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!

Slawi Bay

We're anchored in Slawi Bay off Komodo Island. I am not going ashore to see the dragons, so all I can report on is this first touch of Indonesia, island after island after island, green slopes rising steeply from the ocean, trees outlined on the summits, occasional cliffs, occasional beaches, a poky little ferry putt-putting by, probably connecting this island with others nearby. Humidity, air temperature, water temperature all in the low 80s, though it feels more humid than that to me.

Many Indonesian crew members are on deck phoning home. I passed Yudith, who told me she was calling her husband. She says he lives too far away for them to see each other as the ship passes through. I told her to tell him "Hi" from me, which, now that I think about it, was a fairly weird thing to say, but she smiled with the tolerance the crew must develop toward eccentric passengers, and went back to her call.

Tomorrow 29 of us leave the ship for a six-day "overland adventure" in China. I feel uncharacteristically well prepared, probably because I have no idea what I'm getting into. I won't have Channel 40 to give me geographic and meteorological information, and the days look fairly tightly scheduled, but I will post as the opportunity permits, certainly at length once we get back on board. We spend tomorrow getting to Beijing, arriving the next morning after an overnight flight from Singapore, which we reach from the international airport at Denpasar, which we reach via a 25 minute flight in a Fokker* F27 from Mataram, to which we drive in a (hopefully) air-conditioned bus from Lembar, which we reach via tenders from where the ship docks tomorrow. There are miscellaneous visits to a temple, a market, and a museum in Lembar early in the day, but everyone will be thinking "China", so the Indonesian locations won't get the attention they probably deserve. Plus which everyone will be dressed for China, where it's still winter, making us very overdressed for equatorial Indonesia.

*Besides sounding funny, this plane name makes me think of World War Two fighter planes. I am having visions of a single-prop craft with smoke billowing from the engine as it warms up for take-off. Well, as the guide said repeatedly during the pre-briefing yesterday, "Just remember to think of it as an adventure."

I know these people!

It's 10am, and as is usual for me on a sea day, I'm sprawled on a deck chair on the 3rd deck looking out at the ocean. People stride by me doing their daily walk around the ship (3.5 circuits equals a mile), and I realize to my delight that I know many of the people walking past me.

Not "know" as in "can put names and histories to", but know as in "have some specific knowledge about that differentiates this person from the other 999 passengers on this trip."

The woman in turquoise Bermuda shorts who strides along so purposefully, for instance: yesterday afternoon as I waited for the daily Bingo game to begin, she and her husband were finishing up the ballroom dancing class in mambo. I remember her because she was clearly having such a great time with it, dancing with her whole body, a satisfied, energetic smile on her face.

And this Japanese man in shorts and a grayish T-shirt: he was part of a group I had lunch with a couple weeks ago. Whoever introduced us laughed about always getting his name wrong, so now I'm not sure whether his name is Terry and she always calls him Mike, or his name is Mike and she always calls him Terry. He has a shy look, as if he would be too polite to correct her either way.

And this long-legged man with the intelligent, academic face: he and his wife are birders and helped confirm that the flocks of flying things at sunset in Cairns were fruit bats, not crows.

What has it been, just about two months. We're officially halfway done, more than 20,000 miles behind us and less than that to go. In half an hour, I get my pre-briefing for the six-day China overland that starts day after tomorrow. The sea is very calm, I almost won't need my sea-legs when I stand up to go to it.

Couple walks by talking in Dutch, followed by two Japanese guys in black who are somehow kind of scary -- maybe it's the expensive dark glasses and precise haircuts. They will probably turn out to be botanists on board to give lectures on the flora of Indonesia.

I gotta get to the pre-briefing.

How to find me

My friend Pat Moore, who is covering my TIP dispatch shifts while I'm away, asked whether there's any way to follow the Amsterdam. Turns out there is. Go to www.sailwx.info/shiptrack/shipposition.phtml?call=PBAD. It will show you a map of where we are at specific times of day, probably in GMT. I didn't get a chance to do much exploring of the site, but where it shows on the website is pretty much where it shows on Channel 40, which reports our position, course, speed, ship's time (for one stretch coming across the Pacific, we set clocks back an hour five nights in a row to get from Easter Island, which keeps Chilean time, to Tahiti, so that's not as dumb as it may seem), current weather, and a series of maps of various resolutions showing planned and actual course.

But I babble. Try that website to figure out where I am.

Reef pilots

Some place south of Cairns we took on board two reef pilots to guide us through the intricate lanes of the Great Barrier Reef. They were having lunch at the same time I was yesterday , and when one walked by, my lunch companion asked about the insignia on his shirt, which looked official, but not crisp, Dutch Holland America official.

For that matter, he himself didn't look very Holland America. He was kind of scruffy in a benign way, bearded, with the rolling gait of a sailor and a breezy confidence that recalled Paul Hogan ("Crocodile Dundee") or Steve Irwin, the late crocodile hunter.

"That's insignia's for reef pilots," he said with a warm smile, leaning just a tad too close to my friend, who blushed. "We're helping your captain get your ship through the reef." I don't think he actually said, "Darlin'", but it was clearly implied.

He and his partner -- we figured they needed two to cover 24 hours of continuous sailing through reefs that could tear the ship apart -- have just disembarked the ship, clambering out a doorway low on the side of the Amsterdam onto a little boat that would carry them to a big container ship outlined against the rain a couple miles south of us. They scrambled across the deck of the small boat, gave us a jaunty wave goodbye, and turned to their next assignment.

I have no idea where the little boat came from. It had been over an hour since we had seen land, and even then it was an island so small it seemed insufficient to support a palm tree, let alone a government agency.

Bereft of the guidance of the reef pilots, we sailed onward from the Coral Sea into the Arafura Sea, whose name was completely unknown to me before today, but whose complexities apparently are sufficiently under control with charts and electronic navigation equipment. If you want to see where we are, just look north of Australia. We're south and just west of Papua New Guinea, 10 degrees 43 minutes South and 139 degrees 17 minutes East.