If you see a purple taxi, you must be in Bangkok. No-where in the world have I seen a variety of colorful taxis like in Bangkok, the capital of Thailand. Mostly Toyota’s Corolla, the color varies from bright orange to red, dark pink and dusty pink, dark blue or light blue, green-and-yellow or any combination thereof. There must be thousands of them, like in most big cities we visited, but in Bangkok they color the town in bright, gay colors. And Bangkok is big. Seemingly bigger than Cairo for instance where supposedly 18 to 20 million people live. The traffic [View Full Entry]

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From Kashgar we planned to take a normal line-bus, as opposed to local taxis, to Sust, over the border in Pakistan. This was going to taker two days and therefore we were not entirely surprised to find that the bus we were to board was a sleeper bus. We had been in the same hotel for a few days, hotel Seman in Kashgar as when we came into China and this time we noticed the difference between a “minority town” and the rest of China. This Uygar town is not as organized as the towns more to the East, is [View Full Entry]

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In Kunming, after the operation with was, in hindsight, successful, I was kept in the Nr 1 Peoples Hospital for three days for observation, mostly on a drip and with a batch of pills periodically. On the second day I was allowed to walk in the passage and on the third day, a Saturday, I was discharged. Ann took care of the finances which amounted to R30.000 or 3000 Euro and that included a batch of pills for one month. We went back to the youth hostel where Ann prepared to go, for a few days, to the Tiger Leaping [View Full Entry]

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Kunming again Pulled back from the brink. Many years ago, in South Africa when I was still jogging regularly, I experienced some chest pain every now and again. The doctor I consulted suggested I should visit a friend of his, a specialist heart surgeon. I assume X-rays were taken although I can’t remember that and on the strength of what I told him, it was decided to widen a narrow coronary artery with the help of a “balloon”. After I had undergone the operation no change was experienced and I developed a suspicion that the “operation” had been just [View Full Entry]

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Blog Kunming We are in Kunming, a town in the South West of China. We are in a Chinese Youth hostel called “the Hump” where a large wall is decorated with pictures concerning the epic effort by American Pilots to fly supplies in for the allied forces in China who were engaged in the repulsion of the Japanese forces who had invaded Burma. The year was 1942 and just a week ago I read an article in the e-edition of the New York Times that finally, after so many years, an effort was to be made to recover the remains of [View Full Entry]

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July 1, 2008 A pretty long time has lapsed since my last entry. I did get back to Beijing, spent a few days in Qingdao on the coast where I found the youth hostels (2) not all that welcoming and traveled back again to Beijing when I learned that Ann was about to enter China. But here travel plans made it difficult for me to stay and wait for her, so back to the railway station, this time with a ticket to Shanghai. Here I found the Hiker Hostel, near the Bund and close to bus- and metro stations. It’s warm [View Full Entry]

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Blog May 28 28/5 There is a lot of flag-waving on TV at the moment. I’m watching events around the preparations for the Olympic games, the rescue of victims of the earthquake and a series of documentaries revolving around the epic struggle of the red army to defeat the forces of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang in 1948 and -49. Also the invasion by Japanese forces in the 1930’s gets attention. The filming is monumental with battle scenes involving thousands of stand-ins and period battle equipment that puts films like “the longest day” and Spielberg’s &l [View Full Entry]

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Blog May 23, 2008 After having reported my experience in the bath which proved to be the result of an earthquake, it has since then grown into a national disaster, easily overshadowing the preparations for the Olympic Games To give an idea about the magnitude of it, here follow a few statistics of the catastrophe: 42.000 dead and 32.000 missing, over 200.000 people injured and close to a million people left homeless. A whole town has to be written off, with 80% of the buildings destroyed and the rest unsafe to live in. 400 bridges collapsed and 28.000 km of roads [View Full Entry]

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May 1, 2008 According to the information in the “Lonely Planet” on China, the border with Pakistan opens on the 15th of April, sometimes later. This year the border opened on the 1st of May and I made sure to be one of the first to cross it. A few days earlier I drove the camper up from Gilgit to Sust and witnessed the first sign of awakening spring and receding winter. It wasn’t cold and I parked the car at the PTDC hotel. Hakeem was there to help me further, but I had four days to do something useful: [View Full Entry]

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Seagulls and bare midriffs. I’ve made many mistakes in my life. The latest one was based on the assumption that the weather in Holland and England would be mild since the temperature was going up in Pakistan. That proved to be a wrong assumption. When in September 2006 we started our trip towards the East in the revamped Land Rover, we left behind our “European” camper, the Renault master we had bought the year before. It was a good car although underpowered with too little ground clearance to risk roads in underdeveloped countries. We left it in a garage in Holland [View Full Entry]

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