Blogs from Asia - page 15623

Luckily the morning was clear, the sky was blue and the Annapurna was there for all to see. The jeep from the flight centre came to pick me up on time and we promptly got going. John, the Nepalese driver was also my instructor for both flights, he explained that because it was the low season they were normally close, he was just there to test the equipment and make sure it wasn’t rotting. Because of my pretty dark eyes (and my pretty green dollars) he would specially reopen for me today. I expressed my gratitude, he looked a bit embarrassed and finally told me that because he was close he had no license, so should anything happen I would not be covered by any insurance whatsoever. I pondered and decided to go for it anyway, ... read more

The first month of many in Paradise! ... read more

From Xiamen, I took a 26-hour train ride to Guanzhou, the capital city of the Guandong Province and one of the five centers of the Pearl Delta (others being Hong Kong, Macau, Shenzhen, and Zhuhai). This is the ancestral province of the people from Hong Kong and the home of Cantonese. While I do not consider myself Cantonese (far from it), my great-grandmother is from this province. I shared a sleeper compartment with a family with two girls. How they managed to have two kids in the one-child policy is beyond my understanding. I thought only rich people could afford to pay the penalty associated with having extra children, and here they were sharing the cheap hard-bed compartment with me. I suppose I had a lot of time to ponder this question, given the girls were ... read more

Picking up the pieces from last night we're quite happy to return to Nukus. We load up the car but before leaving we head downtown to the local Aral Sea museum, since the caretakers have opened it especially for us. It is a small hall with various regional memorabilia, paintings of fishermen, models of fishing vessels made by school children, photographs from the old canning factories, stuffed animals from the region and so on. Paging through a binder with old photographs I suddenly come across a photograph that captures my interest. It depicts some ships and a special tractor with a crane that I recognize from one of the photos I originally found on the Internet months ago. On this photo the tractor can be seen with around ten grounded vessel in the desert and I ... read more

Another update from the school computer, but I think I will be getting a laptop sometime this week. Crossing my fingers at least. Daphne said she will take me. Yesterday I worked for three hours in the morning at the JAC, then I came back to the school and went for lunch with Duncan at Jenny's cafe, which is a Western food cafe that doesn't have the greatest food but is at least familiar. I had fettucini alfredo and a vanilla milkshake, both slightly on the expensive side in chinese standards, but worth it for a taste of home. I am getting the worst cravings here for Western food, worse than the ones I get at home. All I wanted the other night was grapes!! After lunch we went to the U-mart, which is a Western ... read more