Final night

Tomorrow we disembark, a graceless word for a sad process that Holland America will have organized to a faretheewell. They have to. They need to move around 800 of us passengers off by around 10:30 amin order to start moving 1350 new passengers on board at 11:30.for a trip through the Panama Canal. (I could have extended my trip for three weeks and gotten off in Seattle, but it's really time to be going home.) About half the 600 crew members will also leave the Amsterdam tomorrow to be replaced by new folks, who must be both moved on board and integrated into ship procedures in time to set metaphorical sail tomorrow evening.

Only the Dutch could manage to make all that happen and stay essentially human, God bless them.

I said a reluctant goodbye to the ocean, watching the waves after supper until it was too dark to see them, and even then I staying on deck because I could still hear the water sloshing past the ship. We're only 121.7 nautical miles out of Ft. Lauderdale with calm seas and following winds. By dawn tomorrow we'll be docked.

Reality looms

"Remember to send me a grocery list," my daughter Lizz texts me. Grocery list? Oh, right, I will need to feed myself, starting Sunday.

"Do you want me to extend the temporary insurance coverage I have on your car for the day after you get back?" Car insurance. Oh, yeah, that.

For four months, I have been totally taken care of, and in five days, I will be my responsibility again. I am not complaining, I prefer to be the one doing that, but my instincts are rusty. What do I eat when I can't take the elevator to the Lido? What other normal adult responsibilities besides car insurance have I not thought about since early January? I know I'll need to file my taxes -- I filed for an extension, but they do need to be done relatively soon. But if Lizz hadn't reminded me about the car insurance, I wouldn't have remembered.

I think I will just trust the combination of Lizz and cold hard reality. It's six hours earlier in Portland than currently on board the Amsterdam, I'll be waking up way early and can spend the extra time remembering how to be a grownup.

Bad photo juju

As I hefted my big green suitcase onto the bed to pack it, the plug-in charger for my camera batteries fell out.

To appreciate the irony of this, we must return to the Great Wall of China, where after I had taken a few pictures, my camera announced that it needed its battery changed, and turned itself off. "Damn!", I thought, "I know I didn't pack that recharger. Now what?"

But the concierge at the Beijing Sheraton Dongcheng was up to the challenge. He dispatched a minion to a camera store, got an all-purpose camera battery recharger (and a second battery), and got a half charge into one battery -- all there was time for. I repaid the costs and set forth confident that I had my camera woes resolved.

Fast forward to the overnight to the Taj Mahal. At the hotel, I raise my camera to snap the picturesque valet and once again, "Change battery, charge low." The next day, I was to see the Taj Mahal, I had to have a camera. But I'm now a seasoned world traveler, I can just ask the concierge to get me a battery charger or even a new camera -- it is, after all, my once-in-a-lifetime visit to the Taj. But midday in Beijing is not late evening in Agra. The concierge looked at me as if I were only the latest of a long line of crazy tourists with absurd expectations, and said in the slow enunciation one uses with a fussy child, "I am sorry, Madame, but no stores are open at this  time."

Unreasonably, I felt ill-used. "The Chinese solved this problem for me," I thought, confirming the Agra concierge's unspoken evaluation of me, and went off, pouting. Eventually I realized that I had my tablet with me, and that my tablet has both front and rear facing cameras, and schlepping the tablet through the security line got me a great conversation with one of the machine-gun-carrying guides, who was curious about my "iPad", which has apparently become the international generic for tablets, so that one turned out OK too.

When I returned to the ship, one of the first things I did was to try to recharge my camera's batteries with the universal recharger. I couldn't figure out how to make it work. No instruction manual, and all labels were, of course, in Chinese. After several days of failure, I went to the photography shop on board, and they were great, going far above and beyond, but they too were unable to make it work.

Photography was forbidden in the Valley of the Kings anyway, and I am (by the grace of God) not all that photographically oriented anyway, so the Suez Canal passed undetected. But by the time we got to Greece, I had decided I wanted a camera and went out and bought a new one -- cheapest model point-and-shoot, powered by AA batteries, adequate to the task of reminding me where I had been. 49 Euros.

Now we are on the tour of Barcelona. I know I put the new camera in my bag. The guide says, "Around this next corner is one of the most magnificent views in all of Sevilla, perhaps all of Spain." And he is right, we are staring at the gloriously elaborate facade of Sevilla's cathedral in the morning sun, I reach into my bag -- and cannot find the camera. I search frantically without success. I'd like to be able to blame pickpockets, but not even the most degenerate wretch on the street would bother lifting my el cheapo.

The tour winds to its conclusion, we return to the ship, I unpack my bag, and there's the camera with an innocent look on its face.

And now the recharger for my original camera tumbles out of the suitcase. And the original camera and its batteries are already packed away in the other suitcase, which has its snaps fastened and a pink strap wrestled closed around it.

I give up. If any irresistible photo op occurs in the 1412.2 nautical miles from here to Ft. Lauderdale, I will run for my tablet and probably miss it . Taking pictures with a tablet, by the way, is a damned awkward procedure. Maybe I will just beg some passerby to shoot whatever it is and give him my email address.

Sargasso sea

I dream of lush tropical landscapes. We are in the middle of the Sargasso sea, the only sea with no coasts. Only the 1000-mile map on Channel 40, that tracks our progress, shows any land at all. The closer focus maps just show the circled arrowhead symbol that represents the ship on a deep blue-black field that represents the abyss to the west of the mid-Atlantic ridge. In the Captain's noontime navigational and meteorological report, the nearest point of land was 500 miles away in the Azores, and there were three miles of water below our keel.

I wish I could just sit on deck and enjoy my last few days of ocean, but packing (blech! ptooey!) must be done by Friday afternoon, and there are voyage-end celebrations that focus more on food than drink. Like a brunch this morning at which the Captain will autograph the back of my souvenir delft plate. And I will meet with Vera (see "A steel magnolia" from a few days back) at afternoon tea to learn more about her. And there are only four more days of Bingo, my gambling indulgence, at which I usually win almost enough to pay for the costs of my Bingo cards.

But I will still find time to sit out on the deck and watch the Sargasso sea roll by.

Playing hookey

Right now I am not attending a cocktail party with the Captain, Jonathan Mercer. I mean absolutely no disrespect to Captain Mercer, who, in addition to being tall, handsome, and endowed with a confidence-inspiring British accent, seems to be a highly competent officer and a prince among men. I particularly appreciate his willingness to explain things to us, like the time we suddenly veered off course so dramatically that it woke everyone at 4 am (it was a malfunction of the steering machinery, which the crew handled without further mishap,and which Captain Mercer explained without resorting to "There, there, don't worry your pretty little heads about it" dismissiveness). I even like his wife, whose charm is surpassed only by her lively intelligence.

No, my decision to stay in my cabin and play mindless computer games has to do with my inability to understand why anyone goes to cocktail parties and my growing realization that I Have A Choice.

In the first place, the Captain will not miss me. Half the people on board have been invited, and I am just sparing him the necessity of smiling warmly at one more anonymous face and making meaningless social noises for 20 seconds before turning to the next passenger.

In the second place, half the people on board have been invited -- the other half will attend a later session for people who eat at the late sitting. Several hundred people in one place make a lot of noise, virtually guaranteeing that conversation will be impossible, even should it be possible to find someone with whom to converse, which, in a crowd of several hundred, is, paradoxically, far from easy.

In the third place, although I indulged myself at the Murder Mystery dinner, drinking alcoholic beverages is not my idea of a good time. I imply no judgment, it's personal taste, I'd just rather have a ginger ale than a martini.

But most important is my realization that I don't have to go everywhere I am invited. It's marvelously liberating.

And at that point in the composition of this blog entry, I went to dinner. All the other people at the table had gone to the party, had drunk several glasses of champagne and eaten what were universally acclaimed as excellent hors d'oeuvres, and were feeling very little pain, thank you very much. Maybe I should try not being such a snip. There's a clear difference between a theoretical cocktail party, to which all my objections still stand, and an actual cocktail party, which may have many unanticipated redeeming features, though if I had attended, as they did, and imbibed, as they did, I am not sure I could have found my way unassisted through words like "unanticipated".

Sevilla

Before Madeira, we stopped at Cadiz. A friend gave me her ticket for a tour of Sevilla, a couple hours inland from there. It took until now for me to realize that I had a couple things to say about that tour.

First, I think I got my pocket picked. Lillian, a woman at my table, had been warning us for several days about pickpockets in Sevilla (known to English speakers as Seville because we English speakers seem to feel we have the right to rename foreign cities -- Beijing to Peking, for instance -- for our ease of pronunciation, though I personally have no problem saying "Seh-vee-ya"). Now Lillian is a woman of strong, if sometimes dubious, opinions, and when she insisted that "It's the pickpocket capital of Europe. There's one in every family in Seville , and they're PROUD of them", I didn't worry too much.

And lest you concern yourself overmuch about my loss, it was only 10 or 12 Euros (around $15) in coins that I was sure were there when I left the ship, but weren't when I reached in to pay for a minor purchase. Also in the same pocket was a Swiss Army knife worth twice the value of the coins (why lift the coins and leave the knife?) and several Kleenexes, some used, which I had vaguely considered as pickpocket repellent. Maybe pickpockets practice grabbing pocket change the way pianists practice scales.

The second thing I learned was the staggering amount of wealth Spain extracted from the new worlds Columbus' voyages opened to them. It was the huge carved wall of Cuban mahogany that was part of remodeling the central mosque into a Gothic cathedral once the Moors had been driven out of Spain (coincidentally in the same year Columbus first sailed) . It was the enormous gleaming silver ornamentation on the main altar.

And, oddly, it was seeing the House of Contracts in the Alcazar, the royal Spanish castle virtually across the street from the mosque-turned-cathedral. The House of Contracts was where the 16th and 17th century equivalent of venture capitalists came to get royal permission to organize voyages across the Atlantic to loot the New World, robbing people who didn't understand that, as Spanish colonies, they no longer had any rights to their land or their resources or their cultural artifacts or, for that matter, their lives.

Which was, of course, not the way the guide presented it. He was nostalgic for the time when Spain ruled the seas and was the wealthiest country in Europe. Hard times in Spain these days, so his nostalgia is understandable. The archetype of Spanish galleons laden with gold and silver is not just something Hollywood made up so Errol Flynn could buckle his swashes. Even losing ships to pirates and the dangers of the high seas and the occasional victories of the inhabitants of the New World, even deducting the percentage that doubtless poured into the royal coffers for the privilege of setting sail in the first place, the amount of wealth brought back to Spain was staggering.

And now, thanks to my Sevilla excursion, I think I can begin to imagine what that meant.

Not the Ritz

Turns out the hotel associated with that glorious restaurant in Madeira was not the Ritz after all, it was Reid's. I am publishing this correction so you won't register in the wrong place the next time you vacation in Funchal, which I highly recommend.

Last port : Funchal, Madeira, Portugal

Wonderful excursion here. This is a stunningly beautiful place, red tiled roofs on pastel houses scattered all over the steep slopes of the volcanic mountains that make up the islands of Madeira, with carefully maintained terraces where they grow bananas and sugar cane and, of course, grapes from which to make Madeira wines. (Looking down one almost vertical set of terraces, our guide shared the local joke about such fields: "You only ever fall once.") The annual flower festival is this weekend, and someone made damned sure the flowers knew about it. Even more variety than in Sicily. Jacaranda trees lining the streets with their elegant blue-violet flowers, and yellow and pink and orange and red and white flowers whose names slipped past too fast for me to catch onto them. Our morning took us up 1000 meters into the Nuns' Valley*, on a twisty little road that had half the bus cowering down in their seats to keep from having to see just how near the edge we were and just how far it was from "up here" to "way down there". (Another local joke: "Our roads may be narrow, but they are elastic -- there's always room." Our driver, Victor, had been driving tour buses along Madeiran mountain roads for 21 years and was nonetheless a calm, elegant, and personable man.)

*The Nuns' Valley got its name when some 15th century nuns hid there from the pirates who raided the island seeking the gold and silver Madeira got from the sale of sugar. The guide told us a story of the aged Mother Superior who accompanied the nuns in their flight. "They say she carried all the monastery's treasure with her. Before she died, she buried it. It has never been found." It is the kind of story where the "They" in "They say" may possibly refer to the current membership of the Union of Licensed Madeiran Tour Guides.

And then we stopped for lunch.

My experience of excursion lunches led me to expect an indifferent buffet including one, count them, one glass of wine OR beer OR soft drink, any additional potable to be paid for by the consumer. Well. We had lunch at Villa Cypriani, a restaurant attached to the Ritz (no, really, the Ritz) Hotel. We ate out on the balcony overlooking Funchal Bay from a height of several hundred feet, allowing us to see other islands of the Madeira Archipelago and to watch a replica of one of Christopher Columbus' ships sail by. The service was impeccable; the food -- a pasta dish, a main course of chicken plus side dishes, a tiramisu dessert plus petit fours and coffee -- was delectable; and both the white wine served with the first course and the red served with the second were excellent. The wait staff seemed to consider it a personal insult if they saw anyone's glass approaching half empty, and they promptly and gracefully corrected the problem as often as it occurred.

I most likely won't be going to dinner tonight. Instead, I think I'll find a place on deck to sit and watch us sail away from Funchal. It is the last land I'll see until we dock in Florida on the 28th, and the last point in the voyage where I can feel this pampered and irresponsible. Tomorrow I will be trying to figure out how to get everything I brought plus everything I bought into luggage that bulged when I arrived -- was it less than four months ago?

Drunk

I am currently more drunk than I have been in living memory, which, given the unreliable state of my memory these days , may not be as long as you think. I went to the murder mystery dinner, which was five courses*, each accompanied by its own wine, which is more wine than I have drunk in living memory, which, given the unreliable -- but we've been down that path already. The murder mystery plot was very silly, which is fine, since the murderer was whoever got the most votes. The food was superb, even by the standards of the Amsterdam, which are quite high: beautifully presented, exquisitely prepared, and luscious. Also at my table were a couple from Michigan and a couple from Alabama, both of whom voted against me as to who killed the victim , but my candidate won out overall, so I feel vindicated. Also very well fed. Also more drunk than I have been in living memory.

We are on our way through the Straits of Gibraltar. I will not see the Rock thereof because we will pass it around 2 am, and even if I were awake, I would not be able to see it. Plus which the idea of going to sleep is sounding better and better.

*Anti pasto platter with Australian Turkey Flat Rosé

Potato and leek soup scented with truffle with California Pine Ridge Chenin Blanc Viognier

Shrimp and lobster salad on a bed of greens with tarragon dressing with Washington Columbia Crest Grand Estate Chardonnay

Petite filet mignon with asparagus, balsamic drizzled cherry tomatoes, and slow fried new potatoes with Washington Columbia Crest Grand Estate Merlot

Chocolate, hazelnut, and coffee cakes with raspberry sauce with Chilean Errazuriz Sauvignon Blanc late harvest

A chivalrous gesture

I really like sitting on deck watching the ocean go by. Sometimes I apparently take this pastime farther than anyone else on board, sitting outside when it's windier or colder than other people find reasonable. Like today, for instance, when it was bright sunny out, but with a chilly wind. Sea and air temperatures were in the low 60s, which would be T-shirt weather at home, but left me shivering as I lay on the deck chair being hypnotized by the sparkles of the sunshine on the waves.

Two men, clad in jackets and windbreakers, strode by, their pace showing they were exercising, not just strolling.

"Would you like us to get you some blankets?" one asked. There are wool blankets available to guests on the outside deck, lovely warm blankets in blue and black plaid.

"No thanks," I replied because I always say "No thanks" when someone offers to help me. It's a character flaw due, I'm sure, to an early trauma or basic lack of courtesy or cerebral short-circuits of some kind. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them because I was cold, and those blankets are snuggly-warm, But the two gentlemen were past me, and I had made my statement, and I couldn't think of a face-saving way to change my mind. If I wanted a blanket, I could stand up and get one for myself, grumble, mumble, scrunch down into the deck chair, shiver.

A few minutes later, they came by again. This time, they didn't even ask. They just grabbed two blankets, covered me to the chin with one, wrapped up my feet (I was wearing sandals!) with the other, said, "You know, you're the only person sitting out on deck", smiled, and strode off.

Viewed from the perspective of feminist empowerment, I should resent their presumption. I say phooey on feminist empowerment. Their kindness warmed me, body and soul, and I continue to smile whenever I think about it. Like now.

Ajaccio

Have you ever heard of Ajaccio? Neither had I until I saw it on the itinerary, and even then I had to keep checking back because the name would not stay in my head. It's a resort town on the island of Corsica, where Napoleon Bonaparte was born. It's part of France, our only French port of call. For some reason I associate Corsica with pirates, and I suspected that the Corsicans think about France the same way that the Sicilians think about Italy. I also expected to encounter the famed French arrogance.

Well, not so much. I didn't have an excursion, I just walked off the ship for a few blocks (my arthritic knees refused to allow much more) and was charmed. The town looked charming. The vendors in the little crafts market were charming, and that's not just because they wanted to sell me something. OK, it was maybe partly because they wanted to sell me something, but I have been in a lot of situations where people were trying to sell me something over the past few months, and none of them charmed me like the Corsicans. I found a ring I wanted to buy -- little bits of amber set in silver like four-petaled flowers -- but the merchant only took Euros in cash, a limitation which he communicated with diplomacy and, yes, charm. He gave me directions to an ATM, agreeing to hold the ring for me until I got back, and as I walked there, I watched the people around me being charmingly Gallic and no one ever was snooty or unpleasant in any way. It seemed like a place I wished I had more time in.

And now the idea of spending time in France is beginning to appeal to me. How weird! I have nothing in common with France. I can't tell one wine from another once it's in my mouth, I prefer Rachmaninoff and Shostakovitch to Debussy and Ravel, and Corsica isn't even mainland France!

Oh well, we'll see how the rosy glow weathers. But I had a lovely hour in Ajaccio.

End in sight

It's Day 100 of 112. I have a spiffy copper medal honoring my 100 days aboard a Holland America cruise ship. One more day in Barcelona, a sea day, a day in Cadiz, after passing through the Straits of Gibraltar, another sea day, Madeira, then a week at sea to pack up and cross the Atlantic. Actually, a lot of cruises last only a week or two, on one of them, we'd just be starting. I don't think I can actually psych myself out to that extent, but I guess it's worth a shot. Or maybe watching the end approaching is part of the experience. Yeah, I think I'll go with that instead.

A steel magnolia

Got into conversation at breakfast this morning with Vera, a soft-spoken widow from Georgia who told me a story that makes her my hero and role-model.

It happened in Sharm-el-Sheikh. She wanted to get a quick tour of the town and agreed with one of the many taxi drivers on the pier that he would drive her around the town for an hour for $5. She got into the taxi, and he drove for several minutes before stopping at the town's dump and demanding $80 to take her back to the docks.

Tourist nightmare. The ship was due to leave long before she could find her way back on foot. But did she falter? She did not. "I don't carry that much money with me, " she told him. He would take a credit card. "I never carry my cards off the ship," she replied. Maybe she would let him give her a massage.

At this point, she got really mad. "We agreed to $5 for an hour. Now you take me back to the ship right now!" He pretended to be outraged, saying he would take her to the police station. "Fine. That's perfect. Take me to the police station, I want to tell the police about this criminal behavior."

He took her back to the ship. She got out of the taxi before paying him his $5.

When I grow up, I want to be just like Vera.

Insomnia cure: rough seas

Turns out being rocked back and forth in bed by 6-8 foot swells is very calming. I even dreamed I got sent to a newly created world in the second crew because of my debugging skills. Apparently my subconscious considers this world BTDT*.

So, Sicily. We were there at the perfect time, before the summer drought turns everything brown and sere and when Etna was conversational. In the volcanic-ash-enriched soil on Etna's slopes, anything that can grow will grow. We saw lemons and oranges ready to pick, lots of vegetables, lots of prickly pear, pruned back grapevines, flowers, all in carefully maintained terraces -- we're on slopes, remember. Our first stop at the end of the most recent major lava flow took us through villages on streets whose curves were clearly designed with donkey carts rather than 40-passenger tour buses in mind. Our driver deserved an award for not knocking any corners off the beautiful two-story stucco houses we passed within inches of.

And here we are at the end of a lava flow from the mid 90s, hearing how the Sicilians have learned to control the flows to minimize damage, when, out of a clear sky, a growl of thunder. Then a couple more. "Oh, that's just the volcano," the guide says, not visibly running in terror. Turns out Etna, unlike St. Helena, has little mini-eruptions all the time, tossing a few boulders into the air, emitting clouds of smoke, ash, and gas, and spooking the tourists. "If you are here at night, you can see the glow of the lava in the crater," the guide said. One spooked tourist asked, "But we won't be here at night, will we?"

The thunderous basso continuo accompanied us all afternoon. A few of us were spooked, but most of us were delighted. We were delighted to have the volcano commenting as we sampled flavored honey at the little stand by the lava. We were delighted as we walked up from the bus to the winery where we tasted five wines, two reds, two whites, and a sparkling. (The connoisseurs were unimpressed. I liked all five, but especially the red that was presented as "subtle and complex".) We were disappointed to learn that we would not be able to hear Etna back on the ship in Messina, and our guide, Maurizio, a charming man, tried to console us with a passable amateur rendition of "O Sole Mio" and the Sicilian version of the origins of the Mafia.

According to Maurizio, while Sicily was under the thumb of Spain several centuries back, the Spanish were big on extracting the island's wealth, but not so keen on keeping order and providing justice. So the Sicilians set up their own shadow government. Kind of like what Don Corleone provided to the Sicilian immigrants in New York in "Godfather 1". Once Italy took over in the 19th century, people were used to trusting the local guys and the system continued, in spite of the Italians. Maurizio said he considers himself Sicilian first, Italian second, but he thinks the Mafia is in decline because the younger generation, including himself, is no longer intimidated by them. I was surprised to hear him talk like that. Is omerta passé?

*Been There, Done That.

Insomnia

Apparently when I can't sleep, I can't write. Or maybe it's the other way around. But in either case, I find myself unable either to sleep or to tell you about the wonderful day I had yesterday on the slopes of Mt. Etna in Sicily. All cures for insomnia and/or writer's block gratefully received.

Katakolon

We are docked for the day in Katakolon, Greece, which is the port closest to the site of the ancient Olympic games. I'm sure those who arranged a tour to that site are happily snapping photos and being treated to informative lectures, but I am sitting on deck enjoying looking at Katakolon.

Debate continues as to how to pronounce the town's name, with emphasis on the second syllable (ka-TACK-a-lon) being the current favorite, though the third syllable (kat-a-COAL-un) having its adherents as well. But what has won my heart is its scale: this is easily the tiniest port we have docked at. Nary a container in sight. There are three cruise ships docked here: us, the Cunard Queen Victoria. and the Costa Fortuna (yes, that is the line which had the ship capsize off Italy, one must wonder how many of their cabins are booked).

But the port itself is miniscule. A row of shops and restaurants along the harborfront that lack the grab-the-tourist-dollar frenzy we've seen elsewhere. Houses where actual people live extending up the slopes that ring the harbor, with trees that look to be two-thirds evergreens, though that may be because it's still mid-April. And it's quiet. A truck goes by on the main street, and you can hear it. What a refreshment for the soul!

Now you will have to excuse me while I immerse myself in the luscious human scale of Katakolon. I will attach a photo or two, but they don't do it justice.

Free wifi!!!

We are in Piraeus, which is the port for Athens. And the terminal at which we are docked has free wifi of such potency that I can get it on deck on the side next to the terminal! For the first time, we have mildly unpleasant weather -- rain and temperatures in the 50s -- but I am feeling grateful to Greece for letting me download some new books (including Mark Twain's "Innocents Abroad") to the Kindle on my tablet. The terminal (where it is warmer and drier than on deck) is full of crew members connecting to family and friends halfway around the world. Being young, they fold easily down to sit cross-legged on the floor or on the footrests under the public phones or against idle security scanner tables and type with eager concentration. Their contracts have them on board for ten months at a time, and they seem to be continuously on duty while on board being efficient, courteous, and appropriately friendly to people, some of whom are -- I search for the appropriate term -- royal pains in the ass even to those of us. who don't have to be nice to them.

Now, do I dare read Mark Twain? Having read his version of travel writing, will I ever have the temerity to post my own again? I think I'll start with a Kinsey Millhone murder mystery instead. I have no ambition to do what Sue Grafton does.

The hotel in Luxor

The outing to Luxor consisted of a four-hour bus ride across the Eastern Desert during the afternoon and evening of the first day, an overnight at a hotel in Luxor, then, the second day, tours of the Valley of the Kings and miscellaneous temples, followed in the late afternoon by the return bus trip.

The hotel in Luxor, the Sonesta St. George, deserves its own commentary. Specifically, the bathroom. I mean, sure, marble floors, a life sized etching of Queen Nefertiti in the elevator, luscious Egyptian cotton bed linens, bathrobes, and towels, staff clearly more oriented to serving oil-rich sheiks than plebian tourists, Holland America doesn't do Econolodges.

But that bathroom! Jiminy! Radios inside and outside the shower enclosure, jacuzzi outlets in the tub, six little rotating shower heads at shoulder-to-hip level in addition to the big overhead one and the other one on the flexible hose. One woman on our tour turned on her shower, only to discover that the last user had left the water flow directed to the six small heads, which promptly sent water out the door of the enclosure all over the floor. One needs to acclimate to a sybaritic lifestyle.

The. Toilet. Had. A. Control. Panel. The settings weren't activated until you sat down, at which point there was this low hum as it prepared to do your bidding. Wait a minute, I may have a photo. Yes. I have no idea what most of the advanced functionality does. Bidet I understand, but that one on the far right looks like it will paddle your bottom for you. And the second option may be an enema. There's a  white sign partly visible to the right that is an introductory guide, I think. I know you can set the water temperature.

I was sufficiently intimidated that I just used it in its most rudimentary sense, at which point I noticed another sign indicating that toilet paper should not be discarded in the bowl. I guess maybe the water treatment facilities in Luxor are not as sophisticated as the Sonesta's plumbing.

Valley of the Kings

I already wrote about how being in the Valley of the Kings was a scary existential experience for me, but while I was freaking out confronting my mortality, I was also having a great time wandering around in 3000-year-old graves.

I will assume you know as much as I did going in: that Pharaohs wanted really elaborate tombs filled with treasure because they believed they would need it all in their next life. Maybe Egyptian geography gives everyone existential crises about their mortality. Earlier Pharaohs built pyramids, which turned out to be like big neon signs saying "Grave robbers, here you go!" So later Pharaohs decided to take a different tack and be buried inside mountains. No less treasure, still big rocks pointing skyward, but hopefully, with this new approach, they would be less vulnerable to the not-dead-yet.

So they set their minions to carving out tombs in the limestone and sandstone of the mountains west of the Nile near Luxor. So far over sixty of them have been found, including one (only one!) that the grave robbers never found their way into -- Tutankhamen's. You have to pay extra to see his, even though, what the grave robbers missed, modern museums have scoured out, so there's not a lot left inside to look at.

And, incidentally, looking is all you can do. Photography of all kinds is strictly forbidden in the Valley of the Kings, not only inside the tombs but outside in the parking lot as well. No one is quite sure why this is the case. The current most popular theory blames an exclusive deal between the government and National Geographic. We were ordered to leave all cameras in the bus under threat of having them confiscated by the tourism police. And I'm not making that up, there really are police cars driving around labeled "Tourism Police". I cannot testify one way or the other as to whether they confiscate cameras.

The first grave was a finished one. The Pharaoh buried there had managed to hold onto the throne and not be poisoned by any ambitious brothers or sons for long enough that the plans for his tomb were brought to fruition. I walked down a long, sloping hallway whose walls were decorated with hieroglyphics painted in red and blue and yellow and black telling the Pharaoh's life story, illustrated with paintings, also in color. The colors were vivid and bright and 3000 years old. Part of the credit probably has to go to no sunshine, but even so. It wasn't perfectly preserved, of course -- the "Do Not Touch Anything!" signs were of recent vintage. And it was so tempting -- to my surprise, I found the wall paintings very appealing, lively and even good-humored, and I caught myself thinking, "Oh surely just one quick touch... " I resisted, but it took more will-power than I would have thought.

And no, I was not being seduced by the spirit of the mummy. Those hieroglyphics were just way more likable than I had expected.

At the bottom of the tomb was the Pharaoh's sarcophagus, a Chevy Suburban sized stone coffin with a statue of his body carved on top. To see the statue, I had to stand on a little wooden step stool and use a flashlight offered by a man I thought was an attendant. He turned out to be just another vendor who helped me down off the stool and immediately had his hand out for a tip. I figured, what the heck, how often do I get to see the top of a Pharaoh's coffin, and gave him a dollar.

On the way back out, I happened to look up. The ceiling was painted dark blue with hundreds of white stars drawn like five-pointed asterisks. I wonder why people think of stars as five-pointed. Thousands of years and a huge difference in cultures, and the Pharaoh's artists and I draw stars the same way.

After that, I went to see the tomb of a Pharaoh who wasn't as lucky or well-protected. He died before his tomb was completed. Apparently, the custom in such cases was to give the tomb-building team 70 days -- the length of time it took to mummify the recently deceased -- to finish up as best they could, after which they were to turn their attention to making an even fancier tomb for the successor. It meant walls left only roughly finished, areas without inscriptions or paintings, side tunnels barely begun. No sarcophagus. I don't know whether they just dumped the mummy into the bottom of the excavation, sealed it up, and moved on, or what. I also don't know whether the new guy substituted cheap imitations for the treasure the old guy planned to have. I know that, on exterior carvings, Pharaoh successors were known to scratch out the names of their Pharaoh predecessors, apparently holding grudges way past where it made much sense. Or maybe they just felt there was only room in the universe for one Glorious All-powerful Immortal Invincible Ever-Victorious Divinity.

After we left the Valley of the Kings, we visited three or four temples full of huge stone pillars, bas-relief carvings, and supersized sculptures of whichever Pharaoh was financing the effort. Here too were remnants of bright colors on ceilings -- the temples must have been magnificent before time and weather and vindictive successors wore them down. But the temples didn't appeal to me as much. Probably the same lack of enthusiasm I felt for the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio, which I wrote about, and the Forbidden City in Beijing, which I didn't. I just don't grok gargantuan, I guess.

Transiting Suez Canal

There's more I want to tell you about the trip to Luxor, but right now, as I'm typing this, we are going through or, as us seasoned world travelers term it, transiting the Suez Canal. It will take us 12 hours, and Holland America is serving us rolls, juice and coffee on several decks with good views. We are leading our convoy -- maybe they let us go in alphabetical order -- and I can see five huge ships following us before the line disappears in the desert dust.

It's another Egyptian line between life and death. The irrigated west side is verdant with date palms and green fields, full of houses and apartment buildings and mosques. Minarets, by the way, are much more elegant during the day; at night they are lit up with white and green neon, making them look like tall, skinny Christmas trees, though probably only to American eyes.

And on the east side of the canal, desert. Sand. Bleakness and nothing whatsoever growing. Almost no buildings. Very occasionally desolate highways from nowhere to nowhere else. (Why don't they use Canal water to irrigate? Because it's sea water.)

Every so often, on the west side are stack of green boxes like shipping containers. During the Egyptian/Israel war in the 70s, Egypt sank a bunch of ships in the Canal so Israel couldn't use it. The Canal was closed for ten years as they got the damned ships back out. The green boxes are there in case they need to block it again -- easier to unblock it afterwards if you use regular-shaped objects with no breakable parts. Oh, and if you can't use the Canal, going around South Africa adds more than 3000 miles to the journey.

OK, that's your "here we are!" entry on the Suez Canal. I'm going back out on the bow for another while. If nothing else, I can wave to the soldiers posted to the frequent guardhouses. About 2/3 of them wave back, which I think shows Egyptian graciousness. I only go by once. They see ships going by all day every day.

Abdul the Nubian

When I heard the word "Nubian", it brought to mind gigantic black-skinned grim-faced muscular types equally adept at guarding emperors or playing power forward in the NBA. Not necessarily. "My name is Abdul, and I am a Nubian from Aswan," our Egyptian guide said, introducing himself to our bus. "Nubian means I have dark skin, curly hair, a big nose, and a big mouth. I just got a hair cut, so you'll have to trust me on that, everything else you can see." Slightly below average height, he was anything but grim -- when I asked him to teach me to count to three in Arabic, he had me repeat three words after him several times, praising my pronunciation. Then he grinned and told me I had just said, "I love you."

He took excellent care of us, always arranging his on-scene talks so we could stand in the shade while we listened (which, of course, usually meant he stood in the sun to talk) and herding us diplomaticly so we didn't get lost in the crowds or overwhelmed by the vendors. He walked up and down the bus aisle during the four hour bus trips to and from Luxor to let individuals ask him about anything from history, of which Egypt has more than just about anyone, to politics -- he thinks the upcoming national elections will come down to three candidates, of whom the radical conservative to the right of the Muslim Brotherhood is not one. He referred to him as "the guy with the beard", as ubiquitous election posters show him, and passed along gossip that the man's mother may not be a citizen. He didn't do as well with religion questions. Not that he was argumentative or hostile, but listening to him and his interlocutors talk past one another was a sad lesson in the limits of human communication.

Example:
What the passenger said: Do you think the new government will institute Sharia law in Egypt?"

What the passenger meant: Do you think the new government will turn Egypt into Afghanistan under the Taliban?

What Abdul heard: Do you think the new government will incorporate some Islamic principles into how it runs the country?"

To which Abdul answered: Yes, it seems likely to me that they will. After all, 75% of Egyptians are Muslims.

Passenger: So you expect education for women to be banned?

Abdul: What? Of course not! My parents are illiterate, but all of us, my three brothers AND my three sisters and me , have university educations!

Passenger: But under Sharia law...

Eventually that conversation petered out in mutual frustration.

But through it all, Abdul kept a good-natured cheerfulness and relaxed confidence. He probably would have made a poor harem guard -- too much smiling, not enough musculature -- but as a tour guide, he was top-notch.

Egypt is scary

Not the vendors, though Egyptian souvenir vendors make the Chinese seem shy.

Not even the gun-toting jelabia-clad young men I spotted out of the bus windows as we drove through the Nile valley to Luxor. They weren't pointing their guns at anyone, the orange street lighting would have made the Easter Bunny look sinister, even without the Pavlovian conditioning of the past ten years of TV coverage of terrorism, and it was the end of a four hour bus ride that had left me somewhat loopy. Actual Egyptians I met were gracious and handsome people, except maybe for the hotel personnel who were clearly condescending to have to deal with non-millionaires.

No, it's Egypt itself that scares the bejesus out of me.

I thought I knew what a desert is. I've driven through Nevada and Arizona, I grew up in eastern Montana, which is always described as high desert. But the sere golden cliffs that loom over the Nile Valley to the west and the emptiness that separates it from the Red Sea take the concept of desolation to a whole new level.

Maybe it's the contrast with the Nile Valley in spring, where life is everywhere. Flowering bushes, probably azaleas, line the roads with color, and small fields (Nasser's revolution gave individual farmers plots of only five acres each) are dense with grains, vegetables, herbs, and sugar cane that are sown, tended, and harvested by hand using techniques and tools that would seem familiar to Egyptians of the time of the Pharaohs.

But this vitality occurs only where the millennia of Nile floods have piled up rich silt. Particularly on the west, you can almost draw a pencil line where life stops and the desert starts. And what a desert! No fooling around with cactus and sagebrush. The mountains that house the Valley of the Kings and keep Sahara sand from burying the river seem as sterile as the Moon. Clearly people can survive here -- the steep slopes above the Valley of the Kings are criss-crossed with foot trails probably left by hearty young archaeologists (more likely in baseball caps than pith helmets, alas!) digging for the 64th or 65th New Kingdom burial crypt.

But I am neither hearty nor young (nor, for that matter, an archaeologist), and when I got dizzy in the sun and stumbled walking from one tomb to another, I was grateful for the assistance of one of the vendors, even if, a few minutes later, he came over to sell me a souvenir book ("This is not because I helped you, I did that because we are both human beings, but... "). It made me realize that, if I stayed out in that sun for very long, even under my floppy purple straw hat and protected by the long-sleeved cotton shirt a friend had lent me, I would pass out and, without aid, would die of heat stroke. Right there, mortality, my own personal mortality, inherent in the place, which has been as it is for millennia.

So Egypt freaks me out a bit. Doesn't seem to bother the Egyptians, who turn out new citizens, according to our guide Abdul, at the rate of one every 26 seconds. Does anybody know whether Israel is like this? I know Arabia is. Maybe imminent death concentrates the mind such that religions germinate more readily. I think there's a good analogy with the Nile Valley in there somewhere, I just can't tease it out at the moment.

Red Sea miscellaneous

1. It will cost the Amsterdam $215,000 to transit the Suez Canal on Saturday.
2. I am now as close as I am likely ever to be to Mecca, which is roughly 100 miles to the east.
3. The Red Sea is not red. It is blue, just like all the other waters through which we have sailed. Apparently, at one point, Egypt was once called the land of red sands, and this body of water was associated with that.

Pirate sighting!

Or, probably not. In any case, as we approached the entrance to the south end of the Red Sea, there was a small motor boat passing to the north of us with five people squeezed into it and no signs of fishing equipment. They went their way, we went ours without mishap. No Jolly Roger flying (no mast of any kind to fly it from), no hearty cries of "Heave to there, matey, or ye'll be on yer way to Davy Jones' locker, argh!". We were at least twenty miles from land, so they weren't just out for a jaunt -- though what do I know about jaunting range off the horn of Africa? Maybe they were pirates who decided five to 1500 was not very good odds. Maybe they weren't.

Losing time

If you travel all the way around the world to the west, one way and another, you're going to have at least 24 time zone changes that work like daylight savings time in the fall -- you get an extra hour to sleep. I say "at least" because our course squiggles around some, occasionally requiring a "spring forward" instead of a "fall back". The ship's clocks are always moved back at 2am and forward at 2pm, so we always gain an hour of sleep and lose an hour of afternoon. And India is half an hour off from everyone else, so there we gained half an hour we'll have to give back one of these days.

BUT ANYWAY. Tonight is one of the gain-an-hour-of-sleep nights. Maybe it's some obscure anti-pirate measure, we're in the Gulf of Aden until tomorrow at around 11am. But when 24 out of 112 nights is an extra hour long, it raises some conundra.

The ship's clock currently says 9:30pm, a not unreasonable time to start heading to bed. But the impending time change means that, in some sense, it's only 8:30pm, way too early for anyone over the age of four to be ending her day. But I'm sleepy. Yawning even.

I know, I could go to bed now and plan to get up a nominal hour earlier and do something worthwhile, like exercise or meditate or read something to improve my mind. But getting up is a challenge even when the clock says it's time.

What I usually do is believe the ship's clock. Right now the ship's clock says it's bedtime, so I will go to bed. Tomorrow the ship's clock will tell me I have another hour to doze, so I will doze.

Now if I could just figure out how we'll get back to where we are on the same calendar page as the US after crossing the International Date Line. I suspect it may involve having to give back all those extra dozing hours.

A multitude of voyages

It occurs to me that there are a multitude of voyages happening on the Amsterdam.

There is my voyage, whose purpose is to sail around the world. My voyage likes sea days because we are progressing toward my goal -- Ft. Lauderdale the long way around. And my voyage involves a lot of looking at water going by, to the exclusion of, say, ballroom dancing classes or evening shows or shopping for diamonds or tai chi or acupuncture.

And then there is one of my tablemates who seems grimly determined to wring every last drop of possibility out of the trip. He has scheduled excursions for every day in port, some of them 12 or 14 hours long. He seems to spend sea days mostly in the sports bar or the casino, two places where he can smoke, though he does go to some of the lectures and is merciless toward lecturers who don't hold his interest.

The woman who was my roommate on the China trip seemed most interested in what she could buy and how cheaply. She described destinations in terms of what could be bought there. Her targets ranged from black pearls in Tahiti to jade and silk in China and Thailand and India. She has dozens of people she's buying small presents for, and she seemed to find it difficult to pass a street vendor without trying to haggle herself a bargain. I hope she brought a couple extra suitcases. And that's off the ship. I don't think she buys the gemstones offered in shops onboard, but someone must. Maybe the people paying $100,000 apiece for deluxe veranda suites on Deck 7 need diversions on sea days and pick up spare diamonds to cure the tedium.

Then there are those for whom a cruise provides support that any other form of vacation does not: a widowed tablemate* nearing her 90th birthday, frail and nearly deaf, or the Australian woman who sits near me at bingo whose husband is in a wheelchair. She suffers seasickness the whole voyage no matter how calm the waters, but it's preferable to trying to rassle all their equipment onto and off of airplanes and into and out of hotels. (There are several couples in her situation, all with him in the wheelchair and her on her feet. I would like to see just one with roles reversed. But "judge not... ". And now that I think of it, there was a couple on the China trip, him physically healthy, her in a walker, so forget I said anything.)

I think most passengers, at least the ones with more than one world cruise to their credit, are just garden-variety hedonists. (Again, "judge not... ") They like endless good food served with reliable smiles from people who take the trouble to learn your name and preferences, no housekeeping chores, lots of diversions, and a chocolate coin on your pillow each night.

*One evening at dinner, I asked my six tablemates why they were on this voyage. Answers were kind of what you'd expect until we came to Sue, the frail 90-year-old. It took a couple tries to get her to understand what I was asking, but then she smiled and answered, "Because this will be my last one."

Entering the Gulf of Aden

So here I sit on deck, assuming that the warm, moist air will be good for my cold, which is a weird turn of phrase, since I mean good for my health and bad for the cold. Temperature is in the upper 70s, sky is clear, ocean is calm -- friendly little sparkly ripples glitter in the sun, but no swells and only a light breeze.

And we've just entered the Gulf of Aden, right between Somalia (pirates) and Yemen (Islamic radicals). It's a major shipping route, so container ships have begun parading across the horizon between me and Somalia. From where I sit (or, more accurately, from where I recline) I can see three Amsterdam security officers studying the horizon. The sun gleams off curls of razor wire visible from the deck. I have completed the easy sudoku and gotten stuck on the hard one. Why does having a stuffed up head physically make my brain sluggish? I need a nap.

Streets of India

The trip to the Taj involved two five-hour bus rides between Delhi, where the planes were, and Agra, where the Taj is. The physical distance is 127 miles. We were lucky to make it in five hours.

First there are the legal barriers. Many roads in India are built by private industry, which then gets to collect tolls for a few decades until they make enough money. Road taxes are collected by each individual state as vehicles cross state borders. The booths that collect these fees are understaffed, and long lines are standard. Imagine traveling across the US if you had to stop and pay every time you entered a new state.

Then there are the other drivers, and I use the term loosely. Indian traffic follows the British paradigm of driving on the right, but only usually. Seeing someone driving against the stream of traffic is commonplace. I even saw a police car going the wrong way without warning lights or sirens. Trucks carrying farm produce are customarily so overloaded that they look like pumpkins and, also customarily, frequently overturn, stopping or impeding traffic. Motorcycles and motorbikes, sometimes carrying as many as five passengers, zip in and out of lanes with suicidal indifference, and many intersections and roundabouts are negotiated without the aid of signals or even signs.

Our way led through villages where the road, though paved, was so narrow we could look into the houses as we passed. Cows, water buffalos, pigs and goats lay beside the road or wandered almost within reach, not only in the countryside, but on the streets of towns we drove through. (Cows, by the way, are sacred, but water buffalos are not, even though water buffalo milk is richer than cow milk. Our guide was a fountain of unexpected information.)

One needs a driver's license to drive a car, truck, or bus (though our guide said the system is so corrupt that virtually anyone can get one), but anyone, licensed or not, can drive a tractor or other farm implement. We were driving along after nightfall at a fairly good clip when the driver of a tractor ahead of us simply stopped in the middle of the road and walked away. The tractor, of course, had no lights and, had it not been for the skill of our driver, we would have been in an ugly crash.

Many vehicles in India have no mirrors. It is considered the responsibility of someone who wants to pass another vehicle to announce his intention by honking his horn. Sometimes you even see "please honk" bumper stickers. It means, among other things, that you will not be able to nap during a long bus ride. There are,however, some very melodious and unusual honks to be heard.

Roadside trash is inescapable. Not just occasional discarded wrappers or out-of-date newspaper , but decaying muddy collections of plastic and metal so old it's impossible to tell what the pieces once were. Garbage is dumped everywhere and left to rot. There is no way around it: India is filthy with an ancient, ground-in griminess that defeats even the idea of clean.

Not that recycling is unknown. Cow patties are collected and dried to use for fuel -- we saw countless "haystacks" of dried dung everywhere, the raw materials carefully sculpted into discs the size and shape of Frisbees and left in the sun until dry enough to stack and store. And brick structures are disassembled once they can no longer be used and the bricks are resold by the roadside or trucked to a new building site.

I will close this by telling you about the Sanskrit on the walls between fields in the country. Everywhere on the low brick fences that separate farmers fields are painted what look like Sanskrit slogans. They are carefully executed with black shading to emphasize the elegant curves of the letters. I assumed they must be quotations from the Rigvedas or the Bhagavad Gita, put on the fences to ask the gods for good harvests. Not so. When I asked the guide about them, he smiled in embarrassment. Apparently they are ads for sexual products, the rough equivalent of email spam advertising non-prescription viagra. Some things are universal.

No lions, no tigers no bears, but...

... you know you're not in Kansas any more when :

-- a man leads two camels past as you walk along the street. They are muzzled with rope nets, but clearly they are thinking of spitting as they peer down their long noses at you.

-- monkeys perch on top of the security office as you wait your turn to be patted down outside the Taj Mahal. One has a banana, and the other cavorts around him, hoping to find the posture that will get a share.

-- troops of green parrots flit in and out among the trees, calling to one another conversationally.

-- a horse whose ribs you can count waits in harness to draw a cab along the city's cobbled streets.

-- a mother pig trots by, inches from the side of your bus, purposeful and intent on business of her own.

-- a humped cow with beautiful, languid eyes looks up at you from the city sidewalk, secure in its god-nature and willing to offer you blessings and peace.

I missed seeing elephants on the streets. They aren't common in the areas I was in, and the only time some were visible -- possibly for a festival or a wedding -- I was on the wrong side of the bus..

Taj Mahal

Wow.

We got up in our hotel rooms at 5 am, rode electric buses through the early morning streets of Agra, walked the six blocks to the entrance, then waited in line for an hour or so because India is very serious about security, and all women had to undergo not only a very personal physical patdown, but a complete examination of the contents of each purse. It was just like with restrooms: the men's line zipped through, the women's line took forever.

But OK, so finally here we are, through the eastern gate into a pleasant garden, walking along worn paving stones to the center, then turning right, and...

There it was. Outlined in an interior gateway. Literally breath-taking. In the morning sun, it was a gentle golden color, perfect, seemingly feather-light, making me wish I had more eyes to see it with. I took photos, but they won't show you what I saw -- I have seen photos of the Taj taken by much more skilled photographers than me, and it's not the same.

We were squeezed between the lengthy security checks and the need to be on the road back to Delhi in time to catch our return flight to the ship in Mumbai. Our guides did their best to get us around and through the Taj quickly, reciting the information about the creation and history of the building, moving the 30 of us through the other crowds of tourists and vendors ("Please stay together and follow, we do not have a sufficiency of time.") as our arthritic knees and hips did their best with steep stairs and marble floors.

But what I really wanted was to find a place to sit and just look. I understand that in bright noon light, the Taj is almost blindingly white. And that it glows silver in moonlight. I would have had to sit there for a few weeks to get to a full moon, but heck, why not?

Pirates #3

Just below the lowest open air decks, the Amsterdam is now festooned with silvery coils of razor wire. We leave Mumbai tonight at 9 pm to begin our voyage across the Arabian Sea to the Gulf of Aden (aka pirate central), and thence to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. Maybe the extra anti-pirate measures are just to reassure anxious passengers. Or maybe there is New Intelligence that indicates a more serious threat.

I trust Holland America not to expose its passengers to danger, of course, but at this point in the trip, it would cost them huge amounts to re-route us -- canceling existing port arrangements and excursions in Europe, making new ones at the last minute to get us around the Cape of Good Hope and back to Ft. Lauderdale by April 28, if it's even possible to get there by then via the longer route. Plus the negative publicity for cruises at a time when there is already plenty of that in the air. Though an actual pirate attack would be worse, even if there were no casualties.
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A challenging time to run a cruise line.

Disconnect from reality

And this shows just how disconnected from normal reality I have become.

As an added anti-pirate measure, we're going to zoom through the Gulf of Aden so fast that we will arrive at our first Egyptian port, Safaga, late afternoon on April 4th instead of first thing April 5th. In consequence, a new excursion is being offered that leaves the afternoon of the 4th, makes the 3- or 4-hour drive by bus, hopefully air-conditioned, to Luxor that afternoon and evening, spends the night in a hotel, then spends the next day touring Egyptian antiquities, returning to the ship the evening of the 5th. For a single booking, the cost is $650.

Before this piracy-enhanced opportunity, I had decided not to do any of the one-day Egyptian antiquities outings, which crammed both bus rides into one gargantuan 14- or 15-hour day. They cost less than half as much, but they seemed to promise frenzy and exhaustion and the guarantee that, by the end of the day, I would not be able to distinguish one tomb from another.

Cost-conscious friends onboard tell me the price is way too high, and they are undoubtedly correct. And the code indicates strenuous activity will be involved.

But I think I'm going to sign up for it anyway. It doesn't feel as frantic as the one-day tours, and I will never be here again and if I don't, I won't set foot in Africa (the Sinai peninsula, where I take my camel ride in Sharm-el-Sheikh, may be in Egypt, but it's east of the Red Sea, hence, to my mind, in Asia).

And somewhere in the back of my mind, a lonely voice is crying plaintively, "But you will be paying $350 for an overnight hotel stay!" If I were in Portland, I might give heed to that voice. But if I were in Portland, the threat of pirates wouldn't be offering me a visit to the tomb of Hatshepsut and the Karnak Temple. QED.

And lest you suspect...

... that I have been spending my time hallucinating instead of exploring Colombo, here's a picture of the statue in the traffic roundabout.

Colombo, Sri Lanka

There's the good fantasy: scorning the "tourist bubble", where I sit in an air-conditioned bus and watch someone else's idea of what Sri Lanka is about move past the window ("To your left, you will see magnificent veeblefetzers, central to Sri Lankan culture, while to your left is an outstanding example of seventh century amadamanama architecture... "), I stride confidently forth from the ship, finding The Real Sri Lanka in quiet parks and unexpected encounters, returning with insights and anecdotes that enthrall my readers.

There's the bad fantasy: I get lost in the twisting back alleys of a city about which I know nothing. I realize that there are several young Sri Lankan men staring at me in a hostile fashion, and I realize furthermore I am a woman alone in a (possibly conservative Muslim) culture where solitary women can only be non-believers or prostitutes, and that I am wearing shorts and exposing my naked legs. I am never heard of again.

Then there's what actually happened. Sri Lanka is Buddhist, not Muslim -- one of the first buildings I pass once I leave the dock area is the Young Men's Buddhist Association, labeled in a couple different beautiful curlique scripts as well as English. The "striding confidently" part is not possible because the streets are all under construction and getting from point A to point B requires maneuvering around piles of sand and chunks of what used to be pavement. There are numerous -- very numerous -- taxi and tuk-tuk* drivers eager to drive me on tours of the city, all including the Buddhist ceremony that begins soon and includes baby elephants. They are not importunate -- one or two "No, thank you"s dissuades them, and I continue on my way.

It's hot. It's midday, Colombo is about 7 degrees north of the equator, and my personal thermostat is set for Oregon, where I understand it has just been snowing. (Atypical, but still.) And in my zeal to travel lightly, I have neglected to bring along any water.

A young man from among the taxi drivers has decided to accompany me on foot, continuing to praise the ceremony with the baby elephants as well as a sale of gemstones -- Sri Lanka is apparently known for its sapphires. He is not frightening -- his insistence is courteous, and in fact he may just be practicing his English. We walk together for a block or so to an intersection marked by the statue of a big hand holding a telephone receiver. I try to ask my companion what it's there for, but fail to communicate, as he just continues to talk about the baby elephants. (If this had not actually happened to me, I could mistake this sequence for the recounting of a dream.)

My mouth is getting really dry. The shops we pass do not inspire my confidence in their cleanliness, and Bad Fantasy wonders whether Pepsi in Sri Lanka contains the same things Pepsi in the USA does. I decide it's time to return to the ship. My companion is disappointed, but we part ways amicably. I get back to the docks without problems, but then I need guidance from several men in reddish brown uniforms who see at once that (a) I am trying to get back to the ship, and (b) I don't know how to do it, even though I can see the Amsterdam looming hospitably just over that direction. It's generous of them not to laugh at me, at least not while I can still see them.

*A tuk-tuk is the offspring of a taxi and a motorbike. Powered by an electric engine, it has seating for two people behind the driver, usually protected from sun and rain by a canopy. Tuk-tuks are named for the sound their engine makes and are usually cheaper, slower, and less comfortable than taxis.

Pirates #2

On return from dinner (a formal night with an Oriental theme*), I found with the usual pillow chocolate, a letter from the captain about our upcoming transit of the Gulf of Aden, aka "pirate central". He gave all the reasons a pirate attack on the Amsterdam is unlikely (high fretboard (distance from waterline to deck), relatively high speed (old joke: if you and your friend are running away from a hungry lion, you don't need to run faster than the lion, you only need to run faster than your friend), close coordination with anti-pirate forces in the area, etc.

But the exciting part is what happens "in the unlikely event of an attempted boarding, or even if we are suspicious of a vessel". Then they will signal us, and we are to "move out of your staterooms... and stay in corridors or interior spaces... stay away from windows and doors... sit down, as any maneuver... may result in heeling of the ship, as we will be moving at high speed. " Wow! In prospect, it seems like a great adventure. In actuality, I suspect it would be much less fun than that. But it is good to know that (a) the ship's staff is prepared, and (b) they won't try to fob our concerns off with the cruise line equivalent of "Don't you worry your pretty little head about such things."

*All evening, I have had running through my head the phrase "... more than Oriental splendor." I think it's from one of Rudyard Kipling's Just So stories, but that's as close as I can come to pinning down the source. If you know where it's from, please comment or send me email to rmtaussig@gmail.com.

Pirates #1

We're in the Straits of Malacca, a narrow passage between the Indonesian island of Sumatra to the south and Malaysia to the north. This used to be prime pirate territory because all shipping between India and China had to pass through here or take a much longer route around the other side of Sumatra.

One of the housekeeping crew is from northern Sumatra. I asked him whether there are still pirates, and he reassured me. "There were pirates until recently when Indonesia and Malaysia got their navies coordinated to eliminate them. Don't worry, Roberta. Even if there are pirates, I will be here to protect you."

He's a big guy, so I imagine he'd be pretty good protection. Besides which, I can't remember the last time a man offered to protect me, and I am charmed.

Singapore

Barely a block off the ship, which is again docked at a shopping mall, I am sitting in a McDonalds so I can use their free wifi.

To my right sit two women in saris with red dots on their foreheads gossiping over cups of McCafe. Across from me is a Middle Eastern family whose father addressed one of his young sons as "Sadat" as he tried (and failed) to convince the child to sit in the yellow chair closer to the rest of the family instead of the green chair the youngster preferred. Eventually, showing international parenting skills, the father switched chairs so his toddler could have his green AND sit with the rest of the family. To my left, a possibly Chinese mother unwraps the plastic from the toys her three preschoolers got with their Happy Meals (TM). Beyond them is a Muslim woman in full head-to-toe gown.

I had planned to go out for a walk, maybe find a nice park, but having found this UN complete with free wifi, I am having trouble deciding to move on.

Awards for China trip

In no particular order and based entirely on my own eccentric preferences:

Most unexpected delight: the Wild Goose Pagoda in Xi'an. Having seen the terra cotta warriors the day before, the prospect of visiting a big old Buddhist temple was pretty much "ho hum I suppose they have to fill the second morning in Xi'an SOMEhow". But hearing the monks and worshippers chanting turned it into a peak experience. I remember the weather as bright sunshine and the gardens as green, though it was probably smoggy, and I'm deductively sure all the trees were grey with dust.

Favorite street vendor: As we struggled through the crowds at the Summer Palace (Beijing Day 2), we came on a man practicing calligraphy on the blocks of the sidewalk with a wet rag tied on the end of a broomstick. He would draw one elegant character after another, the water on the grey stones making black strokes as dark as ink. When he completed a character, he moved on, leaving his work behind to dry to invisibility or to be trampled and smeared by passersby. We stopped, fascinated. "Where you from?" he asked, then proceeded to draw characters for "USA", "Canada", and "Australia". Now that I think about it, I'm not even sure he was actually there to sell anything. He may just have started demanding money to write names so we would go away and let him get back to his calligraphy.

Favorite city: Beijing -- clean, lively, international feeling. Xi'an was too gritty, and we didn't actually see much of Guilin, which Arthur, our guide, described as a "small city" -- only two million people. I guess when you start with over a billion people in the national population, the scale shifts.

Favorite show: Legends of Kungfu. The Beijing Opera greatest hits was unquestionably the most authentically Chinese and had gorgeous costumes, but it only reinforced the sense of being in a really foreign foreign country. And the T'ang dynasty show was too transparently tourist fodder with music modulated to Western tonalities and costumes festooned with sequins and glitter that I suspect were not authentic to a thousand years ago. Legends of Kungfu had real kungfu moves done by half-naked, well-muscled young men and has been performed over 5000 times (though we got to see it in the Red Theater, its home court, with an audience that was mostly Chinese). Should it ever come to Portland, I'd happily pay to see it again.

Best food: I hate to say it, but I think it was dinner at T'ang Dynasty in Xi'an. They served us a somewhat China-fied version of a Western five-course meal, and I really liked their take on our cuisine. Which probably just means I have no breadth of taste, but hey! If you want to argue about it, set up your own awards.

Best hotel: Guilin Sheraton. The Beijing Sheraton and the Xi'an Hilton were newer and flashier, but the 15-year-old Guilin Sheraton felt comfortable and friendly and like I could sleep there without worrying about running into the sharp edges of its trendiness. Plus which the Beijing Sheraton had a glass enclosure around the toilet inside the bathroom. Why would anyone do that?

It's not just me!

I spent the past two days while the ship was docked in Vietnam feeling uncomfortable. Grumpy, heavy-hearted, guilty, unsettled. I didn't leave the ship except for a brief stroll on the dock at Nha Trang. It took almost that whole time for me to realize that I was reacting to being where the war happened decades ago. I thought I was succumbing to a spate of melodrama until I talked with other passengers.

Everyone -- especially men of my age, whether they had fought here or not -- reported the same feelings. The tours went to places we all knew and dreaded the memory of. One guide claimed to show the very last helicopter that took the last Americans off the hotel roof. Seems unlikely, but that didn't lessen the impact of the memory. It doesn't seem to matter whether one was for or against the war, now and here it is a heavy burden, recalling the photo of the Vietnamese official shooting a suspected Viet Cong in the head, another of a Vietnamese child running from tear gas or maybe Agent Orange, and the name "My Lai" resurfaces with deep shame and horror, perhaps primed by the recent slaughter of Afghani citizens by an American soldier reportedly on his fourth tour of combat duty.

We're now sailing slowly (only 11 knots when our typical speeds across the Pacific were more like 20) toward Singapore. We have another sea day tomorrow to finish being in Vietnam. No one seems to have found an effective exorcism for what that meant. I sent email to my priest asking for prayers.

China generally 3: crashes

1. Beijing Day 2: As we drove back from the Summer Palace to the hotel through evening rush hour, a car swerved toward our bus as we drove in the middle of three lanes. To avoid the collision, our driver tried to get into the outside lane, but the SUV in that lane decided not to yield the space, and the two vehicles collided side-to-side. Neither was moving very fast, and no one was hurt, but the SUV lost a mirror and the bus was scraped. Things proceeded just like they would at home -- insurance info exchanged, SUV passengers escorted to the sidewalk. The SUV driver wanted the cops called to make sure the official version made it the bus driver's fault. Beside his chair, our driver had hung a ceremonial Olympic gold medal, given to him for his excellent work driving athletes during the Beijing Olympics. He did not look happy at this blot on his record.

2. Xi'an Day 2: China Air was flying us from Xi'an to Guilin early in the evening. We were all dozing off for the hour and a half flight when Wham! The plane came in for an unusually hard landing. Consensus was that the pilot was lucky not to blow a tire. Most of us forgot it until...

3. Guilin Day 1: To alleviate the boredom of taking their boats loaded with tourists down the same stretch of river they traveled yesterday and the day before that and the day before that, the Li River boatmen jockey for position in the curving channels, playing a mild version of chicken. Our boat lost one round, banging against the side of the winner, forced out of the channel as the victor sailed triumphantly ahead.

At that point, the people on the Holland America excursion put our crash experiences together, assuring one another that crashes come in threes, that we had had our three, and that we were consequently safe for the rest of the voyage.

Guilin 1: Trip down the Li River

"I often sent pictures of the hills of Guilin which I painted to friends back home, but few believed what they saw. " -- Fan Chengda, Song dynasty scholar ; Song dynasty was 960-1279.

We have Richard Nixon to thank for our trip down the Li River. At the time of his second visit to China, after all the unpleasantness of Watergate and not having him to kick around any more, he returned to China as a tourist and asked his hosts for a ride down the Li, to see the scenery praised by Chinese artists and scholars for centuries. "We had to rent some fisherman's boat for him then," Arthur, our guide, said, looking back at the half-dozen fully loaded tour boats following us.

The scenery is otherworldly. I know of nothing else like it anywhere. The photos I took utterly fail to capture its beauty. If you want to see other people's equally inadequate attempts, go to Google / images / Li River. It's not just the individual rock formations rising around the river behind the bamboo groves on the banks, it's mile after mile of them, towering like huge limestone fingers, grey and beige and brown and red and black rock beneath green shrubs, each unlike all the others, each and all so unbelievable that the mind simply gives up trying to make sense of them and surrenders to a sense of wonder and delight and repose as more and more come into sight around each bend.

People actually live here, poling rafts made of three or four bamboo poles or PVC pipes to fish with cormorants or to peddle fruits and vegetables to passing tourist boats. Talk about minimalist watercraft!

The standard trip takes anywhere from two to four hours, depending on how the river is running. Mercifully, the spectacle runs out before the trip ends or the tour operators might have to pry their customers away from the boat railing as they beg for "please, just a few more minutes". There are the inevitable souvenir stands (see earlier post on the "hello" people), and I bought a "silk" scarf and a "pashmina" shawl because I found them beautiful. We paid 15 yuan each to ride golf carts the half-mile to bus to take us to the airport and back to the Amsterdam in Hong Kong. Our China excursion was complete.

Phu My, Vietnam

We are docked for the day at Phu My, Vietnam, in the Mekong River delta downstream from Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. To our port side is the river, broad, muddy, flowing seaward past a landscape that must make any residents of New Orleans feel right at home. To our starboard side is a large and completely empty storage space for containers, looking very peculiar with its container-sized spaces delineated by slightly raised sidewalk slabs and its forlorn container-moving equipment stranded with nothing to move. Beyond it is some major electricity-generation facility with transmission lines radiating out into the smoky distance. I have no clue as to why the lot is so empty, and the person I can ask won't be at her desk until later. I will probably stay onboard and inside, since it's (a) hot and (b) humid and (c) smoky outside, plus which I'm having another "what am I doing on this stupid ship anyway?" day. I think I will spend the day pouting and writing stuff like this reaction against the PR we get for every single port we stop at:

"This hellhole has nothing whatsoever to recommend it. Full of pickpockets and muggers, its markets offer overpriced, plastic trash and bubonic-laden, tasteless garbage hawked by ugly, hostile vendors with open, running sores on both hands. Guerrilla warfare attacks are common, and current political theory here blames all the country's problems on western tourists. If you could see the scenery through the smog, you would wish you hadn't. My advice is not only to stay on the ship, but to remain inside and to stay away from the windows."

There. I feel a bit better.

China generally: 2

For the first time, in China I didn't feel like the king of the world.

Everywhere else, not just on this trip, but on my trips to Russia and in the countries I passed through to get there, being an American felt like being a Roman must have felt like 2000 years ago. Not that other people didn't feel proud of their countries, but we all knew who was The Big Cheese.

Not in China. In China we were a side show at best, the barbarians visiting the true center of the universe, where history is counted in millennia, not centuries, and citizens are counted by the hundreds of millions. Vendors saw us as rubes, giggly teen-aged girls took pictures of one another with us as if we were trained monkeys, and we became invisible among the crowds of Chinese people looking at what was, after all, their culture and history, not ours. Arthur, our guide, taught us the characters for "Middle Kingdom", what the Chinese write as the name of their country, and we pointed them out to one another on signs like illiterates proudly recognizing an 'A' or an 'M'.

As thrilling as it was to stand on the Great Wall; as beautiful as the Li River landscapes were; I suspect that the direct encounter with that alternative view of the universe may be the experience of China that lasts longest in my memory.

Xi'an 1: Terra cotta warriors

This is a lesson in how small aches can block out major experiences.

We went to the site where thousands of years ago a Chinese emperor buried 8000 terra cotta replicas of his best warriors to guard him in the afterlife. This was an amazing feat, not least because the custom until then was for the emperor to bury the actual warriors with their horses and weapons, sometimes alive.

Knowledge of this cultural and artistic treasure was lost in the intervening millennia until 1974, when a farmer, digging a well, found a lot of pottery shards. As it turned out, he had dug into one corner of an acres-big archaeological site. If he had dug 10 feet north, he would have found nothing. Instead, the state now pays him a generous salary to sit in the Terra Cotta Warriors museum and sign guide books for tourists.

The site is superbly set up to allow tourists to look on at the three active pits as more shards are carefully extracted and reassembled into lifesized replicas of individual warriors who lived before the time of Christ. There's a museum and a wrap-around movie offering background information and a relatively civilized number of souvenir stands staffed by relatively restrained vendors. And because our guide Lynn did translations for the museum, we got to drive our bus right up next to the museum instead of having to hike half a mile from the public parking area.

But my feet hurt from the hikes in Beijing. My knees were stiff. I limped around the first pit, and then I got disconnected from our group. I sat in the public square and people-watched for a while, bought a few terra cotta warriors refrigerator magnets, tried with limited success to use the non-Western toilet facilities, then crept back to the bus and just waited for it to be over.

Most of the people on the tour rate the warriors as a high point. I envy their experience.

China generally: 1 -- The "Hello" people

Street vendors met us at every stop with watches and souvenirs and postcards to sell. They had just enough English to engage a customer -- "Hello", "Rolex" (often pronounced "Lolex", though one vendor conscientiously rolled the 'r' as if he were momentarily Spanish), a wide variety of number words, and, of course, "dollah", though the yuan (6.25 yuan to the US dollar) was preferred. "Yuan" is pronounced pretty much like "UN", which is close to "US", so there was often confusion over which currency was being discussed.

For those vendors without the number vocabulary, price negotiations were carried out on paper -- the vendor scribbles an opening price, the customer scribbles a counter-offer, the vendor looks outraged and counters the counter, and so forth ad infinitum or until an agreement is reached.

Making eye contact with a street vendor or responding with more than a brusque "No!" was a guarantee of being harangued for at least a block with lower prices and additional merchandise. One tour passenger who stayed haggling for so long that he held up the bus as we left the kungfu show (Beijing Day 2) eventually climbed on board with seven "Rolexes" he got for $10. (The tourist was out $10 for watches he didn't want, but he felt triumphant because the vendor had started out asking $20 for one watch. The vendor probably felt triumphant because the watches had cost him something like 25 cents apiece.)

Chinese street vendors are distinctly tougher than those I've met in other countries, and more adept at using the prevailing emotional tone to make a sale. You want to laugh at him? Fine, he'll laugh right along with you, haggling all the while, playing the clown without missing a beat. Are you admiring a particular "100% silk" scarf? (One fellow passenger actually seemed to believe that labels on scarves in street stalls meant what they said.) The vendor will pull out three more in the same color palette, plus some "100% pashmina" shawls to match, generating new deals, rejecting counter-offers, and assuring you that the items are all "very beautiful for you" as she goes.

If we get into a trade war with China, only patriotism will allow me to hope we can win.

China orientation

It occurs to me that it may be confusing as I post about China in random order. So I am going to establish a Roberta in China code system based on the days I was there.

Beijing 1: visit to Tiananmen Square and Forbidden City, performance of Beijing Opera greatest hits

Beijing 2: Great Wall, Summer Palace, Legends of Kungfu

Xi'an 1: Terra cotta warriors, T'ang dynasty show

Xi'an 2: Wild Goose Pagoda, Xi'an city wall

Guilin 1: cruise down Li River

In future, I will try to remember to label entries with their day, if they have one. The entries so far are "Direct from the Great Wall", obviously Beijing 2; "Slow blog from China", written at the beginning of Xi'an 1 before we left Beijing; and "Xian city wall", on Xi'an 2 before I learned how to spell Xi'an.

Hong Kong harbor

A correction to my last post: we are docked at a Kowloon mall. Hong Kong is across the harbor and presents a terrifying metropolitan facade of glass-sided skyscrapers, many with gigantic animated corporate logos atop them. Some are tall enough that their upper floors disappear in the clouds.

Meanwhile, below, on the water, the green and white Kowloon-Hong Kong ferries take people back and forth. The Kowloon terminal is just past the end of the mall where we're docked, and I figured that I almost have enough energy to take a ferry ride and will never have the opportunity again. I hiked through the mall, past the glittering seductions of the Gucci and Adidas and jewelry and children's clothing stores, out briefly onto the street, and into the ferry terminal.

I stood, puzzled. I had $4 US in my pocket. The token machine instructions were almost completely in Chinese, and I couldn't figure out how much the fare was in Hong Kong dollars, which are 7.75 to 1 HK to US, plus there was no one to whom I could offer my greenbacks. A Chinese man in some kind of official blazer took pity on me.

"Are you a senior?" he asked me.

"Yes," I replied.

"Seniors ride free," he said, pointing me to the appropriate gateway, and I was off.

The ride itself was anticlimactic. We passed a tug pushing a barge loaded with cement mixers eastward. We passed a pretend sampan full of tourists motoring around the harbor. We passed another tug pushing another barge full of cement mixers westward. I'm pretty sure it was another barge. Other green and white ferries chugged off to our right (left coming back), garishly painted harbor tour boats motored past on our left (right coming back), black helicopters racheted across the sky, probably taking executives to boardrooms or government officials to top secret conclaves. It didn't have the feeling of happy anarchy that Sydney Harbour had, but there are probably fewer private boats, plus which Hong Kong feels more commercially purposive than Sydney did, judging on no substantive basis whatsoever.

My fellow ferry passengers ignored it all, engrossed in their own lives because they weren't Riding The Ferry Across Hong Kong Harbor, they were just going shopping or out on lunch break or meeting a friend for coffee. Being on a world cruise tends to capitalize even one's anticlimactic experiences.

Docked at a mall

I am back on board the Amsterdam. We arrived last night, and the bus from the airport dropped us off right between the ship and the back door to a Hong Kong mall, to which the ship's exit gangway connected at the second floor. So we trudged through a maintenance hallway to emerge facing a KFC and a Gap. We caught the up escalator past the Toys 'R Us, and walked onto the ship.

I have roughly a gazillion things I want to write about China, but they should turn into five or six entries before I begin to forget or have new adventures to report. On the other hand, China will be my only immersion experience, so there may be "And another thing about China" entries for the foreseeable future.

Xian city wall

I am sitting atop the 700 year old wall built to protect the city of Xi'an, which, at the time, was called Chang An and was the capitol of China during the T'ang dynasty, which, our Xi'an guide assures us, was the golden age of China, during which the country was at the height of its cultural richness and creativity.

Well, who am I to contradict the woman who translated for Bill Clinton when he visited Xi'an in the 1990s?

Today Xi'an, several hundred miles west of Beijing, is a gritty industrial city with air laden by effluent from coal-burning factories and dust brought in by prevailing westerlies from the Gobi Desert. Our good weather karma has come through again somewhat, and I'm sitting in T-shirt and jeans enjoying the sun on my back and able to believe that the sky above me could in some sense be described as blue.

We came here mostly because the terra cotta warriors were found a few miles outside town. We went to see them yesterday. It really seems like I should have more to say than that, but, at the moment, at least, I don't.

Walking along the city wall is apparently considered a pleasant thing to do on a Saturday afternoon -- lots of citizens up here enjoying the sunshine. Restful music is being broadcast over the PA. It was very Chinese sounding when I started writing this, but now it's more like Kenny G. I guess it really is a global culture. God help us.

You can rent bicycles or golf carts up here if you want to travel the whole 13.5 kilometers of wall. The top of the wall is about as wide as a two-lane highway, has yard-high walls along both sides, and is fairly smoothly "paved" with big bricks. A teenaged boy and his girlfriend just rode by on a bicycle built for two. And the music has gone to a twangy Chinese stringed instrument backed by easy-listening violins.

In a courtyard below where I'm sitting is the bronze sculpture of an oversized group of five musicians in court robes playing instruments from a long time ago. I would guess T'ang dynasty, but that's just because folks around here seem really into T'ang dynasty. Occasionally passersby on the street stop to look at the statues, and then move on. For civic statuary in a gritty inland municipality, I think that's doing pretty good.

Slow blog from China

We are quite tightly scheduled on this tour, and I am finding it impossible to find time to blog. You got the Great Wall entry because some of my fellow travelers (hi, Doug!) actually climbed the hill, leaving rare spare time for the rest of us to Not Do Something for a change. There will be an avalanche of China posts when I get back to the ship, but until then, it will be sparse. I think I can get the picture of me at the Wall attached to this post, being written en route to the airport and our move to Xian to see the terra cotta warriors. And maybe Beijing airport has free wifi and we'll be stationary long enough for me to post it.

Just for the record, I would have been twice as happy with half the stops and time to think about them. But I'm very much in the minority about that. I said something about it as I rode with a

Direct from the Great Wall!

I am sitting in the bus, having stood on the Great Wall of China! Damn! That is one awe-inspiring entity. Even given the hype. We are at Ju Yong Pass in some very rugged mountains about an hour outside Beijing. The Wall extends very steeply on both sides of the highway -- VERY steeply -- with stairs built centuries ago without concern for aging knees and hips. I climbed just far enough to know I was standing on the actual Great Wall, stood and rubber necked for a few minutes, then climbed cautiously back down. It's cold but clear and not too windy -- the guide said the usual winds would blow right through us. But as it is, the banners are floating over the crowds climbing heroicly toward the local summit, where they give you an official certificate of heroism.

I came away with a hat and gloves I bought from a street vendor on the way in. I believe I said "no" to the first three prices he offered before buying. Someone else got him down two more decreases as we walked along, but the he hat says "Great Wall" and kept my head warm -- seems like a bargain to me.

People are returning to the bus now, showing off their purchases, much more interested in acquisitions than in Chinese history. A million people spent 30 years linking small segments into the Great Wall stretching 5000 kilometers from the Pacific Ocean to the Gobi Desert in the 15th century. The guide calls it a great accomplishment by the Emperor, the third of the Ming dynasty, who probably didn't lay a single stone. I am having a lot of trouble with that.

Indonesia miscellaneous

1. Where I'm used to seeing rebar in second story construction, here they use bamboo, lots of bamboo. Odd to see a brick walls going up atop a forest of bamboo supports.
2. Though one does see women with Islamic headscarves and coverings, the guide at the one multi-faith temple we visited told us things that make Indonesian Islam sound very unlike Saudi Arabian Islam. Only three daily prayers instead of five, for example, and abbreviated Ramadan, with fasting for three days at the start of the month, three more in the middle, and three more at the end. There are lots of mosques, which are noticeable in the chaos of urban Indonesia for their cleanliness -- gleaming tile work within and without, floor to ceiling windows showing bare floors divided by a curtain to separate men and women worshippers -- and beauty.
3. The concept of zoning is not part of Indonesian urban planning. Well, OK, urban planning is not real prominent either. Stores next to houses next to rice fields next to schools next to buildings that could be any of the above, all surrounded by riotously lush vegetation with black and gold and grey chickens running in and out as the motorbikes chug past the horse-drawn taxis, only nominally staying correctly in the left lane. Everything here seems to be under construction or in the process of collapsing, and often both.
4. The Indonesian term for bribery translates as "cigarette money". It has come up in the guide's narratives with regard to getting a driver's license and being exempted from school fees.
5. Swallows swoop and flit and dive in Indonesia exactly the same way they do in Oregon.
6. As our air-conditioned bus drove us to the Mataram airport, we passed several fields where people in coolie hats were harvesting rice in the heat of the day. It's stoop labor to cut the stalks, then someone has to beat the stalks against a slanted board to free the grains, which pile up in the dirt in front of the board. The stalks are gathered and burned to provide fertilizers for the next crop.
7. The Mataram airport has prayer rooms.
8. Indonesian school children wear uniforms, and the combination of their neatness with the brilliance of their youthful energy in the anarchy of Indonesian street life is intoxicating and inspiring.
9. There's competition among the islands of Indonesia. The guide at the multi-faith temple made sure we knew he was from Bali (the next major island west) and was only working in Lombok because there are no jobs in Bali at the moment. Contrary-wise, the guide on our bus told us Lombok was a better island to tour than Bali because Bali is all commercialized and pre-packaged, while Lombok is still fresh and real. There's a tribal aspect to it as well, with Balinese looking down their noses at the Sasak who are the original occupants of Lombok.
10. It is very disorienting to be in a place where I am guaranteed to be unable to understand the street signs. And in Indonesia, at least they use the same alphabet we do. Tomorrow, China!