Hotels,Hostels & Guesthouses

To Guangzhou China

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Friday November 22 2002 Hong Kong to Guangshou
Across the street to noodle shop for breakfast. Sat with woman who worked as a buyer for a British department store & whose English was very good.

When Bob tried to get Hong Kong dollars from an ATM the message he received was that his account was empty eliciting possible cardiac arrest; went to internet again and, panicky, checked his account through the internet. All was well.

Picked up our passports with Chinese visas right on time from the hotel receptionist and checked out…no messing around…the maid was right there at 12:00 sharp asking us to be out. Think these places have been conditioned by unscrupulous backpackers.

Took taxi to train station for new fast two-hour train to one of mainland China�s big cities of commerce, Guanzshou in neighboring Guangdong Province.

Three China Travel Service (CTS) guys met us in the Guanzshou train station; Biggest Professional Hustle we�ve seen yet; with great confidence and aggresiveness they took us to a desk where they explained the train route from Guanzshou to Guilin; they took us to CTS office (state sponsored China Tour Company where they ran in and bought our train tickets… on the way telling
us they had a cheaper hotel on Shamian Dao Island-the tourist section-but we declined. So they took us to a modest Chinese run hotel near the big international hotels. Probably paid a commission for the train ticket but it would have been a big hassle to try to communicate to the railroad ticket seller which ticket we wanted and the ride to the hotel was free so all in all we felt OK about being touted that day.

The ($30 hotel room had three beds, worn carpet, but had TV with no English programming and a telephone; the bathroom was grimy with mold on the floors and walls. All they had to do, Jana and I told each other, was douse the whole room with bleach! A lady at a desk outside the room kept our key and gave us hot drinking water in a thermos for tea (as they do at all Chinese hotels).

Saturday November 23
Buffet Breakfast at upscale Garden Hotel; I looked for American Press and Cultural Club that was listed on a hotel kiosk but couldn’t find it; we laughed-thinking the club was a cover for the CIA!

Took taxi to the Shamian Dao Island-the tourist area with shops and cafes. Bob made friends with Sherry at Sherry’s Place and bought two T-shirts (one saying “No Money” and the other saying “Love” in Chinese) and cap with Chinese lettering saying Macho Man (Hero). What else is there to say? Saw kerchief with marijuana leaves on it…we laughed and told her what it was…she looked it up in her Chinese dictionary and was mortified.

On the street in front of the shop talked to a friendly outgoing older guy with suspenders and pot belly from Indiana and his young Chinese wife he met through a friend living in China; he had written to her for awhile and then made the trip to China and brought her over on a fiance visa…married 7 years with a 4 year old boy. The 65 year old gu said he had the easiest job in the world at Chrysler (probably sales) and had no plans to retire. Wife used to have a shop in the upscale White Swan Hotel on the island where Communist Party heads used to meet.

Orange squash drink and iced coffee at Lucy’s Cafe; Bob made friends with Paula the waitress. Bob and Jana entertained a group of school girls 17-20 who wanted to practice English.

Watched large group of young kids…some with wanna be baggy pants and stocking hats… all waiting to enter an MTV karaoke hall.

Practically every male smokes…difficult to get away from it.

Hong Kong

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Wednesday November 20 2002
We flew to Hong Kong from Bangkok on China Airways at 3pm…a one hour time change. We noticed the metal spoon and fork that came with our food service but with plastic knife instead of a metal one…

I am always forgetting to fill out departure and arrival cards and you would think I�d have memorized my passport number by now! Difficulty finding information about bus and train to Hong Kong; finally found an ATM after a fashion. On the way out of the airport we saw guy in suit squatting, talking on his cell phone: past and present.

A very plush train took about 15 minutes to travel to Kowloon Hong Kong (vs. the bus that took one hour) but was about $10 each. A young professional woman with a badge walked very slowly through the train carriages casing everyone…watching for what…?

Garden Lee Guesthouse Cameron Road
We had made a reservation via email with Charlie Chan, the manager, for a Y400 (8 Yuan to the dollar) a night triple but when we arrived we were informed the triple was not available so they gave us two doubles for the same price. We were given a handful of keys…key to street enclosure; lift to eighth floor; key to hall door in entry; key to room just a little larger than a double bed; key to valuables drawer…

Applied for a multiple entry 90 day visa through the guesthouse. Then we got something to eat at small noodle shop up the street; were taken to the very back and seated.

Impressed by cleanliness and orderliness of the city; was told that plain clothed police patrol the tourist areas and fine anyone tossing garbage Y600. Little old ladies with brooms and dustpans keep the gutters clean just like the cities of SE Asia.

Bob and I sat on the steps of guesthouse and waited for Jana who came in from the airport on the bus about 11:30pm. Then went across the street to noodle shop so Jana could get something to eat; seated at the very back again…

Lovely Lao

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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My favorite country so far…the people are sweet but very natural and direct. Flew from Siem Reap Cambodia to Vientiane, the Capital of Lao. The “s” was added by the French so many travelers now use the word Lao like the locals do. I stayed a couple days in Vientiane and then flew north to Luang Prabang in the mountains where I stayed in the new Mano Guesthouse for a couple weeks at $5 a night…a home away from home…having many wonderful conversations with newfound traveler/ friends coming and going again.

I was usually the only foreigner in the morning market getting my noodles for breakfast at 7am. Lao massage, and herbal steam bath down the street at the local Red Crosswas $3 an hour. Heaven. I began to think maybe this is all I needed to live a good life.

Bob, in the meantime, had worked his way to northern Thailand from Bangkok and took a slow boat for two days down the Mekong River to meet me in Luang Prabang. A few days later we flew back to Bangkok where we would spend time running errands and getting ready to fly to Hong Kong.

Siem Reap

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My original plan was to take a boat up the Mekong River in Cambodia to the Lao border and then on up through Laos but I kept hearing reports about the opening and closing of the border and you have to pay off the guards to let you through and someone reported they had to pay $200 and if they don’t let you through for some reason that day and then you are faced with coming all the way down the Mekong back to Phnom Penh and starting over in another direction so I said the heck with it and decided to do the “tourist route” to Siem Reap instead.

Siem Reap
While Bob took a bus to the Thai border and then on to Bangkok, I took a fast boat down the Tonle Sap (Great Lake) to Siem Reap, a sleepy village famous for it’s many wats (temples and monasteries) especially the biggest-Angkor Wat-but fast becoming a major tourist destination. Most of the people sat on the roof of the boat for the four hour trip through marshes and past entire villages on stilts.

I spent an entire day on a motorcycle taxi going from one temple to another that was built between the 9th and 14th centures in the middle of the jungle when the Khmer civilisation was at the height of its creativity.

Angkor is one of the most important archaeological sites in South-East Asia. Stretching over some 400 sq. km, including forested area, Angkor Archaeological Park contains the magnificent remains of the different capitals of the Khmer Empire, from the 9th to the 15th century. These include the famous Temple of Angkor Wat and, at Angkor Thom, the Bayon Temple with its countless sculptural decorations. UNESCO has set up a wide-ranging programme to safeguard this symbolic site and its surroundings.

You could easily spend a week or more here seeing all the monuments. Most temples are actually little more than ruins…blocks of carved volcanic and sandstone rock lying in piles at the foot of the remaining structures. Much of Angkor’s finest statuary is stored inside conservation warehouses because of the danger of theft. In some monuments such as Ta Prohm, where a French movie company was filming the few days I was there, the jungle has stealthily waged an all-out invasion with bare tree roots spilling out and over the walls.

I had a Cambodian roast chicken and vermicelli salad late lunch at Les Artisans D’Angkor, a small artisan shop and cafe amazingly situated directly opposite Angkor. I thought of my friend Jana who visited here in the 60’s and wondered how the town had changed since then. My day ended taking pictures of the sun setting pink on the face of the dark stone of Angkor Wat.

I had had my fill of war museums in Vietnam and Phnom Penh so I avoided the War Museum in Siem Reap with an exhibition of Soviet and Chinese Mi-8 helicoptors, Mig 19 destroyers, T 54 Tanks and US 105mm artillery. You could also see an artificial minefield here, the brochure says. My motorcyle driver did pull onto the grounds of a Buddhist temple on the way back from Angkor that displayed a glassed-in pagoda filled with bones and skulls that could be viewed from all four sides.

Back in my hotel I spent some time organizing photos on my computer…we have some really wonderful ones of people…especially women and children. I gave a two hour English lesson to one of the Khmer girls that worked in the kitchen of the guesthouse where I was staying.

Finally, after five days, it came time to leave Siem Reap so I regretfully said goodbye to Arnfinn and his Khmer staff and left the simple and elegant Earthwalker Guesthouse that was built and managed by a young Norwegian cooperative and made my way down a dirt road out to the highway with my pack on my back to flag down a motorcycle taxi for the 10 minute ride to the airport. The young guys working in the airport laughed at my hair when I walked in. “Motorcycle Hair” I said laughing! The $100 Lao Aviation flight that took me to Vientiane Laos had no safety card, no airline magazine, no safety demonstration by the hostess and no floatation device under the seat…and I doubt if there were oxygen masks…but we did get a sad little hamburger patty and bun with a packet of catsup.

Cambodia Today

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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Pol Pot, the architect of one of the most brutal and radical revolutions that had its origins in Beijing China, was never brought to international justice. He died in 1989 from Malaria (or some say a massive heart attack). Some of his cohorts are running free; some are in jail in Phnom Penh.

The guesthouse where I was staying offered motorcycle tours to Pol Pot’s house and grave about four hours from Siem Reap but knowing that there are still a few thousand Khmer Rouge out there and knowing they hate the Americans I decided to stay put. Today Hun Sen of the Cambodian People’s Party, who destroyed all his opposition with political guile and cunning and likes to be called The Strongman of Cambodia, was elected Prime Minister in 1998, amid rioting and demonstrating, but recently seems to be a force for stability. There will be another election in 2003.

The People
Even though the country is very poor, the Cambodian people are surprisingly open, cheerful and friendly…busily going about their business on bicycles and motorcycles…scars lying just beneath the surface by years of conflict and the legacy of an estimated four to six million landmines dotting the countryside awaiting new victims. As many as 40,000 Cambodians have lost limbs due to mines…the highest per capita rate in the world…about one in 250 people. But they are reserved and guarded with foreigners…those human ATM machines.

At the Goldiana Hotel in Phnom Penh, the desk folder contained 7 double sided pages of Non Governmental Organizations with 35 NGO’s listed on each page…all attempting in one way or another to undue the ravages of war…providing over 70% of the income of the country.

It is heartening to see children gleefully playing marbles in the street and friends laughing over a beer in a sidewalk cafe…life bravely continuing on. We still prefer to eat at sidewalk food stalls, many of which are really extensions of the family kitchen that is all moved back inside at the end of the day. We did stop in one restaurant for Bob’s favorite drink, iced coffee and my favorite drink, Lemon Juice, to find that as many as 35 older children from the countryside lived and worked there so of course Bob entertained them all with his camcorder…their giggling and laughing…

Hanoi

Posted on by Laughingnomad

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September 24 2002
Bob left Hanoi right away on the train for Sapa near the Chinese border to do some trekking among the colorful minority villages and then to spend three days in Halang Bay learning to kayak. We are traveling separately until we join a friend in Hong Kong on November 20 when the three of us will spend two months in China before going back to the US after the first of the year. Bob is presently somewhere between Hanoi and Saigon and I will meet him in Saigon on Monday for a flight to Phnom Penh Cambodia.

Flying into Hanoi felt very strange after watching years of television during the “Vietnam” War in the 6.s and 70.s. (The “Vietnam War” is called the “American War” here.) The first night in Hanoi I ate a dinner of pork with pepper sauce and french fries, a wonderful break from the Burmese and Thai food, on the deck of a popular cafe while watching the lights reflect off Hoan Kiem Lake near the Old Quarter.

I stayed at a small charming hotel called the “Classic Street Hotel” in the Old Quarter which is full of narrow winding streets with tunnel or tube houses so called because their small frontages hide very long rooms that were developed in feudal times to avoid taxes based on the width of the frontage onto the street. At the time they were only two stories high but over the years stories have been added so the buildings are now very narrow and very tall.

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My cozy little room had a little veranda where I could stand and watch the busy street scene below.
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I loved my little neighborhood for the five days I was there…early mornings the same ladies in the same clothes and cone hats came to sit on the street below me with their big shallow baskets to sell small silvery fish and vegetables…one morning a young woman at a street stall angrily chewed the heck out of one of the women for some reason and chased her away…every day in the early afternoon I ate a huge bowl of duck noodle soup for about 30 cents at a food stall down the street….sitting on a little plastic stool at a two foot high wooden table with my knees under my chin……the same old man and his wife with kind faces welcoming me like old friends each day.

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Across the street was the A to Z Queen Cafe which was a kick-back comfortable budget backpacker hotel with dorm beds for $2.50 a night and free internet if you bought something at the bar…otherwise you donated a few dong via honor code in the little plastic boxes sitting on top of each terminal. Every night the guest house showed a war movie to the mostly young males from around the world, many of whom are Israeli by the way. An Israeli guy told me that every young man has to spend three years in the military…and then they take off to travel to clear their heads.

Nearby was a street market where the women did all the selling and the men sat on the sidewalks drinking whisky and playing board games. As I walked by, the women laughed when I gestured and said to them…look…you work…they play…

Down the narrow street and around the corner the local street kids pestered you to buy postcards…just buy from me today…I am lucky you are my first sale today so I can buy some food…old ladies glided along in slippered feet carrying two fruit-filled baskets one on each side of them that was balanced like a pair of scales across their backs with a long flexible blade of bamboo who wanted to sell you exotic fruit…pumalos that have to be picked a few days before it is eaten so it has time to “forget the tree,” custard apples, durian so stinky it is forbidden in the hotels, green dragon fruit, guavas, jackfruit, longan, lychees, mango-steen, rambutan, starfruit and juicy persimmons.

Then you could escape all this by ducking into the Tamarind Cafe & Fruit Juice Bar where the Handspan Adventure Travel Company sold tickets to Halong Bay and Sapa in the back. Bob took a three day excursion to incredible Halong Bay and claims it is one of the very best experiences of all time. Here you were sure to find fellow foreign travelers to trade stories with…not just a few of whom…to my amazement…or maybe just never noticed before…were women traveling alone. In happy solidarity I invariably urged them on…

Kalaw…British Hill Station

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In a monsoon rainstorm we climbed off the train in this cool wooded hill station built during the British occupation. The locals laughed (with me) at my little paper sun umbrella I carried that I had bought at the umbrella shop in Inle. Only transpo available was in a partially covered horse cart driven by a kind old man. Off went the horse clip-clopping with us along to the ironically named Dream Villa Hotel a few blocks away in the center of town. It was off season and we and a French couple were the only tenants in the second floor room in the very friendly hotel painted white with verandas and windows open on two sides.

I looked down into the street to see a common occurrence in Asia that we hardly see in the West…males touching each other…often holding hands while walking down the street. On this day three boys stood one behind the other looking out toward the street, each with hand and arms around the boy in front and finally the one in the back reaching to the boy in front, lovingly cradling the boy in the middle…it was done spontaneously and naturally and lasted only a few seconds. Refreshing I thought.

We explored the rotating market that happened to be in town the following Saturday…we have wonderful pictures of the goods that the colorful tribal hill people bring to town to sell; flowers, fish including eels, perfect looking leafy green vegetables of all kinds, cigars, prepared food of all unidentifiable kinds. Everyone wears flip flops; heels cracked and calloused. Babies in Burma are not diapered…the child is just held out in the air at the right time and whatever wants to come out comes out. One mother in the seat in front of us on the moving train to Kalaw held her baby with bare bottom out the window for this event.

We stop by a tea shop (patrons are almost always men and they all stare at me; women stay at home as they did in Morocco, Egypt, Africa, India, Greece and Thailand) to rest and watch the street scene. There was cheap clothing brought in from China…some of the tables piled with used plaid shirts, levi jackets and 501’s. So this is where the young Burmese university students get their levis I thought…you know those levi trucks you see in the supermarket parking lots at home?

Taunggyi…Last Frontier of Burma

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Taunggyi is the official end of the line for east-bound foreigners in Burma–at least if you are travelling by road. Beyond Taunggyi lies a world of black-marketeers, ruby miners, insurgent armies and opium and methamphetamine warlords. Because it functions as a conduit for smuggled goods from Thailand, China and India, this is one of Burma’s most colorful towns. Long-haired smugglers in army fatigues down the street alongside turbaned hill tribe people and sleek-suited Chinese businesspeople. An abundance of black-market consumer goods is displayed in the Taunggyi market.

In the market we see two Buddhist nuns asking for donations from the vegetable vendors followed by a young girl in a white T-shirt with Jesus (Heart) You on the front. I particularly liked the military green combat hat with a pirated Nike label which was very popular. An Indian in a military hard hat explained to us that we could get “free” pastry at the tea shop. Guys with camoflage jackets and military green Chinese issue tennis shoes are everywhere. On a second floor alley I was carrying some chicken and rice in a sack when two small raggedy boys came up to me so I gave them my chicken. They ran off tickled to death. A few minutes later they appeared again and handed me my 1000 kyat bill that I had forgotten that I had dropped into the bag. So we took the bill and gave them back 500 kyat (about 40 cents) and you would have thought they were just handed a fortune.

On our way out an old man came up to me and spoke in excellent English. He used to be a teacher he said and just wanted to talk. San Francisco, San Francisco he laughed. (People always seem to mention San Francisco for some reason when we tell them we are from America.) Good city! Then he cautioned me against buying any of the rubies two traders were trying to offer me. “Glass,” he said, “glass!”

Mothers make a big deal out of having their babies see us. They beam if we pay any attention at all to the small ones or take their pictures-almost like it is good luck for the child. We are a symbol offreedom-freedom they long for and hope to have sometime in their lifetime.

On the way back to our Chinese owned hotel called New Paradise that night we stopped at the Coca Cola Restaurant with pigs ears and pig brains on the menu and spent 20 minutes trying to get the waiter togive us some sugar for Bob’s ice tea. Think about it. How do you explain “sugar” to someone who doesn’t understand a word of your language nor you theirs?

Continuing along the street that evening, I asked a young guy at a betelnut cart to make me some betel chews that are made with small chunks of dried areca nut wrapped in a betel leaf smeared with lime paste. Some may contain flavoured tobacco (Indian snuff) peppermint and other spices. Experienced chewers can hold betel cud in their mouths for hours without spitting. An alkaloid in the nut produces mild stimulation and a sense of well being. The chewed nut stains the teeth dark red and leaves the streets everywhere running with blood-red spit.

Poverty, Government Greed and Human Sweetness

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August 18, 2002 Rangoon (renamed Yangon)
We took Thai Air to Rangoon. Bob left his Lonely Planet Guidebook Burma (renamed Myanmar by the military junta) on the plane and of course someone had pocketed it by the time we debarked. But we remembered the Yoma Hotel downtown and headed there in a taxi…discovering how the locals get free rides when a guy jumped in our taxi with us for the ride into the city.

At the Yoma a French Canadian couple at dinner loaned us their LP so we couldlocate a bookstore somewhere in the city. Incidently the guidebook says that Lonely Planet is outlawed by thegovernment in that country…but lo and behold we found one…at a government gift shop/ bookstore no less…the Myanmar Book Centre…for the hefty price of $30 for a book that has a sticker price of $17….but hey, we have to admit we felt lost without it so we were stuck paying the money.

I was pretty much cut off from email and the internet; the government does not allow anyone the use of the internet-even tourists. They only allow businesses to have access and it was extremely disconcerting for the hotel to tell me I could not click on the browser to get my web-based email. The hotel had their own email address that I could use on Outlook Express, they told me! That was no help of course because all my email addresses were on the web.

Rangoon (Yangon) is the only city in Burma, I was to discover, that had access to the internet. All of this restriction, of course, is government control to limit access of the populace to international information.

Watching the street scene outside the hotel window that first evening I see bare-footed boys playing soccer on the sidewalk and a line of bare-shouldered monks in maroon colored robes banging a gong as they marched single file down the sidewalk on the other side of the street. Bicycle rickshaws with side chairs weave in and out of traffic..there are no motorbikes or auto rickshaws here…it is heavenly…a third boy in thongs has joined the soccer game.

The next day walking down the sidewalk I am stopped by the sign of an old man nuzzling a tiny baby while carrying it. More barefooted monks carry louvered or round food bowls on their daily rounds. They usually carry a large fan the same color as their robes that they hold up to their faces.

Having called ahead we took a taxi later to the bookstore to bargain for our Lonely Planet guidebook. The taxi driver and I laughed when I pointed to the steering wheel; he had used his horn so much he had worn a hole through the vinyl in one spot! After checking out the outrageous prices for the ethnic artifacts in the museum/bookstore we walked next door to a very nice hotel. The Prime Minister of Malaysia happened to be in town and there was a trade exposition at the hotel. Found out the most common kind of oil the people use for cooking is Palm oil which isn’t even considered a food in the U.S!

One afternoon we decided to check out the American Embassy and register our presence in the country but when we found the building it was cordoned off with guards stationed around it and we were told we could visit an out-station about 20 minutes away by taxi. Needless to say we scrapped that idea.

Then walking past St. Mary’s Cathedral compound we decided to go in and pay a visit; we were greeted by Ms. Bernadette Ba Tin, a matronly woman who showed us the inside of the church (very unique interior-looked like Arafat’s headdress) and told us her life story. She had been in the military as a young woman but when they wanted her to spy and report on people she took the recommendation of her father and got out. “I was mean,” she said. “I would kick and pinch and hit people. But I’m not like that now.” She retired a couple years ago as the editor of a Catholic publication and they gave her the job of watching and cleaning the church in exchange for her room and board. We exchanged addresses; after all my middle name is Bernadette.

Jaipur India

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July 22-26 2002
The next day we discover we are the only guests in the Hotel Meghniwas and we have breakfast in the quiet restaurant downstairs. The night before Bob had a few minutes of the sweats but no fever…this morning he complains about not
feeling well…bones ache…no energy…tired…. I am silent and surly…but thanks be to the gods we hole up in our comfortable room all day watching movies on the HBO channel aware that this is our first bout of good old culture shock.

Culture Shock
I am having my first bout of culture shock on this journey. (My other culture shock experience in reverse was upon return to the States from a summer hitchhiking in Europe in 1965). Lonely Planet says there are several stages to this phenomenon. The first is the honeymoon stage-euporia and excitement-but the novelty quickly wears off and then comes the disintegration stage where instead of being thrilled you find yourself really disliking this new culture-right now in India it is because of the malodorous air, heat and noise.

Then you hit the reintegration stage when you grit your teeth and just get on with it because your return ticket isn�t for another six months! You blame every little problem on your host culture and become snarlingly hostile-for example, daring the next person to approach you for money.

By the autonomous stage you begin to focus on revising your travel style that is based on a more realistic assessment of local conditions…like never deliberately putting yourself at the mercy of a lunatic taxi driver. And we are realizing that underneath the layers of cacaphony there is an implicit order to the culture..very poor people finding the most efficient way to live that works for them…the many are not just individually lost on the sidewalks but are part of the community of their nearest neighbors…trading support and solace…ensuring survival.

Finally the interdependence stage is supposed to arrive when you develop an emotional bond with the new culture. Lonely Planet says this will take some time and effort but it will happen. We are not there yet we feel it coming…maybe…

Supposedly the more you know about the new culture before travelling the easier it will be…but god help me I don�t think there is anything that can prepare a westerner for India. What this experience WILL definitely do for you is cure you of any sense of feeling privileged or of being a more valuable person than the locals, just because you are American or have money or position, that you ever had or ever thought of having. Everyone endures the same conditions in the same way. In the movie “The Mexican” Brad Pitt cockily tells the cop “I am American!” The cop just looks at him and says “I am Mexican!”

Hotel Meghniwas
We luck out with a hotel that is well off the noisy street with grass and trees all around and a swimming pool in the back. The proprietors are professional and the staff is very friendly and helpful. After a nice quiet solitary Indian buffet dinner in the hotel restaurant we are invited by the proprietors, Mr. & Mrs. Singh, to have a drink with them in their office. Their two sons were educated in the states and live there still-one has a software business in Seattle and the other lives in New York. Mr. Singh is an articulate retired military person who has a good knowledge of Indian and US history and for an hour we appreciate his reasoned analysis of Indian, US and Arab domestic and foreign policies.

He says that the US and India got off on the wrong foot with each other years ago when Nehru, an aristocratic man that was highly educated in England, visited President Truman in the US. On the return to India Nehru remarked what a buffoon (or some such word) Truman was and US intelligence picked up the comment which injudiciously got back to Truman. Mr. Singh goes on to say that he thinks that in the next 5-10 years India and the US will become very very good friends because they will be the two biggest democracies facing the threat of China. Bob says that he has seen some very expensive looking homes in Jaipur and wants to know who would be living there. Mr. Singh answers that there are three upper class groups of people in India-first business owners, then politicians and then bureaucrats. I think that some of my friends and I who have worked for the state for years have been living in the wrong country!

Then Bob asks Mr. Singh what he thinks about the Pakistani/Indian conflict. He says the hostilities are old and the two countries have been threatening each other for years but there is a balance of power because both countries have nuclear capability. Furthermore, he flatly stated that this conflict is historical, it is not a situation defined by war and that India is not going to release a bomb just because a few villagers and politicians were killed in a couple terrorist raids!

He went on to say that people here are living life normally and the State department warning has ruined tourism that was already bad because of 9/11 and the off-season. The media carried the news today that the warning has been lifted but the damage has been done, he says.

Later I read an article in the India Times Magazine that reported that local corporate executives never did send their American expat employees home and furthermore they think the warning was timed to coincide with an orchestrated international move to pressure India and Pakistan to talk peace. The article, entitled “The Triggered Exodus” ends by saying that “the wait is now only for the nuclear silly season to end.”

Mr. Singh has some interesting but very big questions for Bob: are intra-uterine cures possible yet…are we close to human cloning…Bob tells him in all seriousness that he thinks man is headed for extinction and then the proprietor spends 20 minutes telling him how it is already slowly happening in India. Global warming and the resulting drought will leave Jaipur without water within two years.

We excuse ourselves when his brother and his wife come to the door and after Bob had been bitten by their dog. Should have opted for the rabies shots as suggested before we left home!