VIETNAM THE jump from Macau to Vietnam was a short one: 1,5 hour plane-ride with the only service, a can of coke or other soft drink for a handful of Dollars, or a cup of Nescafe coffee for another handful of Dollars in a styrofoam cup. Arriving in Ho Chi Minh city, previously Saigon is a pleasant revelation: a large modern terminal with a number of ATM’s and a welcome with an excellent map of the city, the country and other places. We are a distance from the city center, I don’t see busses, but a guy with a car, [View Full Entry]

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About Tibet, Buddhism and kind people Arrived in Chengdu on 10th of June. The next couple of days I spent finding my feet in town, walking long distances to the Carre-four shopping centre and looking at all the nice things in bakeries etc. I then booked a tour to the biggest Buddha in the world, which I visited with an American couple. A lot of climbing because a path leads up to the top, and apart from that, the statue or shrine is part of a much larger park where other interesting things are to be seen. But at first you [View Full Entry]

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Hallo there! There is a large chunk of information I out of my bog at this moment, that’s the things we saw and did before we left the car. In all honestly I must confess that I don’t recall most of it without a map and without the pictures I took, which stayed behind when I left my computer in the car. I deemed the computer too heavy to carry along, based on my previous experience a year ago. What I’m writing about Laos leaves out all the glitz and splendor Ann has related in her latest website addition under the [View Full Entry]

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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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