1) A new story, in theory about Australia, has been posted below.

2) The trip is over! I have one more story to post, then it’s back to the real world!

3) Final updates have been made to the Route, Packing, Reading and Finance pages under Details.

4) The final set of photos, from India, Nepal and Australia, has been posted. Click Images to your left, or on the photo below.

I was sitting on pavement, in the pitch black, staring at black, white, silver, yellow, the occasional pale red, and realized: night is underrated.

Not skylines, though. World-class skylines like Hong Kong Central viewed from Kowloon, Manhattan from the south, Pudong from Shanghai’s Bund, Chicago’s Loop: all are better at night, but everybody knows they’re better at night. With clouds and mountains made invisible, these creations of man stand preeminent after dusk. Beautiful, yes, but the most beautiful?

No, you must look up, up to Khayyam’s “inverted bowl”, to see why night is underrated, and the shame is that, for nearly everyone in the modern world, this underrated night remains invisible.

Do you know the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore? He has a poem, often translated as “Lost Star”, which begins with Gods admiring the canvas of stars just after creation. One of the Gods soon notices that a single star, the very jewel of the heavens, bind of its beauty, has disappeared. From that day forward, the Gods can never be satisfied with a just less than perfect sky.

The poem ends by claiming that becoming depressed over near-perfection is the definition of vanity, so I’m afraid the rest of the essay is a direct contradiction of Tagore’s point. Because the sky is pretty good everywhere, isn’t it? Even in the middle of the Bright Lights, Big City, Mars is still red, the North Star still guides, Orion maintains his belt, the Moon is the Moon.

But those voids, that black emptiness! Should not, the skygazer wonders, the sky have filled itself in more properly?

And indeed, the sky has filled itself in properly, if only you go to the right place.

Ayers Rock – Uluru is “what we call it now” - is what it claims to be, a giant piece of sandstone, covered with strange indentations, shifting through the palette, pink, red, orange, brown, as the sun ambles overhead. It seems reasonable to expect that, where there is one giant sandstone rock, there should be other smaller sandstone rocks – mountains come in ranges, rivers have backwaters, cities have suburbs. But Ayers Rock stands lonesome on a vast plain. Thirty miles west is similar formation, the Olgas, but otherwise the landscape is flat red sand dotted with spinifex grass, shrub-like gum trees and spiny mulga, nothing more.

And the skywatcher lucks out, because this landscape is so barren, so inhospitable, that the nearest town of any size is three hundred miles away. No streetlights, no effulgent televisions and cars and convenience stores compete with the stars.

And what a sky it is. It’s not moon plus the odd planet plus a spattering of stars. There are so many stars that their field takes on depth, larger closer stars appearing enormous, distant stars hazy, very distant stars merely giving the faintest discoloration, not more than a suggestion, of white to their corner of the sky. Pinpoint satellites masquerade as stars until their parabolic movement presents evidence of their nature. Did you even realize that you can see satellites? They are everywhere, unmissable, in a truly dark sky.

The structure of the galaxy itself is also impossible to miss. A great silver arc flows from horizon to horizon – the Milky Way! - proving our solar system’s location in the galaxy’s spiral arm. The random location of bright stars seen from an urban viewpoint is utterly misleading; the stars look to be all around us because light pollution hides all but the closest stars! The vast majority of stars lie in the center of the galaxy, forming the band the Chinese call a “silver river”. This arc is a true wonder of the world, and what a great loss it is that most of us now need to fly to barren deserts to see her beauty.

The power ascribed to constellations by our ancient ancestors is made easier to understand by a proper night sky. Since a truly dark sky has depth, the shapes of the constellations are so evident that they need no explaining. After being told to look for a constellation only visible in the Southern Hemisphere called the Southern Cross, a ten second search was sufficient to find it with no further explanation. These constellation appear, mechanically, every night in the same place, without the massive seasonal variation of our earthbound environment. Is it any wonder that such faith was put in the power of meteors, or red moons, or eclipses? Is it any wonder that so many societies believed the stars themselves were Gods? Is not a God inherently immutable, mechanical, perfect, light shining where darkness stands?

Is a beautiful sky not best viewed when the viewer is alone, in darkness, miles from anyone else?

But night is underrated. From the thousands of tourists who bussed by me in daylight to take snapshots of Ayers Rock, not one was near me – lying down, looking up - on the area’s only road three hours after sunset, an hour’s walk south from the hotel complex. Each morning, when I asked other guests whether they took in the Milky Way, or went satellite hunting, or appreciated – I hate using the word, but it’s the only proper choice here – the magnitude of the heavens, the most common reply was that they’d turned in early, that the itinerary called for an early start the next day, that, after all, wasn’t there a site of world interest which we’d flown so far to see? There was such a sight, but you needed to look up to find it. And so I was left alone. I greatly preferred it that way.

New China, Tibet and Xinjiang photos are up - these are my favorite yet. Click the photo below or “images”:

Also, new stories from India and Tibet are posted below.

1.
Every traveler’s report on India opens with a discussion of the heat. In an unbearably hot country, the temperature is hottest away from the coasts, during the summer, right before the monsoon arrives with cooling downpours. This Build Up, with only wispy clouds and a few drops of moisture, brings humidity as well as heat.

So maybe the mid-afternoon flight to New Delhi, in late June, was a bad idea.

This is how hot it was: we exited the plane, Jet Air from Kathmandu, on a staircase attached to the rear door. A stream of heat from the engine roared past as we began to descend. Incredibly, the heat from the engine was cooler than the air down on the tarmac. The temperature read 48 Celsius – nearly 120 Fahrenheit.

Here is where I note that India doesn’t much believe in air conditioning.

The summer heat, however, captures the India travel experience in a microcosm: it’s unlike anything else in the world, but even so it’s an enormously frustrating place to visit.

2.
A brief interpolation: There is something about India even more noticeable than the heat, but this something goes unmentioned by most Hindustan correspondents: the woman are of a phenomenal size. Not all the women, of course. Recent development notwithstanding, India remains one of the world’s poorest places. And the young, perhaps, haven’t had enough time to pack it on. But essentially every middle-class woman I saw was an absolute giant. On dirt tracks, the heft is literally ground-shaking.

The novelist Aravind Adiga likes to pick on this fact – women in his books always “become plump at just the right age” and his men would have it no other way. As a traveler, this trend is made all the more clear by the sari, that uniquely South Asian wrap of a garment. The “summer wrap”, as it were, seems almost designed to display as much weight as possible, shoving the choicest portions of flesh into the open like gaudy royal jewels.

I ought not pick on the women too much, though – Indian men still love their utterly ridiculous mustaches, an unfortunate result of India’s colonial period occurring during the Highest Era of English Facial Hair.

3.
India should be a no-questions great destination. As much of the world continues a long march to sameness, India remains as crazy as ever, e.g., Hindus with vermilion hair and bindi filling religious sites by the millions – the millions! - on auspicious dates, clothing in outrageously bright colors, camel safaris, tigers!, snake charmers wearing nothing but a white sash luring cobras from their baskets, a national cuisine that includes dishes like paneer cheese with raisins and peppers, regional cuisines of even greater diversity, a English literary culture more British than Britain – Roy and Ghosh and Desai and Rushdie – with stubborn old broadsheets like the Calcutta Telegraph that refuse to allow the new transliteration “Kolkata” to appear on its pages.

And politics even crazier: two legendary national parties, Nehru’s Congress and the Hindu Nationalist BJP, attract only a small portion of the overall vote. Uttar Pradesh is a fiefdom of the statue-loving dalit Mayawati, the restive east elects some combination of Christian, ethnic minority and gangster, and West Bengal, its state headquarters in the colonial Writers’ Building, has seen the hammer and sickle wave its red banner for decades. In much of the middle, the Naxalites and related Maoist insurgents, violent 1960s style Maoists, do their extorting and kidnapping and decapitating with little federal opposition.

Cows and water buffalo still walk the streets, undisturbed in even the biggest cities. A story in the largest national newspaper in early July mentioned that a major interstate highway was shut down when a herd of wild elephants blocked the road for hours while stealing food from the quickly-emptied stalls of roadside vendors. This story was judged so commonplace by the editors that it merited only a blurb on the left corner of page 16.

Smells are overpowering. There are the smells of those spices that brought Marco Polo and Vasco da Gama and Ibn Battuta to the sensuous East so many centuries ago: cardamom, cumin, various mixtures of curry paste, rosewater, fenugreek. There are the equally ancient smells of rotting garbage and human urine that permeate every railway station and back alley and roadside gutter.

There are Muslims with red-colored beards, half-naked ascetics with mangy locks, Punjabi Sikhs with towering turbans. There are, regular as the summer Monsoon, periods of interfaith violence. There are, regular as the winter Dry, periods of non-religious violence, leaving a full five states for all purposes presently closed to tourism. There are incredible wedding ceremonies, with brass bands in bright regalia, marching animals, the raucous energy of the latest Bollywood hit songs, hundreds and sometimes thousands of revelers under lights, morning to late night.

The colonial legacy, India being the Jewel of the Empire, has allowed a piece of the past to live on to the twentieth century. Hawler Station in Calcutta has a soaring entryway, wooden carvings rising thirty feet, with a Cloak Room on the right, a much grander name than Luggage Storage. New Delhi’s wide tree-lined boulevards, statues, arches, and Greco-Indian Revival public buildings stand out incongruously from the dense bustle of other Indian cities. Cricket is played everywhere, bowled with the arm straight. “Toy trains” still steam their way up to cool, breezy hill stations. Fantastic Ambassador taxis, still the most common on the roads, look like something out of Casablanca.

But the pre-colonial past is even more fantastic. If the Taj Mahal was all that India produced before the British East India Company arrived, it would be enough – Shah Jahan’s mausoleum is the greatest building in the world. Perfectly symmetrical and inlaid with elegant blue Arabic script, soaring white marble domes and minarets reflect back the sun as the building slowly shades from white to orange at sunset. This is to say nothing of Jaipur’s Pink City, or ancient Varanasi’s steps along the Ganges, or Amritsar’s massive temple.

It is no exaggeration that India has more That Was Unexpecteds than any other country in the world.

4.
So why didn’t I like the country?

There should be no surprise at India’s vast proliferation of ashrams, silent, silent, ashrams. In a country of over a billion loud and aggressive people, peace and quiet is the most valuable commodity. If you’re a foreigner, the problem is even more acute. Every rickshaw driver, or drink vendor, or shoe shiner, or begging child latches on to you with a firm grip. Every poor country has these, of course, but nowhere else has such persistence among the tradesman’s qualities. Beggars will follow you for an hour on end, and giving a donation only doubles their resolve. Shoe shiners will try to dab polish onto your Nikes, or even your Birkenstocks. Rickshaw drivers will hail you from a hundred meters, unconvinced by your claims that their services are not needed.

Salesmen play the most odious game. They come to you, often in pairs, claiming to be nothing but young men interested in conversing with a traveler from a faraway land. Pleasantries are exchanged. Small talk is bantered. Eventually, an offer to sit down for tea is given. Inevitably, the tea happens to be served in the young man’s souvenir shop, or fabric store, or travel agency, and since you’re such friends now, he just wants to show you a bit of product. Exactly this series of events happens every five minutes or so if you are walking the major tourist cities – the Delhis and Agras and Varanasis. There is no shame in such deception.

And worse that the sales tactic is the attitude it thus engenders in the traveler – that of aloof impoliteness. Indians on the whole are enormously friendly, and greet you with expressions such as “May I ask your good name, Sir” that make you feel like a pukka sahib circa the era of Kipling. But the time spent fighting off salesman/impostor friends stiffens any outgoing nature when friendly non-salesmen come calling.

Should an actual conversation begin, it is not long before India’s pungent religiosity proves itself. If one is sick, the Hindus offer strange explanation relating to their proliferation of Gods. If one is bearded, the Muslims turn into a particularly missionary bunch, a trait I’ve never seen among Muslims anywhere else in the world. If the conversation is with another traveler from the West – inevitably dreadlocked and dressed in the “gone native” style – talk will soon turn to obscure eating habits, pseudoscience, and particularly powerful gurus. My poker face is poor; each of the above eventually question me with an astonished “You don’t believe it’s true?”

It’s all simply too much. India is the only place in the world where, when traveling, I’ve spent a full day in my hotel room because I couldn’t bare to go outside and run the gauntlet another time.

5.
So I find myself mired in contradictory thoughts. On the one hand, a reserved society, where no one talks to outsiders, and no strangeness is evident in the culture, would be no fun to visit at all. On the other hand, there is a lot to be said for bursts of familiarity, for conversations where each party shares the same basic axioms, for the ability to wander and gaze and contemplate at leisure.

Perhaps this is a case where memory will differ from experience. From a distance, a thousand pinpricks become merely pinpricks, whereas vibrant colors and sights and sounds retain their brilliant hue. And if memory sifts in this way, the stature of the Subcontinent may increase in my mind over time; surely a few touts can’t bring down a country with elephant-induced traffic jams.

1.
Not long ago, an ugly, hairy goat, a particularly loathsome goat, with a scar rising on the left side of his face from jaw to nose, tried to throw me in jail. Along with four other foreigners, I spent two hours being interrogated by this goat, while my guide, who was a peaceful yak, begged for forgiveness. Her job was made harder because I kept telling the goat off, and even doing so in his own goat language.

2.
That Chinese government, it sure does like to censor. People said, the internet, hah, you can’t censor that one, my not-quite-Communist-but-still-repressive friend! What are you gonna do about the internet? The only way to stop it is to sit a few hundred thousand people down in cubicles and have them manually censor away every nascent breath of electronically-enabled freedom, right?

No problem, replied China, as they sat a few hundred thousand functionaries in cubicles and started censoring. The problem isn’t usually too bothersome – a blogspot shut down here, a gmail locked out there. But when you’re talking about Tibet, particularly this June, when there was the twentieth anniversary of nothing that never happened in Beijing, particularly around Tiananmen Square, on June 4, 1989: well, in that case, the censoring gets to be a bit much.

Luckily, the Chinese are used to totalitarian government. The most famous emperor, Qin Shi Huangdi, the Great Uniter of China two thousand years ago, was a notorious scholar-killer and book-burner. Unsurprisingly, Mao loved the guy. In any case, a standard Chinese response to repression developed: to speak by analogy. If the current government was employing some terrible agricultural policy, then the Chinese would stage plays about some widely-hated former emperor that happened to employ a similar policy. This leaves the government in a catch-22. Either they can ignore the insulting play, or they can ban it, and by doing so, tacitly acknowledge that their policies are the same as a hated former leader.

This interesting historical aside is completely and utterly unrelated to the following story, which is merely a lighthearted tale about two groups of animals.

3.
This is a story about the Land of Yaks, which is currently controlled by the repressive fist, or hoof, as it were, of the far-off People’s Republic of Goats.

The Yaks live on a very high plateau in the far southwest of the People’s Republic of Goats. For most of history, this sparsely-populated plateau was very rarely invaded. To the South, the Himalayas rise out of Indian jungles at a sharp gradient, closing off access for all but the summer. To the North and West, a thousand kilometers of desert keep even the hardiest armies at bay. The East offers no insurmountable barriers, but few goat leaders felt that there was much worth conquering in the Land of Yaks. At various times, such as after the 18th century, the Land of Yaks was in theory a vassal state of the Goat Empire, but direct control was always quite limited.

Without threat of invasion, the yaks developed a simple lifestyle. They nearly all proscribed the faith of Yak Lama Buddhism, believing in the reincarnation of the great Yak Dalai Lama and Yak Panchen Lama. Most common yaks were organized, under their monastic rulers, into something looking a lot like slavery. The few foreign observers who arrived, however, noted that the yak serfs, grazing in their fields and eating the occasional dumpling-like momo, seemed a poor but cheerful lot.

In 1949, the goats had a communist revolution under their leader Mao Goat Zedong, and by 1959, the revolution had shed any pretense of moderation. The ultraleftist goats, in that year, finally reached the Land of Yaks, forcing the Yak Dalai Lama to flee into exile, and leading to up to a million yak deaths over the next decade. Over the next fifty years, the goats began to educate the yaks, ended yak serfdom, and developed the yak economy. They also began to migrate to the yak plateau in great numbers, and today, in the biggest cities in the Land of Yaks, you scarcely ever see a yak manning a hotel desk or running a police squadron. The combination of deaths in the early days of Mao Goat communism and the slow replacement of yak culture with goat norms has led to a great resentment among yaks.

Last year, the yaks did a bit of wylin’, as they say, smashing the windows of goat-owned businesses, and occasionally the heads of the businesses’ owners as well. This was not a good idea. The People’s Republic of Goats sent in their army, arresting yaks left and right, especially those uppity yak monks with red robes over their fur and splittist ideology in their minds.

4.
It’s not that the army presence has totally ruined Lhasa. There are still old yaks circumambulating monasteries, and butter tea, and barley wine, and long strings of five-colored prayer flags, and traditional houses that refuse the cubic formula of houses the world over and instead stand as trapezoidal pyramids, the outer walls inclining ever so gradually from floor to roof. There is the harsh smell of burning juniper, its smoke slithering out of porous white stupas. There is still the Potala Palace, with its unique shade of red and its utterly modern appearance, despite existing in more or less its current state for four hundred years.

Take a look at the earliest photographs of Lhasa, taken during the quasi-imperial expeditions of Tsarist Russians and mustachioed Englishmen like the ones following Younghusband. Potala is an absolute titan, gazing down on Lhasa’s shacks. The palace, thirteen stories itself, is on top of Lhasa’s tallest hill, with staircases forming ziggurats on their way down. From a distance, Potala looks like a mountain itself, surely an architectural reflection of the primary topological feature in the Land of Yaks.

Yet still, the army grates. Young goats with harsh expressions, buttoned up in overstarched uniforms, stand frozen on circular platforms beneath umbrellas at nearly every intersection – the umbrellas to keep the fair-toned goats from acquiring a yak swarthiness, and the platforms, one imagines, to hide the fact that the goats are much less physically imposing that their yak neighbors.

I did my part; my last day in the city, passing one particularly odious line of goats, honest to God I gave a quick fart in their direction. I forget – was it Gandhi or Doc King who recommended this form of flatulent civil disobedience?

5.
If Potala is a titan, what can be said of Everest, that greatest of mountains that the yaks call Qomolangma? The road to Everest from Lhasa never drops below ten thousand feet of elevation, rolling past lakes the colors of jewels – lapiz lazuli, jade – and over wind-strewn, barren seventeen-thousand foot passes. There are few birds and fewer animals: even insects make themselves scarce.

Forty miles from Everest, a dirt track with dozens of switchbacks opens on a marvelous vista, looking out on five of the fourteen tallest mountains in the world. The view might indeed be breathtaking on its own aesthetic merits, but at such elevation any activity is breathtaking, forcing gasps of breath regardless of the scenery. From this distance, Everest doesn’t look as massive as you might imagine; its vertical prominence from base to peak is about 11,000 feet, significantly less than solitary mountains like Denali and McKinley, and nearby mountains like Lhotse, itself a 26,000 monster, lessen Everest’s visual impact.

Two hours of driving onward, our Landcruiser arrived at a series of yurts set up a few kilometers from Everest Base Camp. The road to base camp lies in a narrow valley, artistically framing Everest, and the day we arrived was a rare clear sky, allowing the mountain to fade from gold to gray as the sun took its leave. The Tibetan face of Everest is imposing; there is very little snow, because from the peak a seven thousand foot tall cliff forms the mountain’s northern edge. Unsurprisingly, the Nepali side is the more common route up.

Our yurts were set above 17,000 feet, much higher than the highest peak in the Alps or the Rockies. Even after a good deal of acclimatization – I had spent nearly a week over 11,000 feet, and two weeks above 8,000 – that is an incredibly difficult altitude. A run of one hundred meters is enough to leave you completely out of breath. The real trouble is at night, however. The air isn’t thick enough to breathe through your nose, so every hour or two, you can’t help but wake up gasping for breath; the sensation is what I imagine claustrophobics must feel. Breathlessness wasn’t what got us into trouble, however.

6.
It was the next morning that got us into trouble.

From the base camp, a six kilometer road winds its way toward the peak itself, an ice cold river forming the rightside nadir of the valley, and gentler, scree-covered foothills forming the left. A walk along a main road struck an Irish tourist and myself as a bit boring, so we scrambled up the foothills. The wildlife in this area hasn’t yet learned to fear humans; I jumped clear in the air when a troop of deer lumbered down the hill a few feet in front of my path.

The foothills climb higher and higher, leaving the main road out of sight, until a rocky, hundred-meter cliff opens up to a narrow, glacier-fed stream crossing the valley, and a series of outhouses and flat campsites that make up the base camp proper during climbing season. We made our way down the hill to the open expanse where a dozen tourist goats and a handful of Westerners were taking photographs of Everest. The best site for photos, however, appeared to be on a rise just past the stream, and the two of us joined a Canadian and an Englishman in an attempt to get across.

The stream, though narrow, proved its mettle. An outrageously slippery moss – more slippery than any ice I have ever encountered - covered all of the rocks, prohibiting a frog-like series of jumps across. The standard technique in this case is to go across wearing only socks, which grip better, particularly on the pebbles at the floor of the stream. This too proved impossible – the water was frigid.

The Englishman and the Canadian continued their attempt, while the Irishman and I searched on the right side of the valley for some sort of bridge. It was then that a young goat, in oversized camouflage, on a dusty old motorcycle, rode up to us. In loud, stoccato English: “You…not…allowed.” Why, I ask. “Not…allowed.” I tell him to speak Goat. He says the area we’re is restricted. I ask why. He says it’s restricted because it’s a restricted zone. But for what reason? Well, the regulations and laws say you can not be here. We’re told to come back to the checkpoint, a checkpoint whose existence we still didn’t know about. He rides off.

Being Westerners, we string out our direct walk back along the longest possible route; the mathematician in me will note that the young goat soldier didn’t specify which geometry he meant when he wanted us to go back by the shortest route, and can I be blamed if I chose not to use the Euclidean form? Halfway back, two goat soldiers on motorcycles reach us. The newer goat has a better command of English, though his accent sounds suspiciously like a villain in a bad movie, the final syllable of every sentence drawn out with extended vowels. “Youuuuuuu have….broken the ruuuuuuuuule.” I tell him to speak Goat. He says that we’re in a restricted area. The rest of the conversation goes pretty much as before.

I imagine that the two had planned, by this point, to escort us back, but our conversation was halted when the newer soldier spotted our two river-fording friends attempting to climb a hill off in the distance. The goats quickly drove off in their direction.

The checkpoint turned out to be a proper country army base, tucked in the side of a foothill, invisible from our walking path. Our yak guide – guides are mandatory in the Land of Yaks - did not look happy.

“I told you not to go past the checkpoint!” Our argument that we never saw a checkpoint, and further that a dozen tourist goats were with us on the other side carried no weight. The goats had apparently been yelling at our yak guide for some time, claiming that her permit to lead tours in the Land of Yaks would be torn up.

As the lower-ranked members of the goat army took our passport details, I happened to see the commander of the post, the aforementioned, sour-faced, cigarette-puffing goat with the scar running up his cheek. Being a Westerner, I gave him both barrels, telling him to stop wasting our time, and to stop harassing our guide, and that now that we’re registered, we’d like to go, and so on, et cetera. He was unresponsive. I broke out the trump card, that unless we were permitted to leave soon, I was going to call my friends in the security bureau back at the Beijing embassy, where I used to work, comrade, and have them call their friends in high places in Goat ministries, and let’s be clear, it’s obvious you’re not that high up, because otherwise they wouldn’t have assigned you to this desolate expanse of land. Oh, and how you like them apples?

True, that may have been counterproductive.

An hour passes, and the Irishman and I are called to the main office, which is nothing more than a canvas tent with a table and three chairs inside. Scarface is sitting regally, as if his plastic table were the desk of some high-powered CEO. Blah blah blah, he begins, speaking a very stiff, formal Mandarin, you have violated rule XXX of the People’s Republic of Goats, entering a restricted border zone which must be protected by the Goats Liberation Army, a very serious breach, you understand, very very serious.

He continues: I will let you off today with only a fine of five thousand yuan – eight hundred dollars. We tell him we don’t have the money. He says, with a grin, that there’s nothing he can do, rules are rules, and if we don’t pay we’ll have to visit the police station a few hundred kilometers to the north. And there, he says with an even bigger grin, who knows what will happen?

Our poor yak guide is supplicating herself, apologizing, bowing, doing all sorts of humiliating things; the yaks often have to do this when the goats are around; we know who has power, after all. I don’t like this.

Look, Scarface – I actually called him Xiansheng, Mister, my concession to politeness – we were only a few hundred yards past the checkpoint, we never saw your hidden tents, we came back here when we were told, and anyway, there were tons of goat tourists there with us, and I don’t see them here being badgered. Now we’ve registered, and we’re going to Nepal today anyway, so just let us go.

Scarface stiffened up. I continued to plead the case. Ah, but rules are rules, and anyway, you’re talking too much, do you want to go to jail right now?

7.
Shall we cut straight to the denouement? I got let go, the guide got let go, the Irishman got let go. No fines, no jail. Indeed, the other Westerners, who all played along with the bowing and the apologizing and the supplicating ended up detained longer than we did. And who got to have fun berating that jerk of a goat? This guy.

There’s a moral here. Next time you’re getting harassed by goats or Siberian tigers or Arabian onyx or Congolese elephants, make sure you hit back just as hard. That always works.

Right?

Shimiankuang is the saddest little bird in China. The entire world, maybe.

She’s not the saddest because of her location at the top of the windswept Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. The town lies at nearly ten-thousand feet of elevation, northeast of the twenty-thousand-plus foot Kunlun Mountains, east of the ferocious Taklamakan desert, and south of a gebi, a dry, pebble-and-scree filled expanse. A dusty wind regularly whips in from the west, leaving Shimiankuang chilly in summer and outright frigid in the winter. The surrounding landscape is a uniform brown, with no grass, no trees, no birds, no animals; desert dust regularly obscures the sun even at midday, casting an apoplectic pallor across the sky.

But many hamlets lay in such a desolate landscape.

She’s not the saddest because of her isolation. Only one road runs through town, west to east. To the east, it scrambles in serpentine arcs for a hundred kilometers to the mining town of Huatugou, new-yet-old concrete apartment buildings, trucker restaurants, hookers, then another day’s journey to Xining, the only town of size in western Qinghai, a region with twice the area of Texas. Xining has grown since the 1950s to become the de facto capital of an immense jail for political prisoners. Particularly from 1949 to the 1970s, and to some extent today, enormous numbers of political prisoners were deposited in the province to harvest minerals, to make deserts bloom, to break rocks.

Compared to the east, the road heading west is truly desolate. Unpaved, it forces hardy vehicles to bounce their way across wide canyons, dry except for the summer snowmelt, an empty landscape of boulders and broad vistas. A half day from Shimiankuang is the first village, on the border of Qinghai and Xinjiang, named Work Regiment 36. The few people scattered here are the descendants of prisoners sent half a century before, in an impossible effort to create farms in a land without water. There is one gas station, a few drips of petrol available, and a tiny general store, nothing more.

Two hours drive west of Work Regiment 36 is the town of Ruoqiang, pleasant enough, a sometimes-base for Xinjiang’s oil workers and government functionaries. The roads to Ruoqiang are now nearly all paved, but as recently as the late 1960s, reaching this site involved a thirty-day overland journey, camels and headdresses and Silk Road regalia; it has never been confused for accessible. For good reason, China’s main nuclear test site is located not far from Ruoqiang. The town’s one moment of fame came with the discovery of the Loulan Beauty, a fair-skinned, light-haired mummy from second millenium B.C. that is generally considered to represent the easternmost prehistoric settlement of Caucasians. The archaeologists wonder how she and her compatriots arrived in such an inhospitable environment, so far from the orchards of the Caucasus, leaving no trace of great cities.

But many towns are isolated.

Shimiankuang is not the saddest because her people, her town center, are the saddest, though these claims are true. The residential precinct consists of one hotel – no electricity, a mud-floored kitchen – a police station, and a series of dirt-walled, one-story buildings running down two streets. A basketball court, unpaved, with rims lying many degrees off the level plane, is at the north end. Litter peppers the open spaces. The grocery store is a dark, damp grouping of three shelves, covered at intervals with dusty packaged goods: no fruit, no chocolate, few colors.

And the people. There is a great Chinese character, tu, technically meaning “earth”, which has no precise translation in English when applied to a person. Uncultured or uncouth, perhaps, though tu specifically refers to peasants. Maybe the adjective “country” - as in, that boy right there is country! - but country might have a positive connotation - them country boys sure are polite – whereas tu is rarely positive. If someone asks you whether you were raised in a barn, then you’ve done something tu.

Everyone is Shimiankuang seems a bit tu.

Mopeds with the mufflers removed. Oversized army camo. Greasy mullets. An overreliance on honor, on this woman is mine, glaring eyes distrustful of strangers, ten-year-olds with cigarettes, unfiltered, brother, spewing black smoke like a steam engine with each puff, self-important police, bad music bumping from handhelds with the volume way up, thump, thump, oh yeah.

But many towns are too dusty, with people too dusty. Shimiankuang is not the saddest solely for these faults.

No, the real reason Shimiankuang is China’s saddest lies in its name. Shimian means asbestos. A kuang is an open-air mine. The town is actually named open-air asbestos mine, and it’s not some clever poetic allusion.

From a distance, the town looks to be backed by enormous, white, mountain peaks. These are not mountains of rock, but mountains of asbestos. Heading south from the residential district, the locals all with flimsy facemasks, the landscape, for miles on end, has the appearance of a snowglobe, roofs and power lines covered in early-winter white, missing only a few notes of Bing Crosby.

The roadside slowly shifts from houses to machines, great demonic machines, steampunk machines, fragments of Industrial Revolution dreams. These are gorgeous, giant machines, the type that give proof to human progress, the type that pronate through a series of gears with unnatural speed, that lift with superhuman strength, that look powerful even when they languor, a set of modern day dinosaurs. These machines, all likewise covered in their carcinogenic snow, are well scattered across white moguls, waiting patiently for the next shift. Machines wait for production, not for smiles, not for laughs; they are not romantics.

There can be no redemption for Open-Air Asbestos Mine. It is not the type of town that will slowly develop green parks and statues of founders, red-bricked schools and avant-garde authors and Rotary clubs. Its purpose will someday be complete, all its rocks removed and shipped off, and its population slowly moved away, its houses returned back to dirt, its machines rusted, relics of another age, to become Beauties for future archaeologists, its open mines covered again with sand and snow, its peaks a newer, purer white. For history remembers its great lions, not its saddest birds.

Just South of Shimiankuang

1.
The divided nation has been unified for 34 years, but travelers are still asked whether they’re headed to North or South Vietnam. I say I’m headed to Hanoi since us Americans still don’t like flying young men into Saigon. I got good mileage out of that joke.

2.
But here’s the thing: these Asian tigers change so quickly as to make our mental impressions irrelevant. Vietnam has, like China, implemented a market economy, but I figured the country was still Red Brigades and Slogans with perhaps a textile export factory thrown in for spice, like chillies in the stock of a bowl of pho.

I flew in from Luang Prabang, that old French base in the North of Laos, on Vietnam Air, and indeed saw slogans as I walked through the Hanoi airport terminal. The surprise was that the terminal was modern and the slogans were for HSBC, Your Local Bank.

Hanoi itself is perfectly pleasant, with leafy boulevards, temple-strewn lakes, and many French restaurants serving proper coffee and crème caramel. The largest lake – West – features an Intercontinental and a Sheraton, as well as stores selling Scandinavian design, imported wines and giant flat-screen televisions.

Indeed, the development is so striking that I began to hunt for any reflection whatsoever that Vietnam was run by a Communist Party, descendants of Uncle Ho and his toppling Dominoes, which threatened to spread its Black Heart across Asia and then the World in the manner of an ideological oil spill. Vietnam the King Cong wasn’t solely a mental fiction of Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon; her human rights record during the war (the massacre at Hue, for instance) and after (the infamous ‘boat people’) is appalling, and both the Pathet Lao and Khmer Rouge were originally branches of the Vietnamese Communist Party.

Certainly memory of the war and the Red Menace exists for tourists, who tromp daily up to Ho Chi Minh’s tomb. But what evidence can be found beyond the tourist sites? I saw only two, and the first is a stretch: a hammer and sickle graced the main gate of, incongruously, the Hanoi Stock Exchange.

The second was a faded old poster on a side street south of the Old City. A black bomber, labeled “B52” and “USA” on the two wings, soars over a white, pinnacled, Soviet-style building capped with the Vietnam flag. The plane is aflame, its cockpit lit with a red toupee. The contrails of the Vietnam missile, however, soar past the plane itself, ending at a gold missile fired far into a cerulean sky. I like to think this is a metaphor for Vietnam’s recent history – the war and the darkest days of communism lie below, while prosperity in the future means moving past both.

3.
But if Vietnam has changed greatly over thirty years, what must be said of China? I studied and worked in China in 2005, only four years ago. As the Chinese economy continues to hum, however, the percentage increase in the average Chinese worker’s income from 2005 to 2009 is greater than than of an average American from 1965 to today. I returned to Beijing to see what had changed.

Little differences were apparent even before I reached Beijing. Yuan and Jiao bills had largely been replaced with coins, Cokes were sold in cans rather than in glass bottles, and smoke-filled, rickety buses were now leather-seat, bottled-water affairs. Pirated everything was tougher to find as more Chinese demanded the genuine article. Trains are quicker, prices are higher, buildings are larger, cities are busier.

But a voyage to my old neighborhood, just south of the zoo and west of the communist-era Moscow Restaurant and Soviet Exhibition Center, made the scale of changes clear.

4.
The University I studied at was previously flanked by two tiny convenience stores, or xiaomaibu: little sales offices. The one to the right was manned by a portly, twenty-something hunched over a Playstation controller, a stack of one-dollar bootleg games stacked on the black machine. He was known for collecting rare Western compact discs; a slice of British punk, classic rock, or underground hip-hop could be parlayed into free snacks. I don’t know how he fared in the MP3 Era, but his former storefront now sells ladies’ garments.

The other xiaomaibu, my regular, – overseas, one has more ‘regulars’ than at home, the fruit boy, the laundry wallah, the tailor, et cetera – was run by a woman recently emigrated from a rural province to the southwest. She had two young kids, for which schooling was always a problem. In China, the identity card system, or hukou, limits urbanization by refusing city services to those with a rural hukou. A place at school, therefore, is a matter of personal connections or bribes.

Her store wasn’t more than ten square feet, with snacks piled floor to ceiling, and a solitary freezer to the left. Every Friday morning, she knew to empty the waters and green teas and lychee mixes from the freezer, to be replaced with a case of Tsingtao tallboys, the lot of which would in due turn be purchased by one of the neighborhood Americans that afternoon for the grand price of twenty-five cents per bottle. Her store has now merged with the neighboring shack to become a computer training center; rumor was that her daughter had gotten pregnant, but otherwise nothing was known about what happened.

Up the alley toward the bus station, at one point, was an enormous, chaotic wholesale clothing market. Chinese knockoffs of every brand you could imagine were available for next to nothing – D&G T-shirts for a buck, spring leather jackets for five – and the World’s Busiest McDonald’s served as the edifice capstone. Chinese love McDonald’s Ice Cream, you see. I had my regular girl at McD’s as well – if I showed up in my suit fresh from the embassy when she was working, the nuggets, fries, Fanta and two packets of ketchup would be prepared even before I arrived at the counter. Chinese McDonald’s pays twice the hourly wage of a standard neighborhood restaurant, so the staff was always a cheery group.

The McDonald’s has now moved across the square – the old Soviet square where elderly Chinese would dance the waltz on weekend evenings – and the wholesale market is nothing but an empty lot. The small vendors have all been moved inside a gleaming, soulless skyscraper next door, a glass canyon.

My regular restaurant a block away served the Central Asian Moslem cuisine of Xinjiang’s Uighurs. The Uighurs serve for Han Chinese the role of Indians in America, and the restaurant went all out with stuffed animal heads mounted above, a giant shisha against the bar, and pictures of smiling ethnic minorities on the walls. A circle of naan from the brick oven or a lamb kebab could be had for twelve cents a pop, and dapanji, literally a Big Plate of Chicken, was a dollar. The storefront has now been replaced by a branch of the rapidly growing dumpling chain Qing Feng Steamed Stuffed Bun Shop: their translation, not mine.

The old DVD shop? Now socks and underwear. The hairdresser, who included two shampoos and a shoulder massage with each cut, and who was rumored to provide further, more illicit, benefits for the right price, is now a spare parts dealer. The only recognizable store from 2005 on the whole block was Dead Fish, our play on words of the restaurant’s Chinese name.

5.
The rapid growth, and resultant change, in East Asia over the past thirty years is completely anomalous in world history. This form of progress has unquestionably improved the lives of untold numbers of people. But something goes missing when the good of the past disappears so quickly, or when the bad of the past is ignored so totally. Is it not everyone’s experience that the old things are the best?

New photos from SE Asia, Hong Kong and Macao uploaded. Click on Images to the left, or on the photo below. It’s not that I didn’t want to upload these earlier, but rather that China banned Flickr for two weeks around the anniversary of what is supposedly the unimportant date of June 4, 1989! But don’t worry, I’ve been doing my best to rile up the Chinese police. Oh, you want stories? Don’t worry - three new ones coming soon, the first of which hopefully tomorrow.

She looked around the cafe suspiciously, eyes darting left, right, her back to the wall, before scribbling a few more letters on the corner of the back page of her notebook. I ask, What’s that. No response, but I notice the waiter has hovered toward our direction. The table to one side is a young couple, the man in a collared shirt and sunglasses, though we’re indoors. To the other side, a group of four, smoking, not talking.

The waiter leaves, and she begins scribbling once more, not looking down at the paper, but staring straight ahead.

I’d met her that morning, at a small shop near the big lake in Yangon, the capital of Burma. It was early April, that sweltering season that so perturbed British colonials stationed along the Irrawaddy, among them Orwell, and I’d stopped for a Star, the local version of Coke. She was carrying an English textbook, and as we left the shop, she mentioned that she had just begun studying English at a local college. Her spoken English was not good, though the written lessons in the book were quite complex. She was named, and you don’t forget a name like this one, Zin Mar Thet.

We stopped at a roadside juice bar, which seemed to be run by her parents, or at the least, an aunt and uncle; the relation between young and old was of that type that only exist among families. The Burmese enjoy their juices sickly-sweet, but it would be impolite not to have at least one glass. This roadside bar was not just on any road, however. It was on the corner of the lake and University, the street home to both the US Embassy and the home/prison of The Lady, Aung Sun Suu Kyi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and freely-elected President of Burma, at least until the junta decided to nullify the results and put her under house arrest. That was nearly twenty years ago.

I told the girl I needed to go to the US Embassy, which just happened to be further down the road than Suu Kyi’s house. Heavy police presence lined the street, and we were two of only a very small group of people walking down the broad, shady avenue. As we pass the run-down compound with NLD – National League for Democracy – banners fluttering, the girl moves close and whispers, This house, Is where Aung Suu lives, you know? Many of her sentences end with that interrogative, you know?, expectantly. I did know, but I feigned surprise. Oh really, I asked. Can we go pay a visit? She shushes me, no, no, police, police, and grabs my arm. We walk a hundred yards further, and she says, ok, we can go back now. She knew the embassy story was a pretext as well. As we cross the compound again, she looks down at the ground. I look straight at the compound, and the policeman walking past it.

Later than evening, at the cafe, she finishes scribbling, and glances around nervously. It is a practiced glance, a quick dart of the eyes in every direction without the head needing to turn, an inconspicuous glance. She reaches for a napkin, and in so doing, slides the page across the table into my hand. I hold it beneath the table. In block letters, the penmanship of someone whose native script is different from that of English, is the following:

No. 2

Saw Mail

Sport Camp

ALONE tsp

Burma is a proper totalitarian state. Freedom of speech does not exist. Assembling in large groups can lead to arrest. Staying overnight in another house requires registering with the police; as a young Burmese man told me, this is why young Burmese pretend to enjoy hiking in the hills so much. Traveling between towns requires a permit for locals, and foreigners are simply banned outright from traveling to most of the country. Along the border regions, the Muslims in the west and the Christian Karen and Mizo tribes have it particularly bad. Reports of whole villages being massacred are not uncommon, and the army to this day recruits child soldiers. Heroin production is rife in the mountains, and the government is said to have its hands in the pot. This wouldn’t be surprising: in a desperately poor country, the capital is lined with enormous mansions said to be owned by top government officials.

Nonetheless, the Burmese remain an impossibly cheerful lot. A guide of mine, in the north of the country, was the fifth of ten siblings, five sons and five daughters, born to a lower-class family. She is not yet 30, but four of her brothers have already died, all from drinking particularly vile local moonshine. One sister is retarded and cannot care for herself. One has married an importer-exporter in Mandalay and reached the middle class, and the rest work backbreaking hours as fieldhands.

When my guide was 17, she was forced to leave her secret boyfriend, a peasant, and was placed in an arranged marriage with a relatively wealthy man from the city. She was considered the beauty of the town, with a broad, infectious smile, and had the rare opportunity to reach a better life. Nonetheless, she wanted to marry her peasant boyfriend, but given his status, it was impossible; she hasn’t seen him in years, and only knows that he now works at the airport in Yangon, 18 hours by bus from her home.

After conceiving a daughter at 19, she heard word that her abusive husband had a woman on the side. She confronted him, and he apologized. Soon after, while washing his clothes, she found a portrait shot of yet another mistress. By now, ten years later, they live ten hours from each other, and are for all practical purposes divorced, though this is legally impossible, and therefore she will never remarry. He has a bevy of women in Mandalay, and she is forced to support her daughter, as well as an orphaned niece and a grandmother, on her own.

A week before I’d met her, she had totaled her moped, which was her most valuable possession.

And yet, she laughed so much during our three day hike that we all but named her Giggles. When she saw me reading a book by Aung Sun Suu Kyi, with the lady’s picture on the cover, she grinned and mentioned that everyone in Burma loves this lady. It was not, as far as I know, a problem for me to have the book, but a local with such a banned book would face five years in a prison camp. Despite the risk, a democratic underground exists, and most people are able to see through the government media controls to understand the true political situation in their homeland.

Back to the cafe: I tried to interpret the paper. ALONE tsp? Am I supposed to appear alone somewhere? But when? My dreams of breaking into the underground, of passing samizdat, of knocking on forlorn factory doors in a certain pattern, sliding through the door when it opens a crack, and appearing in a smoke-filled room of poets in turtlenecks, and elderly educated figures from the colonial era, and foolhardy but idealistic students, all bantering back and forth in discussion of Mill and Locke and Paine and their Relevance to Our Present Situation, while an antique printing press noisily churns – gah, kah-WUMP, gah, kah-WUMP - in the corner, operated by a stone-faced gentleman with ink-covered fingers, spits out the latest monthly newsletter, and a reticent old woman circles the room with a tray of tea and snacks: perhaps, if only I could decode the message, this could be my chance. She had taken me past Suu Kyi’s house, had she not? And befriended the solitary foreigner, which is not an everyday occurrence in Burma. And her family, or “family”, happened to pick that corner to run their juice stand?

Saw Mail. Sport Park. ALONE Tsp. Perhaps there is a large sports park in Yangon, and Saw Mail is an apartment block, or a factory, within? I could get a map and check. As I puzzle over the code, she sits back with her drink and a blank look on her face. But Tsp? Perhaps I’m misreading her handwriting! I write on the corner of a bill, “Tsp?”, and slide it towards her.

She is puzzled. I don’t understand, I say. Oh, oh, Tsp, it is township, she whispers. Alone Township, in the west part of Yangon. This is my house. You will send me a postcard after you leave Burma?

Ah, right. Dreams dashed.

But no worry, because the next time I visit the totalitarian world…

Photos from Japan, Thailand and Burma are now posted; click the photo below or look under “Images’.

New Japan story is also posted below, and Burma story is coming soon. I’m in Hanoi now, and am amazed that there are only 12 weeks left! It’s about time to get to China - the monsoon is beginning, and it rains so hard that I was literally trapped in my hotel until noon today because of the floodwater!