In Regard To The Coronavirus, How Unsafe Is Airplane Travel? Will Governments Level With Us?

I'm a fairly intrepid international traveller and I've never thought twice about pandemics when making my travel plans. Until this morning. This morning is when I called my friend Helen, who was putting out summer vacation together in the Dordogne region of France. First off, how cool does this look?





But I told Helen to hold up on reserving the house Sarlat we were planning on. I just got this awful feeling that this coronavirus is way more serious than the public is lead to believe and that by summer, air travel is going to be... well too risky, even just to Europe.

Today the Washington Post reported that both the number of infected people and the number of people dying keeps growing, primarily in Wuhan in central China.

● The global death toll from the novel coronavirus reached more than 810 on Sunday, surpassing the 774 fatalities attributed to the outbreak of the SARS coronavirus in 2002 and 2003. Among the dead was the first American, a 60-year-old woman who died Thursday in Wuhan.
● Although Wuhan and Hubei province remain ravaged by the disease, Chinese officials say the number of new cases outside Hubei is declining, in a reflection of strict quarantine measures taking effect nationwide.
● A World Health Organization-led international team is planning to leave for China on Monday or Tuesday to conduct an investigation of the coronavirus.
● Chinese authorities have labeled masks a “strategic resource,” and experts call for most protective masks to be reserved for medical workers amid global shortages.
● Hong Kong expanded its quarantine orders to more than 160 people who arrived from the Chinese mainland. People who violate the quarantine face up to six months in jail.

As far as I can tell, infected people in China are being put into what amounts to storage facilities. Oh-- and the Chinese government aren't being very forthcoming about the disease. We don't really know much about anything and I don't trust any of the information China is releasing. The Post reported that "Even as infections overwhelm the afflicted province, the rest of China may be seeing the effects of strict quarantine measures, Chinese health officials said Sunday. In all parts of China excluding Hubei, the daily number of new infections dropped from nearly 900 on Feb. 3 to 509 on Saturday, the officials said." Is it true? I wouldn't count on it.

An international team of experts led by WHO will depart for China on Monday or Tuesday to investigate the outbreak, said the director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

Medical experts say available data show the disease-- officially named “novel coronavirus pneumonia,” or NCP, by Chinese health officials on Saturday-- is much more contagious than SARS, but the probability of death for those infected is much lower.

Around the world, cases continue to tick up. The number of confirmed infections rose on Sunday to 70 onboard the cruise liner Diamond Princess, which has been anchored and quarantined off the coast of Japan. Only the sick are able to disembark.

One of the evacuees was Rebecca Frasure, her husband Kent Frasure, 42, told The Post by phone on Sunday from the quarantined ship in Yokohama. The couple from Forest Grove, Ore., had traveled to Disneyland in Hong Kong, Vietnam and other destinations before Japanese medical staff boarded the ship with thermometers. Rebecca Frasure, 35, tested positive for the virus on Thursday, her husband said, and was taken by ambulance to a hospital north of Tokyo.

“She is doing pretty good, no fever or cough,” he said, although symptoms can take as many as 14 days after exposure to appear. Frasure said his wife is being evaluated in a stripped-down contagious disease ward with just a bed, TV and calendar on the wall. Doctors step through a sealed antechamber to see her.

It is an alien experience for her, said Frasure, a technician at Intel. She does not speak Japanese and the physicians use electronic devices to translate confusing medical jargon. But Rebecca, who works for a health-care company, has WiFi and keeps in contact with him and family on FaceTime, he said.

The quarantine on the ship, meanwhile, has become claustrophobic. Frasure had a fever earlier, so he has been restricted to his suite. His Nintendo Switch and reporters calling him for comment help pass the time, he said. The ship captain periodically issues updates over a loudspeaker, but media reports often clue in the passengers before then.

“Usually we know what’s happening before it’s announced,” he said.

Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, urged calm as the city-state reported a spike in the number of cases to a total of 40 and raised its alert level. New cases were also reported in Germany and South Korea.

In Hong Kong, where grocery stores have been emptied as worried residents stock up on supplies, the number of cases rose by three to a total of 29 on Sunday. The city’s health authorities said tests for all 3,600 crew and passengers quarantined for the past four days on a cruise ship, the World Dream, came back negative and everyone aboard was released Sunday afternoon.

China faces a crucial test beginning Monday as laborers from across the country trickle back to work in major cities that have been effectively emptied and shut down since the Lunar New Year in late January.

Officials, concerned about another spike in infections, have tried to delay the return to work. Shanghai is asking companies to dissuade nonlocal employees from returning for several more weeks. In Shenzhen, the iPhone assembler Foxconn has told employees that work is suspended until further notice. Officials in cities ranging from Xian in the north to Tianjin on the east coast have warned travelers from other parts of China that they would be immediately quarantined upon their return.

In a sign that governments are still seeking to prolong closures, state media reported Sunday that the populous Hebei province surrounding Beijing would join a number of other major jurisdictions keeping schools closed until March 1 at the earliest.

At the heart of the epidemic in Wuhan, the situation remains dire.

Officials are rushing to transfer patients into three quarantine facilities with 4,000 beds to alleviate a severe shortage of space inside the city’s overwhelmed hospitals. Hotels and university dorms are being requisitioned and converted into spaces for “centralized quarantine” for patients showing symptoms.

Leishenshan, a second makeshift hospital with 1,600 beds, began accepting patients with severe symptoms beginning Saturday night, state media reported.

Wuhan officials had initially asked all but the most ill patients to stay home in recent weeks due to a shortage of hospital beds, but on Saturday Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, the leader of a central government response group, ordered local officials to “take in everyone that should be taken in” to newly established facilities to quarantine confirmed cases.

But risks remain inside medical facilities. Doctors from Wuhan’s Zhongnan Hospital reported that 41 percent of coronavirus patients at their hospital became infected while inside the hospital by other patients and medical staff. The doctors announced their findings in a paper published by the Journal of the American Medical Association on Friday.

At another hospital, the Wuhan Mental and Health Center, 50 patients and 30 medical staff were infected due to a lack of caution and protective gear, a doctor, Zhao Ping, told China Newsweek magazine.

Hubei deputy governor Cao Guangjing said Saturday that hospitals in the province had only 80 percent of the masks they required.

Two prominent incidents have become symbols for China’s tight grip on information and simmering tensions among its citizens unhappy with Beijing’s response to the virus.

Chen Qiushi, an attorney and citizen journalist, slipped into the Wuhan hot zone on Jan. 24 to interview citizens about the outbreak, The Post reported, garnering worldwide attention for the city of 11 million where little, if any, information has slipped through government censors.

Chen’s family and friends said this weekend he was forcibly detained in an undisclosed location.

Details of his disappearance emerged days after Li Wenliang, the “whistleblower doctor” considered the first to sound the alarm about the disease, died after contracting the virus in Wuhan.

Millions of Chinese tried to surge past censors by amplifying the social media hashtag #WeWantFreedomOfSpeech, and photos of him flooded the Internet as a digital rallying cry.

One month after patients began flooding into area hospitals, many increasingly sick and desperate households say they still cannot secure care and fear time is running out.

Li Lina, a resident in the Hanyang district, beat a gong and shrieked from her high-rise balcony this weekend to beg for help for her and her stricken mother holed up at home. A neighbor filmed her cries and uploaded it to the Internet, where it went viral.

Reached by telephone on Sunday, Li explained that her mother’s condition was steadily worsening but she has not been able to secure a hospital bed since Jan. 29, because city regulations allow only confirmed coronavirus patients to get spots.

Li was finally able to administer a nucleic acid test on Friday; the result returned positive for coronavirus but ambiguous. Doctors gave her mother a second exam and Li is waiting for the result to arrive Tuesday.

“I don’t even know if she’ll hold out that long,” Li said as she tended to her mother, who is too feeble to speak and communicates by ringing a bell. “I feel helpless. I can’t watch my mother die.”

A friend of mine who lives in Hong Kong told me that the city is better equipped than most places, because of previous hibernations in response to SARS and bird flu potential pandemics, to react by being careful without panicking. BUT the government has virtually no credibility. The consequence of that is the city's medics are on strike demanding a total shutdown of the Chinese border.

There were 7,000 medics on strike last week

Waiting to Exhale

-by Skip Kaltenheuser

I find myself in the center of a massive pit, surrounded by thousands of rigid warriors tall enough to look down on me. Posture perfect despite their years-- twenty-two centuries-- they stand in defiant battle formation. Overwhelmed, I back up to photograph a wiseacre standing behind a warrior who is missing his head. I accidentally bump against the warrior behind me. Down he goes. Then down go a hundred, like dominos. Thousands of warriors turn to face me, their expressions uniform in anger. Calvary horses paw the earth and tug at chariots. Crossbows lock and load. I leap from the pit and only quit running when I’m in Kazakhstan, refrains from Traffic’s Forty Thousand Headmen playing in my head.

They may have feet of clay, but these mystery men still intimidate my dreams. Fierce terracotta warriors have transformed an impoverished Chinese countryside-- some people still dwell in caves-- into a tourist Mecca. Beijing may have the Olympics spotlight, but it is the ancient capital, Xi’an, in central China, one of the great ancient cities, where Chinese history really built its foundations. Peasant farmers digging a well discovered the first terracotta warriors in 1974. The more archaeologists dug, the more stunned they were. Here the world awakened anew to the former splendor and mystery of China. Now encased by a world class museum, the warriors are part of a vanguard supporting the prediction that by 2020, China will be the world’s number one tourist destination.

Hard to believe the museum, still a work in progress, began in 1976, the last year of Mao’s life. Some communist somewhere was thinking tourism. Perhaps Mao-- China’s last emperor, loosely defined, and ruthless-- felt some kinship to Qin. So how did eight thousand warriors with armor and weapons, with cavalry and horses, congregate here, six thousand in the largest pit, now shielded by a protective hanger structure large enough to house an aircraft factory?

One of the most ruthless of emperors, Qin, had his successes, including launching the endless project of the Great Wall. Qin created the first feudal and centralized empire in China, the Qin Dynasty (221 BC – 206 BC), by subjugating the various states. But it was a bloody business and many tried to assassinate Qin. He must have anticipated the need for an army to protect him in the afterlife from angry spirits lining up from the scholars he murdered, opposing armies he slaughtered, and his forced labor pool, many of the latter buried alive to maintain tomb secrets. Never mind the 3,000 barren wives and concubines – some revered, some tortured for pleasure – many entombed to keep Qin company. One could assume that he had earned his nightmares. And Qin began earning them young. Becoming king while still twelve, he started building his own tomb in a mausoleum complex spreading over two square kilometers, constructed by 720,000 workers and craftsmen who eventually labored nearly four decades at what was for most of them, the ultimate thankless task.

Embarking on such an endeavor instead of honoring Confucian customs of respecting his late father with a grand memorial brought him the disapproval of 460 Confucian scholars. And because Qin was not keen on critics, he executed them, burning many of them alive. About this time, critics began to see the brilliance in the young emperor’s plan. Qin’s as yet unopened tomb is said to have pearls in the ceiling for stars, and small rivers and lakes filled with mercury.

One distant dig, labeled pit “number five”, surrounded by an orchard, is filled with fragments of armor, like an upended Scrabble game. It is the tip of a huge pit, mostly unexcavated, and thought to contain only armor suits, perhaps tens of thousands of them. As thousands of chariot warriors, infantrymen, cavalrymen and horses were created-- as well as dancers, musicians and acrobats-- Qin’s theory was rather simple: the armor honors those fallen in battle and not properly buried, so the spirits of the dead and dismembered would be less likely to track him down for vengeance.

Today, the museum is visited by over two million people every year, nearly a quarter of them foreigners. Commerce related to the warriors already generates nearly a fifth of the province’s income, not counting what the surviving peasants who discovered them, local heroes, make autographing museum books. Warrior knockoffs of every size are available for sale everywhere, including gas stations and roadside attractions.

It’s an interesting contrast to the technical industries that have gained a presence not very far away-- China’s first satellite and first integrated chip were created in Xi’an, and there are scores of state run laboratories digesting and applying technologies absorbed from around the world. The city itself has contrasts of modernity and the old walled city within it, all of which struggles against the dust and sand blowing in from the advancing Gobi desert. Indeed, the Xi’an sky is as much a signpost of global warming as the world’s defeated glaciers or blanched coral that more often catches the public eye. The sky can be a brilliant blue, but in the morning it can be hard to tell if the dim globe is the sun rising, or the moon. The warriors’ stoic gaze that seems to underpin China’s permanence is mitigated by China firing up a new dirty coal-burning power plant each week.

The sky has the feel of an empire reaching its limits, as empires inevitably do, just as the coal polluted air assaults the terracotta flesh.

At the Shanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeological Research, fragments are assembled in restoration laboratories by German and Chinese scientists who exchange preservation expertise. Fragile artifacts, such as a bronze goose neck and head or sword, are X-rayed and studied to determine weaknesses and original designs. Some are tenderly and meticulously labored over within a sealed glass chamber, the scientists’ arms in long rubber gloves, as if herding renegade microbes. The warriors’ fragility is underscored by the nine or so different moulds that attack the terracotta, said to originate from shifting humidity and tourist breath. Despite the economic boom the warriors generated, funding remains a tough quest. The entire process of putting a single warrior back together can take up to a year.

The Qin Dynasty didn’t last long. Five years after Qin’s burial in 210 BC, a vengeful general Xiang Yu raided the tomb, stealing the real weapons the warriors held, and set a fire in the necropolis that burned for months. Many of the warriors are as shattered as egg shells. They now inspire craftsmanship of a different sort. Today, selected tour operators provide special access for travelers, who photograph themselves with the six and a half foot figures as if they were old chums. Up close and personal, visitors study faces that convey personality, faces that, millenniums ago, would have studied theirs.

It’s the faces that most linger in this writer’s mind, knowing that each, though a notch larger than life, represents a person who walked the earth, fighting in battles that seem otherworldly. We have often seen the idealized faces of emperors across different cultures. We seldom see the faces of Everyman. Their faces speak volumes about the warrior vanities of the day-- the moustaches and goatees, the hair buns. Facial features reveal that many hailed from minority populations to the northwest, likely conscripted from conquered populations. The drama behind their searching faces is enhanced by pondering the armies of craftsmen who gave birth to the clay warriors, and the hardships endured. Perhaps it is respect for these toiling workers, not for the emperor, that the warriors most convey, as thousands of them patiently await their chance to shock and awe.

Trepangs In China-- Yummy, Yummy

Yum?

-by Reese Erlich

[Reese Erlich is on assignment in Moscow. He offers this humorous memory about a long ago visit to that famed city. His current reporting from Russia will appear in two weeks.]

I was only 19 when I visited the USSR with my parents and sister in 1966. It was quite exotic for Americans to visit Moscow in those days and nothing was more exotic than eating at the Peking Restaurant at the Peking Hotel. It was an enormous dining hall with high ceilings, representing the best of Stalinesque architecture.

We perused the menu, which was written in four languages. One item stumped us: trepangs. My father suggested I consult the French version as I was the resident expert, having recently completed two years of high school French. The French menu had the same item, trepangs, although it sounded better pronounced with a French accent.

We asked our waiter, who consulted the Russian menu, and declared that the dish was called trepanskis, or some such Russian transliteration of the mysterious dish.

We never did order trepangs, but the word took on an almost mythic character in our family lore. For years it was synonymous with any profoundly unknowable concept. For example, Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman created gripping dramas full of deep trepang.

In 1980 I made my first of many reporting trips to the People's Republic of China. In those days, workers road to work every day on bicycles, wearing unisex Mao jackets. Bicycles outnumbered cars on the streets by about 100-1. And government officials held elaborate, 15-course meals for special guests. And I was one such special guest.

"Mr. Erlich," intoned our host, who was dressed in a Mao jacket just a bit too tight around the middle. "We have a specialty dish for tonight's dinner, trepangs."

My throat went dry. My hands began to shake. Could it be that after all these years, I was about to learn the secret of the trepang?

I calmed myself and with a steady voice I replied, "Ah yes, trepangs, a dish often discussed by my family."

"I would like one or two of them," I said cautiously.

Our host brimmed with great delight. "Most westerners aren't fond of trepangs," he said. But since they are your family's favorite, you cannot order one or two. We'll have an extra plate."

I nodded reluctantly, not knowing what I was getting into. I knew enough about Chinese customs not to refuse a host's offer and feared an international incident if the food was inedible.

This far into the story, you might be expecting some culturally inappropriate description of a disgusting food eaten by the Chinese, something like the apocryphal stories about monkey brains served from live monkeys in Hong Kong.

It's worse.

The trepangs arrived. They are sea slugs, marine animals with a slippery, gelatinous texture. Trepangs are also translated as sea cucumbers, a name that gives them a certain panache. Wikileaks notes, "In some cultural contexts the sea cucumber is thought to have medicinal value. Most cultures in East and Southeast Asia regard sea cucumbers as a delicacy."

And to tell you the truth, after 14 years of mystery, they weren't so bad. The best that can be said is that trepangs have no flavor of their own. They absorb the sauce in which they are immersed. And my Beijing hosts ordered hot, spicy trepangs. I actually enjoyed them, although I had some trouble eating the second plate.

So what did I learn from all these foreign adventures? If you want to know the name of a particular Chinese dish, ask someone who speaks Chinese.

Trump And The American Tourist Industry-- A Match Made In Hell

Tourism is up all over the world-- up 8% to quantify it. But not in Trumpland. My pal Roland and I travel a lot and he wants to go to exciting, adventurous places, and that often happens to mean places with unstable and even fascist governments. He's always trying to drag me back to Israel, Egypt and Turkey, places we've enjoyed but that I don't want to go to until their political situations are in better shape. He just went to Hungary and Poland without me because I want to avoid countries with fascist governments. Looking at the growth rates of tourism this year, it appears that I'm not alone. Whilethe setoff the world's tourism has been growing-- Britain's by 17.9% for example, and Canada's by 21.2%, both the U.S. under Trump and Turkey under Erdoğan, have seen tourism drop off, Turkey by 6.7% and the U.S. by 6%. Writing yesterday for the Daily Beast, Elizabeth Drew noted that once Trump was inserted into the White House tourism to the United States from foreign countries has steadily dropped.

The U.S. Travel Association has just provided her with figures "projecting a further drop in 2018 from a share of worldwide tourism of 12.0 percent in 2017 to 11.7 percent this year. And this is after a drop in Trump’s first year in office from 12.9 percent. Though the numbers and differentials look small in percentages, they are large in terms of dollars not spent here by foreign tourists and they have serious negative implications for jobs not created... Trump’s rhetoric and new policies and rules and regulations regarding travel have combined to blot America’s long-standing image as a welcoming nation."

[Trump's] travel ban, a barely disguised version of the total ban on Muslims being allowed into this country he announced during his presidential campaign, inflamed worldwide opinion and in practical terms it barred visits by citizens of seven entire countries in the name of preventing terrorist attacks (though none have come from the countries the ban singled out).

The administration’s treatment of people attempting to flee here from violence-wracked Central American countries and Trump’s rhetoric about Mexico from the moment he entered the presidential race hasn’t encouraged Hispanics to come see our wondrous sights and enjoy our beautiful beaches. Trump’s withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord hasn’t helped, nor have his rows with the leaders of friendly nations, which began almost from when he took office.  Neither has Trump’s launching of a trade war. New visa-vetting policies have also caused delays and denials that didn’t used to occur. The invasive new tightening of airport security has put off numerous travelers to this country.

Maybe all these changes have prevented would-be terrorists from entering the U.S., but they for sure have also discouraged or denied many visitors with benign intentions.

The drop in tourism in 2017 was precipitous, and its velocity can be mainly attributed to one factor, what’s come to be called in the tourism industry the Trump slump. Earlier this year, Reuters quoted the head of a German company that specializes in trips to the United States as saying, “Politics is not helping us.”  He added that since the price of the dollar was falling at that time, “we should have seen a much bigger increase in demand.” The Pew Research Center Reserve found earlier this year that a survey of ten nations showed that a favorable opinion of the US occurred in only one country: Russia. The inescapable fact is that Trump’s presidency has coincided with an unprecedented drop in travel to the United States. The US’s share in worldwide travel increased steadily until 2015. While some attribute the recent drop in tourism to the U.S. to a strong dollar, in fact, the dollar was strong in 2015, when our tourism growth was at its apex, and it was strong in 2016. Yet when it declined in 2017, which should have helped tourism, foreign tourism to the U.S. dropped steeply that year. (After starting off weak earlier this year, the dollar’s been gaining in strength robustly, and the recent tightening of credit by the Federal Reserve will likely send the dollar even higher-- which isn’t good for U.S. exports, which includes tourism.)

These are the growth rates she got from the U.S. Travel Association:

• Spain +32.7%
• Australia +22%
• Canada +21.2%
• Saudi Arabia +20.3%
• U.K. +17.9%
• UAE +16.5%
• Thailand +13.9%
• China +9.3%
• Germany +8%
• France +4%
• Italy +2.2%
• U.S. -6%
• Turkey -6.7%

I wish they had included Egypt and Israel. I bet the tourism rates in Syria are way down. I wonder if it's picking up in Iraq and Afghanistan. I doubt it. The most popular U.S. travel destinations-- so the ones being hurt the most by Trump's policies in this area are New York City, Hawaii, Las Vegas, Orlando, Chicago, California (San Diego, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Napa), Key West, New Orleans, Washington, DC, Arizona (Sedona and the Grand Canyon), Charleston, SC, Savannah, GA, Branson, MO, Nashville, Jackson, WY, Moab, UT, Asheville, NC, Maine, Boston, and Aspen.

Our pathetic drop in tourism at the same time that it’s growing almost everywhere else in the developed world has had a striking negative impact on our economy. The USTA (which is more careful about tourism statistics than the Commerce Department) estimates that if this country had merely maintained its share of the travel market it had in 2015 it would have received 7.4 million more visitors from abroad and $32.2 billion more in spending by tourists, which would have created 100,000 more jobs. After all, since tourism is counted as an export, for a president who rants about imbalance of trade numbers and has promised to bring more jobs to the United States, his record in attracting foreign tourists—if he’s aware of it; and if he is, if he cares about it—isn’t impressive. (Just about no respectable economist expects the excellent 4.1 percent economic growth in the second quarter, often the best quarter of a year, to last very long.)

To add to this inauspicious picture of our standing in the world, fewer foreign students have been applying for graduate degrees in what have long been considered our world-class universities. As has long been well understood, the education here of foreign students helps us as well as the countries of origin, by leading to scientific discoveries that might otherwise not have been made, by spreading the idea of America and of democracy, and by raising the education level of countries we hope won’t succumb to malign forces. We can help groom future foreign leaders.)  In the academic year 2017-2018, there occurred the first drop in enrollment by foreign students in the U.S. in ten years, by 4 percent, or roughly 32,000 fewer of them. The Trump administration has taken some actions that make it more difficult for foreign students to remain here if they drop some classes, transfer schools, or accidentally overstay their visas; and it’s considering such proposals as forcing students to have to reapply for a visa each year rather than just once, at the time of their enrollment.

What does all this say about the United States? Among other things it says that a great many others do not separate our country from our president, however unpopular he may be. The cartoonish balloon of Trump in a diaper that floated over the Parliament building in London during his visit to Great Britain in July was an insult not just to Trump but to the United States. It turns out that our having elected someone whose campaign and presidential rhetoric has at the least been unfriendly to other countries-- that is, other than Russia and North Korea—turns out to have been quite expensive financially and culturally. Trump’s “America first” talk has in more ways than we may have realized limited our potential as an influential nation, not to mention as a world leader. It’s to be remembered that the abysmal drops in both foreign tourists and students all occurred before the president further isolated us by his tariffs and his increased belligerence toward countries that have been our traditional allies, not to mention his groveling to Vladimir Putin before the entire world. It doesn’t require leaps of imagination to understand why visits to the U.S. from the Middle East and Mexico dropped last year. Some Canadian columnists have urged citizens of their country to stop vacationing in the United States—in retaliation for Trump’s new tariffs and his rudeness to their leader Justin Trudeau and as a moral position against his thinly cloaked Muslim ban. As it happens, the number of people seeking asylum in Canada from below its southern border, has increased dramatically of late.

Unfortunately, at the rate our president is going, his policies and his becoming increasingly lathered up as some of his past political and personal activities are catching up with him, we probably have nowhere to go but down in important and potentially lucrative international travel. The boom in international tourism is continuing, but we’re not benefiting from it-- and it’s not to be expected that in the foreseeable future we’ll see a great many tourists from the president’s best foreign friends, North Koreans or Russians, shopping along Fifth Avenue or hiking in the Grand Tetons. Like it or not, Trump’s face to the world is our face and his voice is ours. The costly-- in several ways-- drop in tourism and the decrease in curious foreign minds at our universities are not to be taken lightly, though they’re being ignored by the Trump administration.

If you have traveled to Europe-- or almost anywhere in the world these days-- tourist sights are overrun with busloads of tourists from China. And they spend a lot. In recent years I've been to old haunts where Chinese tourists were rare and where Chinese tourists are now dominant: Paris, London, Rome, Florence, Kathmandu, Delhi... And, according to the U.S. Commerce Department, in 2016 there were nearly 3 million Chinese tourists to the U.S., generating-- wait for it-- $33 billion in tourist spending. That's a lot of money, not just for hotels, airlines, tourist attractions... but also for retail businesses. Just go to Fifth Avenue in New York and Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills and see who's walking out of shops with lots of bags from high end stores.

And the Chinese government, furious at Trump's foolish trade war, is starting to look at tourism as a way to strike at Trump. The Chinese government is starting gently-- warning potential Chinese tourists that the U.S. is dangerous to visit because of shootings, violence and criminal activities. The government owned Global Times warned potential tourists "If you are Chinese, take your embassy’s travel warnings very seriously before planning your next holiday or deciding where to send your kids to college, because by coming to America you risk being shot, robbed, raped, or beaten." They have specifically urged Chinese travelers to avoid Trump hotels and resorts.

Perhaps Hollywood will become an ever more popular tourist attraction when the City Council removes the Trumpanzee star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame. The vote is tonight. There is always feces and urine on it and it gets vandalized all the time and has been completely destroyed twice. Their resolution (in part):

One Way To See China For Free-- Or Even Make Some Money In The Process

Now that she's moved away to New Orleans, I don't see Ricky Lee Jones much any longer. But she was in town last week and we got together for dinner to catch up. She had just been in China. I didn't recall her having much of a following there from when we were both at Reprise, so I was very curious about how the economics of that trip worked. As best I can understand, a wealthy guy in suburban Shanghai put up a very large amount of money for her to play a kind of prestigious show for a small number of people. nice way to see China-- or at least suburban Shanghai-- and walk away with a tidy sum to boot!

The story reminded me of an HBO Vice episode from last year, "Rent A White Guy," about how it's possible for westerners, specifically white westerners, to make a bundle in China by... being white. I knew that China-- among other Asian countries-- will pay a lot for white models. But this story goes way beyond that. I mean how about being the westerner who gets hired to go out on the town with a group of rich Chinese kids who just want to make an impression-- of looking "cool and worldly?"

"White Makes You A Winner"

I was in Bangkok for much of December and January. Everywhere I looked there were billboards and signs advertising skin whiteners (or lighteners); it was overwhelming and it's creating a neurosis among Thai kids-- of both genders-- that darker skin is unattractive. I didn't like it and couldn't escape from it. Apparently it's even worse in China. The episode makes the point that "there's a grey market for whites in China. A white face isn't just a marketing ploy, but a substitute for actual professional credentials." Even doctors-- like the fake "vice chairman of clinical urology at the University of Virginia," lecturing actual Chinese doctors about chronic prostatitis, about which he knew exactly nothing at all.

The rent-a-laowai business is for real in China. And ruminative enough for an enterprising American to go over there, sign up with an agency and make enough money to live... and then some. As long as you're ok with being a prop, or even a fake celebrity. This is especially lucrative in third and fourth tier cities, not in cosmopolitan places like Beijing and Shanghai. And very often there's something shady about those hiring the foreigners to pretend to be something they're not, a white something they're not.

Trip Advisor's "12 trips of a lifetime"

Soar in a balloon above unique landscapes: This is the most striking image of the Trip Advisor "12 trips of a lifetime," and looks like it might indeed be a cool thing to do -- except for someone with a pathological terror of heights, who probably has no business in a balloon.

by Ken

[Click to enlarge]

You'll be pleased to hear that Howie is back on terra firma, in Quito (Ecuador), after his sea galavant around the storied Galápagos Islands.

Long-time readers know that his travels often take him to off-the-beaten-path destinations, while my gadding is pretty much confined to the service area of New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority -- or, more specifically, anyplace my unlimited-use MetroCard will take me. At least as regards actual travels, that is. For travels of the armchair variety I'm prepared to go wherever a real-world traveler of the right sort volunteers to take me.

Once upon a time this was the province of writers in newspapers, magazines, and books. Video crept into the picture as early as the old newsreels but eventually got a big kick with the expansion of TV programming and more recently with the home-video boom. When I think how hard it was to follow along on the travels of Michael Palin when they could only be caught by synchronizing your schedule with such times as the various series happened to be shown on TV, I'm delighted by the ease with which they're now available on DVD. I know there are a plethora of other camera-accompanied travelers whose journeys can similarly be bought or rented at our convenience; at some point I suppose I'll have to troll for guidance as to which are worth pursuing.


See the Northern Lights: Those Northern Lights sure look cool, but the trip is to northern Iceland, and with all good will toward the sturdy folk of Iceland, do I really want to journey to the north of their island?

Since there are gazillions of places I regret never having been, I was a sitting duck for a feature offered in a recent e-mailing from Trip Advisor, called "12 trips of a lifetime." I got on the Trip Advisor mailing list by writing a review after a memorable walking tour I took a year or two ago around the World Trade Center site, including a visit to the memorial itself. I had already done tours of both the Trade Center area and the memorial, but wanted an updated view, and by the end of the tour, "the amazing Debbie" (as I described her in my review) had become a dear friend to everyone. So when she asked just one thing, that we add a review on Trip Advisor, I felt obliged, and proceeded to find out what the heck Trip Advisor was and how it worked.

Of course, since that was -- and remains -- my only review, anyone who tries to vet it will discover that it is my only review, and that it must therefore be bogus, when in fact it is scrupulously truthful, and from someone who's hardly inexperienced in the world of walking tours. Anyway, I've never had any reason to write another review, but I do now get all sorts of e-mail from Trip Advisor, as well as notifications anytime a college classmate (presumably located on my paltry Facebook friends list) either plays a new golf course or visits a new inn -- or anytime anyone "likes" one of his reviews. (This is someone I last saw probably 40 years ago, though in that time we've spoken a few times on the phone and e-mailed a few times, and insisted that we really should get together at some point. That point just hasn't arrived, apparently.)


Walk the Great Wall of China: I love reading about the Great Wall, which sets my imagination, both geographical and historical, running wild. But I also have some idea of the ordeal you have to go through to get to any of the segments of the wall that are open to tourists, and the actual hiking doesn't sound quite as romantic as the image -- look at those steps! Also probably not a good place for a committed acrophobic.

Okay, so I clicked through to the "12 trips of a lifetime," and they're to places that pretty much all lurk in many people's imagination, including mine. And there are lovely pictures of all 12. So I got the idea that I might like to share this feature with our readers, incorporating, say, three or four of the pictures. Only when I took another look at the list, thinking I might choose photos according to the three or four places I would still most like to visit, I came to the realization that I'm really not inclined to add any of them to my list of Places I Most Regret Never Having Been.

The closest, in fact, is the one place on the list I can give myself partial credit for having been: Niagara Falls. It's only partial credit because the Trip of a Lifetime is to the Canadian side, whereas the visit I made with my family when I was maybe seven or eight was to the U.S. falls. I'm thinking it must have been on the late-summer cross-country car trip we made from our home at the time in Milwaukee across Lake Michigan to pick up my older brother at the summer camp where he had been a counselor, then somehow or other across the northern U.S. till we swung up to the Niagara area on our way to New York City, where my grandparents lived.

(Actually, I wish I remembered that trip better, since it must have taken me to or through places I've never been again. Apart from Niagara Falls, my one vivid recollection is of the ferry trip across Lake Michigan, which was rough enough that most everyone on board seemed to be vomiting, many of them publicly enough that the stench was itself a threat to the digestive equilibrium. I recall that they showed some kind of movie, but the thought of being trapped in a room with all that aroma was hurl-inducing.)

All that said, let's proceed to --

Trip Advisor's "12 trips of a lifetime"

The text comments are presumably comments submitted by Trip Advisor readers who have taken these trips.

See the Northern Lights
North Iceland, Iceland

"Great swathe of green light with hints of red sweeping across the sky and down to the horizon. Breathtaking!"

Sleep in an over-water bungalow
Bora Bora, South Pacific

"The bungalows are beautiful... We certainly don't know how we'll be able to top this trip!"

Tour the canals in a gondola
Venice, Italy

"Venice is amazing, the Grand Canal is one OHHH AHHH after another . . . very relaxing, informative and romantic."

Marvel at the wonder of the Taj Mahal
Uttar Pradesh, India

"Magic - just magic! You don't realize until you go, just how stunning this place is."

Explore the ancient pyramids
Giza, Egypt

"You feel like part of the ancient history. The heat, the dust, the sun. The spirit of a long gone civilization."

Walk the Great Wall of China
Beijing, China

"You feel like part of the ancient history. The heat, the dust, the sun. The spirit of a long gone civilization."

See an awe-inspiring sunset
Santorini, Greece

"It's the perfect spot to enjoy the beautiful sunset, amazing volcano views in the Aegean Sea, peaceful ships..."

Dive into the Great Barrier Reef
Queensland, Australia

"The deeper side of the reef was extremely beautiful... the sheer beauty of the coral is unimaginable."

Visit gorillas in their natural habitat
Ruhengeri, Rwanda

"The gorillas came very close to us - one even pushed me aside to get past with her baby. It wasn't scary."

Soar in a balloon above unique landscapes
Cappadocia, Turkey

"Cappadocia is probably the best place on Earth for hot air ballooning... to the canyon and all the way up to the sky."

Trek the famous Inca Trail to Machu Picchu
Cusco Region, Peru

"The trip of a lifetime. Inca Trail was such an experience. 4 days of hiking... worth it when you see the view at the top."

Journey to the edge of Niagara Falls
Ontario, Canada

"Maid of the Mist will make you feel alive . . . hear the thunder, feel the swells and pitches! A fantastic life long memory."


Now this is more like it! Niagara Falls from the Canadian side! But didn't we ride on the Maid of the Mist back in the '50s, from the U.S. side? I know we were on some boat. Still, I've always thought I might like to go back to the falls, especially now that I know so much more about how they were formed and have evolved.

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Closed To Tourists... Tibet And Timbuktu

Ever see the uncropped version of this famous picture of Tiananmen Square? (click on it to enlarge)

Roland and I were just rejoicing that we had a chance to visit Timbuktu and northern Mali before the whole area-- as much as two-thirds of the country-- was captured by savage Tuareg slavers and closed up tight. Supposedly the alliance between the militant Islamists and the slavers has been cancelled but, on the other hand, flotsam and jetsam, fanatics and jihadists from all over the Muslim world are flocking to northern Mali. There's not much there. I mean, beautiful, varied Afghanistan it will never be. And now the residents-- or what's left of them-- are fighting back against the conquerors, at least in Timbuktu.

Timbuktu was incubating a proper little tourist industry when we were there a couple years ago-- I mean beyond just for tourists who were backpacking and roughing it. That's totally over now. Everyone who invested in boutique infrastructure must be bankrupt. And the Islamists are systematically destroying whatever it was-- apart from the allure of the name itself-- that has drawn people to Timbuktu for hundreds of years.

Since seizing the city in March, Ansar Dine has targeted Timbuktu's precious Muslim heritage.

The shrine of a 15th Century sufi saint Sidi Mahmoud Ben Amar has been attacked, according to Lazare Eloundou Assomo of Unesco.

"The entrance gate of the mausoleum was completely destroyed and burnt," Mr Assomo told the BBC World Service. "The curtain that protected the shrine was destroyed."

Timbuktu is known as the city of the 333 saints, says Alida Jay Boye, author of Hidden Treasures of Timbuktu.

The fundamentalist Salafi branch of Islam objects to the veneration of saints' tombs, maintaining that it amounts to saint worship.

"Salafis do not want there to be any intermediary between the believer and God. It looks like Ansar Dine is going after shrines just like other groups have done in Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia," she says.

Neil Whitehead, a former hotelier in Timbuktu, has fled to Morocco because of the recent unrest.

He says that conditions are deteriorating in the city.

"The Salafis are turning on the locals, raiding their homes and taking anything of value, together with any food. All shops are shut and, in the words of our friends, 'everything is broken'," he said.

"They have introduced a form of Sharia and the locals feel like prisoners in their houses."

His account is confirmed by Mari Touri, a Timbuktu resident.

"There is no food in the shops, no stocks of supplies, because everything in Timbuktu comes from Bamako in the south and it cannot get through at the moment."

Another resident, Youba Ag Moha, said that the situation in the city was "calm" but that government offices were closed and there was a problem with the electricity supply.

There are also concerns for the city's wealth of manuscripts.

Exactly a year ago, Roland and I were getting ready to visit Tibet. Unfortunately, just as we were getting ready to leave, our visas were pulled and the borders were shut. We wound up staying far longer than anyone should have to in Katmandu, the overly polluted capital of Nepal. It was for one of the periodic crackdowns-- they normally last a few weeks-- that the Chinese occupiers impose on the country for a brutal crackdown they don't want to be embarrassed by in the West. But this week ABC News is reporting, ominously, that China has shut down tourism to Tibet indefinitely.

In a matter of days, the number of expected foreign visitors to Tibet has gone from millions to zero.

Chinese authorities alerted foreign travel agencies Tuesday that they would no longer be issuing entry permits to Tibet, the latest in a series of regulations being put on travelers to Tibet. The announcement follows the self-immolation of two Tibetans last week.

Tibet is no stranger to Chinese interference in its tourism industry. Tibet’s failed rebellion in March 1959 and the event’s annual memorial on National Uprising Day has chronically put the region at odds with the People’s Republic of China. In 2008, protests after National Uprising Day turned into riots that were met with violence by PRC forces. The Chinese government temporarily closed Tibet to foreign visitors. That is a now-annual practice in March, and during other national events significant to the Chinese government.

Now, many are saying that the latest in a string of Tibetan self-immolations led to the country’s shutdown to outsiders. According to Free Tibet, a campaign promoting Tibetan independence from China, there have been more than 30 self-immolations since March 2011. Most recently, on May 27, 2012 two Tibetans were the first to set themselves on fire in Lhasa, Tibet’s tightly-controlled administrative capital. The shutdown also coincides with the Saga Dawa festival, which celebrates the Buddha’s birth and draws many Buddhists to Tibet. This year, the festival began on June 4, which is also the anniversary of the Chinese government crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests.

While many tourism agencies have learned to adapt and predict the trends on tourism bans, this closure comes as something of a shock. According to Nellie Connelly, marketing director of WildChina, a prominent travel company that regularly coordinates trips to Tibet, Chinese authorities informed the company in mid-May that travelers would only be allowed to visit Tibet in groups of five people of the same nationality. Last week, the government stopped issuing entry permits to Tibet altogether.  Connelly is in the process of rerouting customers whose Tibetan vacations are affected by the new ban. Only those Chinese nationals are allowed to enter the region.

“Tibet is a bucket-list destination for many people,” she says.

Last year, WildChina sent approximately 100 travelers to Tibet. This week, the company had to turn down approximately 10 inquiries about travel to Tibet. Four other WildChina trips are being re-routed, and five more are on indefinite hold.

The loss of income for Tibetan communities is significant. Tibet received 21.25 million domestic and foreign tourists in between 2006 and 2010, generating $3.58 billion in income for the country. Tourism is a staple of the region’s economy. Tibet set a goal to increase tourism revenue between 2011 and 2015 to more than 20 percent of its gross domestic product.

The Chinese government’s recent actions will make reaching 2012 targets difficult.

We never made it to Damascus either.

How Important Is Food In Determining Where You Travel? Hygiene?

I was 15 the first time I hit the road and hitchhiked from Brooklyn to Miami Beach. I had the wanderlust. It never left me. When I was 15 Florida seemed exotic-- and my grandparents were down there for Passover/Easter so I knew I'd have a (free) place to stay. Motivations and destination targeting has changed for me over the years. Delicious food is always an incentive when I think of going to Italy, Morocco, Turkey, France or Thailand. A poor cuisine or an unavailability of healthy food is always a detriment when I think about Egypt, Mongolia, Cuba and, oddly enough, China. (We decided to go to Mali anyway and managed to survive well enough... and then found an absolutely fantastic restaurant-- serving traditional food-- in Bamako.)

China? With it's world famous cuisine? Well, I have to say, I was just in Hong Kong for a few days and every meal was really excellent. I was also in Nepal and... well, no one goes there for the food. And the amoebic dysentery I picked up only lasted for 8 or 9 days. But China... David Sedaris put it so very elegantly in the Guardian this past weekend:

I have to go to China." I told people this in the way I might say, "I need to insulate my crawl space" or, "I've got to get these moles looked at." That's the way it felt, though. Like a chore. What initially put me off was the food. I'll eat it if the alternative means starving, but I've never looked forward to it, not even when it seemed exotic to me.

...I think it hurt that, before landing in China, Hugh and I spent a week in Tokyo, where the food was, as always, sublime, everything so delicate and carefully presented. With meals I drank tea, which leads me to another great thing about Japan-- its bathrooms. When I was younger they wouldn't have mattered so much. Then I hit 50 and found that I had to pee all the time. In Tokyo, every subway station has a free public men's room. The floors and counters are aggressively clean and beside each urinal is a hook for hanging your umbrella.

This was what I had grown accustomed to when we flew from Narita to Beijing International, where the first thing one notices is what sounds like a milk steamer, the sort a cafe uses when making lattes and cappuccinos. "That's odd," you think. "There's a coffee bar on the elevator to the parking deck?" What you're hearing, that incessant guttural hiss, is the sound of one person, and then another, dredging up phlegm, seemingly from the depths of his or her soul. At first you look over, wondering, "Where are you going to put that?" A better question, you soon realise, is, "Where aren't you going to put it?"

I saw wads of phlegm glistening like freshly shucked oysters on staircases and escalators. I saw them frozen into slicks on the sidewalk and oozing down the sides of walls. It often seemed that if people weren't spitting, they were coughing without covering their mouths, or shooting wads of snot out of their noses. This was done by plugging one nostril and using the other as a blowhole. "We Chinese think it's best just to get it out," a woman told me over dinner one night. She said that, in her opinion, it's disgusting that a westerner would use a handkerchief and then put it back into his pocket.

"Well, it's not for sentimental reasons," I told her. "We don't hold on to our snot for ever. The handkerchief's mainly a sanitary consideration."

Another thing one notices in China is the turds. "Oh please," you're probably thinking. "Must you?"

To this I answer, "Yes, I must", for if they didn't affect the food itself, they affected the way I thought about it. In Tokyo, I once saw a dog pee on the sidewalk. Then its owner reached into a bag, pulled out a bottle of water and rinsed the urine off the pavement. As for dog faeces, I never saw any trace of them. In Beijing, you see an overwhelming amount of shit. Some of it can be blamed on pets, but a lot of it comes from people. Chinese babies do without diapers, wearing instead these strange little pants with a slit in the rear. When a child has to go, its parents direct it towards the kerb or, if they're indoors, to a spot they think of as "kerby." "Last month I saw a kid shit in the produce aisle of our Chengdu Walmart," a young woman named Bridget told me.

This was the seventh day of my visit and so desensitised was I that my first response was, "You have a Walmart?"

There are the wild outdoor turds of China, and then there are the ones you see in the public bathrooms, most of which feature those squat-style toilets, holes, basically, level with the floor. And these bathrooms, my God. The sorriest American gas station cannot begin to match one of these things.

In the men's room of a Beijing subway station, I watched a man walk past the urinal, lift his three-year-old son into the air and instruct him to pee into the sink-- the one we were supposed to wash our hands in.

My trip reminded me that we are all just animals, that stuff comes out of every hole we have, no matter where we live or how much money we've got. On some level we all know this and manage, quite pleasantly, to shove it towards the back of our minds. In China, it's brought to the front, and nailed there. The supermarket cashier holds out your change and you take it thinking, "This woman squats and spits on the floor while shitting and blowing snot out of her nose." You think it of the cab driver, of the ticket taker and, finally, of the people who are cooking and serving your dinner. Which brings me back to food.

If someone added a pinch of human faeces to my scrambled eggs, I may not be able to detect it but I would most likely realise that these particular eggs taste different from the ones I had yesterday. That's with something familiar, though. And there wasn't a lot of familiar in China. No pork lo mein or kung pao chicken, and definitely no egg rolls. On our first night in Chengdu, we joined a group of four for dinner – one Chinese woman and three westerners. The restaurant was not fancy, but it was obviously popular. Built into our table was a simmering cauldron of broth, into which we were to add side dishes and cook them until they were done. "I've taken the liberty of ordering us some tofu, some mushrooms and some duck tongues," said the western woman sitting across from me. "Do you trust me to keep ordering, or is there anything in particular you might like?"

I looked at her thinking, "You whore!" Catherine was English and had lived in China for close to 20 years. I figured the duck tongues were a sort of test, so I made it a point to look unfazed. Excited even.

When I was eventually forced to eat one, I found that it actually wasn't so bad. The only disconcerting part was the shape, particularly the base, from which dangled tentacle-like roots. This reminded one that the tongues had not been cut off but, rather, yanked out, possibly with pliers. Of course the duck was probably dead by then, wasn't it? It's not as if they'd jerk out the tongue and then let it go, traumatised and quackless but otherwise whole.
It was while eating my second duck tongue that the man at the next table hacked up a loud wad of phlegm and spat it on to the floor. "I think I'm done," I said.

The following morning, and with a different group, Hugh and I took a drive to the mountain where tea originally came from. It was late January, and the two-hour trip took us past countless factories. Mustard-coloured smoke drifted into the sky and the rivers we passed ran thick with waste and rubbish. Eventually we hit snow, which improved things visually but made it harder to move about. By the time we headed back down the mountain, it was almost three. Most restaurants had quit serving lunch, so we stopped at what's called a Farming Family Happiness. This is a farmhouse where, if they're in the mood, the people who live there will cook and serve you a meal.

One of the members of our party was a native of Chengdu, and of the five Americans, everyone but Hugh and I spoke Mandarin. Thus we hung back as they negotiated with the farm wife, who was square-faced and pretty and wore her hair cut into bangs. We ate in what was normally the mah jong parlour, a large room overlooking the family's tea field. Against one wall were two televisions, each tuned to a different channel and loudly playing to no one. On the other wall was a sanitation grade-- C-- and the service grade, which was a smiley face with the smile turned upside down.

As far as I know there wasn't a menu. Rather, the family worked at their convenience, with whatever was handy or in season. There was a rooster parading around the backyard and then there just wasn't. After the cook had slit its throat, he used it as the base for five separate dishes, one of which was a dreary soup with two feet, like inverted salad tongs, sticking out of it. Nothing else was nearly as recognisable.

I'm used to standard butchering: here's the leg, the breast, etc. At the Farming Family Happiness, rather than being carved, the rooster was senselessly hacked, as if by a blind person, a really angry one with a thing against birds. Portions were reduced to shards, mostly bone, with maybe a scrap of meat attached. These were then combined with cabbage and some kind of hot sauce.

Another dish was made entirely of organs, which again had been hacked beyond recognition. The heart was there, the lungs, probably the comb and intestines as well. I don't know why this so disgusted me. If I was a vegetarian, OK, but if you're a meat eater, why draw these arbitrary lines? "I'll eat the thing that filters out toxins but not the thing that sits on top of the head, doing nothing?" And why agree to eat this animal and not that one?

I remember reading a few years ago about a restaurant in the Guangdong province that was picketed and shut down because it served cat. The place was called The Fangji Cat Meatball Restaurant, which isn't exactly hiding anything. Go to Fangji and you pretty much know what you're getting. My objection to cat meatballs is not that I have owned several cats, and loved them, but that I try not to eat things that eat meat. Like most westerners I tend towards herbivores, and things that like grain: cows, chickens, sheep, etc. Pigs eat meat-- a pig would happily eat a human-- but most of the pork we're privy to was raised on corn or horrible chemicals rather than other pigs and dead people.

There are distinctions among the grazing animal eaters as well. People who like lamb and beef, at least in north America, tend to draw the line at horse, which in my opinion is delicious. The best I've had was served at a restaurant in Antwerp, a former stable called, cleverly enough, The Stable. Hugh was right there with me, and though he ate the same thing I did, he practically wept when someone in China mentioned eating sea horses. "Oh, those poor things," he said. "How could you?"

I went, "Huh?"

It's like eating poultry but taking a moral stand against those chocolate chicks they sell at Easter. "A sea horse is not related to an actual horse," I said. "They're fish, and you eat fish all the time. Are you objecting to this one because of its shape?"

He said he couldn't eat sea horses because they were friendly and never did anyone any harm, this as opposed to those devious, bloodthirsty lambs whose legs we so regularly roast with rosemary and new potatoes.

The dishes we had at the Farming Family Happiness were meant to be shared, and as the pretty woman with the broad face brought them to the table, the man across from me beamed and reached for his chopsticks. "You know," he said, "this country might have its ups and downs but it is virtually impossible to get a bad meal here."

I didn't say anything.

Another of the dishes that day consisted of rooster blood. I'd thought it would be liquid, like V8 juice, but when cooked it coagulated into little pads that had the consistency of tofu. "Not bad," said the girl seated beside me, and I watched as she slid one into her mouth. Jill was American, a Peace Corps volunteer who'd come to Chengdu to teach English. "In Thailand last year? I ate dog face," she told me.

"Just the face?"

"Well, head and face." She was in a small village, part of a team returning abducted girls to their parents. To show their gratitude, the locals prepared a feast. Dog was considered good eating. The head was supposedly the best part, and rather than offend her hosts, Jill ate it.

This, for many, is flat-out evil but the rest of the world isn't like America, where it's become virtually impossible to throw a dinner party. One person doesn't eat meat, while another is lactose intolerant, or can't digest wheat. You have vegetarians who eat fish and others who won't touch it. Then there are vegans, macrobiotics and a new group, flexitarians, who eat meat if not too many people are watching. Take that into consideration and it's actually rather refreshing that a 22-year-old from the suburbs of Detroit will pick up her chopsticks and at least try the shar pei.

I'd like to be more like Jill, but in China something kept holding me back. In clean, sophisticated Japan the rooster blood, arranged upon a handmade plate between the perfect, tempura snow pea and a radish carved to look like a first trimester foetus, would have seemed a fine idea. "We ought to try making this at home," I'd have said to Hugh. Here, though, I thought of the sanitation grade, and of the rooster, pecking maggots out of human faeces before being killed. Most of the restaurants in China to me smelled dirty, though what I was smelling was likely some unfamiliar ingredient, and I was allowing the things I'd seen earlier in the day-- the spitting and snot blowing, etc-- to fill in the blanks.

Then again, maybe not.

While on our trip we ate at normal, everyday places, and sometimes bought food on the street. Our only expensive meal was in Beijing, where we went alone to a fancy restaurant recommended by an acquaintance. The place was located in an old warehouse and had been lavishly decorated. There was a wine expert and someone whose job it was to drop by every three minutes and refill your water glass. We had the Peking duck, which was expertly carved rather than hacked and was served with little pancakes. Towards the end of the meal, I stepped into the men's room to pee and there, disintegrating in the western-style toilet, was an unflushed turd, a little reminder saying, "See, you're still in China!"

Back at the table I asked for the bill. Then I remembered where I was and amended it to "the check". In France, you can die waiting to pay for your meal, which is something I've never understood. "How can they not want me out of here?" I'll think. Ten minutes might pass. Then 20, me watching as the waiter does everything but accept my goddamn money.

I'll say that for China, though-- offer to pay and before you can stab a rooster with a rusty screwdriver someone has taken you up on it. I think they want to catch you before you get sick, but whatever the reason, within minutes you're back on the street, searching the blighted horizon and wondering where your next meal might be coming from.

Asian culture doesn't subscribe to the germ theory. I'll never forget the first time, decades ago, I visited Thailand and watched our beautiful, smiling waitress coming towards us with a huge platter of delicious looking food. She sneezed all over it, and kept smiling beautifully as she served us. My friend Digby, who lived in Thailand for many years, suggests you kill whatever bacteria you can by using plenty of hot sauce... on everything.