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The Walled City of Pingyao

2012-01-15T20:17:00.000-08:00

When we started planning our trip to China, one objective was to find a few places off the path that most Westerners take there. Tianjin and Shenyang proved to be pretty good choices in that regard, but Pingyao was the most remarkable.

Even getting here was a challenge. We were able to book second-class tickets on a fast train most of the way there from Beijing, to the provincial capital city of Taiyuan. Second-class on a fast train means 5 seats to a row instead of the 4 in first-class, but we always managed to get the group of 2 seats and found them plenty comfortable. But getting 4 stops on a local train the rest of the way from Taiyuan to Pingyao was tricky, as you can only buy coach seats for that leg of the journey from a station nearby, not from Beijing. A travel agent in Beijing came up with a solution: she found us "seats" in a sleeper car! They cost $16 for the two of us for that last 60 miles, 3 or 4 times what coach seats would have cost but still a bargain.

On the first leg of the trip we passed some cities with abandoned factories alongside the track, looking just like some scenes we've passed by train in the Northeastern part of the U.S. As we got closer to Pingyao it was overwhelmingly agricultural, as we were in the fertile valley of the Yellow River. We were surprised how green it was for late October.

Our first view of Pingyao did not exactly charm. But after pulling the suitcases a kilometer we came to a barrier that was supposed to stop motor traffic. As you can see, it didn't stop us or the traffic, but it did lead us on through the walls of Pingyao.

Pingyao has had a protective wall of some sort since about 800 BC. In the late 1300s the new Ming government rebuilt the walls as they are today, about 6 km in circumference. Most of the city inside the walls is much as it has been for centuries. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage city.

Our lodging for three nights in this magical city was the exquisite Cheng Family Folk Hotel, built in the late 1700s. It cost less than $100 -- and that's the total for three nights!

After checking in we checked out the town, and the night lights made it all the more magical.

The next morning we enjoyed the complimentary breakfast of steamed buns, various stir-fried vegetables, two hard-boiled eggs and a bowl of congee, a thin corn meal porridge. Our first destination was that city wall. We stepped outside the wall through the North Gate to buy our three-day pass to the wall and various museums in town, then reentered and hiked up. It provided an interesting perspective on this ancient town, from 30 to 40 feet above it all.

One of the first things we noticed is that the city is laid out in perfectly north-south and east-west streets and alleys. Many of the houses are actually "compounds," courtyards surrounded by buildings of various sizes. Later when we were on the ground we peered into a few of these, such as the last picture in this series.

Shortly after taking this next shot of hundreds -- maybe thousands -- of ears of corn drying on a rooftop, we decided to descend from the wall to have lunch. To our annoyance, we later discovered that we had used our one "ticket" to walk atop the wall, even though the pass we had purchased was good for three days. We wandered down side streets past one house with its cooking coal out front, another with gates that led to -- who knew? We visited a small church we had seen earlier from the wall, a Confucian Temple our guidebook claimed was the oldest in China, and finally Nan Jie, South Street, the heart of "downtown" Pingyao.

After our fried dumpling and stir-fry lunch we visited yet another temple, this time with some world-class "chinglish." It also had a section filled with graphic illustrations of punishments awaiting the wicked. We'll show you two of the milder ones and let you imagine what some others looked like if these are the nice ones. Before we left, we did come across the Kitchen God and the Kitchen God's Wife. No wonder they come across as gods -- look at all the little people who made them look good! You never hear about them!

As fascinating as the walls and gates and streets of this ancient city are, it is actually an historically significant place as well. Situated in the Yellow River valley with the Silk Road to the west and ancient routes to Mongolia and Russia to the north, it was a major trading city a few hundred years ago. In the mid-1800s the first bank in China was founded here, Rishengchang, a fact that attracted the attention of the NY Times not long ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/world/asia/18pingyao.html

We visited the Rishengchang Museum, and we must say it was a tad different than other banks we know. The only "computer" in the Accounting Room was an abacus, and the building to Louise's left was a guest house for customers who had travelled one or more nights to do their banking. Behind Louise is a room that was used to wine and dine the customers over their banking deals. But perhaps your bank offers these services? We'd like to know if that's the case!

Our last day was a short one as we had a noon-time train to catch, so we just visited the municipal offices, including this jail cell with some fairly stiff "pillows," and a mock trial being put on for the tourists. Perhaps the judge was going to sentence someone to a punishment device that reminded us of the stocks that pilgrims used in old New England.

After climbing one more tower for a look over this remarkable city, it was time to board a train and head south on an overnight train to Xi'an, except that we headed north instead. Pingyao is a small place, and is only allocated a few sleeper berths per night on the one train that makes the overnight trip, tickets we had no hope of getting. So our travel agent in Beijing had arranged for us to take a sleeper car north back to the major city of Taiyuan, from which she had booked those precious sleeper berths for us back past Pingyao and on to Xi'an. As you can see, our compartment has four berths, as do virtually all of the first class sleepers in China (the second class ones have six!) but we had no compartment-mates on the way to Taiyuan. On the overnight trip from Taiyuan to Xi'an we did have two companions who never spoke to us. Then again, they were strangers to each other and never spoke to each other either, even though they had no language barrier.

But we're getting ahead of our story. We had a 5 hour layover in Taiyuan, and we discovered that we could store our rolling suitcases at the station for $1.50 each. We found a map of the city that showed a park about one inch away. It was actually 2 km on our pedometers when we got there, but it was a very nice park and a photo of another map inside the park helped us navigate our way around. We hiked past a statue, presumably from a children's fable, of the harvesting of a giant radish, then rested our feet by taking an electric "speedboat" that piddled around the lake at walking speed.

We headed back to a restaurant across from the train station where we fueled up on Chinese-American comfort food -- fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, corn and vegetable soup. Louise put aside a little something for dessert, an Ambien pill, just in case all our walking hadn't tired us out enough for the upcoming challenge of the sleeper car. We did indeed wake up the next morning 400 miles away in Xi'an. We'll tell you how we did and how our adventure continued in our next blog entry.

Shenyang

2012-01-15T15:48:00.000-08:00

When we first planned our trip to China we knew we would see son Matt and his family only briefly during our cruise ship's 5-hour stop in Dalian. We figured we would return by train to Dalian. Then Akiko and Tyler had to leave for Japan just when we would have headed back to see them, so we scrapped the plan to go all the way back to Dalian. But in that planning we had learned about Shenyang, where we thought we'd break up the 8-hour train trip to Dalian by spending a few nights. We now decided to go out-and-back from Beijing. Our Beijing hotel agreed to hold our suitcases, so we travelled lightly with just a backpack each. It turned out to be a great destination.

The train wasn't the highest category of fast train, but it was plenty fast, covering the 440 miles in just under 5 hours, averaging 88 mph, including 3 stops. We whizzed smoothly along the coastal plain past fields that had recently been harvested or were about to be, as this was mid-October. We were surprised by how much corn was being grown, much of it shucked and drying on rooftops. As we passed through the city of Shanhaiguan we could see the Great Wall of China descending to the Pacific!

This was our first time using elong.net to find a room, and the $70/night lodgings they found for us were quite pleasant, if you overlooked the overly-firm mattress that every hotel in China offers. The hotel occupied a dozen floors above a six-story department store that looked exactly like a Macy's. There was a 7th floor restaurant where we had one dinner, but we skipped the expensive breakfast buffet and had Egg McMuffins each morning at a Mickey D's a block away. One day we came by the banquet hall in time to see a wedding with a rather impressive army of food servers waiting for the signal to march in. By the way, there was one of those electronic picture frames in the lobby showing a continuous loop of 40 or 50 photos of the bride and groom, quite a few of which showed them all dressed up in front of a church somewhere, notwithstanding the fact that the wedding itself was here in the hotel, not at a church.

Shenyang is the main city in what the Chinese now call Dongbei, "the Northeast." It is one of China's ten largest cities with almost 5 million in the city and another 2-3 million in surrounding areas. It has some interesting century-old Western buildings (the street is currently torn up as they finish building Shenyang's subway line), some old Chinese architecture, a few remaining gates from the mostly-gone city walls, and several strikingly modern skyscrapers.

However, there were three main things we came to see in Shenyang, and we saw two of them the first full day there, the Imperial Palace and the home of warlords Zhang Zuolin and his son Zhang Xueliang.

The scale model shows that it is quite a bit smaller than the Imperial Palace aka Forbidden City in Beijing, but still quite impressively huge. The Forbidden City was built by the third of China's Ming emperors from 1406-1420, when he moved the capital to Beijing. Nurhaci (that's him to the left) was a warlord in what was then called Manchuria. He was duly impressed by accounts of the Forbidden City, and started his own imperial palace in Shenyang in 1625. His grandson conquered the rest of China upon the downfall of the Mings in 1644, starting the Qing (pronounced 'ching') dynasty that ruled until 1911. Even though the Qing acquired the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace and other extremely nice real estate, they continued to add to the Shenyang Imperial Palace for occasional visits back to what they thought of as their 'homeland.' It's a pretty impressive place. We'll start with the emperor's own home sweet home, and the doorway to his favorite concubine's quarters. Close by is a plaza ringed by lodgings for his various generals. That's the inside of one of them, spartan in more ways than one. Those large urns, which you may have noticed also in photos of the Forbidden City, are not ceremonial. They are for fire control, and were always kept topped up with water.

The Qing emperors kept adding to the palace over the years, such as this courtyard where Chinese opera was performed. A wall hanging helped us imagine what the spectacle of the court might have looked like. Although some of the glory (and paint) is a bit faded, there's a lot of decorative beauty here. There were even some locals who had paid a few yuan to dress up as Qing aristocracy who agreed to let us take their photo.

The most interesting thing that happened there, however, is that we became part of the attraction for a number of the Chinese visitors. Apparently very few Westerners make it up to this part of China. Not once, not twice, but eight times as Jeff was taking a picture of something, he looked up from his camera to see someone else taking a picture of him or of Louise! Then, as he headed across one courtyard, a family of four approached him: a grandmother, mom and dad, and child. Before he fully realized what was happening, the mom thrust the boy into Jeff's hands as the grandma pointed to the camera in the dad's hands -- they wanted a picture of Jeff holding the grandson! Unfortunately, grandson seemed to be saying the Chinese equivalent of WTF, quite emphatically, so Louise stepped in and her calm grandmotherly ways calmed him down long enough for Jeff and the boy's dad to get some photos. Afterwards we pulled out our iPad and showed them a photo of Louise with her son Brian and our grandson Cedro. We then pointed at Louise and the grandma, Brian and the dad, then Cedro and their child. They smiled as they understood our sign language analogy, and the grandson warmed up enough to wave bye-bye and to throw us some kisses as we left!

After the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911 it looked briefly like China might become a republic under Sun Yat-sen, but Sun had only political power, not military, and China soon descended into a medieval patchwork of more-or-less independent areas, each under the control of a local military figure called a "warlord." Manchuria came under the power of General Zhang Zuolin, and it was his house we visited for our second destination. It was quite an impressive place. To get to the house we first had to go past the military command center, which would have relieved us of any weapons in Zhang's day, then passed the accounting office and the formal meeting room. This house was in a real sense the "government" of Manchuria for about twenty years.

At last we made it to the home itself, and it is a very impressive place, though the decorating scheme in the living room, aka the Tiger Room, was not all that 'homey.' Besides affecting your decorative style, being a warlord has other downsides, and Zhang's came on June 4, 1928 when the Japanese blew up his private rail car, with him in it. They were hoping that someone more amenable to Japanese imperialist desires in Manchuria would take over, but instead the army came under the control of Zhang Zuolin's son, Zhang Xueliang. Despite a quite understandable dislike for the Japanese, he did nothing to punish his father's executioners since he doubted his army was ready for full-scale war with the nation of Japan. Little did he know what was yet to come from the Japanese in Manchuria, or for himself when he clashed with Chiang Kai-shek later in the 1930s.

Before we move on to the next day's adventure, when we learned much more about Japan's subsequent misdeeds in Manchuria, we'll take a quick look at an unexpected part of the Zhang mansion tour, a visit to the Shenyang Money Museum. The younger Zhang founded the Frontier Bank next door to the mansion he inherited from his dad, and it has been converted to a museum that was wonderfully peopled with wax customers and employees giving a lifelike view of banking in the 1930s. There were also extensive exhibits of Chinese money over the years and a little about the modern economy, including an explanation of bull markets and bear markets. We don't know quite what it says, but the fact that there was even a sign explaining bull markets and bear markets says a lot about how far from its proletarian roots modern China has come.

Seventy years before September 11, 2001, China had a similar event. Our destination for our second day in Shenyang was the September 18 Museum. Even the entrance to the building itself with its simulated cannonball damage was a reminder of the events that took place on this spot eighty years ago. The museum told that story with no attempt to softpedal the anger many Chinese still feel about it.

Several railroads ran through Shenyang in the 1930s. They carried tons of Manchuria's agricultural and mineral wealth to Dalian for shipment overseas, primarily to Japan. The South Manchuria Railway was owned by Japan, and China had been forced by Japan to allow Japanese soldiers to protect it.

That wasn't enough for a radical group in the Japanese Army. Without approval from their superiors, they placed a small bomb alongside the tracks close to a Chinese army camp. The museum is built on the very site itself, and this diorama shows the scene the night of September 18, 1931 when the bomb exploded. The bomb was so small the Chinese army didn't even react to it, but the Japanese nonetheless launched an attack on the Chinese, claiming "self-defense."

Since Shenyang was then called "Mukden," the Japanese press called this the "Mukden Incident," the name that has stuck. Within days the Japanese had not only routed the unprepared Chinese in Mukden, they started conquering all of Manchuria. They eventually installed the pathetic character Pu Yi, who had been deposed as the last emperor of the Qing dynasty in 1911, as the puppet "Emperor" of what they now called the nation of Manchukuo.

Warlord Zhang Xueliang wanted to fight back, but he knew he needed help. The largest army likely to offer it was that of Chiang Kai-shek, but Chiang also feared the power of the Japanese Army so he trusted the League of Nations to do the right thing. Meantime he held Zhang back from fighting the Japanese. The League eventually sided with China, but did nothing at all to punish Japan or to force it to give Manchuria back. China and Japan moved closer and closer to total war over the next six years. By 1937, they were fully engaged in a war that would last 8 years, over twice as long as the U.S. was involved in WWII.

Before total war broke out, Zhang pressured Chiang to cooperate more with the Communist Party in fighting a guerilla war against the Japanese. When Chiang refused, Zhang kidnapped him! Chiang finally agreed to Zhang's terms, a promise he did not keep for long, but the incident made Zhang Xueliang a hero to the Communist Party, even though he had no sympathy for their political aims. For obvious reasons, the museum commemorated the Communist resistance to the Japanese with several dioramas and with an oversized painting showing the celebrations in Shenyang when the Japanese Army surrendered at the end of WWII. It was a positive way of ending our journey through this part of Chinese history, a partial antidote to the brutality that the museum otherwise overflowed with. Like the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, it has a difficult story to tell, and seemed to do so effectively.

While touring the museum, we kept running into an American visitor, Krystal. By the time we all finished, we had agreed to head out together for some lunch and a visit to a park a short taxi ride away. We learned that Krystal is a U.S. Army veteran and a student of languages who has been studying in Harbin, another few hundred miles north of Shenyang. She lost her passport and was now in Shenyang because that's the nearest place she could come to to get the problem fixed. We learned later that it took over a week, but all eventually worked out for her. While visiting that park, we tried out a four-wheeled bicycle-like contraption that was a few sizes too small for Jeff, but somehow we managed to pedal it a few kilometers around the mostly-flat landscape.

We'll close out Shenyang with a collection of tricycles that astonished and amazed us. Why don't we see things like this in the U.S.?

From Shenyang we returned to Beijing, a part of the trip we detailed in our last blog. So our next entry will be about the small but fascinating city of Pingyao. See you there!

A Week in the Capital, Beijing

2012-01-06T22:51:00.000-08:00

We visited Beijing for parts of two days in 2009, described in this blog at http://redtandem.blogspot.com/2009/07/beijing-and-great-wall.html, and that had only whetted our appetite. This time around we spent 7 nights there, although almost a day's worth of that time was spent planning for the following weeks.

To get there we walked to the modern Tianjin train station, showed a ticket agent a piece of paper with "Beijing" written in Chinese, handed over our passports (you cannot buy a train ticket or check into a hotel without a passport or, if you're local, your national identity card), and a modest number of yuan, and within half an hour we were walking down to our high speed train. How fast? Here's photographic proof we hit 298 kph (185 mph). So fast that we were in Beijing, 75 miles away, in 33 minutes! And the trip was smoother than any U.S. or Canadian passenger train we've ever taken, and we've taken a few -- Jeff has covered over 100,000 miles on Amtrak alone, Louise more than half that.

The Beijing subway was another story. It's much the same for speed and comfort, or the lack thereof, as New York's or Tokyo's. However it was cheap, 32 to 64 cents, easy to navigate, and not always jammed to the hilt. Here for example are a fairly quiet station, a sign announcing the next train in English, and a line map in the subway car showing where we were at each moment. There was also some strange technology on display, LED screens in the tunnels between stations, synchronized with the speed of the passing trains to keep the straphangers amused.

We wore down our shoes some with all the walking we did in Beijing. One major goal was to see the old hutongs, or alleyways. Many were destroyed in past urban renewal projects, but now they're largely being saved. The first photo is of one near our hotel, just blocks from the Forbidden City. We took a long walk near Xi Hai and Hou Hai, two lakes that link up to the Grand Canal that was used to bring grain over a thousand miles from central China to Beijing. Along the former lake we saw what is unquestionably the longest fishing pole either of us has ever seen! Nearby was a typical hutong with a typical public restroom, as individual homes in a hutong rarely have their own toilet. They may be quaint, but that's not quite synonymous with charming.

Life is lived out in public in China more than in the US, sometimes even work that for esthetic or safety reasons is usually indoors here. We're fairly accustomed to having meals out on the street, but not really our haircuts and our welding jobs.

While most of the hutong neighborhoods feature only 1- or 2-story buildings, there are occasionally taller apartment flats nearby. This one is about par for the course -- fairly well-worn. In the middle of the neighborhood was a lively open air but roofed market, full of colors and flavors and surprises, such as this egg stand where we can spot at least 18 different types of eggs! And we're not talking small, medium and large . . .

We visited the enormous complex built for the Emperors of China known as the Forbidden City 2 years ago. We decided to return since Matt hadn't seen it -- in fact his visit to us in Beijing for 3 of our 7 days there was his first foray out of Dalian since Citibank sent him to China in February. We headed first to Prospect Hill for an overview. There are no natural hills in Beijing. This lofty spot, now a beautiful park, is actually the dumping spot for all the earth that had to be excavated to build the moat around the Forbidden City. At the base of the hill is a tree planted in 1644 to replace the one that the Emperor Chongzhen used to commit suicide by hanging as a rebel army entered Beijing, thus ending the Ming Dynasty. The original tree melted away in the form of grisly souvenirs.

We discovered too late that the Prospect Hill entrance to the Forbidden City was recently converted to exit-only status. We watched our pedometer tick off almost two miles walking to the other end! This place is huge! The buildings are humongous too, particularly when you remember that the whole place was constructed in 1406.

The spaces between buildings are sometimes as magnificent as the structures themselves. This is the view from the Gate of Supreme Harmony to the Hall of Supreme Harmony, inside of which is the emperor's throne, and in front of which Matt and Louise posed, harmoniously.

The front 3/4ths of the Forbidden City is for show and ceremony, the last part for living quarters for the emperor and empress, their servants, eunuchs and concubines. For all its glamour, it was a tightly controlled and narrow world. Can you imagine spending your entire adult life rarely venturing outside of a limited number of walkways and courtyards, however pretty they may be?

The next day we revisited the Summer Palace, which we had only gotten a brief glimpse of two years ago. It's another enormous place many times the size of the Forbidden City, on the outskirts of Beijing a kilometer from a recently opened subway line extension. It took us 45 minutes by subway from the station next to the Forbidden City, then a 15 minute walk -- we wonder how long the same trip took the Ming and Qing dynasty emperors? And whether they would have minded standing for half the journey, as we did? By the way, this is only one small part of it known as Longevity Hill.

Vast as the palace grounds are, there was a small enclosed space that intrigued. When Emperor Guangxu started to reform the corrupt and archaic Chinese political system in 1898, an event now called "The Hundred Days," his aunt, Empress Dowager Cixi, worked with arch-conservatives to pull off a palace coup d'état. Cixi loved the Summer Palace so she brought her captive nephew with her, almost like a pet dog, and kept him pretty much confined to this one small courtyard when she visited. He lived another 10 years and died, curiously, the day before Cixi. No one can prove it, but few doubt the story that Aunt Cixi poisoned the emperor in one last coup de grace.

We walked down the 1/2 mile long Long Corridor along the lake -- Boy, is it long! -- then turned and climbed -- Boy, did we climb! -- up Longevity Hill to the Temple of the Fragrance of Buddha, past views of smaller temples to the side and the Seventeen Arch Bridge in the distance, with the northeastern part of the city in the far distance.

After descending the far side we came to a jaw-dropping place, astounding not for it's beauty but for the other-worldliness of the concept. Suzhou Street was actually a path along both sides of an inlet to the lake. The lofty nobility of China came here to play-act being shopkeepers and commoners engaged in trade, as goofy an idea as when Marie Antoinette used to dress up as a shepherdess and prance around her fake farm at Versailles. And we know where that led, don't we . . . ? We don't think they were nobles in disguise, but there were a few shopkeepers in late Qing dynasty attire for any of us unwashed masses who wanted to play-act being nobles play-acting common folk buying their goods -- but with real money, thank you very much.

We then paid real money ourselves to rest our tired feet for a few minutes on a short boat ride which brought us around Longevity Hill to the infamous Marble Boat. Infamous because the lovable Empress Dowager Cixi -- remember her? -- spent money remodeling the boat that was supposed to be used on some other boats, commonly called the Chinese Navy. Which just happened to get it's clock cleaned by the Japanese a few years later in the First Sino-Japanese War. But, really, how was Cixi supposed to know that the Navy was going to need modern warships . . . ?

We finished our visit to the Summer Palace with a walk over to the bronze ox and the poem by the Emperor Qianlong engraved on his ribs, of the Seventeen Arch Bridge, and of one last longing view of Longevity Hill from the bridge and its hundred carved lions, each one slightly different.

On the way back we passed a grocery store where we could have picked up some PB&J fixings, with real Skippy™ PB and with plump rounded loaves of Bimbo bread. Instead, we let our guide book direct us down an obscure alley to a Uighur Muslim restaurant where we tasted some of the cuisine of China's westernmost province, Xinjiang, out next to Kyrgyzsan and Kazakhstan. We had naan bread, a cold yogurt and cucumber dish and a sort of lamb curry, among other treats.

For our last day with Matt we visited Prince Gong's house, or rather his estate that just happened to be in the middle of Beijing, the largest residence in town after the Forbidden City. The scale model gives you an overview. Yup, that entire complex was his "home." The next two photos give you a taste of Prince Gong's stylistic taste in porticos and doorways.

We then gave Matt a little hutong tour en route to the Drum Tower, sort of like a village clock tower but with . . . drums! It was a steep bugger!

We ended his visit with a walk along Hou Hai past the Silver Ingot Bridge to a Vietnamese restaurant that looked out at folks enjoying this fine October afternoon alongside another small lake, the Qian Hai. Having spent six months in Saigon on his last assignment from Citibank, Matt was delighted by this chance to enjoy those familiar flavors once again.

After Matt headed home to Dalian we took a three-day trip to Shenyang that we'll describe it in our next blog. We then returned for three more days in Beijing. Jeff had picked up a cold the second day in China, and it was getting worse. After three nights of minimal sleep, Jeff because he was coughing and Louise because Jeff was coughing, we decided to do something. Our travel agent suggested we go to the "international clinic" of Peking Union Medical College, which was close by. We walked in and paid a $1 registration fee and were told to wait on a bench around the corner. In 15 minutes a doctor called Jeff in, looked down his throat, listened with his stethoscope, asked in English the same questions Jeff's regular doctor would have asked, and handed him a prescription for cough syrup with codeine, Tylenol PM, and "myrtol" pills, a concoction related to eucalyptol. Start to finish, including a stop at the in-house pharmacy, was just under an hour, and cost about $30! Better yet, the meds worked almost immediately, and we both slept like babes -- very tired ones at that -- for the first time in four nights.

One time we walked past the Wanfujing Night Market as it opened in late afternoon. Another amazing food street, but the first and only one we found with an entire stand full of edible bugs. Well, assume they were, but there was no way we were going to do anything more than stare at them, bug-eyed as it were. More to our liking was the dumpling restaurant nearby where we had some terrific dumplings, even tastier than the ones on display outside.

Our last destination was the Chinese National Museum. Like America's showplace Smithsonian museums on the Washington Mall, China's premiere museum was in China's premier location, on one side of Tiananmen Square, right across from the Great Hall of the People. The museum entry hall told you in no uncertain terms that you had entered a cathedral of culture.

We spent some three hours there, way too little time. One of the treasures was this acupuncture model made in 1443. Each acupuncture site is a small hole. They would cover the model in wax, fill it with water, and bring in students to practice. If they hit the correct spot precisely, a spigot of water would reward them. We had worked our way backwards in history to these pottery dancers from 943 AD, found in a tomb in Nanjing, when the museum closed for the day. 1,000 years of Chinese history down, just another 5,000 to go.

Earlier we had checked out what might almost be called the 'Hall of Communist Hagiography.' It was filled with paintings of an almost beatific Mao Zedong as teacher and hero, of his fellow saint Zhou Enlai as an earnest young leader. An entire wall told the story of The Long March, the long harrowing escape from Chiang Kai-shek's army that reshaped the Communist Party of China in 1934-35. At the end of the hall were two identical monumental pictures of Mao standing at Tiananmen Square on October 1, 1949, announcing the birth of the Peoples Republic of China. There was an unsurprising gap, with no artwork depicting the disastrous Great Leap Forward or the even worse Cultural Revolution.

We emerged into Tiananmen Square ourselves and took this shot of an endearing mother and daughter, then of the crowd gathering for the daily lowering of the national flag. Tiananmen has changed over the years, especially since the events of 1989. We'll close with a subtle reminder of those days, one of today's light posts bristling with security cameras. On many levels, China came across to us as an open society, until we came to a little clue like this showing that its openness has distinct limits. Perhaps the Chinese were right in keeping us from writing our blog while we were in China.

We'll write our next entry soon to tell you about Shenyang, in Manchuria.

Tianjin

2011-12-15T17:53:00.000-08:00

23 days out of Vancouver, we landed at Tianjin to begin our personal exploration of China. Except we didn't land in Tianjin, exactly, but rather at Xingang, "New Port," a community some 35 miles from downtown Tianjin. Boats the size of ours can't get any closer than that, so our first order of business after disembarking was to get a taxi. There were many to choose from, but none of them wanted to use the meter, they wanted to bargain over the price. With some effort we agreed on one and set out on the toll road to town.

Halfway there, our driver had a flat. He had a spare, but worried about driving that far with no other spare, so he pulled out his cellphone and arranged to swap taxis with a fellow driver. Our new taxi looked like a police special, but it worked just as well and our driver found the hotel, albeit with several more cell phone calls to get directions.

And what a hotel it was! The Astor House started in 1863, not long after the British had forced the Chinese to concede sovereignty over a portion of the city. In time, Tianjin (known as 'Tientsin' in the Wade Giles system of writing Chinese) got carved up into numerous "foreign concessions," as these areas were called, eight in all! You can click on the map below if you're curious -- the dark colors were the original areas, the pastel ones later additions. Our hotel was on the east end of the red section on the map, the British Concession. As the city grew in importance, the hotel rebuilt itself in 1886 in brick with large wooden verandas, overlooking a park across the street built at the request of the hotel. Like almost every city park we saw in China, it appeared to be well used and well cared for.

Our own hotel room was in a new section built in the late 1980s, when a new lobby was created with that mural of early Tianjin seen above. We joined up with some fellow passengers from the boat who were also staying there and received a personal tour by the hotel concierge of the historic 1886 part of the hotel, including two amazing rooms.

The first was the "Herbert Hoover Room," where the future president stayed while supervising the development of coal mines as an engineer for a British firm. The second room was the "Sun Yatsen Room," named after another regular occupant after he stepped down from the post of first President of China, while he worked to unify and modernize China. We'll say more about Sun as we encounter him later in our travels. We ended our explorations in the museum downstairs. We learned about the two peace treaties signed at the hotel (one of which was commemorated by this print hanging in the Herbert Hoover Room) and of the many visits by Pu Yi, the last Emperor of China (deposed, in fact, by Sun Yatsen) who came often to tea dances in the ballroom in the 1920s. We also captured for you this reproduction of a well-furnished room of the late 1800s, curiously missing those plastic bottles of shampoo we get nowadays.

We had chosen to spend two and a half days in Tianjin in part because it is not on the standard tour of China, and in part because of its history and architecture resulting from European colonialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Because it is not on that standard itinerary, we found very little in guidebooks or online about the architecture we were looking for, but architecture is such a large and public art form, it has a way of being found. As we walked along one of the main streets in the old British Concession, we saw numerous business palaces that looked like they were from London or Paris of a century ago, such as this one. Like so many others, it was built as a British (or French or German or Japanese) bank, and is now a Chinese one. BTW, if you look on that ledge between the 2nd and 3rd floors, near the right, you can see a fellow working on his hands and knees. Another fellow is up there but out of sight at the moment. Both were walking around that ledge, 30' up, without any sort of safety device whatsoever, one of many instances of things we saw in China that would drive an OSHA investigator bonkers in the US.

The buildings in the French Concession, we discovered, have largely disappeared, but they've been replaced by an enormous development, part shopping mall, part movie complex, part apartment/condo project, all in a style between French Baroque and Second Empire. It fronted the Hai He, or Hai River, and was as gorgeous up close as it was in these more distant shots, at least where it's complete -- the back sections were still half-built. In the second and third views, you can also see some of the nearby modern architecture that is going up and creating a new identity for Tianjin in architecture.

Here are two more shots of some of the more striking modern buildings. That's not distortion from a wide-angle lens, the tall building does indeed get fatter then skinnier as it rises. And those are two different buildings with upside-down U shapes.

As we continued into the Italian Concession we came to a more residential area, one filled with restaurants and with homes that have been or are in the process of becoming home to China's new wealthy. At times you had to question whether you were in China, the buildings were so un-Chinese!

Hordes of cyclists on bicycles, tricycles, and power-assisted 2- and 3-wheeled vehicles reminded us we were in China, however, along with the church we passed. Oh, the church was western enough, but all the brides hanging around the outside give it away as being Chinese.

We visited a park nearby, and found statues of musical greats -- all of them European. Although in many ways, they're universal, aren't they?

The next day we visited a local park. It was buzzing with activity on a weekday morning. Look at all the bicycles parked outside the bike-proof gates (on the right is a second view of another set of these interesting gates). Inside, one group was singing Chinese songs accompanied by a cellist and three fellows on Chinese instruments. Nearby, four or five couples were dancing to big band dance tunes played on a boom box, while off in a corner of the park a solitary saxophonist practiced. Quite a few grandparents were walking or playing with their grandkids, and some folks just sat reading their books or their newspaper. It was fun to see a park so well-loved!

We had heard there was a food court worth visiting, so took a $3 taxi ride to get there (the subway system is closed at the moment as they expand from one line to two). What we discovered were twenty different restaurants, all of middling quality and almost all lacking an English menu. One had a more convincing hustler of an owner than the others as well as a menu with English translations, and we had an acceptable if middling lunch. After lunch, however, we looked down to see Sugar Man. A customer told him her sign, a dragon, and he made her a quite amazing dragon out of melted sugar!

We continued our exploration by going to a market a kilometer away where there was quite a collection of furs for sale. Not knowing Chinese, we never did find out how one turned the hides into something a little less like an artifact from a natural history museum. Another entrepreneur had set up a sort of carnival game on the street that attracted both players and kibbitzers. With his girlfriend standing there next to him, our contestant of course kept playing 'til he won something.

As we headed back toward the Hai He, we passed a fairly typical apartment building complex before coming to our next shopping area, Paper and Calligraphy Street. It took some searching, but at the booth right behind Louise we found a children's book in both Chinese and English to bring back for our grandson Cedro. His dad is on Broadway in the play Chinglish right now because he is one of that rare breed of actors who speaks both Chinese and English. Never too early, right? Never mind that Cedro's learning both Japanese and Tagalog as well as English from his mom and dad. That's one busy 16-month old!

You'd think that was plenty of shopping streets, but the best was yet to come, a place they call Antique Street, not because you can find antiques there, but rather because it has been rebuilt to look like a shopping street in old China. Granted, it may be as authentic as Disneyland's "Main Street USA," but what people think the past was like is sometimes as powerful and important to a nation's cultural identity as what the past truly was, yes? Antique Street was filled with small shops where Louise indeed found a beautiful silk scarf, and it connected us with a truly ancient temple that gave us an interesting juxtaposition of old and new Tianjin.

We'll close with three night photos, the first of yet another shopping street with nothing antique about it whatsoever other than faux antique jeans in the trendy stores. The last two shots were taken along the Hai He. We never did see either end of this marvelous walkway that ran on both sides of the river, despite a few miles spent exploring it both by day and by night. One of the nicest things about China is that we never felt concerned for personal safety even when walking on dimly-lit walkways at night along rivers like this, or down dark alleys through poor neighborhoods day or night as we did in many other places.

The building across the river is the train station, and the next day we left on a fast train to Beijing from there after one last 2-km walk along the river pulling our suitcases. Thanks for enjoying Tianjin with us!

Qingdao and Dalian and a Short Family Reunion

2011-12-07T16:23:00.000-08:00

We started our visit to China with three port calls on the Diamond Princess, to Qingdao, Dalian, and our final destination, Tianjin. We'll tell you about the first two in this blog, and Tianjin in the next.

As many of you know, there have been two major systems of writing Chinese using the Roman alphabet since westerners started turning up in large numbers 170 years ago. The one officially adopted by the Chinese government in the 1950s and internationally in the early 1980s is called pinyin, and it is relatively easy to use if you remember a few uses of letters that are not the same as in English, the two most prominent of which are probably Q and X, the former pronounced "ch" and the latter something between "s" and "sh." So Qingdao is pronounced more or less like "ching-dow." However, it is one of those place names, like Beijing's former spelling "Peking" as in "Peking Opera" and "Peking duck," whose transliteration in the nineteenth century Wade-Giles system refuses to die, thanks in this case to Tsingtao Beer.

And Tsingtao Beer came to be China's first and most famous beer, still made here in Qingdao, thanks to the colonial ambitions of Germany. Germany only became a nation in 1871, long after Britain and France had created vast colonial empires, and even small European countries like Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands had colonies many times larger than the mother country itself. As a suddenly large and powerful European nation with no shortage of feelings of superiority toward other races, Germany felt quite put out. It assuaged its inferiority complex by picking up a few African colonies in places other European countries had not bothered to conquer, probably for good reasons, and then in 1898 it coerced China into letting it run Qingdao. China by this time had given up trying to stop European countries from gobbling up its best cities, having lost a few wars that tried to do just that, so in short order a quiet fishing village began to become a city with place names like Berliner Strasse and Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse, and of course a brewery. [Click on the map to enlarge it if you'd like to see the full set of Teutonic names]. Alas for the Germans they blew their first attempt at the domination of Europe in WW I, and part of the price of losing was the loss of Qingdao.

We spent about 6 hours of shore leave exploring Qingdao's Germanic heritage, but started the day with a hearty breakfast and a look out our dining room window on Deck 14. By golly, we were looking straight across to a sleepy crane operator perched, like us, 125' above the dock. Never could figure out why he was up there when his crane was clearly not going to be getting any business that day, but maybe that's one of those inefficiencies we saw so often in China that we no longer fear the supposed juggernaut of an all-conquering Chinese economy, an image that certain politicians pull out and polish up around election time each year. More on this in future blogs, we're sure.

In any event, those buses waiting on the dock soon took us for a 3 or 4 km ride to a location in the heart of downtown Qingdao, where we took off to explore with another couple from the boat, Joe and Betsy. Within blocks we had struck some architectural gold as we came upon the Catholic Church and some surrounding buildings that any German city would be proud to show off.

And then we discovered another one of those quirks of Chinese life that guidebooks never seem to mention. They often tell you about churches in Chinese cities, as they're relatively rare and always display such distinctly un-Chinese design. But the guidebook writers forget to tell you about the brides and grooms. Yes, hang out near almost any church in China and spread some honey on the ground, and you'll see brides and grooms before you see ants or Winnie the Pooh. And on a pleasant Saturday like this one . . . well, as you can see, the place was almost overrun with them! It is the thing in China these days for the matrimonially-inclined to wear western-style wedding attire and to show up a few days or weeks before the Big Day for a photo shoot.

As we continued our Teutonic Tour, we passed many buildings that continued the theme, such as this apartment house in a side alley, or the Government Building put up by the Germans in 1903 and now given some Chinese touches with flowers and lanterns.

Our second major destination was the other church the Germans put up, of course a Lutheran one. And sure enough, there were several sets of brides and grooms round and about, but something was a little different here -- by golly, they were actually getting married! As we entered the church on the heels of a newly-blessed couple, we heard that another wedding would occur shortly. Hmmm, why not stay and see what a wedding in China is like? Soon enough the flower girl we had seen before entering was marching up the aisle with a flower boy, the bride and the bride's father, marching to something by Handel. The service lasted 15-20 minutes, much of which was in the form of a homily by the minister and then the familiar words of attachment -- at least, we assumed they were -- and then the choir sang a hymn, the couple bowed deeply to the choir, and out walked China's newest married couple. We looked at each other and said, this Chinese wedding was a more typical American wedding than our own!

As soon as it was polite to leave after the bride and groom, we checked out the church tower, which we discovered we were just young enough to climb unaccompanied, and took one more shot of the German-Chinese-American wedding, then headed to our third and final Deutsches destination, the German Governor's Mansion, which our companions Joe and Betsy are posing before. Maybe it was a bad sign for the couple we had just seen married, but on the way we passed a series of posters advertising family planning. They made a fairly compelling case for it even if you can't read the words, yes?

If you're going to establish a colonial barony in a foreign land, you've got to put up a suitably baronial castle for the guy in charge, and this home met the bill. Met it so well, in fact, that it became a favorite of Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De and other top officials after the Communist takeover in 1949. We took the tour and got to see, in fact, Mao's own bed and Mao's own phonograph player, made in China in the 1950s!

We also saw the "Golden Hall" where the German Governor formally met guests, and where the Politburo convenened in 1957 for one of its classier meetings. Another room had some old photos, such as this turn-of-the-century ball, and a light sconce whose nose was battered in by radical students inspired by the May 4th Movement in 1919. Luckily for "big-noses," i.e. Westerners, the students attacked this big-nosed sconce instead of actual Big Noses as part of the students' reaction to the raw deal China got in the Versailles Treaty announced that day. Thanks to the fondness the Communist bigwigs had for the mansion, there was no similar incident or worse during the far more chaotic Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

Having finished our German Tour of China, we headed down to check out the waterfront. For a nation on the Pacific, China does not have all that many cities of note on the ocean itself, and this is one of the ones that gets special mention in many guidebooks. With hazy weather limiting visibility, it was not having one of its better days. There are a number of beaches along the full shore, but the ones we visited near downtown are not known for swimming, and we only saw one or two folks actually in the water, though good-sized crowds did mill about alongside the water or on the pier sticking a half-mile out into it. As we walked along, we saw 4 or 5 stands selling slices of something that appeared to be full of grains, nuts, honey and dried fruit, but our worries about the sanitary standards, especially the old door the food sat on, held us back from trying a wedge. Sadly, we never saw this delicacy in any of the other cities we visited, when our standards had slid somewhat.

As we walked back to the meeting place for our shuttle bus, we had to cross a busy road by means of an underpass. Here was a new lesson, or rather an old lesson from our previous visit to China reawakened. The lesson is this -- if someone, sometime, might pass a place with an appetite, some entrepreneur will soon be there with a food stand. Here are just the first two of a dozen stands we passed before emerging on the other side of the street!

As we got closer to our final destination, we turned down an alley and entered a full-fledged food street, a common feature of many Chinese cities. Octopus, squid, sea urchins, even star fish, all those and more were there for your eating pleasure. Even the sculpture glorified food vendors. Jeff played it safe and had a stick of sticky rice balls dipped in a soy-based sauce then rolled in sesame seeds. His adventuresomeness does know some bounds.

By late afternoon we were back on the boat and wondering how much of the haze was natural and how much Made in China. As we glided out to sea, we passed one more interesting sight, a Chinese submarine base. According to the internet, there is another submarine facility nearby, out of public sight, where the nuclear sub fleet makes its port calls.

Our final port call before we disembark in Tianjin was the next day, in Dalian. We visited here in May 2009, and you can revisit our photos and commentary from that visit by going to http://redtandem.blogspot.com/2009/07/two-smaller-stops-dalian-and-jeju.html. Since that visit, Jeff's son Matt plus his wife Akiko and son Tyler have come here on a work assignment from Citibank. The Diamond Princess did not give us a long time to visit, but it was precious all the same.

Tyler was now exactly 3 1/2 years old, and of course quite a bit more verbal than when we last saw him over 2 years ago. However, at that time he spoke with equal facility, or lack thereof, in both Japanese and English. While he clearly understood everything his Dad said to him in English, he clearly wasn't buying the bilingual bit and conversations with him were particularly challenging. However, he was all for playing ball games in his apartment, and for doing jigsaw puzzles. He really knew the puzzle Akiko pulled out, and put each piece where it belonged without having to look at the nearby pieces. Nope, didn't care to talk about it. Just do it, like the ad says, just do it.

After our play date at the apartment, we headed off for, of course, some Chinese food. We were joined, as we were in the apartment, by Akiko's visiting Uncle Motoi. We didn't know it at the time, of course, but it proved to be one of the best meals we had in China.

It was a much-too-quick visit. We had planned to remedy that known shortcoming by returning to Dalian as part of our Tour de China, but after the cruise had been locked in it turned out that Akiko and Tyler had to return to Japan for Tyler to take an entrance exam of some sort (yes, we know, he's 3 1/2 -- but we're talking Japan here, home of the perpetual school exam). As Louise knows all too well from her own years in Japan, to play the system you've got to get kiddie into the right nursery school, which then makes it easy to get into the right elementary school, the ideal middle school, the best high school, the top college, the premier . . . life??? Lucky for us, Tyler aced his first exam, and his future as a Japanese exam-taker looks bright. As for us, we've arranged for Matt to meet us in Beijing for some sightseeing several days from now, which will be his first trip outside Dalian since arriving 6 months ago.

We'll hop off the boat tomorrow and tell you all about Tianjin, our first stop on the next phase of the trip (Jeff and Louise on their own, trying not to get hopelessly lost), in our next posting.

Getting to Know China Without Actually Speaking Chinese

2011-11-27T16:35:00.000-08:00

[Editorial Note: As we thought might happen, our blog was blocked in China. There is blogging in China, on Chinese websites like Weibo. But the government can't edit out things it doesnt like on blogspot.com or other western sites, so they disappear. Try to go there, and you get a message that looks like the one that pops up when your computer has gone offline. So we're now back in the U.S., trip all done. This and subsequent posts are not as contemporaneous as we like to be, but perhaps will gain something from hindsight.]

Traveling generally requires a good bit of reading and speaking: road signs and maps, menus and train schedules, labels in museums and signs over exit doors, and questions galore for others or questions posed to you. Seeing and understanding a country is a tad challenging when you don't read or speak the language. Which we don't when it comes to Chinese. So how did we do it? And how successful were our efforts?

A lot of our stories will be in the blog posts to follow, but we thought we'd start our exploration of China with a few words on how we prepared for this challenge, and how it worked in practice.

First off, we actually prepared a lot. We were very lucky to get into Professor Madeleine Dong's History of Modern China class during the Spring Quarter at the University of Washington, where we audit classes through the Access Program for senior citizens when we are not on the road -- we get to enjoy the readings and lectures without all those annoying term papers, midterms and finals! We constantly found references in places visited to topics from that class, from the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions to the foreign concessions imposed by western countries on the Chinese to the Cultural Revolution, and to people studied, from the Qing emperors to Sun Yat-sen to Mao and Deng Xiaopeng.

Besides the books for Dr. Dong's class, we also read much more. Jeff focused on travel guides, Louise on personal narratives and novels. Before our prior visit to China we had both read Jan Wong's Red China Blues, an amazingly perceptive and sometimes painful view of life in China from the tumultuous late '60s to the '80s by one of the few westerners present in those xenophobic times. This time around we both read A Traveller's History of China for an overview of the full span of Chinese history. We like this series, and have used other books from it for New Zealand, Southeast Asia and Japan. In addition to 4 or 5 books about China read in the prior two years, Louise read over a dozen more just before or during the trip, the best of which were Peter Hessler's three memoirs of his Peace Corps experiences in China and subsequent adventures around the country, Jonathan Watts' ecological view of China in When A Billion Chinese Jump, and Lisa See's novel Dreams of Joy. There are many more good ones, just ask Louise and she'll give you a list with a month's worth of great reading.

We drew up a tentative itinerary, and for each city on it Jeff found and printed maps, guidebook selections and info from the web, especially from wikitravel.org, where travelers have provided commentary and prices about sightseeing destinations. For 12 of the 15 cities we ended up visiting, this gave us a decent starting point of information and orientation. For the other 3 cities that were added to the itinerary as we went, it was trickier, particularly with no printed map. In Taiyuan, where we found a rudimentary map posted at the train station, we used the trick of taking a photo of it. For Luyuan and Hangzhou, we found maps on the Internet before arrival using wifi with the iPad at our hotels. The problem, never fully solved, was that they usually wouldn't appear unless we were actually on wifi, which we almost never found mid-day, but we managed to navigate to our hotels in both cases and find a free printed map there with sufficient details to suffice. In fact, we always asked for a map at each hotel, and more often than not these maps provided additional info beyond the ones we had found on the Internet.

We both read two additional books of advice for travelers to China. We found we had gleaned most of the advice already from our other wide reading and from our own experience of four days in China during our repositioning cruise from NZ to the West Coast in 2009, though we picked up a few new kernels of wisdom.

The one most important piece of advice we can give to anyone trying our sort of adventure is to do whatever you can to print out, in Chinese, the name and address of your hotel before arriving in a new city. The reason is simple: taxis are amazingly affordable in China (we'll say more about prices further on), but we never met a single taxi driver who could speak, let alone read, a single word of English. But show the driver your little piece of paper, wait for a nod of the head signifying recognition of the place or at least some idea of where it is, and you're as good as there.

Finding lodging was of course a big challenge, but made quite manageable by the wonders of the world wide web. We chose three hotels based on recommendations in guidebooks supplemented by checking out their own web pages and Expedia. We selected 2 or 3 more through Expedia, always looking not only at prices but also at other travelers' reviews. But over half we selected through elong.net, a Chinese equivalent to Expedia, which links very smoothly to reviews on tripadvisor.com plus also had more listings and sometimes better prices than Expedia. Elong's biggest plus, however, was the email confirmation they send you with your hotel's name and address both in English and in Chinese. Chinese characters are often identical to Japanese kanji characters Louise was familiar with, so she became our amanuensis, transcribing these to paper since we never had access to a printer when we were on the web. Finally, once at a hotel we always picked up its business card, a standard traveler's trick in China, as it always had the precious name and address in Chinese, and almost as often a map to help you or a taxi driver navigate back there.

In 5 of the 15 cities we used their subways, so often we became quite proficient at it since each system was largely similar to every other one. You found the ticket dispensing machine, you pressed the button for English, you pressed the button for the line your destination was on, found the destination and pressed it on the screen, and it told you the price and asked you how many tickets. Feed the coins or bills and out came your tickets and any change you were due.

What came next was odd. Every subway system but one had an airport-like x-ray machine at every station where we had to put our backpack or any loose bag on for screening. The standards were so loose you'd have to be hauling in a WWII-sized bomb to trigger any reaction, it seemed, but we guess they figure it's somehow worth the manpower to staff these, two people per checkpoint, generally two checkpoints per station.

In any event, subways were easy to figure out, incredibly cheap, and like any subway, the fastest way to get around any large city. Probably more so in China, where street traffic is tremendously congested.

To get from city to city, we used trains for all but one long hop done by air. Trains are fast and relatively inexpensive, but the system for getting tickets takes "quirky" to a whole new universe. Except for the Beijing-Tianjin run and for trains in the Nanjing-Suzhou-Shanghai-Hangzhou triangle, where there are multiple trains per hour and we could go to the station and get a ticket for a train leaving shortly, we used travel agents. In order to visit Pingyao, our travel agent had to use the sort of creativity that among writers wins awards with names you've heard of. Suffice it to say that, except for some angst about getting the tickets, we were very pleased with the train system and the benefits of using it to get around the country. We'll save all the wonderful stories for subsequent blog posts, they'll read better in context.

We did a lot of walking. In almost every city there were moments of disorientation, but we mostly got where we wanted to get, more or less directly. If there was a street sign, it was always in Chinese and in pinyin, the system of writing out Chinese phonetically using the Roman alphabet. Finding those signs was the bigger challenge as they're not at street corners, but usually set back 5-10 meters from the corner. The street names -- in fact many, many place names -- were easy to understand, once you became familiar with some recurring words.

The Chinese are big on directions, and once you learn them, things fall into place. "Bei" is north, as in Beijing, northern capital. Nanjing means "southern capital." The provinces of Hebei and Henan are on either side of the Huang He, which we call the Yellow River in English, while Hubei and Hunan Provinces flank a large lake in central China. Shandong is east of a certain mountain range, Shanxi west of it, so now you know the words for "east," "west" and "mountain." Tiananmen (which can also be written as Tian An Men or as TianAnMen) Square is the Gate of Heavenly Peace, and many cities will have a Nanmen or Dongmen Street, where there is or once was a southern gate or an east gate through the city walls. All streets we encountered were either a "Lu" (road), "Jie" (street) or "Dajie" (big street, i.e. avenue). What gets tricky is that streets change names often, so you might be on Dongmen Nanlu, then a few blocks later on Dongmen Zhonglu, and in another kilometer on Dongmen Beilu, as you've walked down what has gone from South Dongmen Street to Middle Dongmen Street to North Dongmen Street. So, not really all that complicated, once you see the pattern.

Finding toilets was surprisingly easy, they were well marked and never once did Jeff have to recall which of those characters meant "men" and which "women," as they were always marked in English or with the universal symbols. What you found in the restrooms, once you found them, was another matter. For guys, it's not a problem most of the time as there were always urinals. But for those special moments, or for any visit by a western woman, there's always the question of "throne" or "squatter." On rare occasions you were given a choice, but only once, in S. Korea actually, did we find it marked. If it mattered to you, you pushed on doors and checked each stall.

Not counting hotels, where there was always a western-style toilet, Louise found herself using a squat toilet about 3/4 of the time. Having used them often in her years in Japan, she wasn't as taken aback as most Westerners are by them, and she actually prefers one to a wet toilet seat 10 times out of 10. We found that public toilets provide toilet paper maybe 1 time in 10, so never left the hotel without packages of Kleenex. There was almost always a sink, but rarely soap, so we carried along a little bottle of "body wash" liquid soap picked up at a hotel, which lasted the whole trip. Paper towels are virtually unheard of, but some places had hand blowers, and Louise carried her owncloth towel for convenience. Last but not least is the smell. It's a familiar one to be sure, but truly rank public restrooms were several times more common than we've found in our travels in the U.S., and Jeff found that about a quarter of the ones he visited were also fairly thick with the smell of cigarettes.

Finding restaurants was no harder than in the U.S., but finding ones with English on the menu was trickier, and with appealing choices harder yet. In Seattle and even more so in Vancouver, we can get really good Chinese food. Ironically, in China it was challenging. So much was fairly oily, and we never mastered the art of getting things lightly spiced. We quickly learned to say "bu la" for "no spice," but then Jeff sometimes had to ask for chili peppers (in oil, of course) it would be so bland.

It also didn't help that many of the menu choices were . . . uh . . . strange. A few were just bad translations, such as the buffet we went to one morning at our hotel which had an item called "breakfast bowel." Louise persuaded the manager to change the spelling, on the spot. Some were ambiguous, even with a photo. Other items were, shall we say, an acquired taste we didn't care to acquire, such as chicken feet. Then there were the ones that just puzzled, such as "Pork colon in oyster sauce." "That's just a bad translation, right? They don't really eat . . . Well, let's see what's on the next page of the menu." With the help of guidebooks we did find a handful of very good places, but frankly we found ourselves in McDonalds, Subway and KFC more often than we like to admit, so tired did we get with the effort of finding enticing meals in the local cuisine. But the more gastronomic among you are invited to drool over a few of Pingyao's local specialties in the next photo. We actually ate at this place, but skipped the "Cosmetic Meat" and the "Fries Pulls Out the Rotten Child." Don't know, guess we just weren't in the right mood for those particular local treats that day.

Thanks to guidebooks and our background reading, we did not need local guides either to find interesting places or to put them in their historical and cultural perspective. At most museums and historic sites we found that many signs were labeled both in Chinese and in English, but individual artifacts less commonly so, particularly in the cities less visited by Westerners. If we needed a taxi to get to a more remote attraction, the hotel always had a checklist of place names on the back of their name card to point to, or someone at the desk would write it out for us to hand to the driver. But most places we walked to, using our maps, or got there by subway.

As mentioned earlier, Louise does know quite a few words of written Chinese thanks to her knowledge of Japanese kanji. Numbers are identical, for example. But her kanji vocabulary was never enormous and is slipping through nonuse -- it's been 17 years since she left -- and there are two huge caveats. One is that the Communist Party of China decided in the early '50s to simplify a number of characters, e.g. taking one with 9 strokes and making it over with 6. We both eventually got to know the character for gate, but it was a stranger the first time Louise saw it. They took out the doors in the kanji version, leaving only the frame and a new short stroke. The second and far, far bigger limitation on Louise's knowledge was that the Japanese had borrowed the characters and (usually) the meaning, but not the pronunciation. So she could sometimes tell what something was, but had no clue how to say it.

So we worked on our written language skills, Jeff learning his first two dozen characters, Louise learning a few dozen new ones. We both tried to speak Chinese, usually places or streets we were looking for, but mostly got blank stares, like a visitor to Seattle asking for the spice noodle rather than the Space Needle. But the language skill we got best at was sign language. We're sure we left more than one person muttering "strange foreigners" in our wake, but we survived.

In our travels we saw relatively few Westerners, and in fact extremely few Americans. From our few encounters, we think the reason is that very few venture off on their own as we did. When we did meet them, they almost always had a private guide nearby, taking them from place to place, finding them restaurants and getting them to hotels that cater to such arrangements, and giving them commentary on what they were seeing.

Our system was no better or worse than theirs (though vastly less expensive), just different. For someone who doesn't want to take courses in Chinese history or to read a shelffull of books, a guide is invaluable, and there are certainly many insights we missed as we visited historic places without one. We did do one full day guided tour to the famous Terra Cotta Warriors near Xi'an, and we're very glad we did.

What we gained, of course, was flexibility to see what we wanted, for as short or as long as we chose. We saw far fewer temples per day than almost any guided tourist would experience. Been there, done that, let's just visit these three or four outstanding ones during our six week visit. Other places saw us look at every item, read every sign, we couldn't get enough of this amazing history or art or culture. And of course we had spontaneity galore.

What we lost, besides the guides' knowledge of the places they knew well, was the chance to actually talk to our Chinese hosts. Regrettably, we encountered very few who had the time and the English language skills to chat with us about what their lives were like, or how they perceived the changes taking place in their cities and in their country, or what they would like to know about our lives and our country. Perhaps that's why Louise read so many books about China, particularly memoirs, to have those conversations vicariously through her authors. In some ways we were like archaeologists studying the culture through its artifacts. Like them we indeed learned a lot, even without actually talking to the folks living amidst all that we were taking note of. But our trip lacked a fullness that we missed at times.

One final word about prices in China, and we'll sign off and start working on the blogs to come, the ones with the stories and photos you really come here to read. Not counting our cruise to get here or our air fare to get home, our daily expenses were about $175/day combined, for the two of us. Had we not taken a three day boat cruise down the Yangtze through the Three Gorges, which was quite pricey, the average would have been more like $160/day, comparable to what we often spend on our bike trips in the U.S.

We mostly stayed at 4 star hotels, which in America would be considered 2 star places, though we did splurge it Tianjin and got triple our money's worth in historical payback, as we'll tell you in an upcoming blog. Our average night cost under $90, and we were as comfortable as we needed to be, or could be with China's notoriously hard beds under our tired bodies. Meals were far cheaper than in the U.S., by 30-40%. The biggest exception was Starbucks, which Jeff patronized twice, paying just over $4 for a grande mocha, about the same as in Seattle. At the other end of the scale, there was the baozi stand in Suzhou (here's a photo of a similar though smaller one in Pingyao) where awoman had two tall stacks of wooden trays with a different kind of steamed dumpling on each tray, some meat- and others vegetable-filled, and each one going for 5 cents apiece! We were stuffed long before we could get even close to $1.

Many but not all museums and historic sites charged a fee, but even the most outstanding rarely exceeded $10/person. In six weeks, we spent only $250 combined, plus $125 for two for an all-day excursion to the Terra Cotta Warriors and another historic site en route. In short, we got 6,000 years of Chinese history over a six week period for much less than a pair of 3-day passes to Disneyland.

Transportation was also very cheap. Most subway rides were 32 or 48 cents, a handfull 64 cents, and only one more than that, a 90-minute ride from Shangai to Pudong Airport 46 km away, which cost $1.12. In every city the drop fee for a taxi was $1.45 to $1.90 for the first 3 km, then 9-12 cents per km. Most taxi rides were $3 to $5 for the two of us, a few were just the drop fee.

Intercity travel by train was fast, comfortable and reasonable, about $35 for two for one trip we did that was about the same distance as from Seattle to Portland or NYC to Washington DC. Had we taken the slow train, it would have been about half that cost. How fast are the fast trains? As fast as Japan's famous Shinkansen, or "bullet trains." We'll say much more as we describe the rides in later posts. In all, we took 14 different train rides for a total of almost 3,000 miles.

We can't say much about airplane travel since we only took one flight, but we can say that it was shorter than Seatle to San Francisco but cost 10-20% more than a quick check of Expedia gave us for the latter, but either of those figures could be an anomaly.

If any of our readers would like more info or specific recommendations of hotels we used, just give us an electronic jingle at redtandem@yahoo.com. Otherwise, we think you've gotten enough of the nuts and bolts of how we did it, let's get on with telling you about how it went. We'll post a new episode every few days 'til we get them written, so stay tuned for more.

Hiking High Above Pusan

2011-11-22T14:55:00.000-08:00

As we prepared for this trip last Spring, Jeff scoured the Seattle and King County library systems for reasonably current guidebooks. Researching Pusan (also sometimes spelled Busan), our one stop in S. Korea, one book said exciting things about an ancient Korean temple, Beomeo-sa, calling it "perhaps Busan's best sight . . . a world away from the urban jungle, with beautiful architecture neatly set against an extraordinary mountain setting." Sounded pretty good, but there was more -- it was right next to Geumjeong Fortress, not a fort but rather a wall built in 1703, behind which the city hoped to protect its people if the Japanese or Chinese invaded again, as the former did in 1592 and the latter in 1636. Can't tell you why the delay in building the thing, but we can advise you that the guidebook's statements that we would find some of the city's best hiking, and that it would be "a comfortable hike with a few steep stretches" were both serious understatements.

Before arriving we had roped another game couple into joining us, David and Katherine. At dawn we stood on deck and watched Pusan come into focus as the Diamond Princess made its way to our dock. Through the morning mist we saw a group of skyscrapers come into view, the newly-risen sun glinting off the tops of the tallest ones, and thought it was the city, only to discover it was merely a distant suburb. Then we passed a starkly beautiful apartment or condo development looking out over the rocky shoreline, also miles from downtown.

At last we entered the main part of the port and saw some of the cranes for handling containers that make Pusan Korea's busiest port city (and 5th busiest container port in the world, roughly equal to the entire U.S. West Coast combined). Our berth was across from those cranes, both us and the cranes about a dozen miles from anything that could be called "downtown." As we disembarked, a local bank had parked a bus at the dock that had been converted into a mobile bank. With swift efficiency we exchanged a few dozen dollars for a few thousand "won," the local currency, and headed with David and Katherine for the taxi stand. For about $30 split between us we were whisked on surprisingly unjammed expressways through downtwn and at least a dozen miles beyond into the hills, and deposited at the doorstep of Beomeo-sa. We had come 25-30 miles and a world away, halfway up a mountain and deep into the forest. Quiet enveloped us, broken by an occasional bird chirping.

Beomeo-sa indeed had beautiful architecture, some of it recently repainted in exuberant Korean designs. But the memory that will remain long after the architectural details have merged with those of many other temples, is the chanting. As we approached the first building, we began to hear a monk intersperse minute-long verses chanted with his congregants with pauses of a similar length, when he would sound out a haunting and irregular beat using a baton on a hollow piece of wood, ending with a single high-pitched "ting" on a small brass bell. And then another verse came floating, ethereally, out the temple doors.

A second building looked quiet, a place of worship no longer needed in this busy world of ours, a quaint relic of history. But as we walked up the stone steps to the veranda we discovered that it was broken up into three separate rooms, and each one was filled with 1-2 dozen folks quietly murmuring prayers. So too a third building! Between us we have seen many, many temples in the Far East, and never one so active as a religious site, not just a tourist one.

After taking a photo of one of a series of paintings that told religious stories in ways that are remarkably similar to what one would find in a medieval European church, we headed out to explore Geumjeong Fortress. Lucky for us, we came upon a map that was far better than the minimalist one Jeff had copied from that guidebook. Taking photos of maps encountered on hikes is a trick we learned a ways back. Yes, they're teeny-tiny on a digital camera screen, but you can enlarge a portion of almost any map enough to read a relevant portion of it. Well, yes, this one was in Korean, but at least we could see where the trails were and where they went to.

Having a map was one thing, doing the hike another. This was a steep bugger! At least the temperature was comfortable, the air clean, the forest attractive. But boy, was it vertical! After 45 minutes of heavy going we reached the North Gate, one of only 4 in the 17 km-long wall. The wall itself wasn't at all tall, generally only 5 to 9 feet. Like so many grandiose defensive works, such as the forts that ring Seattle or the Maginot Line in France, it was irrelevant in the next war, the invasion and subjugation of Korea by Japan in 1910.

The trail now turned and followed the wall. The wall went up and down hills, so we did too! Big time! But check out those views -- we were now about 1200' to 1600' feet above Pusan as we climbed and descended, climbed and descended.

At about mile 7.5 David established with sign language, goodness knows how, that a short walk through one of those four gates that we had now reached would bring us to a road with bus service. In 150 yards, there was the road. In 5 more minutes, there was the bus! It was a memorable schuss off the mountain through enough hairpin turns to qualify it for a Tour de France stage. With help from a college student on the bus who spoke some English, we found out where to get off the bus to catch the subway, and there we were, soon after, riding it to downtown where there was a pickup stop at a certain hotel for a shuttle bus out to our boat. An odd thing happened on the subway. A fellow got on one stop after us and, the moment the train got moving again, started a sales pitch for a sock-like shoe, or perhaps it was a shoe-like sock. Whatever it was, he made two sales and had his apparatus all folded up again by the time we reached the next stop!

We can't say much about Pusan as a city, but what we did see from our taxi and buses was very reminiscent of Japan. Fairly modern, quite densely packed. We had a half hour before the last shuttle bus to wander up and down a shopping street, and if you didn't notice the Korean lettering on signs or hear the shopkeepers and customers speaking Korean, you'd swear you were on a similar street in Japan.

We have one more day at sea and then we are in China, with three port calls in a row: Qingdao, Dalian and Tianjin. We'll start the China portion of our journey in our next blog entry.

A Brief Visit to Vladivostok

2011-11-22T14:16:00.000-08:00

It's surprisingly far from Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan, to Vladivostok, even though it's just a matter of crossing the Sea of Japan. It took us about 36 hours to cover the 570 miles, but oh, what a berth they found for our ship, right next to the iconic sign on the maritime terminal saying "VLADIVOSTOK" in Cyrilic, with the railroad terminal right next door where the legendary Trans-Siberian train ends each trip from Moscow. Later in the day, in fact, we watched the Trans-Siberian head off on its voyage to Moscow, 9,289 km and 6 travel days away -- it's the middle one of the three trains at the station.

A little early morning fog added drama and mystery to a portion of Russia's Far Eastern Fleet that was berthed next to us, and to the two ends of a suspension bridge that will soon span the harbor. So long as we stayed in town, we were not required to have a visa, so as soon as the ship was cleared by the authorities to disembark, we were in that first wave off the boat. Before we had gone two blocks, we also saw that we were not in the Russia of Joe Stalin or even of Nikita Krushchev, as we were implored to buy a "hot dogi" and Coke for 70 rubles, about $2.25. Nearby another sign offered "piroshki, burgeri, hot dogi" and two other dishes we didn't recognize, the first of dozens of identical signs offering these standard items at fast food carts all around town.

In that first photo, you can see a high-rise under construction at the top of a nearby hill. We often head for a hill in a new town to get a feel for the layout, and as a way of having a definable destination. In this case we never got the views we hoped for, then got a second surprise -- the building was abandoned, no sign of construction in perhaps a year or more. We had no way of finding out why, or whether it will any time soon get completed.

As we headed to yet another prominent hill we passed two Orthodox churches, one a little jewel-box of a church with a glorious though tiny interior, the other a larger church undergoing serious beautification. Inside we were admiring some of the icons, holy pictures, when an elderly woman walked up to each one and kissed it. Our first reaction was revulsion at the public health implications, then wonder at the intensity of her religious feelings. It was what some professors call "a teaching moment."

As we continued up the hill we found another lesson, that in Vladivostok it is the poor people, not the rich, who live at or close to the tops of hills. Perhaps it has something to do with steep hills covered with snow for a few months of winter, we don't know, but the apartments we saw were fairly sad-looking. We felt bad about even taking this one photo of a typical apartment flat, and skipped documenting the abysmal condition of the roads and staircases we took to climb the hill. Near the top we were stopped by a menacing dog, so never made it all the way but we did salvage one photo from on high of hilly Vladivostok and of our ship, then descended into town for an even more dramatic view of the Diamond Princess down Okeanskii Avenue, past one of the bronze Heroes of the Soviet Far East there on Svetlanskaya Street.

We were determined to have borsht while we were in Russia, and succeeded splendidly when we located a deli with a steam table and a few cauldrons of soup. With a lot of finger pointing we got our borsht and a few other delicacies: a dark stew of eggplant and beef, a quiche-like patty, and a whole bunch of potatoes that appeared to have been rolled around in butter. Maybe not the healthiest meal, but authentic! In the pursuit of more info on the Russian diet -- well, actually in pursuit of some good Russian chocolate -- we perused a supermarket and found this collection of exotic Russian condiments, including curry sauce, "barbekyu" sauce, "italyanskii" sauce, and Heinz 57 "steik" sauce. Oh, and that chocolate was scrumptious.

It was our first foray of this trip into a country where neither of us knew the language. Jeff knows no Russian but at least knew how to read the Cyrillic text, and occasionally could puzzle out what a sign said if the words were similar to English, Geman or French. "Oh, that sign we just passed in a restaurant said it served 'authentic Japanese food'," or "look, that dive is a lawyer's office!" We passed a kitchen store with nice German-made products, and went in and purchased a few of the cleverer ones. Then Louise decided she needed a sink plug in case we found ourselves in a hotel with no plug for the sink, a serious problem when you have only two sets of undies and one of them has to be washed each night. Think this through -- how do you ask a clerk for a sink plug using charades? Within 20 seconds, Louise had done it and the clerk had plucked one from the collection of gadgets!

We finished the visit with a quick trot past some beautiful buildings from the late 19th or early 20th century, including the GUM department store, at the corner in the first photo below. We walked in and out 5 minutes later, looked like a Sears store but with a fur department. An old revolutionary faced our boat and seemed to be waving goodbye to us. His machine gunner sidekick wasn't nearly so friendly, perhaps because he hasn't turned around in a few years since a Cinnabon store opened on the street right behind him.

At 6 pm it really was goodbye, and quite a crowd lined the maritime terminal building to see us sail off. Twenty minutes later we sailed by yet another massive bridge nearing completion, one we're not sure our boat will fit under when it's done. It's about to link growing Vladivostok to a large island that, for the moment, has only a small army base and about a million spruce and birch trees.

As the sun lay just below the horizon, we said farewell to Russia's so-called Window on the Pacific and set our sights for Pusan, another 36-hour sail away.

Across the Wide Pacific

2011-11-21T17:36:00.000-08:00

Two years ago we twice crossed the Pacific by cruise ship as a creative way of getting to and from New Zealand. We found ourselves cruising across it for a third time because of Citibank. Jeff's son Matt works in their Tokyo office, and a year ago was selected for a management training program. As part of the deal, Matt was assigned earlier this year to work in Dalian China for 12 months. As soon as we heard Matt's news we started searching for repositioning cruises from the Pacific Northwest to Asia. The Diamond Princess's September 17 sailing from Vancouver, stopping at Dalian on October 9 and dropping us off October 10 in Tianjin China, seemed just the ticket.

For a number of reasons, the biggest two being uncomfortable beds and bumbling, poorly-prepared lecturers, the Diamond Princess matched up poorly in our estimation compared to the Holland America Volendam, which we took on those cruises, to New Zealand in 2008 and then back home in 2009. That said, the Diamond Princess is still a cruise ship and it's not a bad life even on a cruise ship with some disappointments, and it did get us to China with some good touring in Alaska and in Vladivostok and Pusan. We told you about Alaska in our last post, and will tell you all about the stops in Russia and South Korea in the next two episodes, and limit today's entry to the voyage across the Pacific and to our first stop in Asia, Muroran Japan.

As we visited our last glacier just before the port call at Whittier, our ship hit its most northerly point, about 61.3 degrees from the equator. This is the farthest north we've ever been. This is really north, closer to the North Pole than Helsinki, Stockholm or Oslo, further north than the northernmost islands off the coast of Scotland. Not that it meant much -- it was only a few days after the autumnal equinox, when day and night are exactly 12 hours long everywhere in the world. At this far northern outpost we would have enjoyed 19 1/2 hours of daylight had we been here 3 months earlier, or a mere 4 hours 26 minutes of sunlight in late December, and with the sun never rising even a third of the way above the horizon. Nor did we have a chance to see the Northern Lights, as we had a steady week of clouds and/or rain. Oh well, someday perhaps we'll experience these things, just not this time around.

As we left Whittier for Japan, we followed the Aleutian Islands for three days, for about 1,500 of the 3,505 miles we covered from port to port, each day finding ourselves further south as well as further west. The islands were always quite a ways off in the distance, only visible because they are also incredibly mountainous. The Pacific lived up to its name and stayed more or less peaceful, and we had no further episodes of mal de mer, as Louise experienced for one afternoon when we hit big rollers north of Vancouver Island a week earlier. At a lecture about the ship and how it navigates, they showed us this slide of the stabilizers, enormous "wings" that practically eliminate rolling, the side-to-side movement of a ship, though they do little to stop pitching, the movement up and down of the bow and stern. It was fun to watch the explosion of water near the bow when we did hit a larger than usual wave, but with only dim shapes of land for three days and then no trace of it for three more, that was about all there was to look at outdoors, that and the pulsating energy of the propellers and the wake of the ship as one stood at the stern and both watched and felt them, viscerally.

As you can see from this shot of it while we were docked in Muroran, the Diamond Princess is a big ship, 115,875 tons and 946 feet long to be exact. Decks 1 to 4 we never saw except for a passageway on 4 we sometimes used getting on and off the boat; these are where all the mechanical and storage facilities and cabins for the staff are located. Most of decks 5, 6 and 7 were public areas: multiple dining rooms, a vast theater for lectures and performances, and a casino and shops we entirely avoided. A very attractive atrium linked these 3 decks amidships, and every afternoon and evening an occasionally good string quartet performed. The atrium was also a good place for people-watching.

There were one or two lectures each day when there was no port call, and we went to almost all of them, but as noted only a handful were outstanding. There were performances every night, both in the big theater and in a smaller venue, but again these are not really "our thing." We found one comedian fairly funny, another so bad we walked out within 10 minutes, and we watched the film Water For Elephants, which we loved. Two or three times we watched an old movie or a History Channel program on the tv in our stateroom. That was it for ship-provided entertainment on the 23-day cruise. We spent far more time reading, Louise on her Kindle and Jeff on the iPad.

Our cabin was one of the least expensive, an inside one on deck 9. It was 2 to 4 decks down to the main public areas in the lower part of the ship, and 4 to 6 decks up to the ones on the upper decks, and we rarely used the elevators so we got plenty of exercise. 12 days on our 23-day voyage we had no port call, and our pedometer tells us we walked 75 miles total on those days, or just over 6 miles a day. A few times when we felt we hadn't gotten enough exercise, we started on the bottom deck and walked every public corridor we could walk without covering the same point twice until we reached the topmost deck, and found that we had hiked over two miles! And that was just inside -- add the outside decks on 7 and 15 and you can add about a half mile more. It was truly a big ship!

Mealtimes are always wonderful on any cruise ship. We ate in the cafeteria-style dining room on deck 14 for all our breakfasts and lunches and for almost half of the dinners. It was bright and cheery, but you usually sat as a couple at your own table and did not often mingle with other passengers. The food was excellent, more so when we learned where and how to get made-to-order omellettes at breakfast. The serving area looks so inviting just before it opened, when we took one of these shots, but look out when the doors opened for a meal, it looked like a Chinese street at rush hour. With so many food stations and almost all of them self-serve, however, it moved remarkably fast. And did we mention the chocolate-filled almond croissants that Jeff had roughly 22 of our 23 mornings?

There were several dining rooms with sit-down service where we more commonly had dinner, usually asking to be seated at a table for six. Our past experience was that a table for eight put some people too far away for conversation, but six allowed you to converse with everyone and gave you two couples to chat with in case one of them turned out to be duds. Our favorite couples were these folks from Delaware who knew each other and spoke Mandarin between themselves but were happy to have us join them and chat in English. One had come from Taiwan, the other from a Chinese community in Burma, in both cases emigrating to America when the husband got a scholarship to graduate school in the US. Their life stories were quite fascinating to us, and our wide-ranging travels were equally amusing to them, and we all enjoyed a similar eagerness and excitement about seeing the world from our cruise ship.

Yes, the food was tasty and, if you selected carefully, healthy. Each half of the cruise they offered a tour of the kitchen, which Jeff took both times, and he was impressed with it's size, orderliness and cleanliness. We took a photo one evening of the menu (actually about 2/3 of it, as there's a second page with a dozen items available every day, including shrimp cocktail, Caesar salad, and both salmon and steak main courses), and of the grilled veggie appetizer and our main courses. The serving sizes were modest enough to keep one from overeating - or to allow one to try an extra appetizer or salad - and always very nicely presented. Our belts told an even nicer story: neither of us put on any noticabe weight despite all that wonderful food.

3,505 miles from Whittier, Alaska we finally hit land at Muroran, Japan. For six days and seven nights we had pushed on at 18.8 knots -- almost 22 mph -- and crossed six time zones and the International Date Line. Each of those six days was therefore 25 hours long. This proved to be a little tiring but manageable, and far far easier than two years ago when we had six consecutive 23-hour days. By the fifth of those, Jeff gave up trying to sleep at 2 a.m. and walked around the ship, discovering to his surprise that a fourth of the passengers were doing the same thing as their bodies failed to feel tired with so many too-short days and nights. This time around we felt and observed a smooth accommodation to the demands of the clock. As for the Date Line, we lost Wednesday September 28. Poof, gone! It just never happened! As recompense, of course, when we head back to the US we get to try out November 18 twice, when we leave Shanghai at 9 p.m. that evening and arrive in LA the same day, but at 3:30 pm!

Muroran was a disappointment, though a lot of the blame goes to the Japanese Customs and Immigration folks who decided they wanted an electronic fingerprint as well as the usual passport check of everyone getting off the ship. It was so badly bungled that we stood in line 90 excruciating minutes, watching any hope of getting out of Muroran to a national park 50 km away drift away and finally vanish. There just wasn't time enough left for the train-bus trip there and back to work and still have enough time to see the sights so tantalizingly described in our guidebook.

The city was one we had never heard of before, as it's a fairly gritty factory and port town with no real attraction other than its accessibility to that national park and (but with a 3-hour drive each way) to Sapporo. Folks who paid the big bucks for Princess-organized tours did get to board all those buses waiting while we did the fingerprint foolishness, and they did do their tours, though the visit to Sapporo was ridiculously brief compared to the travel time to and from. The rest of us made the best of Muroran, which was not much. We found an Internet cafe and caught up with email and checking the bank and credit card accounts; we found a charming ramen shop where you sit at a counter around the small kitchen, and got bowls of soup that brought waves of nostalgia to Louise; we visited a mildly interesting Shinto shrine; and we talked for a while with an American English teacher and one of his students, part of a welcoming group that Princess had arranged and stationed all around town. But compared with the port stops we made on the Volendam at two other cities not far from Muroran and which we glowingly described in this blog two years ago, Hakodate and Otaru, this was a downer. We hope Princess either chooses one of those ports, persuades the Japanese that they have to do a far better job of letting passengers disembark from cruise ships, or both.

It's now on to Vladivostok and our first visit ever to Russia. We'll tell you all in our next entry.

A Week in Alaska

2011-11-21T16:34:00.000-08:00

And now to China -- but with a week in Alaska for starters. In that week we saw Ketchikan, Juneau and Skagway, spent two days amongst the glaciers, waved "hi" to a wide assortment of wildlife, and finished with an entirely forgettable day in Whittier dropping off some passengers and picking up new ones. We also got 1,869 miles and one time zone closer to China. The big push across the Pacific will come next week.

We pulled out of Vancouver BC past the ever-present pile of sulphur, preceded by a Holland America boat. It turned south to Mexico and we headed north to Ketchikan. We visited here on the Holland America Volendam on our way back from New Zealand, and Ketchikan is still just as much a tourist trap the second time around, except that this time we shared it with only two more cruise ships our size instead of three, meaning 8000 passengers and 1000+ crew members on shore leave were out there, looking for things to do. We did the obligatory walk up Creek Street and Louise modelled her new hat from Vancouver's Hudson Bay Company store. We marveled at the salmon heading upstream to spawn. We admired a totem pole outside the Totem Heritage Center but passed on entering - well, really passed on paying the admission fee as we've seen the better collection in Vancouver. We walked to the edge of town then back to a viewpoint overlooking our ship, the Diamond Princess. OK, that killed an hour . . .

We returned to the ship for lunch, then headed off to the public library to take advantage of a free hour of wifi, did a little browsing and a little aimless wandering, and by golly it was time to reboard. It was hard, but we did pass on buying the fur bikini set. Wrong shade of red. Later that day a crowd gathered on deck as we passed through an area where hunchback whales tend to hang out. We did indeed see a half-dozen, though none stood still long enough to have his or her photo taken.

Juneau was a far more interesting stop, but the town was not the attraction. Getting off the ship, the town clusters in that valley just ahead. We climbed through town past the ancient Russian Orthodox church and onto Basin Road, past a sign reassuring us that there is a half-mile DMZ around Basin Road protecting us from ex-governors and other Alaskan gun nuts.

And what a road it was! A little over two miles from the heart of downtown it turned into a hiking path that climbed into the sky past glorious waterfalls and an ingloriously decaying gold mine that was once the largest in the U.S. Oh, it was good to get out in the woods like that, even though we had to yell out "Hey Bear!" every minute or two to let them know we were in the vicinity. Rangers at Glacier National Park taught us to do this years ago, since bears just hate surprise visits from humans. Let 'em know you're coming and they'll leave is the theory.

Part way up the trail we found a sign telling us that our narrow shelf of dirt and rock was Alaska's first road, servicing gold mines up this valley. That must have been an exhilarating drive! Well, we were thoroughly soaked on our return to the ship, but with dry clothes on him and a hot lunch in him, Jeff managed a second trip out into the steady hard rain to do an hour of Internet at a cafe, mostly catching up on checking the bank and credit card accounts.

Skagway was our third stop. Captain William Moore was a prescient fellow. He had done some prospecting himself and knew that other gold hunters were wandering all over Canada's Northwest Territory. In 1887 he staked a homestead claim in what is today Skagway on 160 acres at the base of White Pass, the lowest pass over the mountains from Alaska to the NWT. He farmed enough to "prove up" his homestead claim, and he waited. And waited. Nine years after he arrived and built the cabin you see here, a few fellows 300 miles to the north were stuffing every sack they owned with shiny rocks that were turning them into millionaires, and Captain Moore's ship came in the next year as the Klondike Gold Rush began and the population went on from 7 Moores in 3 generations to 10,000 mostly single fortune-seekers. Except it was more complicated than that. Those thousands descended onto his property with little regard for fine points like legal title to land, and it took several years of litigation before he, too, joined those first miners in the millionaires club.

The National Park Service today owns a lot of historic downtown Skagway and leases much of it out to stores that agree to properly conserve the buildings and spirit of Gold Rush Skagway. The 1899 Arctic Brotherhood building, a fraternal organization that fizzled out 20 years later, is now the tourist bureau and reportedly the most-photographed building in Alaska thanks to the 8,800 pieces of driftwood adorning it.

The Park Service runs a small but excellent museum that brought the Klondike Gold Rush to life, such as this model of just how many provisions a miner had to bring before the Canadian Mounties would let him cross the border in search of gold. It was supposed to be enough clothing, equipment and food to last him a year, and it weighed approximately a ton - 2,000 pounds!

The vast majority of miners actually hiked from nearby Dyea up the Chilkoot Pass, a taller crossing but several miles shorter. Since it took many trips up and down the trail to bring your ton of goods to the top, short was important. Just as the gold rush was almost over, however, a railroad made it over White Pass and on to Whitehorse, and Dyea became a ghost town. Skagway survived, and the White Pass and Yukon Railroad today is mining tourists better than any of those early settlers mined gold. $117 gets you a 2 1/2 hour round trip to the summit, $129 if you buy it as an excursion from the boat (you get a 4 minute bus trip to the train station for the extra $12), and we saw four pairs of locomotives each pulling about 15 fairly full passenger cars, and that was mid-day on the second of three runs! There were 4 cruise ships in port and we estimate their passengers left close to a quarter of a million in the railroad's coffers that day, plus who knows how much more in the shops in town. OK, we admit it, a few of those dollars were ours as we picked up a stuffed toy for grandson Tyler, whom we see in two weeks.

But other than bemusement as we captured the illusion of a "stretch" cruise ship from two Norwegian Cruise Line boats docked on a neighboring pier, and astonishment at the number of jewelry stores on the main street (we've never heard of a diamond mine in Alaska, though there's an average of two diamond stores per block in one part of town), we pretty much limited ourselves to the National Park sites and to another hike into the wilderness. Two blocks from the train station you enter the woods and start climbing over a wooden bridge and past a spot overlooking the other 2 of Skagway's 4 cruise ship berths, the last signs of civilization for a while.

A 45-minute steep climb on a somewhat rough trail brought us to Lower Dewey Lake. We alternated between views across the lake and up into the towering mountains, then down at our feet at the rocky trail and an amazing variety of mushrooms. Half-way around the lake the off-and-on light mist of the morning became another hard steady rain, and then the trail changed for a quarter hour from a path to a rock scramble on all fours, but once again the chance to get into such stunning nature made the day a big success.

The next two days involved sightseeing from the decks of our ship, and we lucked out with dry days in the 50s. Jeff visited Glacier Bay on a cruise ship in May 1987, and saw a lot of wildlife and several excitingly large splashes as ice "calved" off the glaciers. On these two days we saw a few whales, a small pod of porpoises and a few dozen sea otters, one of them floating on an iceberg, plus acrobatics from hundreds of starkly colored kittiwakes, but sadly much less than on the earlier trip. The glaciers were also having off days.

That said, the scenery was still awe-inspiring. We'll turn off the audio commentary for a while and let a batch of our favorite shots speak for themselves. To get a sense of the scale, keep in mind that all but the last 3 shots were taken from a deck 75' above the water, and the last three from the top deck at twice that height.

Welcome back. The first shots were in Glacier Bay, the last ones on College Fjord the next day. This second waterway is where a bunch of university science professors sailed into an area previously blocked by ice and named the newly-discovered glaciers after various East Coast schools. We parked for an hour in front of Harvard Glacier, down the street from Vassar and around the corner from Yale, among others.

Sixty of our fellow passengers missed Glacier Bay. They took an excursion the day before while we were in Skagway, jet-boating 25 miles to Haines for some bald eagle watching. As that heavier rain moved in mid-day, so did an intense wind storm. It was too dangerous for their boat to return to Skagway! Luckily an Alaska state ferry was also stuck in Haines, with 40 - 50 empty staterooms. The eagle-watchers spent the night on that ferry, albeit toothbrush-and-pj-less, and rode it the next morning to Juneau, where Princess chartered a jet boat which brought them to the mouth of Glacier Bay. The rendezvous worked smoothly, and we heard later that some whale and porpoise sightings plus perhaps a free beer or two on the Princess tab left them feeling OK about the incident. In any event, College Fjord was every bit as stunning as Glacier Bay, so they made out just fine. They probably also appreciated that the Diamond Princess came to a dead stop for their reboarding. A half hour earlier our National Park Service guides for Glacier Bay disembarked while we did 16 knots on a southerly course.

One week out of Vancouver we reached Whitter. It was created during WW II to bring supplies to Anchorage and on to the Alaska Highway that was being hurriedly cut through the wilderness, in case the Japanese tried to attack the U.S. from the north. As it turned out, they did, but never got closer than the Aleutian islands of Attu and Kiska, almost as far from Anchorage as Seattle is. After WW II Whitter remained a military installation, this time because of the fear of Russia. Today Whitter is dominated by two enormous buildings, each one the largest structure in Alaska when it was built. The Buckner Building off to the left was abandoned when the military pulled out about thirty years ago, and is today an empty and heavily-vandalized hulk brooding down on this cold, wet place. The Begich Building has been renovated and looks better now than when it was built over fifty years ago, and today houses 98% of the population of Whittier. You can even go by underground tunnel to the public school from it! It's certainly an improvement over the housing options during the 1940s, as seen in an old photograph we found in town.

With pretty much every "sightseeing" spot covered in 15 minutes, and with a steady rain and a temperature of 50, the highlights of our port call were a slow inspection of the lone grocery store, the last chance to buy American products for the next 2 months - and we did come up with $10 of odds and ends to purchase - and a long visit to the cafe to use wifi in one last orgy of connectedness before our week-long crossing of the Pacific. Back on the boat we still had a good cell phone signal so called up family and friends for one last chat before we suspend service 'til our return in late November.

OK, time to let go of North America. For the next 6 days and 7 nights our ship's engines will be pounding as we cover over 3,000 miles to Japan. With lots of time to explore the boat, we'll tell you about our floating palace in our next blog from the other side of the Pacific.

Repositioning

2011-09-20T17:22:00.000-07:00

We're writing this from the Ketchikan Public Library as we take shore leave on our our "repositioning cruise" from Vancouver BC to China on the Diamond Princess, which continues on to Australia without us for a winter of cruising Down Under during the antipodian summer.

However, today's post will be a quick summary of our own repositioning from biking in Wisconsin to our departure from North America. We'll tell you about the cruise and our adventures en route and in China in future entries, but don't know if time and the Chinese government will give us that opportunity before our return to the US on November 22. If our past experience in China is any guide, we will probably be waiting those two months to tell you, since blogspot was on their Do Not Fly list last time around -- waaaay too subversive, it seems.

We took Amtrak west with no floods or other disasters blocking our way this time. You can see our tandem making its way from the baggage car on the Milwaukee-Chicago train to the Southwest Chief, which took us via Kansas City and Albuquerque to LA. Louise's son Brian was back from his acting gig at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago to pick us up. He has been offered and has accepted the same job as understudy to three of the actors in Chinglish when it opens next month on Broadway. With an open run, if the play has legs the odds are in his favor of reaching that acting pinnacle of pinnacles, a live appearance on the Great White Way! We're already talking about a trip to New York next Spring.

We stayed in LA for a week to visit with Brian and his wife Ardy and our newest grandson, 1-year-old Cedro. Also in town for her sabbatical year is daughter Lisa, husband Ray and two more of the grandkids, almost-7-y.o. Elise and 4-y.o. Issei. Elise and Issei love to hang out with their cousin Cedro and vice versa, and we had some great beach weather while we were there to have a big family get-together. Our week in LA also gave us plenty of chances to see Cedro try to get the knack of walking. At sea yesterday our own walking looked kind of like Cedro's, but we'll wait 'til the next blog to tell you all the rest of the cruise details.

We had a nice adventure one day visiting the Getty Museum with Lisa, Elise, Ardy and Cedro. You park or, in our case, get off the city bus next to the Interstate and a tram whisks you up the hillside to an amazing campus of gleaming white buildings filled with art, all for free other than $15 for parking for the automotive crowd. They even offered us free use of a stroller for Cedro! They also have a gallery where patrons can sit and sketch for a while, and Elise tried her hand, apparently with more of an eye for drawing than either of us has ever had.

The view to the skyscrapers of nearby Westwood and Century City and to more distant downtown LA was impressive, as is the art collection inside those buildings. Though much of the work is from periods prior to our main interests, they did have a good grouping of Dutch paintings and two large rooms of pre-Impressionist and Impressionist works, including the energetic and colorful Irises painted by Van Gogh while he was recovering at the asylum of Saint-Remy; Monet's 1873 Sunrise, and Camille Pissarro's Hermitage Garden, Maison Rouge, painted in 1877.

We had an interesting bump during our stay. Our rental apartment was on the second floor, and Ray was holding the elevator for the kids to get on after a visit with us. It was a very impatient elevator, and started closing its doors sooner and more vigorously than Ray expected. Before he knew what was happening, his keys went flying out of his hand and found, with an almost magnetic determination, that tiny crack between the elevator and the landing. Poof! They were GONE!!!

A series of emails to the rental agent only resulted in a wait while she tried to find the owner to see what the owner thought could be done. By day 3 Ray and Lisa had worked out a complicated set of contortions to make life work with only one apartment and one car key between them, when Jeff got the idea to pull out his cell phone, turn on the flashlight feature, and look down the crack while the elevator was on the lowest floor. By golly, it was only 3-4 feet down to a remarkably clean cement floor, with almost no debris save Ray's set of 5-6 keys and car door clicker. Back upstairs for a wire hanger and down again with Louise as designated door-holder, and he determined that the hanger was a few inches too short even though unwound to its full 3' length. Back upstairs for another wire hanger and some creative work making the two parts stay attached to each other, then down again for another fishing expedition. Bingo! After about ten minutes team redtandem finally got just the right angle to snag the keys yet not drop them while hauling them up. Luck continued to hold, and they came up through the narrow crack between elevator and landing without slipping off again. Whew, that was an adventure!

After our one-week apartment rental was up we stayed on in LA two more days to do a road trip with Lisa and family to Ojai, a small town in the mountains 75 miles west of LA. We had rooms at a nice motel with a swimming pool and hot tub that got good use, and paid a visit to a nearby farm that produces high-end olive oil. Gourmet Lisa stocked up on several varieties, and found yet more outstanding items the next day at Ojai's remarkably good Sunday Farmers Market.

That evening we had a Thai dinner in town that featured a flaming crock of Tom Yum soup that was pretty impressive, as well as good tasting. On the way home we got a call from Brian to tell us that he and Ardy had let themselves into Lisa and Ray's place and that supper would be ready for us when we got back to LA. It is so nice to have kids who are better cooks than we are, and who play so well together even as adults!

At last we left LA, at least until we're back in late November. We flew this time to Seattle, and the security procedures and sardine-in-a-can seating again reminded us, especially 6' 4" Jeff, why we generally prefer the 36-hour alternative on Amtrak's Coast Starlight. Good friends Steve and Janet put us up at their place for a few nights and pulled out the suitcases we packed for China back in June and left at their place. They are equally avid boaters as well as tandemers, and took us out for a trip on Puget Sound on Hobbes, their sailboat which performed as a motorboat this time around, given the wimpy 4 knot wind. Then again, it was so calm we didn't have to have Dramamine hors d'oeuvres, which are always good things to avoid.

We filled our last day in Seattle with all sorts of adventures, including 3 immunization shots each, haircuts, last-minute shopping, and lunch at our condo as guests of Victor and Janice, who are renting it from us while we explore various corners of the world. Less than 24 hours later we saw the condo one last time, ever so fleetingly, as the Amtrak Cascades took us along the edge of Puget Sound to Vancouver BC for our cruise departure. We had two surprises in store for us, however. One was the presence on board Amtrak of long-time friend Eric, an earth sciences professor at UW who is also, with stoker/spouse Julie, an avid tandemer. He was travelling with his single bike to Mt. Vernon WA, a 25-mile bike ride away from the Washington State Ferry that runs to Friday Harbor, where he had a lecture to give the next day. It was great to catch up with him and hear about his plans to buy a second tandem now that his kids are 7 and 10 years old, old enough to be stokers as Julie takes on a new role as captain of the second tandem.

The other surprise was the phone call a few days earlier from yet another tandem couple we've ridden a lot with, Don and Ericka, to tell us they would meet us in Vancouver! They drove 25 miles, took a ferry, then a bus, then Vancouver's newest Skytrain, and made it right on time to our designated meeting spot in front of the Hudson Bay Company store. In the next 24 hours -- they got a room at the same hotel we were using -- we caught up on each others' news, shared photos, and then said goodbye with our cruise ship the Diamond Princess in the background. It's the larger white ship to the left of the Canada Place cruise terminal across Burrard Inlet, with a Holland America boat on the other side that we think was headed south for the winter. You can also see Vancouver's high-capacity Sea Bus over Don's shoulder, headed to North Van to pick us up and drop us a few meters from Canada Place and our departure for China! The second shot was from the Princess looking out one last time at Canada Place and downtown Vancouver after we'd made our remarkably quick and easy way through customs and onto our home for the next 23 days.

We'll close with two shots of shops in Vancouver's Chinatown. It will be interesting to see how close -- or not -- they are in appearance to what we see in China itself in the coming months.

Here's hoping we get to update our blog while we're on the road in China. If not, we'll tell all when we're back at Thanksgiving time! 'Til the next time . . .

End of One Adventure, On to the Next Ones

2011-09-07T17:55:00.000-07:00

We started this year's bike trip at the Amtrak station in St. Louis and ended it at the Amtrak station in Milwaukee, a distance of 370 miles according to the timetables. We never got lost but we did wander a bit . . . and our bike computer showed a total of 1947 miles ridden! Straight lines may give you shortest distances but almost never the most interesting routes.

We left Green Bay along the Fox River and the excellent Fox River Trail, which started as a twisty brick path, changed to a smooth paved 8-foot wide bike trail (yes, that what picture # 2 is, as seen from a few inches above the tarmac), then morphed into a typical Wisconsin rail trail with a crushed limestone base and occasional railroad-related businesses still standing alongside the way. By the way, the astute among you might have recalled that we also pictured and praised a Fox River Trail in Illinois, but they're two unconnected rivers and quite separate trails, though equally deserving of praise for their scenery and trail quality.

640 of those 1,947 miles were on bike trails, and over 400 of the trail miles were on limestone surfaces. Because we knew the majority of trail miles would be on limestone, we mounted 26 x 1.5 inch tires, rather than the inch and a quarter tires we normally use. They did give a ride that seemed stabler. The downside is that they are heavier and run at a lower pressure, 80# vs. 100#, so are less efficient. A crushed limestone surface also creates more surface friction, which slows us down 1-2 mph for a given amount of effort compared to a well-paved road or trail. While we still prefer a limestone trail to a busy road, we agreed by trip's end that we much prefer Minnesota to Wisconsin since the former has only paved trails. Two days after riding the last limestone trail we were still shaking limestone dust off the panniers and our clothing, another reason for our lessened enthusiasm.

While we could have followed the coast of Lake Michigan down to Milwaukee, we decided to stay 30-40 miles inland to see Lake Winnebago and then travel through Glacial Moraine State Park. Winnebago was only mildly interesting -- it's just a fairly big, more-or-less oval body of water from the west side we travelled down, lined by an unbroken string of modest homes. But our route did take us through Oshkosh. B'gosh, we were sorry to learn, you can no longer visit the famed maker of children's clothes -- blame it on insurance companies worried about slip-and-fall lawsuits, says one guidebook.

But Oshkosh is also home to the third-biggest UW campus, in this case UW standing for University of Wisconsin, not Washington. And therefore home to Cordelia and Michael, two professors at UW-Oshkosh, and their 2 children, Konrad and Zosia. We met them while waiting for the ferry to Washington Island at the top of the Door Peninsula, and by the time the boat had docked we had an invitation to stay with them. It will remain one of the special memories of this trip.

They have a large older home in a leafy part of town just blocks from Lake Winnebago. A faculty friend agreed to supervise a play date for Konrad and Zosia with his own kids of a similar age so we could start our visit with a gourmet lunch and adult conversation, followed by a six-mile bike tour of Oshkosh's park-filled lakefront. We then swung by to pick up the kids (Michael had pulled them there in a "child chariot" bike trailer, which stayed at the friend's home for our lunch and tour). Back home we chatted away the rest of the day and well into the evening, both couples fascinated with the other's life stories and life styles.

Cordelia's mother is Swiss, courted after the war by her American GI dad, who convinced her to come to our shores. Cordelia grew up speaking Swiss German and English, then later picked up High German and a degree in language acquisition. She now teaches German at the University.

But she also has apparently succeeded in an interesting language experiment at home. While almost 3-y.o. Zosia and almost 5-y.o. Konrad know that mom speaks English (in fact at bedtime she read them a story in English), in all direct conversation with the children she only speaks German, and they in turn only speak German to her. To Jeff's ears, with 3 years of German classes over 40 years ago, they sounded equally fluent in both. In fact when he spoke in German to Konrad about some of his toys, he got back such a torrent of excited kid-talk that he could only catch bits and pieces of references to toy autos and things that were red or small or -- what? He nodded in knowing assent, and Konrad never caught on.

We enjoyed fresh vegetables from Cordelia's garden that Michael cooked up into some delicious pizzas while telling us how he came to America from Poland as a teenager. His dad was active in Solidarity, which after some initial success was suppressed by the government of General Jaruzelski in the early 1980s. His family was "invited" to leave Poland. Michael now teaches international political science at UW-Oshkosh, a topic we think about a lot and have studied at the Jackson School of International Studies in our own UW, the University of Washington.

With hugs from the kids and a supply of fresh tomatoes and cucumbers from Cordelia's garden, we left with promises to reunite in Seattle some time when we can stay still long enough for them to catch us at home.

Our last sightseeing was a visit to Glacial Drumlin State Park, which had a great sign explaining many of the landforms continental glaciers have left behind in Wisconsin and other northern states. We'd love to come back and spend more time exploring, but this time were too focused on getting to Milwaukee to do much more than observe a kame along the way followed by a relaxing picnic lunch at a small kettle pond, Mauthe Lake.

This was our third visit to Milwaukee on bike trips, and the longest at three nights. Our accumulated desire for ethnic food exploded in a feast of flavors: Thai for the first dinner, upscale American at the Milwaukee Art Museum for lunch, Ethiopian for the second dinner, Vietnamese for the next lunch (that's the one pictured, with a vegetable-filled fried crepe in the foreground that was as messy as it was delicious) and Near Eastern for the third dinner. Oh, the joy of good food once again! Vegetables! Flavor! Food that's actually healthy!

We had already done the boat tour of the Milwaukee River, pictured in a blog post two years back, so this time turned our attention to the previously overlooked MAM, the Milwaukee Art Museum. It is in a striking new building on Lake Michigan and had a lot of great art, particularly by German artists and/or about Germany. We'll share three with you: Working City, done by Herman Balushek in 1920, which we admired for its dynamism; an 1825 View of Danzig by Michael Carl Gregorovius for its historical view of this charming seaport now known as Gdansk; and Ernst Oehme's Meissen in Winter, painted in 1854, for the way it captures the cold of winter and the contrasting warmth of the room on the left with its Christmas tree showing through the window.

Two other paintings are really worth sharing with you, Jean-Leon Gerome's The Two Majesties and Gustave Caillebotte's Boating on the Yerres. The first was done in 1883 by a Salon painter, i.e. from the old school that was appalled by the Impressionists, the second actually six years earlier by one of those early Impressionist painters, complete with shimmering water. Although we are quite fond of the Impressionists, both paintings here are actually quite charming in their separate ways.

Our final day in Milwaukee saw us climbing on the bike one last time for a ride south of downtown on bike paths that at times gave us grand views of Lake Michigan and of the downtown cityscape. At the end of the ride we pulled into the Amtrak station and boxed up the tandem for the next day's trip to LA and one less thing to worry about before our 11 a.m. departure.

Alas, the red tandem will be somewhat neglected for a while. We're on our way to Los Angeles for a week's visit with Louise's son Brian, daughter Lisa and families, then a flight to Seattle for half a week's visit with good friends Steve and Janet, a train to Vancouver BC, and on September 17, embarkation on the Diamond Princess for a cruise through the Inland Passage of Alaska and on to Russia, Japan, South Korea and China. We will be visiting Jeff's son Matt and family in Dalian China, then spending another 6 weeks travelling by train all around that fascinating country. On November 22 we will be back in the LA area with a 5-week stay in Santa Monica, where our well-rested tandem will hopefully be happy to see us again.

Thanks for following our Midwest Meander, "talk" to you next from the left coast!

Through the Door

2011-08-25T14:31:00.000-07:00

We've now finished a week and a half trip through more of the Door Peninsula than many Wisconsinites have seen, and liked it well enough to agree that we'll be back, sometime. It was in many ways the most scenic part of Wisconsin we've yet visited, and the roads were terrific for biking: well paved, not too hilly, and oh, so quiet.

We started and ended with visits to museums in Green Bay, which sits at the base of the Door Peninsula. The starter was the National Railroad Museum, a fairly impressive collection of rail cars and locomotives. One of their biggest stars is Big Boy, one of 25 built in the early 1940s for the Union Pacific RR. At 1.2 million pounds, it was the heaviest steam locomotive ever built. We wonder if anyone running this monster ever did learn what every single control was for in this jumble of valves and dials. Interestingly, although you could theoretically throw coal into the firebox, that's not how it was done since this engine burned coal faster than any human could heave it in -- it was fed automatically by a screw device from the coal car that ran behind the locomotive.

The museum had quite a few railroad cars as well, just two of which we've illustrated here, the kitchen from an early 20th century dining car and a mail car, where postal workers sorted the mail as they picked it up from towns and cities along a rail line.

Our first destination was Little Sturgeon Bay and a resort called Wave Pointe. Do any of our readers know why developers think it's cool to misspell "Point" these days? Well, misspelled or not it was a nice place with views over that little marina, or off to the side to the back portion of the bay. Across the bay the next morning we stopped to photograph this group of pelicans.

A little further on we had our own photo taken by another tourist, with Green Bay the bay (as opposed to Green Bay the city) in the distant background.

That was in Potawatomie State Park, and nearby we climbed the first of many similar towers around the peninsula for a view of Sturgeon Bay the bay -- yup, there's also Sturgeon Bay the city. The tower is 75 feet or 99 steps high, depending on how you want to think about it, and was built in 1932. The bay was 225' below us when we made it to the top.

By the way, that gash on the opposite side of the bay (you can click on the picture to enlarge it, then hit your back button to return to the blog) is Old Quarry County Park, and it illustrates what lies under the Door Peninsula -- dolomite limestone. In fact, the spine of the Door Peninsula is part of the Niagara Escarpment, a geologic feature that is responsible for the massive climb by the Erie Canal at Lockport NY, for Niagara Falls itself, for the Bruce Peninsula in Ontario, and for the Door Peninsula here in Wisconsin. Since dolomite is harder than rocks which were created later on top of it such as sandstone, shale and less durable forms of limestone, the escarpment resisted erosion better and remains where other rocks have been crushed and taken southwards by the continental glaciers, or carted off by eons of slow erosion by wind and water.

The Door Peninsula and Door County (the northern 2/3rds of the peninsula) get their name from the French description of the ship's passage at the northern tip -- "Portes d'Enfer," i.e. The Door to Hell. There are a lot of sunken ships up there. Given that danger, and to cut a lot of miles off the trip from points to the south like Chicago or Milwaukee into Green Bay, a canal was cut across the peninsula in the 1870s. They only had to cut through a mile and a quarter, then dredge Sturgeon Bay a bit. Technically, much of Door Peninsula is actually now an island reachable only via any of three bridges. Needless to say, there was no need for locks on a canal like that.

People talk of the "bay side" and "lake side" (west and east sides respectively) of the peninsula as the busy side and the quiet side, in the same order, and we saw why. There is only one town on the lake side, and it's fairly small. We encountered some sand dune beaches a short ways north of the canal, then charming Moonlight Bay further up.

Between those two placid spots is the one dramatic place on the lake side, Cave Point County Park, where Lake Michigan is taking on the Niagara Escarpment and sometimes winning. In fact, there was one bedroom-sized chunk of the peninsula sitting in the lake, awaiting further dismemberment by ice cracking and by waves.

If you look closely at the map of the Door Peninsula above, you will notice one sizable island plus a few small ones right above the Portes d'Enfer. This 1896 lighthouse is on Plum Island, one of the obstacles in that strait that used to hurry sailors on to the nether world. We passed it on a ferry to that bigger spot, Washington Island, whose main charm is its remoteness -- $28 r/t for the 2 of us and our bike, much more for a car, will do that to a place. But Washington Island did have some "sights," such as Sand Dunes County Park on the south side, where we had a picnic lunch with a trio of turkey vultures soaring above us, perhaps eyeing our Wisconsin cheese and crackers. And then there's the absolutely amazing Lighthouse Beach Park on the north shore, with its rounded dolomite stones reaching right into the water in the third photo, just perfect in a challenging sort of way for building things, in the last one.

There were two sights worth mentioning in the center as well. One was Mountain Wayside Park, though the "mountain" is so short that it takes another 75' tower to get you 225' above Lake Michigan for the view north. That's the quiet road we biked along to the base of the hill, where this 119-step staircase did much of the ascent for us, past a little fern grotto on the shaded north slope of the hill.

The final highlight of our visit to Washington Island was the Stavkirke built by the local Lutheran Church. It's patterned after a church in Norway that was built in 1150 A.D. Washington Island has a strong nordic background, and in fact is the only place in America to see a significant number of Icelandic immigrants. The Stavkirke was a quiet place of contemplation, enhanced by the fact that you have to walk 100 yards into the birch-fir forest to reach it.

It was now time to ride back on the ferry and down the busy bay side, though this is Door County and busy is a relative term. One quiet side road took us to this outlook at Ellison Bluff County Park, and a series of remarkably quiet roads in Peninsula State Park brought us to views of the town of Ephraim and to Horseshoe Island, once a private enclave but now part of the state park. In case you're wondering, that's part of the Upper Peninsula portion of the state of Michigan in the distance, about a dozen miles away as the crow flies. If you enlarge the third photo you can see a sliver of the main part of Lake Michigan peeking over the hill to the right, but the lower half of Michigan is so far away -- over 50 miles -- that you can't see it thanks to the curvature of the earth.

We thought about riding this tandem at the state park beach but didn't think much of the idea of giving both riders a steering wheel. That's a relationship breaker if ever there was one! We also checked out the 1868 Eagle Bluff Lighthouse, one of the shortest lighthouses we've ever seen.

We spent an extra day in the nearby town of Fish Creek, seen here from the park. That was partly to see the park but also to feel unhurried as we had tickets to hear the final concert of the Peninsula Music Festival's 3-week season. The orchestra is composed of musicians from orchestras around the country, most of them first or second chairs, and they were just terrific performing Brahms' 2nd Piano Concerto, Wagner's Siegfried's Rhine Journey, and Jeff's favorite, the Rosenkavalier Suite by Richard Strauss.

One more quiet road got us to stop for a photo, Cottage Row in Egg Harbor, then we got on the totally quiet Ahnapee Trail to Algoma, at the Lake Michigan base of the Door Peninsula. We were impressed with how orderly they've gotten the birds to be down by the Algoma Lighthouse.

And now we've come back through the city of Green Bay to pay a visit to Heritage Hill State Park, a collection of historic buildings from northeast Wisconsin. They have about 20 historic structures, but we'll illustrate just three: a cabin that was built by a fur trader some time prior to 1830; a wigwam, actually a reconstruction of ones built by Jesuit explorers and missionaries who were among the first white men to visit Wisconsin starting in the late 1600s; and the general ward from the base hospital at Fort Howard, which was built to protect Wisconsin from the British after the War of 1812, and was abandoned in 1841 when Canada proved to be a peaceful neighbor after all.

Lest our readers think our trip lacks any challenges other than the miles ridden, we'll close with two photos to illustrate three of them. Weather is the first challenge, and heat and humidity were major issues for us until two weeks ago. We've been much luckier avoiding rain, though we did have to hang out somewhere for a while when this thunderstorm bore down on us one day on the Door Peninsula. We saw a dozen lightning strikes as it approached, which succeeded quite effectively in getting our attention.

Keeping the bike running well is the second challenge, but we've also had fairly good luck with the tandem, though we did break one spoke that a bike shop replaced and have had 4 flats that Jeff has repaired. We also had a derailleur cable fray, but we had a spare and the repair took us less than 20 minutes.

If you look closely at Jeff working on that inner tube, however, you'll see the result of our third challenge after weather and bike problems -- motel rooms. Every week we have to learn the layout of 5 or 6 new ones so that we can navigate through them to the potty in the middle of the night. For instance, in one place we both visited the john in a bathroom that was particularly dark at 3 a.m., and both had the impression that it had the most uncomfortable seat we had ever rested our buns on. Then, after dawn, we discovered that each of us had sat on the toilet seat sideways! Well, on the Door Peninsula Jeff zigged around a wall when he should have zagged, and that cut over the eyebrow is a result. A day later Louise nailed a chair leg with her pinky toe, surprisingly the first biker-furniture assault of this trip (last year we had 3 or 4).

If the walls and furniture don't get us first, we'll be at the end of the bike trip in one week, when we reach Milwaukee. We'll wrap up the bicycling part of this year's blog in our next entry.

Into the North Woods

2011-08-12T19:52:00.000-07:00

We left you last in southern Wisconsin. We're now leaving the North Woods that we've traversed for a few days and about to explore the famed Door Peninsula.

We started this segment in Frank Lloyd Wright territory -- his famed home Taliesin is a few miles from the route we took, and he spent many of his early years in this area. He designed only one warehouse in his career, and we passed by and photographed it in Richland Center. It's known as the A. D. German Warehouse and was built in 1915. Architectural historians lump it in Wright's "Mayan" period, with good reason as you can see. Just outside Richland Center we passed what is referred to as a "natural bridge." A stream does indeed flow through the hole in the rock toward the viewer, but calling it a "bridge" seems a stretch too far, though it is certainly picturesque regardless of its pontine qualities or lack thereof.

Then, for three days, we did about 90 of the 100+ miles in the Elroy-Sparta trail complex. We'll let this sign tell the story of the Elroy-Sparta. It was so successful it was extended in both directions, ending up in three additional names for the three additional segments. One website calls it the Four-In-One Trail. Anyway, this is our fourth time on one or more of the segments, the only trail we've ridden that much other than ones in our home turf of the Puget Sound area.

Once again, it's tunnels that provide a big draw. Here's one of the two shorter ones that are about 1400' long and navigable without a flashlight, sort of, though it is dark enough in the middle third that you cannot see the side walls without your own light, only aim at the elusive Light At The End of The Tunnel. The third one is 3800', the longest rail trail tunnel in the country until Washington State opened the Snoqualmie Pass Tunnel a few years ago. And the Elroy-Sparta does draw in the cyclists -- we saw over a hundred in our three days, pretty good for a trail that's over 100 miles from the Twin Cities, Milwaukee or any other city of significant size. Here's Louise chatting with a couple in their 70s who are biking from their home in Illinois to someplace in the Dakotas, and then Melanie and Trillium, two sisters from Bellingham who started in Boston and are pushing hard for Trillium to get back in time for classes at Western Washington University. If they can average 65 miles a day for the next 6 weeks, they'll have it nailed. We exchanged email addresses and hope to hear from them again as they head west.

The last of the four trails brought us out to the Mississippi River near Trempeleau WI, where we took a side road right along the river to Perrot State Park. We parked the bike at the ranger station and climbed over 500' up to Brady's Bluff for some more terrific shots of the river, including one with a barge headed upstream and another with a train headed downstream. We spent the night in Trempeleau, and during the hours we were awake heard trains headed up or down the river about every 60-75 minutes, and that was just on the Wisconsin side where the BNSF tracks are. CN has tracks on the MN side that are almost as busy. And those are not short trains -- we counted cars on four that went by as we walked to and from dinner and/or during our meal, and they ranged from 97 to 137 cars behind the locomotives. That lone hill, known as Trempeleau Mountain, is a piece of the limestone bluff that the river once ran to the right of before shifting to the left, leaving only this little bay that is rapidly turning into what is known as bottom land as it silts in and becomes terra firma once again.

We crossed the Mississippi to Winona Minnesota and it was easy as pie -- first took a trail past some houseboats and two railroad bridges, one clearly abandoned, and then a bike path on the bridge itself that looks narrow but was perfectly fine.

The next day we rode up the Minnesota side to Wabasha and a fascinating visit to the National Eagle Center, where we learned more than we knew we could learn about these grand birds. This area attracts numerous bald eagles, in large part because in winter the fast water of the entering Chippewa River stirs up the Mississippi enough to keep it ice-free for quite a few miles. The center houses a half dozen eagles injured enough to be unable to return to the wild, and brings them out for talks several times a day. Here's Louise checking out an eagle egg that was passed around and one of the eagles showing us his wingspan and his bad left eye. Rabbit was on the menu on the day we were visiting, not as interesting according to the guide as rat day, although the twinkle in his eye told us that his story of eagles slurping up the tail like spaghetti was a tall tail -- er, tale. Not all the eagles in the area were in the center -- they had telescopes on a balcony that we used to see two others perched in trees across the big river, looking for rabbits, rats and other delicacies on their own.

We crossed the Mississippi for the seventh and last time at Wabasha and headed into the Drifless Area, a section of Wisconsin that missed being steamrollered by any of the four major continental glaciers that covered the northern part of what's now the U.S. between 20,000 to 10,000 years ago. Lucklily we only crossed a small part of it before getting into the valley of the Chippewa River for a flat ride into the interior. These hills are challenging, but the scenery sure is interesting back in these valleys! We had a short day and went canoeing in the afternoon on the Chippewa, and it was one of the most interesting canoe trips we've taken. The river was exceptionally high though not quite at flood stage, so it was flowing fast. We were taken by truck 10 miles up the river, and without paddling all that hard found ourselves back at the boathouse 2 hours later! Even more exciting, we had four flyovers by bald eagles, three adults and one brown-headed juvenile.

We find ourselves answering questions about where we're headed almost every day. One of the most frequent questions we get after folks hear the kind of mileage we're putting on is "what roads do you bike on???" It's usually spoken in a way that seems to actually ask, "You guys aren't crazy enough to head down the Interstate, are you . . .?" Well, on this trip so far about 35% of the miles have been on trails, mostly fairly safe and uneventful places for a bike ride, but every now and then . . .

Except for that little problem, our ride across the width of Wisconsin was pretty easy for the first third of the way, done on the paved Chippewa River Valley Trail shown above. The next third was a bit more challenging, and involved covering some big miles in an area with few paved roads. Adding to the equation was a powerful tail wind that promised to blow at 15-20 mph for two days. That's great when you go with the wind, not so great when you go 90 degrees to the wind, as we would have had to do to stay on back roads that jogged here and there for a few miles at a time. So we tried the fast highway for about 50 of those 100 miles through central Wisconsin, and it turned out just fine. In fact, it was faster still, since we got an additional boost when large trucks went by. For those two days we averaged 18 mph while on the back roads, over 19 mph on the shoulder of the highway. In case you're wondering, the rumble strip wasn't all that rough to ride over, and when there were long breaks in traffic we did cross it to ride on the slightly smoother cement surface. But the smooth part of that asphalt shoulder is wider than it looks, and was no problem to ride down -- particularly with the wind as our additional partner!

That road is Highway 29, the last major road across the state even though it's only about half-way up the state. But the vast majority of the state lives below it (it runs from a point near the Twin Cities through Eau Claire to Green Bay), and the area above it is generally referred to as the North Woods or sometimes Northwoods. Hwy 29 roughly parallels the 45th parallel, staying just a mile or two south at the closest approach. For West Coasters like us, that doesn't seem very far north -- even Portland OR is north of that line -- but in the eastern half of the country it is the north, as 45 degrees marks the northern border of NY and Vermont, and runs quite a bit north of Bangor ME.

For the last third of our passage across Wisconsin to Green Bay we rode 80 miles of the Mountain Bay Bike Trail, and it truly felt like the North Woods. For one thing, we had dense woods on either side of the trail 95% of the way. More importantly, we almost never had a road running nearby. Most rail trails have nearby roads because railroads got there first and took the best routes, then roads generally squeezed in next to them to take advantage of that route. The railroad that became our trail did the usual thing of making a bee-line regardless of direction when it was on flat ground, and winding gently around hills otherwise. But the roads hereabout stayed on the north-south-east-west grid that defines midwest geography, and so we rarely saw roads except when our trail crossed one, every 2-3 miles. Since houses need roads for access, we almost never saw houses either.

Sounds boring, but it wasn't. Jeff especially was busy staying on track, as it were, since the smoothest part of the trail was the track to either side of the median, and there were occasional sticks to avoid or animal burrows built right on the trail by critters that clearly didn't read the trail user rules. But those deep woods kept changing, we stopped a few times to talk to a couple from Virginia to take this trail, to explore this once-busy railroad station that used to watch 65 trains a day go by, and to visit a small town nearby for lunch. We also had to be sure to take the correct branch when another trail joined ours for a few miles.

And we also had a great North Woods experience at Konkapot Lodge. It was built by an extended Mohican family on the Mohican Reservation here in northern Wisconsin, and the folks running it were as friendly as the place was inviting with its glowing log architecture. We had a terrific dinner a mile down the road at an Indian casino -- best vegetables of the entire trip, in fact -- and we slept like lambs with the windows open to the quiet woods surrounding the lodge.

We're spending a rest day in Green Bay, which also coincides with a prediction of 70% chance of rain all day. Hopefully we'll figure out how to navigate the local buses to the National Railroad Museum for some mostly indoor activity. After that, we're on to the famous Door Peninsula for a week and a half. We'll tell you all about "The Door" in our next blog.

On to Wisconsin

2011-08-01T19:41:00.000-07:00

After our 6-day visit in Chicago with Brian, Ardy and grandson Cedro, we hopped back on the tandem for the next leg of our trip, heading northwest and back to the Mississippi River. We're now in Wisconsin, over half-way to Winona MN, our next destination on the Big Muddy.

Rail trails made the escape from Chicago reasonably easy, although most of the surfaces of the trails were packed limestone. It's a surface that looks like a dirt road but is quite hard, and in fact feels similar to a clay tennis court, with good reason since the trail is made of a mix of crushed limestone and clay. Here's a view of the Sugar River Trail in Wisconsin to see what one looks like. Since packed limestone creates more surface friction, we tend to ride 1 to 3 mph slower than on good asphalt, though that disadvantage is often offset by three big advantages. First, any rail trail is either flat or gently graded, so no steep hills. Second, a rail trail keeps you out of traffic, and quite a few of the ones we rode out of Chicago passed under or over busy roads, saving us from having to stop for traffic lights. Unless the trail runs right next to a highway, it also makes for a quieter and more nature-filled experience.

Last and sometimes most important of all, rail trails tend to have a lot of vegetation next to them. Even the low bushes next to the trail above will help, and many are virtual tunnels of trees, as you've seen in photos in past blog entries and which you'll see much more of in the next few weeks as we ride many more rail trails here in Wisconsin. When the wind is blowing in your face on the highway, it's usually calmer and sometimes close to dead still on a nearby rail trail.

We reached the Fox River valley at the end of our first day, and enjoyed this beautiful bike bridge over the Fox with views down to kayakers. A short while later we hopped onto the River Bend Bike Trail, which as you can see was much pleasanter than riding down the edge of that busy highway.

Of the 70 miles we did in the first two days out of Chicago, 55 were on bike trails. Eventually we were back on roads, but they either had adequate shoulders or were fairly low-trafficked. They also brought us by a rather impressive grain storage facility near Rochelle IL and past this bucolic scene of hayfields, farmhouses and nuclear reactors.

We had booked two nights at yet another Illinois state park, White Pine S. P. As at Pere Marquette and Starved Rock state parks, we had a cozy cabin and a restaurant that served us some good meals. We had not, however, booked temperatures and humidity both in the high-80's, but that's what we got. In fact, it's what we've had all but a few days since we left St. Louis. When you're moving at 15 mph on a bicycle, at least you're creating a cooling breeze. Even though biking sounds like the more intense and therefore hotter activity, hiking is actually less comfortable on a muggy day, especially in a breeze-free forest, and we didn't do as much of it as we would have liked to do here. But what we did do, before the full heat of the day descended upon us, was enjoyable. You just wouldn't have wanted to give either of us a hug right after we were done, shall we say.

It has actually been a very hot and wet summer in these parts (we read recently that it's been 5 degrees above average), and while we've been sweating a lot during the day at least we haven't gotten far wetter still from rain. And there have been some doozies either at night or nearby or both, including one that broke the all-time record for rainfall in 24 hours in a town 25 miles from us. On our last night in Illinois a powerful storm passed through and led us to skip most of the Jane Addams Trail that runs right into Wisconsin's Badger State Trail. We were mostly worried about flash flooding closing the trail but when we did try riding 5 miles of the Jane Addams, we had to stop four times to negotiate our way around downed trees. Thunder clouds continued to threaten, and a little further down the road we took shelter from a lighting-filled downpour for 1 1/2 hours in this barn. It smelled wonderfully of new hay, but our time there was a sort of dance fest as we kept in near constant motion trying to avoid being a landing site for the hundreds of flies also enjoying the new hay.

At last we got onto the Badger Trail, which did not have any downed trees and which brought us to New Glarus and its attractive train station, now a trail headquarters and visitor center for the town.

New Glarus was settled in the 1840's by 108 emigrants from Glarus Switzerland. Despite the scarcity of tall mountains within the surrounding thousand miles of this place, they thought it looked kinda sorta like Switzerland. If you're searching for the look of a Swiss village, though, you'll be disappointed. There are a half-dozen Swiss-style buildings such as the so-called Chalet of the Golden Fleece, built in 1937, but Leavenworth Washington looks way more like an alpine community than New Glarus, even though it's a totally manufactured look. Surprisingly, a whole lot of tourists come to New Glarus, by the bus-load, to see this "Swiss village" in Wisconsin. Other than higher prices than in other towns nearby, we're not quite sure what they think they're finding here. Yes, we did have some good "bratwurst mit sauerkraut," but hey, this is Wisconsin, you can get brats & kraut almost anywhere in this state, thanks to the millions of Germans who settled all over the place.

After spending a rest day in our fruitless search for a New Switzerland, we headed back to the Badger Trail with its unusual picnic benches designed for those who feel compelled to read while they eat, and for its famous Stewart Tunnel. The tunnel's claim to fame is that it is the darkest rail trail tunnel in America because it has a curve in the center, and you can never see "the light at the end of the tunnel" until you've rounded that curve -- at which point you're half-way into its 1200' length. So that light you see below is not the other end of the tunnel, it's just a person walking through with a flashlight, which is pretty much mandatory if you don't want to examine the tunnel walls with your face. It was built in 1887 and was actively used for 95 years, mostly of course by coal-burning steam engines but also by diesels in it's later years of service. Now of course it's a giant magnet drawing cyclists into its dark bowels. We can report, however, that some of them do emerge triumphantly at the other end.

Two days later we were 80+ miles to the west (well, indirect miles -- the proverbial crow could have done it in a little over half that), in Mineral Point. Thanks to the Badger Trail and the Military Ridge Trail, only 7 of those miles were on roadways. Mineral Point was everything New Glarus wasn't. It was low-key, un-hyped, genuine, and fascinating. It is in an area where first lead and later zinc were discovered in the early 1800s. Many of the first miners dug small burrows in the ground to sleep in which were called "badger holes," leading to Wisconsin's nickname as the "Badger State."

While the very first miners were mostly from the southern states, by the early 1830s they were largely from Cornwall England. The miners' wives used to shake a dish rag at the front door of the solid limestone cottages they built to signal that lunch was ready, and today the street with the largest number of these old homes is named Shake Rag Street. We stayed in a wooden building that was built about 1840 as a stagecoach house and is now part of an arts community called Shake Rag Alley. It's the one Louise is entering below. Just down the street is a group of buildings saved in the 1940s by a local with a sense of history, when they were in danger of being pulled down. It's now owned by the Wisconsin Historical Association, and our guide Nancy brought us into several of the buildings, including so-called Polperro House, then Pendarvis House, and finally a group of row houses. She also showed us a great diagram showing how the miners were lowered into the mine in what looks like an oversized water well bucket. That was one tough way to earn a living!

For dinner we walked downtown, and this was another experience in itself. We've seen pictures of places that look like this in England, but we've never seen a downtown like this in the U.S. Building after building made of solid limestone, with just a few others thrown in for variety. There was even a 5 and 10 cent store, though we suspect there's not much there anymore for 5 or even 10 cents. Our supper repast included a Cornish pasty, which is pronounced "pass-tee" not "pace-tee," as we've thought for years. It was served open, and consisted of pastry dough, meat, potatoes and rutabagas in a dollop of gravy. We can see how it would keep a miner going for a while. For dessert we tried our first ever figgyhobbin, a confection with raisins, nuts, cinnamon and brown sugar wrapped in pastry dough and covered with caramel and whipped cream. The promise of one of those as a reward could almost convince a lad to go back down the well on that bucket to do a bit more mining.

We're now on our way back to the Elroy-Sparta Rail Trail, which we wrote about in this blog in September 2009 when we rode it with our Victoria BC friends Don and Ericka. Today we spent part of the day on back roads like this beauty, then on the Pine River Rail Trail past a pair of sandhill cranes that were astonishingly loud as they told us to bug off. We'll write next from the Mississippi valley.