From the Mind of Trevor Stone

Google Earth has some pretty cool ways to view buildings in 3D, but like any great technology, after a while it seems ordinary. So it was a big "Whoa" moment when I saw what Baidu, China's largest search engine, is doing with their SimCity-style building layer:

Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, Zoom in on Mao's portrait
Shanghai too
Sprawling Guangzhou and the second tallest building in the world, the Canton Tower
Apartment buildings in Shenzhen Even the highway interchanges are 3D.

In the last week or so, Myanmar's coast got hit with a typhoon and China's Sichuan province buckled under an earthquake. The governments of both countries like to control information and are often hostile to foreign involvement. On the BBC tonight I heard that China has accepted aid from Taiwan (!) and that the U.N. is still trying to negotiate with the Myanmar military junta to establish a basic aid presence. The international media has provided regular updates on death counts, destruction situation, and other information as the rubble is uncovered in Sichuan. I gather that "people affected" numbers are still quite vague for the Burmese situation.

I wonder if China maintains tacit support for the Burmese military junta because it makes the Chinese Communist Party's policies look rather mild in comparison.

A month after leaving Xiamen, my travels in China are on the web in word and image forms. There's more details I want to write and pictures I want to caption, but what's there covers most of what the mollybee and trevorbear did. Please let me know if any links are broken, words are misspelled, or the pages look stupid in your browser.

"You've crossed the line, bucko. Now you're dating internationally." This is inscribed in The Book mollybzz and I maintained of quotes, by-hand boggle games, and 88 auspicious things to do in China. It accompanies a diagram like so:

                      \
                       \.--- really complicated
                       /            portion
                       \
                     In|
   Dating            te|      Not Dating
                     rn|
   *                 at|
International        io|
Date                 na|
                     l |.--- amorphous "it's
Monday               Da|     "complicated" zone
1-28                 te|     (on facebook)
9:30 am              Li|
                     ne|

Well, my four-week-long international date ended as I crossed the international date line, turning Monday night into Sunday night, which quickly became Monday morning. I got on a plane in Hong Kong around 8 on Monday morning. I spent about two hours several feet above Japan on early Monday afternoon. I left the land of ten feet above the land of the rising sun at 3 on Monday afternoon. I landed in Minneapolis (land of 10,000 ice sheets) before 11 on Monday morning. By quarter to five in the afternoon, I was having a burger and a beer at City Grille in Denver.
Time is an illusion.
Lunchtime doubly so.
Especially when you've slept like I have.
How's that?

On Saturday night I took a bus from Xiamen to Hong Kong. China has these creepy things called sleeper busses. They're half way between the stretcher busses from M*A*S*H and a regional bus. Beds are too small for big euro builds, you have to watch your stuff carefully, several dozen Chinese are coughing and smoking in the shared air space, and right when you're about to fall asleep, they stop the bus, make everyone get out, and serve a 不 好 吃 (not well eat) meal. The bus I took was nothing like that. Except the midnight meal portion. Those with money can bus overnight to Hong Kong on reclining leather seats with other folks well enough off that they can get respiratory ailments cured and smart enough to read the no smoking signs. I only remember waking up twice on the bus ride, but I got a lot of REM wakefulness with my eyes closed and song lyrics cycling through my head.

So Saturday: decent rest, but not much sleep.

At 7 AM on Sunday I passed through Chinese exit customs. Passport stamp #1. I then passed through Hong Kong customs. This is somewhat akin to going through customs when traveling from the U.S. to Puerto Rico. Except you can take a bus. Passport stamp #2.

The bus took us through the 山 of New Territories (山 is Chinese for both mountain and hill, Hong Kong's terrain fits somewhere between the two), down the Kowloon peninsula, and across to Hong Kong Island. I caught the metro to the ferry terminal and spent about an hour looking for a public toilet and following misleading signs to "Electronic Luggage Locker." Having finally found the latter (but not the former), I purchased a round-trip ferry ticket to Macau. Less than 4 hours after entering Hong Kong, I went through the exit process. Passport stamp #3. An hour later, I passed through Macau customs. This is somewhat akin to going through customs when traveling to the U.S. Virgin Islands from Puerto Rico. Except the boat takes an hour. Passport stamp #4.

For the next six hours I wandered around Macau, admiring the yellow building with wraparound balconies, windy streets, and vendors selling breadlike products. There's lots to like about Chinese cuisine, but they don't really have bread down. The ethnic minorities have some tasty bread dishes (try a Naxi banana pancake) and the Muslim Chinese (physically indistinguishable from other Han except for the headgear) know how to make good breads, but on the whole, the last month didn't feature a lot of cooked non-rice flour. Ah, but the Portuguese know bread. I ate a curry fish roll, a green onion "pancake" (more like pan-fried bread circle), a beef curry and savory salad dressing crepe, and a bunch of connected round balls cooked on a waffle iron. Oh, and a mango smoothie.

Aside from tasty bread products, Macau has some good churches, a 500-year-old Chinese temple (maintained and currently used), and a bunch of hotels, casinos, and boutiques. It's billed as The Las Vegas of the East, but it's got some authentic old buildings. And typhoons instead of dust storms. If you're in that part of the world and any of that appeals to you, it's worth a short visit. Know, though, that stuff is significantly less expensive in China, so if your goal is to pick up clothes and gifts on the cheap, cross into the mainland. If your goal is to blow a lot of cash, Macao and its casinos and Hong Kong with its entertainment and shopping are good bets.

At six I passed through Macau customs at the ferry terminal. Passport stamp #5. After half an hour waiting on the ferry, they announced the boat had another problem, so we all migrated to a new one. In the intervening time, the seas in the Pearl River delta had picked up, so somewhere around the halfway mark, a hundred people started vomiting in unison. Now that is entertaining cacophony. I only felt slightly queasy and all the bread in my stomach sat firm. Maybe the others had fancy casino lunches instead of saying om nom nom nom out loud while eating US$1 clumps of carbs. Suckers.

By 8 I had cleared Hong Kong customs for the second time in 13 hours. Passport stamp #3. I reclaimed my luggage and decided to follow Lonely Planet's suggestion for ethnic food in SoHo for dinner. After riding the longest escalator in the world several stops further than I'd intended and wandering around looking for an alley with good Thai, I settled on a good Vietnamese place. A combination of the $ currency symbol instead of 元 and the menu's entree prices after a month of great Chinese food for 10 to 35 yuan reminded me that I wasn't really in China any more, but Chinatown organized by the Brits.

With an early morning flight, I didn't want to spend HK$150 or more on a bed without an alarm clock, so I walked along the tip of Kowloon, photographing the Hong Kong skyline and then walked up Nathan Rd in search of a night club. Quintessential Hong Kong moment: six Asians in a rock band ended their set with a very good rendition of Play That Funky Music White Boy. Then the DJ started mixing (poorly) disco and other 70s hits. Then another band of four or five Asians (one might have been Filipino or Brazilian) took the stage and played a really bad version of Sweet Home Alabama.

The Lynyrd Skynyrd Rule: You're not allowed to play Sweet Home Alabama unless you've lived in or visited Alabama and enjoyed the experience.

The place was called All Night Long, but I didn't want to listen to bad versions of American songs of already questionable quality, so I decided to see what else was shaking in the New York of the east. At 2:30 on a Monday morning, the answer is apparently "not much." Maybe there are more all-night clubs on the Island. Or maybe they take Sunday nights easy. But the signs on sky scrapers had been turned off, the taxis were thinner, and a higher percentage of the open bars had pictures of scantily clad girls on their signs.

I found an open entrance to Kowloon Park, where my international date had begun four Mondays before. I hear New York's Central Park is a pretty dangerous place to be at 3:30 in the morning, but in Kowloon Park it's a very peaceful time to sit by a pool and reflect on a four-week date. I saw two other people walk through the gate at about the same time I did. I saw three security guards, one of whom was napping. I took a picture of some sleeping parrots. The only other folks awake were a flock of about 50 flamingos having a late night flamingathering.

So Sunday: lots of relaxation, but no sleep.

I took the 4:10 bus to Hong Kong International Airport, for some reason chiding myself for falling asleep for a few minutes and missing the quiet city scenery. You can't really check in at HKG before 6 AM, but I felt my time with the city was complete. I quickly went through security (5th of 7th airport not to notice or care about the tube of toothpaste in my carry-on bag) and Hong Kong departures. Passport stamp #7. My sleep plan worked, and I fell asleep shortly after the Pacific ocean got dark, waking up above a cloudy morning. I told three people at U.S. customs that I'm a { computer scientist, software engineer, computer programmer }, though I'm not sure how the answer would affect anything. Would they scan my bags if I said "second assistant pig-keeper?" What about "I don't work, that's why I was traveling in China, where life is cheap?" Passport stamp #8.

Back in Denver, I saw about six guys with beards as I got off the plane. It's good to be back in an environment where, on the off chance someone were to ask "Is your beard real," I can come up with a suitable comeback. I've never seen white folks yell out "¡Hola!" and then giggle whenever they see a Hispanic person walk down the street, but I'll accept bilingual public signs in my language in exchange for amusing locals with my greeting word.

I don't usually get hit by jet lag very bad. It's 10:30 PM local time and I'm fairly alert, but will probably get some good sleep soon, even though it's mid-afternoon China time. I won't go in to work until Wednesday, though, giving me a day to unpack, read mail, and loaf about in my hammock.

So Monday: perhaps 8 hours of napping, followed by a good night of sleep. But it is a 39 hour day.

The microscopic demons of Xishugangbanna invaded the gastralaowai systems and sat around in the lower bowel regions muttering things about the small bumps and numerous turns of the Yunnan Expressway First Grade Freeway. The road is something akin to driving from Golden to Glenwood Springs and then immediately driving back. Except with ten times as many tunnels. And with a sign that instructs "Elephant Passage Don't Blow." And toll booths at each city. We spent an hour going from the tool booth at the entrance of one city to the toll booth at the exit of that city. Unfortunately, the driver was in the blowing lane the whole way. But The Unmatchable Match was on the bus's VCD player. I knew it would be a good movie when it opened with a tow truck dropping a flaming police van off a cliff.

The next day we spent three hours in an Indian restaurant drinking sprite, chai, and banana lassi and eating vegetable curry and tandoori chicken in small increments whilst assessing our digestive abilities. We then walked thee stores up and spent 45 minutes listening to The Cranberries in a fruit drink shop before buying some fruit and big bowls of ramen for the next stage of our journey.

Two friends with a soft sleeper room to themselves is the most enjoyable way to travel, not just in China, but in the world. We cooked ramen, played boggle by hand, watched lovely karst scenery slip by, and slept better than the previous night's hostel while covering the distance from Kunming to Guilin in an evening, a night, and a morning, all 355 Yuan each (that is, transportation and lodging for less than US $50). I wish American rail travel was this good.

Today we met a guy who, in good English, complimented me on my beard. We proceeded to learn that he owns a tea shop, so we sampled the osmanthus (a local speciality), molihua (he claimed Guangxi produces the best in the nation) and oolong with ginseng. For the second time we spent too much on tea, but for the second time it was to nice people. He then lead us to the cheap (relative) place to buy river ticket cruises and helped translate the situation. I'm glad to get some kilometerage out of my fuzz face.

Have a happy Valentine's day and buy a red tassel for your sweetie.

If you ever find yourself in Lijiang, Yunnan, China, make sure to stay with Mama Naxi. The Chinese version of an Italian grandmother takes care of all the awesome native-and-adopted-English-speaking backpackers, feeding us family style dinners for 10 yuan (a buck and a half), banana pancakes (flatbread + banana = yum), and organizes travel tickets all over China and mini busses to Tiger Leaping Gorge. If you need a reason to be in Lijiang and Mama Naxi isn't sufficient motivation, do an image search for Tiger Leaping Gorge. Then you'll have a reason to come.

When you come to Lijiang, be sure to take a side trip to Shuhe. Like Lijiang, the streets are cobbled, and the rooves are fanciful. But Shuhe's streets are wider, their canals bubblier, their shop owners more laid back. In all, it's a more photogenic city. And it's an Oficial AAAA Chinese Tourist Site. American measurements usually only go up to AAA, but China's undergone immense growth in the last few decades, so they'va had to import some additional As from Africa.

Tomorrow night (Chinese New Year), we fly to je ne sais pas banana pancake (Xishuangbanna), a jungle region in southern Yunnan which has warm weather, diverse people, and lots of fruits for us to devour.

Northwest flight 554 takes off from Denver (DEN) at 9:10 AM on Saturday the 26th. The 7:07 AF bus gets to DIA at 8:27, which is less than 45 minutes before takeoff. So I'm going to take the 6:07 bus, leaving my house at 5:30 to walk to Cold Spring. (Unless someone has an unnatural desire to waste gas crossing town at dawn thirty on Saturday).

I will land in Minneapolis/St. Paul (MSP) at 12:04. At 1:40 I will board Northwest flight 3. The airport layout looks like I can go from domestic to international flights without another trip through security; I assume they'll just check my passport at the gate. Flight 3 will land at Narita Tokyo International Airport at 5:10 PM on Sunday the 27th, meaning I take off on Saturday afternoon and land Sunday evening.

The Narita (NRT) website makes it sound like connecting international passengers have to go through security between flights. However, all the Northwest flights yesterday were within about a five-gate range, so I sincerely hope that I don't have to spend my 50 minutes in Japan going through security to get from gate 25 to gate 23. Northwest flight 1 leaves NRT at 6 PM on Sunday and lands in Hong Kong (HKG) that night at 10:20 PM. I will then wander out with unknown hours of sleep and my just-small-enough-for-carryon backpack and take the subway to a hotel of some sort, probably in Kowloon.

On Monday the 28th, I will meet up with mollybzz for big hugs and lunch in Hong Kong. We will then sally forth to Shenzhen or Guangzhou to catch the train to Changsha, capital of Hunnan. After an eight hour train ride (plus a two-day flight for me), we'll probably want a cheap massage from a blind guy.

On the 29th and 30th, we will climb up and down Heng Shan, the southern of the five Taoist holy mountains.

We will take a train from Changhsa to Guilin in Guangxi, arriving early in the morning of February 1st. We will spend three days in Guilin and Yangshuo admiring karst formations and other art-inspiring features. (Search for images of Guilin... it's a stunning area.)

We will then fly from Guilin to Kunming, capital of Yunnan province. We'll spend ten days enjoying the many cultures and features of that fantastic province including the cities of Dali and Lijiang and a two-day hike through Tiger Leaping Gorge. (Search for images of that, too.) We'll experience Chinese New Year (of the Rat) celebrations somewhere fun. We might even get to the volcano+hot spring area of the province.

On the 14th of February, we'll fly from Kunming to Xiamen, where Molly must return to work. We'll enjoy the nooks and crannies of her neck of the woods for a week; I'll make sure to procure some fine tea as gift tokens for folks back home. On the 21st, Lantern Festival will light up the night as I prepare for the final piece of my journey. I'll take the overnight buss on the 22nd to Hong Kong. I'll spend a day in Hong Kong and a day in Macau before boarding Northwest flight 2 at 8:45 AM on Monday, February 25th.

My return to Narita will occur at 1:30, granting me a grand total lifetime Japanese soil accumulation of two hours and twenty minutes, assuming no airline delays. Flight 20 will then whisk me back to my ancestral land of Minnesota, departing at 3 PM on Monday and arriving at 10:55 AM on Monday. After that jaunt through the space-time continuum, I'll take a comforting flight 555 from 1:18 to 2:23, landing in Denver with my head full of Chinese and my belly full of airport food. I've told work I won't be in on the 26th of February, giving me a day to lie in my hammock until strange hours and then catch up on email, buy some groceries, and recover my postal deliveries from the neighbor who will be watering my plants.

Should you wish to contact me while I'm on the road, use my gmail.com address (trevorstone), as I'll be more likely to skim through its slim volume than my (still preferred for general contact) address at trevorstone.org (tstone or any other username you choose). I hope you all have a wonderful Groundhog Day, Shadowboxing Day, Lunar New Year, Valentine's Day, Presidents' Day, Lantern Festival, and every day in between. If you visit when I return, I'll make some tea for you.

It may be that I resonate better with ancient Chinese philosophy more than ancient Indian philosophy because the key untranslated concepts in the former are mostly mono- or bi-syllabic while in the latter the syllables flow freely and every god has several names. I'm able to build a better associative hashing function for Chinese concepts.

On June 3rd, 1989, the Chinese army massacred an unknown number of pro-democracy supporters. The Chinese government remains unrepentive to this day, and arrested many people who tried to publicly mark the 15th anniversary. One strike each against peace and democracy.


6/6/4 marked the 60th anniversary of D-Day. It was an incredibly bloody battle, so it's not the greatest anniversary of peace. However, it was a major turning point and led to the end of a warmongering and violent regime. A good day for democracy and not terrible on the peace scale.


Ronald Reagan died on Saturday. His affect on peace and democracy was somewhat ambivalent. On one hand, he demonstrated that anybody can become president of the United States, even if you don't know what you're talking about. In all seriousness, though, he mastered the ability of getting people to like him, which is how democracy works. His administration supported anti-democratic governments or rebels in Iran, Iraq, Nicaragua, Honduras, South Africa, Indonesia, and elsewhere. His election was helped by a secret deal to exchange hostages for weapons. A strike for both peace and democracy there. His primary contribution to peace was outspending the Soviet Union on nuclear weapons, though it takes the paradoxical (but well-reasoned) logic of nuclear brinkmanship to see this as a step for peace. That said, his death is neither a loss nor gain for democracy. After ten years of Alzheimer's may he rest in peace.


All in all a fairly bleak week. Let's hope this week is a better weak of peace and democracy.