EUROPE, RUSSIA, AND CHINA 1 of 5
JULY 6-SEPTEMBER 3,1981
MON,JUL.6: Fly Laker Airlines, leaving JFK Airport at 7:30PM.
TUES,JUL.7: Land in Gatwick Airport at 7:10AM. Britrail Pass started with hour train-ride picking up typical British commuters between Gatwick Airport and Victoria Station. Lots of dirty backpackers speaking ugly German. Check large suitcase at Grosvenor Victoria Hotel, and pack everything into small shoulder bag for my "preview" week in Scotland. Take the Underground to Kings Cross Station for train to Edinburgh, having sole for lunch with wine for ten pounds, about $20, sitting across from a judge who talks of his travels around the world and fills me in on local history as we pass it. Wander Edinburgh streets and find the Nelson Hotel, out to take a distant photograph of Queen Elizabeth visiting Edinburgh, tour the Royal Academy for awful local art, have a Mixed Grill and red wine for $16, and have a few drinks in the hotel bar, talking with interestingly-accented locals.
WED,JUL.8: Brunch at "The Laughing Duck" with someone from the bar, walk up Stable Road and North Wynd Street to Edinburgh Castle, particularly impressed with the Scottish War Memorial, see Scotland's crown and regalia which they tout as the oldest complete set in Europe, and enjoy the sun and wind and clouds in a day said to be one of the most beautiful of the year. Impressive Delacroix and questionable Vermeer in the National Gallery, and then climb the Scott Memorial to take fabulous slides over the flower-covered city. Check tomorrow's trains and dine at Bernard's Restaurant Francais around the corner from the hotel. More bar-talk.
THU,JUL.9; Tea-water bubbling into my cup as the alarm rings at 5:30AM, all automatically done in the room, and the Waverly Station is dreary so early. Pass lots of building-windows that were blocked up to reduce their LIGHT Tax! Rabbits running from train; TREES of Queen Anne's Lace. Huge arrays of wild-flowers everywhere. Train fills with exhaust fumes in Glasgow station. Eat instant oxtail soup and pork pie in buffet (pronounced "boofe") car for $2.25. Pass hotel-resort towns and brick-arch rail bridges. Lunch in the Inverness Station and train to Forres and tax to Findhorn, which is a disappointment: no organization, no plans, no enormous vegetables, though most of the people there seem happy enough. Cool and rainy, even in July. Driven back to Forres and the next train returns to Inverness, so I return to find a bed-and-breakfast hotel for an expensive $14 (most go for $10) and cross the river for the Castle and the Piper at 7:30, and have the most delicious Soo Chen Duck at a Chinese restaurant named "Dickens"!
FRI,JUL.10: In drizzle to station, through countryside somewhat less breathtaking than Ohio, though there are three deer and more rabbits. Marsh birds and sea birds and land birds all intermingled. Find I must take a ferry from Kyle to Kyleakin, then a bus to Armadale across the bottom of the Isle of Skye, and the strait is filled with huge (8-10") jellyfish. Scotch pie quite fatty for lunch. Skye is barren and empty and almost treeless. Ferry across to Mallaig, train to Fort William, and people are SWIMMING (I'm in two sweaters) in Airsaig! Crags lovely between Lochailert and Glenfinnan. Monisee Gap as wild as northern Norway. Bogs and forest-fire remains. Off train at 5 in Crainlerich and wander stream, meet tourists, have an ale in a local pub, and into the hotel to avoid the rain. Chat with Gilles LeGuen between Crainlerich and Oban; we decide to share a room to cut costs, have dinner together, tour the "Folly" of a model of the Coliseum above the town, and enjoy the hilly town, which reminds me of Mont St. Michel. Loud locals.
SAT,JUL.11: Hotel breakfast is one egg and lots of underdone bacon (the local style), dry oatcakes, and lots of tea. Down to the Caledonian-MacBrayne ferry to Craignure, COLD on the water, and the bus across to Fionhport on Mull; the one-lane (!) road passes spectacular hill-country scenery. Connections with the ferry are perfect, but the island of Iona is disappointing: the colony living there now occupies old buildings without regard to their original use, cutting them off from visitors, and the famous Abbey is a hodge-podge of styles and construction. Coffee shop offers a fabulous hot toasted ham and cheese for 65p (about $1.30). Lovely gardens on island, and the view over to Staffa (where Fingal's Cave is) makes me want to return sometime. Left my bag on the boat and was aghast when the Captain returned it saying "You sure left a lot of money in there." Ferry and bus back, seeing deer high on a hill, sheep and goats near road, and seals on the rocks. Lochs, waterfalls, clouds, and the greenest of green grasses. Just barely make train back to Glasgow at 9PM in heavy rain, so I check into the North British Hotel from the station and pay $34 for an enormous room with a good TV. "Hebridean soup" in the restaurant turns out to be Scotch broth, and all the sausages taste DOUGHY. They're out of rolls so I ask for toast and butter, and have to use a CUP for my wine before they'll bring a GLASS. Ugh! Ponelle's "La Clemenza di Tito" production on TV, just grand.
SUN,JUL.12: TV includes Gaelic, religion, education, computers, and weather ("rain at times in the east; rain in places in the west; clear now but rain later in the north; rain now but clear later in the south"). Computerized CEEFAX gives news (riots in England, though I've seen none; problems in Poland, where I'm going), sports, recipes, and Bible quotes. Bus to the University of Glasgow campus: walk to the Botanical Gardens, and then tour the Glasgow Museum: enormous, crowded, and well-stocked with French and Italian masterpieces. Bus to Glasgow Cathedral (sneaking in on the pretense I'm attending a service) and wander the monolithic tombstones on the hill above it. Eat (believe it or not, I've gotten so tired of English food) at Kentucky Fried Chicken. Pouring rain again, nothing in town, so I rest with TV.
MON,JUL.13: Peterhead kippers VERY bony for breakfast. Wait in Glasgow station until I have the wit to ask where the London trains leave from, and they leave from the Central Station. Just make it. Papers and windows FULL of congratulations for Charles and Di, hitching in just two weeks. Rather boring countryside, but lovely Glaswegians feed me and tell me about railroads and countryside sights. Two breakfasts waiting for me, in my $50 room, which I eat for dinner, and get to the Group Meeting at 7:30. Chris, the guide, is pleasant and knowing, but the group is hideous: old couples, but a surprising lot of single men, though I'm the third youngest of the 24. I remark to George Parras, my roommate, a pleasant-enough Filipino who'd moved to Australia and is a medical-aide instructor, youngest on the trip at 38, to "Fasten your seat belts, it's gonna be a rough train ride!" as some of the old couples start complaining ALREADY. And there wasn't enough wine, either. I wander down Victoria Street for a breath of air, admiring London's architecture (they're actually CLEANING Westminster Abbey!), buying stamps at an all-night Post Office, and wander through the Royal Enclave, feeling like I'm intruding on this area of palaces, Royal Guards, and no cars. Watch a Laurel and Hardy movie on TV (English TV FAR better than ours) until bedtime.
TUES,JUL.14: "Champagne" breakfast serves Asti Spumanti; I sit with Olga, French from Montreal, only woman traveling alone. She's witty, intelligent, and brutally frank and practical. My impression of the group climbs. Board Calais-bound train at 10, have awful lunch on ferry, cloudy crossing, though people swimming on the BROAD beaches off Calais. The UCLA tax lawyer-teacher talks drivel ALL the time. Board train to Paris, deluxe: Paris is all wrought-iron balconies! Into hotel, phone Jean-Jacques, and he picks me up at 8 for dinner at the Quai d'Orsay Restaurant for a HOT pleurotes and girolles (mushrooms) salad, tasty duck in raisins and apricots, and lovely gateau aux cassis frais. At 11 he says "something may happen" around Trocadero. It's their Independence Day and the fireworks over the Seine are blazingly successful. Takes about an hour to get back to the Sheraton in the tumultuous traffic.
WED,JUL.15: AM Paris tour passes firework-remnants all over. Up to Montmartre and I get out after Sacre-Couer to see the Train Exhibit that Jean-Jacques recommended: all about the Orient Express, the Trans-Siberian Express, and others. People-stare at an outdoor cafe at lunch, force them to open the stamp office to serve me, and wander through Montparnasse Cemetery. Treat Jean-Jacques to a mediocre dinner in the hotel with tour chits, then he drives to "La Dame aux Camellias" by the Belgian Ballet, amateurish.
THU,JUL.16: Skimpy breakfast at 5:30AM and we pass beautiful Trans-European Express cars to get to green-velvet-seated non-airconditioned anachronism for 13.5 hours. Complaints, stories, family photographs from group members. Mrs. Blum a harridan, Mr. Blum charming (he has to be to put up with her). Henin-Reese must be the strangest couple in the world: he a retired American Captain, she (EDITH) a mousy British-German pedant. Through Belgium with a delicious lunch on the train, into Germany talking to others in the group who have really TRAVELED: Paul went "Encounter Group" from Tierra del Fuego to north Brazil overland in 16 weeks and then 17 weeks overland from Capetown to Tangiers. Henin-Reese had to help build a raft to get their truck over a flooded river in Africa and she SAYS she stayed in the Buckingham Palace houseboat on Dal Lake in Srinagar, which is the one John and I stayed in, in 1971! West German wall around Berlin depressing. Hansjorg and Christel are waiting for me in the station! George will bring my bag in from the hall, so I take off to Le Bou Bou with them for a tasty Tomate: half pastis and half grenadine, and I find that Pfifferlinge German mushrooms are Girolle French mushrooms. They drive me around city, we chat, they return me to hotel.
FRI,JUL.17: Fabulous breakfast buffet in the Intercontinental, then city tour to Kaiser Wilhelm Church, Reichstag (very academic), and observation point over wall to bunker in which Hitler died. Egyptian Museum with the bust of Nefertiti that I've wanted to see is CLOSED on Friday! Wolf down buffet lunch to get to Berlin Zoo for quick look at pandas, then on bus at 2 for Checkpoint Charlie for a half-hour's rigamarole to get into East Berlin. Big and unimpressive Russia War Memorial, pleasant beer-garden rest stop, and mind-boggling Pergamon Museum, containing the ENTIRE facade of a Greek temple, reconstructions of Assyrian walls, and other revelations. Back to hotel for dinner, Hansjorg and Christel return to take me to a beer garden, where they introduce me to a lovely concoction of fruit, brandy, white wine, and champagne. To a canal, the Turkish area, and a park.
SAT,JUL.18: Breakfast at 6, on train at 7:15, drizzling as we cross to Poland at noon. Poland looks JUST like Ohio! Forests along track; watch a horse being trained to run in circus circles. Over Oder River on military bridges, no photos permitted. Group drinks, reads, and dozes. Crowds on Poznan platform. Thousands of white butterflies in fields. When it clears, people harvest grain, ride wagons, pick fruit, stack hay, drive bicycles. People living in old train cars; no one has a tan so there's not much sun so far. Warsaw at 6PM, raining again. Hotel Forum enormous and impersonal. STORM outside with lightning and thunder; very little food for dinner but GREAT fresh white asparagus. We're offered up to five times profit for black-market money exchanges, though they prefer $100 bills for compactness when they leave.
SUN,JUL.19: Group eats like starved peasants at breakfast, draining them of coffee and bread. Sweet, childlike Tadusz is guide to President's house: "Note how much it looks like your White House", Lazienski Park and memorial to Chopin, listening to Mass on radio. Cathedral packed, Town Square totally reconstructed; trees downed in storm last night, some streets flooded still. We were to stay two nights, but we leave at 1:30 today, probably because everyone fears war with Russia. Over featureless Bug River and into Russia, with armed soldiers standing guard on metal bridge saying MIR (Peace). Takes two hours to cross border, people laughing nervously when four of our group are led away for having "illegal books and magazines" like Time and Newsweek. They return, and we pass into Russian forests. Sleep uncomfortably on train first night, though compartment is roomy for two (designed for 4).
MON,JUL 20: Scenery is MIDDLE: farms neither poor nor rich, apartment blocks not elegant or rundown, but the paint is always the same: green a pale bluey-yellowy green, red a brown scabby color, blue watery and washed out. People walk around, through, and UNDER trains (many of them moving!) in all the Russian stations. Same pink weed-flowers as in Scotland and England and France and Germany. Good breakfast, at which Mrs. Blum asked who had two years of acrylic and I reminded her that I had a year of Russian so I knew the Cyrillic alphabet. In Moscow at 11, surprised by sexy jeans and tight Western clothing. Nadya's the guide with perfect English. I spend an active hour changing money and buying tickets, since the tour's cheap and not much is included for evenings' entertainments. Tour of city takes a while to start, since our Cosmos Hotel is new and high but WAY out of the center of things. Kremlin highly impressive; University weed-overgrown, but was pleased to see the same vista shown as the opening shot in the movie "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears." Dinner in hotel and taxi to Tchaikovsky Hall for the Bashkiri Folk Dancers, pleasant; and speak to charming Tiu from Estonia who introduces me to her group from the Cosmos and we return by Metro, as elegant and well-maintained as the publicity would have you believe.
TUES,JUL.21: Kremlin tour extraordinary: the Armory the repository of some of the most spectacular robes, crowns, jewels, icons, carriages, and gold and silver objects in the world. Christopher Lee asks me where I bought my guide book. Past the Tzar's Bell and Cannon and Congress Hall. Then after lunch back at the Cosmos Hotel, we're across the street to the Exhibition Park, looking at hall devoted to space, industry, computers, vegetables, fish, dams, and other industrial facets, then to the gardens in back where I'm surprised to see Russians enjoying themselves with what seems to be a great degree of freedom. Air is clear and warm; Moscow seems pleasant, not dictatorial. Good fish for dinner (caviar almost every appetizer) (ice cream always a hit for dessert) and get a cab to Congress Hall for an Uzbek opera "Buran." Melodramatic, spectacular, balletic, and almost Chinese in sound; it'd never be a hit in America, so I'm not surprised no one's ever heard it before.
WED,JUL.22: I leave tour (they always go so slow) and find the line's too long for Lenin's Tomb, so I wait for an hour to get inside the circus-box colors of St. Basil's, interested in how the guides point out the secular aspects of the church, while the tourists are interested in the religious aspects. GUM department store a triad of three-story glasshouses. In the Museum of History in Red Square the rooms on politics are empty, while those displaying culture and art are full. Lenin's Museum includes his Rolls-Royce, incredibly ironic. He's a GOD to them. Back to Cosmos Hotel and meet Dennis's friend Tania, then to the Tretyakov Gallery for mediocre Russian classical art with NO good tourists booklet: their "official" taste changes so capriciously they probably can't afford to keep reprinting books eliminating art they find "decadent." Eat fast and get cab to the Congress Hall for "Sleeping Beauty" in a "different" and not very good version.
THU,JUL.23: Cool today for a change. Bus driver goes out of his way to drop me at the Pushkin Gallery for the special Paris-Moscow Exhibit that's impossible for people without tickets to see, but my Intourist pass works miracles. They also have a GREAT classical collection and NO booklet on it. After lunch to Yaroslavl Railroad Station for the Trans-Siberian Railroad, platform jammed. Radio on train plays folksongs, car air-conditioned and carpeted: great since we'll be on it for four days running. Zagorsk has lovely golden onion-towers. Lovely changing clouds fill blue skies. I photograph the Volga, though I'm not supposed to, and no one stops me. German hotel-keeper in our group sells
discount Russian rubles. Meal on train not bad.
FRI,JUL.24: Strange dreams about riding on trains. 5:15AM through Kirov; George said it hailed heavily in the night. Days are hazy in morning and hot and clear in afternoons. Loads of flowers in Siberia in summer! But sadly there's lots of trash and papers and cans, too. 50-55 cars pass about every five minutes in trains: busy line. Theme-food on train is cucumbers, at every meal, in varying forms. Lots of milk products: buttermilk, yogurt, hot porridges. Fruit soup in a glass for dessert. As we cross the Kama River and stop at Perm, there are people swimming in all the rivers and ponds: hottest summer in Russia in 100 years. The fashion for men seems to be exercise pants after the recent Olympics. At 10PM there's still enough light for a clear photograph of the Europe-Asia obelisk at the border. First time overland into Asia. Meals skimpy; people drink lots.
SAT,JUL,25: Breakfast of bread, butter, cheese, vinegary cider, two eggs in their little frying pan, and milk making coffee cold. Someone stole an expensive radio and two bottles of wine from one of our group. If we stand at a window for photographs, we get sooty from the steam engines pulling the train, though usually the engines are sootless electric. Park-like scenery of forests and meadows and farmland. Industrial Omsk and helicopters. Cabbage soup and beef stroganoff. What had been swampy Taiga is now drained and productive hayfields near Tatarsk. Group-members have long chats about their lives to pass the time; there's so much going on I hardly have time to read and take notes; not boring at all. Novosibirsk enormous and currently closed to tourists; large tourist hotel going up.
SUN,JUL.26: Have a good sponge-bath to get rid of the grit, will welcome a shower. Thank goodness there's soap and toilet paper in supply, with all the tea we want to drink. Krasnoyarsk terminal bustling and dirty: flies on leftover noodles, on gray hunks of meat, on bottle tops. Queues in front of all the shops, as was true all over Moscow. Cucumbers in buttermilk come alive with lots of pepper. Extraordinary flowers. At Ilanskaya there are buckets of currants and strawberries and raspberries; they're clean, we don't get sick. Fragments of the Trakt, the old road, are visible beside the rails, looking very abandoned. This is the only way to travel overland in Russia. Chilly and foggy; lots of abandoned wood-storage depots.
MON, JUL. 27: Beginnings of boredom, but here are roads on the outskirts of Irkutsk and we start packing. On bus for Lake Baikal along the Angara River, and I visit the lake before the lunch at the Intourist Hotel. Then there's a tour of the Limnological Institute and old-fashioned villages of Pechanaya and Listvianka, where I'm too shy to take pictures. Quaint wooden buildings and old people out of picture-books. Bony Siberian fish dumplings for dinner, and I watch sunset from a nearby mountain: peaceful silence.
TUES,JUL.28: Russian construction falling apart at this "luxury" hotel, and they haven't even finished building it! After breakfast we Hydrofoil on the Angara back to Irkutsk, and it's too cold to stand outside. Tour of the town's cathedrals, monuments, wooden houses with gingerbread decorations carved many years ago, and I leave the shopping tour to visit the Otel Istoriya (History Museum) and the Minerals Museum, getting a piece of lapis lazuli from the curator --- who believes in Astrology, which I thought would be forbidden in this materialistic culture. More rain, but dinner is a party celebrating our leaving of Russia: free vodka and cinnamoned apple juice along with the caviar and chicken and ham salad and ice cream.
WED,JUL.29: Cold lobby at 8AM and bagged breakfast for train. For the tenth time the able-bodied men have to tote luggage for the old couples, and the older and more feeble, the heavier their bags. This is a luxury tour?? Around Lake Baikal with factories heavily polluting the clean air. This time a terrible smell replaces soap and toilet paper in the john. Terrain get more barren south of Ulan-Ude: irrigation sprays and wells appear. Forest turns to grassland, too short for grazing. We empty our cameras so that border guards can't ruin our photos if they open our cameras. Stop at first border at 9:40PM, move into Mongolia at 2:43AM: a grinding 5 hour 3 minute process. Mongolian forms ask for "Membrs of your family accopanying you," "memorable avticles," and "Srgnatures." Mongolian soldiers have intelligent placid faces; Olga remarks they were SMILING, which was more than the Russian soldiers ever did. Bed on train feels good at 3AM.
THU,JUL.30: Dzun-Hara at 5:45AM wakes us. Russian influence in Mongolia for the worst: why build wooden houses and fences in a land without trees? Round Mongolian yurts dwarfed by Swiss-type chalets. Mongol woman in a neat bun, violet dress, and white Cuban-heeled shoes chases a cow. Lots of propaganda in villages: Russians trying to convince the Mongolians they're happy? Attendant (who's done nothing) on train motions that I roll up my bedding. I don't. Long wait in Ulan Bator for English-speaking guide. To Hotel by 9:30AM, breakfast of sugared yogurt and one fried egg atop the sausage which was to be the Mongolian staple. Elevators have no memory, so it's easier to walk --- even though we're on the 9th floor. Russian architecture out of place in Mongolian desert. Shop has some nice trinkets. I wander town and afternoon tour returns to same Main Square, embassies, and then up the hill to the Mongolian-Japanese War Memorial overlooking the entire city. Hard to believe I'm actually in Mongolia. Italian movie at night, because there's nothing else to do and I don't want to sleep more.
FRI,JUL.31: Fried sausage with SLIGHT coating of egg with sweet yogurt. Tour to lamasery with active monks with gold crested hats and prayers being said in incense-filled temple rooms. Surprise! Buddhism rampant in a Communist-controlled country! Then into the country to catch glimpses of the partial eclipse behind clouds and sunglasses, and to tour a yurt village where we can pose for photos in Mongolian dress. Kumess is fermented mares' milk and NOT very tasty. Again a strong black-market exchange rate for money. I climb a hill and enjoy the hilly, clear, beautiful view. Back to movies.
SAT,AUG.1: Missed a disco party last night. Good. High Lama's Palace is very colorful, filled with Tibet-like tankas and mink-lined clothing and painted scenes of every conceivable (and some mysterious) human function. Afternoon is free for me to wander weedy amusement park, Museum of Mongolian Fine Arts, and the 60th Anniversary Exhibit of the Mongolian Nation, none of which have intrinsic interest outside of being Mongolian. By enormous coincidence the film that night is a history of Mongolia that includes scenes and costumes inside the High Lama's Palace and surroundings. Authenticity!
SUN,AUG.2: Flocks of butterflies and cloud-shadowed countryside of short grass along the train-route south from Ulan Bator toward China. Meals on train horrible; we drink more than we eat. Shot 26 slides of sunset to empty my camera again. Three cameras from our bright group were opened and they lost all their shots of Mongolia. They'd been warned. This border hit at 10PM. They must LIKE darkness to cover what must be heavily military-fortified borders from tourist cameras. These midnight border-crossings are the ONLY ones possible --- agency is thinking of removing Mongolia from the itinerary as being too much trouble for too little sights. May be, but I'm glad I went, nevertheless. Find a Chinese restaurant car and the food is great! We're through by 2AM, exhausted.
MON,AUG. 3: Wake at 6AM to see Chinese earthen houses and people performing their morning Tai Chi warm-ups white watching the passing train. We're the center of attraction in this non-tourist area. Long bus ride to the Da Tong Hotel at 9AM, not quite open yet, past people sleeping in the streets for the coolness. Breakfast features awful boiled eggs that may be rock-hard or slimy-soft. I sit on curb outside hotel for an hour watching life pass by: pedestrians, bicycles, horse/burro/donkey carts, few trucks and busses, no private cars. Lunch ends with a fabulous anise/salt bass. Afternoon tour of Yungang caves, Buddhist temples carved out of hills between 460-535AD; many destroyed, but some reflecting what must have been original grandeur. I leave group at end to watch reconstruction work in forbidden area. Everyone is patient with me. Beer is free with dinner in China, a real treat. Hotel is only marginal: again, this is NOT a tourist center. Evening of Chinese Acrobats and jugglers; many sleep; it's a hard trip.
TUE,AUG.4: Wake at 6 with a cough. Locomotive factory tour is obligatory and a bore: speeches and politics. Earplugs in for factory noises and for tour of a schoolroom. Kids cute. I roam city to constant stares; all streets are jammed, some buildings incredibly old, there's lot of DUST but little FILTH, though some sewers aren't working in the lucky sections that have sewers. Otherwise, people cart our wastes themselves. Afternoon tour of monasteries in rain and dark; photographs impossible. No one buys anything at the Metal Arts Factory. We drink a lot for dinner, because we have to get to the station for an 11PM train to Peking. We have a waiting area with carpets and plush sofas covered with lace doilies while others have to sleep on concrete floors. Majestic rosewood-paneled car with green velvet curtains and thick carpets, but there's not much room since in China we must be four passengers in a four-passenger compartment as big as a bathroom. Two people go to bed immediately in the top bunks, we follow quickly and I'm relieved when everyone says they're exhausted: they sleep even though I cough all night, completely miserable.
WED,AUG. 5: Wake at 6, out at 7AM in people-filled Peking rail station. I feel better. To Ching Chow hotel for excellent breakfast, but as we drive toward the Summer Palace it starts to rain torrents, so we stop in the Zoo for a look at the pandas while guide determines that we go to Peking Hotel and unpack and hope rain stops. I buy stamps and tickets for the evening, then we're to Summer Palace in rain for lunch in a pavilion, then I get wet wandering hillsides in mist and staggeringly beautiful collections of art and antiquities in a palace as big as a city. I can't buy enough books or take enough pictures to hope to capture the extraordinary quality of the site and furnishings. Mountains of jade, tons of gold and silver, a carpet of elephant ivory (literally!), acres of scrolls and screens and enamels. Dinner alone and out to the Peking Opera for a "contemporary" (1918) drama.
THU,AUG. 6: Morning tour of Forbidden City surpasses yesterday's thrills. Gardens filled with a thousand years of botanical skills and odd-rock collecting. Rooms filled with vases and pottery and gongs, pots and basins and ewers of solid gold; a square meter of jade mountain with amethyst, agate, lapis lazuli rocks, streams of silver and gold, nephrite men looking at ruby- and emerald-eyed animals of onyx and crystal and beryl. FANTASTIC! Towers of ivory with inch-high figures on each of 25 balconies, hair ornaments encrusted with precious stones, framed pictures made from shells or pearls or butterfly wings, ivory boats laden with passengers and their pets in gold, swords and daggers radiant with diamonds and sapphires. Inlays and repoussés and cloisonnés and filigrees --- and most of China's treasure was stolen by Chiang Kai-shek and ferreted to Taiwan! Awesome! It's raining heavily now, but I climb hill to see other temples stretching away in the fog: I must go back to Peking! Afternoon tour to the Temple of Heaven very wet, though the Circular Mound is very like the Buddhist Temple of Borobudur in Java. Bus then takes us to the largest Friendship Shop, for tourists only, but the prices seem high except for the cheapest items, and I buy tiny stuffed pandas and an intricate "monkey orgy" for a very low price. Evening variety show has too many comics telling Chinese jokes.
FRI,AUG.7: Bus tour to a reconstructed section of the Great Wall, though miles and miles of remains can be seen snaking across nearby hills. Hard climb to the top through thousands of Chinese tourists. Sixteen jet transports and twenty-five jet fighters swoop overhead. Box lunch at the local eatery ends with sweet yellow watermelon in addition to the usual red ones. Continue with a tour of the Ming Tombs, group shaken by being the first bus past a peddler killed in the traffic, his brains strewn across the highway. Down the legendary Statuary Lane to the Ding Ling tomb far underground, but the guide's English is very poor here and I get what information I can from booklets, buying slides since the tomb isn't lit well enough for photos. Back at the Peking Hotel I walk into the People's Park, and Chung Boë enlists himself as my guide so that he can improve his English. I tell him to write to me, but he hasn't yet. Peking-duck dinner in an outside restaurant.
SAT,AUG.8: Peking Station at 8AM is cathedral-like with shafts of sunlight irradiating dusty smoke over thousands of people moving in rivers to their train platforms. Escalators sweep up and down through four stories as massive conduits of humanity. Five of the men must take hard-class: three-high bunks, straw matting over a "cushion" about one centimeter thick, no air-conditioning, no privacy, patient Chinese who don't know any English. Pass naked bathers in Xing Tai River, strings of mud-brick villages, walled communes, and unending fields of corn. In our car the air conditioners labor to reduce the temperature to the high 80s. Anyang Station at 4PM, but nothing from the past of this city is visible from the station. Lunch and dinner were stifling in the fan-cooled dining room, but the hard-class men said it was cool by comparison --- though they passed up our offers to at least sit in the "cooled" compartments by day, even if there's no room there for them to sleep at night. No beer; China guide passes pitchers of water.
SUN,AUG.9: Arrive at Xian (ancient Ch'ang-an) at 5AM, awful outhouse smell in squalid station, and by bus through a purgatory of sleeping, coughing, restlessly moving bodies waiting outside the station and continuing through all the streets. The gold-tipped iron gates of the People's Hotel have to be opened for us, but when they turn on the chandeliers the lobby is musty and none too clean. This is a city that Britannica reports: "The T'ang, who took over in 618AD, expanded and restored Ch'ang-an, making it into one of the most splendid and extravagant cities in the world." It was the capital of China from 202BC-8AD, again around 316, and from 581-904AD. Before breakfast I stroll to the main square and watch Tai Chi by hundreds of early risers, using swords, poles, canes, and spears, staffs and tassels. In the Shanxi Regional Museum (in POURING rain) is a bell from 700BC with a MEXICAN bird on it. Hundreds of steles with Buddhist doctrines incised. The Big Wild Goose Pagoda is completely new inside, and then we're taken to a cloisonné factory. Lunch inside the old walled city, and then another culture-buff and I hire a taxi to the Ban-Po Neolithic excavations with beautifully simple utensils carved from stone and bone. Then we meet the bus for the trip to the Terracotta Warriors, where I refuse to attend the introductory lecture and thus get about fifteen minutes by myself with the remains of the 6000 life-size figure protected from the elements by a football-field size hanger-type building, on the roof of which the rain drums funereally. Unforgettable minutes. I buy everything I can lay my hands on in the shop in the hopes of recapturing the solemn beauty of the site. A further stop at a Mountain Hot Springs is too wet to be effective; anyway I'm totally filled up with impressions already. But pay an extra $10 for a "provincial taste" restaurant that starts with a phoenix-tail fan-appetizer of hundred-year-old egg, beef, egg yolk of the consistency of Muenster cheese, pork, cucumber, flower-cut tomatoes, and maraschino cherries. Meal continues with the first abalone dish I've ever been able to CHEW, a "mousse fish," a second type of Peking duck that's fatter and saltier and less crisp, and superb millet wine with a lemony-honey flavor. Magnificent tastes.
MON,AUG.10: George has to use the plunger on the stuck toilet. Onto train at 8 after breakfast, vistas of terraced fields receding to the misty north. Cross the Wei River and begin to enter cliff-and-tunnel light-and-dark transitions filled with waterfalls and villages and tiny fields clinging to precipices. Countryside beginning to resemble poorer sections of India. Station is Xiedaibaozhaxiranweixianwupinshangchedengyusharenfanghuo in the ancient city of Lo-yang, capital in 11th Century BC for 9 dynasties, again in 771BC, 23BC-220AD, 313, 494, 619, 657, 904-960. China may have been one country for four millenia, but it's been host to endless civil war and competing ruling clans. Long lane of over-arching trees to the White Horse Temple that the Red Guards "severely damaged," and it's only open to the public within the past year. Hard to look at the present when the past has changed so much of it. Guide passes out candies wrapped in paper; when the paper's removed the candy is still wrapped, but in RICE paper that's EDIBLE! So the Chinese invented the M&M concept! Canton Restaurant for dinner, squabbling with some of the group, then to the Friendship Hotel. I go for a walk in the park across the street at sunset and am soon surrounded by a dozen students asking questions about books, marriage, money, politics, travel, America, China, Pinyin, indexing. Exhausting!
TUE,AUG.11: Tai Chi in the park has less variety and originality than in Xian. Breakfast of good omelet and bad sausage, then bus to Longmen Caves, built by Buddhists in 495-683, in better condition than the Yungang Caves, and these are filled with tourists clambering up and down the stairways cut into the cliff-face. Buy a good book for 15 Yuan, about $9, which is somewhat more than the average weekly salary for Chinese in this city --- for me it's about 15 minutes' work. I fill a hiatus in the touring schedule with a quick walk to the People's Park in the middle of town, though I get more stares than the monkeys and pandas when I drop into a zoo. Three of the group have high fevers at lunch; they got injections and pills. Train leaves for Nanking at 3, past scenes of flooding from the nearby Yangtze River. We walk OUTSIDE the length of the train to get to the dining car for dinner, and walk INSIDE the length of the train to return: we must have been stared at by 5000 Chinese who, from the intentness of their faces, would have been willing to pay more than their train-fare just to see us. I share some Bartlett Pears from a can whose top clicks. Diarrhea at night.
WED,AUG.12: Wake at 4 with diarrhea, watch flooded scenery until we cross the Yangtze River at 7AM, arrive in Nanking to a pleasant morning at last; heat was getting oppressive. Nanking a "medium large city with 3.3 million people." Morning tour to Xuan Wu (pronounced "swan woo") Lake, and though the weather continues pleasant, I feel hot and dizzy. I walk out of lunch to lie down; my temperature rises to 105Ε by 2PM so Miss Tien, our Chinese guide, calls a cab and takes me to the Nanking People's Hospital. I fear it might be so awful I don't have the courage to raise my eyes, just watch my feet so I don't trip. I'm escorted into a two-bedded room and laid on a wooden-slatted bed covered with a bamboo mat and that's all. Later, when my bones ache, I plead for a huge towel which I double and use as protection. I sweat a lot though the room is comfortable in temperature. They take lots of blood samples but when I look at one twinge that doesn't stop I find I'm being given intravenous fluids. I doze on and off, given sweet warm gruel to sip slowly. Chris, the tour guide, says he took a guess that I'd be in Nanking's largest hospital. Miss Tien's sweet, but this is her first job and she doesn't know much. Bathroom visits are horrible: I must ring for a nurse (or Miss Tien) to hold my intravenous bottle outside the door while I take care not to dislodge the needle. When the tube goes pink (with my blood) they have to pinch the tube to force the fluid back into the vein. Sleep fitfully.
THU,AUG.13; Tien is exhausted by 1AM and is replaced by Mr. Tsi, local guide for another tour group. He sleeps in the next bed and translates when he has to. No doctors or nurses speak English but the Chinese Tour Service, Luxingshe, supplies an interpreter for me every minute of the day and night. He helps with my bottle. I wake startled at 9:30AM to find Chris and Miss Tien back. Chris describes Nanking as being beautiful and relaxing; I may have to stay 3-5 days. Phalanxes of doctors disagree: eat lots, eat little; drink lots of water, don't drink water; nurses serve delicious scrambled eggs, doctors say don't eat eggs. New interpreter Mr. Jo arrives and says there's no cross-talk between doctors and nurses, so the nurses try to cook as delicious food as they can for me regardless of diagnosis. Samples of everything take three days to investigate: I never find EXACTLY what was wrong with me, but the general idea was intestinal infection, probably the sausage was bad in Lo-yang, maybe the tinned pears helped, maybe I was tired. Hospital doesn't use soap; hot towels, yet no one will go inside my shorts. I want to wash my hair, but there's no hot water in mornings --- and no cold water in afternoons, since toilet doesn't flush then. They try to increase rate of intravenous flow, but I move and the needle leaves the vein and causes the worst pain of the stay. They remove it from my wrist and put it into my ankle. Abdominal pains come and go but in general I feel better. Lots of good food, but the diarrhea remains. Visitors from group. Sleep better because I've had 5-6 bottles of fluid and don't need any more. Horray!
FRI,AUG.14: Snail-like black pickled vegetables that someone said was sorghum among foods for lunch; if I can eat THAT, I can eat ANYTHING. I'm now feeling great and asking when I can leave. They suggest I can walk around hospital ground and I walk so fast and far they practically have to club me to get me back into bed. More talk, more temperatures and tests; finally I get pills for six days and injections for three days and a release I have to sign saying I won't hold the hospital responsible if I have a relapse. I make sure the doctors don't think it's SILLY to leave, and leave at 6PM, borrowing the $50 for the three-day bill from George until the bank opens in the morning. Cheers from the dining table when I rejoin them. Bed early.
SAT,AUG.15: Incredible dreams. As I shower at 6 the cold water goes off and I have to find the finest spray of hot so that it cools enough to rinse me. One of the doctors in the group says I shouldn't eat such a big breakfast, but I figure my appetite is a good indication. Onto train for Shanghai at 8AM, and Tien says those black dots are silkworms on mulberry trees. We pass pagodas in the distance and cross canals filled with man-powered boats and look over fields filled with cotton and rice. Chat about what I missed in Nanking; I most regretted not seeing the remains of Peking Man. Shanghai hotel is WAY out from the city-center, old-fashioned large rooms. Cyclists and trees and store-fronts during the city afternoon tour, then to an Arts and Crafts Factory, ending at the waterfront of Western-style skyscrapers that served as the center of activity when Shanghai used to be the capital of half a world in the 30s and 40s. Busy harbor, but it shares the industry-oriented tourist-boring activity of Hong Kong and Singapore --- all there is to do is shop and spend money. Give impromptu lecture on my hospital stay to some of the group in my room in the evening. Bed early again.
SUN,AUG.16: Morning tour to Jade Buddha Temple in time for a memorial ceremony with ancient instruments and gongs. Yu Gardens for two hours: more people and pavilions in a small space than anywhere else in the world. Seven sets of working people each have a different day of the week off to share recreation facilities. Every day is Sunday. "Treasury Corner" filled with warfare displays and "Hall of Mildness" is all about the Revolution! Lunch at the Seaman's Club with excellent food including a cucumber-tomato salad and FRESH peas for the first time in a month. My souvenirs include a tumbler inscribed "International Seaman's Club of Shanghai", given to me and one other in the group when we couldn't resist asking if we could have one. Tien's not feeling well. Afternoon boat tour of the harbor down to the mouth of the Yangtze River; I don't think any RACE works as hard as the Chinese! Dinner includes good chicken and fish soup, but the sweet-and-sour gristle is inedible. Variety show with seats on the side of the back balcony: that's taking equality a step too far on a $100+/day tour!
MON,AUG.17: Phone for taxi to the Shanghai Zoo, with bulbous-eyed carp the first and finest exhibits. Flamingos weren't eating their shrimp and the panther had yet to attack the live dog supplied for its lunch. Giant panda too hot and terrified of its keeper to take advantage of a block of ice shoved at it. Shanghai Museum fabulous in the afternoon, but the workers were the best show at the Arts and Crafts Research Institute. Chris photographs a flower while a starving kitten tries desperately to attract his attention. Shanghai International Industrial Exhibit closed Mondays, but the Shanghai Arts and Crafts Trade Fair supplies better products for cheaper prices than any other place I'd seen. Buy two T'ang horses (modern copies, of course) for under $9. Walk through the inner city for an hour before dinner, and it just LOOKS like the most densely populated city in the world. Dinner in the Park Hotel is "American" cooking and a disaster, but the $2 vodka bottle gets passed and everyone's happy anyway. Party for "luggage porters."
TUE,AUG.18: I start writing my farewell poem, and at 9AM discouraged to find that the last, hottest train-trip finds us in non-air conditioned cars. Men strip in shorts. Pleasant surprise of a lunch so tasty we insist on applauding the chef; the meals continue to be excellent. One of the women passes out with heat prostration; temperature in car above 100ΕF even with windows open for the soot-filled breeze. Rice paddies and lots of workmen with submerged water buffalo. Dinner surpassingly good: chicken soup, celery and broccoli and tree fungus, beef and wood mushrooms, pork and butter mushrooms, one other. Bed on embroidered silk cushions, dirty and tired.
WED,AUG.19: Sponge bath in AM, followed by a shower of tea from Mrs. Blum from the next window. Edith waits five minutes outside a washroom she didn't try hard enough to open: it was empty. 85Ε was the morning low. Red-purple earth, green terraced fields, yellow-orange brick buildings. Lovely Peh Kiang river before Pangkou. Conductors throw tea, garbage, and broken crockery out the windows; even so, people constantly use the paths along the train-tracks for walking. Scenery begins to take one some of the jagged verticality that Kweilin is noted for. Finally into Canton at 7PM, floor-level station platform for first time in ages. To 32-floor Bai Yun Hotel, no time to shower before dinner; bed at 10PM, raining outside.
THU,AUG.20: Only part of the group goes by bus to the Chu Liao People's Commune --- others have seen a Chinese Commune before: some have already seen almost everything we're seeing on this trip, yet they keep traveling. Lots of data about the communes, but one of the group remarks that we have no way of knowing what's true and what isn't. Visit their clinic, a "typical" farmhouse that we're quite sure isn't typical (I SAW one man putting on his shirt as he saw us coming), and have dinner with them, with longyu, or "Dragon's Eyes," for dessert: a smaller big-nutted versions of lychee. Back to the city for the Sun Yat-sen Memorial; I'm the only one who climbs the 500 steps to the monument at the top of the hill. I get off the bus to walk myself, since the tour is otherwise devoted to shopping; the Chinese living in the old English and French and German Embassy quarter live EXACTLY as painters show Italian peasants living among the ruins of Ancient Rome: noise and lack of appreciation and tiny narrow lives among grandiose archways and heroic building proportions. Walk hot streets to Liwan Garden, awful dust and heat and smells; get lost trying to find my way back, finally flag a cab meant only for tourists and return to hotel. Finish my poem by the time the bus take us to the restaurant for the "Farewell to China" dinner. Poem seems to go well; some of the group that I'd been most sarcastic about asked if they could copy the stanzas about them. Final party in hotel.
FRI,AUG.21: Suitcases out at 6, bus at 7:30, luxury train leaves at 8:30, and we cross into the New Territories at 10:45AM. Far more built up than it was when I was last there 20 years ago. Farewell to group at noon, cab to the airport, flight from 4 to 6PM to Manila through clouds most of the way, pay $110 for two nights at the Philippine Village Hotel. Bed at 8PM.
SAT,AUG.22: Wake at 5 (time changes beginning), down after great breakfast in room, and take taxi to Makati and Chinese Cemetery, which IS like a real city people could live in, and get a feel that the city isn't really much in itself. Back to Pagsanjan Falls Tour at 9, talk with couple from New South Wales, and share a boat with them to the falls, uphill-pushes from rowers over boulders and bamboo stairways; I had no idea it would be such a struggle for the rowers and such a spectacular canyon for the trip. Much of the area was used as the setting for "Apocalypse Now." Place full of tourists: elated Italians, dour Japanese, stupid Americans, smiling Asians. Wet trip under the falls themselves, back for pleasant lunch with "local coconut wine" and chicken and fish, and back to Manila for a visit to Nayang Pilipino, an outdoor museum showing huts and native cultures from the other Philippine islands, and THIS is the Philippines to see more of. Fascinating. Hotel is pretty awful, as is the food. Spoiled in China.
SUN,AUG.23: Papaya yesterday and mango today for breakfast, more time in Nayang Pilipino, to airport at 11 for boring three-hour flight through clouds to Guam, two more hours of time-change. Phone Bill (with whom I'd been a supernumerary in "Aida" at Randall's Island 20 years ago) and he's willing to take me to dinner and put me up at his place, right on the bay, but that's not so great since Guam is rather built-up and not very tropical.
MON,AUG.24: Bill drives me to some rusting guns from WW II on the beach, then to Pacific Adventures office for my $40 tour of the southern part of the island with two jeeps along in case one gets stuck in the ruts and rocks of the rudimentary road. Downed Japanese Zero, the cave where a Japanese soldier held out for 26 years until he was found in 1971, and waterfalls are the aim of the trip. Pandanus fruit yields huge nuts impossible to crack that taste quite a bit like coconut. Have to pay my own taxi to the Museum when they refuse to take me. Turns out that Yokoi, that Japanese hermit, outlasted ten companions and was alone for eight of his 26 years. Wander around visiting native Chamorro artifacts, Latte stones, Spanish forts, and back to Bill's to drive to a cliff to watch the sunset, not very special, and then to dinner at his friend Caroline's. Good TV shows.
TUE,AUG.25: We catch the 7AM flight to Saipan (he has business there) and he rents a car. I follow him on some of his public-relations import-export business, but I'm glad I'm not him. Between visits I drive the car to some beaches and look at surf and war remains, then we lunch on the tallest building; a revolving Chinese restaurant eight floors up. We drive to the top of the central Mount Tapachou for a quick look around before rain clouds obscure the view. Let him off for more business and drive in PELTING rain to the north. Rain stops to let me see Banzai Cliff, where Japanese threw themselves off to avoid American troops; then it pours again until I get to Suicide Cliff, where Americans threw themselves off to avoid Japanese troops --- what a crazy war!! Around to take "the" picture of Bird Island (rain kills any chance of originality) and back to pick up Bill and get to the airport for a very bumpy flight back to Guam. He's in charge of a hearing for government funding of the Guam Youth Band and some Arts and Crafts grants, which is a bore, and we end up at a Cambodian restaurant.
WED,AUG.26: Flight to Koror in the Palau Islands leaves at 7:45 AM and again clouds block view of atolls in the ocean bellow. Ride to the Continental Hotel with the luggage truck from a tour, but decide it's too Americanized and take the suggestion to stay at the Barsakesau Hotel in the town. It's awful, but it's $25 and individualistic compared to $50 Holiday Inn-type plasticity. Wander town, tour the Museum, try to find a tour but have no luck. Local restaurant has good fried chicken for dinner; it's the social center of the island, but there's nothing going on. Wait till tomorrow.
THU,AUG.27: Water comes on at 6AM (turns off at 8AM) and I have breakfast and buy bananas and beer for lunch and the bus for a tour is supposed to pick me up at 8:30. At 9:25, after incredible fuming on my part, the truck shows up and takes us to the boat that will take half of us snorkeling and the other half scuba-diving. The Rock Islands are like flower pots with trees for flowers, growing out of the ocean at low tide. Pacific paradise. Water transparent, coral varieties endless in shape and color, and the fish are much more spectacular than the ones in the Caribbean. Scuba bubbles from below send schools of fish toward the surface where I can see them better: incredible varieties, astounding fluorescent colors, thousands of silver glints in the sunlight. Legs get sunburst; glad I was wearing a T-shirt in the water. Lunch on a desert island; the Welsh woman married to the Malayan brought too much food so I had to help them eat their cold cuts while they shared my bananas. An English couple describe their hike in Ladakh, saying we're lucky because it rained for a solid week when they were here a couple months ago. Our snorkeling place this morning was called Ngemiles Dropoff, supposedly world-renowned in diving circles. The afternoon place wasn't as good, but it was still fantastically beautiful. Confusion in meeting people was frustrating, but island life seems VERY casual.
FRI,AUG.28: Motley crew of natives smoking cigarettes, chewing gum, and spitting bright-red betel-nut juice --- sometimes all at the same time --- waiting at the airport for the 10AM flight to Yap, getting great shots over Babeldaob, the biggest island in the Palau group. Pick a hotel, have lunch, and rent a car for one of the best days of the trip: my own boss, driving over coconut-hazardous dirt roads until they ended, then following smooth-worn stone-forest footpath highways past villages looking like they haven't changed in a thousand years. One villager offers me my first chew of betel nut: half a leaf for a beginner, sprinkle with lime from the reef, put on a small nut, and chew and chew. Makes my teeth red for a day, but doesn't ruin them or break them off or grind them down as it does to the natives who chew it constantly. There's a light buzz, rather like the quick high from the legal Indian bidi cigarettes that are made from betel leaves, but it certainly seems to me that liquor is much more effective and not as hard on the teeth. He shows me the men's house, dancing grounds, a trio of old men working for their second year on a dugout canoe, and more stone money. I've already taken dozens of pictures of the twelve-foot to two-foot stone money Yap is famous for --- I'd feared there wouldn't be any; but by the time I left I'd had enough of it. Travel almost all the roads on the 18-mile-long island, but I'd still love to go back for a week. Idyllic life, lovely people, beautiful scenery, untouched beaches, prehistoric lifestyles. Museum is closed and I almost lose the car trying to get to a hilltop monument on a muddy road, so I'm back to the hotel for dinner and bed.
SAT,AUG.29: Wake at 6 and drive more of the island, to the "Stone Bank" and the "Outer-island community" with dwellers from the more remote Pacific Islands, each retaining their customs. Incredible cultural richness in a tiny area. More stone money, palm-fringed beaches, beautiful natives --- and I hardly pass a car! Talk to an Italian group staying at my hotel and get invited to Rome and Naples in December. May go. This is my day of island-hopping: from Yap to Koror in an hour, getting pictures of the Rock Islands. Guam flight takes two hours, with one hour on the ground, and at 3PM the hour-and-a-half flight to Truk; over the huge lagoon but can't see any of the sunk Japanese fleet from the air. Everyone who boards from Truk wears flower wreaths or crowns --- the place smells like a florists'. One hour to Ponape through a dazzling purple-orange sunset and land in complete darkness at 6:15PM. Find the truck to the recommended Village Hotel and bounce for an hour over five miles of road in the rain. For dinner everyone recommends the Mangrove Crab, so I point out the live one I want roasted and it's the best seafood I've ever tasted: more tender than lobster, tastier than crab, delicious with melted butter. Good drinks and conversation with other tourists --- maybe I should have stayed at the Continental on Koror.
SUN,AUG.30: Trouble sleeping because mosquitoes slip through screens (no windows on island) before I put on the mosquito coil. Creepy noises from the lizards on the windowsills and in the jungle. Nursing sunburn aches. After breakfast Bob Arthur, the owner, tells me to go to mass, so Betrika walks me down to the village where the women are dressed as if for a fashion show in Harlem: bright green dresses with white flowers, ultramarine with pink and orange slashes, brilliant green-and-red shirts. The singing at the service is four-part perfection, the basses at my right (the church is segregated down the middle) balancing the sopranos on the left side. Walk back to the hotel and thumb a ride into "town" with an unmarried couple who work for the government, who end up taking me ALL over the island --- in an hour --- the island has only twelve miles of roads. Treat them to lunch for their kindness, laugh at their stories of native inefficiency, and get left at the airport to take the same truck back over the same road to my hotel. Mangrove Crab again for dinner; I can't imagine eating anything better. Rain at times blocks out the sunset, but there are rainbows in exchange.
MON,AUG.31: Tour boat for Nan Madol leaves at 9:30, and I take towels from room because everyone says the day will be bright. Wrap up completely on the way out for another morning of snorkeling, just as incredible as the afternoon place in Koror; a picnic lunch packed by the hotel is eaten by a refreshing waterfall that washes the ocean salt off; then we continue to the Venice of the Pacific: Nan Madol, built 700 years ago of huge basalt logs and stones and coral dug from the bottom of the sea. Hollywood couldn't have imagined a more exotic site or scene. University of Oregon is combing some of the more accessible sites (mangrove trees cover hundreds of tiny islets accessible through an intricate canal system) for pottery and stone and other implements. Race rain clouds back to the hotel (and win) and pack and take final pictures before bumping to the airport for the 8PM flight via Kwajelien and Majuro (I hate flying at night) to Honolulu.
MON,AUG.31 (part 2): Cross International Date Line and gain a full day to make up for the hours I'd had frittered away coming constantly toward the sun. Nap only a bit and watch sunrise over Niihau, then Kauai, then Oahu. Rent a car and look up an address I was given by Bill on Guam, but no one's home. Ride to the YMCA and get a room for $11. With the car came a booklet of free tickets, so I ride up to Paradise Park and see birds and flowers and the Moana Falls trail, have a half-price lunch at Zippy's, miss a free tour of Pearl Harbor but get a free Glass-Bottom boat ride out in the Waikiki Beach area --- snorkeling's got it beat by a mile. Drive to the Bishop Museum for a marvelous building housing worthwhile Pacific exhibits, then go across the Pali Highway to get a look at the other side of the island, and the Halona blowhole. Back to town to dress for my "dinner-dance" on a catamaran, (also free) and it's the worst evening of the trip: off-color jokes by a lousy dance band and horrible food. Moving onto the top deck to watch the spotlighted sails on the catamaran was the only move that saved my sanity.
TUE,SEP.1: Return car and get 9AM flight to Los Angeles, watching Molokai and Lanai and Hawaii recede into the west. Boring flight with squalling kids. Delayed landing in LA so that I get to the Western flight to San Diego, but my LUGGAGE doesn't. Dennis surprises me by meeting me with his parents in the San Diego airport, and they take me out to dinner in Old Town. Stay in his little house in back of his folks' home and start talking of trip.
WED,SEP.2: Still no luggage. Mrs. Southers. Makes a fabulous breakfast and the family drives me to my Actualism lesson from 9-11AM, then picks me up for lunch at "Taming of the Stew" and introduces me to fore-edge painting with an exhibit at the library of these oil paintings on the EDGES of books, seen by riffling the pages slightly; sometimes two different paintings if the pages are slanted the two possible ways. Then to the San Diego Wildlife Farm, colorful and deserty, where I pay for dinner and we take the monorail tour and watch some of the animal shows. Back to wait for luggage that doesn't come. Getting anxious to get home to piles of mail and different clothes!
THU,SEP.3: My bag is sitting inside the Western terminal when I check in. Dennis is taking another flight back the same day, so we say goodbye for a few hours and I fly back to Los Angeles (VERY smoggy day!) on a flight that's so delayed I miss my Capital flight connection! When I say Western Airlines delayed me, they put me on an American Airlines flight at no extra charge, how nice of them! By coincidence I get a window seat and the movie "Arthur" that Dennis had recommended the day before. So it was a bit of luck to miss the Capital flight. Clear views down of the California mountains and deserts and some of the canyonlands of the Southwest, but around the middle of the flight it clouded up and got fairly bumpy before I landed at 6:30. My luggage shows up this time and I taxi home with great relief.
Though I know I want to return to different places in Russia, will not return to China until I can plan my own itinerary and hotels, and want to go back to some of the North Pacific Islands, I learned that I do NOT want to travel for as long as sixty days again. There's too much I miss about being home, and there's too much to catch up with when I GET home. Took me about a month to feel like I was "back and caught up." But it was a fabulous trip!
RUSSIA / CHINA TRIP 1981 PART 1
MONDAY, JULY 6. Wake at 6:30, up at 7:30, through to 9:30 without mail. Down to take laundry out, down again for traveler's checks and meet Dennis at 10:45 for Barclay's checks and British brochures and unimpressive "Superman II" from 12-2. To my place for lunch at 3, he leaves at 3:45, and suddenly there's no time. Buy shoes and belt till 4:45, phone Laker and they say to be there by 5:30. Sure. Record message and pack frantically, poorly at end, almost forgetting earplugs, raincoat, and NO razor blades. Out at 6 to car service for air-conditioned Cadillac for $18, $20 with trip. There at 6:35, but STILL line at window. Get seat 3B, only ONE from window, only 3 non-smoking seats LEFT. Change United ticket by 7:05 and No razor blades. Onto plane about last, Japanese to left and Robert Newton from Vienna on right. We move at 7:30, incredible, and take off at 7:50 for a stated 6 hour 10 minute flight. Strip of Fire Island and then clouds. Dark about 9:30, dinner-time, and watch movie "The Mirror Crack'd" from 11-12:30 --- or 5:30 new time, as sun comes up and I remind myself that's it's a NEW day.
TUESDAY, JULY 7. All cloudy until WAY down over lovely curved roads, rowed forests, castles, at 6:55, landing at 7:10 for 55Ε coolness! Out at 7:30 on bus, wait 10 minutes in HUGE line for passports, then 10 minutes for Britrail validation at 8AM. Only SLIGHTLY tired. Gatwick-Victoria £2.60. Rush down and train leaves DOT of 8! I have the misfortune to get a SMOKING car. Seems FIRST and NO SMOKING are marked. Lovely CIVILIZED old houses and SMALL-SCALE villages. Guy on rollerskates. Lots of local stops. German young jabber VERY ugly --- I SWEAR they say "Neo-Nazi" and lots of "Achtung." In at 8:55 to ads of "40 minutes to Gatwick." (I take 55) and wander station and find "Grosvernor" is "Grosvenor Victoria" hotel. Porters say I can check bag and lead me to lounge to switch. I switch in a flurry of STUFF, everything fitting nicely in little bag. Wander looking for banks and find 1.925, which I think is BETTER than 1.909, but AFTER she gives me £50.88 she says LOWER rate is better for me, and it's getting STEADILY lower. So I lose 1%. Learn. Back to Victoria, look puzzled, and find I'm in Victoria UNDERGROUND Station, not at Victoria RAIL Station. Across, ask info for schedule for Edinburgh. "We don't have any." "What time do they leave?" "10, 11, 12, hourly." It's 10:01. "So 10AM has left?" "Yes." So I go back to watch fabulous board (and Glasgow is 10:45, but I decide to stick to counterclockwise). Maybe hungry? Look at liquor shop, then "Stop Nice." Steak and kidney pie 44P, ginger wine 40P. Ask for both. S&K pie is cooking, ginger wine not servable until 11. Get hot chocolate for 28P. Drink it cruising tight-thighed straggly-haired unshaven guy. Back out at 10:30 to stare at board. By 10:45 NOTHING has gone up for Glasgow OR Edinburgh. Ask guy, "Do ALL trains leave through here?" "Yeah." Pause. "Where's 10:45 to Glasgow and 11 to Edinburgh." "THEY go from King's Cross Station." Stare. Couldn't info guy TELL me? "How do I get there?" "Victoria Underground." Go. Large map. Ask: "50P yellow line." I flash pound. "Get it at the ticket window." Huge line. No hope for 11AM train. Get ticket for 50P. Put in machine. Get out the 50P ticket. Take it. Down hallway and search for Kings Cross on map. Find it. Train comes --- nice, cool, seats demarked, few standing. Fast 6 stops. Wander Kings Cross station and have to ask TWICE which way to Rail Station. Finally there (glad I'm not lugging SUITCASE) and find long queue ALREADY at 11:05 for Aberdeen via Darlington and Edinburgh. Stand and debate expensive fruit: apples 32P/1b (kilo?), ratty peaches 18P, huge grapefruit 40P, cherries 1.20P/1b. Line moves at 11:20. People claim seats, lots of seats pre-RESERVED. I get into first car, empty, stake corner seat, and group of GERMANS come chattering on, making sure it's not first class. Two young teenagers and low-class mammas come on and I DON'T like their looks, voices, accents. Seem to be tiring. SOME sexy people, lots of back-packers. Lots of noise and vibration, but cars clean and cool. Write to 11: 45. Off at 12:05, car filling up. Towns and WHOMPF of air pressure as we enter and leave tunnels. Guy comes through for meal car, saying he'll call me for last sitting. In at 12:45 for sole and peas and carrots and baked skinned potatoes and half bottle of Bordeaux for £10.50 in all. Across from a judge/ traveler/raconteur and we talk of trains and travel and Concorde and food and local history. Into front at 4, SWEET Scandinavian pair of backpackers, and good cliff scenes at low tide, Into Edinburgh at 5:30, SEARCH for information and find none, but ask for schedule to Elgin. Wander out: Prince St., Registry Building, St. Andrews Square North, Dublin St., Abercromby Place --- RANDOM, and look down Nelson St. to Nelson Hotel. Humpy clerk says £11.50 for shared bath and I take it. Upstairs exhausted at 6 after phoning Findhorn and getting a message, but change into red pants and out to wander. Up the street, "Why the crowd?" "Get out your camera, there's the Queen!" It IS. In to LOCAL exhibit at Royal Academy, modern and mediocre, save for GULL killing a sparrow on the plastic DOME. Out and Queen's still in at 7:30. See start of open-air dancing as SUN comes out and ROSES flare in LOVELY color and smell. Search along for restaurants and on Race St. come on Fortrae Restaurant. Two Canadians, 2 Japanese, 4 Germans, 3 Swedish, 4 Canadians and me. Mixed grill with 1/2 red carafe for £8. Back to Hotel at 9 and it's a gay bar!! Bathe, change, to jeans and T-shirt, down to have Sherry for 50P and cruise first bartender and then a blond-mustached blond. We look and look, others look at me. I order second sherry, 11PM "Last call" bell sounds, I'm getting desperate, and a plumpish Richard Dreyfuss type comes over and says "Let me introduce you to my friends," and so he does, and there's a cutish fellow who seems to like me (call him Tom) and Tom's FRIEND (the blond) says "What about me?" I get introduced to Brian Foley. We talk; Dreyfuss-type said, "This is not what I expected," and Tom says he'll meet me TOMORROW at 8PM here, and Brian wants to finish his Carlsburg Special before coming to my room. He's taller than me, I suggest he's 22-23, he laughs and says he's 16 (he MAY be!) and we finally get to my room for direct necking; he's nice and smallish of cock and HARD and passionate and uncut, but he wants to FUCK, and turns me over and HURTS me (blood on sheet) and MAY come, but I come by jerking off, and he takes it, and we fall asleep about 12.
WEDNESDAY, JULY 8. We wake and have sex: I do HIM, and it's 4:20AM! Back to sleep and 8AM alarm CAN'T be shut OFF. Finally take plug out of wall, and HE wants to SLEEP. I dress and breakfast and then down to phone Findhorn at 9:15, busy, then they say "Tour at 2PM for two hours." Pay £11.50 for next night and lay by Brian as he sleeps till 11, and we have sex AGAIN, me coming first, he following. We use john and leave and he takes me to "dinner" at "The Laughing D(F)uck," and he knows people and we have drinks and he has pizza and lasagna and I have pork and potatoes and peas and FULL UP by 1. He leaves, taking my car, and I wander up to Prince, find bank and cash another $100, walk up Latham to graveyard and wander markers, rows, LOVELY weather and breeze. Up Stable Road along terraces and up North Wynd Street steps and Edinburgh Castle, building bleachers for festival, and in for £1 and it's NICE. Up walls for view, into St. Margaret's tiny chapel, the English and French prisons, the IMPRESSIVE Scottish War Memorial --- SAD all those red-booked names of the DEAD --- and museums of RAF, Navy, Army, and LOADS of medals, guns, swords, uniforms, boots, tins of chocolate from Queen Victoria, uniform changes and models, photos, lists, awards, sales, candy boxes, shakos, bagpipes, and other military models and exhibits, finally dazzling and boring at the same time. Tour Scotland's crown and regalia (oldest COMPLETE set in Europe), Great Hall, north parapet and fusilier's exhibit, and to shop for a book and out at 3:30 to wander down South Wynd to National Gallery at 4, too late to really see ALL, but impressive Delacroix. From the LACK of DETAIL I'd say Vermeer's "Christ in the House of Martha and Mary" is NOT his! Also impressive central van der Goes altar-endpieces (center GONE, sides turned as I was there at 4:15, though they announce the last turn at 4!), down for lots of Scottish stuff, Raeburn best, up to GREAT French (Gauguin, Monet, Seurat, GOOD Renoirs) and out at strike of 5 past Rembrandt and Hals and ter Hooch. Up Scott Memorial and dash up and take pictures, and taking out notebook two things FLY away: find my BRITRAIL pass on FLOOR at feet, sheer LUCK, and I THINK it was a money-exchange receipt that flew away, but maybe more? Grand gardens and look --- Edinburgh is a NICE TOWN! Down at 5:50 to station and more information on trains to Forres and plan trip while waiting for the "City, Sea and Roads" tour at 6:30 for £1.25 in a double-decker. Down to Firth, fishing "village" redone and wrong --- too modern --- and docks and far hills and surrounding greenbelt and old old volcanoes and not MUCH except hospitals and nursing homes and schools and houses and tracts and current history. Back at 7:55 and walk to Hotel past Portrait Gallery, no Tom. Bathe after wiping still-bloody ass after shit, and down at 8:30, no Tom. Around corner to Bernard's Restaurant Francais for Menu Gastronomique at £8: Souffle with Airflotet, which means mushrooms, carrots, and other things in nice fluff, but they're out of veal and give me SMALL bit of CHICKEN with eggplant and carrot and grapes and reasonably tasty sauce, and three awful boiled spuds. HANDSOME son with cruisy, gray-haired father (remind myself I should have taken a PHOTO of BRIAN) (he told me of permissive parents, pizza-making job, his trip to an aunt's on the plane in Vancouver, his love of London and the gay life, "That's all that's interesting in my life," and his lover that drinks too much and is in debt and losing the house and "not much to do and everyone knows everyone in Edinburgh.") talking with two Texans and two (gay?) Edinburgians at next table and "flashy" blonde who talks with her cigar-smoking boyfriend first in French, then Italian, and then obviously native American. Out at 10, getting strawberries in REAL cream and sugar instead of Sorbet de Cassis and pay £10 and CUTE French waiter gives me the souvenir bill. Still no Tom, still light at 10. I change back to blue tee and jeans and OLDER guys keep looking and cute BARTENDER is back as a customer, but he hardly looks, and a NEW bartender is handsome and sexy in a Bruce-way, but no Brian and no Tom by 10:25 so I'm up to pack and get to bed at 10:50, setting alarm for 5:20 for 6:10 train. No trouble falling asleep with earplugs, even with the light.