Pig Knuckle to the Exploding Onion

Walking down a cluttered street in Taipei yesterday, headed from the metro to the city's main Confucian temple, Laura said (quite sadly, I'll add), "I don't know if we will ever get to come here again."

(Coffee time in Taipei)



I answered that we probably would not -- actually, most of the places we go to we will probably never go back to again. Taiwan is, after all, an island, it is not particularly cheap or easy to get to, and we have already spent two weeks here. There's so much more to see out there ...

(Tao temple in Tainan)



But Taiwan really is a pretty nice place. It's very easy to get around, it's fun and relaxed, the standards are high and there's a lot to see. The major downside is the food. It was hard to really figure out what was going on, since the preparation and presentation of most dishes, even those bought from street vendors, is spectacular. But when you begin to taste stuff ... eeuuww!


(Taipei)



The food train came off the tracks one night when everything I was served came with what I think was sauteed brains on it. Poor Laura, who was just trying to get a cup of plain rice, earned the sympathy of the chef who thought rice alone was not enough -- her rice came, too, with brains. Besides the occasional brain, you also saw lots of whole fried fish (people: do not ever give me a fish to eat ever again), intestines, stomachs, kidneys, livers, tongues and miscellaneous internal (and perhaps external -- who knows?) organs.

(Inscription at main Confucian temple in Taipei.)



And then there were the classic Chinese-inspired faulty menu descriptions. One, literally, said "Pig knuckle to the exploding onion." So I totally gave up, and Laura mostly gave up, and had fast food for the second half of the trip -- either that, or 7-11, which is ubiquitous here and serves a variety of microwave or add-hot-water meals. Oh thank heaven for ...

(Sacred forest in Alishan)



On our second to last day we left the famous resort of Sun Moon Lake to head to Taipei. The bus from the lake let us off in the island's second largest city -- ah, what was the name of it? Anyway, it let us off at the city's high speed rail terminal. High speed rail? We looked at each other. Why not?

(Alishan)



Why not, indeed. After traveling on high speed rail it's hard to fathom why we don't have this in the US. Here's how it works. Walk in to the granite-and-stainless-steel terminal, buy a ticket from an automated touch-screen kiosk, wait until the train is called (or shop in the terminal) and hop on.

(Rainy afternoon at Sun Moon Lake)



Like all trains in Taiwan, the HSR leaves exactly on time, and arrives exactly on time. We had comfortable forward facing seats. The train left the station silently and began to accelerate. The speed was posted on an overhead screen, and within a few minutes we were rolling along at 290 kph -- that's nearly 180 miles per hour. The HSR travels on its own dedicated electric line. To attain high speeds the train needs a practically flat and straight track, which in hilly Taiwan means it is almost totally elevated above the ground (or in tunnels). We crossed 100 miles in about an hour, the pace slowed by four stops. In the southern section of the country, where there are fewer cities, the average speed is much higher. We bought tickets for an off-peak train, and paid about $14 each for the ride. That's about 50 percent more than what you pay for regular express trains.

(Sun Moon Lake)



It was easy to see how such a plan could revolutionize travel in the US, where HSR would seen to be even more feasible. With just a few stops, for example, you could easily travel, say, between Atlanta and Houston in 5 or 6 hours -- about as fast as you can drive to the airport, check in, wait around, fly, debark, gather your bags and wait for a ride to pick you up.

(High speed train)



We left Taiwan on a beautiful windy day -- one of the few clear days we had. We trekked around downtown and went to the city's amazing main Confucian temple. We took a bus to the airport and caught our KLM 747 back to Bangkok. We arrived in BKK close to midnight and took the bus into town. As befits a city which just spent heavy rotation on CNN, it's very quiet here. The bhat is down about 5 percent and hotels are offering nice discounts. The receptionist at Sawasdee House actually hugged Laura when we checked in. "You're back!" she exclaimed. It's hot, but it's good be "home."

(HSR clips)

The Little Country That Could ... Exist?

We made it to Bangkok's airport after a scary drive through downtown. The flight to Taipei was with a KLM 747. Taipei was quiet, calm and cool.

Taiwan ceased to exist for many nations in the late 1970s when China instituted its "One China" view of the world, which meant Taiwan was not the Republic of China but part of the People's Republic of China. The US agreed with PRC, but said they'd defend ROC if PRC did anything funny. Most other nations followed suit. So today only about a dozen countries recognize Taiwan as an independent nation -- and it's a pretty motley group, unless you cound Mali and Nicaragua as major world players.

Taiwan was not fazed. They became one of the world's industrial giants. Only they don't technically exist in the eyes of many.

I don't know about One China, but here's what we have seen to exist.

Crowds flock to Koahsing's night market.



There, they can find intestines for sale.



And waving kittens.



The simple lines of a Tao temple in Tainan.



And prayers posted inside.



Tainan's main Confucian temple.



With its prayers.



And carved door.



The boat to Green Island -- hey, why is the water up there?



Your author, demonstrating what happens to people on the boat when the waves get big.



Green Island: cliffs and beaches.



and beaches and cliffs.



And then there's Taroko, with its marble gorges.





And smoked sausages for lunch.

Bangkok is Burning

(Hotel rooftop, Bangkok, 5:30 p.m., April 13 2009)



Sri Lanka continued to mesmerize and repulse right up until the moment we left. Despite fatigue, we kept on plowing our way across the country, traveling from Galle, a World Heritage Site, south to Tangalle and then back north to Hikkaduwa before finally heading back to the airport.

(Girl on a bus)



In Galle Laura came down with an eye infection, and we figured we should get it checked out. It was the start of the Sri Lankan new year, and so all the private clinics were closed. Our hotel called a tuk tuk for us and the driver took us to the Galle General Hospital. I had a lot of flashbacks to Kenya and Tanzania in 1994 when I had to be hospitalized there for malaria. If you do come to Sri Lanka, try and not get sick. Let's just leave it at that. Even so, I was amazed to find her care was free, courtesy of the taxpayers of Sri Lanka. I tried to pay something, and there was not even a way to accept money.

(Gratuitious sunset shot, Hikkaduwa)



The journey to Tangalle was extraordinarily difficult and painful. Pollution, noise, heat, cramped spaces, body odor (Sri Lankans are likely the stinkiest people on earth -- sorry, guys!) and the usual assortment of people barfing on the bus.

I took an afternoon to myself to visit a set of mountain caves painted with frescoes begining in the second century BC. I was the only tourist there.

(Laura goes under the knife, Galle General Hospital -- OK, it was only eyedrops, they all thought it was very funny I was taking this picture)



That night we took a tuk tuk through a night fluid with humidity to the beach at Remake. Remake is one of the best sites in the world to view sea turtles laying eggs. A conservation project pays villagers to look after laid eggs instead of what they used to do, which was collect laid eggs and sell them for about 20 cents apiece. We were assigned a guide, a mostly naked drunk man, and sat in the rain on the beach for an hour. Suddenly his radio crackled -- a turtle had landed. We took off running down the beach and made it just in time to see a green turtle -- five feet long and 500 pounds -- waddling a wide trail toward the crashing waves. For a moment I looked into her eyes -- a timeless and unforgettable experience. Later we found the eggs -- 138 buried in a deep pit. We took turns pulling the eggs out and warpped some of them in Laura's handkerchief to transplant them to a section of beach where they could be looked after.

(Frescoes, 200 BC, Tangalle Sri Lanka)



From Tangalle we headed back to Hikkaduwa, a ramshackle beach town where we stayed in a swaying palm tree hut overlooking the beach and its 10-foot waves -- no joke! The next day we lollygagged, ate Sri Lankan pizza (not really pizza, in case you were wondering) and took a bus to Colombo and then to the airport.

(138 eggs)



Security at the airport was heavy due to Sri Lanka's ongoing conflict. When we got through to our gate I was surprised to see free Internet terminals all over, and so we checked our mail and learned about the trouble in Thailand.

(Laura catches up on some very important reading, Hikkaduwa)



Thailand has had political problems for years. In 2006 a coup replaced the prime minister with the current one. Last fall protests erupted against the government by supporters of the ousted PM, who has fled the country -- those were the riots that closed the airports for weeks. Two weeks ago tens of thousands of protestors converged on a central park -- all of them wearing red shirts. Two days ago, the red shirt protestors swarmed a summit at a nearby beach resort, forcing some delegates from Asian nations to fleet the convention center by running down a beach to waiting speedboats. Protests then spread to the capital, where the government declared a state of emergency and banned the gathering of more than five people at a time. Government forces, however, stood by while rioters attacked government vehicles and swarmed toward the capital.

We landed in Bangkok about 6 a.m. after the overnighter from Colombo. We found the famous Land of Smiles had been replaced by the Land of Surly People. Out of the airport, we found many bus routes had been cancelled; we had to take a taxi partway. Protesters had parked busses at key intersections leading to the state house, and there were fires burning at some intersections.

We checked into a hotel in the famous tourist ghetto of Khao San Road, and from the rooftop swimming pool could this afternoon see smoke from several fires and hear intermittent gun fire. We have a flight to Taipei tomorrow afternoon, and have learned now all bus services to the airport are suspended. We plan on taking a taxi early.

The violence in Bangkok is being played against the surreal backdrop of celebrations of the Thai new year. In our district, most streets are closed and are filled with throngs of locals and tourists who spray each other with ice cold water and smear clay on one another. The fact that many people use huge water guns to douse each other stands as a bizarre juxtaposition to the rioting taking place just blocks away.

Here's hoping for calm times in Taiwan!

Gross National Happiness

A few nights ago we stayed at a hotel here in Sri Lanka that had satellite TV, and one of the stations available was Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based Islamic news station which got Americans irate a few years ago by posting film of Bin Laden. I suspect most of those mad at Al Jazeera had never actually seen any of its news broadcasts, becuase when it comes to objective news content, there are few networks in the world which are finer.

(Where's Waldo? Who gives a shit! Where's the bus to Galle?)



Anyway, one afternoon Al Jazeera had a story on drought in America, and the story showed images of dry fields, towns with no fire protection and empty swimming pools. Then there was an interview with a woman standing in front of a very large home in Atlanta, and it was fun to hear a Southern accent after such a long time. Having lived in North Carolina for five years, we are well aware of the problems of the drought. This woman, however, was speaking emotionally about the hardships faced by some Atlantans who, due to the drought, had to live with brown lawns. Some had spent tens of thousands of dollars to drill private wells so watering the lawns and landscaping could continue unabated. Viewing this from Sri Lanka -- even from the comfort of our hotel -- made me wonder if the woman in Atlata had lost her mind.

(Anurahadpura)



The more I think about it, the more Sri Lanka resembles Ethiopia. Both countries harbor vivid remnants of ancient religions -- in Ethiopia it was the Coptic branch of early Christianity -- and harbor physical relics of that history. In both countries travel is fairly difficult and uncomfortbale. Both countries had the same ability to simultaneously enthrall and repulse. (Street scene in Sri Lanka: belching busses, endless horns, fish smells, sewage, unrelenting heat, people on either side of you trying to sell bottled water and lottery tickets, and a mass of school boys yelling simultaneously, "Hello sir! Hello madam!) Both countries, also, have had civil wars. When I was in Ethiopia, in 1997, the country had just ceded a strip of land that had become Eritrea. Ethiopians were saddened by this. The song you heard at the time in every restaurant and on every bus was this grating pop tune titled "Zero-zero," though it was pronounced "cero-cero." The song said, in essence, that if Ethiopia kept dividing itself to appease every group that came along then "soon we will all be zero-zero."

(Pilgrims in Anurahadpura)



Sri Lanka has had a much longer civil war to deal with -- a war some 30 years long. The central government has been battled a group called the Tamil Tigers, a Muslim group which wants to create an autonomous state in the northern part of the island. Earlier this year the Colombo government announced it was breaking a cease fire in order to achieve peace by either killing all the remaining Tigers or pummeling them until they surrender. So far, the central government is pretty far toward achieving its goal. The Tigers, who just a few years ago controlled the nothern end of the island, have been pushed on to a 10-mile long strip of west coast, where they have surrounded themselves with civilians. It's hard to get a very firm idea of exactly the situation here as the media is rampantly pro-government, but jubilant people on the street predict that within a few weeks the country could be at peace. Unfortunately, news that peace was about to break out have been tempered by the realization that years of war have left the country bankrupt.

(Anurahadpura)



Sri Lanka resembles Ethiopia in another way -- low per capita income. When I visited Ethiopia in 1997, it had the world's second lowest per capita income -- $60 per person per year. The lowest, incidentally, was a country I visited a few months later -- Mocambique, where the annual average was $50. While I'm no economist, I do believe that the math is fairly simple. For every person at the time in Ethiopia who earned $90 a year, there was one earning $30. For everyone earing $120, there was one earning nothing. For everyone earning $240 a year, there were two (or is it four -- OK, now I'm confused) earning nothing.

(Musicians under the bo tree in Anahadpura. This tree grew from a graft of the tree in India under which the Buddha found Enlightenment.)



Well, good times have ensued and the per capita income in Ethiopia in 2006 had shot up to $180. (Mocambique, incidentally, had grown to $340 while the world's lowest was Burundi, at $100, followed by Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Malawi, and then Ethiopia.

(Anurahadpura)



In Sri Lanka, in 2006, the per capita was a respectable yet still lowish $1,300 per person. That figure is low enough to classify the nation as low to middle income and while the figure means many Sri Lankans face grinding povery on a daily basis, recent growth (6 percent is forecast this year) means it is rising at faster than world standards.

(Ruins of the 11th Century mountaintop royal temple in Siguriya)



It's difficult if not impossible to quantify just what it means to live in a country with a low per capita income, however. A few years ago, however, the king of Bhutan had an idea. Bhutan has a fairly low income ($1,321) and the king got tired of seeing the country, which is sandwiched between China and India, referred to as poor. So he created an alternate index called -- I'm not making this up -- Gross National Happiness.

(11th Century frescoes in Siguriya)



Gross National Happiness is easier to say than it is define, but it was the king's attempt to integrate cultral values into living standards -- i.e., money isn't everything. Some economists took the notion seriously, with one suggesting happiness be measured through a recollection of recent memories. A more accepted definition processed seven criteria including economic wellness (things like debt and income), environmental wellness (pollution, traffic and noise), physical wellness (health and illness), workplace wellness (unemployment, job change, workplace complaints adn lawsuits), social wellness (crime, divorce, abuse), and political wellness (quality of democracy, freedoms and wars). Wait -- is that only six? Oh well ...

(Girls in Siguriya)



The resulting list, not surprisingly, showed Bhutan ranked 8th in the world in happiness. It also, not surprisingly, showed many "rich" nations were unhappy, and many "poor" nations had good things going on.

(Local tourists in Polunnawara focus on what is really exotic -- Laura)



I haven't been to Bhutan, but I have been to a lot if not most of the world's poor places, and my experiences are that many of the world's richest nations -- America included -- are places where people are also pretty unhappy. On our last RTW, in Calcutta, there was an unbelievable downpour one afternoon. Calcutta, as you can imagine, lacks a lot of things, like storm drains. The streets filled up so high with water that store keepers made dams to keep their shops dry, and the cars gradually all stalled. Then, when it became quiet (the power was cut), the rickshaw drivers came out, all of them filthy, barefoot and seemingly much too skinny to pull people around. All of them had the most magnificent smiles on -- the busses were stranded, the taxis grounded, and they would finally get their day. That's happiness. Yesterday, grinding through rushhour traffic in Colombo, we glimpsed an empty lot amidst the tumbledown apartment blocks. There were piles of trash (Colombo went something like three weeks without trash collection this month), there were stray dogs, there were abandoned cars, there were people bivouakced in allwys. And in the middle of it all there was a group of kids playing cricket with a stick and a plastic ball. That's happiness. The woman in Atlanta upset about her browning lawn? Is that happiness?

(Monitor lizard on 12th Century ruin in Polunnawara)



(Polunnawara -- Buddha's feet)



(Polunnawara)

The Consecration of Sri Lanka

I have this fascination with international airports I can't really explain. Well, it's not the airports so much as the places planes are flying to. Bangkok's incredible new international airport is one of the best I've been to, the departure board reading like a map of another world: Male, Addis Ababa, Tashkent, Tehran.

Our flight was to an equally exotic location, Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka. We got a fantastic last minute deal on Cathay Pacific, an airline based in Hong Kong. It was one of the nicest planes I've ever been on, and the service was great.

We landed in Colombo at 1 a.m. -- after adjusting our watches an unusual 90 minutes to meet the local time. Asians fly with an enormous amount of luggage, and we waited for nearly an hour to collect our bags in the small airport. Then it was a quick trip to the ATM -- it's unbelieveable you can go to almost any country on earth, stick a card in a machine, and get cash. My card, from a local bank in Texas, gives me fee-free withdrawals worldwide. We took a taxi out of the airport and into the sticky Sri Lankan night to a hotel in a nearby beach town. We were not asleep until nearly 3 a.m.

The Sri Lanka we saw when the sun came up was one both familiar and exotic. We took a tuktuk -- a sort of three wheeled contraption -- to the bus terminal and took a series of busses to get to Dambulla, which is not a very scenic town but is situation perfectly in the heart of Sri Lanka's Cultural Triangle.

For about 2,500 years the history of Sri Lanka has to a large extent been the history of Buddhism. Buddha found enlightenment under a bo tree in India a few hundred years before Jesus was born, and within a few years he had travelled to Sri Lanka.

DAMBULLA

Dambulla is an unattractive and dusty town at the base of a granite mountain. The top of the mountain has a huge overhand which starting at about 300 AD was filled in to create five caves. The dim caves are adorned with Buddhas and elaborate ceiling frescoes. The heat was intense and we stayed just a couple of hours before retreating to our hotel -- a nice one, with TV, a/c and a swimming pool.

(Dambulla caves)



POLUNNAWARA

Polunnawara, two hours north and east of Dambulla, was the capital of Sri Lanka for about 1000 years. Today it's a vast ruined city. We hired a tuktuk to take us around to the sites -- our guide book suggested renting a bicycle but with the temperature at 100 degrees with near equal humidity such an exercise was out of the question. Even being ferried around in the three-wheeled open sided contraption known as a tuktuk only offered us brief respite.

We've broken down this week and bought bottled water. Our UV pen water filter, cantankerous though it may be, is good at killing germs but apparently not effective at killing worms, which we've found in our UV filtered water several times.

(Dambulla caves)



SIGIRIYA

When the capital of Sri Lanka was not at Polunnawara, it was here, where the king resided atop a sheersided mountain today filled with ruins and monkeys. Halfway up the mountain, in a cave, are the untouched paintings of topless Sri Lankan maidens dating to the 4th Century.

ANAHADPURA

Andhadpura is not really a tourist site, though it is another of Sri Lanka's UNESCO World Heritage Sites. It was the home of an collection of extensive Buddhist monasteries.

The Buddha attained enlightenment under a bo tree, and soon after a cutting from that tree was taken to this spot and planted. Within a few years the original tree in India died, leaving this specimem. Today it's encircled with pilgrims praying beneath its huge canopy. Nearby are stark white dagobas, each said to house a relic of the Buddha. Just to the north is an enormous brick dagoba built on a footprint of the Buddha.

(Monkeys under a bo tree at Anahadpura)



KANDY

As the Buddha was being cremated someone ran into the pyre and grabbed one of his teeth. The tooth of the Buddha remained in India for years until it was threatened with destruction; it was then brought here, to Kandy, where it resides in a golden chamber sealed off. Hundreds of pilgrims pray in front of it daily, lay lotus flowers and light incense.

(12th Century floormat in Polunnawara)



Sri Lanka, perhaps more than any other country I've been to except Ethiopia, has the uncanny ability to awe you with its beauty and madden you with its idiosyncracies. Lankans are incredibly polite. I've never been called anything but sir, and Laura has never been called anything other than "the madam," even when being spoken to directly. At a dagoba in Anahadpura yesterday, a man had his children bow before us, he said, to show proper respect to visitors. Hotel workers bow and clasp their palms when addressing us. It's humbling and awesome. And yet, one very nice hotel we stayed at had bloody buggers smeared on the wall. You can't cross the road without risking your life. The food is "character building." The heat is insane. The beautiful stupas often have a pile of trash burning near their base.

We've got another week to go before we fly back to Bangkok.