Author: karenswenson7289095

I was not driven to the airport by my favorite taxi driver, he doesn’t get up at 5, but by someone he assigned. When we got to the airport I only had a thousand, no change. The fare is 400B. He gave me a 500B note back. I sat there and after a few seconds said, “Another hundred please.” He came up with the other 100B. Not good.

I took an uneventful plane ride up to Chiangmai to see my friend M who has Parkinson’s. I could tell when he greeted me in the airport without his saying anything, although he did say it, that he was enormously glad to see me. I think he has a lonely life here.

Oddly, years ago I taught a Japanese American, in a Creative Writing class at City College, R.O., who has ended up living here. When I taught him he was slightly odd, suffering from an overdose of ego. But many young, male writers think they are astral talents. With the years he has become odder and less amiable. When we got to my B&B, the Zzziesta, he was in their coffee shop—they have the best coffee in Chiangmai—and when he saw M and me, he hurriedly left so as not to have to talk to either of us.

M was full of news. Our mutual friend Scott is in a town a bit north and will come down to join us. More about Scott later.
Through Scott, M has met a young woman, Myanmar-Chinese from the Kachin area on the Myanmar-Chinese border. She has been working for a German NGO organizing an exhibition of children’s art from her Kachin area, which the Myanmar Generals are shelling. There is no news of this in the Western press that I know of. The Generals are also lobbing explosives at the area of the Shan tribes. The young woman used to be a teacher but now devotes herself to this exhibition of children’s art taking it to various locations in Europe, including Madrid. I might get to meet her. I would like to see this work exhibited in Barcelona.

We had coffee looking out onto the dusty, leafy lane outside the hotel’s coffee shop. A squirrel was tight rope walking a telephone wire going in and out of the leaves. For dinner we went to a vegetarian restaurant near the B&B where we were served by a little Thai girl in her teens, slender as a young bamboo and adorable in braces. Probably she thinks she is ugly and has no idea she is adorable. Walking back to the B&B the air was perfumed with the intoxicating smell of flowers of unknown varieties and occasionally with incense offerings before the spirit houses.

I had a superb Lanna breakfast of four kinds of pork—large sausage slices, small sausages with a rich stuffing, maybe liver, sticks of satay, and pork rinds with a little dish of green chili, plus two varieties of sticky rice, black and white with sesame seeds, lettuce, cucumber, three luridly colored Thai deserts and excellent coffee. I sat beside the long rectangular pool and watched the big, multicolored koi swim back and forth. Once in a while they would breach. I am not sure whether this is because of an insect or high spirits.

Two sparrows came, fought, looked for rice grains and left. A young grey and white cat came tearing through obviously internally screaming, “I’m not here. I’m not here. You didn’t see me. You didn’t see me.”

When M came we took a red truck to the Insect Museum that we didn’t make it to last year. It is two floors, quite amazing, with specimens of mosquitoes of a size that would cause me to vacate my room if one showed up. There were various beetles with one to three horns, or with beautiful, rich, green iridescent wings, now much used in women’s jewelry. Will they become extinct? Lots of butterflies with iridescent wings, cases of minerals and seashells, all collected and organized by a devoted couple who were scientists.

We took another truck to the Warorot Market which starts off with a clutch of Chinese gold shops—Chinese lacquer red background for gold chains, rings, bracelets, makes for a loud display. It then develops into a free-for-all of clothes, fake tribal clothing and bags, and anything you can think of. I had brought a piece of applique I bought last year, which I knew I couldn’t match but I was hoping to find something similar. No luck. We ate in the market an okay but ordinary Thai lunch of chicken and noodles for me. We gave up and decided to go to the museums in the center of town and see what we could find out. What we were looking at was obviously fake and what I had was obviously genuine.

When we got to the Craft Museum I pulled out my applique again. The young people at the ticket counter immediately suggested we go to the Queen’s Hill Tribe Craft Show Room. They wrote out the address and walked us to the Grab taxi to tell the driver where to go.

It was a long trip out of town, beyond my B&B and M’s rooming house. On the way we passed a field full of cows happily munching in a meadow. We went by the big, splashy mall, the Maya that will probably kill the night market in town. We turned into a park like area with buildings that house the Queen’s various projects. Upstairs in one of these buildings we found the show room with baskets full of applique work and embroidery. I found some approximations and also bought some northern silk in a strong green with delicate embroidery.

We took a red truck back from the Queen’s shop. M talked to the two other passengers, two more than middle aged men. I presumed he was speaking Thai. They were Chinese and he was talking to them in Chinese.

The same lovely breakfast but without the Thai sweets, fruit instead. The koi were the same, also the sparrows but no cat this morning.

We went first to the Chiangmai Folk Life Museum that has been largely changed since last year. This was a little startling because museums are a staid crowd and don’t usually up and completely alter their exhibits. There are some rooms on customs around the local religion, folk beliefs, lanterns made from mulberry paper, musical instruments. The flutes surprisingly are held in the mouth.

Upstairs things had been changed less. There were exhibits of 19th and early 20th century fabrics for women’s skirts, or rather, women’s skirts, since the length of the fabric is the skirt. There were lots of cottons but also silk with wide borders toward, but not at, the bottom with gold thread or silver. These, the property of the aristocracy, were exquisite in wondrous shades of purple and blue. A loom was on display, not an ordinary loom, but one carved with flowers and arabesques. There were exceptional pieces, carved and painted, from temples and lots of small Buddhas in all sorts of materials, gold, rose quartz, jade, silver, alabaster, rock crystal and others I’ve forgotten. We finished just as it was time for us to go off to lunch with Scott.

Six five, with shoulders to match, good looking and gifted with an exceptional sense of adventure, Scott has for the last thirty years or so been immersed in SE Asia. He has lived in Taiwan, written a book about the indigenous inhabitants and their situation with the Chinese, A FAR CORNER published by the University of Nebraska Press. He also writes songs. The lyrics of this one seem to me particularly important https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XioSV6lO1iE

He has walked and ridden the borders of Cambodia, Laos, Burma, and Vietnam with each other and their neighbor China. He is writing a book about this. At the bottom of this bog is a link to a piece Scott wrote about crossing the Laos-Thai border. He is someone who knows where tigers are kept in cages to be killed and eaten by gamblers. He has spent time in the areas of unreported violence that continue to exist unreported particularly in Burma.

Lunch was pretty good at a nice place on a corner. Scott recently almost achieved an assignment with WWF to do a documentary on a herd of wild elephants in an unprotected area of, I think, Cambodia. But they keep postponing it.

Scott had appointments so Mike and I went on to the Chiangmai City Art and Cultural Centre. This too had been totally rearranged since last year—more videos, fewer objects. I suspect that is a sign of the times. Must keep everyone entertained. They did, however, take you through the history of the area starting in the 13th century with King Mengrai.

There was a room devoted to local crafts—lacquer ware, pottery of various sorts, the big brass and silver hairpin the women use, wood carving, and the weaving of children’s toys from bamboo strips.

In two different rooms there were paintings on glass of the animals of the Chinese zodiac. They were not as skilled as the best Chinese paintings on glass but I hadn’t known they existed.

There were also architectural elements that were magnificently carved and then you hear the sound of a train and stumble upon the story of the building of the railroad, with the construction of the first tunnel in Thailand that cost many lives and put an end to the river traffic of the scorpion tailed boats which used to do the transport of commercial goods.

When I went upstairs to the toilet I found the gift shop as well and amongst the usual offerings the ultimate useless object. It should get an award. It is a basket made from some sort of vine with pods along the stem. Its form is between a bowl and a ball with handles. It is completely open, therefore unusable to carry anything and besides that it is so delicate it could support no weight. But it is an enchanting object.

I went down to join Mike in the coffee shop to finish our museum day. He had coffee. I had butterfly pea tea, which is the most enchanting shade of blue and has no particular flavor.

Another Lanna breakfast with koi and sparrows, after which I talked Mike into a taxi to go up to Wat Phratat Doi Suthep, at the top of a 1,000-meter hill, rather than transferring from red truck to red truck all the way.

Our driver started taking us into town. He claimed there was a wat in town with a similar name and when he made the price he thought we wanted to go to that wat. The new price was interestingly set.

“I ask over 1,000B but you say how much over 1,000.”

Mike who is no bargainer said, “300.”

The driver said, “400.”

We settled for that, which is about 43 US for the day. I suspect we were gulled but that’s all right. He has a two-year-old son and another on the way. He took us everywhere we wanted to go all day. It was pretty complicated. It was also the right thing to do because it kept Mike and me from being exhausted by the heat and possibly having to bargain again and again over rides.

We went out past the new Maya shopping mall, passed Chiangmai University and then abruptly started climbing in swinging hairpin turns, taking us quickly from a scatter of houses into jungle on both sides. We passed the oddly isolated zoo and some, at that point, unidentified wat.

We knew we were approaching Doi Suthep when stalls and small shops began to beak out like a rash along the road. He dropped us at the beginning of the stair, telling us to take the lift up and walk down. We did the opposite, walking up the well-spaced stairs with their rippling Naga railings. As we approached the top there was a branch off to the right that we took.

It was at this point that I began to have vague feelings of familiarity. We came out to an open area decorated with an abundance of plastic flowers—Thais will do this—some alien to Thailand, most faded by exposure to sun and rain. This led us to a platform with views over Chiangmai. I turned to Mike and said, ”We’ve been here before.”

“You’re right,” he responded.

Not only that but I remember my mood the last time. I was tired and cranky. There is a higher viewing platform above this one that I think we decided against going up to because I was so blown.

This time we went up, worth it, and then on to the main temple at the top. Oddly I have no memory of the temple. There is a gold chedi and gold parasols at the corners of the chedi. The surrounding wall has paintings of scenes from the Buddha’s life as well as from the Ramayana. They could stand a little attention but are charming.

Outside this main area, where people were praying and making offerings, there were other buildings surrounded by trees, one of which had orchids trailing from a branch. A group of nuns came through, some in orange, some in grey. We took the lift down and were pick up by our driver to go to the Galae restaurant. Mike had researched this.

It was located on a small lake or reservoir with umbrellaed tables along the shore. Dinners were feeding the two-foot catfish that leapt out of the water, whiskers twitching. We were the only Caucasians, always a good sign. Finding a table at the water’s edge we ordered cashews to hold starvation at bay while we waited for Scott to join us. They arrived simultaneous with him.

Scott had Northern Chicken Sausage with ginger, peanuts and parsley. Mike, a vegetarian, had a platter of Chinese morning glory vine and another of shitake mushrooms. I had green chicken curry, my favorite, and pomelo salad with crispy catfish, hot but heavenly both in flavor and texture.

We returned to our taxi, Scott following on his motorbike to go halfway up to mountain to Wat Polaad. This turned out to be the wat we had passed early in the morning. Its buildings are scattered up and down the mountainside along a stream that slips shallowly over enormous grey boulders. It is being renovated by Burmese immigrant laborers. The old statues, they are of the Thai fantasy creatures variety, are furry with mosses and hairy with ferns. At the entrance a peacock accompanied by his two hens strolled, dragging their tails, like 18th century ladies with trains, through the leaves. The second wife was, in her demeanor, definitely the second wife.

There are little cabins being built whose roofs are made with the dark brown, incredible rumple of teak leaves. Beyond these we crossed the stream by a bamboo bridge and walked down to a platform from which there is a spreading view of Chiangmai and all the time, among the ruined temples, on the bridge, the platform the cicadas drilled our brains with their shrill cries.

It was a precious day. Wat Polaad, quietly emerging from its decay gave each of us a memory of it and of each other that will come back for years to sooth and calm.
Returning to the road we parted from Scott and headed back to Chiangmai where over my yogurt dinner Mike and I discussed Spanish literature of the Golden Age.

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The link to Scott’s article is academia.edu as
but you will have to register to see the article.

P, someone I am just getting to know here, Belgian, worked for the IMF and various UN organizations, and I went along Convent Avenue, although surely it is Thanon Convent, looking until we found the little hole in the wall place I had noticed when N and I had coffee on this street. It was full but we found a table in the back, the only Caucasians, and ordered their dish, a soup with noodles, you chose your noodles, and fish balls, little meat balls, a meat patty, a piece of pork strewn with some veggies. Very good and cheap.

We hadn’t seen each other in a year and there was a lot to catch up on. She had been painfully separating from her husband last time I had been here. She had cancer and her husband a benign brain tumor. The stress must have been horrific, killing the marriage. The process of recovering is not over but she is obviously on her way. She knew Norah, whom I also knew, more as an acquaintance than friend, and knew about Norah’s death, which I also wanted to hear about. No, I was agog to hear about it is more accurate.

In her younger years Norah had cut a broad swath through the male population. She picked up stray husbands the way a black sweater picks up white lint. However, she decided to give up that activity and became a regular Sunday attendee at the big Catholic Church, Holy Redeemer, on Ruam Rudee and was instructed by Father Jack an Irish American priest there.

Norah, born in England married to a Frenchman, well one of them was French, much traveled in Asia in the good old days, and I were acquaintances for 35 years essentially I think because Norah was a man’s woman, didn’t trust other women and had been brought up to believe that her fellow women were competitors not friend material. But being French speaking, although her English was fluent, she may not have felt able to be close to an American. That may be nonsense because she did have an American friend for many years until she used her up. This was part of Norah’s problem. She was a user, vacuumed people up until they would not come near her.

And that, my Dearly Beloveds, is why Norah died alone and was found four days after she died. Since she was discovered dead, the police had to be called. They came and took the body away, putting it in their hospital morgue while they ascertained that she had died naturally. It took them a while to do this. In the meantime her community of acquaintances were trying to figure out how to claim the body. The police had to release the body in three weeks but they would only release it to a relative.

The acquaintances contacted the British Embassy, which wanted NOTHING to do with this. Then they contacted the French Embassy, which more humane got busy trying to find a relative. However, Norah had been an only child. There was no relative and it was getting closer to the time when the police would have to release the body. If there were no one to claim the body, the police would cremate it along with all the other bodies in their lost and found. Ashes would be dumped wherever. It’s a bit like what happens in NYC when your cat dies if you can’t afford an individual cat cremation. You get ashes but everyone’s tabby is in there.

The acquaintances were not happy about this but what to do? Into this drama walks a most unexpected Deus ex machina, the Catholic Church in the guise of the Holy Redeemer Church on Soi Ruam Rudee.

The Church claimed the body, arranged the funeral including, P. says, very nice flowers, giving Norah a send off mass and rather than a mass cremation. I think they also disposed of the ashes.

After this fascinating conversation, I went on to Kai’s shop and atelier on Ratchadamri. He is closing up in four months, after being the most famous women’s dress designer in Thailand for 35 years. He told me to look about for what I wanted and I walked out with about $2,000 worth of Kai originals.

He knows about the restaurant on Kansemsan 3 and says the family is Thai Chinese. The grandfather came over on one of those boats where they were crammed below decks. Another Chinese success story.

There are things I have never bought from Kai because he was always there. I found on my way home that I was thinking about various uniquely Kai things such as his tops and dresses made from strips of Thai silk sewn together and the very dainty Thai lace blouses and drapey silk pants that go with them. This is definitely the end of an era. Humm.

I discovered Kai many years ago when he had a tiny shop in the Oriental Plaza. I was entranced by the clothes but could neither fit into them nor afford them. I did buy one blouse when it was on sale. I still have it. After that I tracked Kai down as he moved from location to location but could never buy anything. Then maybe 7 years ago I stumbled across his big shop and atelier on Ratchadamri. I went in and looked at what was on sale. As I was trying on something that didn’t fit because it was a Thai size, I said to the young sales woman, “I have been following Kai around for years, ever since he had his shop in the Oriental Plaza.”

“Would you like to meet him,” she asked.

“I’d love to.”

So Kai and I met and the harmony of feeling and interest was immediately apparent. Enough so that he asked me if I would like to run the NYC end of his business, seeing if Bergdorf Goodman’s and such would carry his line. Terrified I said I would but it never worked, too many technical glitches.

So I sat on the Sky Train going, “Huumm.”

My time in Bangkok is self-indulgent time. Another day I went to Pansy’s a salon, which has been in existence since 1979, before I came here, run by a Singapore woman who married a Thai. She studied in Paris and has a very good salon with her name, Pansy. If that’s too cute for you I understand. Her operators do a really good facial. Pansy had just come from Singapore where she says some of the people are complaining that the times should be better. We both disapproved of this attitude.

After, I had lunch with Kai at Nara, River Shrimp broiled and scrumptious, and a beautiful white fish in a sauce so hot I couldn’t do more than two spoonfuls. This meal showed me up as a genuine farang, foreigner. Kai ordered a soup with a pig’s backbone standing up in it. It was FAR too hot for me, could not do it. He took it home. It is a dish from his southern province. For dessert we had durian with sticky rice in a coconut sauce that had absorbed the flavor of the durian. Absolute heaven and highly caloric. Durian is the fruit famous for it’s supposedly bad smell out here. If you like Camembert cheese, durian will not cause you distress. What is interesting about durian is its texture. It has the texture of rich custard. Quite amazing.

Kai and I talked about his coming to Barcelona and possibly living there. So this was a discussion of taxes, health insurance, metros, buses, apartments to buy or rent and all those things one needs to know.

The next day, working out at the gym, sweating plentifully and red in the face, I was spoken to by a handsome young Thai. First, I was amazed that I had enough breath to respond; second I could not figure out why he was talking to me. Later I realized he was a trainer and anyone sweaty and red in the face must look like a good prospect.

C, whom I have known for 35 years, even before she had children, picked me up at the Anantara for lunch. What we have in common is our birthday, ten years apart, and that she went to a college in southern California that I taught at, although not at the time she was there. One of my elder colleagues was her advisor in the Philosophy Department. Each year we exchange a small present; I catch up on her life and her children’s lives. The girl, who is beautiful and very tall for a Thai, has started a perfume business in Paris and married. The boy is working on his PhD. in England on the history of ancient warfare. He’s very like his mother intellectually and I expect will come home to teach at Thammasat, the Harvard of Thailand.

We had planned on lunching at a particular place but because we both had afternoon appointments this had to be cancelled. We went to Chan Pen (Full Moon Night) an old restaurant, which as we both decided afterwards, was not up to its old standards. C thinks there was lots of MSG. It just wasn’t very good, although if we had this restaurant in BCN we would be delighted. The best dish was the dessert of coconut and gingko fruit. I have never had that anywhere else in the world including China.

After lunch, C put me in a taxi driven by a fresh-faced young Thai who was very impressed with her authoritarian, professorial manner, taking her instructions about how to get to K Village, on Soi 26 Sukumvit, with great earnestness. We came into Soi 26 the back way through Soi Ari and found K Village. The driver was ecstatic with joy at having successfully delivered me, pointing out the sign with an emphatic finger and grinning delightedly. I tipped him the equivalent of a whole dollar.

Now that I was in K Village the next hurdle was where the hell was Rudi in this sprawling shopping mall with courtyards full of trees and fountains. I had presumed that she had opened a store here so I looked at store names. Then I called her. No she was part of the fair that was a meander of stalls through the courtyards and trees. I started looking at stalls. Rudi’s jewelry is pretty identifiable being eccentric and unusual.

Just as I was moving into the second court a man with a delightful grin came up to me. I knew Rudi had sent him and twenty feet behind him there she was with her hair now totally white, she’s in her mid eighties, cut in a sort of shingled effect, in a long blue and white dress, wearing a necklace of blue and white Chinese porcelain fragments and looking terrific. She had my jade butterfly earrings from last year. She has given the butterflies tiny ruby eyes. I showed her the opals to be made into earrings that Kathy had brought from Australia for me. We agreed that they were not the best opals but that they were pretty. Unfortunately at that point I noticed a small white jade Buddha nested in a gold ring. So I added that to the bill. Rudi is tempting because her prices are low.

I walked from K Village to the Sky Train on Soi 26 which is a very pretty soi lined with trees but even the trees cannot scour the air of the amount of carbon dioxide the cars are producing. I was exhausted by the pollution by the time I had walked the 3 kilometers to the Sky Train station.

The following day I met Kai for lunch after the gym at the Peninsula Plaza, once a very elegant little mall next to the Anantara Hotel but becoming less and less populated, however, we changed out minds. Kai loves Japanese food so we walked over to the Nippon-Tei that I have always meant to try in the Nantawan Building on Ratchadamri. It is very good. I tried to restrain Kai’s ordering to no avail so we had: sun dried squid which is a bit like chewing squid flavored rubber bands, a hand roll of crab and shrimp, something rectangular, small jelly like with fish eggs all over it, crunchy and nice, sting ray and a tray of sushi, oh yes, and soup. We finished with melon. Too much.

We talked more about his plans for coming to Europe. He complained as he has before about the lack of fashion imagination in the young saying, “The next fashion statement will be a bikini under a cloak to go to the opera.”

I told him about my plans for next year, doing my bucket list. We went back to his shop and I went a bit wild. Kai invented a method of lacing strips of Thai silk together to form a fabric. Yesterday I thought a woman had bought the last of these blouses in strips of rose and pink. But she hadn’t. I pounced. Pants to match. One of Kai’s perennial items has been lacy, very feminine, blouses in some kind of organdy with matching, floaty silk trousers. If I don’t buy these now I will never see them again.

Just as he was kindly bringing the price down a bit for me his nephew, wife and two children turned up. Nice people. The nephew has a beard. This is unusual in a Thai. They all went up stairs to his apartment. I went to be measured, a very involved, rather baroque process in Asia that includes everything: wrist, ankle, between nipples, nipple to shoulder, waist to waist through crotch, thigh, and neck.

Between Rudi and Kai an expensive day.

After going to the gym, I gathered up my big bag with all the clothes in it for the dressmaker, feeling put upon for having to carry something so heavy in this heat. I called Moon before getting on the Sky Train to say I was on my way.

It is important never to plan much in a Bangkok day if you don’t want to burst into tears or go apoplectic with rage. Moon and her sister had to do an errand to a tailor near their old location so we went in the opposite direction from their factory. Moon’s sister is a dreadful driver and drives a monster vehicle of the truck/car combination variety. She drives like Hemingway’s prose—start, stop, start, stop, start, stop. At one point she did a U turn on one of the busiest streets in BKK but everyone took it calmly.

Moon and I went through everything. I think I bought some Indian fabric I shouldn’t have. It is pretty but fragile. What Kai would call, “ethnic fabric.”

The factory is amazing. I have only seen two floors but it is full of women cutting, sewing, and embroidering. There must be at least 20 of them. There is the occasional man but he is usually delivering something. They employ people others would not, for instance there is a hunch back among the cutters, and if they go under all these people will be unemployed.

We finished around 5, that is, of course, the worst time to drive in BKK. So they drove me away from my Sky Train stop to the Taksin stop, which is closer to them and has less traffic. It had enough. I had not eaten since breakfast and was beginning to fade. I went, much more lightly burdened, to the Paragon where I ate at my 3rd Thai restaurant in a row, the Nara– pork strips with a hot dipping sauce and duck curry with the tiny eggplants in it.

The next day, a Saturday, T and W picked me up in their maroon Mercedes. We went to one of my favorite restaurants in BKK, the Kalapaprack. N met us there; she is T’s sister. I am amused at the way we have general conversation until the food arrives—we picked 7 dishes for 4 people. Then there is relative silence as we become serious about the food. Conversation is usually limited to comments on the dishes. We had: curried fish cakes, rice with Chinese olive oil, rice with Northern sausage (hot) and ginger, little crisp bundles of deep fried dough containing minced pork, shrimp with smoky eggplant salad, another salad whose ingredients I didn’t recognize and a thing that looked like a quail egg stuffed with minced pork. When we 4 were finished there were 7 totally empty serving plates. For dessert we had one piece of coffee meringue cake, which is absolutely deadly, among the 4 of us. About half way through the meal I noticed that some of the staff were standing to one side and grinning cheerfully. Thais get a kick out of watching foreigners enjoy their food.

I asked W about the crepes I eat in the street. He says they are an ancient Thai sweet. When I told him I thought the white sticky stuff was some kind of chemical compound and the yellow too, he told me the yellow is egg yoke cooked in syrup. Then he talked to his phone and it came up with the receipe for the white stuff, not chemicals but icing sugar, lime and egg whites beaten for 10 minutes.

W has done a real estate venture of nineteen houses five miles outside of BKK. He’s sold most of the lower priced ones but the higher priced, high because they are on bigger pieces of land, aren’t selling. His son, an architect, is trying to figure out a way to cheaply, make the houses look fancier.

Came back to the A One before a monsoon with thunder and lightning, rain bucketing down. A bicycle went by with two people on it, clothes clinging to them, drops shivering off the edge of the peddler’s helmet, both bent over so as not to get rain in their eyes.

Sunday after the gym I crossed over to the number one exit for the Sky Train at the Ratchadamri stop where M had told me to wait and along she came. We met J, coming with his golf bag, and opened the undistinguished corrugated metal gate into the great, astonishing green space with trees, ponds, birds, golf course and racecourse with bleachers, all surrounded by a high fence of buildings, that compose the Royal Bangkok Sports Club. When you are at the Ratchadamri Sky Train Station you look down on this wondrous patch of green with its palisade of tall buildings. We crossed the edge of the golf course to the club but rather than eating in the old section we went to one of the modern buildings. Upstairs one has a nice view across the greenness to the fence of buildings that includes the Paragon Mall and its predecessor, the Siam Centre, the place to go for teenaged Bangkok when I first came here 35 years ago. That was when girls held hands with girls and boys with boys. Those days are long gone.

We had a dim sum lunch, good but not exceptional, although the shu mai and the chicken feet were particularly good. I am so glad that I was not raised by a Western mother who taught me to think, “Chicken feet? How disgusting.” J and I really got into the chicken feet. J is Japanese but is an omnivore. We talked and talked not having seen each other for a year.

They are happy at the Royal Sports Club, as I have to say, who would not be. The fees are hefty, $6,000 a year but I think that covers the two of them. They live on one side of the club’s park and she works at the college on the other side. They have reinvented themselves with a new business importing fish from Japan to Thailand. They seem very content. People at the Ananatara, formerly the Four Seasons, did not treat them well. She, because she is a tiny and dark Thai, got the brunt of the Thai prejudice about dark skin. She is so tiny she has to buy her clothes in the children’s department. He, because he is Japanese, got a lot of edge from people.

I told M the story of my dressmaker, how one of the men in the family, who had a factory, was offered a loan by a bank, took it, gambled and womanized for six months, if that, until the money was gone. In the meantime the factory died because he was paying no attention to it. So it is the women who are paying off the loan with their dressmaking business. M said with unrepressed indignation, “Since I was a little, little girl I have heard this story over and over.” I am sure she has.

I told them about my plans for my bucket trip next year with two months in Japan. J says I will be all right in Tokyo, Kyoto and the south but not in the north where they do not speak English, are closed and not used to foreigners. It is his part of the country and he wants to take me there. I am thrilled.

We also talked about clubs, how the Japanese have none and don’t understand the idea and the different kinds of clubs in America, England and Spain.

Got caught, although not too badly, in a monsoon coming home. But the shoes I had on will not take another soaking. They will die. The landlady arrived as the monsoon ended with family in the Mercedes. They had been shopping. As they unpacked themselves they revealed bags and bags of groceries from the Paragon Gourmet Market where I also shop and a mid-sized gilded Buddha. The car was very full with grandma, my landlady, her son the tech wiz, his pretty wife, their two year old and his Nanny, a patient young man.

I had a day to myself, which, of course, I spent mostly writing. I slept in until 7. I treated myself to a long, delicious and expensive lunch consisting of one large steamed crab in a sauce of some kind with egg in it and a drink of ginger, lime and something else I cannot identify. I was lured into the restaurant by a tout who came up to me and asked, as I was looking at the menu, “Do you like Thai food?” I had seen the crab and made up my mind so I followed him in. He wears his hair in two spit curls on either side of his forehead, like Betty Boop.

The crab was very messy to eat, they had no wet wipes, so they took me into the kitchen to wash my hands at the sink. I thought that was darling of them.

It has just occurred to me that this is turning into a food blog.

I then prowled the Paragon locating shops that are old favorites, poking into new ones, mostly not that good, and ending up at Jim Thompsons which is always fatal but I did find a purple blouse to go with my purple pants.

The next day, after the gym, I thought I was early to meet W so I sat in the Anantara lobby, a fine high ceilinged space with ceiling to floor windows onto the two lily ponds outside. There are delicate designs in pastel colors on the ceiling and in the central aisle leading from the front doors, opened by smiling young women in Thai dress, to the grand staircase is a sort of open Lucite bookcase full of vases of flowers of all kinds and a few objects of ambivalent meaning.

W had to come in and fetch me. We were going to a new restaurant on Soi Kansemsan 3. I am in the A One on Soi Kansemsan 1, Jim Thompson’s house and museum is on Soi Kansemsan 2. All of these sois back on the klong that runs through Bangkok. I think it is only one of two klong’s left in the city. Express boats traverse its entire length stopping at various piers.

We drove up to a grand, white 19th century house over looking the klong, with many windows, walls of windows, in big, high ceilinged rooms, very airy and bright. Interesting geometric tile floors lend color. Unfortunately someone thinks the way to decorate is to put up streamers of plastic flowers everywhere. Also the wait staff is in Thai dress. I find this too kitsch. But the food is good, although to my chili limit and the glass noodle yum was beyond my limit. There was an unusual soup of pork, I think, that was citrusy and flavored with an herb I am not familiar with. There were pink noodles, nice if not hugely exciting and shrimp with basil, at my heat limit. I am missing a dish. For dessert we had a sour fruit in syrup.

Downstairs there is a tiny museum composed primarily of the family’s old furniture, a large round dinning room table, the center of which is a circular piece of grey marble you turn by a pedal under the table or by hand, a lazy Susan.

The family wants to keep the house but can’t afford it. They have started the restaurant in hopes that it will support the house.

I had a short day on the 10th but I did get to a favorite store in the Chinese-Thai Commerce building-regulation modern ugly- on its ground floor, a shop whose name I do not know. There is a sign, but I cannot read it and I have never heard anyone say the name. Despite the sterility of the building this little place sells herbal teas, soaps and creams. I bought mangosteen soap and cucumber face cream.

At the Anantara, where I go to the gym, I lunched at Moca and Muffins on, everything at the Anantara, once the Four Seasons, is in a decline, Pomelo Salad which had the right sauce and good pomelo but no dried shrimp at all and the meagerest amount of crabmeat. I watched the staff load hotel luggage carts with imitation alligator boxes, which looked like top hat boxes, full of moon cakes in flavors that never used to exist—Red Velvet, chocolate, tiramisu.

Across the little tree embedded pond, swirling with huge orange and white koi in the court of the Anantara, I looked in at the largely unaffordable riches of the Lotus Artes de Vivre—wonderful mother of pearl fan shaped earrings studded with gems, teak burl trays in which sterling frogs and chameleons lurk.

In the gym I got to hang out a bit with my Thai lesbian friends. I wonder how much longer they will be loyal to the Anantara. I saw the smiley, Thai man, who is in charge of the gym. He has a huge chest, amazing arms, a dainty waist and a pair of ball bearing buns. He gave me a good rate. Over the two months, I will be in and out of BKK I have thirty days and then will have to pay for single days.

The monsoon was on when I walked to the Sky Train but I managed without damaging my shoes. It’s the shoes that die in monsoon. Having lost my Met Museum umbrella, I now have a Thai purple umbrella with two insufferably cute bears on it. I wonder if Walt Disney had Thai genes.

The next day, after the gym, I took the Sky Train to Taksin and then the Express Boat up to Banglampoo to see Mr. Thai of the shark mutilated hand and buy all my plane tickets. I love this trip up river and always have a day dream about what my life would have been like if I had moved to Bangkok to the apartment on the Chaophaya River that I would have bought with three terraces, a maid’s room, and about 2,000 square feet of teak flooring. On a high floor, it had stunning views up and down the river. The road not taken.

Mr. Thai was there but so was his daughter whom I had never met before. She’s a bit chubby but sweetly pretty with, of course, great waterfalls of black hair. She was conceived when he was 15. Mr. Thai was an early starter. He says in front of her, “She’s smarter than me.” What a wonderful father. I am always amazed at how deftly he manages the computer, tickets, papers, and envelopes with his fingerless hand. For $630 I got plane tickets to and from Chiangmai, HK and Phenomphen. It took two hours but that’s okay because I get to listen to him or enjoy his interactions with other customers, in this case two girls from Holland going to Kho Samet. He charged my phone too. No visa necessary for Cambodia.

The trip back on the Express boat was perhaps a little special because the light was softening toward evening. There are many kinds of boats on the river but they essentially fall into three groups: the cross river ferries with snubbed noses, which are painted one color; the up and down boats—express boats and tiger boats both wildly painted with thin stripes of white, yellow, pink, turquoise, orange and green—with long, pointy noses, and the brown, matronly rice barges high in the water going up, low in the water coming down, pulled by tough little tugs, looking like scruffy enameled pieces by Faberge.

Going up river to Wat Artit, the Banglampoo stop, you pass the 19th century East Asiatic Company, now offices, the elegant Oriental Hotel, the ugly CAT Tower followed by a 19th century derelict building which did not seem to have squatters this time, then the Sheraton, River City Mall, River View Guest House which I always intended to stay in but never have, Chinatown with its distinctive gates and towers, Wat Arun with its crockery decoration much despised by the 19th century English and on the other bank the spires of temples soaring behind the red tile roofs of houses. Then, shining in the late sun, the roofs and spires of Wat Phra Keow, the Emerald Buddha complex. These are suitably more complex than other temples. The steep roofs rise in a series of diminishing gold terraces to end in sparkling gold needle spires. Then there is the lighthouse of the University after we pass under Memorial Bridge. There are still a very few old mansions along the river and also a very few shanties of wood scraps and corrugated metal up on stilts above the greeny-brown water on which small islands of water hyacinth float.

When the striped tiger boats go zooming by, the streamers of plastic flowers attached to their bows spread like the hair of a girl running in the wind.

For a wonder my boat stopped at the Oriental landing. I hopped off and went to eat at the Oriental’s Verandah restaurant, my favorite Thai curry—superbly smooth with coconut milk, the two small varieties of eggplant, one no bigger than a big pea, little bunches of pepper pods and chicken. Cozy in my curry I watched the boats on the river and a northern European couple, hotel guests, he well maintained in his 50’s, she imperially slim and pale, money written all over them in the quietest way.

Someone commented on smells in Bangkok. There’s a lot of fried chicken and occasionally drains make a pungent appearance. But the smell I miss, that used to be on every street corner is jasmine from the beautiful loops of jasmine buds that people hung on their banyan tree or before their spirit house. There is the smell of frying, always and sometimes of durian, even though it is tightly wrapped in Saran. Chili wafts off of the food carts into your path.

I saw Kiko and we actually had a conversation. I used to have a friend named Noi who was housekeeper to my designer friend Kai for many years as well as running his little discount annex. She had lived with Kai and his partner for years when she suddenly disappeared about two years ago, taking everything she owned with her. No explanations. She now lives in her sister’s compound. Noi’s mother-in-law is Kiko who is Japanese. Kiko’s husband was a notorious Thai playboy but she married him at the end of his career inheriting everything when he died. His son, also a Thai playboy, was Noi’s husband for a few years. She married him at the wrong time of his life, too young. She didn’t get enough to live on and take care of their daughter from the courts, which is why Kai and his partner took her in many years ago.

Anyway, Kiko and I have been chary of each other since Noi left because she knows I know but she doesn’t know how I feel about it. I feel Noi was an idiot not to talk to Kai. I decided to dare the Devil and asked her if she had seen Noi. She said, “Not in a year, maybe more. But I think she is very happy. She is traveling.” Interpreted that means she is visiting her daughter in the US who has become very adept at getting money out of her playboy Dad.

When I woke this morning the soi was slick with rain shining like dull silver. I was down to breakfast early enough to see a heavy monk—how do you put on weight when you only eat once a day?—with a big, black umbrella over his orange robes go by on bare feet. He carried his begging bowl before him covered with an orange cloth.

I had some time to waste before meeting my friend N so I gave in to temptation and bought a bag of my favorite Thai sweet, little crepes the size of a small saucer, thin as beaten gold that curl up around their center piece composed of two unidentified ingredients—something white and sticky topped by something yellow and sweet. I suspect these two are chemical creations. I ate the whole 10 Baht bag.

N and I had coffee and tea together while talking about my pneumonia and her thyroid. It had gone totally wonky on her and she had to have it radiated, making her radioactive. She stayed alone in her little apartment that the family uses for overnights and then cleaned everything in it herself because everything was radioactive from her. But her thyroid is now behaving like a proper thyroid; it’s stabilized.

When we parted, she to go back to work, she got me a taxi to go to the Palladium Mall which otherwise would have involved a longish walk in the heat and a ride on the Sky Train. I have not taken a taxi in Bangkok in about 7 years. The last one I took sat in traffic for twenty minutes without moving. I then got out, paid the driver and walked. This trip took an hour and a half for a twenty-minute trip but I was cool. A jeweler I have known for years moved a year ago to the basement of the Palladium from her ritzy quarters in the Peninsula Plaza. I searched all over, looked at the map, asked people who spoke English, there aren’t many, to no avail. I could not find Rudi´s shop.

I did, however, go to the Peninsula and find an old neighbor of hers who had her number. I called. She and her daughter were about to get on a plane to go to the HK gem fair. Rudi is 86 and can’t hear on the phone any more so I told her daughter about the earrings Rudi made for me, which I hadn’t been able to pick up last year. All is well. I will have the earrings when they return from the fair.

I have had another outrageously wonderful Thai meal, this time at Ping Ling in the basement of the Paragon—Thai crab and shrimp dumplings, followed by river shrimp in a cashew and garlic sauce with caramelized shallots.

I started my journal on the flight to Helsinki and then left the notebook on the plane to Bangkok. It was a nice one from that paper shop near the Ajuntamento. Anyway, I was thoroughly annoyed with myself.

In Helsinki I went to the Finn Air Lounge and had beet soup and a cookie surrounded by Asians of all varieties eating lasagna and smoked salmon. My jet lag has, by the way, swallowed my spelling abilities. As I finished my snack a British couple, he very nice looking she calculatedly plain, who had an aura of oddness about them came to sit near me. She went to get them food. As he angled and re-angled himself to get into his stool it became apparent that what was odd was that he was drunk. She may have been too but less than he. He turned and said something to me, which was totally incomprehensible. He then paused, got his mouth under control and announced, “I hate Chinese.” Since we were surrounded by many who probably were Chinese, I am still after all these years inadequate at telling the difference between various Asian groups, this was a startling conversation opener. I inadequately responded, ” Well, I supposed you could hate anyone you want.“ For some reason this silenced him. Five minutes later I thought of what I should have said, “I hate drunks.”

I removed myself to my gate, where I became imbedded in a mob of Thai speakers and their children in a happy hubbub.

The flight was fine, although I slept little. The food was good but the best was breakfast with a bagel heaped with small shrimp and fennel salad that I adore. They had The Seventh Seal on their movie list. I watched it for the first time in about 40 or 50 years. It is still superb.

Walking out of the airport in Bangkok was like walking into the gentle embrace of a large, very warm, damp bear. I had no difficult getting to the A One Inn where I was greeted by Khun Fai who had expected me yesterday. I had forgotten to tell her it was an overnight flight.

Before I left Barcelona people asked me if I was excited. I wasn’t, just content to be going to Bangkok and then to be in Bangkok until I got out into the soi and began to see and recognize things—the banyan tree hung with offerings, tables where people eat from the food carts, the scrawny cats with their knotted tails, the woman who sells rambutans and longans.

I took the Sky Train to the Paragon Mall—I immediately become a mall rat in Bangkok—where I had a lovey lunch at Bao’s Beans, meaning coffee beans, of crab, shrimp and noodle curry. This is not Western noodles but thin, broad slightly glutinous Thai noodles that soak up the curry. I was seated at the outside perimeter of the restaurant, which meant that I received the full impact of Thais happily circulating in search of the right restaurant in the basement food court of the Paragon. The noise is pandemonium. Across the way at another restaurant a young woman was lunching with two men friends, one, attractive but not outrageously handsome, had on a pair of rhinestone earrings that became him very well with his dark skin.

After lunch I walked among the restaurants enjoying the bustle and the variety—What’s for Dessert, The Durian, MK’s that has excellent shabushabu, the Mandarin Oriental pastry shop, several Japanese restaurants, a Swensen’s Ice Cream place. Then I went into the Gourmet Market inhaling at the durian aisle, admiring the monstrously perfect peaches, rejecting the humungous carrots in cellophane, to find my rucala, cherry tomatoes, smoked salmon, brie and yogurt.

I just saw my old landlord and wife from the no longer existing Bed and Breakfast walk by. Night has fallen and the soi is full of Scaparelli pink and lime green taxis.

Dear Sirs:

I am writing this letter to celebrate, applaud, eulogize and extol the NHS. I am an 81-year-old American. I contracted pneumonia, collapsing on the stair of a friend’s house. They called an ambulance that took me to Guy’s and St. Thomas’ Hospital where I lost almost all of three days to respirator, breathing tube and oxygen. I do remember hallucinations in which I admired the inventiveness of the hospital designer who had turned the ceiling of the ward into an aquarium where I could watch brilliant colored fish swimming among the ceiling tiles.

When I came to more rational consciousness, I found myself, with windows on incredible views of the Houses of Parliament and the Thames, cared for by shifts of astonishingly kind, thoughtful, of course polite, intently dedicated people who heard me when I asked for help or information. Two of the best were Beccy who tried to tempt my appetite, which had gone into hiding, with various cheeses and Charlie a down to earth pillar of no nonsense with a sense of humor always ready to break cover. But there were many more remarkable for their patience with testy patients and their compassion for those whose suffering a bed away from me was from time to time audible. The staff was multi-national, many of West Indian background as well as others I found, as I asked about origins, from the Philippines, both people with a particular talent for long hours, little sleep and large dollops of compassion.

Just as wonderful, as I improved, were the PT staff who urged on my wobbly steps with bribes like, “If you use a cane I can sign you off to go to the bathroom alone.”

I did not see doctors often, only when necessary, usually marking a change in my status – being moved from intensive care to a room in isolation until I was declared no longer infectious. Moving from that status put me on a ward where most were straining at leash, gnashing at bit, to leave as the doctors judiciously decided when we were ready to leave and under what conditions. They badly needed the beds we were in but no one was hustled out before they could manage their new freedom.

For all these reasons I want everyone to know how superb I think the NHS is.

Thank you, Karen Swenson
Barcelona, Spain

In the five hours we were incarcerated in the Lhasa airport, for unknown and certainly undisclosed reasons by Szechuan Air, who gave us a boxed lunch to keep us from licking the flies off the windows or gnawing on the rigorously uncomfortable plastic seats, I further developed my fanatic hatred of Chinese airlines. Did they keep us there in hopes that they would finally sell the moldering souvenirs in glass cases that adorned the waiting room? I did catch up on my journal in between watching Chinese Army fighter jets explode the silence with their take offs.

The one happy spot was an Israeli family of four small children who played and napped as though they had spent their short lives in airport waiting rooms and knew no other life. When we did take off we passed a line of 20 Army helicopters. Tibet is an occupied country. On the plane there was an atmosphere of suppressed chaos augmented by the lugubrious unhappiness on the faces of the stewardesses. This did nothing to improve my attitude, nor did the on- plane lunch of rice with miniscule unidentifiable bits of meat. How do you chop up meat that small?

In contrast to my attitude Sarosh was relaxed and smiling, eating his as well as my lunch in the waiting room and trying to site Everest as we flew over the Himalayas. His time of crankiness, although one could hardly call his barely ruffled feathers by that harsh a name, came when we exited the airport and spent half an hour trying to find our car and driver. Either Sarosh’s phone battery was low or our greeter’s phone, our greeter was a young woman, the first to hold that office, wasn’t functioning. But we did finally get together and, although the whole day had been lost, I finally was at the Kathmandu Guest House.

Before going up stairs I went to the baggage room desk. The large cheery man who tends the desk took me into one of the damp cave like rooms where bags are thrown all hugger-mugger. The tenants of the KGH, since most of them come to trek, store mounds and mounds of bags. He miraculously extricated mine instantly from a heap to my joyous amazement. When I gave him a tip to express that joy, if not the amazement, he gave me an unhappy, disappointed, reproachful look. Amazing how much can be crammed into a glance. It hadn’t occurred to me that he was an admirer. But I very carefully did not tip him when he carried all three of my bags up four flights of stairs for me. This restored his good humor and he left me obviously happy.

The next morning at breakfast there was an odd incident. A group of Australians, included a family with older girls and a little boy of eight or nine, cute, animated, with bright pink jug ears. He walked across the garden where I could see on the other side a small brown dog with a plumy tail. In a minute he tore across the lawn, with crimson, contorted, tear-streaked face erupting into a scream of raw terror before us. I thought at first he had been bitten; that in this country would be serious. But I concluded no. His mother and sisters comforted him but with such an air of condescension in their manner, leading him away, that I concluded what I had seen was a recurrent incident. What do you do when your child has such a phobia? Dogs are everywhere.

That night I tried to call my broker to pay my Nepali agent—I had done my entire trip to Tibet on credit and was feeling great pangs of guilt. But he was not in. However, while making the call I got to know the woman in charge of such attempts at international communication and her American friend who has been coming to Nepal for more than thirty years working for various charities that help women and children. She had recently been widowed and had come over this time to work and try to find her way through the difficulties of psychological amputation. What a sensible way to deal with one’s mourning.

As Shirish and I sat about talking in Yasmine’s shop, Shirish mentioned that her daughter had complained about her skin color, that she wanted to be lighter in color, that her color was not pretty. I was horrified that Western mainstream idiot prejudices should have infected this child’s life on the other side of the planet with such a vicious virus. I know that Shirish’s daughter is a devoted reader of Harry Potter and we have discussed how wonderful Rowling is. I suggested that she might want to ask her daughter what Rowling would think about her judgment of herself and her skin. What more awful thing can we do to a child than to teach her to feel she is intrinsically, physically ugly and unacceptable?

I took a taxi to Patan to see if the leaves for my lamp were ready. They were not and the cross-eyed little man who was supposed to have them looked astonished to see me. Mr. promised that they would be delivered before I left. Since I had paid nothing, I had nothing to lose except the leaf I had given him as an example. But I trusted Mr. .

Indeed, late in the afternoon, the day before I left, the cross-eyed man arrived, accompanied by another man who spoke English, with the leaves. I was ecstatic at receiving them and therefore, did not examine them carefully. The cross-eyed man, sweating lightly, resembled something that had crawled out from under a particularly nasty Dickensian rock. All shifty eyed he slipped into an unappealing whine about how much labor the leaves had required, how difficult it was to make them. I was interested to see that the translator, I could tell by eye contact and body language, was on my side. I ignored this speech, pulling out my money, which abruptly brought down the curtain on the scene he was developing. The translator grinned and we parted company.

In my room I looked at the leaves more carefully and discovered that they were made of steel when they were supposed to have been made of brass. Luckily, on the receipt that Mr. had written out for me it said that they were to be made of brass. In the meantime, the only person likely to realize that the leaves are steel not brass is me. Ah well, I shall be coming back to Nepal in a year or two and we can reopen the problem.

I had one day in Bangkok, now a blur, before flying off to the capital city of Samsara, Hong Kong. One thing I do remember, however, is that I went to Boots in the Paragon to ask for my eye medicine, which was at long last down to its last drop. My heart did a rock in water plummet when the young woman said they used to stock it but had stopped. I must have looked forlorn because she then added that she thought the pharmacy behind the Gourmet Market had it. They did. The drops had outlasted my prognostications by a couple of weeks. So much for obsessing.

Coming into Hong Kong on the airport express to the Financial Centre I got on the inevitably long line for a taxi but was exhilarated when I was able to direct my driver not just to Cotton Tree Drive but to show him the underpass that plunges you into the parking lot behind St. Joseph’s Church. This is important because only very experienced drivers know the difference between St. Joseph’s and St. John’s. To them a church is a church is a church. This parking lot is crammed to its last bitumen inch with cars whose drivers play cards, gossip and talk on their phones while waiting to be summoned. We came out the other side at the parish house, went around it, and found ourselves, as I knew we would, with our nose on Garden Road. I walked down the steep incline to the Helena May braking constantly so as to prevent my big, wheeled-suitcase from hurling us both down the sidewalk to crash into the sign for the Peak tram.

Having explained to Phoebe, the ever patient manager of the Helena May, that I had no credit card, I paid part of my bill with the cash I had in hand and then went to my lovely room, cream and pistachio, with windows onto the verandah encircling the building, where I unpacked the dainty white orchid my friend Sue had sent to make the room a home, along with the phones and the coffee maker she provides for her visiting friends.

The Helena May is a club and women’s hotel that was created from Governor Sir Henry May’s old mansion and named for his wife. It is a lovely, gracious place with apartments around a garden as well as rooms with shared bath for more transient visitors.

I walked down to Pacific Place, a ramble that takes me down past the entrance to the Peak tram, then down an escalator in front of a shiny glass office building that houses the gym I use in HK, the ICBC Tower, I think. But then I cross a lozenge shaped planted island between two roads to my favorite building in HK, the Bank of China Tower designed by IM Pei that looks like a glass and steel abstraction of a length of bamboo. There are steps to go down here but they are beside pools and Chinese scholar’s rocks that yield up a moment of peace before one comes into the full-throated traffic of Queensway.

Then it is a short walk to the door of Pacific Place in the basement of which resides a supermarket called grEAT food that has been characterized by a HK friend as a fast food outlet for the rich. This is not an inaccurate description. The population pushing dainty little carts about could certainly be described as international Yuppies. However, there are counters from which you can buy prepared Japanese, Thai, and Indian food and it is the one place I know of in HK where I can buy European cheese. I huffed and puffed my way back up the hill, stuffed the refrigerator in my room, had some yogurt and went to bed lulled by the traffic on Garden Road.

While in HK I was able to replace my credit card since the head office of HSBC is in HK in a building which like the Pompidou in Paris wears its intestines on its outside.

Sue and I had set ourselves a busy calendar early in my stay that included hearing Bruckner’s 8th Symphony conducted by Jaap van Sweden, at the Kowloon Cultural Centre, and, with some mutual friends, “Priscilla Queen of the Desert”, definitely opposite ends of the cultural pendulum swing.

I don’t know Bruckner and found it interesting that, at least in this symphony, he often used the sections of the orchestra–horns, strings–as separate units rather than melding them. This in turn startled me into awareness that there is a cultural divide in the world I had not been aware of. Chinese mothers apparently do not usually urge their little boys or girls to practice their oboes or trombones. No, they may say, “Liu it is time to practice your new cello piece,” but that eight out of ten mothers say “violin” is obvious from the racial makeup of the orchestra—no western faces in any of the violin sections, half the cellos and bases were western and all, every blessed one, of the horns had a western face above it. I found that fascinating.

The next night, Saturday, we went to “Priscilla” where we all cheered, stomped occasionally and almost always sang along with great enthusiasm. We, being an enormously varied, international and racially diverse crowd. There were two, just pre-teen children with us. I suspect exposure to things like “Priscilla” will keep them from blinking at their own or other people’s sexual choices in a few years.

Sunday we had a mild typhoon but stayed in, because it did get up to level 8, eating the usual peanut butter sandwiches or scrambled eggs. What was worrying was that Sunday is the day on which all the Philippine maids, and there are thousands of them, are off. They generally have no sheltered place to go, hanging out along the walkways, pedestrian bridges and small parks in HK in chattering groups like brown sparrows. I did go out to look about and they seemed to have found all kinds or nooks and crannies to spend their Sabbath in without getting drenched. St. Josephs had opened up spaces for them to sit in safety.

Sue and I went out to visit our friend J who lives on Cheng Chao. Sue had found an excellent Indian restaurant, not something you would expect to find on this little island that used to be fishing center and is now one of the places you go for a weekend away from HK. We lunched before going on to see J. He has an inherited disease that has bent him double for which there is no cure. We spent the afternoon talking to him about a huge range of things. He is an expert translator of Provençal poetry. However, his latest adventure is on the web where he has found he can watch the daily life at a mid-western railway station.

One day I went over to Kowloon and spent an hour or two trying to find out when, if ever, the old museum, that used to be in the Culture Centre housing the auditorium where Sue and I had heard the Bruckner, will reopen. Its dusty doors are closed and no sign tells of a reopening. The museum used to include a floor telling the history of HK with paintings, etchings, and prints. Another floor had modern Chinese paintings. Here I discovered a painter named Wucius Wong whose work I admire hugely, enough to have bought one of his paintings some years ago when I was flush. He is now sold by Sothebys. But I could find out nothing about the old museum although I was handed all sorts of pamphlets and brochures about other museums all over HK and Kowloon.

Another day I met my friends from BKK for brunch on Stanley Street at a Michelin one star restaurant, Yat Lok. It was difficult to locate because the name is not obvious on the storefront. It is a typical hole in the wall restaurant but its speciality is goose, roasted, deep fried and served moist on the inside, crisp on the outside, heavenly. I met W’s mother who is in my age group, a smartly dressed, lively woman. She is from HK but married a Thai. Her son and daughter-in-law bring her here so that she can speak her own language again and eat the food of her youth.

The rest of my stay in HK was pure Samsara, looking at clothes, buying a pair of amber earrings, and enjoying Sue’s company. I will stand hesitant and over awed before a very expensive jeweler’s window and Sue will say, “Come let’s go in and try those on,” or “Let’s just find out how much that ring is.” It is always more than I can afford, and it is rarely something I would really like, despite my admiration for its beauty, but it is wonderful the way she urges me through the wall of my timidity before what I think is above me. I have tried on a pair of extraordinary quarter of a million dollar emerald earrings because of her, earrings that, while of great beauty, belong to some other life. But it’s a good adventure into a land I don’t and never will inhabit.

Back in Bangkok the preparations for the cremation of the King were in their final days. Very rarely did I see any one, even a tourist, who was not in black. Television showed the preparations, particularly of the building in which the cremation would happen and the vehicle, a wonderfully fantastically carved and painted “cart” that would carry the body to the crematorium. It seemed as though every public space was filled with pictures or photographs of the King at all ages. One exhibit in the atrium of the Paragon included a picture of which I took a picture of the parade of the royal white elephants in the funeral cortege of the King. The massive white beasts dressed in black and gold ridden by their mahouts exemplified for me both the all-embracing gravity of this death and the grandeur that the Thais have as part of their heritage. One of the mahouts is a young woman. When I pointed this out to W he said proudly, “In Thailand a woman can do anything she wants to.”

I spent the entire day of the funeral watching the ceremonies on the television in the guesthouse with the girls who were on duty as desk clerks. It was a slow paced ritual of immense depth of feeling, the crowds, huge, silent, black, tear stained. I don’t ever expect to see another funeral as impressive. We will see what the English do for Elizabeth.

Seeing the funeral helped to release me for my trip home. I had been much entwined with the Thais and their sorrow. Now I could leave them. But I took the picture of the white elephants on parade with me.

Before we leave Lhasa there are two things I forgot to put in the previous blog, both animal centered.

At Drepung we saw a raven chiseling with his beak a channel between two stones in the monastery wall. He was very intense about this. Mortar was flying in all directions. He would stop for a breather from time to time and then return to the task with renewed determination. We couldn’t figure out what this was about. What was buried in the mortar? While he was chiseling away at the top was there some mouse working his way, with equal diligence, further and further down between the stones in the monastery wall?

The Kiychu has a cat with three and a half legs. She is powder puff soft and comfortably round. One of her front legs is missing a little more than half way down, although she is able to get around quite well despite her limp. Whether it is because of her disability or it is just her character, she is an extremely vocal cat. She comes to sit by your chair at breakfast and delivers voluminous diatribes, which I imagine have to do with the lack of disability compensation from the communist state to small cats. A little bacon will temporarily stop the lecture but the only thing that turns it off completely is a call from the man who makes cappuccinos in the garden. She disappears after him limping rapidly into the kitchen.

We drove out of Lhasa on a freeway passing tall apartment buildings. Marching up the sides of hill-mountains were those great complexes of apartment buildings that the Chinese create. It pains me to see these in this landscape. Then we drove, on a less intrusive road, through what looked like suburbs, but with recently harvested fields of barley between the houses, passing a fenced park where, through the bars, I saw a dainty, spotted deer all by itself. The mountains closed in showing patches and streaks of mineral green and red on their apparently barren sides.

We passed the glacier that has been neatened up. No beggars at all. There used to be terrible ones here in fearsome condition coming to your car window to plead their misery. But now there are lots of tables at which people are selling fake antiques and, possibly, fake fossils. The Chinese have made it a bit park like. It was nicer wild. It is still impressive, however, but we did not see the second glacier. Is it gone? Global warming in action? Or have they changed the road so it doesn’t pass that glacier any more?

We had lunch in a town I remember that has at one end of its one street a magnificent, perfectly symmetrical, black mountain with beyond it white topped mountains. The town’s one street is ugly with paired, absolutely static, red, plastic Chinese flags on all the lampposts and the usual garish storefronts coming apart under the onslaught of Tibetan wind and weather.

The lunch was okay, chicken and peanuts with carrots and zucchini julienne, and seemed innocuous, but made me fart unmusically for the rest of the afternoon.

We passed innumerable army trucks going in both directions but they were cleaner than in years before and not filled with young men in uniforms looking woebegone in this alien environment. I may hate the presence of the Chinese army in Tibet but I find it impossible not to be sorry for the individual soldier who comes from the relatively warm, green and wet low lands of China, running with rivers. Tibet must seem like a desiccated hell to them.

I did not arrange this trip well. I tried to cram too much into too little time. Tashi had, when I arrived in Lhasa, asked to rearrange the itinerary, which was fine, until I realized that we were at a Nepali-Tibetan divide. He wanted to head quickly for Darchen and the circumambulation, or whatever part of it I could do. Satish had planned the trip so that I would do the khora at the end, when I had had as much time as possible to adjust to the altitude. This is a striking difference between Nepalis and Tibetans. A Nepali will always think of the person. Tibetans will think in terms of efficiency. I pointed out to Tashi that he was cutting down on my acclimatization time. We did not go back to Satish’s schedule but we only cut one day off of my adjustment time.

But the first victim of my overscheduling was Gyantze, one of my favorite towns. There has been the usual Chinese invasion but somehow it has stayed a Tibetan town, unlike Shigatze that seems to be completely Chinese now. However, Gyantze was very much under construction. We had to drive this way and that to finally get to the monastery. This meant missing the beautiful approach down a street edged by old Tibetan houses, their windows glowing with geraniums and dahlias with the monastery gate in front of you.

It was at this gate, from the paintings inside it, that I first learned about snow lions, a superb mythical beast. Here they romp on the wall, snowy but with green manes flying in the wind and toothy grins. It was, I think, the Fifth Dalai Lama whose mother raised him on snow lion milk.

Lack of time was the first disappointment, the second was that the upstairs of the temple was closed, and there were very few monks about. We did see the protector chapel that has a few old skeleton masks and new ones of toothy animals, which Tashi was dismissive of, however I am fond of them.

Tashi told me that the gods and the complex toranas behind them—a torana is a structure somewhere between a large halo and an arched frame—were made from clay. However, to the casual glance they look as though they were carved from wood. They are indeed ceramic, which makes their survival through the Cultural Revolution more surprising. There is one room I´ve never been reconciled to that is an imitation of limestone caves, perhaps around Guilin. I have always thought it looks tacky and this trip didn’t change my mind.

The murals in the monastery are fine, some old, but they are heavily darkened in most cases by the smoke from yak butter lamps.

We went on to the Kumbum, a uniquely Tibetan building that looks like a wedding cake, particularly since it is painted white. It is a series of terraces that you climb up to, often on shaky ladders, with small chapels all around each terrace. The number of chapels depends on whom you read. Victor Chan says 69. Wikipedia says 76 in one place and 77 in another in the same article.

I say it is a wedding cake structure but it is to a Buddhist a three dimensional mandala. Founded in 1047 it was destroyed a number of times. I believe that what we now see was built in 1427, the Fire Sheep year. However, the paintings, which combine various influences, Newari and Tibetan, are 15th century. The figures are delicately drawn, the women with small but definite bellies and neat little breasts above which they smile abstractly.

My idea of how to enjoy these chapels is to lose my guide and wander about focusing on randomly chosen figures. This visit there was no time for that, besides the upper floor had been closed. I was tired and we had Shalu monastery to get to. The curse of being 81 is how quickly you tire.

I had not been to Shalu since my first trip to Kailash in the 1990’s with nine other people of various nationalities in the back of a baby blue Chinese truck. It seemed best to cut our visit to Gyantze short and head to Shalu. On that first trip, I had no idea of the significance of Shalu and I can’t remember which of the passengers in the back of the truck urged us to go there. When we did get there the villagers were astonished by us and not entirely sure they wanted us around. The inside of the temple was so dark we could see nothing and so we left.

It was some years later that I learned that Shalu was founded in 1040 but destroyed by an earthquake two hundred years later. It was rebuilt and the present murals were painted in the 14th century. It was an important scholarly centre and also a focus for esoteric studies, such as thumo, a meditation in which you are able to raise your body temperature, a useful skill in this climate. Alexandra David Neal was adept at this, so was Milarepa who lived a hermit’s life in a cave wearing a cotton tunic.

To my surprise I recognized the approach to Shalu through barley fields. The temple is slightly less dark than it was twenty-five years ago but it has a startling new roof of green tiles of unmistakably Chinese design. This is not an error. The original roof was Chinese. The murals, many of them in terrible shape, some because of leaks, and others because of the smoke from yak butter lamps, when not damaged are magnificent. They combine the influences of Tibet, China, Mongolia and Nepal in a euphoric ebullience.

In the illumination department what worked very well was the three of us, me, Sarosh and Tashi concentrating our flashlight beams on an image. They are a bit faded but the delicacy of the paintings is blissful. The faces, the variety of their expressions is entrancing. There are delightful animals and fish with animated expressions. One section features happy, rather roly-poly monks flying among the clouds.

Upstairs there are chapels with mandalas. The monks have pushed cabinets full of new statues in front of them. This obscures them but also protects them.
Some of these paintings may be 12th century but most are 14th century and are thus earliest murals in Tibet.

With the Cultural Revolution the temple and monastery were shut down and sat empty for thirty years until the local people petitioned for it to be reopened.

We had the place pretty much to ourselves through most of our time there but toward the end I noticed a Tibetan woman, middle aged, dressed in her Western best with a husband and wife. The couple was Chinese and she was their guide. She, I’ve no idea why, cast very nasty looks at me. She may have considered this her preserve and us trespassers. The monks were very nice to us.

We drove on to Shigatze, not one of my favorite towns but, to my interest, one of Tashi’s. Tashi likes his comforts and those are available in Shigatze. The drive there, however, was superb. I find the vastness and austerity of the land in Tibet viscerally thrilling. It is an uncompromising landscape that lets you know you don’t matter. A woman in a group I guided to Kailash years ago remarked in a derogatory manner on how inhospitable the landscape is. To me that is its attraction.

We arrived in Shigatze around eight and I was desperate with exhaustion. I did not do well on the stairs to my room, of which Tashi was very proud. It was a suite. There was a living room with its own bath and then the bedroom, very large, but with lights that didn’t work and its own bath that provided only boiling hot water, no cold in the tub. I slept poorly with all kinds of wonky thinking going on. Even now I am too embarrassed to describe it.

We left the super fancy hotel after an okay buffet breakfast. Certainly it was better than the old breakfasts sternly administered by young Chinese women years ago of one boiled egg, two stone cold pieces of toast and instant coffee.

The Shigatze monastery is pretty much as always with the chorten tomb of the 10th Panchen Lama and the enormous Buddha. We went across the courtyard with a thousand Buddhas on its walls to the old temple but the Drolma chapel was closed. Walking down to the gate there were delightful flowers looking over the walls of the monks’ cells. One little court we could look into had huge heads of pink dahlias nodding in the sun.

Lunch was at a Tibetan restaurant in town up some stairs where a group of monks were having lunch with some women. Perhaps their sisters? But there was nothing improper.

I took a chance and ordered lamb ribs with fried potatoes. The latter appeared very quickly but the ribs didn’t appear despite Tashi doing a lot of talking. Finally I got some sliced lamb, tough but with good flavor with fried vegetables. I wonder if there were any lamb ribs or were they just a fantasy.

We had to wait for Palden, the driver, in the street. There were children about and when Palden arrived I dove into my pack for balloons although there were only two girls left. I was a little taken aback that when I offered them the balloons they immediately backed off, the older one more than the younger with fear in their eyes. Up to this point they had been very curious about me. I put two balloons each on a table that was there and walked away. They immediately came up to get them.

We then drove to Sakya. It was on this drive that I realized with a shock that there are surveillance cameras everywhere. In Lhasa they are in the temples and monasteries. There are checkpoints—ten between Lhasa and Darchen—but besides this there are white frames over the road. Palden would slow down as he approached one of these almost to a halt. There was a camera on top that would take a picture of us. The security system has you in its sights at all times.

I was so glad I went back to Sakya, which I had not seen since my first trip to Tibet twenty-five years ago. It was my first Tibetan temple and it completely overwhelmed me. No wonder. It is huge. The outside is massive with deep, deep walls unrelieved by windows or doors. It looks like a fortress.

There is a mammoth front gate/door followed by a court and then the assembly hall that is enormous with high ceilings. The pillars, 40 as I remember, I had read about in Victor Chan’s pilgrimage guide book are amazing not just for their height but for their girth. They are raw tree trunks, not smoothed or shaped, although they have the usual cloth wrapping around their bases. You can see where the branches were struck off centuries ago. They have all been painted red.

The one that was brought to the temple by a wild yak, or possibly a white yak, is labeled. Next to it is the pillar a tiger carried from India on his back. He died upon delivering the pillar and his skin, or at any rate a piece of tiger skin, surely not the original, is nailed to the pillar. I could not find the pillar which when felled bled black blood from the spirit that had inhabited it.

The images through out are either new or relatively new with magnificent brass toranas, halo/frames. It is impossible to take it all in.

The outside is massive, painted blue-grey with white and red stripes at irregular intervals. You can walk along the wall that surrounds the gompa’s buildings. We did this as I felt myself fading out. The houses in the surrounding villages are also blue grey with white and red stripes irregularly applied to their walls. This identifies their inhabitants as belonging to the Sakya sect of Tibetan Buddhism.

As we drove on toward New Dingeri, or sometimes Tingeri, I began to formulate a plan to return and, with plenty of time, come back to see these gompas and their wall paintings, carrying a big flashlight, one day per temple. I would include two gompas outside of Lhasa with particularly interesting murals.

Some way out of Sakya we found ourselves at the end of a line of cars, some had been waiting there while the Chinese had worked on the road since eight that morning. We joined the end of the line. I started writing furiously. I was two days behind in my journal. I was making grand progress when an Indian woman whom I had met at the Kiychu with her family showed up and naturally wanted to talk.

This was fine for a while but I did want desperately to get back to my journal, plus she started talking about how today we could not build the pyramids, that they must have been constructed with magic or with God’s help, that it is 666,000 miles from Kailash to the North Pole and twice that to the South Pole and all kinds of magical stuff. I loathe this kind of talk because to me with its sticky web of manufactured “facts” it denigrates what it is mythologizing.

(In Lalibela in Ethiopia a local man asked me who I thought carved the churches out of the rock. He said, “I think it must have been angels.” I responded, “I think it was probably slave labor. You can accomplish so much with slave labor.”)

I tried to explain nicely to her that I was going to cross the road, go to the bathroom behind a wall over there and that when I came back I wanted to write because I was still one day behind on my journal.

Well, I did something wrong because she took offence and later when I waved at her husband he ignored me. I felt upset at this and resolved to apologize at the first opportunity. Her anger at me was muddying the channel between the mountain and me. I wanted that to be absolutely clear when I arrived in Darchen. It didn’t matter whether I was wrong or right. I was fairly sure that I would see her again. When people are headed to Kailash their paths intersect at point after point. They were a nice family group, she, her husband, her son and his wife, from Vancouver who all seemed to be in good enough shape do the complete circumambulation.

However, I did catch up on my journal. People in other cars had ben picnicking, taking pictures of each other and playing cards. At about 7:30 we began to move. We were a huge line. It was a long, long drive in the night on an unpredictable road. The surface would be smooth but suddenly have rectangular holes in it, cut where potholes had been and repairs were needed or it would suddenly become corrugated and dusty.

There was nothing to do but relax into the situation and hang on to the handle above the door. After a jammed checkpoint at about 9 pm we stopped outside a very garish, neon lit hotel with its name, with letters missing, blinking—Thingeri Grand Hotel. Tashi, bless him, got me into a nice clean room whose bathroom had a dribbly leak coming out of the overhead lighting fixture. I didn’t bother with dinner, just washed my face and went to bed.

The next day we passed acres and acres of solar panels. They are not very aesthetic but are certainly a good idea. So far very few windmills. There was one rather pathetic airplane propeller outside of a town. I am not sure it was functional.

This drive up to Rongbok monastery from New Dingeri is quite spectacular with views of Everest and her neighbors. Certainly you see more views and more stunning views than coming from the old terraced town of Dingeri, not the highway strip town now known as Old Dingeri. One of these views is from a pass and is a fluttering heap of prayer flags, as though it vast bird was lying there hovering with multicolored wings just above the ground.

We came up to the monastery but there were no monks at all, only a caretaker. Since we had left Lhasa there had been no monks in any of the monasteries we stopped at. They were, we were told, all in Lhasa. This undoubtedly had to do with the big party conference, which Xi Jinping was holding in Beijing.

The caretaker was a cheery old man with a pet sheep who followed him around while moving its jaws sideways in the usual ovine manner. Among the requisite gods was a self-realized image, meaning it is believed to have made itself. It is a lithe bas-relief on brown stone of a man almost dancing. I would bet he is 7th century because he reminds me of the images in the caves across from the Potala. The original temple here was, I believe, 7th century.

When we went down the steps of the monastery to the road the caretaker came partway down to wave goodbye to us while his pet sheep stood at the top waiting for his friend contemplatively chewing sideways. It was a wonderful last time to Everest and a beautiful farewell.

In Rongbok we ate in a not very good Tibetan place decorated with some excellent but odd black and white pictures on the walls obviously by a Western photographer. There was a fine close up portrait of a young Tibetan woman, a peculiar portrait of an angry looking Tibetan woman with her two children, boy and girl, naked. Everyone in the later picture looked pissed off and I would guess it has to do with the nudity probably the idea of the Western photographer.

We kept passing clumps and clusters of empty, new houses, sometimes also offices, built near existing towns. These houses are smaller than the ones Tibetans build and are constructed by the Chinese from cement blocks a material that makes horribly cold houses. The Tibetans make their houses, which are larger, of mud brick that protects against the wind. All of the Chinese houses looked exactly the same. It would be funny, if it weren’t so awful, this Chinese love of uniformity. The Chinese are forcing the Tibetans out of their old roomy, warm houses into these identical, small chilly houses they have built for them. But many of these are empty and in Lhasa there were huge empty apartment buildings. Therefore, I am not sure what is going on.

We arrived in Old Dingeri. When Tashi used this name, I mistakenly thought he meant the town which is a series of terraces up the side of a hill with a gompa at the top that I first saw when I hitch hiked in a truck from Lang La back to Lhasa leaving my 9 fellow travelers after our trip to Kailash, my first circumambulation. There had been a lot of nomads around the town living in their tents with clotheslines up from which they hung, like so many socks, strips of drying meat. This, of course, attracted a very interested population of crows and ravens.

But no, old Dingeri is the strip town on either side of the road. The hotel/guesthouse was depressing. The rooms shabby, dusty with cracks in the walls, dirty linoleum on the floor but with an interesting innovation, an electric blanket on top of the mattress which certainly does help keep you warm. The john was a particularly filthy and odiferous squat. Dinner was thukpa a noodle and vegetable soup with teensy bits of meat in it and lots of cabbage.

In the morning I had time with some Germans who really were brave. They were bicycling to Kathmandu and maybe beyond, a man and a woman together. Something indescribable in English was wrong with the gears on his bike and he could only ride in one gear. There was no bicycle mechanic in Old Dingeri. They were delightful people, both tall and skinny.

As we were sitting at breakfast there was a sudden cacophonic eruption in the street. I got up to look and saw an enormous cow jam outside the window. It went on for some time accompanied by unhappy bellowing. The cows hate the jam as much as the motorists who can’t get through it.

There was also an American, short, spare, glasses, with a grey ponytail who the first time I saw him in the restaurant completely ignored me. This is often the sign of a person who wants to pretend he is utterly alone in Tibet. I remember feeling that way.

But this morning he decided to talk. He climbed Everest in his twenties and has been coming back to the Himalaya region ever since, although not before to Tibet. This is I think his first time to Tibet. He will go on to investigate some of the neighboring areas. He lives outside of Baltimore. He’s an interesting case of the self-absorbed wandering the fringe areas of the world.

I have been worried about the relations between Sarosh and the Tibetans. There is always rivalry between the two nationalities that usually takes two forms, national rivalry and male rivalry. Sarosh who is short is at a disadvantage. Our driver, a tall, good looking Tibetan much taken with his girl friend whose picture he showed me had been the principal aggressor. This is real schoolyard stuff. He was poking Sarosh and teasing him. Sarosh sensibly moved away from him. Tashi, on the other hand tended to boss Sarosh around. There’s nothing much I could do to protect Sarosh and if I tried it would make him into a sort of Mommy’s Boy. What I could do was let Sarosh know that I was aware of what was going on. I did this asking him obliquely, “Are the Tibetans ganging up on the Nepalis?” He laughed and said, “It’s okay.” And then it was okay.

We had a bad road from time to time as we headed toward Saga through the Nature Reserve. There were superb mountain views but we did not pass through a town I remember here and since I could not remember its name I could not ask about it. There was no wild life but many, many ruins from the Gurka War. Some of these are large. The Tibetan forts, mud brick constructions, must have been massive.

We came to Saga in the early evening. I did not recognize it at first but then we turned a corner and I saw the fancy hotel I stayed at, maybe the year my English friend and I went to Kailash. We had a nice hotel with a good dinner that Tashi ordered for us of pork and cloud ears, glass noodles with vegetables, yak with French fries. The problem with the later was that yak in anything but tiny pieces is extremely tough. The pork with cloud ears was excellent. Tashi claims cloud ears are Tibetan from Tibetan marshes.

As we were eating, the Indian family came in. I immediately apologized and all was now right with the world.

The next day was one of driving, only stopping to look at mountains. It gave me an opportunity to notice the huge number of microwave towers, dishes etc. along the way as well as huge electric pylons climbing up the sides of mountains. Often these electronic marvels are cocooned in prayer flags fluttering their colors.

We kept catching up to and then dropping behind a large mainland group that stopped at every piece of water, tiny or large that we came upon. Tashi’s explanation, which I don’t think is correct, is that they had never seen clean water before. But they stopped, about eight cars of them, and tumbled out at every tiny pond, marsh or lake, cameras at the ready.

My nose, while not as bad as in previous years, had been full of blood scabs that I impolitely dug out with my finger. Some nights I had been awakened by my inability to breathe and had had to sit up and dig my way through the blood scabs.

When I first did this trip for many years, no matter what the condition of the roads, I never, ever saw a dead animal by the side of the road. This time I saw five dogs and something small smushed to unrecognizability. I think, I hope, this is the Chinese drivers. Tibetans turn themselves inside out not to hit any animal since it will effect your karma.

As we came through places I have known such as the beautiful ruin on an island, I became aware of how different a good road, not even a highway, makes your relationship to the land. How it distances you from the land, excludes you.

The Chinese Premier’s face is everywhere on billboards, yes there are billboards in Tibet, and signs. The face, not represented in as large a format as Mao’s, is a constant. This is worrying, as it seems to me that it could mean he is pushing his personality.

We saw no wild life at all in the Nature Reserve or anywhere else. Only as we approached Kailash did we see a good-sized herd of wild asses, well off the road thank heaven. No hares, no foxes, no antelope.

The other thing there is considerably less of is snow. We passed the two bridges, the new concrete one and the suspension. This old one has been repaired so that you can walk across it. From there one used to look out at the most fantastic line of white rickrack Himalayas from horizon to horizon. No longer. There are now big gaps of bare mountains between the snow peaks, like gone teeth.

There also used to be big sand dunes around these bridges but year-by-year they have moved west, burying the occasional village. The Chinese are now trying to control them by laying stones, not big ones, all over them. This seems to work.

We passed through Dongba or Tongba, which I recognized. It used to be a scruffy town of run down Tibetan houses, a truck stop. Now those houses are surrounded by white Chinese tile walls made to fake the Tibetan look. All the walls are uniform, of course, but somehow the town retains its scruffiness.

We went up to the temple but no one was there, not even a caretaker. We presumed these monks were also in Lhasa being instructed in Communism.

Late in the afternoon we climbed Maryam La, passing through Hor, where there is an enormous checkpoint. We had to wait quite a long time here. Thank heaven there was a john. I discovered it when I saw some Chinese women grinning and running together. When I went in I started to laugh and so did they. They were all in a row, like a chorus line in the squats. I took the one vacant one at the end.

After the checkpoint we had our first sight of Gurla Mandata, the mountain opposite Mount Kailash, and Lake Manasarovar. Then she, Mount Kailash, appeared on the right, her amazingly white dome crowning her black ridges.

Darchen is as foul as ever. The one street is still unpaved and everything on it looks as though it might blow away before tomorrow morning. My accommodation was a bare room with three beds and a washstand. The squat john was not far away and relatively clean. But I saw her great dome of white every time I stepped out of my room.

That last sentence sounds pretty calm and organized. The truth is quite different.

I was very worried and frightened about this journey, which meant I worked myself up into a tizzy. To do this you first must select an object for your tiz. I elected my eye medicine without which I will go blind. I became, over a number of days previous to this night of packing, convinced that I would not have enough of one of my eye medications to last me through the trip in Tibet. The sane part of my brain took the hysterically tizzy part by the hand and took her to the opthomalic pharmacy, just off Durbar Marg in Kathmandu, we know to show the druggist the bottle of Cosopt. He said he didn’t have that but gave me two bottles and said one drop of each with a two minute interval between would produce the same result. I bought the two bottles. Ms. Hysterical Tizzy calmed down a bit but I could feel her suppressing a fit, as she did a sort of contained rhumba of panic from time to time inside her straight jacket of rationality.

Sarosh and I arrived at Tribhuvan Airport, wended through all the lines and forms. Managing all this was

new to Sarosh who would not usually accompany a client but come into Tibet separately whether by air or road as part of a team. We then sat for three hours waiting for our Sichuan Air flight. Our companions were an international mix, including a young Russian with no English headed for Tibet. He was the first of a number of Russians we were to glimpse but never talk to. None of them spoke English.

We waited so long that we had to get lunch at the fast food place near the waiting room. I had a chicken pastry and Sarosh a big tray of rice with things mixed in it.

When we did board, I realized that the people in front of us were speaking Spanish. They were from Valencia and were at the Kiychu Hotel as was I. There were a lot of Spanish in Tibet this year.

Arriving at the Lhasa airport we had to put our bags through X-ray machines. Both Sarosh and I were worried the Chinese would take food away from us as they had on other occasions. I had brought in ten bars of 99% dark chocolate and decided that rather than bunching them together I would distribute them around my big purple backpack. Sarosh was packing, among other things, four cans of salmon for me to eat on the circumambulation where nothing much is available except dehydrated noodles with flavoring powder.

However, when our bags went through the X-ray, a young woman official singled out mine with an imperious shout to her male companion to be inspected for beads. This seemed so unlikely that I thought I’d misheard. I had not. I have not idea why this year the Chinese were fixated on beads. The young man with a resigned and tired look at me unzipped the purple backpack, zipping it up immediately and motioning me on and out. I was grateful and astonished. He must be fed up with his female counterpart. Anyway my beads, skulls carved out of yak bone, got through.

We were met at the exit by my Tibetan guide, a man in his late 40’s, capable but lacking charm. The driver had more. We arrived at the Kiychu.

I was on the third floor, American second. I could do a flight of 22 stairs slowly but then would have to stop to pant. I had no headache, but I was lightheaded. Before going to sleep I got an email off to Bernard at my broker’s asking him to transfer the money from an account there to the account of Himalaya Expeditions to pay for my trip. I asked him to call me in Lhasa. I couldn’t use my HSBC credit card, as I had not been able to get a new one while I was in KTM and Him Ex’s bank wouldn’t accept my American Express card. I was doing this trip to Tibet on credit. I have been a customer of Him Ex for thirty years.

I had a large pleasant room at the Kiychu with absolutely no view. My window was right up against the wall of another building. On the other hand there was lots of hot water.

The Kiychu is, I should explain, a rather famous Tibetan hotel in Lhasa with a delightful garden at its center with a fountain and trees pruned into umbrella shapes to sit under. Tibetans come here for lunch or to have tea and gossip.

There had been rain the night before and we discovered when we went into the street that the mountains surrounding the Lhasa valley, the high ones, had their first snow. This is the oracle of winter.

Tashi picked me up at 9 am with Sarosh who was about to have his first Lhasa tour. We walked over to the Ramoche temple, which is a complicated walk along streets that seem to have no distinguishing characteristics. The streets are very clean but the paving stones, granite blocks, are often cracked and uneven. Tashi said this is because the Chinese have used the wrong kind of granite.

His English was good; I could understand him most of the time. I asked him about the silent motorcycles, which I had wondered about on my last trip. Indeed, I was right. After the 2008 riots the government

ordered that all motorcycles were to be run on electricity. Tashi said this improves the noise and air pollution but that there are more accidents because people don’t hear the motorcycles. This is true and it
can give one a moment of alarm to turn and find a motorcycle a foot behind you or have one suddenly, do a silent swerve around you.

Despite feeling light headed and like death warmed over, altitude gives one a feeling not unlike the onset of flu, where the whole body descends into desperate unhappiness, I tried, as we went through Ramoche Temple to concentrate on the Buddha. This is the statue of the Buddha at the age of eight, which the Nepali wife of the 7th century king, Songtsen Gampo, gave to him. He has a very geometric nose—flat plane on the top and on the sides. Everything in the gompa is new—paintings, statues.

We went on to the Long Life Chapel next door which does a roaring business with the Long Life Buddha in the centre and a corridor around him along which Tibetans of all ages and physical conditions, many with canes, race at their usual pious racecourse pace.

When we came out I decided to takeover. Tashi was beginning to understand that I was not a Tibetan tyro. I suggested we go on to the gompa of the Talking Tara. She is upstairs; her face always strikes me as

odd, as though it had been painted over white wash. This is also the appropriate temple at which to make offerings if you want to do well on your exams. You give something rolled up in a cylinder with an apple at the top. There are dozens of these scrolls lined up in the chapels.

Downstairs the monks were chanting in their red rows, a few with the deep, deep voices of Gyuke throat singers. That was a lovely treat.

We continued along Beijing Road, once known as Happiness Street, to the little temple I am so fond of. I don’t have its name. It has some old murals and a superb old thangka of the White Brahma. A couple of suits of chainmail hang from a pillar along with a bow, two quivers, a spear or two. I swear there used to be a couple of muzzleloaders on that pillar. The monk who chants next to this pillar uses the chain mail as a repository for small easily lost things, safety pins, hair clips.

There were festoons of a seed that I’ve seen before in gompas. It’s hard to describe. The seed is inside a sort of flat, semitransparent case that is fluffy around the edges. The cases are connected to each other so that they can be strung up as decorative leis. I have wondered about these for years. A monk, when I pointed and asked, showed me the long, curved green

spear like pods that came from India. I have no idea what its significance is but I have seen gompas festooned with these seeds for years and was delighted to have even a partial explanation.

Last time I was here there were to starveling cats.
This time two dogs in poor but not desperate condition were in attendance.

Feeling wobbly but determined I suggested we go to the Ani Gompa, which is a march from here. Lucky again, we walked into a chanting service that went on and on at a frenetic pace. There were no drums, no cymbals, just the mass of female voices sounding to me like a chorus of sewing machines stitching at a mad, unrelenting pace. I sat listening for a while. The men, feeling a bit out of place, waited outside.

A bit desperate I decided what I needed was some butter tea that I was sure I could get from the nuns. Tashi, I was surprised by this, did not approve of my drinking yak butter tea and was astonished that I drank it, two glasses. This meant I could keep going, although added to the water I was constantly drinking I had to use the nun’s toilet. I was determined not to become dehydrated on this trip and so had been constantly sipping as I walked.

As we walked by the Labrang where I usually stay, I

remembered a Chinese postcard shop nearby and steered us there to buy thirty postcards. We then walked back to the Kiychu passing where the Snowland’s Hotel and restaurant used to be. Both are gone.

Back at the Kiychu I picked up my present for Tashi, not my guide but my friend. At the Tashi 1 restaurant Tashi’s sister ushered me into the family dinning room. It turned out to be a family occasion
with four of the five daughters with their children who were eating and play-fighting. This caused the two elderly dogs considerable annoyance. One of the sisters who had a son in school uniform teaches Tibetan. The boys wear dark trousers and a sailor top. The girls have red plaid dresses with pleated skirts.

The children are close in age and obviously enjoy each other. There was also a little three year old who belongs to a Chinese-Muslim family with a shop downstairs eating and playing with them. Her mother, Tashi told me, doesn’t want her to eat Tibetan food and takes away the cookies Tashi gives her. It is important to instill prejudice, fear and hate into a child at a young age. Considering the attitude of many toward Chinese Muslims she would do better to welcome this friendliness.

In the midst of all this happy confusion a big, fluffy, ginger, unkempt cat leapt through the window and headed purposefully toward the kitchen. He looked a bit of a tough.

I went home to the Kiychu, waited for the phone call from Bernard in NY. It didn’t come but I was not surprised. I went to bed but woke in the middle of the night my nose parched, full of blood scabs from the dryness of the air, unable to breathe. But in the morning I felt much better and it was mostly stairs that gave me trouble. Since I was going to the Potala I would have plenty.

At breakfast I met an Australian couple, close to my age, who come out to Tibet every year for two weeks. What a nice idea. There was also an Indian family from Vancouver, husband, wife, son and his wife, on their way to Kailash. I was to see them a number of times. The Spanish from Valencia were there and each day I sent them to a new place when they came back from their day of touring.

I have done this tour of the Potala so many times that at least half is familiar. Tashi was excellent. We did a quick swing through the museum, which has some spectacular applique thangkas as well as a small but exceptional display of gold and silver objects, most

religious—a gold lotus that opens its petals to display the Buddha at its centre and various scenes from his life on its petals.

You are not allowed to take any pictures on the tour, not even when you are on the outside of a building. I am glad I took pictures of all of this years ago including my favorite snow lions on the upper terrace. They used to be surrounded by coins stuck onto the wall with yak butter. All that, of course, has been cleaned up by the Chinese. I did stop at the vibrant stone bas-relief of Garuda on the wall that always gives me a thrill.

The Dalai Lama’s apartments have long since been emptied of their fabulous contents. Then there are the various audience halls for the ordinary or the exalted, the room where he had lessons from his
teachers. The gods are endless and then we come to the chorten tombs of the Dalai Lamas. The two big one’s are, I think the 5th and the 12th or maybe the 13th. The 6th, the Dalai Lama who was a poet, was killed away from Lhasa, so he isn’t there but most of the others are represented in silver and gold chortens studded with massive carved turquoise or agate. There is supposed to be, among these, a huge pearl that was extracted from an elephant’s brain.

There is a big assembly hall that was closed last year for renovation but is now open with high, high

ceilings and skylights. It is very airy and full of brilliant, but new, paintings.

I thought maybe this time I would last the course but shortly after the assembly hall I found I could take in the small chorten tomb of a very young Dalai Lama, I’ve no idea which, but the following row of gods and chortens that symbolized something or other left me totally uncomprehending and mulishly unwilling to stuff any more into my altitude addled brain.

When we came out I headed with half the female population of China for the public lavatory. I was beginning to feel that I had Tashi and Sarosh fairly well trained that the two imperatives were water and toilets.

Among the Chinese on our Potala tour was a young woman in a calf-length white windbreaker with a white fur collar. She and her buddy took pictures of each other, alone and together all the way down the stairs. Where do these Chinese kids thing they are going in their fashionable clothes and where do they get the money?

When we got down all the way, Tashi asked where I wanted to go next. I had been thinking about the cave temples opposite the Potala. So after another dash into a public john in which, with my New York City

subway training, I blocked a woman who was trying to slide with her elbow out into the stall I was waiting for. You quickly lose all compunction about the quick maneuver, the adroit shove with the Chinese.

We headed through the complexity of tunnels and exits to walk through the park full of TV screens displaying the wonders of China and the faces of the leaders, passing the little naga chapel on its island, the prostrators near the fountain and then on out into the hushed lane over arched by whispering, yellowing leaves. The piles of Mani stones, like stacked books, were almost shoulder high with little clay tsatsas along their ledges. Mani stones are flat slates on which a professional sculptor has carved a mantra or other sacred symbol. Tsatsas are small figures, of Buddhas or chortens, made from clay pressed into a mold. Above them in shinning colors painted on the rocks of the cliff images of Tsongkapa or Guru Rinpoche glittered in the late sun.

When we got to the chapel that has the U shaped ambulatory, I told Tashi about the white stone in the black stone pouch in the wall that Tsongsen Gampo used to rattle to let his wife know he had stopped meditating. Then I couldn’t locate it. When we asked the monk he told us, and there between some the 7th century figures carved into the black wall was the

black stone pouch with the white stone
in it. Tashi was delighted with this.

The sculptures on the walls here are considered by the Tibetans to be self-realized figures. In other words, they appeared by themselves out of the wall. Actually, they go back to the time of the first historical king of Tibet, Tsongsen Gampo, the man who fought against the Chinese until he stood at the gates of their capital, Xi’an. It was then that they offered him the Princess Wencheng as a bride. He united temporarily the Tibetan nation in the 7th century and these sculptures are from his time.

The next level is a mostly modern chapel. But the level above, where I don’t think I had been before, was exceedingly interesting. There is to the side of the stair a rough stone alcove and in it is a statue of Tsongsen Gampo and his Tibetan wife. This was the first time I had seen an image of this wife, and besides that, she had, in the crook of her arm, her son by Tsongsen. He had no children by his Nepali and Chinese wives. Clever man to keep the channel of inheritance undisputed. Beyond that surprise was a bigger one. Tashi and I were looking at the statue of Tsongsen.

I said to him, “Do you see?”

He responded with gleeful triumph, “Yes, I see!”

Hanging from a cord around the neck of the image of
Tsongsen was a, totally forbidden, framed, small,
faded photo of the Dalai Lama. This is very Tibetan. They know the Chinese won’t look, so they hide him in plain sight like the letter in Edgar Allan Poe’s mystery story.

I cannot remember what else was in the room beyond this alcove other than the splendid view of the Potala that you get at every level of these temples.

We headed back down. I mentioned as we started to walk out the tiny nunnery that nestles among the rocks near by. We went up and the reception was totally different from the last time when I felt nothing but hostility. There were smiles as we passed before the cases containing the statues. The only one of these that registered was a large statue of Tangtong Gyalpo with a pompadour of thick white hair. In the Potala there had been an image of him but there he had a huge, bright blue pompadour.

I am a fan of Tangtong who built the first suspension bridges anywhere and invented Tibetan opera.

Going down, we were flanked by a line of Tibetan women coming up. One, not over forty, gave me a thumbs up of approval, followed by touching foreheads and cheeks. Tashi was delighted and so, of course, was I.

Home to the Kiychu, which was full of Tibetans. I particularly love the little old ladies who, out of ingrained frugality, bring their own snacks to go with the tea.

I discovered this night that although my email life had been all right for a while I now could not either send or receive emails because I am Gmail and the Chinese, angry with Google, have blocked all Gmail.

In the morning we went to the Jokhang. What the Chinese are doing is terrible. There were no monks in the Jokhang. The Chinese are obviously intent on make the temple into a sterile museum. You cannot get into the Jowo chapel. Offerings are accepted in front of the chapel by soldiers in camouflage uniforms.

Soldiers are present elsewhere. Eight to ten, in full battle dress, fully armed with transparent plastic shields, march around the Barkhor on a regular schedule, about every 20 or 30 minutes.

Inside the Jokhang there are ropes making you walk in particular ways. Many of the chapels were closed.

This said there were three good things. I had a long time in front of the mural of the 5th Dalai Lama and Gushri Khan so that I could enjoy their faces. Gushri is particularly comical with a big lumpy nose. He looks so happy, so pleased with himself and the man

he has just made Dalai Lama that I get happy too. Their courtiers surround them, all smaller figures than they are to show the difference in rank, and have individual faces. In the next life I would recognize any of them.

I found the pillar with the stone in it, although I can no longer remember its significance.

The second good thing was that in one of the innumerable chapels Tashi pointed out down low, almost behind one of the statues, a bas-relief figure, a little wonky, of a goat. I had never met him before. This is the magic goat that carried the dirt to fill in the lake on which the Jokhang was built. He leaps out of the wall, happy and vital in his gilding.

Third was one of the alcoves as you walk along the inner khora of the temple where there are statues of Tsongsen Gampo with his Nepali wife on his right, Wencheng, the Chinese wife on his left, but in the dark, behind the Nepalese wife is the Tibetan wife, Monza Triucham, cradling her son in her arm. Also in another alcove there is a statue of Tangtong Gyalpo with a pompadour of white hair.

There is a new, very gold, mandala and a new statue of Manjushri, the god of wisdom. As you come in the side entrance there is one of the huge copper caldrons

The monks used to make butter tea filled with water and floating on it a selection of plastic lotuses. This to me symbolizes the Chinese tenancy of Tibet. The Chinese can’t tell the difference between fake and real. Those who were going around the Jokhang in dyed hair with silk threads woven in little braids into their hair were fervent in their worship. There was the usual push and shove of the Chinese who, male or female, just ram past or into you. One tactic when possible is to step ostentatiously aside and suggest with a pleasant smile and or wave of your hand that they pass you.

The upstairs chapels were all closed, as was part of the roof.

I suggested that we go on to the small temples that dot the Barkhor. The first, Manilakam, has a huge prayer wheel. There were so many of us on it that we came to a stand still while still pushing the wheel around. We did not go to the upstairs temple where the monk gives a health blessing because I would not jump ahead of everyone on the line, which was long. Tashi was astonished that I would not take advantage of my foreignness in this way.

Behind this was a Chinese propaganda museum about Tibetan prisons in the 19th and early 20th century which were undoubtedly awful but no worse that the Chinese ones of the same period. I got us out of there.

We went to the tiny temple down the street that has several upper floors, which I hadn’t realized. Tashi when I asked him the name of this temple said he didn’t think it had a name. That’s not at all likely!

Something here triggered Tashi to talk about the Tibet Heritage Association, Pin Pin, the Portuguese woman, John, I think American and a German whose name I’ve lost. They did so much good work in restoring structures in Lhasa as well as the humble work of building good neighborhood johns. John died, Tashi said while skiing in the Alps. Pin Pin and the German ended up in Beijing, Tashi said, working on the wall. They were great people.

Pin Pin once lent me her sleeping bag, it was superb, when I had a sleepover in the storeroom with open grain bags and resident rats at a monastery outside Lhasa years ago.

Then we went down the little alley to the big Muru Nyingpa temple. There again we went upstairs and found ourselves with a superb view of the roofs of the Jokhang in one direction and Tibetan house roofs on which people spend time in summer.

I managed to get us to the Makya Ama for lunch, totally populated by Chinese. But we had wonderful spicy lamb cooked on stones, mushrooms grilled with

cheese and stir-fried vegetables. We could watch the Tibetans doing the khora around the Barkhor and the soldiers every twenty minutes marching the same route heavy with automatic weapons.

I was so please when later I asked Sarosh if he liked it and he gave me a glowing, “Yes.” Tashi was less sure but I blame that on his having to eat in the midst of Chinese.

We came back to the hotel briefly and then drove to Sera. Somehow it seemed smaller despite the usual profusion of gods. The mysterious room I am so fond of is less mysterious now that it is well lit. It has extraordinary masks hanging from the ceiling, along with chainmail shirts, bows and spears. Another section of the ceiling is decorated with guns that you spiked with powder and then set off with a spark from a flint. Even well lit it is a confusing room since you are forced to walk through a maze. Dimly lit, the masks glowered down at you and the ambiance had a sinister mystery.

In one of the chapels children were having a black triangles painted on their noses and were blessed. I wondered if it would help my blood scab clogged nose.

When we came out on the other side of the temple I could hear the rumpus of the debating monks.

Tourists, all nationalities—French, German, Austrian, Chinese. Spanish—poured into the courtyard to watch. It is a spectacular show with a couple of dozen monks engaged in debates, making their points with their distinctive hand slapping gesture.

Tashi had let his phone battery run down, and therefore, when we couldn’t find the driver he couldn’t call him. I was annoyed and let it show since we had to wait for 20 minutes. However it was a good day. I was slow going up at Sera but had very little bad feeling, although I was certainly tired at the end of the day.

The next day was Drepung where I have not been in many years. It is beautifully set against the lower mountains that, this year, are very green. On the right hand side are huge boulders brilliantly painted with Tsongkapa in his orange robe and yellow hat. Beside him on a smaller boulder is another orange robed monk and further up the hill a thing that looks like an outdoor movie screen, but is used to display the monastery’s enormous handmade appliqued thangkas. On it an enormous blue conch with orange touches has been painted against a blindingly white background. The conch is one of the Buddhist symbols and represents the Buddha’s voice in his teaching.

Last time I was here there were two nuns encamped in a cave they had extended by a tent and carpeted with Astro turf. They blessed me before I went to Kailash. The Chinese have kicked them out.

I cannot begin to write about the various chapels and rooms and chanting halls that we saw. They are a big undifferentiated puddle of Tsongkapas, Taras, Tsongsen Gampos, Shri Devis etc. There is one court I always remember because it has an ancient, much revered tree that each time I come looks more debilitated.

There is a very large chanting hall, very grand with a high ceilinged atrium at its center that is particularly beautiful, the red of the cushions elegant with the blue decorations on the pillars. I think it is the largest chanting hall among the monasteries.

As well, toward the top there is a chamber with fine old paintings on a yellowish tan background. In one of them some rather Yahooish looking guys, grinning happily, are heaving rocks at people down the hill.

There are wonderful views to the mountains and looking down, alleys, some with prayer wheels on either side. There are small and large prayer wheels powered by the water of rushing streams and tiny ones that revolve on the heat of a candle.

We saw the kitchen, always impressive with its huge cauldrons, its rows of shinning brass ladles, piles of wooden tsampa bowls and the ingrained odor of smoke and yak butter.

When we came back I went to Tashi’s for lunch and to find out where to buy khatas and prayer flags. The Chinese no longer allow these to be sold from tables on the Barkhor. She, of course, went out and bought them for me. She also wrapped a khata around my neck as I left

The two old dogs slept on their cushions in one corner of the benches around the family table and the new, raffish ginger cat slept in the other when he wasn’t going about his business through the window. The little Moslem girl, who is adorable, showed up but refused a cookie she badly wanted because of her mother’s instructions. The Tibetan kids went charging through the restaurant chasing each other.

I said good-bye to Tashi, always an emotional moment since we never know if we will see each other again. She gave me a beautiful stole and an embroidered purse. I hope the sweaters I brought her and her sister keep them warm this winter. We have known each other since 1993, twenty-four years. She is the only unmarried one amongst the sisters.

I walked down to the PO, bought fifty postcards, which I though should take care of me, before returning to the cozy garden of the Kiychu for a cappuccino among the old Tibetan ladies in their chubas, sunglasses, Lhasa Ladies hats and canes surrounded by their children and grandchildren. The flock of sparrow who reside in the trees of the garden came home chattering vigorously as they settled in for the night

We were leaving the next morning. I woke up in the night and had a spasm of hysterical worry over my eye drop supply.