Mahananda's travelog

Mahananda/Andrew, age 61

2009-04-03T21:24:00.006+01:00

Friends of Mahananda/Andrew

It is with regret that I have to publish one last blog on behalf of our mutual friend Andrew Serafinski, also known to some of you as Mahananda. He died on April 2nd in a hospital near his home in London, having suffered a very severe stroke in the small hours of the morning. Many friends from across all six decades of his life were at his bedside when he passed away at 9.20pm, having not regained consciousness all day.

You may well be reading this blog because Andrew met you while travelling. The blogs he wrote while travelling speak for themselves about the kind of person he was and how he saw the world and I can't sum that up here.

He had warm way of connecting, an instant generosity and a kind of love for the world that is hard to describe. You just felt it. If you met him for just one day, you'd likely miss him the next. Before he went travelling he left 50 kilograms of birdfeed for the finches in his garden.

His loss came without warning. A vessel in his brain ruptured and the medicine he takes to thin his blood perhaps meant the damage was extensive and beyond repair. No firm conclusion was drawn as to why it happened.

When he returned from the trip with Joanna and myself across the width of Asia he said he had finished the outer journey and now the inner journey was calling him again. His last six weeks were spent in large part in his garden, planting and clearing for the spring growth and reconnecting with his friends.

Please feel free to leave you messages here. If, however, you would like to contact me personally for any reason I can be reached by email as follows:

waterston.david@gmail.com

Warm wishes
David

bangkok bye byes

2009-02-10T07:30:00.003Z

Yesterday the mercury bubbled and fizzed around 35 degrees C. Humidity was a drenching 30%.
How I long for snow tomorrow!

After months of mostly haunting the abodes of backpackers, I have been embedded in a grand old hotel by the banks of the river for the last two nights of my journey, to be amongst the shades of my writing confreres.

They range from the sublime to the bathetic. My fellow countryman (I'm pure Pole when it suits) Joseph Conrad stayed here, as did Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward and Gore Vidal (and I have lots in common with that trio) and many other illustrious wordsmiths; also, alas, those literary pygmies (prolific certainly but pygmies notwithstanding) Jeffrey Archer and the shimmering pink blancmange herself, Dame Barbara Cartland, graced, or soiled more likely, the Oriental's sheets.

Writing this blog - and this is my final instalment from foreign parts - became an integral, if unintended, part of the journey.

The blog began in a last-minute panic on the eve of departure, when I'd pressed all the wrong buttons and obliterated myself: it endured teething pains in Siberia where the keyboards were in Cyrillic and I didn't know which buttons to press: and came onto its own in Mongolia where I was tested and tormented by screeching teenagers playing computer games all around me, but where I found I could retire into a sound-proofed bubble of concentration, which gave up its riches willy-nilly.

If you are reading this, thanks for accompanying me thus far.

I hope to write more when I'm back at home, where I'll start on a long-overdue journey inwards.

What form despatches will take I do not know.

tattoo tales

2009-02-03T09:08:00.002Z

Everywhere one looked on our island there were tattoos.

Fierce dragons thrashing a passage around the impediments of overripe midriffs; demure circlets of flowers around a young girl's upper arm, an hommage perhaps to Laura Ashley; exotic hieroglyphs highlighting the knobbly vertebrae of a youth's backbone, and all manner of curlicue and arabesque.

I bear my own relatively recent tattoo on the deltoid rump of my left arm, an elegant hum, ancient seed syllable denoting Absolute Reality - the ultimate conversation stopper. It took me over five decades to even entertain the thought of having a tattoo.

Thanks to Darren, tattoed from head to foot with more planned, I took the steps down to his mate's tattoo parlour in a basement beneath a louche hairdressers in the Hackney Road, and was pricked and pierced for half an hour, and then went home wrapped in cellophane.

I didn't feel much, having smoked, for Dutch courage, a tiny spliff in the graveyard opposite beforehand, so apprehensive was I of the imagined pain and even more of what felt like the ultimate transgression I was about to enact, a flight from polite society.

More frightening than that even was how to tell my mother!

She bore her own tattoo, the number 63565, on her left forearm for all the world to see, branded as she entered into Auschwitz in 1943. That number overshadowed my whole life (I often considered that at my mother's death I would have to surgically remove it and keep it preserved in aspic in a bottle, so precious was it. In the event I allowed it to be cremated with the rest of her, but the ashes remain in a lovely ceramic pot in my living room; I am not yet ready to release them to the Golder's Green Crematorium Garden of Remembrance, as decorum demands.)

A few months later, and with renewed Dutch courage from complimentary cocktails in a Swiss mountain hotel, I told her. Perhaps mellowed by her own unaccustomed cocktail, she hardly batted an eyelid, long resigned, too, to what she saw as my follies.

So thanks Darren, and not just for the tattoo. You were such a whizz with computers, and helped me choose and set up my first laptop. I dare say you are still tuned into cyberspace and admiring my blogging prowess from another dimension.

In your simple, direct and often disarmingly crude way, you taught me more in the few months I knew you than any number of sophisticates had, in more than a decade of spiritual searching.

What a shock it was to hear of your death the evening I returned to London from a retreat!
Worse still to see you the following morning at the morgue, unreachable behind glass as your body was still in the coroner's care, so uncertain was the cause of death. Suicide would not have surprised any of your friends, bereft as you were from the loss of Chris your soulmate a year earlier.

There was a dreadful contusion on your forehead, which in my ignorance I thought was a gunshot wound, or mark of some other shocking violence. It turned out to be nothing more than the bruise a corpse acquires when its brow is pressed against the hard wood of a bedframe for days on end. It was a long while before a troubled friend battered down your door and found you. You were 33.

Death from natural causes was eventually proclaimed. A relief, although no one quite believed it.

I led your funeral, as I had Chris' a year earlier.

His had been a baroque and whacky affair, his coffin arriving for the event in the reduced glass hearse of a motor bike sidecar, which had conveyed him from Tufnell Park to Kensal Rise, a not inconsiderable distance. You could not help but smile.

You too aspired to be a biker, Darren, but smiles were in short supply that year and for your funeral we thought a limousine was best.

Another year passed almost to the day, and I led my mother's funeral.
One of the best things I've done.
Many thanks to Rosalind for supporting me so fully through a momentous week.

Enough funerals already!

ooo, I dooo like to be beside the sea-side.....in hua hin

2009-02-03T03:21:00.002Z

My first seaside holidays were Whitsun breaks on the Isle of Wight, where my parents had once honeymooned.

A friend and client of my father's, Mr.Horwich - a Horowitz from Bialystock recreating himself as an English hotelier - had acquired the Pier Hotel at Seaview. The eponymous pier had long since been claimed by changing habits of travel and the ferocious appetite of the English Channel, and hardly a strut or beam survived; but the hotel was a beautiful Victorian affair that struggled on into a postwar world. It was wonderful to a child to explore grand staircases and labrynthine corridors, sniff around salt-smelling cellars and wonder at the overwrought balconies and ornate white stucco of the facade, crumbling and eroding in the sea air.

Looking out across the waves, beyond the massive round forts sitting it out in the straits, deterring past and future Napoleons from setting foot on our green and pleasant land, lay Portsmouth beckoning from the mainland. Portsmouth, drear and uninviting, best seen through a marine haze or obscuring summer downpour. Portsmouth, that would reclaim us after our few days' idyll-by-the-sea. With this constant reminder of the quotidian and dull, we frolicked and rollicked for our allotted few days, in a gay abandon.

Many many years later I spent the New Year with friends in the New Forest. So close to childhood haunts, I persuaded the friends to a jaunt on the Island. We motored around on the first day of a fresh year, through Ventnor where I like to believe I was conceived, and on to Seaview where I promised tea at the Pier Hotel. Driving down the final tree-lined slope to the hotel, prelude to past delights, I was flooded by memories. Coming out onto the Esplanade at last there was a shocking, shattering, unbelievable, vacancy. All that remained of the beloved building was a great smashed concrete raft, level with the earth.

***

We never did get round to diving on Koh Tai.
Perhaps it was a subliminal response to the two diving instructors, the one a chain-smoking (I'm sure he'd devised a way of smoking underwater) South African with a partially bleached Mohican, and the other a hefty monosyllabic shaven-headed hulk, with the craggy skull of a Cro-Magnon.
Lovely fellows, but you wouldn't want to meet them under a dark rock.

confessions of a snorkeling virgin

2009-01-31T10:12:00.003Z

Nobody told me the apparatus does not have to leak.
While others splashed around blithely and gazed intently, I endured a mask that rapidly took on sea water, triggering an allergic rhinitis; the meanly narrow breathing tube was soon bubbling and gurgling frothily, triggering off my worst fears of an ill-met death by drowning in some unkempt corner of a National Health hospital, courtesy of a poorly maintained respirator.

I retired to bed for a day to nurse my phobias and an alimentary indisposition precipitated perhaps by one banana fritter too many on a sub-stratum of papaya salad doused in fiery chili.
Then it rained torrentially for a day, and we wondered why we were there, and why no-one had told us the rainy season is not yet done.

And then the sun returned and I got my hands on proper snorkeling gear and what a revelation that was! Just yards off the beach the reefs began, fecund with piscine life and splendid corals and cucumbers and all manner of delight. A spell-binding phantasmagoria, in which I cavorted for hours. My new submarine friends did not seem the least put out. As curious perhaps as I was about them, they clearly were too about this large, very pink, visitor with ungainly flapping flippers huffing and puffing in greeting.

Here are listed some of my new friends, taken from a marine wallchart : Moustached thryssa, Obtuse barracuda, Starry emperor, Damsel fish, Painted sweetlip, Black-backed anemone, Ornate threadfin bream, Blackspot long tom, Lined silver grunt, Fourfinger threadfin, Areolated grouper and his unsalubrious friend Greasy grouper, Pomfrets both black and white, a very camp Yellow queen fish, Golden toothless trevally and his deceitful companion False trevally, monosyllabic Wrasse, Brushtooth lizardfish and the splendid double-barrelled Chacunda gizzad- shad. Aurevoir to you all, and your less resplendently named companions.

Tonight is our last on this lovely island . Tomorow we split. I return to the mainland and go my own way for a week or so, for an internal and private de-briefing.

becalmed in bangkok

2009-01-22T11:30:00.002Z

A day's delay, as Joanna was ill in the night, keeps us in Bangkok where the mercury soared to 34C today, and you could cut the air pollution with a knife.

A knocking at my door at 4.30 am, heard above the whirr of the lurching ceiling fan (God, they are scarey things: I feel a scarcely resistable desire to put my hand up to its whirring) and the din of an antiquated air conditioning unit outside my window, could only be a maniac.
As there have been lots of wild noises in the corridor (we are staying in a budget hotel), I don't open. Renewed knocking at 5 am reveals itself to be David with news of Joanna's indisposition. He had been the earlier knocker too, but become embroiled with a drunken Belgian next door to me.

I devote the day to air-conditioned museums. I have spent the previous few days long-distance walking around town.

I have booked a flight home for 11 February. David and Joanna will travel on for a while beyond that. My thoughts begin to turn toward London.

momentous day

2009-01-21T14:41:00.004Z

From my sweltering bed in Bangkok I watch events half a world away in frosty Washington, and marvel. I shed a tear or two, and hope for better things.

You, Erin and Sam, are probably recovering from another celebratory Embassy bash. I wish you and your country well.

Thanks Erin for your concern about my defunct camera. I'll try and get it fixed when I'm home, which isn't too long now. In the meantime I"m enjoying my possibly fake Leica\Lumix - I've been seduced by its zoom.

Off at 6am tomorrow to our island.

heimweh

2009-01-19T13:07:00.002Z

How I pine sometimes for an England and Englishness that possibly never existed except on celluloid, in black and white, and in my parents' fond imaginings, born of gratitude to a regime that did not slaughter. Tea and understated sympathy was what you got instead.

What kind of England do we return to in a few weeks? The credit crunch only set in after our departure. Woolworths for one is no more. The only time I have shop-lifted was at Woollies in Streatham. It was a kid's prank, and the dare a Milky Bar, in a dim and distant time when white chocolate still seemed a miracle.

Perhaps it was that illicit thrilling Milky Bar that inaugurated decades of assorted addictions, often involving the briefest of brief encounters, snatching pleasure at the limits of the law. My England became a fraught and unhappy place, without refuge or repose.

For two days now I have been walking around Bangkok in temperatures around 30C, visiting temples and following canals and seeking the shade of public parks. The temples are quite extraordinary, huge in scale with extensive precincts, and very beautiful. Its amazing what you can do with several million mosaic chips and bucketfuls of smashed crockery. Its giving me ideas for the garden back home. I have seen the famed Emerald Buddha which is in fact made of jade, and a golden reclining Buddha who was 41 metres long, and whose massive soles were inlaid with the most lovely mother of pearl decoration; a feat indeed of the inlayers' art. The Royal Palace here knocks most royal palaces into a hat.

We are all a little weary of travelling, and in a last gasp for me as I'll be coming home earlier than the others, we go down the coast in a couple of days to relax on an island in the Gulf of Thailand, where David and I will do a diving course!

battambang to bangkok

2009-01-18T14:32:00.002Z

Our last night in Cambodia we stay at delightfully named Battambang.
Would like to linger longer but Thailand tempts and tantalises.

Will we get across the border this time?
As we approach Poipet, scene of our previous debacle, my bowels begin to churn at the prospect of ever ping-ponging, like Sisyphus, between here and Phnomh Penh with improper papers.

We get through in seconds, and take a tuk-tuk to the nearest station from where we are to entrain for Bangkok. To my surprise we drive on the left side of the road for the first time in months.

Can this be the station, this charming wooden cottage in brown and cream, like a Pullman carriage? It looks like the set for a Thai "Brief Encounter". Surely Celia Johnson will soon emerge with her curious clipped vowels, bravely enduring the mote in her eye, and is Trevor Howard on hand to remove it, and spark off a tragic romance in dreary post-war English suburbia, the only glimmer of glamour being a Kardomah Coffee House to sip adulterous beverages?

All through the film Rachmaninov's 2nd piano concerto bursts in, giving soaring ironic voice to a passion that the stiff upper lip can never enunciate. Marvellous!

Closing time, damn and blast! More of Englishness tomorrow. Am I getting homesick?

pharewell phnomh penh

2009-01-15T12:16:00.002Z

I returned in the afternoon to the lovely national museum, which I have visited a few times now.

I wondered again at the colossal reclining Vishnu in bronze. Once he was six metres long and water spouted from his navel, a C12 Chinese visitor at Angkor Wat wrote. His eyebrows and moustache then were jewelled marvels, and he had gems for pupils. This is Vishnu Anantasayin, reclining in cosmic sleep on the back of the sea serpent Ananta - without end - on the surface of the cosmic sea.
As the story goes, Vishnu brings forth from his navel a lotus from which blossoms Brahma, four-headed and all-seeing, to whom it falls to set down the material world of time and space.
What a marvellous creation myth, primal sea and serpents! Am I becoming a Hindu?

This Vishnu, re-discovered only in 1935 , is now much truncated; the massive shoulders, head and brooding face, and two left arms (!) are all that remain, but what grace and beauty and sheer presence.

I linger long and alliterively around the lingam - Shiva in phallic guise - and regret the linga did not make it into Buddhist iconography, when so much else from Hinduism did.
Perhaps there is a case to be made for reviving the linga at the LBC - the Linga Buddhist Centre, why not?
I'm sure it would have its devotees.

I take chilled green tea in the garden courtyard, and converse in French with the elegant and charming lady who serves me from her little fridge in the shade. She is soon off to market to buy her evening meal - to eat alone in her room, or with her burgeoning family? I'll never know - so we take leave of each other elaborately.

I visit for a last time the room of fragile standing Buddhas. Their wooden arms, raised with palms towards me in abhayamudra- the gesture of fearlessness - seem to wave goodbye.

making a purse from a sow's ear

2009-01-15T07:09:00.002Z

Bangkok beckoned, but here we are back in Phnomh Penh, phlummoxed!

Joanna, a Pole, is a British citizen - indeed I wept tears at her citizenship ceremony a couple of years ago at a town hall in Westminster, where a crowd of folk of all colours and creeds stood up and spoke out loud their name, swearing allegiance to Her Majesty the Queen; the mayor of Westminster dispensed glass souvenir mugs engraved with the coat of arms of his borough, and I thought of my parents who found refuge in this country, like generations of others, and became naturalised in the early fifties: in those more austere times a letter in the post from the Home Office was all you got, but I'm sure it was treasured as much if not more than a crystal mug.

Joanna's British passport, with its exhortations to allow whomever it concerns to go whither they will, 'without let or hindrance', on pain of incurring Her Majesty's Extreme Displeasure, languishes on the sideboard at Sugar Loaf Walk.

Joanna, for reasons of her own, is travelling on her Polish passport. Amongst the forty-one countries, including the UK, that have signed an accord allowing their citizens free and unfettered entry into Thailand, you will not find the name of Poland.

Hence, after extensive taxi-rides through the Kingdom, we are back in Phnomh Penh, where this morning we tuk-tukked out to the Thai Embassy to regularise the visa situation.

Most clouds have a silver lining, and I for one am quite content to be back here. I have a lovely view of the river from my window, and of the Royal Palace with its many gold-roofed pavilions. I have spent a pleasant morning walking around town, acquired three coloured-glass Buddhas which it will be a challenge to get home and, at an over-the-counter chemists, got my hands on further supplies of Simvastatin, a cholesterol-lowering drug I am required to take. Assuming they are not fakes I am now chemically furnished to stay away until the end of February.

more of temples

2009-01-13T10:16:00.004Z

And then another pre-dawn departure on bicycles to watch the sun come up at Angkor Wat.

Many thousands of others have had the same idea, and the lawns heave and all the best places by the northern lotus pond are spiked with tripods that groan with lenses, and there is a hubbub of idle chatter in many tongues, a veritable Babel.
Having seen a few sunrises in my time I amuse myself watching the crowds for a while, and then wander off to the eastern side of the complex where hardly a soul has ventured yet, and am soon warmed by the early morning sun; I sit admiring the splendid stone carvings through binoculars.

Then coffee, and pancakes the thickness of Victoria sponge, beckon.

We cycle on and visit more temples and palaces. Too soon David and Joanna retire fatigued.
I am alone to wander where I will, and I do, all day in a familiar ecstasy.

At the end of the day I cycle out on a rutted track, to the accompaniment of cicadas that could be mistaken for car alarms, to the Eastern Gate of Angkor Thom, little visited as it leads nowhere. Its other name is the Gate of Death. I try to reflect quietly as is appropriate, thinking of Padmasanbhava in the cremation grounds, but my skin begins to creep and crawl in this jungle solitude and I flee back down the track, jolted and jangled, as though a devil pulls at my shirt-tails, towards life. How pathetic, in retrospect.

Tomorrow at dawn - we have seen many dawns on this trip - we leave for the border by taxi (thirty dollars for three hours), where we cross over to Thailand and pick up a train to Bangkok.

Next blog from there!

a day off in siem reap

2009-01-13T02:21:00.006Z

I go in search of a swimming pool.

I,m told that some of the big hotels have one. The first foyer I enter is as big as a palace, with marble floors that stretch for miles to the reception desk. I flip/flop noisily through the sepulchral calm. The receptionist, gliding silently on dainty slippered feet, leads me another mile to a huge pool with its own waterfalls. I am impressed, gob/smacked. I enquire why it is all so empty>not a soul in sight. The trade has been badly hit by all the trouble at Bangkok airport, quite apart from the recession.There have been cancellations in droves.
I go in search of somewhere peopled.
I look in at the Victoria Hotel, a marvellous french palais. Another perfect pool. I am sorely tempted, but my hairshirt complex kicks in and I,m soon back in the streets.

I pause in the Royal park to shudder again at sight of the bats. And wonder at the smell> a sour acrid odour with a touch of evil about it. They have the wingspan of albatrosses.
When several of these malodorous denizens of the treetops conspire to take flight at the same time, their translucent wings pale beigey=pink against the sunlight, and flap and flip and flop langorously about, my skin horripilates and I want to run from the Park and its loathsomeness.

If I don,t its because a young man in tight shiny trousers comes over and propositions me. In my confusion its a while before I realise he is collecting for an orphanage out of town, and he shows me photos and documentation. After a while, and a pleasant chat, I decide he is kosher and hand over a few dollars and my email address. God knows there is need enough in this country.

I am drawn to the sound of drums and flutes from a nearby temple. Standing across the street from it I start a short video. I have been collecting clips of music and sounds from our travels, and when you, Marcela, have taught me to edit, I hope to put together a little film. All of a sudden the palsied cripple at the foot of the temple steps, begging, gets up and lurches and hobbles hideously towards me, arms waving brokenly. I horripilate all over again, and grab another handful of dollars and pass them to him and make a quick getaway, chastened.

I walk for hours in the hot hot sun. I follow a main road out of town. I,m drawn to these arteries that change character gradually as they distance themselves from the centre, dwindling into shacks and workshops and plebean eateries with their tiny plastic chairs out on the pavement, in red and blue, purloined from a kindergarten perhaps. Motorbikes pass bearing huge sheets of plateglass, upright between driver and pillion. Shattering and bloody consequences if they crashed.

Turning away from the dust and clamour, I make a right into a quieter sidestreet, semi/industrial, karoake bars in improbably grand premises surrounded by small factories and more workshops. Lots of new buildings going up on tired dusty old fields.

I make another right after a kilometer or two, heading back into town along an unmade road of quiet villas and furniture workshops where women are applying varnish to cheaplooking beds and wardrobes. Its a sunday. They smile as I pass, and I wave and worry about the noxious fumes they inhale. I pass Medecins sans Frontieres, a quiet villa with parched gardens. A man collects dead leaves, and little dogs snap and snarl at me from beyond the wrought/iron gates.
I enter the precincts of a large wat on the outskirts of town. Around the central temple there are dozens of funerary stupas, painted in all colours, inscribed with names of the dead in a script I can,t read. Its a quiet place. There are few enough quiet places in Asia. Orange and brown robed monks, and creased old men in little more then loincloths, slumber in the shade. Only mad dogs and Englishman, and a few wide/eyed impervious urchins, are up and about in this midday sun.

Excuse some eccentric punctuation. This keyboard doeseccentric Swiss, thanks to Eric.

early morning chez Eric

2009-01-11T02:48:00.003Z

We wake at 4, and breakfast half an hour later. Its a somnambulist affair. The little boy waiters, who in daylight are wreathed in smiles, walk around stiffly, dead-eyed zombies dispensing scrambled egg and coffee. Then we leave in the dark, and with us the whole town it seems. Bicycles, motorbikes, tuk-tuks (motor-bike rickshaws), limousines battered or bright, converge from all corners and stream together out of town, towards the jungle and its ruins. There's a camaraderie de la route at this ungodly hour, and people wave gaily.

Yesterday we took the tuk-tuk, and travelled far afield visiting temple after temple, each more astounding than the one before. In a few it pullulates with crowds, Japanese, prosperous Hong-Kongers, creamy-white European widows. In most its almost empty, and you can easily be on your own, scarily so at times.

There's often the sound of music on the long avenues leading to the ruins. In the dusty shade of a tree you pass a little band of men playing old melodies on traditional instruments; its lovely haunting music. They are amputees, victims of mines, and play according to their abilities. Prosthetic limbs lie around to the side.

Cambodia is one of the most heavily mined countries in the world. I'm ashamed to say I never knew. The consequences are everywhere to be seen.

We visit a Mine Museum, started up by a young man who as a boy-soldier in Pol Pot's militia planted hundreds and hundreds of mines up and down the country. A Damascene conversion later he now dedicates his life to eradicating mines in Cambodia, and teaching the world about this scourge. He is now an expert de-miner, first doing it his own way, and now more efficiently and safely, having done a special course with the military in Salisbury, England.

Behind the moving and revelatory make-shift museum is a school for child victims, and a whole community to look after them. They are the lucky ones.

We alternate our days at the temples with lazy ones wandering around this charming town. I lunch at the Blue Pumpkin. The boys and girls there, slender and white of tooth, are all so beautiful they are surely of ancient royal stock, reincarnate. I sit there transfixed, stupefied by the midday heat and mesmerised by strange music with droning vocals from the next door wedding party. Something in me melts, like a block of ice on the sun-struck pavement.

Every other shop here offers reflexology and massage, and spas abound, but I'm shy of such delights, although God knows I could do with a good rub-down; my back is sore, and bum numb, from cycling, tuk-tukking on rutted jungle tracks, and months of indifferent beds.

siem reap

2009-01-08T11:44:00.002Z

I step out into the Royal Gardens, and start a neglected regime of stretches and dog poses to release my strained back.
Overhead there is a racket in the tall trees. Looking up I see clusters of large blackened leaves hanging from the threadbare tops. Suddenly some of them drop away, and sickeningly spread their prehistoric wings and flap about. Giant bats, as large as seagulls, in great throngs! They are clearly relinquishing their typecasting as nocturnal creatures, and making a dreadful diurnal racket.

.............going for dinner.

angkor : wat can I say?

2009-01-08T02:56:00.000Z

Yesterday, at the suggestion of our Swiss host Eric at the Prince Mekong Guest House here at Siem Reap, we had breakfast at 4.30 am and were on our bikes by 5 to see sunrise at a distant temple. We spent hours cycling around these stupendous ruins which disappear into the jungle at every turn.

Today, saddle-sore and ham-strung, I will do no more than flip-flop around town.

My ankles are being devoured by mosquitoes, so I will sign off.

pol pot

2009-01-05T12:10:00.005Z

Sipping breakfast coffee with David on a lovely cafe terrasse we are approached by yet another hawker, in a wheelchair. He is selling books. This happens all the time. The man has no hands. A bond develops between him and David, who is missing a hand from birth. They touch stumps in greeting, in acknowledgement. A mine, the man says.

Phnomh Penh is full of amputees, new ones everyday. Unexploded mines all over the country are a legacy of an atrocious civil war in the first half of the 70,s and then of the Pol Pot years. The day after tomorrow the country celebrates the 30th anniversary of the demise of that crazy regime. No one, bar a minor functionary or two, has been brought to justice. Pol Pot died an old man, cremated in a forest on a pyre of used tyres and old mattresses - I saw it in a film just now.

We went to the Killing Field a few miles out of town, just one of almost 2000 places of execution excavated so far, all over the country. Thousands were killed here. Unlike the Nazis, the Pol Pot regime never perfected the art of disposing of bodies. Bones and skulls have been dug up in shallow pits. 8000 skulls found here have been put in a glass sided tower inside a tall stupa that dominates the site. Many more than that died here, as logbooks show. Large tracts of the site have not yet been excavated, and may never be. Funds are low.

Most of the people killed here, many of them women and children, were brought in trucks from the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnomh Penh. This was in a former secondary school building in a suburb. Classrooms became cells and torture chambers. There are gruesome displays, reminding me of Auschwitz, Teresin........images of violence I can,t get my head around. This place too lacks funding. The government has stopped its grant. Evidence, documentation, artefacts, moulder with neglect.
On my way out a man with a horribly burnt face asks me for money. I hurry on. I can,t look him in the eye. Perhaps he was here in its hideous heyday.

I flee in confusion, and walk for hours to take refuge at last in the beautiful Museum of Antiquities. I stay for ages in a room full of the most wonderful standing Buddhas, wooden, ancient and fragile. I sit in the lovely gardens till almost closing time. I watch a rat or two scurry between manicured hedges, waiting impatiently for us tourists to leave so they can reclaim their domain for nocturnal delights.

My camera goes through weird death throes. Do I imagine the wisp of smoke that puffs out with the flash? The autofocus fails. Everything more than a centimeter beyond my lens is a blurred haze, a pretty, impressionistic fog. Is this how I am to snap Angkor Wat, where we go tomorrow, the most stupendous sight ever I am assured? Necessity being the mother of invention, I reconcile myself to creeping about the ruins, nose to the grindstone as it were, doing microscopic closeups of Buddha follicles. This morning the camera breathed its last, with its dead eye stuck open, unseeing, unretractable. RIP.

I go to the market, a fantastic French building and buy a new camera. Is this a true Lumix, and can the lens be Leica as it says?

Its been lovely here, and sobering.

a constant refrain of.....

2009-01-04T06:00:00.001Z

......give money, give dollars.

This computer has an imp in it, and a dodgy computer that won,t allow proper punctation'[ppl;,[[9 !

phew! {phrom phnom penh}

2009-01-04T05:15:00.004Z

We had a busy sweltering time on the Mekong, tripping on and off many kinds of watercraft, walking rickety gangplanks loaded with our rucksacks and wheelie bags, paddling down narrow channels overhung with dense palms in tight canoes, passing returning canoes shed of their tourist loads emitting a constant refrain of .

We have been serenaded by traditional groups singing delta shanties, which kept breaking into Auld Lang Syne.
Seen acres of Water Hyacinth, with lovely pale mauve blossom, grown to stop erosion of the banks, but largely broken away from the edges and floating all over the place. Tasted more tropical fruits than I could imagine.
Watched how rice paper is made for your spring rolls, and seen rice pop in superheated sand, into crispies, in huge metal cauldrons heated over fires made from fruit husks.
Lurched through rambling floating markets at dawn - wholesale, so one boat will be piled high with jackfruit, another only bananas.
Marvelled at the flash of giant kingfishers, and recoiled from pythons wrapping themselves around brave tourists. We have cycled along dykes and perspired in hammocks, chewing on pomelo dipped in salt and chillie. Examined bee hives and drunk honey tea.

All in tremendous sapping heat, and torrential rain which delayed us reaching our last berth, a hotel boat twinkling seductively out in the bay.

We retired early, New Years Eve, to our mosquito infested cabins, to avoid the sozzled Swedish and German celebrations and merrymaking that a cache of cheap wine and spirits portended.

Another early rise, to a brand new year, and more boats and buses to Phnom Penh.
Lovely place, sinister history.

More of that later.

swelter in the delta

2008-12-31T06:49:00.002Z

This is the last posting of 2008.

a very happy New Year to all my loyal readers.

It is too hot to write (pity us!)

Tonight we sleep on a hotel-ship at the border, and tomorrow sail on up to Phnom Penh.

love to all

miss saigon? i certainly will

2008-12-28T14:48:00.001Z

tonight, our last in saigon, we have been on a cocktail crawl

long island iced tea (lethal) on the 32 floor of the trade centre as evening fell and the lights came on all over the city

saigon iced tea ( lethal) on the roof terrace of the rex hotel a gorgeous deco cruise ship of a building by the hô chi minh hôtel de ville as was

vietnam plays and wins a seminal football match against thailand and the city goes ballistic

at dawn we laeve for the delta

fowler unmasked

2008-12-28T02:03:00.002Z

Dear Jane,

Thanks for letting me know that there is indeed a film of 'The Quiet American' which you have recently enjoyed.
But why, oh why, so swift in your response to what was after all the vaguest of enquiries? Don't you have better things to do than email, with a vast family to feed at Christmastide?
Now when I read of Fowler and 50's Saigon, all I see is Michael Caine in a backlot at Elstree!

David's dengue(?) fever is on the mend; tomorrow we leave Saigon for the Mekong delta, and a few days later we sail upstream to Phnom Penh in Cambodia.

pseud's corner

2008-12-27T01:56:00.003Z

Endre Friedmann, who became Robert Capa, died when he stepped on a landmine in Vietnam on May 25, 1954. The film in his camera was printed, and that's what you see in the museum. His most famous picture is from Spain, of a dying Loyalist soldier falling from the impact of a bullet. There are those who say its a fake.

What is certainly a fake is the 'iconic' shot of a communist tank breaking through into the Presidential Palace in Saigon in 1975, which marked the end of the conflict. There was no photographer present at the time, and it had to be restaged a few weeks later. Apparently, too, the famous shot of American marines raising the flag on a Pacific island to mark the end of that conflict is a staged recreation, as is the shot of Russian soldiers raising the Red Flag over the ruined Reichstag in Berlin.

My Penguin copy of 'The Quiet American' is a bootlegged fake bought outside Hô Chi Minh's mausoleum in Hanoi. It is badly photocopied on cheap and insubstantial paper, and I have to use my Swiss army penknife to cut the pages. I love it all the more for its fakery.
Incidentally the Continental Hotel does still exist, and I've seen it without realising. It stands by the French Opera House, and now sports a row of luxury boutiques (Calvin Klein and the like) where once the terrasses thronged with expat journalists, wheeler-dealers and girls in flowing silk pants.

My unfake Knirps umbrella, bought in Zurich earlier this year, gave up the ghost in yesterday's tropical downpour. RIP.

war remnants museum

2008-12-26T15:08:00.002Z

I drag myself around town in the sweltering heat like a reluctant snail.

I seek refuge in an icy air-conditioned cafe for a premature lunch.

Reluctant ever to leave I get stuck into Graham Greene's 'A Quiet American', which is set in a Saigon of almost 60 years ago. All the street names are French, and the Americans are only just beginning to become deviously involved. A city of terrorist attacks, bombs, assassinations. Marvellously evocative, like a 'film noir.' Did they ever make a film of it? I must track down the Hotel Continental where the expats and journalists mingled on the terrasses, and killed time in drink. Does it still exist?

I crawl across the road to the War Museum, and stay there for hours, rapt.

The 'Quiet American' of the story was killed early on, before even the French had left, but many hundreds of thousands came here to replace him in subsequent years, and the museum traces the ensuing conflict, mainly in photographs.

Many photographers of all nations died here.

Larry Burrows, a Londoner, worked for Life magazine and pioneered the use of colour photography in his photo-journalism, which was still rare. An unprecedented and highly influential 14-page colour spread was published in Life. He was killed in a helicopter crash in Laos in 1971, with several colleagues.

Dickey Chapelle from Wisconsin, christened Georgette Louise, died in 1965 of wounds.

Sean Flynn (son of Erroll), went missing with his companion Dana Stone on Cambodian Route J. They are pictured, young and dashing on their motorbikes, the day they left towards a Vietcong roadblock.

Kyoishi Sawada, a Japanese, died in Cambodia 1970. His Pulitzer prize winning photo of escaping villagers crossing a river is on show, as is a later picture of him and the same villagers in safety.

Many others are remembered.

Perhaps the most famous was Robert Capa, who had already covered Spain, and many terrains in the Second World War. He was at the Normandy landings in 1944, and followed on to Paris. He was a Jew from Budapest, glamorous and brave it's said, and had a romance with Ingrid Bergmann, which was apparently the subtext and inspiration of Hitchcock's Rear Window! He also found time to set up Magnum Agency in 1947.

David Halberstam wrote in his book 'Requiem ' :

"We who were print people, and who dealt only with words and not images, always knew that the photographers were the brave ones, and they held in that war - which began in an era of still photography and ended with colour film and videotape, beamed by satellite to TV stations all over the world - a special place in our esteem. We deferred to them, reporter to photographer, as we did in few other venues"

While I look at the deeply moving photos the air seems to congeal, I sweat profusely, and the heavens open with a massive and prolonged hammering on the tin roof of the Museum. The tanks and airplanes in the yard disappear behind sheets of rain. Catharsis? How would it have been to fight in conditions like this? Unimaginable. I spend another couple of hours wandering, and wondering at all this madness. More terrible images of the aftermath of War. Too much to bear really, but I need to see it all. To witness and honour.

blues continued....

2008-12-26T03:12:00.002Z

a computer blip......

.......with calf eyes, who mysteriously failed to reappear after a summer break; indiscretions in the changing room it was conjectured. We giggled heartlessly in prurient clusters.

'Boggy' Marsh was a lovely gentle man, who usually taught Latin and Maths; he was doomed, on Wednesday afternoons when it rained, to lead Religious Studies in a tiered chemistry lab to a horde of frustrated athletes, and sports skyvers ( a volatile mix). One very rainy season we ploughed chaotically through the Book of Job. What a pain that was!

Young Mr.Dixon, fresh from some brilliant university, who never stayed long enough to acquire a nickname, inculcated in me a love of English literature, although I could never see the point of scanning a sonnet; hero-worship glosses easily over the unpalatable and incomprehensible.

There was the old guard who had fought in the War - one in Korea - and the new generation who had just missed National Service. They floated and glided around in the same black togas, but were poles apart, from different planets it seemed.

To find out more about my old school, and a boy's growth to manhood, read a semi-fictional account of it in Julian Barnes' first novel 'Metroland'.
He was a year above me in the Sixth Form. I breathed the same air, but would never have dared speak to him, august as he already seemed. I note with sadness that his wife Pat Kavanagh, a literary agent, died in October.

Back to the present, David is languishing in his room with a temperature and a sore throat, and watching movies. He went to hospital yesterday, and dengue fever (from mosquito bites) is a possible diagnosis. He seems to be on the mend, and has eaten a fried egg for breakfast, with gusto.

I am off to visit air-conditioned museums.

boxing days blues

2008-12-26T02:12:00.001Z

I note with sadness that Eartha Kitt has died.

And Harold Pinter, Nobel Laureate for literature; born to Jewish immigrants in the East End, he was brought up and educated in Hackney as the family prospered, and died in a beautiful Georgian square in Notting Hill, married to that scion of the Longfords, my heroine Lady Antonia Fraser. A fine actor himself, he wrote some of the most iconic plays of the twentieth century. Rags and schmattes (he was born in Fashion Street) to literary riches.

Last night I dreamt of Mecca. No muezzin sounded , only cries of schoolboys, 'See you outside Mecca at one.' This was Mecca by-the-Thames. Mecca the caterers did our school lunches half a century ago by the water at Blackfriars.

The dream was no doubt prompted by sight of drying cassava roots on our biking odyssey. Cassava roots? Miraculously, and unbeknownst to me, that bane of English school dinners, tapioca, is extracted from the root! The tapioca was always cold by the time I got to the sweetie counter - I was a shy and unpushy child. I never knew it otherwise. 'Toad spawn' we'd cry in unsimulated disgust, and pass on to the wobbly pink blancmange. Sometimes the damp glutinous globules became ammunition when the teachers backs were turned, and flew through the air.

Where are those teachers now?

'Boggy' Marsh, and 'Bonso' ? Monsieur Le Mansois -Field (Froggy) who gave up trying to teach us French before Christmas, to enchant us with his reading of ghost stories? 'Narbo' - the slave driver - we called our Latin teacher, the mildest of men. 'Jock' (Dr.Law-Robertson) , was a refined Scotsman who taught me Goethe and Schiller; his discreet use of peppery cologne ( I can smell it still) excited ribald gossip in the locker-room, in an age when real men wore only Old Spice and, that, never on a weekday. What a long way mens' cosmetics have come since those ante-diluvian times! Now we boys are awash in potions and lotions, and splash on fragrances, from vile to intoxicating, as though there were no tomorrow. What a marketing triumph!

What has become of the softly-spoken and rather unathletic gym teacher with calf eyes

erratum

2008-12-25T02:37:00.002Z

Whoops! For yesterday's AGM please read ATM. Tropical heat plays havoc with my brain cells.

I have received the most wonderful Christmas present from David and Joanna, last Saturday's Guardian! I'll savour it for weeks.

Happy Christmas Day to all.

Back to the streets................

christmas greetings from hô chi minh city (saigon)

2008-12-24T13:46:00.003Z

Hours of walking in my new crocs (made in China - does that make them fakes?)
The flipflops I bought way back in Ekaterinburg to negotiate the toilets (often awash) of the Trans-Siberian railway finally fell apart last night. RIP.

Saigon is replete with the most wonderful deco buildings. I stand amazed and open-mouthed at street corners, as I haven't since we left Russia.

The old hôtel de ville, a glorious nineteenth century extravaganza, is now the Hô Chi Minh Museum; the man himself, 'oncle' as the population fondly called him, sits in the front garden fondling a young girl, in innocent allegory no doubt. He is surrounded by confections of nylon lotuses in many shades!

Its very, very hot so I head for the Botanical Gardens and linger a while amongst the lush vegetation and shady glades, admiring painted storks in lovely greys and whites, and muted pinks, who rattle their long yellow beaks like castanets; I wish I could join the Siamese crocodiles who wallow in glorious cooling mud but opt instead for iced tea.

Hard by is the History Museum, another glorious building from the 20's, an amalgam of Deco and Chinese hard to describe. Inside too its lovely, in the cool halls where the last ten thousand years of Vietnamese history are quaintly displayed.

At the heart of the museum is a small open courtyard, set with tables and chairs, around a tinkling and splattering fountain. I order another iced tea in this enchanted spot where people come and go. The boy - or is it a faun? - who serves me tea, takes up a bamboo flute and plays an ancient air. A troupe of young nymphs arrive in shimmering white silks beneath transparent lime-green shifts which flutter and billow, though there is no breeze. I talk to my young neighbour, a girl from Amsterdam who has been studying town planning in Hong Kong, and is in little hurry to go home and put her clogs up.

I fall into a reverie. Gratitude wells up for all the AGM's which, over a vast landmass dispensed zlotys, roubles, touregs, yuan and now dong without a hiccup. A deeper gratitude too to my parents, who came to England as penniless refugees and worked unceasingly to improve their lot, and give me the best education they could conceive of. If the AGMs have anything to disgorge its largely due to their efforts.

Returning home slowly I stop at the twin-towered, red brick French cathedral. By its side is a grandiose old colonial post office which I mistake at first for a handsome belle époque railway station. Sitting at the base of a tall column which bears a three metre high Madonna simpering odiously at all the Christmas festivity around her, I reflect with sadness on Christmases past, gone with the dinosaurs and the Oriental Emperors.

Seasonal greetings to you all.

extinct now 37...........

2008-12-24T01:36:00.002Z

..........this is where I had to publish and be damned, as the computer started playing up.

As I was saying : Tigers and crocodiles and oriental emperors, all extinct now. This Emperor, a confirmed francophile, scarpered in 1954 to the Champs Elysees, married a French lass called Madeleine, who as Empress of Vietnam perhaps found it easier to book a restaurant table, and gloried in her factitious elevation. The old palace above the lake fell apart amongst the frangipani trees and giant creepers, before being snapped up by a hotel chain and rebuilt.

We pass rice fields both wet and dry, and visit an illegal granite quarry which continues to operate thanks to backhanders to the local police supremo. A massive chunk of granite has been undercut by youths with hammer and chisel, and nothing more than flipflops for protection, and starts to groan and creak and expel little whirlwinds of dust. 10 minutes till it breaks away, the boys calculate. Fascinated, I want to stay and watch but my prudent and fearful companions hurry me along. We pass elephants which once worked the logging trade, and now labour beneath tourists. We see canoes on the lake carved from single massive tree trunks by folk from the many 'minority' villages.

We drench ourselves below monumental waterfalls, and stand by concrete monuments to ferocious tank battles. Both Mr.Wing and Mr.Yang are war veterans - they fought for the South; we hear tales from the horse's mouth.
We eat fruits I've never heard of, and learn the arts of rubber production in shady woods smelling of ammonia as the latex oxidises, where once workers died in droves from malaria and dengue fever. Have you ever seen a cashew tree, or drunk eau de vie from pomelo trees that grow outside your window, at a sweltering brickworks owned by a host who on the verge of bankruptcy and ruin, won the National Lottery? We drink to his good fortune, and admire his many grandchildren.

We take siestas in roadsides hammocks shaded by bamboo, sipping milk from coconuts, discover how rice noodles are produced in wooden shacks where whole families live, and marvel at the profusion and baroque invention of roadside Christmas cribs which line our route south on the Ho Chi Minh Road. Everywhere there are handsome new churches built since 2000, when restrictions on religious freedom were rescinded; the Virgin Mary has moved in with a vengeance, pouting and smirking at her good fortune from domestic doorways and ecclesiastical precincts.

We survive the entry into mad, mad Saigon without a graze or contusion.

Many thanks to Mr. Yang and Mr. Wing and Mr. Nam for wonderful insights into their country, and for two-wheeled adventures without a tumble.

Previous fear of motor-bikes, fed by my internal mother, has quite evaporated. Many times I wanted to wrest the controls from Mr.Yang, leave him a while under a palm-tree, and scoot off alone into the sunset. What bliss. So who out there wants to be Charlie Boorman to my Ewan McGregor for trips of the future?

Talking about Charlie, long before he knew Ewan he came to me for Alexander lessons as a sallow and ill-postured youth. I'm sure you have admired his grace and uprightness in the saddle these days.
While I am name-dropping here is another one. A nautical-sounding Mrs Sail phones to make an appointment for her husband. How pathetic, I think - can't he make his own arrangements? What's his name I enquire politely. Alexei. How pretentious; I have already taken against him. Alexei Sail.
Alexei SAYLE! Ohmygod! Not the vituperative, iconoclastic, foul-mouthed, hyperactive, deeply scarey, Jewish Liverpudlian comic? He'll surely have my guts for garters, make mince meat of me!
My friend Alexei turned out to be a softly-spoken pussycat, touched by melancholy.

Christmas Eve in Saigon. I have just had breakfast, and will step out now into the torrid streets.

pillion epiphanies

2008-12-23T09:03:00.004Z

We are safe and sound in Saigon, three days later!

We have had a fantastic trip, and a whole education.

Hardly out of Dalat, we stopped at a wayside temple with an incredible giant dragon of many colours, snaking its way around the shrine gardens, amongst other mythical creatures, reminding me of the fantastical sculptures of Nikki de Ste.Phalle - and there's a name to conjure with!- she who married Jean Tinguely of the crazily complicated installations.

The dragon perhaps blessed us for the remainder of the trip.

We visited a flower farm where today roses grow for the markets of Hanoi and Saigon, and gerberas for export to Europe. Until quite recently flowers as a marketable crop were discouraged by the authorities, as frivolous and decadent capitalist furbelows perhaps. A Dutchman - who else?- persuaded them otherwise. Today its a thriving and growing industry supporting many families. The whole area around Dalat is an Eden that grows every kind of vegetable and greenery in the sunny valleys.

Next stop a silk workshop, where we follow the whole process from cocoons incubating in giant dish- shaped baskets, to the same being dunked in hot water to kill the larvae before they have a chance to break out and damage the silk; the silk is then unravelled in complicated Heath-Robinsonish machines manned (?) by girls, and in great clattering looms is woven in predetermined patterns into the finished product. All this goes on in big corrugated sheds, airy and light, but the noise cannot be much different from the satanic cotton mills of Lancashire. Most of the workers are young girls, who manage a smile for the tourists who roll in on motorbikes. In case you are concerned about the dead larvae, nothing goes to waste here. The drowned creatures are an excellent source of calcium, and prized as delicacies. I defer when offered one, but David, who has already eaten scorpions at the night market in Beijing, savours them.

We visit coffee plantations. Vietnam, to my great surprise is the world's second exporter of coffee after Brazil. We learn to distinguish robusta, mocha and arabica. The most prized coffee is however 'weasel'. Weasels, discriminating creatures that they are, chew and half-digest only the very finest beans, and then excrete them semi-processed as it were. Their droppings are collected by very patient farmers and cleaned, and then marketed at exorbitant prices. Beware counterfeit 'weasel' however, as it abounds.

We visit dark-skinned montagnard tribes in their villages of shacks and long houses on stilts, who have been persuaded down from the higher reaches, for education and medical care, and to work the coffee plantations. It is a Saturday, and most of the menfolk are piteously drunk, while the women work on. Everywhere, and we will see this for three days, coffee beans are drying on giant tarpaulins on every flat expanse of ground.

We learn how to set up a rice wine distillery, and feed the fermented and finished rice to the pigs; and how brothers fought brothers in the war, and uncles fought nephews.

After a copious lunch overlooking a valley once napalmed and bombed to flush out Communists, we ride on, jolting and jolloping through the rain forest, and I struggle with a fatal desire to have a siesta on the back seat - suicide!

On the second day we visit the rebuilt Summer Palace of the last Emperor of Vietnam (1913-1997), a beautiful place on a hill above a lake where once crocodiles roamed and tigers came to drink. Extinct now 34

les delices de dalat

2008-12-19T13:04:00.003Z

I walk all day in perfect anticyclone weather around this lovely town. A French doctor, Alexandre Yersin, proposed it as a site for a sanatorium in 1893, and this week it celebrates its 115th birthday!
I am at first confused by the plethora of furniture stores spilling their sofas and fauteuils, and tables, out onto the pavements, until I see that some at least are cafes still waiting for their morning custom. I pass a coffin shop with its ornate, rococo wares piled high, and wrapped in cellophane.

I wander up to the French Cathedral on a hill, and watch a Vietnamese boy giving a face-lift to a statue of the Virgin Mary, in white gloss paint. Nearby is a convincing simulacrum of the Eiffel Tower, now hung with all manner of device for modern telecommunication. At its foot is the old Post Office - now the Cafe de la Poste - once linked by leagues of telegraph wire to the Quai D'Orsay in Paris, and to cities and settlements all over French Indochina. An imposing gubernatorial hulk of a building is now Novotel, Dalat.

By the big lake I see some kind of fair going on. Its part of the anniversary celebrations; trade stalls of drinks and eatables ; children everywhere arriving by the bus load. They besiege me with hellos and goodbyes, and giggles and handshakes. I'm an involuntary star. Somewhere I carry an irrational guilt for the Vietnam War. Why are they all so friendly to me?
I enter a cavernous concrete hall where there is a marvellous exhibition of the history of the town. Photographs of bemused, half-naked citizens of the original mountain village soon to disappear in imperial improvements. Pictures of empty streets and splendid villas. There is the station, built in the 20's - I resolve to search that out later. A whole display of Alexandre Yersin, a handsome fellow with a good beard, and an imposing-looking lycee named after him. The market building constructed just after the Second World war. How splendid it all looked, and how little the French could enjoy it, before being booted out. They never got to see the trees they planted in such abundance, around the lake, and in the new parks and spanking golf-courses, come to maturity.

I walk to the outskirts of town to find the station. There it is at last, surrounded by bougainvillea and a lovely garden of potted trees. Now alas only toy trains run from it, for the tourists. Nevertheless it is a haunting place. I imagine the comings and goings. The administrators coming up from the cities to visit their dutiful wives, who have escaped the heat and turmoil below for the season. Honeymoon couples arriving to boat on the lake, and have croissants in the cafes, and do whatever else it is that honeymoon couples do. I am reluctant to leave, I have such a strong sense of the place, and its whispers.

I walk to the grand Lycee Yersin, built to educate future colonial administrators for a thousand years. The French have gone, and the Americans have gone and the country begins to sing its own song.

Back in the hotel I wonder who this Yersin was. Some cool colonial administrator? Adventurer? Exploitative scoundrel? I Google him. What a surprise! Amongst many other things, he was co-discoverer of the bacillus which causes bubonic plague, and is named after him, Yersinia pestis. He set up Pasteur Institutes in Saigon, and in Nha Trang. I passed by the latter yesterday! He set up Hanoi's first medical school. On his tomb is written : "Benefactor and humanist, venerated by the Vietnamese people." His name remains, where many other colonial names have been execrated and erased.

peter fonda, dennis hopper, here we come

2008-12-19T02:01:00.002Z

At the breakfast table I regale my Dutch and Estonian companions with tales of our upcoming motor-bike safari. They ooh and aah, to my great satisfaction, I who was too lily-livered to contemplate motorbikes a couple of days ago.

We met up last night with Mr.Nguyen - 'call me Wing'- , Nam and Khan, who constitute 'Easy Riders Inc, Dalat', and around a hotel table we plot our route, and discuss terms. We peruse their book of hand-written testimonials from happy customers (one from Pat of LLandudno, whom we met in Hoi An, who turns out to have been 70!) and clinch the deal. Tomorrow we set off at dawn for a four day trip which will take us further into the Central Highlands, and then all the way to Saigon for Christmas. I can hardly believe how heroic I am about to be.

Back in about 1967 I acquired a Honda scooter. That year I was a medical student in town, but living, still marooned, in a South London suburb, which seemed ever more remote from modern life as the 60's fizzed and buzzed out of its epicentre in Chelsea. A scooter I hoped would put me in touch with the pulse of the city, and its flower-themed Zeitgeist . It was my first ever private means of motor locomotion, and the world perhaps would be my oyster.

I soon learnt to hate the Honda. It had a meagre 49cc engine, and had been previously owned by a gargantuan baker who had flattened its suspension. It never achieved a running speed above 15mph, and in a headwind you might as well have been going backwards. I bought it in October, at the beginning of a harsh and endless winter, came perilously close to frostbite, and sold it in the spring to the next sucker down the line.

Later that year I bought my first Mini, second-hand, KMX 201B (the only registration number of all the cars I have driven that I have been able to remember, and still remember after 40 years), grey exterior with tan upholstery. It was love at first sight, at the seedy car-merchant's on Brixton Hill, in the shadow of the Prison.
The Mini had the original sliding windows, and a pull-cord to open the doors, and in the middle of what you could not call a dashboard, so devoid was it of any features, stared the Cyclop's eye of the speedometer. It was a joy to drive, and of course was the epitome of 60's cool. I had arrived.

Today I explore Dalat, a hill station built by the French. We are far above the damp and fog, and cloying humidity, of the coast, and the air sparkles at 1500 metres.

the rain it raineth every day

2008-12-18T02:33:00.002Z

The last evening in Hoi An I pay a farewell visit to the small square dominated by a large bust on a podium. Karl Marx's younger brother I thought when first I saw it, with its bushy stone beard but more contemporary hairdo. Turns out to be Kazimierz Kwiatkowski 1944-97. A Polish ethnographer from Warsaw who helped Hoi An to be listed as a World Cultural Heritage site, and revived its dwindling fortunes. Now it thrives as once it did in mediaeval times as trading post and fishery. But for how long? How many trinket shops and tailors can it sustain?

We taxi far to the nearest station in a neighbouring town, down broad dual carriageways in the middle of wildernesses, slowly being parcelled up into building sites for more hotels and tourist facilities. I tremble not for Raffles and Novotel, and all the other fat-jowled hotelier clans, but for the local economy. Tourism is already badly hit by recession.

It begins to rain and we board our train for the 8 hour journey South. The landscape dissolves into greys and greens, and the horizon disappears. We pass ghastly malarial pools; buildings stained in mildew and damp, and lichens of every hue; tidemarks like Abstract Expressionist paintings. Outside and in, its dank, saturated, drear. We cross tumescent streams and engorged rivers. We pass doughty folk in pac-a -macks, plain and polka-dotted, in plastics of all colours, cycling, scootering, splashing in paddy fields.
Perhaps the bananas rejoice, the white ibis stalk more sprightly, and the water-buffalo plash with a gayer tread.

We drip in the carriage, diverted for a while from the sodden spectacle outside, by a Tarzan movie. Not the flabby Weissmuller of yore, with drooping loincloth - what a disappointment he was - but a wasp-waisted, simian-featured, Hollywood Adonis with pert bum, perfect pecs and priceless dentition. Eye candy.

We pass snowy landscapes where the earth has been bombed with phosphates, and then a slight clearing of the cloud layer reveals a congealed sunset in aubergines and mauves.

For a more literary description of what happens, externally and psychologically, when it rains for years on end read 'A Hundred years of Solitude' by Marquez.

We are in Na Trang about to head up into the Central Highlands by bus.

memory lane

2008-12-16T02:47:00.002Z

The Hillman Minx, jade-green and bulbous, is hauled aloft by a huge crane and swung across to the Channel ferry. Harwich 1950. An old photo. Its my parents' first trip back to continental Europe, in the aftermath of the war. I'm a three year old toddler, and my romance with travel starts here.

We head for Cologne. Around the cathedral its still a bombsite. I remember none of this, but the ruins must have made an impression. I'm still haunted by images of wrecked cities, the everyday turned inside-out. My childhood playground, in a south London suburb, is a bombsite. Once a big mansion surrounded by gardens, now its a jungle and a pile of bricks. Its set apart from the High Street by giant hoardings advertising Bovril and Guinness. Behind these our fantasy runs riot. Cops and robbers amongst the ramblers. Cowboys and Indians on the ruins of a pueblo. Perhaps the savvier boys and girls played doctors and nurses behind the bushes. I'm still the innocent, but not for long. We cultivated little plots of land, like pioneers, with nasturtiums and runner beans.
I turn ten and what we called the 'Garden' is bulldozed away. Where the mansion once stood becomes a petrol station forecourt, and the old garden sprouts a nondescript office block.

Opposite my bedroom window, beyond the tram stop, stands the ruined hulk of a warehouse, one of several along the High Street. For years I observed its vacancy and its rotting. It became eventually a pioneering supermarket, at around the time the tram-lines were torn up and traffic given free rein on Streatham High Street. These days that dozy old suburban street, once a hamlet on the crest of a rural hill outside London, has become a perpetual snarl-up stretching from Brixton to Thornton Heath.

We travelled on to Austria. It was too soon for my mother to want to go back to Vienna (that didn't happen till well into the 60's) but we went to Berchtesgaden to make sure, perhaps, that Hitler's Eagles' Nest, his mountain retreat near Salzburg, was well and truly bombed to smithereens, and unlikely ever to rise, phoenix-like, again.
Denied the fabulous spa towns of their youth, inaccessible beyond the Iron Curtain, my parents headed for Bad Gastein, where old Hapsburgs had frolicked, and we continued to go there many times, well into my teens.

Every year we packed the car in August and drove to the 'continent' for a month. The Minx was replaced by a Ford Anglia ( a downgrade in difficult years for my parents) , then a Zephyr, a wonderful duo-toned Zodiac with white-walled tyres in renewed prosperity, a Farina-styled Austin Cambridge which meant we had the first tail-fins in Streatham, a series of Cortinas alas when they were already dull and pedestrian, and then a Honda I didn't want to be seen in ( that was years after my father had died).

England remained the foreign country till well into my twenties, when I began forays of my own into the country-side, and felt shy and tongue-tied in the Cotswolds, bashful in Brighton, reticent in Rye.

Fast-forwarding to yesterday, David and I fought with giant breakers in the South China Sea and collapsed, exhilarated in defeat, under a palm-tree. We cycled along the beach, past condominiums and hotel complexes, building sites where foundations may never rise more than a foot above the ground as the recession hits Vietnam.
In the evening we are hit by the shopping bug. Joanna buys silk lanterns galore, and soon I am infected, acquring bedspreads and throws I didn't know I wanted.

The water-front is still flooded; something to do with the fullest of moon of the year, and perhaps not global warming. Nevertheless bad for trade.

Soon I'm off into the streets again, where Father Christmas beckons from every hotel foyer and shop doorway. No escape.

dolce far niente

2008-12-14T15:03:00.002Z

My first sortie this morning is premature. Torrential rain. When I can I rush back for umbrella and waterproofs, and set off again. Feel initially self conscious in shorts and flipflops, for the first time this trip. My legs seem so green until they tan, and I worry that they are not as shapely as once they were, and how will they be in another ten years? Les neiges d'autan.
After a while these ruminations fade, and I begin to rue the day I have to wear trousers and socks again.

I want to do little today. Assimilate the cascade of impressions of the last few weeks.
I sit a long time in a café reading an Amy Tan novel, set partly in the Guilin area of China where we were recently. Have not read her before , and enjoying it. I watch tourists pass by in pac-a-macs. Two dogs sniff each other enthusiastically, and I wonder what awaits me in the romance department at my age. More Sturm und Drang? I hope not.

The heat is sapping. I stumble over to a restaurant and have a delicious lunch overlooking the little harbour. The beer perhaps is a mistake - I can hardly make it back to the hotel for a long siesta.

In the evening we have dinner with some ladies from Llanddudno and Dublin, that David and Joanna met earlier in the day overhearing them talking about their adventures on motorbikes.
D and J are clearly softening me up for a trip on motorbikes which up until now I have eschewed as being suicidally dangerous. The eldest lady was possibly older than me, and sat pillion for 6 days and had a whale of a time. Where elderly ladies go perhaps I can dare to tread.

I go down to the harbour. The river has flooded the whole street where I had lunch. I think of global warming and consequent flooding.
They are switching off the computers.

hanoi to hoi an : anagram alert

2008-12-14T02:30:00.002Z

We shuffled and shunted across the streets and lanes of Hanoi aboard the evening train, heading South.

Half a day later, soon after dawn, we disembarked at Dong Ha, a town close by the 17th parallel, the line of latitude decreed by Geneva protocol to divide Vietnam into North and South in 1954. This followed the catastrophic and humiliating French military defeat at Dien Bien Phu, and their departure from the colonial scene in Indo-china. Free and fair elections were promised for 1956, but these never happened. The US became more and more embroiled in the South, and then the war began......

We tour the area in an air-conditioned Mercedes mini-bus with a voluble young woman as our guide. Our trip conjures up old television news images. Rockpile, the fortress within a mountain, where American troops were flown in for diversion, deep in the rocks. The Hô Chi Minh Trail. Tet offensive. Route 9. Napalm. Phosphorus. Defoliant. Deep tunnel systems where whole villages lived for years. A million Vietnamese dead. 60,000 American soldiers killed.

Today the hillsides are green again. We visit war graves, a military museum surrounded by giant poinsettias and shot-down carcasses of US planes. Where once there was a huge American airbase, there grows a coffee plantation. Old bomb craters have become fishponds. Weapons to ploughshares.

We travel down here to Hoi An on two public buses, knowing we have been ripped off and fearful for our luggage, such a to and fro-ing is there, as the buses stop at every street-corner sniffing for custom.

We arrive here in this charming little resort on a river, 500 miles south of Hanoi, a couple of kilometres from the nearest beach. This morning we awake to torrential downpours, like in a Somerset Maugham short story - its the rainy season! - but its already cleared up and the sun beckons.

great danes

2008-12-11T00:42:00.006Z

Time of morning here when the public tannoys are broadcasting health announcements to the populace, all agog to hear about HIV and innoculations as the city gears itself for action, interspersed with jaunty tunes and singing.

No chance of a lie-in after our lovely meal with the two Danes. We went last night to a beautiful restaurant in what had been a large private mansion built by a Frenchman in the thirties. We are led up to a splendid verandah on the first floor, where amongst tropical foliage and stuccoed Corinthian columns we peruse the menu. Perhaps we blanch visibly at the prices, and certainly barely-suppressed gasps escape one of us (we are budget travellers! will we ever get to Bangkok airport let alone have a dollar left for a flight home?), but Frederik evermindful invites us as his guests. Many many thanks!! It was a superb meal, a seemingly never-ending suite of dishes, and excellent company.

Frederick suffered a life-threatening, and life-changing, cerebro-vascular incident a couple of years ago. From being a corporate executive he is now a trainee psychotherapist, specialising in body-centred work. He has even heard of, and practised, the Alexander Technique, and meditates. He plans to move to London next year, so the next meal is on me!
Rolf has abandoned the chilly shores of the North Sea for the Australian Gold Coast where he lives now, but they are old and loving friends and travel often together.
We learn amongst many other things that Danes call those eponymous canines "les grands danois", in French! They are apparently a French breed, but like fake Calvins breed everywhere these days. Its amazing what you learn on the road.
Fortified with espresso (I have a blog to write) I am accompanied home by Rolf who helps me cross the crazy road, crazier than usual tonight as flotillas of scooters brandishing the national flag are endlessly circling the town lake, hooters ablare. Perhaps a football victory, or plain tropical joie de vivre!

Sitting at my keyboard later in vest and underpants, barefoot, window open to the nocturnal sounds of the city, I feel like Hunter S. Thompson tapping away with an older technology, his typewriter paper limp with tropical damp, as he reports on human folly, and fear and loathing in Puerto Rico, Cuba or Las Vegas, and his own drink habit. Only the rum at my elbow is missing. I sip at green tea.

This evening we head south on the night train, to visit a huge system of underground shelters and caves, where people took refuge for months on end to avoid the bombs of only three/four decades ago.
Every country we have passed through since crossing the Channel has seen unparalleled horror and devastation in the last century.
A litany of human suffering : Belgium, Germany, Poland, Russia, Mongolia and China. One could weep. We still have the killing fields of Cambodia ahead.

ps Abrazos to Mauricio, and calusy to Nityabandhu for your messages and encouragement. They are much appreciated.

karstaways ahoy!

2008-12-10T15:34:00.004Z

We are picked up from our hotel by a mini-bus and whisked 3 hours east to Halong Bay. The mainland hereabouts had more bombs dropped on it in the Vietnam war than were dropped in the whole of World War II. (David has been reading John Pilger who reported extensively on the conflict.)

We transfer smoothly to a small vessel, which takes us out to a splendid wooden barque, rising out of the water like a Spanish galleon, rich in mahagony and potted palms. We are surrounded by flotillas of similar craft, tall masts swaying in the swell, and sea-eagles circling about and dipping into the brine for their lunch. We clamber aboard and are taken to the most splendid dining room amidships, large windows all around and the crispest of linen and place settings. More gleaming mahogany, followed by a succession of the most delicious dishes, beautifully presented and charmingly served.

We are 25 people, a flotsam and jetsam of Europeans and Antipodeans, and a few Chinese. I am allocated a cabin with a young Chinese girl- 'call me Flora'- from Xi'an, who is studying banking in Singapore. Lunch cleared away and cabins allocated, we hoist anchor, or at least the crew do, us landlubbers just watching and trying not to get in the way. We sail off into the bay, and what a wonder that is.
There are two thousand (David says three) karst islands studding the horizon far and near, in every direction. The weather is perfect, and the sea benign. We sail awhile, mouths hanging open with the beauty of the scene. We put into a small harbour, and are soon clambering up a hillside and entering a marvellous sequence of limestone caves delving deep into the massif, discovered by the French a hundred years ago. ( The only time I have done real speleology was in France a quarter of a century ago. No spotlit stalagmites then, or stalactites with whimsical names, no metal litter bins in the shape of penguins, or signs not to deviate from the path. Then it was pitchblack beyond the feeble light cast by the Cyclopean torch at my forehead, and very scarey indeed squeezing through tight clefts, wet and slippery, wondering just how much mountain there was above my head, and whether the mad spélélogue I was following knew the way out. Crawling bruised and battered into the daylight after hours underground, and distinctly depressed by light deprivation, I could have wept, and promptly consumed half a bottle of whisky to reorientate myself- which of course did not work, but seemed necessary.)

Then I am adrift with 'Flora' in a kayak, trying to keep up with the others - 'Flora' does not know her starboard from her port, and cannot swim, which makes her, and me, rather nervous - as we paddle about into the most beautiful cove. As we return to our vessel the sun is setting amongst the karst in a blaze of colours. We are soon having a complimentary glass of wine and titbits. As dusk falls the braver amongst us - (David has asked me to write that these are shark-infested waters, which is true, but the sharks are tame as tiddlers and only a metre long) - jump into the sea from the poop deck. Sublime - and I'm hoping my fake Calvins will protect me from unwelcome piscine attention.
Another lovely meal, making friends with two great Danes, Frederik and Rolf. In the waters all around as we prepare for sleep are an armada of anchored craft, twinkling benignly. And then to bed.

Up before dawn to witness the sunrise, the seen universe shimmering in shades of grey, slowly taking on colour. A lovely morning on the top deck, amidst the sun-loungers and the potted plants and a pergola for shade, as we cruise amongst the islands and talk to strangers. All beautifully organised. Memories of Yangste squalor and rodent terror quite exorcised.

Alas before we know it we are back in the bus, bound again for Hanoi and the drone and clatter and klaxons of 3 million scooters.

But we have a dinner date with Rolf and Frederik..................

hô-hô-hô hô chi minh hô-hô-hô hô chi minh

2008-12-08T13:56:00.006Z

This is what I chanted one Sunday afternoon many years ago in central London, with tens of thousands of others appalled by the war in Vietnam. We linked arms, surged forward in an exuberant crescendo on the 'hô-hô-hô', and diminuendoed on the 'hô chi minh'. I don't remember knowing much about the man himself, but it made for a great chant.

Today I circumambulated his mausoleum, a modest affair compared to Lenin's and Mao's, and surrounded by lovely tropical gardens, attended to by a dozen gardeners in coolie hats, crouching and clipping and watering. Peace reigned and exotic birds sang. Hô himself was not in residence. Every year at this time he is taken to Moscow for a few weeks, where his remains are given over to the taxidermists' magic attention. (Rough Guide suggests wickedly it is Madame Tussauds, these days, who do the honours.) He is due back in a few days so I may well catch him to pay my respects. From what I know today he was no villain.

A mile away Lenin stands on a plinth in a park. Strange to see him again; stranger still to see him surrounded by palm-trees and, one hand on his lapel, striding out toward the boababs.

I got lost in the warren of the Old City trying to find North. My infallible nose for direction quite failed me The sun seemed to be in the wrong place. Had I unwittingly crossed the Equator to where, I dimly remembered, the sun goes from right to left and everything is topsey-turvey? I gave up trying to puzzle out the map, and gave myself up to the warren of narrow lanes, which serve as conduits for a never-ending stream of scooters, some laden with whole families, others piled to the rafters with all manner of merchandise, all ducking and diving, and weaving and winding.
I am more fearful than ever of crossing the road. I stand paralysed on the pavement. Catatonic. Should I accept one of the endless offers of motor-bike rides from strange and sometimes charming men, just in order to reach the other side? The hubbub is unrelenting, and the air heavy with fumes. Not here the Chinese electric scooters which, weirdly, are completely silent. I witness a scooter gridlock at a crossroads and, mesmerised, watch it untangle, and then lock again, and untangle........everyone seems even-tempered, unfussed, finessing the obstacles with elegance and élan.

Talking about 'élan', the city is studded with the architectural legacy of the French, from official to commercial to domestic. At times you'd think you were in Juan-les Pins, or Antibes.

I retire early from the fray to the air-conditioned cool of my room. I have changed hotels and, halleluia, have a legible keyboard! I notice that my last couple of blogs have misplaced commas and one 'innumerable' too many; so fraught was it writing 'blind', I had no heart for editing.

'Anonymous' of 7th December, please reveal yourself, but thanks anyway for the encouragement! By the way, Roman, how are things in Irkutsk? Are you still skipping your lectures? Greetings anyway.

Tomorrow early we leave town for a couple of days to sail around Halong Bay, another marvel apparently of ubiquitous karst, this time marine.

meetings and partings

2008-12-08T00:56:00.002Z

The railway line into Hanoi enters the city not in tunnels, or up on viaducts, but at street level, slinking tightly between buildings, rattling a hair's breadth distance past ground floor dwellings where people eat their evening meal, rumbling across innumerable lanes and boulevards, where phalanxes of scooters with myriad lights wait and fidget impatiently, interrupted in their flight across the city. We shudder and groan past innumerable cafes and restaurants, brightly or shoddily lit. We are instantly embedded in the city.

Its a surreal entrance. A haunting, and indeed Surrealist painting, hangs in the Estorick Collection of C20th Italian art in London ; a steaming, lumbering and slightly menacing locomotive passes through an empty sunlit city street. The picture always touches a deep nerve in me, don't know why. So much so that I want to prise it off the wall and take it home. Its only 12 inches wide and less in height, and would fit easily under my coat.

Last night we crossed the tracks on foot, with our delightful dinner companions Baptiste and Yusuke. 24 and 22. Yusuke teaches us some Origami, and Baptiste is charmingly entertaining. I am moved by their youth and high spirits. We are about to take farewell snaps at a street corner when a tearful young woman with a backpack approaches us tentatively and asks if we know of a hotel. She has been looking for hours. She hides her trembling chin in her scarf. She is Japanese, as is Yusuke. Rapidly her tears transmute into smiles of relief as the boys assure her their hostel is close-by; they will take her there, provided she take our photograph. Amidst much mirth, a touch of sadness on my part, and bright flashes, we say our goodbyes and depart separately into the night. New friendships formed, perhaps.

¿is this hanoi or havana?

2008-12-06T15:51:00.003Z

Yesterday morning began with a nail-biting rush-hour taxi-dash through Kunming, trying to reach the right bus station, after misunderstandings with the driver. Was this to be the first calamity of our trip? Will someone be slain? By the skin of our teeth, with only minutes to spare, we pile onto the bus, where high-emergency adrenaline keeps me rigid and palpitating till beyond the outskirts.

Ten hours of trying to see something through misted windows, and watching half a dozen kung-fu movies on tortuous mountain roads, leaves me battered.

We spend our last night on Chinese soil in an archetypally seedy border town ( a lady of the night disturbs my slumbers with a giggling phone call to my room; as she seems to know no English she just continues to giggle until, like 'outraged of Tunbridge Wells', I slam the receiver down.)

Outside flows the Song Hong (Red River), and on the opposite bank is Vietnam.
We cross over on foot in the morning, and within yards everything changes - physiognomies, sights and smells, buildings.

For the first time we travel 'hard-class' (Colin Thubron always does of course), which means 11 and a half hours of plain, unadorned, wooden seats in a marvellously crowded carriage, a chariavari of peddlars and babies and shifting passengers providing constant entertainment.

Our companions are two charming young men from France and Japan, travelling singly, who were on our bus the day before. From Lille and Tokyo. We meet up with them tomorrow by the temple in the lake.

At last we rumble into Hanoi, and it is exactly how I imagine Havana to be: a tropical breeze ruffling the palm trees, beat-up cars, cavalcades of scooters and bikes, lovely faded buildings and crowds of graceful people shimmying through the streets. Tears well up at the thought of the appalling suffering this country has endured.

We go for a quick meal, and then I sit at this keyboard whose lettering is mostly vanished, trying to recall Qwerty, and Mavis Beacon's typing system, for you dear reader!

dwindling aquifers

2008-12-04T12:13:00.002Z

The water in our lovely local park, Green Water Park, dried up a number of years ago, a man told me. The natural spring which fed it for centuries was depleted, exhausted, defunct. Consternation. A whole season passed, while kids played football in the empty basins, and the community scratched their heads while discussing what to do. Turf it over? Fill it in? In the end water won, but now it has to be piped in industrially. Similar problems arise nationwide. A cautionary tale of modern China.

Loitering in the lovely grounds of an ancient temple, I passed through a non-descript door, and found myself in an Academy of Ghastly Painting. On display were pictures of white horses frolicking in improbably green forests, fey child-girls in traditional costume smiling winsomely, distinctly pubescent girls with hardly a stitch on dancing in gay abandon to some ancient tune, juvenile pandas chewing on bamboo shoots, and many variations of Van Gogh's sunflowers. Huddled in corners were students of this Art, perhaps absorbing ancient pictorial techniques, but more likely learning to fleece the tourist.
A typical juxtaposition of modern China.

You are walking down the street minding your own business, when behind you there is a ghastly sound of a throat clearing, and projectile matter hitting the pavement. Surely it must be a consumptive in their death throes, a tubercular trauma. You turn round. As likely as not it is an elegant lady in no particular distress, or a businessman glued to his mobile, or a trendy teenager jiggering to his I-pod. Try as I may I cannot get used to spitting and its associated sound effects. But there's modern China for you, and I've loved it.

SoB: a group of art students, the real thing, sit around the reclaimed lake in Green Water Park with their easels. They are painting in their various ways the tormented remnants of a thousand lotuses in the lake, as the sun goes down over China.

ciao ciao china

2008-12-04T10:08:00.002Z

Our papers have come through, and tomorrow morning we take a ten hour bus ride to the Vietnamese border where we overnight, and then continue by train to Hanoi. At some stage we cross the Tropic of Cancer, which will be very welcome as it has turned a little parky here in Kunming.
Today David and I packed a large parcel of longjohns and thermal sweaters, fleecy gloves and woolly hats which have sustained us for the last two months and shipped them back to the UK. Joining then were a talking (in Chinese) calculator , so when I am next here I may at least be able to count in Mandarin. I regretted the gloves as soon as we were back on the street. Heigh-ho!

I have discovered that domestic Chinese dogs may be no taller than 12 inches. (True fact). This I assume is a canine parallel of the one-child policy, and explains the proliferation of petite pooches. It is also a handy size for the casserole when the going is tough.

Kunming is our last Chinese city of any size. Like all the others we have been through it is continuously reinventing itself. Tearing itself down and rebuilding. There is little that seems to predate the last three decades. Old people wander around in a daze, hardly knowing where they are, familar landmarks having vanished, or am I just imagining that?

I did however come across an old Muslim quarter in the centre of town, surrounded by the clamour of construction sites, which retained some kind of integrity. At the heart of it were two twinned Art Deco buildings, superb in their delapidation and very moving, boarded up as they were, awaiting the knacker's yard perhaps, or who knows about to be restored to their former glory.
I don't know why I find buildings from this era - the 20's and 30's - so moving. They arose in Central Europe in an age (in retrospect) of 'innocence', of a brave new world, soon to perish in World War II and the Holocaust.

Passing a restaurant last night, strains of 'Silent Night, Holy Night' , sucrose if not saccharine, emerge. I am horrified. Is there no escape from Christmas and its toe-curling horrors? Apparently not. Santas are beginning to appear in the stores and decorations are going up in the streets. National Geographic magazine informs me that there are 8 million Christians in China, as many as there are Buddhists.
Coming here on the train a group of young men pass us in the corridor muttering halleluias. I take it as ironical reference to us, and am ready to have a fight (in my in-Christian way). They return a few minutes later still chanting and, remembering my charity, we exchange greetings. We discover they are Christians. We explain we are Buddhists. Much mirth. They depart assuring us that Jesus died for us.

Going for dinner.

sunday in the park....and monday

2008-12-01T07:05:00.002Z

Guilin. Sunday. Lovely parks.

Colin Thubron on Guilin: "A long-time Nationalist stronghold, it had been blitzed by Japanese aircraft in 1944, and had survived as one of the ugliest towns in China. Now tourism was shoddily recreating it." That was written in 1986.
What a lot can change in 20 years! Like all of China it seems, Guilin has lost no time in reinventing itself, but there is little shoddy here now. Shoddiness too has been swept away. Its a charming low - rise city, on the river Li, full of parks and waterways, and tree-lined avenues.
I spend all Sunday....and Monday, walking around the lakes, sheltering beneath Osmanthus trees in the heat of the day to read my latest Chinese novel, "To Live" by Yu Hua; very good book which was first banned in the 90's, until it started to win all kinds of award im Europe. Its the story of a Chinese Everyman who endures the vicissitudes and horrors of the last half century in China.

How deep the changes go in Chinese life, who knows? Perhaps they are as counterfeit and insubstantial as the fake Calvin Klein briefs I wear that cost me tuppence in Xi'an.

A child starts sobbing when it sees me at the next table at lunch. My beard I guess. The Chinese don't grow beards - you can't call the wispy Confucian strands you see on a handful of very old men beards. Mine you may remember went through an elegant Tsar Nicholas phase, then a wild Chinggis Khan look (co-incidentally in Mongolia), and now untamed and unpruned is coming into its Santa phase in time for Christmas.

For a new month a new feature for loyal readers - Sight of the Day ; SoD for short.

First SoD for December: two flat wooden trays of drying persimmons, deep apricot - coloured discs lying in tidy rows, in the sun by a bright blue metal shutter.

Another train to catch - only 17 hours to Kunming, west of here, where we will get our visas for Vietnam.

no smoke, no cook

2008-11-29T01:36:00.002Z

We are picked up from our hotel by another slip of a girl, who - ' call me Janet'- takes us first to the local market. We are delighted and entranced by the first hall, piled high with all manner of colourful vegetable, and then pass below an arch into an altogether darker realm, the Fish market. On all sides creatures, short and long and thin and stubby, with and without scales, are expiring in large vats. They squirm and slither and wriggle, or lie defeated on their sides. I pass a row of giant carp heads, separated from their bodies, lying on a stone slab. They are still mouthing their silent despair.
I hasten through another arch and enter the infernal realm of the Animal market. Again the produce is mostly alive in myriad tightly-packed cages. The Chinese, it seems, will eat anything. (I pass no judgement.) I quicken my step and leave to a dreadful cacophony of bleating, crowing, shrieking, whimpering, whooping, snuffling, bellowing, barking and meowing.

Chastened, and grateful that we have chosen the vegetarian option, we are whisked off to an idyllic farmhouse in the karst (for geological clarification of this, see Kieran's message of a couple of days ago, and for correction to my Cohn-Bendit story see Claus's of the same day - thanks guys, I'm grateful for your prompt interventions).
We are a rum crew - an Antipodean, some other Brits, a camp gentleman from Seattle and a modern lady from Xian who has always resisted her mother's attempts to inculcate her with cooking lore.

First lesson : let your wok start smoking on a high flame before proceeding. This must be where I have always gone wrong back in Blighty, nervous of triggering my hypersensitive smoke detectors. The ingredients are ready waiting for us in tidy dishes, and all we have do is chop and shred and smash and sizzle, and have a lark. One dish done, we go out to eat it and sip green tea in an arbour surrounded by bougainvillea, and contemplate the karst. Back in the kitchen, our woks have been miraculously sluiced and dried, our worktops gleam afresh, and a new set of peeled and prepared ingredients await our attention. Bliss. Why can't cooking always be like this?

Today we return to Guiling upstream, a delightful place.

ps calling krakow, berlin, mauretania and primrose hill

2008-11-27T14:27:00.002Z

Many thanks Kieran and Claus for factual clarification, and to Nityabandhu and Mauricio and Mussy for your kind encouragements! I'm enjoying writing my blog, and thinking of you all, and appreciate your comments. love to all.

karaoke nights

2008-11-27T13:36:00.003Z

Today we cycled through the karst and are none the wiser as to its geological origin. Its a flat plain with the most extraordinary hills just shooting straight up into the sky, and goes on for miles and miles. Our guide is Bin (call me Maggie) Yan, a slip of a girl more used to filing her nails and dying her hair orange than cycling. She spends a lot of time looking at her mobile phone, perhaps trying to coax messages out of it to alleviate the boredom of our frequent photo stops. The landscape is astonishing, and the orchards are full of citrus fruits , and cotton, and bougainvillea in glorious blossom.

After a few hours my bum is very sore. We all know how the sinews and flesh of the body hold a remembrance of things past; I am taken back directly to the summer of 1984. I was nursing a bruised heart after a confusing love affair, and thought the only thing to do was get on my bike and cycle alone across France . It took me 11 mostly blissful, and certainly saddle sore, days to ride from Dieppe to Nimes and my heart was mended for a while. More lastingly, the beloved's sister was an Alexander Technique teacher, so I had heard a lot about the Technique and been advised that I would even benefit from it. On my return from France I searched Time Out and found an Alexander workshop advertised. After that I never looked back . I began lessons and within a year had been accepted on to a three year training course which changed my life. So thanks Ben! I saw Ben recently at the theatre with his two teenage sons. We chatted pleasantly, and there was no tugging of the scar tissue around my heart.

Tomorrow we do a Chinese cooking workshop on a farm nearby. If local delicacies are anything to go by - pig hand with sauce, steamed cuckold, fried pig face meet, spicy cattle hoof with local pepper, crispy pig lung, crab porridge, bamboo leopard cat, masked civet and snake (soup, pepper, braised) - we are in for a treat!

Our idyll here is shattered nightly by dreadful sounds arising from a hundred karaoke bars. I want to tear out the perpetrators' tonsils, which on reflection might make a nice soup.

seven men on a boat

2008-11-26T13:28:00.003Z

Undeterred by our recent trials on the Yangtse, we embark on another rivercraft, this time a small speedboat, in the company of two New Zealanders, a girl from Melbourne who wears bewilderingly few clothes, and a Frenchman from Bordeaux. This last, Fred, is the spitting image of Daniel Cohn-Bendit in his revolutionary prime. Remember him? Paris '68? Were you there? Daniel stormed the barricades, and speechified at the Sorbonne, elbow to elbow with Jean-Paul Sartre, then already a superannuated 'philosophe' trying to ingratiate himself with youth. Daniel ended up many years later as member of Parliament in the German Reichstag, a shadow of his former firebrand self. (Is this correct Claus?)
That heady summer of '68 I turned 21, and twiddled my thumbs while Rome burned around me.I went on no marches, set fire to nothing except the odd joint, and was very depressed, wondering when my life was going to start. It clearly hadn't. Until then, and for many a year after, it seemed just a painful simulacrum of a life.

Back to the river Li, where we careened and swooped, and shuddered and juddered, and sent the local flora and fauna rushing for cover. Our macho helmsman clearly fancied
himself as 007 in a movie, but was ever sensitive to our photographic needs (our craft bristled with Nikon zooms jabbing at the landscape) and would decelerate vertiginously at the sight of local colour - some poor fisherman trying to keep afloat on his bamboo raft in our shocking wake, water buffaloes minding their own business ( strangely the Chinese have not yet invented mozzarella, considering they had invented most things while Europeans were still daubing themselves in woad, and grunting) clouds of white egrets and fishing cormorants. These latter have a cord tied loosely round their throats so they are unable to swallow any fish they catch. The fish are squeezed out by the fisherfolk, and the cormorants are allowed to eat every seventh fish so they don't go on strike. Cormorants are sinister old birds at the best of times; here they are the size of vultures.
And the scenery, which after all is why we are here? Fifty miles of the most stupendous hills and rock formations (karst our guidebook tells us, but none of us can remember what that means).
I have forgotten again where I am, but its quite charming , by the banks of the Li.
Tomorrow we hire bikes and will cycle amongst the karst.

yangtse capers

2008-11-24T01:56:00.003Z

Embarking at the port we approach a splendid craft, dining-room ablaze with chandeliers, and a white-uniformed and helmeted brass band blaring away on the quayside. Surely our budget does not stretch to this opulence? Indeed it does not. We slope on despondent to the furthest dark reaches of the dock, and pile on to a fleapit of a boat. Fleas would have been the least of our travails. Within minutes of entering our ghastly dingy berth David has killed our first cockroach, gallantly. And then came the rodents. Difficult to know if they are modest rats or supermice, such a scuttling and scrabbling is there in the ceiling. We pull the foetid bedding closer around us, and I remember with horror the Sukhavati Rat. It entered, unbidden, our Buddhist community in Bethnal Green, and caused havoc for days. One night I returned and everyone on my floor had decamped to other quarters. The rodent had last been seen on my bed! I went to sleep tremulously. At some stage in the night I imagined ,or actually felt, a creature run over my head, and my screams woke the neighbourhood. How many Buddhists does it take to dispose of a rat? In the end we fudged and summoned Tower Hamlets Pest Control.
Was history to repeat itself in this riverine context?

On our last evening aboard our sordid craft we see evidence of a visit. A dropping or two, and macaroons scattered cavalierly about the room. David goes storming about asking the startled staff (who speak little English) what their 'rat procedure' is. We are assured, after much miming and leafing through a dictionary jabbing at hieroglyphics, that mice bring luck ( the rat word is never mentioned). Chinese smiles and titters (what are these whitefaced creatures making such a fuss about?) David, enraged, decides to dismantle the antique central heating system, from which we have heard much scuttling. I retire to my top bunk, wanting only to read my novel, a very good one by Xiaolu Guo who almost won the Orange Prize last year. The rat has clearly scarpered by now, seeking respite from this unwelcome and unaccustomed attention Our pleasant roommate reassembles the heater.As I gingerly go to sleep, I am less concerned with the tectonic plates far beneath me shifting in the night ( some scientists claim that the Three Gorges Dam, which is downstream from us, is responsible for recent earthquakes and will certainly precipitate further ones) than with whether ratus ratus will choose tonight to gnaw its way through the plasterboard above my bunk.

Apart from these inconveniences (I'm sure Colin Thubron would not have made such a fuss) we had a lovely time, although grey-glaucous sky like phlegm hung over us for the duration, and the waters of the Yangtse were a ghastly glabrous green.. We passed hideous vertiginous cities, sprouting high-rises which clung to the steep slopes. Belching chimney stacks wafted thick smoke over the river. Improbably, heavily- laden orange trees and bananas flourished here too. We stop at Ghost City. An empty place. The river will have risen a staggering 175 metres when the filling behind the dam is complete. There are only 3 metres to go! Hundreds of thousands of people have been rehoused in other provinces, while remaining communities creep further up the mountainsides. At Ghost City you see roads and lines of lampposts disappearing into the water, and muse on these massive displacements of populations, which seem to characterise our times.

The folk on the boat, apart from half a dozen of us Europeans, are all Chinese. And mostly men in large groups, returning from training trips. We befriend a few.
'John', who works for the Government speaks bizarrely excellent English, although he has not practiced for five years and has never been to Engand and on his wage is unlikely to for 30 years, and is our articulate guide to contemporary Chinese reality, for which we are very grateful. He is charming, and once he has the linguistic bit between his teeth is unstoppable.
The Gorges were great , and the Dam itself stupendous.

We are now apparently in Wuhan. I have just had to ask David, as with all these displacements over huge expanses of terrain, I had lost the plot. I'm not sure where we are going to next , but there is a train to catch in the afternoon, and mosquitoes are in evidence and it can't be long till we start on our anti-malarials. The joys of travel!

ps bliss on the battlements

2008-11-19T12:39:00.002Z

Bliss indeed to walk the eight miles of city wall, high up above the streets, at one remove from the clamour and bustle below. I could stay up there forever....... but there's a train to catch!

terracotta tourism

2008-11-19T03:09:00.003Z

Xi'an may be the start of that fabled, most alluring -sounding of all routes, the Silk Road, but on a wet misty morning you could well be in Birmingham. (Apologies to my Brummie readers). Our first day here we all have traveller's fatigue. David wants to be back in Sugar Loaf Walk, warming his slippers; I want to be in my garden at Primrose Hill, admiring the autumn colours of all the Acers I planted in the spring and am entirely missing; Joanna nibbles at things all day long.

This is a metropolis of 5 million, and renowned for its textiles. It is a dowdier sister to Beijing, where everything sparkled and gleamed. Here they glister. The Chinese love shopping and the shops remain open long after my bedtime. All the great European Queens are here: Yves St.Laurent, Versace, Louis Vuitton, Ermenegildo Zegna and the newest of them all on the block Alexander McQ...... You can just imagine the whoops of joy on the Champs Elysees and the coffee haunts of Milano, not to mention the Stock Exchanges, when the trade barriers came crashing down. The Chinese learnt in less than 20 years to replace their blue suits with haute couture.

For over a millenium Xi'an was China's capital. We visited the Big Goose pagoda which once stored Buddhist scriptures brought back here here in the C7th from India by a monk Xuanzang, who travelled for 17 years in the sub-continent collecting sutras, and then spent the rest of his life at the Big Goose translating them into Chinese; he was thus responsible for re-introducing Buddhism to China after it had been banned by some mad emperor. Buddhism here never looked back after that.
The next day the sun returned, and with it our 'esprit de touriste'. We book on to a tourist bus (our first) for the day, and in the company of Columbians, two pretty Marseillaises, a Los Angelino and a Chinese-Australian exploring his roots, we set off for the suburbs where we visit first an ancient Neolithic settlement, to whet our appetite for things to come. Then a Disney-esque re-creation of what the mad emperor's (another one) tomb might have looked like. Great fun. Then a vast studio churning out replicas of all manner of thing, from pottery to furniture. Then a vast lunch in a vaster (obviously) dining hall. And then, only then..... do we enter the precincts of the Terracotta Warriors. In the 30 years since the first clay head was uncovered by a farmer digging a well, the site has grown to mammoth proportions and is probably China's prime tourist destination. In spite of this it is absolutely marvellous!
You enter first a vast hangar, which could house several Concordes (remember those? sleek glamorous beasts that flew at vast expense between London and New York - now as dead as a dodo, and entombed in Aerospace museums up and down the M1). And there is a stupendous sight - rows and rows of soldiers and horses, some bathed in sunlight from the glass roof. It does not disappoint. And then two more vast hangars with thousands more of the same. What megalomania created all this? The actual Emperors tomb has not yet been excavated. He had his catafalque, reputedly, placed in a great lake of mercury, to deter visitors. Traces of mercury have been discovered; health and safety panic......!

Last night I walked down a boulevard of petshops - goldfish in vast shoals, a small pig out on the pavement in a cage hardly bigger than its body, all manner of pooch.... and budgerigars in the greatest abundance outside the antipodes. In another Proustian moment I recall Bobbie the blue feathered companion of my childhood. One day when I was at school he dropped off his perch, dead . In a panic to protect me from the truth of impermanence, my mother consulted a neighbour and together they performed a clandestine funeral in the neighbour's garden. When I learnt this I was furious, deprived of due obsequies for my mate. At the time I was incapable of expressing fury. It stayed stored up and festering, being added to over the years, until perhaps 40 years later it erupted in my mother's kitchen in St.John's Wood in a very messy moment of things being thrown around - eggs, flour, china, nothing was spared in an attempt to make my mother HEAR me. It was a terrifying moment for both of us. A very dodgy few months ensued, where sometimes I could not stay in my mother's presence for more than 5 minutes without having to leave, for fear of repeating the brouhaha. A great deal of therapy smoothed out our relations, eventually. But I'm still not sure if she ever really heard me.

Last night too, as for the previous couple of evenings, I stood outside the China Construction Bank, watching the dancers cavort on the pavement with fans and parasols like Geisha girls (whoops, wrong country!), and that was just the men! Who are they, these ordinary folk, whom you see everywhere, practicing their Beijing opera arias, scraping away at strange instruments, blowing on their hurdy-gurdies? Were these after-hours bank employees letting their hair down after a day at the tills? Or a group which chose the venue for its acoustics, a vast wall of plate-glass, reflecting the cacophony and high spirits out onto the boulevard? The music rises to a tremendous climax of kettle drums and cymbals, which sets off several car alarms; a hallucinatory hubbub, Dervish-like. And then its over. No applause, although a big crowd has gathered, and clearly appreciated the event. A lot of smiles, and shaking of hands, and people slope off into the evening, satisfied. Me too.

This evening we set off on another night train to Chong Qing, south of here, where we embark tomorrow for a three day trip down the Yangste, to visit the Three Gorges. I'm putting my sea legs on...now I'm off round the city walls, 12 kilometres of them!

footsore and fancyfree

2008-11-14T14:28:00.003Z

This is our last night in Beijing. We spent it at the Chinese Theatre watching some very inscrutable goings-on, interspersed with wild acrobatics and spectacular high jinks. It was great fun, although I kept dozing off during the quiet bits only to be woken judderingly by falsetto shrieks, and flame-throwing.
I'd spent the whole afternoon walking round the Olympic site, I who have had no interest in sport since David Beckham left England, and little before that. It was magnificent.

I'm afraid I can only come up with superlatives to describe this city. It has blown me away, and that is just the fabric of the place. The people are something else. If the Russians were unexpectedly friendly, and the Mongolians friendlier, the Chinese have been friendliest. And that still surprises me. Where is the fabled inscrutability? Where is the dour dress, and drab uniformity? This place sparkles.

Although I've had the Internet in my room at the Bamboo Garden I've hardly been at home to use it, wandering as I have. Perhaps things will quieten down in the provinces. We leave tomorrow on the night train to Xi'an, which is south-west of here.

ps for Erin and Sam: I can't get into my email tonight - another gremlin perhaps, so here's a public message. I wish you both well on your journey, and will follow your blog attentively. Thanks very much for your comments on mine. If you are still in Beijing and looking for English books, go to Wangfujing Dajie just a couple of big blocks east of the Forbidden City. There are two huge bookshops there, and one is called Foreign Books Store just down from Dong'anmen Night Market (which is worth a visit anyway, even if your stomach heaves at the sight of what they sell there). The other is huger, and magnificent, and further south on the East side of the street. Happy reading and bon voyage!

as sick as a parrot

2008-11-12T14:13:00.006Z

Last night just as I was putting finishing touches to a compendious account of our stay in Beijing thus far, it vanished into thin air! A gremlin? Perhaps someone from the 'Philatelic Society' wielding the stick. I went to bed as sick as a.........

( note to Oiuna: hello! in future I'm not going to alert you anymore to English idiom. Your English is very good, and if you don't understand what I'm writing about the chances are I am using idiom; if you have a butcher's {this is in Cockney rhyming slang which is different from idiom, and means 'to have a look', as it rhymes with ' butcher's hook' etc. etc. etc.......who said English is easy?} in your new Oxford English-Mongolian dictionary you may find it explained; if not just email me; lots of love to you and Elisa!)

So just some vignettes; besides I can't, and won't even try to, do verbal justice to this magnificent megalopolis.

Even after several days here it still seems strange to see dogs. I don't mean the feral canines that have dogged our steps from Moscow to UB, either cowering against walls expecting the boot rather than caresses, or like the overbearing Mongolian hounds trying to make love to us as we peed in the snow and ice. I mean the boulevard dogs - the primped Pekinese, perky poodles, intolerable chihuahuas and spoilt pooches of all types, taking their owners for walks through park and down avenue, quite oblivious to travellers' tales of dogs being served up for dinner.

Today we walked sections of the Great Wall (what the Rough Guide calls 'that pointless product of state paranoia'), about 50 kilometers north of the city. We got there by bus and taxi and cable-car, and finally Shank's pony. Pointless or not, it was an eerie experience following it as it melted into the November mists.

Enough; time to turn in and hit the sack

flâneurs unite

2008-11-11T00:33:00.003Z

Mussy, Mauricio and Claus! Many thanks for your encouragement! I went to bed as sick as a parrot, thinking I'd failed to convey the essence of the flâneur. I wake to your messages, and feel accompanied in the world!
There are many wonderful websites on the 'flâneur'. Here they are mostly blocked, which is very interesting. Innocent enough fellow the flâneur, you think, strolling around minding his (and possibly her) own business. But of course he is the archetypal loner, individual, spectator and commentator, and clearly seen as subversive. Enough. I don't want to push my luck, or push the boat out too far, and certainly not stick my head my head above the parapet (idioms for Oiuna) or you may not hear from me again. Mum's the word........I passed a very strange building on my walk yesterday. It claimed to be the Chinese Philatelic Society. It was VAST, filling a whole city block, faceless, and a guard stood outside...........

ps Baudelaire coined the term, and Walter Benjamin wrote extensively on shopping arcades and the flâneur. Benjamin, who is still read in art schools today, was a Berlin Jew who fled to France and in 1940 found himself at the little fishing village of Port Bou on the Mediterranean, just on the border with Spain. Thinking his papers to cross over to Spain and safety were not going to come, he committed suicide. His pass came the following day.

flâneur in beijing

2008-11-10T13:53:00.026Z

Today I walked around the city, alone, for eight hours with scarcely a break. This solitary walking is a reflection of a deep need that goes back decades. There is a kind of opening to chance, to adventure. I feel myself in a lineage of 'flâneurs'. Edmund White writes beautifully about the 'flâneur' in his book, not coincidentally, on Paris. He describes him as someone in search of aesthetic and erotic delight.
The 'flâneur' was born in Paris in the late C19th. Baron Haussmann had torn down great swathes of Paris, to build wide boulevards (that troops could swiftly enter in case of popular insurrection) full of bourgeois apartment blocks and shopping arcades, and thus created the first recognisably modern city (I simplify!). Ancient neighbourhoods were broken up for ever.............I have decided its quite impossible to describe the 'flâneur'! If you are one, you may recognise yourself. Let me know.
I don't know if women can be 'flâneuses'. A woman in search of aesthetic and erotic delight might attract a different and less flattering epithet. A woman, besides, cannot slip as easily as a man, alone, through the interstices of city life. (Do prove me wrong, girls!) There have however been some great women photographers of the city, Berenice Abbott to mention but one, so I guess a woman behind a camera must count as a 'flâneur' - 'flâneuse' as a word is just too hideous, and perilously close to 'floozy'.

The baser elements of Eros, fortunately, play much less of a part in my life than hitherto. My interests and explorations on my solitary perambulations are largely aesthetic, but having now exhausted myself trying to explain the 'flâneur's' impulse, after a hard day's walking, I need to turn in, hit the sack. ( More idioms for you, Oiuna!)

ps re: format

2008-11-10T00:32:00.002Z

If you are receiving this blog in standard email format you may like to try at serafinski.blogspot.com directly, for the full Monty!

put in our place by erin and sam

2008-11-09T23:35:00.002Z

Our companions, from Wyoming, on the train between UB and Beijing, were Erin and Sam. Charmers though they were (hi guys!) they have seriously dented our amour propre. Our hitherto heroic (-seeming) crossing of a continent has been knocked into a corner, pipped to the post, dwarfed, cut down a peg (more idioms for you Iouna!) by their enterprise.
While we have Scrabbled, potnoodled, and gazed somnolently out of the carriage window at the passing scenery, they have been toiling through it on bicycles! They left Kazakhstan in August, and by circuitous routes aim to reach Prague by the early spring of 2010! Snookered! Buggered even.
Why are they on a train? It's apparently very troublesome crossing borders on bikes (officialdom can't cope with cyclists) and besides the Gobi is an inhospitable place at the best of times and in winter unpitying. Only a shaggy camel would survive. As it is we enjoy their company, share cakes and tales, and rejoice together in Obama's victory (they had tippled at the US Embassy in UB the night before).
The Gobi was uneventful, mostly flat with distant swells in the landscape, and quite awesome; I was glad to be watching it unfurl from behind glass. Eventually we passed into China, the military who checked our papers smiled and chatted a little in English to my great surprise, we followed sections of the Great Wall as we breakfasted, went through a series of monumental gorges to debouch into the plain of Beijing.
And here I am at the Bamboo Garden Hotel (Internet in every room) about to walk through the ornamental gardens full of gingko and fruiting persimmon, for a copious breakfast. Then perhaps the Forbidden City.

kristallnacht

2008-11-09T15:54:00.002Z

All day as I wandered around the Imperial Summer Gardens in autumn sunshine I thought about the events of 70 years ago tonight, when all over Germany hundreds of synagogues were torched and destroyed. It was a harbinger of things to come. I watched the news tonight. Plus ca change.

We delight at Obama's victory at the polls.

We are alive and well in Beijing, and are making plans to stay here longer as it is so marvellous!

bye bye 4 now 2 UB

2008-11-05T08:58:00.002Z

Am brain dead. Have spent the afternoon helping Oiuna with her English idioms homework. After a while I felt like throwing in the towel, at the strangeness of it all. I could not keep my eye on the ball. One could become as mad as a hatter trying to explain things like catching the waiter's eye, let alone changing the goalposts and being boxed into a corner. And how about hitting the road, and being wet behind the ears? Is this what Alice felt like in Wonderland, when the familiar suddenly seems wondrous strange?

Tomorrow we leave for Beijing by the 8am train. 30 hours later we will be there. Back to the confines of our compartment, and to pot noodle.
I part reluctantly from this Internet Cafe, as I have become familiar with it, and can operate solo without help from strangers (although I will be glad to see the back of screeching teenagers).
I part sadly from Mongolia too. Its been great here, and I don't imagine I'll be passing this way again.

ps

2008-11-04T03:52:00.002Z

Przewalski's horse is a charming and intriguingly named sort of proto-horse, which once trotted in great abundance all over Mongolia. It became almost extinct, but with help from zoos all over the world it has been reintroduced into the wild with some success. Przewalski was aPole!

przewalski's horse

2008-11-04T02:46:00.004Z

"The Ulanbaataar is establishing of the introduce by the named." But one of many charming captions at the City Museum. "The first story of the under the jurisdiction of the retail trade tryst's in the state of Ulanbaataar."
The Museum is housed in one of the city's last remaining wooden buildings, from 1907, and is a charmer. Where else will you find a full-length portrait of Brezhnev, in embroidery? And a porcelain plate depicting Leeds Town Hall, recalling some long-ago celebration by comrades? Marvellous old photographs of a city full of temples and gers, before the First War, and of a new city being built in the 20's and 30's with wide empty avenues. Proud ministries, and model factories. Opposite the museum is another wooden house, now crumbling, once the city's first Post Office, festooned with telegraph wires.
Last night David and I went up the Irish Pub for some male bonding. Joanna stayed at home nursing the aftermath of a migraine. We hope for Guiness but there is none left! I guess it's a long way from Dublin to UB. We make do with a pint of Chingghiss, in this very popular and noisy watering hole. Recently tempers have been a little frayed. Moods have swung. Hormones have played their part. Released from the confines of a railway carriage into the vastness of Mongolia, we have had to make plans, and this has sometimes been a little fraught. On the trains one falls into a strange trance-like state (at least I do - which probably accounts for the fact that I have not won a single round of Scrabble since St.Pancras), and the only decisions to be made are when to go to the toilet, get hot water from the samovar, and which pot noodle to open. The Chinggiss soothes, and the excellent french fries sustain, and harmony is restored. We watch English football, and then retire to our guesthouse when the very loud, homegrown, Goth band makes conversation impossible.
The night before, a glance at a souvenir plate from London up on the kitchen shelf, with its depictions of Big Ben and Buckingham Palace and other familiar places, induces a Proustian moment of recall, and we are soon discussing the Royal family. Tears are shed, in this corner of a foreign field, when we contemplate the Queen's demise. What a big moment that will be for the national psyche to cope with. And whither royalty after?
Prompted by this discussion I begin Alan Bennett's hilarious short story, (An Uncommon Reader) of the Queen, who after half a century of leafing through little more than Country Life, develops a passion for literature after a chance encounter with the City of Westminster's mobile library van in a backyard at the Palace. It is mercifully short (I have become hopelessly bogged down with "In Siberia", excellent as it is), and also very moving in its descriptions of love of literature. I could happily spend the rest of my life travelling and reading.
How can I wangle that one?
I go most days to the Cafe Amsterdam. It has a charming raised deck up above the pavement, and on a sunny winter's day one could be in St.Moritz. It serves Illy coffee. Illy were a Jewish family from Trieste. Ever since I read Jan Morris' account of Trieste, called something like 'Nowhere Place", I have wanted to go there - perhaps it will be my next trip. Once it was the Hapsburgs' great port on the Adriatic. Decades of confusion later, it found itself in a remote corner of a new Italy, quite irrelevant.
I once bumped into Jan Morris at the Wallace Collection. I was looking at my favourite Poussin Painting, A Dance to To The Music of Time, and heard a gentle voice beside me. A greyhaired lady in a cardigan was commenting on the same picture to her companion. Jan Morris! My hero/ine!
For those of you unfamiliar with Jan, one of our finest history and travel writers, she started life as James, fought valiantly as an officer in the Royal Navy during the war, and in the 60's went to Tangiers for a sex-change operation. In those days operations of this sort were not available on the National Health. She returned as Jan, and described her experience in "Conundrum". She continues to live with her wife Elisabeth, and writes beautifully.
With Alan Bennett, she is a national treasure.
A last caption from the City Museum: "The socialist attitude of the name's medalion".

more from UB

2008-11-03T02:17:00.002Z

Testosterone departed, calm and decorum has been restored to the Internet cafe. The rowdy youngsters are back at school.
Yesterday we went skiing. My own efforts were rather feeble. While the others gambolled about on the slopes, I struggled with my unfamiliar cross-country skis that have untethered heels, and only ventured a few metres from base, uncomfortably.
The occasion was a visit with Oiuna, who has followed us to UB from Erdenet (she studies here) , to her sister's place 10 miles out of town. Sister and brother-in-law treat us to a gargantuan meal of mutton, cooked with superhot stones in an iron bucket in the garden. They used to be skating champions for Mongolia, and we looked amazed at old photographs from the 60's, of lithe streamlined bodies winning medals. Today they are more comfortably shaped, and marvellously hospitable in their dacha out of town.
UB and environs have been full of delights and surprises. We visited a mountain top Observatory where we gazed at the stars through a large telescope that is twinned with the one in Krakow! My own active interest in astronomy dates back to fifty years ago, when I wanted to be an astronaut. Since then I have not kept abreast of discoveries, and was surprised and bemused to be looking at 'black clouds' and supernovae. It was also bloody freezing in the observatory, with the roof wide open to skies. We were staying alone in the adjoining deserted hotel, which recalled 'The Shining" and the Bates' Motel in Psycho.
We travelled 50 miles out of town to see a gigantic steel statue of Genghis (pronounced Chingis, there being no hard 'g' in the language) Khan, 40 metres high on a rearing horse, and climbed to the top to survey his ancestral lands. His name is everywhere, and enshrines Mongolia's aspirations. Contrary to what I learnt at school he was a wise old bird, and was indeed voted Man of the Millenium by Time Magazine in 2000. I was intrigued to learn, from a museum caption, that his warriors wore silk underwear. "One would not normally consider underwear to be military equipment," it opined. Apparently silk has miraculous powers to resist penetration by arrows. A must therefore for your next forays to Hackney and Peckham.
We travelled by taxi through an amazing National Park that recalled the Dolomites, and seen superb dinosaur skeletons in the Museum. The Gobi desert, which we will cross in a few days, was once verdant pastureland, and is the world's prime source of preserved bones (together with California). Moving indeed to study those skeletons, not so different from our own, give or take the odd claw or 20 metre long tail. Familiar shapes from my human anatomy studies many years ago at medical school.
Stopping for lunch at a Czech restaurant we are assailed by the Pet Shop Boys, who transport me back a couple of decades to the unhappiest, and maddest, moments of my life. The Boys were the soundtrack to a doomed and crazy love affair, which opened up a Pandora's box of pain. Years of therapy, and meditation, and new friendships, shifted all that, but the tears I shed for that distant time, and for the main protagonist, now dead, are hot.
China begins to loom large in our thoughts. We travel there in a few days. We move from a friendly population of 2.8 million to one of 1.3 BILLION. How are we to cope? Are they all as unfriendly as Mongolians say?
Love to all.

teenager mayhem

2008-11-01T03:07:00.002Z

I am surrounded by screaming youngsters playing noisy computer games, so not conducive to blogging.
We are all very well however, and in UB for another 5 days.
Lucy, thanks for your postcode, but what is the rest of your address ?- I want to send you a postcard!
Off to Cafe Amsterdam for a cappuccino! love to all, and thanks for your emails - they are still not arriving in floods, but are very welcome, however brief!

aborted safari precipitates premature return to 'genghis khan' guesthouse UB or 'all's well that ends well'

2008-10-27T02:20:00.002Z

At the end of the third day of our adventures the jeep failed to start, half-way up a snowy mountain. Fortunately we were on horseback at the time, having just visited a monastery high on a peak, where the renowned Zanabazar meditated in the C17th, and changed the face of Mongolian Buddhist art. The jeep abandoned, we trotted back to the 'ger' where a friendly nomad family had given us a shelter the previous night, lost travellers in the dark. A couple of hours later two Russian micro-buses full of New Zealanders hurtled us back to Karakoram, and safety.
Mongolian landscapes are awesome, and indescribable. I have taken a hundred thousand digital images, so do come and watch them some time.
Watching the constellations shift across the sky through the large hole at the top of a 'ger', as you lie on your couch under many layers of insulation is a marvel. Deciding you need to get up and have a pee in the sub-zero dark outside is equally a marvel, of denial, reluctance, acceptance and eventual fearful exit from the safety of the ger, having first to step over the sleeping bodies of our two drivers and very handsome host. The starry, starry night is dizzying. Are the overfriendly Mongolian hounds asleep, and is it safe to remove one's tackle?
The day after our rescue we return through more awesome scenery to UB, in the company of a handsome elderly couple, wearing the very beautiful traditional silken coats, done up with a cummerbund of contrasting colour, a couple of adorable tiny twins, swaddled in swathes of pink and blue, and assorted others. En route we stop at a roadside hostelry for a hearty mutton soup (we have long since given up trying to be vegetarian in these mountain wastes) which must have half a sheep in it.
Returned to UB we spend a night back at the station hotel, and then remove to our present quarters near the centre, in the most charming guesthouse. David and Joanna have bagged the double room, but I am quite content in my shared dormitory, inhabited at present by two beautiful Buryat girls from Ulan Ude, and their older protector or uncle. From the look of their huge bags they are traders, but who knows in what. 'Uncle' plies me with vodka, which is very welcome after our ordeal, which aids bonhomie and smiles, but does not help linguistically. Genghis Khan guesthouse must be the cleanest and friendliest in all of Mongolia.

Facts and figures: Mongolia's population is 2.8 million. One million live in the capital, 100,000 in Erdenet, and the rest are scattered in a landmass the size of Western Europe! Awesome indeed. The people are charming and friendly, and goodlooking.

Today we will visit a museum of political persecution - Mongolia has a shady communist past, dominated as it was by the Soviet Union. Then we go shopping. Love to all.

pre-safari nerves

2008-10-21T15:51:00.003+01:00

Last night, late, as I finished my previous blog it began to snow. Severe cold is forecast. We have been lucky so far. The snow we experienced in Ekaterinburg, a while back, was joyous but momentary, and wildly premature. All through Siberia we basked in relatively balmy weather.

We spend the day in desultory shopping, and a lingering malaise. What DO you take for off-piste jeeping in sub-zero temperatures?

coals to newcastle?

2008-10-20T15:51:00.005+01:00

Yesterday morning was all fear and hysteria (on my part) at the prospect of giving our talks later in the day. Coals to Newcastle? Hubris finally punished in Erdenet?
We had lunch at our local Chinese, and then played snooker for a while to vent our manic energy.
We arrive at the Cultural Centre with plenty of time to spare, and set up. The hall is not a giant one as I had feared, but still sizeable. People arrive in dribs and drabs. At last around 40 people have turned up (not the hordes that invaded my dreams) , and we begin. It goes very well. We each talk for a quarter of an hour about our experience of Buddhism in the West; I lead a 20 minute meditation, and we have questions and answers. The audience are charming. Oiuna has borne the brunt of the evening, having to translate us as we go along, not something she has attempted before so publicly. She is excellent, and we are very grateful to her. We leave the building after fond farewells to our audience, and look up to take a last look at the huge poster of ourselves ( which secretly we would like to take back with us to London) - it has already been removed! The bubble of celebrity has burst.
We spend the evening watching Tom and Jerry, to unwind.

This morning we were given a tour of the copper mine, by a charming young man called Nassa, who had studied in the States and spoke passable English. Its a stupendous business extracting copper, and here everything is on a vast and superlative scale. I have seen nothing like it before, and find it very moving. Nassa is disarmingly frank about the health hazards of working here, and it seems as if health issues have not been uppermost in managers' minds until recently. We are invited to lunch at the office workers' canteen. Noticeably, there are Caucasian faces in abundance, as many Russians work here. We have become so used already to being surrounded by Mongol physiognomies. Copper is widely used in electronics, and you probably would not be able to read me now , with such ease, if not for gigantic and life-threatening operations like these at Erdenet.
We return to our flat dazed by the experience, and flattened by the copious lunch, and sleep awhile. Too soon, a taxi comes and whisks us to the outskirts of town, to the University. We are to address a class of Business students. ( Business, because they are the ones, we are told, who request outside speakers). Its a giant class of 150 youngsters, and again it goes very well. We talk very much off the cuff, and I lead another meditation, which for them is a very novel experience. Although they think of themselves as Buddhist they have no real experience of meditation, which to us seems very strange. I glance out of the window. Beyond the road that skirts the building is a great, featureless, brown hill. I imagine it in a few years' time, covered in streets and buildings as Erdenet advances inexorably into the landscape. It is already Mongolia's second city after UB. The University throbs with youth and energy.
Hardly recovered from lunch, we are invited to dinner by our two host monks, who have arranged our program here. We can hardly refuse. We are soon in a private room of a restaurant, lined in gold wallpaper, politely trying to consume our meal. The younger monk is the head of the monastery, perhaps thirty. He is the archetypal doer, and fundraiser. He has the build of a rugby player, and wears resplendent and rather flashy robes, and is constantly attending to his mobile phone, between mouthfuls. The older, and altogether gentler soul, has gently frayed cuffs, and a lovely quiet manner, with a hesitant smattering of English.
Later, and alone, we flop down to Tom and Jerry.

Tomorrow is our last day here, and then we go on safari to the wilds, in a jeep manned by Ouina's brother and brother-in-law. We will be mostly off metalled roads, and will visit the ancient Mongol capital at Karkoram and various Buddhist temples. I may be out of cyberspace for at least a week, until we return to UB.
A huge thank you to Ouina for her hospitality. Its been a huge privilege, and pleasure, staying here.

A plea for emails : I would love to know how you all are . I am aware there is an economic crisis and you are busy counting your shekels, but I want to know how things are at Goldsmiths and Edinburgh. What's up in Bow and Bethnal Green? What's happening in Devon and Kirkby Lonsdale? How are things in Primrose Hill and High Hurstwood? Blaendol House? Tayport, Fife? If you are shy to write to the blog, try me at mahananda@tiscali.co.uk
Happy birthday to you today, Rosalind. I think about you, and would be pleased to have news.
Bon voyage Kieran! See you next in Morocco perhaps!
Thanks 'Ronny' for your message, but who are you? Roman from Irkutsk? If so best wishes from us all!

travelling trio hit the small screen in Erdenet

2008-10-18T02:21:00.005+01:00

Last night we were whisked into a television studio, with a friendly local lama and our hostess/interpreter Oiuna, and interviewed LIVE on a local TV channel. This was an hors d'oeuvre to our public appearance tomorrow night at the local Palace of Culture where, before a possible audience of hundreds, we will give our thoughts on Western Buddhism. On the front of the building hangs a poster, half a mile high, with our faces on it!

But backtracking a day or two to our last afternoon in Ulan Ude.........
I spent it alone, first visiting a local Photography Museum, all abustle with a party of primary school children, full of early images of the city which grew up from the C16 on the banks of the Selenga, a mighty river which flows down from deep in Mongolia into Lake Baikal. It was a trading post on the Tea Caravan route from China to Irkutsk. Outside, an accordeon plays in the street, and I am transported into an aural/visual ecstasy. I drop my last roubles into the accordeonist's hat - 'mon semblable, mon frere'. (For those of you who do not know me too well, I play the accordeon, indifferently perhaps, but certainly with great enthusiasm). Back out on the streets I soak up the glorious late-afternoon light, and snap away with my digital camera which I am at last making friends with, after years of older technologies which I have relinquished reluctantly. I make a friend of handsome young Sergei, who, too, is snapping away , he as part of his job for an advertising agency, me as indolent tourist. He is curious about me, and engages me in conversation, in pleasantly fluent English. He turns out to be a Jehovah's witness! Siberia is full of surprises.
The next morning long before dawn we are back on the train, and chug away into Mongolia after an 8 hour wait at the border, where nothing much happens. We have masses of time to watch our single train carriage, alarmingly alone, locomotive-less, marooned at the platform. We walk into the village and have soup in a hostelry, and then back out in the street watch a crowd, a hundred yards away, coalesce into a funeral procession coming our way. We withdraw to the verges of the main street, a dusty track, as the procession straggles towards us. The whole village is out. A man leads the way with a yellow flag, and then with an electric shock we see TWO coffins, side by side and open, all draped in shocking pink and preceded by equally frilly and gaudy coffin lids. After the walking mourners have passed a truck passes from which a man throws fronds of pine onto the roadway, and then a slow cavalcade of trucks and private cars. This is a desolate place to live, and to die.
Back on the train we have another twelve hours' slow progress to Ulan Baator - henceforth UB. We sleep a couple of hours at the station hotel - our windows look straight out onto the bustling platforms. And then Oiuna comes up to greet us. Oiuna lived recently in London for four years, where she came into contact with the West London Buddhist Centre. Although an ethnic Buddhist from home, she knew little about Buddhism or meditation till she hit Ladbroke Grove! We have been in email contact for a few weeks, but have never met. She whisks us around UB, and its vast plazas and teeming streets. Its the most chaotic place we have seen so far. We pass the burnt-out premises of the Communist Party, torched only a few months ago in riots following allegations of rigged elections. The fire alas spread to the neighbouring Art Museum. No great loss architecturally, as it was the most hideous 80's building this side of the Urals, as its charred remains proclaim, but it was full of priceless and irreplaceable artefacts, gone up in smoke at the whim of the crowd. We go to various agencies to change our rail tickets to Beijing so we can stay an extra week in Mongolia. We make plans for expeditions into the outback - Oiuna's brother will take us. We have an excellent cappuccino in a cafe I'm sure we'll frequent when we return to town full of travellers' tales.
Later that night we get back on the train with Oiuna and travel for 12 hours to the town of Erdenet, NW of UB. This is where Oiuna lives, in a copper-mining town, which sprang into being amongst the desolate hills only 30 years ago, when the precious metal was first detected. Now its one of the world's biggest mines, and the raison d'etre for this town. From the station we pass miles of mined hillsides and massive installations, and then suddenly there we are in photographic splendour,our images hanging across the facade of the biggest civic building in town! Even Oiuna is taken aback. All we can do is sit back in our taxi seats and giggle.
Erdenet is a rough and ready place. For its coming 30th anniversary civic pride is bursting into action. A huge Buddha will be built on a hillside, up from a massive fountain. The town has doubled in population in the last 7 years, and stands now at 100,000. Everywhere new appartment blocks are under construction, eating away at the virgin landscapes around.
Oiuna has very kindly let us her flat for our stay here; she will stay at her brother's down the way. We feel incredibly privileged to be here. After a short sleep ( we are getting used to these strangely dislocated days and nights) we go out for a Chinese lunch, and then taxi it to a monastery up on the hill, where we converse with lamas, and make preparations for our television appearance later tonight. Next to me, petioners of all degrees come up to a table where a monk sits and chants, to order, for them. One petioner's mobile phone goes off in the middle of this transaction; she has a long chat with a friend while the monk chants on, seemingly oblivious of any interruption. Conversation concluded, the lady folds her palms again in rapt attention to the monk. A while later she leaves the temple already noisily engaged in another telephone conversation. Above Oiuna's head hangs a giant poster advertising the different mantras available, and next to them their prices. Not surprising perhaps that it was only in West London that Oiuna could connect, in a heartfelt way, with Buddhism. But the lamas are charming, and later drive us to the television studios. We enter from a desolate carpark, through a back door, into the razzmatazz of showbiz . Aquariums, potted plants, bright lights, technicians. We are in a daze of delight. We all sit at the desk, nervously sipping complimentary water, watching the monitor in front of us.....the Russian cartoon gives way to the opening credits of our live broadcast, and then there we are on screen! Oiuna is a modest but excellent interpreter, and through her we engage with the Mongolian 'grand public', sharing our thoughts on Western Buddhism and our plans for our stay in their lovely country. It seems to go very well and, after, I have my picture taken with the diminutive, giggling girl presenter. I look like a hulking bearded giant, in my moment of fame. Anything to get the crowds in tomorrow night, but to be honest I'd rather stay at home finishing Colin Thubron's excellent "In Siberia". ( I'm falling way behind with my reading, so busy and full of impressions are our days and nights.)

from russia with love, for the last time

2008-10-14T06:01:00.002+01:00

We arrive in Ulan Ude at 6am and have a long walk in the freezing cold into town. I have almost given up on David's navigational skills (we seem to be about to engage with a motorway) when our hotel surges up improbably in the middle of a vast shopping centre. We rest for a little, and then head for town for our rendez-vous with Natalya who was our companion on the train. (Hello, Natalya! It was lovely to meet you, and many thanks for looking after us! Thanks too to Alex in Krasnoyarsk, who met us improbably off our 6am train - yes, another one - and took us to our appartment - happy ballroom dancing!. Thanks also to Roman in Irkutsk who helped us decipher a menu in a moment of need, and became our almost constant companion for a couple of days. Roman, you have no excuse now not to attend your lectures at University!) We meet at the foot of the largest Lenin head in all the Russias, a Lenin with decidedly Asiatic features. Another beautiful sunny day, shirtsleeve weather, spent wandering around this attractive city, capital of the autonomous Buryat republic. Asiatic faces in greater abundance. Funny how I feel more at home than with unsmiling Caucasians. We all go out of town to an open-air ethnographic museum, which apart from a desolate little zoo, is full of interest and a typical Buryat townstead, all timbers and stockades.
Yesterday we take more 'mashrutka' little buses right out of town to the Ivolginsk Datsan, a complex of Buddhist temples, and the centre of Siberian Buddhism. Shown around by shy hesitant apprentice monks with rudimentary English. In the 30's Stalin destroyed all the temples in the area, and thousands of monks were sent to the gulags. In the capricious way of demogogues and lunatics, Buddhism was allowed to resurface in 1945, when this temple complex was first built and now flourishes. At once strange and familiar, being surrounded by Buddhist iconography, in this vast plain ringed around by curious shallow hills. We rattle back to town on more buses. In the evening we dine excellently in a Buryat restaurant, surrounded by handsome Asiatics. Flop down in our spacious hotel room with all modcons.

Tomorrow we leave for Mongolia on the morning train. We are all sad to be leaving Russia, which has been full of surprise and delight, not at all like our earlier imaginings. Last impressions - endlessly tall and attractive girls in high heeled boots, four-wheel drives clogging up the roads from Minsk to Pinsk, sophisticated shopping centres full of everything we take for granted in UK, but which here still seems a surprise, excellent restaurants with smiling service, boys with beautiful cheekbones, endless pot-noodles on the trains, Siberian plains full of turning birches, and brooding ambiguously over it all, Lenin in his marble mausoleum, deathly pale against black and red marbles. What does he make of it all? Next posting from Ulan Baator.
Greetings to all.
ps. Kieran please write - I don't think I have your current email.

quickie from Irkutsk

2008-10-11T09:13:00.002+01:00

Waiting for the train, back in Irkutsk
We had a few glorious sunny days
on the banks of Lake Baikal. Baikal, be warned, will one day split Siberia in two to become the world's fifth Ocean!
Today is hot in Irkutsk, but we have had snow flurries and hard ice in the mornings.
More from our next destination, Ulan Ude.
I am starved of the Guardian, so please someone write and tell us how things are back home!

news from Irkutsk

2008-10-07T06:12:00.002+01:00

I wept through the first act of Coppelia - not a ballet usually eliciting tears, just a confection of froth. I weep at the strangeness of it all, and the music touches the heart. Half the old city was rased in 1930 to make space for the largest opera house in all Russia, and a gigantic Lenin Square. Classical ballet, descended from the court of Louis XIV at Versailles, survived and even flourished through the ghastly Stalin years, and here we were in a vast auditorium, ringed by classical statuary(I saw at least two armless Venus de Milos) and surrounded by balletomane children, and their doting mums.The music speaks across the cultural divides. The main waltz tune is one I often whistle unconsciously, and drive people mad, and can even play on my accordeon.
As soon as the final curtain is down we sprint across Lenin Square to pick up our bags and bundle into a taxi bound for the station. However, as soon as we have loaded all our bags into the boot, the taxi spontaneously self-locks! The driver seems as surprised as we do. Murderous thoughts fly up unbidden, and we jam his skinny arm through a tiny crack in the window till bruisedly he can reach the keys.
We travel through the night to Krasnoyarsk in the company of a banker with Societe Nationale, on his way home to Chita. In this city we have our own little appartment in the centre. We spend a pleasant day roaming in a National Park, Stolby, full of volcanic peaks and charming nuthatches and tits that eat calmly out of our hands. Our guide is a rather fearful Natalia, who speaks excellent English, but is rather scared of bears and has brought her athletic younger brother along for protection. (We saw on the previous night's news that a bear has been seen on the outskirts, and attacked a pensioner.)
We travel on to Irkutsk where we arrive at 6a.m. and wait in a daze for a taxi to turn up. Miraculously it does and transports us to our homestay with a family and their pets,a dog, a cooing dove and white rabbit.
Rested, we venture out into beautiful sunshine and charming streets. We stroll along Lenin and have lunch on Karl Marx. We search out a synagogue mentioned in our guide, long-since closed it says and transformed into a furniture store. We turn a corner and there it stands, but spanking new paintwork, and signs of building. We go in and there are JEWS in debate! We are warmly welcomed and Rita, an elderly lady with excellent english and many gold teeth, shows us around proudly. She is originally from Baku at Azerbaijan, but things got tricky there in the 90's and she emigrated here with her husband and daughter. I shed more tears.
In the evening we go to a Russian circus in purpose built arena, and see more animals than at a zoo - bears, pelicans, horses, racoons, camels, doves, monkeys, ten breeds of dogs inter al. I watch it all through an asthmatic haze, wheezing and sneezing. Is it the animals, or an ancient fear of being dragged up on the stage by a sinister clown, which dogged my chilhood in circus and pantomime?
Tomorrow we leave for Lake Baikal.

more of lenin

2008-10-01T10:12:00.002+01:00

Scarier than the ghost ride at Gorky park funfair the previous day was descending into the Leader's mausoleum on Red Square. We descended into a penumbra down dark marble steps. At corners lurked motionless soldiers in those ludicrously large caps, who came into action as we approached, ushering us round corners and further into the gloom, chastising us if need be for talking too loudly. Then we ascend into a large airless toplit hall full of unearthly light, and lined in darkest marble, the gloom slashed by a red marble flash that streaks like lightning around the walls - more vivid admittedly in the postcard than in the fact. At the centre a huge catafalque on which lies Lenin, unearthly pale, in a black suit, one pale hand in a fist, the other open. Although later Joanna claimed she saw glass around the catafalque, I saw none, and was amazed at the 'presence' of this corpse and that it existed in the same space as me. I lingered too long, jaw dropped open, and was shooed along by the guards.......it was a relief to come out into the fresh air and the present tense. Opposite the mausoleum stands the palace that is the GUM department store, now full of western franchises and labels. Here you can shop till you drop on Versace and Hugo Boss inter al. We contented ourselves with a cappucino and marvelled at the shopping crowds. How Russia has moved on. Our fears , born of growing up in the Cold War, begin to melt. People are very friendly, and are no longer the ogres of our fancy. There are some stunning lookers too, with legs 6 foot long and slender as young birches.

Yesterday Joanna had her dark hair cropped short and bleached. She looks like Jean Seberg in A Bout de Souffle where she played the gangster's companion opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo. She was the prototype for many 'gamine' girls in the 60's. Neither David nor I quite have Belmondo's looks, but it gives us a frisson to accompany her down the boulevards. My own hirsute efforts are directed at growing my beard like the last Czar's - but perhaps that's not too auspicious. I read a few years ago that Seberg was found gassed in her own car on a Paris boulevard.

In Ekatarinburg we came across a lovely Photography Museum in a little wooden palace, that had been a photographers shop for over a century, as old pictures of the town attested. Piaf was playing to accompany the exhibition of Robert Doisneau and Cartier-Bresson, and more local photographers, and the charming lady on the desk spoke Polish; for a moment it felt as though the Urals had melted away and Europe was not so far away.
Tonight after the ballet we go further East to Krasnoyarsk, a 12 hour ride, our shortest yet.
We will be sorry to leave Novosibirsk, a great city that started out as a station by the Ob just over a century ago, in the middle of nowhere.

from beyond the Ob

2008-09-30T12:39:00.002+01:00

We travelled 23 hours to Novosibirsk on the banks of the vast Ob river. Our companion was Mikail, an ex-Army major, a charming man, 37, now working for a japanese firm. His schoolboy English blossomed with the hours, and together with Joanna's Russian, we were able to converse on English literature. Kipling, Charlotte Bronte, Conan Doyle,Walter Scott and many more - he knew them all, and we showed off our own knowledge of Russian literature, much more meagre. At midnight we rattled across the Ob and arrived here in a place that grew up around the Railway in the 1890,s and is now Russia's third city after Moscow and ST.Petersburg. More amazing Modernist buildings, a vast Opera House where tomorrow we go to see Coppelia. The Opera is on a huge square with a monumental Lenin statue. So many of these statues have been destroyed, or banished to corners of parks, like Gorky Park in Moscow, where two Stalins stand in a meadow with three Lenins, that its a pleasure and a shock to see them in situ, and to muse on the passage of time. Lenin's tomb in Moscow was amazing. The authorities cannot decide what to do with it and have deferred decisions until 2012. More of Lenin tomorrow - my time is running out, that is my Internet time!

love to all

news from Ekatarinburg

2008-09-27T08:40:00.000+01:00

Greetings from beyond the Urals. We have been 3 days in this city founded by Peter the Great in 1725, to exploit Siberian minerals. For 70 years the town was called Sverdlovsk, after the rogue who arrested and disposed of the Royal family. It reverted to Ekatarinburg in saner times in the 90's.(Saner, bar the Mafia, who were busy killing each other in immediate post-soviet days). From our hotel window we can see the new church, many-domed and golden, built only a few years ago, on the site of the merchant's house where in 1918 the Tsar and his family were held under house arrest. Here one grim night they were all murdered, and their bodies taken out of town to a desolate spot where they were consumed in acid and buried in a mineshaft.Yesterday we followed their route approximately in a Chrysler taxi, to find a whole nest of shrines and churches in the forest, and new ones springing up all around. The Romanovs have been canonised, and souvenirs confirm it in saintly postcards and prayer sheets. Much more moving are the old family photographs in a great display. Mostly they are informal, showing the family at play, smiling, relaxed. In one you see the shadow of the photographer, a woman with a slender waist! One of the princesses indulging her latest passion? I make an immediate bond with her across the decades - me the photographer, the catcher of the passing moment.
Leaving this moving shrine amongst the birches, we drive on to a paltry monument by the motorway which marks the dividing line between Europe and Asia. Newly-weds straddle the line in their finery, in the drizzle,for photographs. This dreary spot is enlivened by trees hung with coloured ribbons and empty champagne bottles.
The main Prospekt Lenina, back in town, is full of Modernist architectural masterpieces, and my camera clicks away in an ecstasy.
It took us 26 hours to get here from Moscow, in the company of a pleasant and neat Muslim gentleman in our four- berther, and tonight we leave after 11pm for our next destination, Novosibirsk.
This morning we had our first snow flurry, and wonder what awaits us further East.
People are much friendlier than I had imagined, although my paltry vocabulary does not get me far, but I have elicited smiles and chuckles, which melt away the FEAR of cold-war days.
We are all very well, and will repair now to our local Sherlock Holmes-themed restaurant for a late lunch. A bientot.

news from Moscow

2008-09-22T19:21:00.004+01:00

Hello from sunny Moscow. We have been here four days in perfect anticyclone weather. Tomorrow we leave on the first stage of our Siberian adventure. This is my first ever blog from foreign parts, and I feel like a sputnik voyaging in virgin territory. Moscow is amazing. Enough said.

Our journey began in Chaos at St. Pancras following the Tunnel fire. We got their hours early, queued in an immense line snaking out to Euston road; suddenly we were rushed forward to take the last few seats on the Brussels train, upgraded to first class, and were soon quaffing complimentary wine and tucking in to a delicious free meal. Having arrived in the Flemish capital six hours earlier than expected, and rejoicing in our good fortune, we had beer and frites on the Grand'place, with its Renaissance splendours .

Our train to Berlin left at midnight, and we were soon having breakfast on the fabulous new Hauptbahnhof in that city, a stone's throw from the Reichstag.

More train all day to Krakow where we stayed two nights, and witnessed the opening of the new Buddhist centre in the Kazimierz quarter of that city by our teacher Sangharakshita. This is the old Jewish part of town. My father(not Jewish) was from Krakow, and my mother lived there for several years before the war before moving into a ghetto; having escaped from the ghetto as it began to be 'liquidated' , she moved back to Krakow on forged 'Aryan papers'. A year later she was arrested and taken to Auschwitz where she remained until the death marches out of the camp in January of 1945. She was shunted around the Reich in the last chaotic months of the war before being liberated in Mecklenburg. She made her way back to Krakow through the immediate post-war chaos that reigned in those parts. A year later, as no-one from her family returned, she came to London, and on her first evening met my father in Chelsea through a common acquaintance. My father had arrived in London as a refuge in 1940.

I've been very emotionally tied up with the founding of the Krakow Buddhist centre, and wish it well.
From Krakow we took the train to Warsaw, and then overnight to Moscow. Crossing the border into Byelorus our carriages are taken mysteriously into a huge shed where massive machines in the dead of night lift us into the air whilst the bogeys are changed beneath us to another guage. And then on to Moscow where we have been staying in a youth hostel. Yes 'youth'!

My travelling companions are David and Joanna, Buddhist friends from Bethnal Green.

We are all very well , and in good spirits .
Many many thanks, Ed, for setting up this blog for me! I feel as though I have belatedly arrived in the 21st century.

Best wishes to you all. x mahananda

Pre-Siberia packing and blogging

2008-09-14T20:27:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow we leave for Krakow and the opening of the new Buddhist centre there. Last minute Eurostar consternation as the Channel Tunnel was closed after a fire on Friday and services are much reduced but right now I'm much more worried about my first blog post!