In the past two days, Steve and I have explored the world’s biggest shopping mall, gone almost all the way to the top of the tallest building on the planet, shopped in a gold souk, 

visited two mosques, bought a liter of camel milk in a grocery store (and washed down our M&Ms with it), 

ridden in the gender-segregated sections of the spiffy Dubai subway, 

and walked 22.6 miles (47,628 steps, according to my iPhone.) Yet I feel I little disappointed. It’s not that we haven’t had a good time. It’s all been great fun. But I still have very little clue about how things work in the capital of the United Arab Emirates.

Before this trip, to the extent I ever thought about Dubai (i.e rarely to never), I envisioned it as a sort of mashup between Shanghai (the outlandish architecture) and Las Vegas. It’s more evocative of Vegas, if missing the casinos and alcohol and scantily clad women; the searing heat, wild attractions, and sense of having sprung up just yesterday out of the lonely desert all feel familiar. I’ve seen men in white robes and headscarves crowned with coiled goat-hair rope in Vegas, and women in full black burkas too. You see more of both here — but not so many more. Most folks dress in standard Western garb. 

In an attempt to gain deeper understanding into the history and culture of Dubai, we signed up for a couple of activities sponsored by the Sheikh Mohammed Centre for Cultural Understanding. I particularly had high hopes for the “communal lunch” where we would have the opportunity to “ask questions and exchange  ideas with nationals while enjoying delicious Emirati food.” The complex in which the centre is located was built by the Persians around 100 years ago, and it’s been beautifully preserved and turned into an arts and culture district. A couple dozen of us foreigners sat on richly decorated cushions in an air-conditioned courtyard, and the food was tasty and filling, if not haute gourmet. While we ate it, our Emirati host expounded on local customs. But it was all very basic and bland, kind of Islam for Dummies (or a bit like learning about Abe Lincoln from Walt Disney). 

Far more tantalizing is the neighborhood where we’re staying (Deira, the old heart of the city). Our guesthouse once was the residence of a powerful sheikh. Parts of the large complex that contains is are still being restored. We love the open-beam, 15-foot ceilings; the stained glass windows; the beautiful stone courtyards. The maze of streets that surround us are jammed with what look like tiny retail shops selling every kind of good imaginable. But they’re actually wholesalers! So the casual shopper can’t buy anything from any of them. Nearby souks do sell gold and spices and household items. We strolled through them a bit this morning, then even though the stunning heat was already building, at 9 in the morning, we walked along the canal where a flotilla of dhows are docked. They’re laden with rice from India, saffron from nearby Iran, cheap clothing from China. 

We have no idea how all this commerce interlaces. We don’t have a clue what the different emirates in the UAE think of one another. We’ve read that something like 80% of the people who live in Dubai come from elsewhere: India and the Phillipines and Burma and similar places. Hordes of these guest workers crammed into the metro with us yesterday, but we know nothing else about their lives here. 

It’s a little frustrating. And in an hour or so, we’ll take a taxi on the short (30-minute?) ride to the next emirate down the road, Sharjah (dubbed by Unesco the Capital of Islamic Culture). We’ll also return to Dubai in about 10 days for a final afternoon before we head to Uganda. All we can do is continue to keep our eyes and ears open.

 

I could report that Steve and I are hanging out in the Korean Airlines lounge at LAX in honor of the 105th birthday Kim Jong Il, but that’s not what brings us here (although today is his birthday.) We also are not about to depart for Korea (which, in light of current events, is probably a good thing.) The truth is that in about two hours, we will fly off to the Arabian peninsula, where we’ll be seeing some of the sights in the United Arab Emirates and Oman for the next two weeks. After that, we’ll continue on to Uganda. In Africa, we’ll be on a mission — NOT the religious sort but rather, as emissaries of the Women’s Empowerment (WE) organization. WE provides funds for microloans that help poor Ugandan grandmothers, and Steve and I serve as liasons between the San Diego and African groups.

We’re in the KAL lounge because when I got a Chase Sapphire credit card last winter, one of its benefits was the used of a “Priority Pass” that gets you into a variety of airport lounges. The only one in the Tom Bradley International Terminal here in Los Angeles is this KAL facility. (It’s not dazzling. But it is a whole lot nicer than than regular terminal waiting areas.)

As usual, I will make every attempt to report on our adventures as they unfold.

 

On our return journey to San Diego last week, we had about 24 hours in Beijing and less time in Tokyo. We did some fun things in each city and ate some good meals, but none of it merited blogging about. The larger question I never addressed, though, is whether it was worth returning to Tibet. Or more broadly: should anyone consider going there in the first place?

Tibet has a number of strikes against it: mediocre food, complex and expensive Chinese travel regulations. The dry, oxygen-starved air makes any visit at best uncomfortable and at worst dangerous. Steve and I have an almost-religious devotion to never returning to most places. The world is too big and our appetite to see as much as possible of it too keen. Yet we went back to Tibet, and both of us felt good about that choice.

Why?

The world has shrunk so much in our lifetimes. I can go online and within minutes figure out how to get to almost every point on the planet. But Tibet still isn’t that far removed from being a forbidden kingdom. A hundred years ago, no Western woman had ever set foot in Lhasa (the capital city). When Steve was born, there wasn’t a paved road in the entire country. No Tibetans lived with electricity or a car. Then the country was a theocracy, filled with monasteries that often were inhabited by thousands of monks, powerful men who pulled the most important levers within the society. If you travel, as we do, in part to glimpse different ways humans have lived throughout history, Lhasa still provides an extraordinary link with the medieval past.

On our five-day road trip to Everest Base Camp, we visited an important monastery almost every day. All of them suffered terrible destruction in the years after the Chinese took over; things were particularly ghastly during the Cultural Revolution. The places we visited all have been at least partially rebuilt, though the resident monk population has shrunk severely. Tibet isn’t what it was 70 years ago. But it also isn’t like anything I’ve experienced anywhere else.

The temples are gloomy, spooky places, still illuminated (at least in part) by yak-butter lamps. Statues of the Buddha (past, present, future!) and other deities tend to be big and baroque — the stuff of nightmares or dreams. For a country as poor as Tibet, it’s strange to see all the paper money, usually but not always the smallest bills, stuffed into every crevice of most temples. Believers think they gain spiritual merit by donating generously. The temples offer other head-spinning sites. The library off the main assembly hall of Sakya Monastery fills a narrow passage. It’s lined with shelves that ascend probably 35 or 40 feet up every wall. The shelves are crammed full of boxes containing centuries-old manuscripts. Our guide told us the pages on those manuscripts bear gold, silver, turquoise, and coral ornamentation. I could only begin to imagine all the man-hours, the man-lives, required to create them. I couldn’t imagine anyone ever again climbing up to the upper realms and retrieving one of the boxes and using the contents for anything.

A handful of pilgrims shuffled through that passageway along with us, but most of them weren’t glancing upward but rather making their way to a huge old book on display in one corner. We passed several young couples who had brought their infant babies to it. Our guide said they believed blessings would result from touching the adult or juvenile head to the sacred volume. In the distance, we heard the periodic sound of a conch shell being blown. Pilgrims pay the monks to blow it. They believe it can enable the suffering souls of evil-doers who are trapped underneath the nearby hills to get a breath of air. Lighting butter lamps was a similar act of kindness, we were told. Doing so is thought to allow the subterranean sufferers to enjoy a brief glimmer of light.

Not all the weird, exotic past is confined to the temples. On the road, we passed a hillside that’s still a site for so-called “sky burials.” In this Tibetan tradition, the dead person’s body is cut up and placed on the mountain-top for vultures to eat. (Really poor families also apparently use less expensive but similar “water burials,” while sick people whose bodies are diseased may be burned.) I questioned Tashi closely about this, and he insisted that sky burials are not a relic of the distant past, but rather the most common way most Tibetans still dispose of their dead today.

Hundreds of pilgrims still shuffle all day long around Lhasa’s Jokhang Temple, the holiest site in all of Tibetan Buddhism. On this visit, we joined in that procession as we did last year and stared at those who believe they get spiritual credits by prostrating themselves fully on the ground, over and over.

It’s a bizarre religious practice. More homey was the kora we joined in Shigatse, on our way home from Mt. Everest. In Tibetan Buddhism, a kora is the practice of walking (“circumambulating”) around a sacred site or object – commonly a special mountain or lake or a temple or religious tower. Again, believers think they accrue merit by this, but I found it pleasantly relaxing and social to join in the group stroll around the great Tashilumpo Monastery near sunset.

Most of the folks walking around the monastery were older. In contrast, teenagers were at the heart of another sight that almost by itself seemed to make our long demanding journey to Tibet worthwhile. At Samye, the country’s first monastery, we watched a large group of girls and boys working to restore a rooftop built in the traditional method. The monks mix special clay and small stones and pebbles then spread the mixture on the room or floor. Workers then must pound the mixture to make it strong. We were told that the kids doing this work were no longer in school and being paid something for their labor. We didn’t ask how much. Clearly this sort of work was another relic from another time long ago.

<p><a href=”https://vimeo.com/191044439″>My Movie</a> from <a href=”https://vimeo.com/user25079241″>Jeannette De Wyze</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>

 

If I were being reborn a girl in Tibet today, I’d much prefer to come back as the 6-year-old daughter of the young couple in whose Lhasa home Steve and I dined on our last night. The “family kitchen” of the parents serves up tasty food at their dining room table. While we savored yak dumplings (steamed and fried) and stir-fried eggplant and green beans, the little girl and her friend sang along to songs on an iPad kitted out to be first-grader-friendly.

<p><a href=”https://vimeo.com/191041930″>ABCs</a&gt; from <a href=”https://vimeo.com/user25079241″>Jeannette De Wyze</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>

It was easy to imagine that little girl learning English (and Mandarin), getting educated, growing up to do something other than pounding the rooftop of a lonely monastery in the middle of nowhere. I hope that happens. At the same time, I’m grateful to have had a glimpse into the fast-disappearing world in which she was born.

 

 

The highest railroad in the world used to run through the Andes east of Quito, Ecuador. I first heard about it when I read the great rail-traveler Paul Theroux’s chronicle of taking trains through South America (The Old Patagonian Express). Theroux’s description of the distress suffered by him and his fellow passengers as a result of the altitude was both hilarious and riveting. I had no desire to experience it. Yet early Saturday afternoon (Oct 29), Steve and I pulled out of Lhasa’s main station on the rail line that knocked the Ecuadorian train out of first place. 

The line connecting Lhasa with Golmud in China’s Qinghai province (and thus the rest of China) opened in July of 2006. Costing $4.2 billion, it was said to be an engineering wonder, designed to stay safe and strong through some 340 miles of permafrost. Many observers decried it as the final hammer that would enable the dominant Han Chinese culture to obliterate traditional Tibetan society. Indeed, since its inauguration, tens of thousands of Han have immigrated to Tibet, and millions now have vacationed there. Steve and I wanted to take the train from Lhasa eastward, both to experience one of the world’s most remarkable rail lines and to see a big swathe of China unfold through our windows.

The train has three fare classes. “Soft sleeper” tickets don’t cost much more than the next grade down, but the train has only a few such cars, and competition for the berths is fierce. Despite the beguiling name, the 4-person compartments offer little privacy. Picture two sets of narrow bunk beds packed into a very small room. The “hard sleepers” contain two additional bunks (6 beds total), so things are even more cramped. Your only choice is to be lying down (on your bed) or hanging out in the corridor. The third category are like any train seats. You sleep sitting up in them.

In August, our Tibetan tour operator emailed the good news that he’d managed to secure seats in a soft-sleeper compartment for us. Since our guide Tashi had to meet another tour group Saturday morning, the tour-company owner (Woeser) picked us up at our hotel and accompanied us to Lhasa’s hulking train station, which was obviously designed with the Potala Palace in mind. Woeser shepherded us through the security checkpoint, including a body scan and pat-down. Then we said our good-byes and Steve and I headed for the waiting room. A clear announcement (in Mandarin and English) alerted us when it was time to board. The way the crowd surged aggressively toward the boarding gates also was a clue. The stampede puzzled us; all the seats were assigned. But once we got to our compartment, it was clear why it paid to be early.

At first glance, the compartment looked cozy and inviting. Clean pillows and comforters were piled on the lower berths, and a pristine white table cloth covered the little counter holding a glass vase and (fake) red rose. But… where to stash our suitcases? No space for this seemed to have been provided. One of our compartment-mates, a serious young economics student who spoke pretty good English, carried only a small pack, but the fourth in our foursome was a larger guy lugging a bulky sky-blue suitcase. After some scrambling, we figured out that we could cram all three of the bags onto a shelf near the ceiling. Very close to 12:45, we eased out of the station, and settled in for our 33-hour journey.

1 pm — A cute young Chinese woman in the uniform of a railway worker takes our tickets and gives us plastic cards that we guess we’re supposed to guard. She also hands us two forms. Besides asking for the basics, they require us to confirm that we’re fit enough to tolerate altitudes of 3000 meters (about 9750 feet). This is strange. The highest pass crossed by the line (Tanggula) is more than 16,000 feet. I note the little boxes labeled “Oxygen Outlet” near the head of each bunk. Inside, there are two holes, but nowhere do we find any hoses to connect to them, hoses which reportedly pumped out oxygen in the line’s early days. At the foot of each bunk there’s also a sleek little TV screen, but these also don’t seem to work any more.

4 pm — Steve and I have been staring for hours at the vast and empty landscape north of Lhasa. Rugged snow-dusted hills rim close-cropped ochre grasslands that remind me of felt. We occasionally spot some lonely railroad workers, but the principal inhabitants of this grim country are yaks — so many that Steve thinks some must be wild. (I doubt that).

5:25 pm — We start seeing frost (or is it snow?) laced through the grass. Have we finally reached the permafrost? A huge mistake was our failure to bring a decent map of the country we’re passing through. We also have no train schedule. The only other Westerner we’ve seen on the train, a friendly young Dutch woman who’s on a 6-month-long backpacking adventure, has told us she’s getting off in the city of Xining around 10:15 Sunday morning. From such bits of information, we’re struggling to extrapolate our position. 
6:15 p.m. — For lunch we ate sandwiches purchased in Lhasa, but we’ve resolved to use the train’s dining car as much as possible to see more social action. When we enter it, however, the sullen looking waitress pointedly ignores us. We plop down in an empty booth and wait to see what happens. 
After some time, another train worker comes up to us and brusquely asks, “You want fish?”
“Is there chicken?” I counter. “For two. And beer?” This prompts him to scribble something on a piece of paper and to demand from us 50 yuan (about $7.40). That seems awfully cheap, and we soon find out why. We get only one dish consisting of small pieces of bony chicken and hot peppers, two bowls of rice, and two watery bowls of soup. No beers. 
After polishing off the meager fare, we supplement it with some beer and a can of Pringles purchased from a guy with a cart. But we’re feeling the altitude, and so we refrain from tucking into the Oreos we picked up in a Lhasa supermarket. 
1 am — We turned off all the lights in the compartment shortly after 10, but I haven’t done much more than doze. The train has an unpleasant habit of lurching abruptly every now and then. A train derailment anywhere in the world would be a nightmare, but the thought of it happening in this desolate wasteland is enough to keep me from relaxing. There’s no way to tell if we’ve crossed the highest pass, but I look forward to getting it behind us. The dry heat on the night train has irritated my sinuses so much they’re all but blocking any intake of the already oxygen-depleted air. I feel breathless every time I roll over. Still, there’s no drama unfolding on this train to match what Theroux described in the Andes. Maybe that’s because everyone is already more or less acclimated from their time in Tibet. Climbing up from Beijing may be uglier. 
7:10 am — I’m sitting on one of the jump seats in the corridor outside our compartment, happy to see the eastern sky begin to lighten at last. The imminent dawn reveals still more frozen wilderness. When I peek into the dining car, a few minutes later, I note that someone has hauled a piece of furniture to block admission. I also spot the toes of a railway worker asleep in one of the booths. 
8:15 — Discouraged by our experience with dinner last night, Steve and I buy two boxed breakfasts. The dough balls have no tasty meat in them (as they often do in China), but I’m feeling so veggie-deprived, all the little pickles taste delicious to me. The only calamity concerns coffee. We’ve got plenty of Starbucks Via packets with us, and there’s a spigot near one end of our car that supplies really hot water. But we’ve got nothing to drink it in! I type “2 cups of hot water” into my iPhone and Google translates it promptly and accurately. But in the dining room, one of the chefs snaps that we can get our hot water from the spigot. (We don’t need Google Translate to figure this out; his expression makes it obvious). We meekly request 2 empty cups, but he refuses, contemptuous. (Only after boarding did we realize that every Chinese passenger has sensibly brought a little thermos in which to carry his or her hot water.) 
10 am — We reach the outskirts of Xining in Qinghai province, the first real city we’ve seen since Lhasa and a much bigger, smokier, more industrialized population center. At the big train station here, we’re surprised to see our two compartment-mates prepare to disembark. The nerdy English-speaking economics student tells us he’s switching to the train on the track across the platform. The guy with the big sky-blue suitcase is too. I dare to dream that Steve and I might have our compartment to ourselves for the remaining 12-hour-ride to Xi’an, where we’ll get off and head for a hotel so that Monday we can visit the tomb of the first emperor of China, with its famous army of terra cotta soldier statues. I head for the door to try to photograph the “Lhasa-Guangzhou” sign on our car. But the cute little train attendant, seeing me, starts shouting at me in Mandarin. She’s alarmed. Wait! She seems to be saying that Steve and I must also change to the other train! In a panic, we gather up all our stuff and cross the platform. In car #6, compartment 7 (the same one we had on the first train), we reunite with Sky-Blue and Economics Student. I don’t know why Woeser didn’t warn us that we would have to change, but all’s well. The new train doesn’t depart for several more minutes. And moving to the new quarters gives us an opportunity to extract the plastic cups we’d buried in our carry-ons. With them, we can get our daily java jolt.
12 — The new train has a fancier looking dining car. When Steve pokes his head in shortly after 11, he spies a quartet of young railway workers sitting in one of the booths, snapping the ends off big fat green beans piled high. No passengers were in the car then, but when we decide to seek lunch shortly after noon, every one of the 10 booths has filled up, except for one that has a “Reserved” sign on it. A tall handsome guy in some sort of a police uniform is sitting in it, and we observe him tell several other would-be diners that they may not join him. About 12:25, four higher-ranking officials in civilian clothes push in and take the booth. 
The dining car staff kowtows to them, serving up a variety of dishes immediately and several times offering extra rice. All this helps to distract me from how hungry I am. (Those breakfast pickles lack staying power.) We’ve grabbed a couple of stools and are determined to wait until the first shift of lunch patrons eats and leaves. At one point, a Chinese guys sits down in the remaining stool, and a waitress gruffly shows him the hand-written menu and takes his order. She ignores us. This irritates me. 
Finally one pair of lunch patrons departs and Steve and I charge up the car to claim the seats. I also come up with a plan for ordering. We inspect the three plates of leftovers on our table, and I snap a photo of the two that look best. The next time the surly waitress passes us, we all but physically restrain her and show her the photos on my phone. She gets it and even asks if we want rice to go with the two dishes. This time we pay 75 yuan (about $11). The food is delicious.

Back in our compartment, we sip Starbucks instant, munch on Oreos, and breathe in air that already feels fuller and more satisfying (if polluted).

1:30 — We arrive in the ancient Silk Road city of Lanzhou, where Economics Student gets off. Lanzhou today is home to some 3.6 million residents. Xining has 2.2 million. Our destination for this night, Xi’an, has around 10 million residents. The chance to glimpse these huge cities that we’d never heard of before this trip is part of what attracted us to the ride. Lanzhou looks like a poster child for China’s environmental woes. The smokestacks and blast furnaces remind me of what the far south side of Chicago looked like in my youth.The smog is worse than it was in LA in when Steve was a kid.

5 pm — We’ve spent the last several hours staring at the muscular mountains of Gansu province. They frame huge valleys, every inch of which is farmed or occupied. Mysterious caves dot many hillsides. Every few minutes, we also see clusters of mind-bogglingly huge apartment buildings. They’re interspersed with more farms and at one point, a sea of greenhouses. 

6:30 — Worn down by our earlier battles to get fed, we gamble that someone eventually show up with beer for sale (he does) and boxed dinners. They prove to be edible, if unexciting.

10 pm (Sunday) — I’m so ready to get off this train. The sun went down several hours earlier, and the train light that replaced it is wan and depressing. Our roommate, Turquoise Suitcase Guy, isn’t a bad fellow, but he’s spent the entire ride watching insipid Chinese TV shows on his Samsung smartphone, napping, or furtively munching on the contents of a large bag of junk food. Although we were supposed to arrive in Xi’an at 9:47 pm, the train rumbles on and on past that hour. Eventually I begin to see huge buildings looming against a night sky that often seems to be tinged with dull red light. In my craving to reach our destination, the passing scene makes me think of Blade Runner.

7:30 am Tuesday — We’re feeling rested and happy after our day in Xi’an. For our last train ride in China, we have to head to a different rail terminus in the northern section of the city. It’s just 5 years old, a gleaming vortex of high-speed rail lines that feels more like a fancy airport than a train station.

We find our boarding gate with plenty of time to spare, and settle into our second-class seats on the bullet train. It looks a lot like its counterparts in Europe, and soon we’re ramping up to speeds of about 180 miles an hour. 

1:15 pm — The past four hours have borne us through mostly flat country. At least we think so. We can’t see more than a few miles out either side of the train. Beyond that, everything has disappeared in a murky fog that looks like some of the worst air pollution on the planet. Nonetheless, it’s an entertaining ride. For a while we speed along next to the enormous expanse of the Yellow River. We pass large tree-rimmed fields where all manner of crops are being grown. Some farms look as large as their American counterparts, except we spot within them something we’ve never seen in America: little mounds of earth and stones that obviously mark the graves of ancestors. 

As charming as that is, the thing that makes our jaw drop over and over are the massive apartment buildings — 20 and 30 stories tall grouped together in clusters of 8 or 12 of 20. We scarcely go more than 5 minutes before seeing another mob of them, all the way from Xi’an to Beijing. It’s another glimpse of the reality of sharing life with 1.3 billion fellow countrymen.

On a morning in late March of 1974 (just a week or two after Steve and I were married), a farmer near the ancient Chinese capital of Xi’an was digging a well in search of water. He thought that the persimmon trees in the area suggested water might be present. While digging, he encountered some clay fragments. At first he thought they were remnants of an old pot, and thus potentially valuable, but he couldn’t discern any pot shape and the decoration suggested it was something else. Later digging unearthed a ceramic arm. Eventually, suspecting that the site might have archeological significance, he turned the fragments over to the cultural office of the local museum. Experts soon confirmed that Farmer Wang had found the first clues to one of the most important archeological treasure troves in human history — an as-yet-undiscovered part of the burial complex of China’s first emperor.

That guy, Emperor Qin (pronounced “Chin” — from whom the country’s present name derives) was a monster — both ruthless and stunningly cruel. He was also obsessed with immortality. According to the biography Steve read, at one point he ordered some of the country’s top scholars to find the secret to eternal life. When they failed, he had them 460 of them executed. If he had to go on to an afterlife, he was determined to rule as emperor there, and he reasoned that he would need a strong army to seize power. He ultimately decided to build and bury one — thousands of larger-than-life soldiers and archers and cavalrymen made of clay — near where his own body would eventually be interred. The artists who created them produced beautiful work, but if the emperor was impressed, he had a funny way of showing it. He killed them too (and buried them with the terra-cotta army.)
We went to Xi’an to see the incredible figures that have been exhumed and reassembled over the past 42 years.

This is what the warriors looked like after more than 2000 years and several major earthquakes:

A huge amount of excavation and puzzle-solving remains to be done. These warriors are in the process of being painstakingly pieced together by archeologists.

In addition to feeling intensely grateful for the opportunity to see them, we appreciated other turns of our good fortune. The guide that we hired to take us to and around the huge, impressive complex that’s been developed at the site told us it had been raining for the past week or more. Rain is rare in Xi’an, and it scoured the legendarily polluted air, so our outing took place under sunny, blue, and relatively smog-free skies. We learned that the the gigantic building that houses terra cotta horses and chariots would be closing to the public the very next day (so that the workers could continue excavating and reassembling them). Although 30,000, 50,000, even 100,000 Chinese tourists jam this space on days during the height of the season, the crowds were relatively light; we could see everything easily. 

Perhaps our coolest stroke of luck was that we met… Farmer Wang! His digging days are long gone. He’s rich and famous, our guide said, and his family owns one of the fancy gift shops that have been erected on the complex grounds. He’s not there every day, but when we popped in, he was sitting at a table piled high with the book that bears his name. An assistant told us if we bought one of the book/postcard packages for 200 yuan (just under $30), Farmer Wang would autograph it and pose for a photo with us. Who could resist that?

Note the photo behind us of Bill Clinton meeting Farmer Wang. (We imagine that Bill didn’t have to buy the book.)

I’m writing this on the train that runs between Lhasa and Beijing. We left the Tibetan capital a few hours ago, the start of the last phase of all the railroad adventures we’ve had on this trip. Eventually I hope to report on the highlights of those. But first I’d like to share the top 3 insights we gained from all the driving we did in the previous week.
1) The Chinese take the screwiest approach to accident-reduction you’re likely ever to see.

On the roads between Lhasa and Mt. Everest (and other points), government officials have set up a complicated system of speed-control checkpoints. Over and over, our driver would stop and our guide would dash into a roadside office to have the time recorded. Further down the road would be another checkpoint, and we would have to take care not to reach it sooner than the time allotted. If we did, that would indicate to the speed-control cops we’d been driving faster than permitted. 

The problem with this strategy was that the time allotted was often too long. And the intent was laughably easy to subvert. Our driver never drove at speeds that seemed reckless to Steve and me, but over and over, he would have to halt shortly before a checkpoint and wait for anywhere from 5 minutes to 20. This rigmarole increased the time of our final drive from Shigatse to Lhasa to seven and a half hours, instead of 7 or less.

In addition to the pointless checkpoints, the Chinese authorities often set up phony police cars…

And phony policemen (often holding phony radar guns) along the side of the road. Apparently everyone knows they’re fakes and can be ignored (except for the occasional rube who blunders along and believes them?)

We also saw occasional installations of wrecked cars adorned with lots of wordy warnings. Tashi said the signs described the gory details of how everyone in the car had died due to reckless driving. Sometimes we passed under actual working video cameras set up to check driver speeds, but apparently every professional driver on the road knows the location of every one. Ours always slowed to a crawl (for the few seconds it took to pass under the speed detector).

2) Fueling one’s vehicle might be an act of terrorism.

We didn’t see many gas stations, though of course they do exist, sometimes resembling their American counterparts but sometimes tucked away inconspicuously on a small town’s side street. That’s not so strange, but what boggled Steve’s and my minds was learning that every time Tibetan drivers need fuel, they must present their id card and fill out special forms. They have to do this regardless of whether they’re filling up a van full of foreign tourists or a simple motorbike. We were told that the reason for this was to reduce the risk of some Tibetan dousing his body with gasoline and setting himself on fire in protest of the Chinese presence. That’s happened a lot over the past 65 years of the occupation, and apparently the authorities still consider it a serious threat.

3) There’s more than yaks and hillside monasteries to catch the traveler’s eye out in the country. 
To keep big trucks off one 50-plus-year-old bridge, the road masters built a special jig at each end of the span. Our 8-passenger Hyundai van squeaked through — but with only inches to spare.
A bit further down the road, we passed a congregation of trucks and vans.Tashi declared that it was a Chinese filmmaking crew making a movie. We also were amused by the sight outside tiny roadside establishments of kettles of water surrounded by parabolic mirrors set up to catch the sun’s rays and keep the water hot — solar heating in the service of sanitation (and a steady source of hot water for tea). 
We failed to catch a photo of any of those, and I felt it would be intrusive to aim my camera at the old lady who walked across from where our van was waiting for one of the speed-control stops. She casually climbed down into the ditch next to the road and squatted. All I could see was her head and shoulders, but it was obvious she was hitching up her skirts and apron. She squatted in that position for a couple of minutes, craning her head to observe the infrequent passing traffic. Finally she re-arranged her skirts, climbed out of the ditch, re-crossed the road, and went back to stand near a small cluster of storefronts. If she washed her hands, I didn’t see that.

Never have I longed to climb Mt. Everest. However, a year and a half ago, when I learned we could visit the base of its north face, the idea of doing that seized my imagination, and it proved surprisingly hard to shake. Wednesday morning, as we were driving up the road that leads to the base camp, it struck me that ever since 4th grade, when I learned the name of the tallest mountain on earth, Mt. Everest lodged in my brain as a mythic spot, with the details of the myth growing in complexity over time (as I read Into Thin Air, saw various movies, and otherwise embellished the indistinct image in my mind.) When we crossed the last pass, and the great span of the high Himalaya stretched before us, I felt the same jolt I felt last year in Jerusalem when we visited the Garden of Gethsemene and the spot where Jesus is believed to have been crucified — the jolt of seeing the real physical object underlying the mythic one.

Every other hairpin turn brought the mountain into closer view out my side of the van. It was spell-binding to take in not only the massive striking triangular form of Qomolongma (as the Tibetans have long called the most famous peak) but also to see the threadbare villages shivering in the nearby valley floors; to learn first-hand just how difficult it is to approach this monster mountain, even as a lowly tourist.

Such a visit requires special permits that are even more complicated than the already crazy-complex ones required for Westerners who wish to visit Tibet. No independent travel is permitted, so that makes it expensive too. The Chinese government is deadly serious about scrutinizing all the paperwork. Our Chinese and Tibetan permits got close attention in Chengdu Airport, and on the road, we probably had to stop 10 times to have our paperwork inspected. Most of the time our guide was able go into the inspection offices alone (sometimes just with the permits; sometimes with them and our passports). But at the start of our final approach to Everest, Steve and I had to present our physical persons, to be compared against the passports and other documents.

For a visitor to reach Everest Base Camp also means paying special attention to the task of acclimatization. Just arriving in Lhasa is rough. At 12,000 feet, it’s one of the highest cities in the world. When we came to Tibet a year ago, we felt slammed by symptoms of altitude sickness within an hour of disembarking from our flight from Kathmandu. And Everest Base Camp is almost 6000 feet higher than Lhasa. Even if you’re not planning to climb the additional 12,000 feet to the summit, visiting just the base camp means spending a minimum of 5 nights trying to get accustomed to the dearth of oxygen (only 50% of what it is at sea level).

Our trip was interrupted last year by Steve’s mom’s health crisis only two days before we were scheduled to hit the road and head for the Himalayas. I was still seriously sick from the altitude; had dreadful headaches and no appetite. Couldn’t sleep night after night because I felt like I was suffocating. Moreover, I had caught a cold and developed a terrible case of bronchitis in Nepal, so I was coughing almost hard enough to break a rib. Had we set off southward, as we would have done were it not for our emergency return home, I now think things could have gone badly. I learned on this trip that there is no possibility of helicopter evacuation from this part of Tibet. Our guidebook says one person a year dies from altitude sickness, but our guide Tashi told us that this year 16 Indian pilgrims perished from it while attempting to walk around Tibet’s holy western mountain, Kailash.

Given that background, I was fiercely determined to stay healthy. We sanitized our hands religiously as we shared metros and buses and trains with hordes of folks on the Malay peninsula, many of whom quite obviously were fighting respiratory infections. I started taking Diamox (the drug often used by mountain climbers to speed up the acclimatization process) a day before our flight to Tibet, and on the day of our visit to base camp, I added in a steroid (dexamethazone) recommended both by the CDC and personal friends. It all seemed to work. Or maybe we just got lucky. We avoided catching any colds or developing any traveler’s diarrhea, and when we left the tiny town of Shegar Wednesday morning, neither of us had any obvious signs of mountain sickness.

We had other reasons to rejoice. At the Pang-la Pass, Tashi confided to us that he was getting his first view this year of Everest and its massive companions: Malala, Lhotse, Gyachung, Cho Oyu, Xixiabangma. Tashi has probably made the trip to the base camp 100 times over the course of his guiding career, but this year we’re the 6th group he has accompanied. All the other 5 were greeted by a bank of clouds and fog and dust that obscured the fantastic sight. “You had to imagine it,” he said. But the sky was cloudless for us, and the snowy giants shone knife-edged against the preternaturally blue background.

By 11:30 we were checking into our room at the small hotel across the road from the monastery at the foot of the mountain. Here too there was good news. We’d been warned that the monastic-sized cells were unheated, with outdoor toilets located some distance away, no running water and often no electricity (when the wind blows the lines down). But a strong incandescent lightbulb clicked on in our room, which was further equipped with heating pads under the grubby sheets. I checked out the squat/pit toilets and found them to be less frightening than the ones we’d experienced on the road from Lhasa a few days previously. Those were big enough to actually fall in (and die shortly afterward, I presumed), worse than anything I’ve seen in Africa (where we’ve now traveled in 11 countries). Returning to the room, I repeated one of my favorite mantras for such situations: “Camping would be dirtier.”

We piled in the van and set off on the short ride down the road to the spot where the tourist tent camp is normally set up. We’d been booked to sleep in it last year, but the timing of this trip brought us here a bit later in October — just four days after the tent camp was taken down for the season. Slightly disappointed by this news at first, I now realized that spending the night in the communal tent would have been hideous in the ferocious winds that were developing. I had read that it’s possible to hike from the tourist tent camp site to the true base camp — the spot where the real climbers stay and from whence they depart. Steve and I climbed out of the van all geared up. I was wearing pants and long underwear, with six layers on top (including a fairly heavy down jacket), and Steve was similarly armored. We both had our collapsible hiking poles. The sun was shining brightly, but we walked only 100 or so feet down the road into a driving icy wind that occasionally blasted our small patches of exposed face with gritty sand. We stopped. I felt like I was moving in slow motion, with great effort (the way I felt approaching the summits of Mt. Fuji and Mt. Whitney, my previous mountaineering efforts that made me realize I would never, ever want to climb Everest.) Steve felt the same way, so we sheepishly told Tashi it would probably be better for us to be driven the 4km to the base camp.

There, Tashi declared he would wait in the van, but we could take our time climbing up to the large flat area where the serious expeditions pitch their tents. We moved slowly and carefully and reached it without incident. Once at the top, we estimated the gusts to be 60 mph or more. Time after time, they threatened to knock us off our feet. The site struck me as being perhaps the most dramatic and simultaneously brutal places I’ve ever stood (or wobbled). My iPhone died. (We later joked that it must have been on strike, declaring that I needed to take it back to some kinder, warmer place or it would never work for me again.)

In all, our visit to the climbers’ base camp lasted about an hour. Then we returned to the guesthouse and had a surprisingly tasty, if simple, lunch. The communal dining room is a congenial space, warmed only by a yak-dung stove, and after getting a bit more organized in our room, we returned there with our iPads and grabbed seats in front of one of the south-facing windows, with their commanding views of the mountain. We sat there for 5 hours straight, often glancing up and out.

From time to time, a mane of clouds appeared around the summit, and I thought of how similar clouds in the past have been harbingers of sudden homicidal storms. More than 250 people have died trying to reach the top of this monster since the first Westerners started vying for that honor in 1921. The wind whistled and howled; at times it shook the walls of the dining hall and forced cold air through the crevices. But no storm materialized. As sunset approached, the shadows on Everest deepened and spread, and near the summit, the remaining light made the mountaintop glow pastel orange, then coral, then pink. In a matter of moments, the color drained away. All that was left was white snow and menacing shadow.  

I was prepared for some of the contrasts we would encounter on this trip, as we traveled from temperatures in the mid-90s at sea level near the equator to the Himalayas in late October. We chose our clothes carefully. But I forgot about the culinary contrast that would ambush us. The Malay peninsula has one of the world’s highest concentrations of mind-blowingly great food. From there we’ve gone to the place that has the worst food I’ve ever eaten. It’s been a challenging adjustment.

We got our first reminder of what was coming on the Sichuan Airlines flight from Chengdu. Sichuan is a modern Chinese carrier with a good reputation; its attractive Chinese flight attendants wear stylish uniforms. Not long after we took off, one approached me down the aisle, passing out what I assumed would be hand wipes. Instead she extended a tongs and placed into my hand a chunk of hot boiled potato. It came without salt or butter or fork or even a lowly napkin to place it on. It was a portent.

We also got boxed breakfasts, though for some reason mine featured a rubbery egg slab, while Steve got a dish of unseasoned rice porridge, along with two packets of some salty beans and pickled cabbage to mix with it. A bit later, the attendants passed out paper cups containing yak butter tea, that peculiarly Tibetan concoction of the slightly sour yak butter mixed with salt, milk, tea leaves, soda, and hot water. (I would recommend against Starbucks adding it to their menu.)

After our arrival at Lhasa airport, our guide and driver immediately headed for the town of Tsedang where we would stay the first night (Friday). It was lunchtime, and Tashi recommended that we take our lunch and dinner at the hotel restaurant. Though edible, the Tibetan lunch buffet proved less than thrilling, and we took it as another bad omen that the tastiest choice consisted of rubbery globules the size of golf balls that were stuffed with some form of yak meat (one we could only hope was not from the part the spheres resembled). 
Dismayed by the prospect of eating a second time in the restaurant, we decided to check out the two restaurant choices listed for Tsedang in our Lonely Planet guidebook. We were feeling the altitude and moving slowly, but we eventually located the Tibetan one that reportedly featured a “traditional setting, partial picture menu, and lots of local color.” From the street, it promised to have all of that, so we returned for dinner a few hours later. We slipped in the door behind a portly monk in flowing maroon robes, but every head in the place (all Tibetan) swiveled to stare at Steve and me. Waitresses giggled. I slipped into a booth as quickly as possible while Steve went to ask if they had an English menu. That drew guffaws from the serving crew. 
The menu indeed had some photos, but not one word of English, so we couldn’t tell if any given dish included yak tongue, pig intestines, or similar popular ingredients. So we sadly gave up and returned to the hotel (where we were pleasantly surprised to find a good Chinese stir-fried chicken and fried rice).
Saturday we traveled to the site of the oldest monastery in Tibet, and had to eat in Tibetan joints for lunch and dinner. It was a good news/bad news experience. Good news: they were extremely inexpensive (we spent a total of about $14 to feed both of us both meals) and did have (sort of) English menus. Bad news: they didn’t have most of the hundreds of items on the menus, so we wound up eating yak and potato stew for lunch and yak and noodles for dinner.

Good news: both places felt extremely atmospheric and Tibetan. Bad: a big part of the atmosphere was dark and grubby. Good: neither one of has had gut troubles today.

Happily, before arriving in Tibet this trip I read My Journey to Lhasa, a wonderful account by a crazy French Buddhism scholar and adventuress who in the early 1920s posed as a fake Tibetan pilgrim and trekked for four months in the middle of winter in order to become the first Western woman ever to reach Lhasa. Alexandra and her adopted Sikkimese son (a respected lama) slept on the ground, begged for their food, and often hiked for 24 hours without eating or drinking anything. She shrugged off the hardships and claimed to be having a wonderful time. So any time I’m tempted to complain about my yak meat and noodles, all I have to do is think of Alexandra (and NOT think of Singapore.) 
On other fronts, tonight (Sunday) will be our third night at altitude. We’ll be sleeping at about 14,000 feet, and although we both still pant a bit when we climb stairs, neither one of us is experiencing much in the way of altitude sickness. Thankfully, I am NOT waking up in the night feeling as if I’m suffocating (as I did last year). So we’re optimistic that we will continue to be okay when we reach Everest base camp Wednesday morning. 
Along with the food, the Internet in these parts is nothing to rave about. So I plan to keep writing as long as my iPad has a charge. But I may not be able to upload what I write until Thursday night, when we are scheduled to stay in the second largest city in Tibet (Shigatse).

 For foreigners, there are very few ways to get to Tibet. Before the monster earthquakes struck last year, you could be driven from Nepal, but today (18 months later) the roads are still blocked; the border still closed. So you can take the train from Beijing. Or fly from one of only three cities in the world — Kathmandu in Nepal, Beijing, or Chengdu.

That’s why Steve and I went to Chengdu, a place I’d never heard of until recently, even though it’s China’s 5th biggest city, with more than 17 million residents — twice as many as in New York. We flew through Chengdu last October when our trip to Tibet at that time was interrupted by Steve’s mom’s hospitalization. When she passed away in August, we decided to tack a return to Tibet on to the excursion we’d planned to the Malay peninsula. It seemed easiest to travel from Bangkok to Lhasa via Chengdu.

Indeed it was easy to book a flight on Thai Airlines; easy to reserve a hotel in Chengdu on booking.com. We had no trouble finding the taxi queue in front of Chengdu’s impressive airport and giving the driver the hotel address (written in Chinese on the printout of my reservation). We felt like yokels on the ride, gaping at the massive office and apartment buildings, the wide boulevards, everything looking clean and at least as well maintained as Park Avenue in Manhattan. The Wangfujang district in which our hotel was located provided the coolest surprise. With an ancient Zen Buddhist temple complex at the heart of it, sections of the surrounding area have been preserved (or more likely recreated) to look

 historic and traditional. Low wooden buildings house shops selling jewelry, bamboo art objects, intricate silver work, and more, and our hotel was a haven of dark wood and Buddhist art (and a relative bargain at $67 a day, including breakfast). On the surrounding streets, nicely arranged piles of produce spilled out into the sidewalks; old folks gathered around card tables playing mah jong.

We were delighted, but it didn’t take long for us to feel like fish very far from our aquarium. Almost no one spoke any English, and worse, essentially nothing was written in Roman characters.

We pounced on the opportunity to put Google Translate through its paces and can now report that it may do a decent job with French or Spanish, but it is laughable (literally) at translating written Chinese.

At first we weren’t worried. We’d eaten at plenty of hawker centres in Singapore and Malaysia by looking at pictures and pointing. But when we tried that at a little joint near our hotel, the girl behind the counter made it clear many of the dishes displayed weren’t available. We finally secured some noodle-heavy dinner, but we were growing alarmed! Here we were in the capital of one of the great cuisines of the world, and it seemed possible we might not find any place good to eat! Potential catastrophe! (We’d checked out the restaurants in both our hotel and a fancy modern one nearby and rejected both as being unpromising.)

The logical thing to do would be to check Yelp, but of course it doesn’t exist in Chengdu. Even worse: Google doesn’t exist in Chengdu! The Chinese government is still blocking it. I won’t bore anyone with the tedious details of how annoying it is to try and search for things online without a decent search engine. After wasting quite a lot of time being reminded of this, we finally figured out that Apple Maps (which is not blocked) has a “restaurants” filter that’s pretty useful.

Using that, we found a place that sounded promising. We walked to the lively little street it was located on, but then were confused about which of the many eateries was our goal. We picked out the most likely one, walked in, and asked the girl at the front door if it was Weidangjia. She looked confused, but another young woman got up from her nearby table and interceded. She spoke English! With her help, we learned that Weidangjia was actually two doors over. She led us to it and further helped us secure a table and order our food, then she took off to return to her own dinner party in the first restaurant.

Our dinner was delicious and the interaction with the friendly young woman warmed my heart. But I have to say, the rarity of such encounters in China is pretty striking. People don’t seem mean or hostile. But I once again got the sense I’ve gotten on previous visits: that the Chinese in China are under a lot of stress. There are a literal billion of them, and so many are smart and disciplined and hard-working and ambitious. The competition is so fierce. I notice many faces that look harried and brusque and tense.

But maybe that’s just a passing traveler’s misapprehension. Our other stand-out experience in Chengdu both confirmed and contradicted my theories. The mountainous western forests of Sichuan are where pandas live in the wild, and Chengdu is the base for one of the most important panda research centers in the world. When I learned that it’s open to visitors, both Steve and I were eager to go.

The girl at our hotel’s front desk wrote out the research station’s name in Chinese characters, and we caught a taxi in front of Wenshu temple. We went immediately after breakfast, as we’d heard it was best to try and beat the afternoon crowds. I felt optimistic. It was a cool, rainy Thursday morning in late October. How many people could be there? Silly me. Hundreds, many assembled in huge groups, jammed the front plaza. It looked more crowded than the front of San Diego Zoo on a beautiful Labor Day weekend. 

None of that wound up ruining our time there. The paths leading through the grounds pass through dense, darkly graceful bamboo thickets.

We’d read that something like 60 giant pandas live at the research facility, and though many were off display, we still saw around a dozen, including four youngsters devouring bamboo. In the nursery, four infants in incubators were screened from the crowd, but in the adjoining enclosures, three little ones piled up, napping, while one curious guy crawled around exploring.

Cameras clicked. People cooed. Doubtless because of the way the human brain is wired, looking at those big-eyed, round panda faces was making everyone happy. The crowd was probably 99% Chinese, but it felt very convivial and very chill.

Even through my earplugs, through the glass windows and heavy wooden shutters of our hotel room, I could hear the thunderous rain falling Sunday when we woke up in our hotel in George Town on the island of Penang off the northwest coast of Malaysia. It was still pouring when we ate our breakfast around 8 am, and the weather forecast on my phone promised a 50 to 80% chance the downpour would continue throughout the day. As we had only one day in this World Heritage Site city (the one-time capital of all of British Malaysia), we resigned ourselves to venturing forth armed with our umbrellas, raincoats, waterproof sandals, and the determination to ignore any uncomfortable dampness.

Out on the street, the rain brought at least one benefit: lowering the temperature into the high 70s. When we’d ventured out Saturday afternoon after arriving by van from the misty mountains, it had been at least 20 degrees hotter. The intensity of the sun beating down made me reel. In contrast, walking in the hard steady rain surprised me. I hadn’t done it in memory, but it wasn’t bad.

Something else Steve and I haven’t done in a long time is to wander into a strange city with a plan of discovering it only aided by a map and a guidebook. Usually I’m more organized; I could have hired a private guide to tour us around, or joined the food tour that gets good reviews on Trip Advisor. But we also knew that the historic heart of George Town is small enough to cover on foot. Sometimes you just want to poke around and puzzle out a place at your own speed. That’s what was calling to us Sunday.

It paid off. Next to the elaborately British Colonial city hall, we found a “speaker’s corner” deserted in the rain. But in the grassy field next it, we stared at a huge circle of bears, each posed in the identical posture (palms raised high), but uniquely decorated. The field was so flooded we hesitated to make our way to the explanatory sign. Then a Malaysian guy came along and braved the soggy ground, and I followed him to learn that the installation was a salute to international harmony, conceived of by some Berlin artists. There were bears for almost all of the 140-plus countries in the UN, each one painted by artists from its country, to represent their national spirit. I couldn’t resist going further, to see America’s ursine avatar (a bear done up as the Statue of Liberty). I was hooked. Steve at first refused to follow me, declaring that he was afraid there would be leeches in the shallow water. But eventually, he couldn’t resist either.

Moving downward through the alphabet, I had worked my way around to the French bear when I glanced down and noticed something moving in the inch-deep water — long wormy creatures wriggling along at a brisk clip. Leeches?

I thought there was a good chance they were leeches but what a dilemma they presented! I wanted urgently to finish looking at every bear. But I didn’t want any leeches attaching themselves to my vulnerable feet. I finally figured out a way to complete the circuit by walking on the bears’ concrete pedestals. 

I can’t say which was my very favorite; so many were charming. But the Moldovan bear gets the prize for humor. 

The rest of the day brought other discoveries big and small. The charms of Georgetown hadn’t been all that obvious in the streets around our hotel. Traffic was hellish, and even on our short walk Saturday afternoon, the shoddy condition of the city’s walkways appalled us.

We’d read that the whole place looked decrepit 20 years ago, but it had great history and a big enough stock of striking (if dilapidated) architecture to win the World Heritage Site designation in 2008. Since then, money to spruce it up has poured in. 

Today even in the central core, there’s still a roughness to the place; it’s no Brugge or Barcelona. But it has some gems. We’d never anywhere seen anything like the complex created and still owned by the Khoo family, one of the Chinese clans that immigrated to the island in the 1800s. They multiplied and prospered and by the dawn of the 20th century were rich enough to build a temple that reportedly made the gods jealous enough to burn it down. The Khoos shrugged and built a replacement (the one we visited). It’s hard to imagine how its predecessor could have been more ornate and gorgeous.

Even more impressive to Steve and me was a volume on display from the family’s genealogical records. They went back more than 1000 years. 

When we got hungry, we walked into a seafood joint in the center of town and asked if they served fried fish. A friendly young woman led us to a table piled high with whole fish and directed us to pick out a good one.

She weighed the red snapper we chose and said it would cost 40 ringgits (about $9.50). A few minutes later, the fish appeared on our table, reincarnated.

Working only with forks and spoons, it didn’t take us long to reduce him to rubble (he was delicious)..

By late afternoon, we were ready to head back to the hotel, but the rain, which had disappeared for a while in the middle of the day, returned with a vengeance. Happily, we were just a block or two away from one of George Town’s many small but intriguing museums. The Upside Down Museum is probably the cheesiest, but I’m a sucker for anything this weird. I wondered whether we’d be disoriented walking from one room to another in which all the visual cues were upside down. Now that we’ve done it, I can report: the answer is no. The main thing visitors experience is being bossed around by young Malaysian employees who tell you how to pose to look the weirdest and then take your picture in room after room. It wasn’t all that interesting. But on the other hand, I now have quite a collection of photos like the following:

More than any of the sights, what the guidebooks rave most about is the food to be had on Penang. To me it felt like a mixed blessing. From our very first meal, it seemed astoundingly good. For lunch Saturday, we walked in the infernal heat to a nearby Chinese family restaurant filled with what appeared to be locals. The fried rice was the best I’ve ever tasted, the rice shot through with subtle flavors and studded with prawns and tender bites of chicken and finely minced vegetables. We ate it with chicken in savory plum sauce, soybean pockets stuffed with prawns and served on crispy noodles that melted into silky smooth strands, and home-made tofu fried and then braised in clay pots along with minced beef and salted fish. Every bite made me swoon, a revelation and so seductive we had to consume almost everything they put before us. (With beer, it came to less than $20). Stuffed as we were, we nonetheless went out for excellent north Indian food Saturday night.

Sunday lunch was that super-fresh fried snapper, and for our final dinner in Malaysia, we walked to a food court just a few blocks from our hotel. It wasn’t as big as some of the places we saw in Singapore, but I couldn’t count all the dishes available. Culinary inventions from Indian and Japan and Korea, a dizzying number of Chinese and Malaysian favorites, even Italian, Mexican, Middle Eastern choices. Our stomachs were only big enough to accommodate three separate dishes plus rice and beer and durian ice cream. To see all those interesting choices but not get to try the vast majority of them felt cruel. For all that’s wonderful about home, there’s no place there where we can eat like they do it Penang.