phi Phi Island, or Phra Nang Cave Beach near Railey Bay.

India through the rear vision mirror

2010-04-18T18:13:00.045+09:30

We saw a lot in 10 weeks in India yet only scratched the surface. It’s a straightforward place for independent travellers to move around (English is widely spoken), though not always comfortable. The weather can be challenging, the local transport rough and ready, and the streets in many places dirty and littered. But these were minor obstacles on the path to a great time.

Indian people are friendly (though too many employed in the tourist industry are ready to blatantly short-change foreigners at the first opportunity), the local food is good, and the variety of sights and experiences is huge. But India obviously faces big challenges in modernizing and lifting millions out of poverty.

Having travelled extensively in China, it surprised us to see how far behind India is in its development. In basic infrastructure such as electric power generation, roads, housing and public transport, China is decades ahead. Why should this be? India has been a relatively stable, independent democracy for over 60 years. The comparison with China provokes uncomfortable thoughts and questions about what form of government is most effective for a financially poor country yet to achieve universal education of its people, during its development phase. In a recent local newspaper article, an Indian journalist referred to “India’s argumentative billion” in analysing why it’s often difficult to achieve unanimity of resolve and action in addressing big nation-building issues. Democracy is wonderful in giving everyone their say, but after all the talk is over, often leaves the tough decisions unmade, and the necessary tough action not taken. Did I just say that? Where’s the soap? But it must be acknowledged that no system is perfect. I certainly don’t envy the people who choose to enter political life in India – they face enormous challenges and complexity in working to improve the lives of the people.

The cows have to go, sadly. Having lived on a dairy farm as a boy, I find something endearing about India’s attitude towards cows. There’s something noble in viewing such large animals on a higher plane than as merely a food source, and allowing them to wander down your street and nuzzle up against the front door of your house, and even go inside the waiting hall of the train station if that is their want. But the public health issues override all these sentiments. Large piles of fly-breeding animal manure caked onto the streets and animal to human transmission of disease are simply inconsistent with modern, healthy living conditions. Cows belong on grass, not bitumen. It was sad to see such revered animals foraging through village and city garbage piles, inevitably ingesting plastic waste that must cause distress and worse later. Of course, with cows so closely associated with religious belief, any change to the status quo won’t be straightforward. By comparison, putting a huge dent in the world’s largest population of stray dogs should be a simpler exercise.

Of course these are just the superficial musings of a first-time short-term visitor to India. It’s certainly a country that makes you sit up and think. No doubt there are more pressing long-term priorities not immediately in the face of the visitor, like education and employment, housing, securing the government revenues needed to fund services, and national security. When you do stop to think about it, you realize what a massive job India’s government has on its plate, and how everything seen in India needs to be considered with that in mind. Maybe the cows and stray dogs can stay on for a bit longer yet.

Incredible India. It’s certainly that, in many ways. If you’re planning or thinking of a visit to India, here are three useful websites:

Lonely Planet India Forum Good for general info and getting fast, up to date answers to your questions.
AirAsia An excellent low-cost airline that flies all over Asia, with connections to Europe, Australia and multiple destinations in India.
Cleartrip A reliable, professional Indian website for online booking of train tickets, hotels and internal flights. We booked all our India train tickets on Cleartrip – their service was flawless. And very convenient too - just print out the ticket from your computer and turn up at the station - no need to stand in long queues at the station ticket office. But book well ahead if you can; Indian trains often sell out weeks in advance.

Calcutta (Kolkata), West Bengal, India

2010-04-15T13:02:00.001+09:30

The former capital of British India, Calcutta (now Kolkata) was once in the minds of many foreigners synonymous with poverty and squalor. This is an outdated notion – the educated locals have long resented this one-dimensional view of their city that they regard as the intellectual and cultural capital of the nation. Certainly there’s still plenty of poverty here, as a walk past the babies and their parent/s sleeping on hessian bags under plastic sheeting slung up over the footpath and garbage piles startlingly show. But most of Calcutta is not like that. It’s a developing city with an increasingly modern skyline, home to a growing middle-class.

The current-day capital of West Bengal state, Calcutta has a fine collection of British-era colonial buildings; perhaps the most grand is the memorial to Queen Victoria completed in 1921. We spent some time strolling in and around this huge white marble edifice, examining the historical information, photos and paintings inside. But the foul weather took its toll, extinguishing our enthusiasm to see other nearby colonial buildings. Instead we returned via the Calcutta subway to our hotel, sagging and soaking wet with sweat and waited until the evening before venturing out again. Weather doesn’t come much worse than 40 degrees C with 90% humidity.

Some of Calcutta’s facilities look to be frozen in a time warp and it's this that makes the city such a fascinating place for visitors. Firemen on their trucks cleared a path by energetically clanging by hand big bells mounted high on the engine. This was quite an achievement considering the cacophony of horn honking by the other vehicles, a large percentage of which are decades-old yellow Austin Ambassador Classic taxis. And Calcutta is the only place we’ve seen where the original style large-wheeled rickshaws pulled by wiry men on foot still ply their trade up and down the streets.

Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India

2010-04-11T15:07:00.016+09:30

Varanasi has a known history stretching back to 1400 BC but the city has been destroyed by invaders then rebuilt several times over the centuries. Our guidebook describes Varanasi as the beating heart of the Hindu universe. Pilgrims flock to the Ghats (steps leading down to the water) that line the Ganges River flowing through the old city centre. For Hindus, the Ganges is the River of Salvation, an auspicious place to bathe, to pray, to die and to be cremated.

It was blistering hot when we arrived on Friday – 44C and the 22nd consecutive day in Varanasi over 40. Varanasi’s electricity supply system is terrible and so there was no relying on air conditioning to stay cool indoors. At sunset we shared a rowboat on the Ganges with a woman from Switzerland. The boatman took us close to the many Ghats lining the river, including two “burning Ghats” used for public cremations. A large stack of dry wood provides the fuel and the family selects the pieces to be used – sandalwood is the most prized and the most expensive. The body, wrapped in white cloth, is carried down to the water’s edge on a stretcher and the wood placed under and around, then ignited. As we drifted past, the combination of the baking hot air and tinder dry wood produced fierce fires that did their job well in the several blazing pyres we saw on the riverbank. After dark we tied up with hundreds of other boats, and along with thousands of people standing on the Ghat steps, watched the nightly Hindu fire and music ceremony performed on the river’s edge.

We repeated the boat trip at dawn – the main activity now was bathing and clothes washing. Hundreds of people bathed then frolicked for awhile in the refreshing Ganges water before emerging to face the wearying heat of another day. We left our boat and walked back to the main road through the maze of narrow winding alleyways above the Ghats. Concentration was needed here – cattle and stray dogs, some of the latter a little too territorial for our liking, roamed the alleyways. They and other creatures also spread an assortment of manures on the ground, making it best to glance down at every step.

Despite its minor challenges, Varanasi is a unique, atmospheric place to visit. There’s no pretence here – life, and death, are laid bare. And that can only be a healthy thing.

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Good Shepherd Agricultural Mission, Banbassa, Uttarakhand, India

2010-04-08T03:08:00.002+09:30

Our train pulled out of Amritsar Station at 2.30 am Friday morning, eight hours behind schedule. It was the beginning of a long day’s travel – the sun rose then set before we finally arrived in eastern Uttarakhand at the small town of Banbassa on India’s border with Nepal.

Banbassa is located in fertile, flat country only about 150 km south of Tibet. In between are several mountain peaks well over 20,000 feet in altitude, including giant Nanda Devi at 26,400 feet. A kilometre south of Banbassa is the Good Shepherd Agricultural Mission, established in 1948 and managed by the Shipway family from Tasmania, Australia, who have devoted their lives to this undertaking. The Good Shepherd was our destination - we had come to visit our nephew Brad and his wife Miriam who have been working here as volunteers for the past several months. Over 100 orphans and otherwise destitute children are housed, fed, cared for and educated in a happy, supportive environment. They range in age from babies to young adults. Also on the property is a separate, new hostel for people with leprosy.

The Orphanage is partially self-supporting from dairy and cropping activities on its 60 acres of land, and a further 50 acres on short-term lease from the Government. But the centre is cash-strapped and relies heavily on donations from supporters – the expenditure of every Rupee is agonized over. We were impressed with the happy and friendly demeanour of the children living here – they are obviously loved and well cared for. It was clear to us that this is a cause well worth supporting. Here’s how anyone can.

We spent three days experiencing life at the Orphanage with the children, staff and the several international volunteers currently on-site. On Wednesday we accompanied Orphanage Director Rick to the leased 50 acre jungle plot, currently planted to wheat. It’s not kangaroos that raid the crops here, but wild elephants. The journey took us across almost-dry river beds and through small tribal villages. Rick assured us that the gunfire in the jungle was from Indian soldiers exercising, not something more sinister. We later drove to the India/Nepal border crossing and looked across to Nepal. Along the road from Banbassa, rows of heavily-laden Nepalis on foot slowly made their way back home after several months’ labouring in India. The border crossing is adjacent to an impressive hydroelectric-related river barrage built by the British in the late 1920s, and still operating. Unfortunately photography is not permitted in the border area.

Back at the Orphanage Lee Tuan did some cooking for the staff and volunteers, conjuring up Australian pasties, curries and apple pies. Her two assistant kitchen boys were me and a very smart young Orphanage boy Sonny who we predict will one day be an accomplished chef (if he’s not the CEO of a national telco). We bought the ingredients from the markets in Banbassa, a ramshackle but well-stocked town. Coincidentally it was Brad’s birthday when we were at The Good Shepherd, and Miriam too bought supplies from Banbassa, then cooked up a storm of butter chicken, vegetables and rice for the birthday celebrations. And ice creams for all the kids. Needless to say everyone was appreciative as Orphanage finances normally dictate a basic vegetarian diet only, with any frills a rare luxury.

Amritsar, Punjab, India

2010-04-04T19:42:00.015+09:30

Punjab in India’s north-west is home to the Sikhs who comprise a surprisingly low 2% of the Indian population. The city of Amritsar just short of the border with Pakistan is a major pilgrimage centre for Sikhs, containing the fabulous Sikh Golden Temple of Amritsar, one of the greatest sights in India. We strolled around the perimeter of the lake containing the Temple in the evening when it shimmered watery golden, and again in the morning. Relaxing Sikh religious music reverberated non-stop around the perimeter walls while thousands of pilgrims kneeled towards the temple and bathed in the cool surrounding waters.

Adjacent to the huge temple complex is Jallianwala Bagh, site of an infamous massacre by British troops in 1919. In response to recently-proclaimed repressive legislation, Indians staged public protests all over the country, including here at Jallianwala Bagh. In a moment of madness, exasperated British General Dyer ordered his troops to open fire on unarmed protesters, several hundred of whom were murdered on the spot. Bullet marks are still visible in the surrounding walls, as is the deep well into which many people jumped in a futile attempt to save their own lives.

On Wednesday night we took a taxi to the nearby Attari-Wagah border crossing with Pakistan to see the nightly border closing ceremony that takes place under the watchful gaze of heavily armed soldiers on both sides. Lahore in Pakistan is just 30 km from this crossing, closer than our return journey to Amritsar. There were many thousands of exuberant, dancing Indians on the Indian side, and a lesser number of much more restrained Pakistanis on the Pakistani side. The ceremony itself was very theatrical with over-the-top marching, shouting and singing, but the crowd on both sides loved it. Then the border gates slammed shut for the night.

Amritsar itself is a pleasant city – it seems more affluent, cleaner and better developed than other parts of India and the food is excellent, particularly fish, surprisingly. Punjab has five large rivers that water the fertile countryside, making this region one of India’s principal breadbaskets.

Kumbh Mela, Haridwar, Uttarakhand, India

2010-03-31T02:12:00.007+10:30

The Hindu Kumbh Mela is the largest religious gathering in the world, attracting millions of pilgrims. Devotees from all branches of Hinduism, including wandering Naga sadhus (naked spiritual men) gather for religious observances and to bathe in sacred river waters. In 2010 the event is held at Haridwar, Uttarakhand, where the waters of the sacred Ganges River first emerge from the Himalayas onto the Indian plain.

As our time in India coincided with the 2010 Kumbh Mela, we decided to adjust our itinerary to be in in Haridwar on one of this year’s auspicious Ganges bathing dates, 30 March. The railway station and town were packed with people and we struggled through the crowds to find an auto-rickshaw to take us to our hotel. This was a hot, tiring job – for once the demand-supply equation was very much in favour of the auto-rickshaw wallahs.

We spent most of our time in the vicinity of the Har-Ki-Pairi Ghat on the edge of the Ganges canal that flows fast through the town. Mesh barriers have been installed to prevent pilgrims being swept away. There was a short riverside religious service at sunset – the atmosphere was electric with tens of thousands of people caught up in the excitement of the moment. Small baskets of flowers illuminated with candles were then released onto the Ganges. Lee Tuan released one, hoping it might reach Calcutta several hundred kilometres downstream. But a nearby woman emerging from the Ganges shook her hair and the water extinguished the candle and sank the basket, barely a metre from its launching point. An appropriate metaphor for the lottery of life we thought. There were only a few ash-smeared Naga sadhus around – their big day is in mid April. There was nothing tacky or sleazy in their clotheless ambulations; even so it was a novel experience to encounter totally naked men on the road.

On Monday we travelled north of Haridwar to Rishikesh, self-proclaimed yoga capital of the world. It was here where the Beatles came in the late 60s to spend time with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and to write the music for their White Album. We ourselves came to Rishikesh seeking not spiritual enlightenment, but roast chicken. Being a holy city, Haridwar is strictly a no meat, no alcohol place. We were hankering for some chicken and our guidebook referred to a cafe in Rishikesh that served it. In the event we never found it, making do instead with a filling eggplant pizza that we ate while overlooking the Ganges sweeping around into view from the steeply-rising hills to the north.

The return transport to Haridwar was at a premium, and seated passengers were required to have others sit on their lap. We were fortunate to have a seat and made our laps available to a pleasant older Rajasthani man. When it came time to leave Haridwar, it was a real trial getting back to the main railway station. The town had been sectioned off and the through roads closed. We ended up catching a train from Haridwar to Haridwar, ie from a station on one side of town to the other. It took nearly three hours to cover the five kilometres but we made it to the main station in time to catch our next overnight train, this one west to the land of the Sikhs, Punjab.

Old Delhi / New Delhi, India

2010-03-26T21:43:00.016+10:30

We saw little of Delhi in our first two days here as we were indisposed with stomach upsets, the first in two months in India. But as soon as the diarrhoea abated, we dosed ourselves with Gastro Stop and gingerly headed out into the heat. Old Delhi was a shrill melee of people, bikes and vehicles swarming along grimy, dusty, smelly streets and side alleys. But everything’s relative and we found the occasional head-jerking jolt of stale urine preferable to the pervasive sickly sulphurous air of Agra.

The fruits for sale in the Central Bazaar were fresh and excellent and we later returned to our room at Express 66 with grapes, oranges, mangoes and lemons that all helped in our rehydration. Lee Tuan carries in her pack a small plastic orange juicer that’s worth its weight in saffron. All over India we’ve had freshly squeezed orange juice every morning and refreshing lemon sodas in the afternoon, the latter simply made from the juice of a lemon or lime with added soda water. The perfect drink for a hot day. The locals add sugar and/or salt but we prefer it plain.

We took auto-rickshaws to see some of the sights around town. Having had our fill of forts and mosques in recent weeks, we zoomed past the imposing early 17th century sandstone Red Fort and Jama Masjid, and stopped for an hour at the National Gandhi Museum, a tribute to the life of the Father of India, Mahatma Gandhi. Mahatma was a small man in physical stature but a moral giant.

We visited the world heritage listed Tomb of Humayun, son of Babur, the first Mughal Emperor of India and descendant of Genghis Khan. Our guide book describes this tomb, the first example of Persian influence in Indian architecture, as the most sublime sight in Delhi. Whether or not this is true we cannot say, but it is certainly much less sublime than the Taj Mahal and “Baby Taj” in Agra, both later refinements of the Humayun architectural style.

We ended our sightseeing in Connaught Place in the New Delhi city centre where we stumbled upon a western-style bakery stocked with Danishes, cookies and classy chocolates. Still a little weak from the stomach upset, these seemed exactly the sort of nourishments one should be having to replenish vital energy reserves. So we chose a selection, perhaps wider than was strictly necessary, and returned to Express 66 to pack our bags for tomorrow morning’s dawn train departure north, to see the largest religious gathering in the world.

Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India

2010-03-23T14:16:00.003+10:30

Agra in Uttar Pradesh is a polluted city with an unreliable electricity supply system. But visitors still flock to the city in their hundreds of thousands every year, for Agra has several fabulous tourist sights, the legacy of the Mughal Empire centred here in the 16th and 17th centuries.

“A teardrop on the cheek of eternity” was how one besotted visitor described Agra’s No. 1 tourist drawcard, the Taj Mahal. Many others have simply claimed it to be the most beautiful building in the world. The Taj was built by Shah Jahan as a memorial to his second wife Mumtaz Mahal who died giving birth to their 14th child, and was completed in 1653. The 20,000 builders and artisans who toiled on the project set up home immediately south of the mausoleum, creating the congested maze of alleyways known as Taj Ganj, now a popular backpacker haunt.

We stayed at the Kamal Hotel in Taj Ganj and dined just the once in their rooftop restaurant, the strangely named Stuff Makers. As it turned out though, it was a fairly accurate description of what’s served up here. Several of the small hotels in the surrounding alleyways also have incredible views of the Taj Mahal from their rooftop cafes, and are packed with visitors at sunset.

We were at the south entrance of the Taj before sunrise on Sunday, hoping to beat the hordes of visitors who would come later. The air looked romantically misty, but this was due to air pollution, not water vapour. Along with a few hundred others we admired the edifice from a distance before going inside the mausoleum itself. It’s certainly a very beautiful, elegant building that lives up to all the hype. Something we hadn’t thought about or expected, though, was just how close the Taj is to the surrounding ramshackle buildings that are anything but beautiful or elegant. The Taj is a swan pressed up against ugly ducklings.

Sadly for Shah Jahan, the Taj Mahal had been completed for only a short time before he was overthrown by his treacherous son and imprisoned in nearby Agra Fort where he died eight years later. His body was then moved to the Taj, next to his late wife.

We had a look around the huge Agra Fort and the very beautiful “Little Taj”, the mausoleum of a Persian nobleman who held a senior position in the Mughal government of the time, and who was the grandfather of the woman in whose memory the Taj Mahal was built. On Monday we hired a taxi to take us to the abandoned fortified city of Fatehpur Sikri about an hour to the west. This was built in the late 1500s and was intended to be the new capital of the Mughal Empire. But severe water supply problems caused it to be abandoned after a few years. The buildings and courtyards are massive and still in very good condition, and to wander through and around them is an atmospheric experience.

Three nights in Agra were enough for us. We’d seen the main sights, and the stifling heat and slightly nauseating sulphurous air pollution were getting to us. And the dozen or more electricity supply breakdowns daily were becoming very irritating. So we boarded a dawn train and headed for Delhi.

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Jaisalmer & Jaipur, Rajasthan, India

2010-03-20T03:24:00.001+10:30

Jaisalmer in the far west of Rajasthan was established in 1156 on the camel train routes between India and central Asia. The city accumulated great wealth, the legacy of which can still be seen today in the few remaining haveli (mansions) built by successful merchants, carved from sandstone and wood.

But otherwise, modern-day Jaisalmer retains little of its former wealth and opulence. Its streets are dirty, covered with baked-on cow manure, grime and litter. Like the other sizeable Rajasthani cities, Jaisalmer was originally located within the walls of an impressive fort containing the Maharaja’s palace. And Jaisalmer’s golden sandcastle-like stone fort is certainly impressive. It’s also perhaps the world’s only existing living fort, with more than a thousand people residing inside, these days catering mainly to the tourist trade.

We came to Jaisalmer on an overnight train from Jodhpur and poked our noses out when the desert heat wasn’t too fierce to inspect the Fort and the former palace and Jain temples within. We took an auto-rickshaw to see a few of the city’s haveli and to admire their magnificent, intricately-carved facades. Late Wednesday afternoon we shared a car with a German visitor and his guide to the village of Sam in the Great Thar Desert about 40 km from Jaisalmer. Manfred first came to India 31 years ago, fell in love with the country, and has returned every year since for several weeks during the German winter. At Sam we hired camels and headed out over the dunes towards Pakistan not far over the horizon. But we got only as far as the sunset before turning our ships of the desert and retracing our steps back to Jaisalmer.

On Thursday we took an overnight train to Jaipur, Rajasthan’s capital. Compared with the other Rajasthani cities we’d seen, Jaipur seemed to have little to recommend it. But we did take an early morning auto-rickshaw to see the imposing Amber Fort about 13 km out of town. By now we’d had our fill of forts and Maharajas’ palaces, and with some different sights in mind, we boarded an afternoon bus on Saturday, eventually leaving colourful Rajasthan behind us.

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Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India

2010-03-17T02:03:00.002+10:30

The blue, western Rajasthani city of Jodhpur (yes, the birthplace of jodhpurs), is presided over by the astonishing 16th century Mehrangarh Fort. Still run by the descendants of the Maharaja of Jodhpur, the soaring Fort and palaces within it are now an awe-inspiring world-class museum.

In its heyday the rulers put beauty on an equal footing with functionality, clearly evident in the architecture, furniture and equipment throughout the massive complex. But it wasn’t all about sweetness and aesthetics back then – far from it. When the perceived need arose, the former Maharajas and their clans were capable of great courage, and viciousness too. Surrender wasn’t considered an option and when defeat and death in battle were inevitable, the wives and daughters would suicide on a funeral pyre then await their men in paradise. Next morning the men would charge out on their steeds to face certain death, taking as many of the enemy as possible with them. (But wouldn’t it be a real bummer if they awoke in the morning to discover that the enemy had made a surprise retreat overnight? - presumably this never happened though.)

We spent a few hours in fantastic Mehrangarh admiring the building and contents, and great views over the city. Along with the fascinating and beautiful palace exhibits there was a large weapon collection, including a nasty looking knife/scissor thing that the audio guide said would spring open when plunged into an enemy, “shredding the innards”. A nearby signboard stated that “Maharaja Man Singh once organized a shikaar (hunting party) near Nagaur. A tent was set up, and a durrie spread out. His guests were invited to sit and dine with him. Little did they know that underneath the durrie, gunpowder had been laid. After some time Maharaja Man Singh got up and withdrew. This was the signal to ignite the gunpowder, and the durrie was blown up, killing all the guests whom the Maharaja regarded as a personal threat.” Hmmm. The new ideas we’ve picked up for entertaining guests aren’t confined to the recipes Lee Tuan learned at her Indian cooking class in Cochin. Dinner anyone?

We also spent some time strolling around the nearby Jaswant Thada, a domed marble memorial to Maharaja Jaswant Singh II, and caught an auto-rickshaw out of town to the Umaid Bhawan Palace, now largely a luxury hotel. This huge edifice was begun as a job-creation project during a prolonged drought. 3,000 workers toiled for 15 years to complete it.

All this sightseeing required fuelling by great Indian food which we enjoyed on the roof-top terrace of the Krishna Prakash Haveli Hotel in the shadows of the Mehrangarh walls towering ominously above. But we checked under the durrie before the waiter came to take our order.

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Ranakpur & Kumbalgarh, Rajasthan, India

2010-03-15T03:37:00.002+10:30

About 90 km north of Udaipur are the small towns of Ranakpur and Kumbalgarh, each with a fabulous visitor attraction. Towering over Kumbalgarh at 4,000 feet in the Aravalli Hills is the giant stone fort built by Maharana Kumba in the early 1400s. It was only ever taken by an enemy once in its history, and then only for two days. The fort walls stretch for 36 km and enclose 360 temples and 700 cannon bunkers. We climbed in the fierce heat to the top of the fort, a forbidding wind-swept place, and looked out over the equally forbidding parched countryside.

The nearby town of Ranakpur has an incredible Jain temple, also built in the early 1400s. We’ve seen many temples before on our travels but never one more beautiful than this. Carved entirely from milky white marble, the temple has 29 halls supported by 1,444 pillars, each unique. The roofs, walls and pillars are all adorned with intricate, exquisite marble sculptures and carvings.

Along the way we stopped to inspect a simple, ingenious method used to raise water from wells to the surface. A team of two bullocks directed by a man sitting behind walked continuously in a circle, turning a horizontal metal wheel which drove a vertical conveyor of buckets that scooped water from below and delivered it to a sluice at ground level. We passed several of these contraptions during the day, and also roadside village wells where women filled large metal containers with water and put them on their heads for the long, hot walk home. Our own journey was much easier. We had hired a car with driver to take us from Udaipur to Jodhpur via Ranakpur and Kumbalgarh. We set off from Udaipur at 8.30 am and reached Jodhpur as the sun was setting on another baking hot Rajasthani day.

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Udaipur, Rajasthan, India

2010-03-14T15:16:00.001+10:30

Udaipur in Rajasthan is widely claimed to be India’s most romantic city. It surely looks romantic with its elegant, ornately turreted buildings, and fairytale palaces and hotels seemingly floating on the glassy calm waters of Lake Pichola.

Our stay here proved to be a cultural as well as sightseeing experience. On Thursday night at the Bagore-Ki-Haveli we attended an authentic Rajasthani dance performance along with Rajasthani puppetry. To my surprise, the latter was excellent and the whole show was great. The following night we continued to indulge in fine culture, attending a guesthouse roof-top screening of James Bond’s Octopussy.

Now I know what you’re thinking – Agent 007 and Rajasthani folk dancers make unlikely bedfellows indeed. But surprisingly, there is a close link. Udaipur itself, for Octopussy was filmed here, utilizing the magnificent palaces, local auto-rickshaws souped up to enable them to do wheel stands as they roared around the narrow, winding alleyways, and the brooding mountain-top Monsoon Palace across the valley to the west. Octopussy turned out to be a very silly show, one of the worst Bond movies, but it was fun picking out the local Udaipur landmarks and seeing auto-rickshaws move as we’ve never seen them move before (and dreading the thought of ever being in one moving like that). Nearly every guesthouse screens Octopussy – every night!

We took a boat ride on Lake Pichola to see up close the mirage-like luxury Lake Palace Hotel, originally the 18th century home of Maharaja Jagat Singh II. Further down the lake, on Jagmandir Island, is another former Palace, this one now used as a function centre and tourist boat stop-over point. Returning to shore we inspected the soaring City Palace, Rajasthan’s largest, and former home to 22 Maharajas over the centuries, but now a labyrinthine museum. Our day ended with dinner at the Whistling Teal, the first restaurant we’ve ever seen with a large cattle grate at the entrance to prevent unwelcome bovines wandering in. We scampered across, chose a candle-lit table overlooking the lush courtyard lawn, and after studying the menu we ordered the Murg Masala, Rajasthani Dahl and Palak Ki Sabzi.

Udaipur, Rajasthan. What a great place.

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Mumbai (Bombay), Maharashstra, India

2010-03-11T15:56:00.001+10:30

Ah Mumbai. What a pleasant surprise. Yes, it’s a giant city of 16 million people, most of whom live in shanty-town suburbs, but central Bombay is a pleasant leafy place with wide, tree-lined boulevards lined with grand historical buildings. We arrived at the Victoria Railway Station at dawn from Goa and checked into Cowie’s Hotel at Colaba, a stone’s throw from the Gateway of India Arch overlooking Mumbai Harbour. Like the Arch itself, there are many fine British colonial-era buildings in the vicinity and we did a self-guided walking tour to see some of them.

In the following days we went further afield, past Chowpatty Beach to the Hanging Gardens near the up-market suburb of Malabar Hills, and through the winding alleyways of Kotachiwadi and nearby huge Crawford Market. At one point along the way we stopped for samosas and lime sodas and chatted with a young man on his way to work as a diamond cutter and polisher.

We took trains out to the northern suburbs of Dadar and Bandra, passing a Small Claims Court apparently just adjourned for lunch. An argument of lawyers in their court finery milled nearby and some spruiked for new business. One approached us and asked if we had any legal enquiries. Actually we did have an enquiry to address to a lawyer but not one of a legal nature. Lawyers and Lunch – two words as natural bedfellows as horse and carriage, or duck and water. We asked the lawyer where we might find a nice restaurant and he pointed the way to go. It was sound advice. Several of his colleagues were already ensconced there enjoying the excellent food, as we too soon were.

Mumbai harbour contains several islands – we took a boat ride about an hour offshore to Elephanta Island containing World Heritage listed 500 AD rock-cut cave temples. One six metre high, triple-headed Hindu sculpture was very impressive. The rest of the site was distinctly underwhelming, leaving us doubting whether it justified its place on the Register.

The dhobi ghat (clothes washing place) at Mahalaxmi is Mumbai’s biggest with over 1,000 washing and rinsing troughs. Thousands of kilograms of soiled clothing and linen are brought here every day from across the city for hand washing and open air drying. If you’ve stayed in Mumbai and used your hotel’s laundry service, it’s very likely your clothes have been out to Dhobi Ghat while you were sleeping or enjoying the sights elsewhere. But Dhobi Ghat is quite a sight in itself, with long wooden trolleys loaded with bulging clothes and linen bags being hauled about, soaked workers around and in the troughs pounding and swinging the wet items, and giant open air clothes lines. We strolled through the adjacent dirt alleyways, stopping at a stall for a drink. The shopkeeper was a young man who told us about the place, ending by exclaiming “This place is a slum!” He said this in a factual, not pejorative tone, and all I could think of in reply was “And a very nice one too.” And it was too, in its own way. Of course it would be much better if there were no slums, but I have to say that we have never met such friendly and outwardly happy children as those we met that morning.

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Goa, India

2010-03-07T00:14:00.002+10:30

Our overnight bus ride from Hampi ended an hour before dawn in Panjim, the principal city in Goa on India’s west coast. With a few days at a nice beach in mind we caught an auto-rickshaw to Calangute, arriving there as the first light of day was licking the faces of the stray dogs. But the apocalyptic scene that greeted us was not what we had in mind. Acrid smoke curled up in the half-light from the fires smouldering in damp trash piles on the street, fouling the air, while dogs, cows and ravens feasted on garbage. And the ground was blanketed with more litter than we’ve ever seen. We couldn’t get out of Calangute fast enough.

Two local buses and 40 minutes later we found ourselves at Vagator Beach further up the coast. This was more like it. Fresh air, nice sand, swaying palms. We stayed for a couple of days, enjoying the beach, great Goan food, and walking around the village. There were many overseas visitors – nubile Norwegians, frisky French, buxom Belgians. And us two. I dropped my towel apparently casually on the beach sand but in truth its position was carefully calibrated to be out of reach of the waves while still close enough so that I could hold my stomach in until I was safely in the warm embrace of the Arabian Sea. The water was clear and clean, and the temperature perfect.

From Vagator we moved on to Panjim to see what remains today of the centuries-long occupation of Goa by the Portuguese. This seems to consist mainly of impressive churches and a few fort ruins. We inspected the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi and adjacent museum that contains amongst many other things large portraits of the Portuguese Governors and a great wooden carving of Mother Mary. Nearby is the Basilica Bom Jesus that contains in a glass sided coffin the body of St Francis Xavier. Francis came to Goa in 1541 with a mission to tone down the lifestyles of the Portuguese colonials, considered much too sinful by the old religious movers and shakers back in Lisbon. At the time Goa was booming, the “Rome of the East”, with a population larger than that of Lisbon or London.

We walked down to the river, passing through the Viceroy Arch topped with a small statue of Vasco da Gama, built to commemorate the initial Portuguese conquest of Goa.

Yesterday evening we boarded an overnight train to continue our northward journey. While waiting for the train to arrive, 27 year old Helga B…… and her 28 year old husband Christopher M…… walked past. We didn’t speak to them at all but deduced their details from the quirky booking procedure used nationwide. An hour or two before a train arrives, a sheet containing the full name, gender, age, booking class, carriage and berth number for each passenger is put up at the station. As passengers must board quickly within the very short time period the train is stopped at the station, it’s essential to be standing at the correct position when the train arrives. There wouldn’t be time to run several hundred metres along the platform with luggage after the train pulls in. Station signage and a posted train plan enable passengers to stand at exactly the right spot.

Using this info, it’s possible to accurately identify several of the passengers (as we ourselves would easily have been identifiable by others). In this way I amused myself while waiting for our train to come. For their part, friendly stray dogs amused themselves by trotting up and down the platform with me. They seemed to be enjoying my company - much more than I was enjoying theirs. The last thing I wanted was for any of them to lick my legs (not having had rabies shots), so I had to keep a close eye on them all which somewhat degraded my concentration on identifying the passengers. I’m quite confident though that it was Boris Y… aged 64, probably from Russia, standing over there at Coach position 24 chatting to Yvette N… aged 61. Boris didn’t hold his age at all well I thought – he looked more like a man in his mid 70s. Too much Vodka or cigarettes I gratuitously presumed. Probably both. Can you imagine the lather privacy advocates in some other places would work themselves into if such a system was mooted for their platforms? But everyone seems to take it in their stride here – part of the lower need for personal space and privacy I guess.