dolce far niente

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

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

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!

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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.