Family on the Move

By Jack Dold

It is the dream of every grandfather to be able to take his children and grandchildren on a travel adventure. In the case of the Dold and Schafer families and their close friends, that dream was fulfilled in an unbelievable way. They were able to watch their children and grandchildren grow over ten years while visiting nearly a dozen countries. Jack Dold weaves the story of those exotic travels with detailed accounts of the history and culture of the lands they visited. Travel along with them to China, Thailand, Korea, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras and Panama.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524647568

Jack Dold

In the course of my 81 years, I have seen a great deal of the world. From my early years in Berkeley, through education at Saint Mary's High, Saint Mary's College, and U.C.L.A., I have been blessed with experiences that have far exceeded my dreams. The lessons learned from my teaching days at Bishop O'Dowd High School in Oakland provided the base for almost forty years in the travel business. And both of those careers have given me the inspiration for my retirement work as an author.

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© 2016 Jack Dold. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse    11/19/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5246-4757-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-4755-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-4756-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016918880

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Introduction

China New Year 2000-01

Hong Kong, China, Thailand & Korea 2002- 2003

Ancient Chinese Cities & Hainan 2004-2005

Guatemala 2005 –2006

Costa Rica, Nicaragua & Panama 2006 –2007

Việtnam & Cambodia 2007- 2008

AUTHOR HOUSE BOOKS BY JACK DOLD

Crosshairs

You Don’t Stop Living

Boris

Eva

Canada: The World Next Door

And The Swan Died

INTRODUCTION

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I’ve always been indebted to Sam Miraglia. He called me one day back in the late ’80s, and asked if I would write a trip for him to Kenya and Tanzania. He wanted to take his family—wife, kids and grandkids—on a safari. Of course I agreed and after he had approved of the itinerary and cost, I met him in Vacaville, California to give his family an orientation to their trip. I’ve never forgotten his look of pride as I told them of the incredible adventure they were all going to experience.

I usually just eat spaghetti, one of his grandsons announced. Will they have that there?

You may have to make a slight adjustment at times, I told the young boy. But you are going to love the elephants.

I made a mental note to include a final dinner at the Carnivore Restaurant in Nairobi.

Sam took them all to East Africa and had a fabulous time. And I made myself a promise that if I had the chance someday, I would take my own family off to exciting parts of the world.

A decade later, I got my chance. Never for a moment did I imagine what a string of incredible adventures was commencing. In the early ’90s, I was doing a good amount of business with the Canadian Pacific Hotels, and talked them into a great rate for a New Year’s trip to Alberta, to the Jasper Park Lodge and Chateau Lake Louise. It would be the first of our elaborate family trips, a wonderful experience of skiing and ice climbing and sleigh riding in some of the loveliest landscapes in the world.

We were a close-knit group, two families each with two kids, ten of us in a 12-passenger van heading from Calgary up the Icefield Parkway to Jasper. That core would come together again and again until we had explored a good part of Asia and Central America.

Mary and I have two lovely daughters, born nearly ten years apart. Nancy is our oldest, and by 1993 she was married to Marty Plaskett, raising alfalfa in Eureka, Nevada, and they were in danger of beginning their own family. Our younger daughter, Annie, was a junior high teacher in Phoenix. With us were our best friends, Jim and Donna Schafer. We first met, literally, back in the late ’60s, when Jim and I backed our wives’ two new cars into each other. We got out to survey the damage.

It looks like we both have about the same dents, I observed. How about a beer?

It began a friendship that would last to this day.

Jim and Donna have two sons, Matthew and Eric. Matthew was nearing marriage with his future wife, Kristi who joined us in Canada.

We followed up that first New Year’s trip with another the following year to Santa Fe, and then again in 1995-96 to Phoenix. I have always felt that twice makes custom so the weeks between Christmas and Little Christmas became the time for our families to travel.

Enter Vicki Lee and Walter.

Vicki was the owner of Ananda Travel in San Francisco, a tour operator specializing in travel to the Far East. We had never done any serious group travel to that part of the world, most of our international business being to Canada and Europe. But the Euro put a stop to the latter when Europe became too expensive for our clients and we looked for another destination to fill the gap. Vicky Lee would do just that. She took me off to China on a familiarization trip to put together a tour for our groups. There we were met by Shui Heng Yong, known ever after to me, my family and all of our China travelers simply as Walter. His name, Shui means water in Mandarin, and Walter was the closest he could come to that. A bond was immediately formed and Walter would from that day on be a major figure on every China trip we did.

It was Vicky who first suggested a family tour to China, a suggestion that would most certainly change our lives. In 2000, the year of Y2K, when the Internet was supposed to bring the globe to a grinding halt, the Dold-Schafer combine first left the continent. We were joined by another couple who would become annual participants—Deb and Patrick Joyce. Deb was our daughter Nancy’s closest high school friend from our days living in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and truth be told, Deb has become Mary and my third daughter. Patrick is a Bostonian, a native of Southy. The two of them are family.

Before we were finished with our globetrotting we had been to China three times, Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama. When we started, our first granddaughter, Kasey, was six and our grandson, Josh, four. We would watch them grow as world travelers for the next nine years, until high school schedules made it too difficult for them to get away. It was a phenomenal ride, a decade of a family on the move.

CHINA NEW YEAR

2000-01

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DECEMBER 28, 2000

TO CHINA

Our China Day has arrived! Sixteen of us, the extended family of Dold-Schafer-Plaskett-Joyce, this year adding our son-in-law Marty’s parents, Walt and Tommye, are on our way to Beijing and the People’s Republic of China. For several months we have been preparing for this trip, by far the most adventurous of our annual excursions at New Year. Each of us has been practicing various degrees of cool, as we tell our friends of our trip.

What are you doing for New Year? they ask.

Oh, we’re going to China.

It is such a great answer to be able to give. With a little practice it is possible to attain a high level of casualness, which makes people green with envy. Ultimately, they will hate you.

Where are you going?

Beijing, for the New Year’s party.

Cities are even better than countries for bragging. If you go straight to Shanghai or Xi’an or Hong Kong, it is so much more impressive than just saying China, elevating you to the rank of world traveler, possessed of an intimate knowledge of world geography, and even better, of culture. It might be even more impressive to say The Orient or the Far East because that will let you field additional questions. But a simple Beijing or Xi’an does just fine. You rarely get a chance to be completely insufferable, and going to Beijing for the New Year is generally unheard of, almost as good as going to Paris for lunch. In fact, it may be better.

So here we are, aboard Air China flight 986, bound non-stop for Beijing, with ten days ahead of us for ancient wonders and modern thrills. 11+ hours of flight and 16 hours of time zones will get us there by 5:30 P.M. tomorrow. We cross the date line tonight and lose a day, which makes it impossible to figure out. I just ask for the time on arrival, accept the report, change my watch and settle in as a local. This is one case where if you leave your watch on California time you are in genuine trouble. On this trip you have to start thinking Chinese. Nothing relates—language, food, music, history, culture, crafts, time. It is best to get there, lose all preconceived notions, and settle in. China is staggering in so many ways.

What are you doing New Year’s?

Oh, (yawn) we’re going to the Western New Year’s Party on Tiananmen Square. Parts of cities are even more impressive than the whole.

Tiananmen Square? That’s in China isn’t it? You mean you’re going to China? For New Year? Really?

Mission accomplished!

DECEMBER 29

ARRIVAL BEIJING

I’ll have to make up something for today because we lost it somewhere above the Aleutians when we crossed the International Date Line. At least we lost most of it. We left San Francisco yesterday in early afternoon, have been flying for about ten hours and it is still early afternoon tomorrow, or today. In fact it is two hours later a day later. I have never quite figured out if I’m supposed to be really tired or sound asleep or wide awake. Whatever it is, in about two hours we are landing in China and it will be 5 P.M., dinnertime. Haven’t we missed a breakfast or two?

The kids have been wonderful. Kasey, age six, is so charming, so huggable, moving around gently from row to row with a happy smile in her beautiful manner. Joshua, four years old, scoped out the airplane structure, analyzed the emergency procedures, crawled under the seats to find the floatation devices, and in two hours declared the aircraft to be okay and commenced patrolling the aisle, flitting from person to person, jabbering away, happy and funny. About nine hours into the flight both of them fell sound asleep, sprawled over whoever happened to be with them. Have there ever been two more beautiful children?

But it isn’t just the Munchkins. Everyone is relaxed, laid back, patient, primed for a great experience. Jim got into his pulpit this morning and set forth the Rules of the Road: no complaining, no fighting, no teasing, no cell phones. We were reminded that we were on a tour and individual rights were subordinated to the general good, commanded to enjoy China and be interested in everything. His admonition has been labeled The Prime Directive. It was a moving speech, delivered with passion and commitment, and it is vitally necessary. It was repeated later for Patrick and Deb and again for Walt and Tommye, although Walt was declared to be permanently exempt.

That shouldn’t be hard to follow, Harold, yelled Walt in the jet way. Harold, aka Jim, immediately lifted Walt’s exemption, piercing him with a baleful stare. Today there is no room for teasing in Jim’s, James’s, nee Harold’s, world.

Just before 6 P.M. we landed in Beijing. Amazing! Halfway around the world, 5,906 miles to be exact, in a single flight and less than half a day, sort of. Our route had taken us over Alaska, across eastern Russia, above the Sea of Okhotsk and on to Mainland China, in 11.5 hours.

Long before we left California, I was with Kasey and Josh in my den where I had a globe. I showed them where California was and spun it around to show them China. Josh was silent for just a moment.

Papa, won’t we fall off?

I was trying to figure out a 4-year old’s answer when he brightened up and solved my problem.

It’s okay, Papa. I’ll just put gum on on shoes.

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As I knew he would, Walter Horatio (Shui Heng Jong) was there inside customs waiting for us. Though we only met last April on my first trip to China, we have become very good friends. He came to our house in California later in the year and the bond only got stronger. He is such an attractive person, always smiling, witty and very interested in everything around him. Our travel groups have all come back from China thrilled with the experience and the quality of the service, all thanks to Walter, who runs the Beijing office.

It is almost an anticlimax going through China customs. They smile and stamp your passport. That’s it! You collect your luggage and simply walk into China. Whatever happened to the grim intimidation of Communism? It almost lulls you into dropping your political guard. Indeed many European countries and certainly the U.S. are harder to enter.

Vickie Lee, the director of San Francisco’s Ananda Travel office, who does all of our China travel, was waiting for us outside, not being possessed of Walter’s diplomatic passport that would give her access to baggage area. Also waiting was Li Xiao Sung, or Sam, our Beijing guide, who will be escorting us for the next few days. Sam has escorted several of our groups already and is almost a familiar person, though I have never actually met him before.

Not knowing exactly when it is or where we are, we trudged to our waiting bus and Mr. Sun, our driver, headed for the city. It’s interesting that all bus drivers in China are addressed as Mr. and Mr. Sun would become a decades long friend, who eventually became simply Sun for us.

With Beijing and other Chinese cities, you never really arrive at city center. It sprawls over a dozen square miles, encompassing nearly a dozen million souls, and just when you think you have reached the center you turn the corner and enter another blitz of neon and high rise. With Beijing the glare spreads in every direction, radiating off of Chang an Avenue and Tiananmen Square. Four Ring Roads girdle the old city spreading the population further and further into the desert, accommodating to the reality of 11,000,000 people.

Sam kept up a running commentary into the city, pointing out historic and modern buildings and beginning our introduction of Chinese customs and habits. Modern Beijing is spectacular at night, especially at this time of year, when a growing Christmas and Western New Year interest prompts light demonstrations on most of the buildings. Beijing is a cacophony of light, sometimes discordant and blaring but just as often artistic and innovative. Trees flow with color. Two Rainbow Bridges, glistening with lights, arch over the highway. Freeway guardrails glow orange; modern buildings are etched in streams of color. Elegant art in light is scarred often by giant, glaring golden arches and KFC walls. The Western food culture has hit China hard, clad in neon. Sam told us there are forty Starbucks in Beijing, all in the past year. McDonalds now numbers 160, accompanied in the invasion by forty KFCs, a bunch of Pizza Huts, Dairy Queens, Baskin Robbins, Chili’s, Hooters, and Roy Rogers. Dim Sun they aren’t, but they are definitely here to stay. They are emblematic, in their explosive growth, of the incredible market that China is opening to the world.

Josh and Kasey were honed in completely, listening intently, thrilled by the bright lights and huge buildings of Beijing. Josh misses nothing, pointing out the overloaded bicycles, the colorful lights, the many Christmas trees, the trains, buses and trucks of the city.

What did he say about the water? he asked as Sam was admonishing us not to use the tap water. I said he told us only to use bottled water. Oh, okay, Josh said matter-of-factly. Actually, that’s what I always do.

Josh is ready.

We cashed in our bodies at the new Radisson Plaza State Guest House, a 5-star hotel just outside the 2nd Ring Road. Jim, Mary, Annie and I wandered out to the local shopping mall, and McDonald’s, but the crush of thousands of shoppers was more than our weary minds could absorb and we quickly retreated to the hotel.

We’ll explore tomorrow.

DECEMBER 30

FORBIDDEN CITY / TEMPLE OF HEAVEN

Zhao san hao! Good Morning! Or just plain Zhao!

I don’t think any of our group expected the kind of breakfast buffet the upscale Chinese hotels offer their guests. They include full American stuff like bacon, ham, omelets and cereal; European fruits and cold meats and maybe a bratwurst or two; Japanese sushi and other live critters; and of course Chinese noodles, dumplings and porridge, called conchi. I always double my breakfast intake overseas, because I add the local fare to the American. Here in China you have four layers to pile on, that is if you can deal with raw fish. At best you have three cultural breakfasts to amalgamate before you can even think of touring. It is particularly difficult in China, because there is bound to be ten hours of tomb and palace walking, plus a Chinese lunch of about fifteen courses and a dinner the same size. That’s the price of world traveling.

Breakfast conquered, we headed for Tiananmen Square, crowded today because it is a national holiday. Sam cautioned us about pickpockets and thieves: In the same forest there are different kinds of beasts. In general, China is a safe place, but crowds always attract the fast fingers.

It took two minutes for Sam and I to figure out that our group would take some organizing if we were going to see more than one site in China during our ten days. We hit the square and immediately dispersed in ten directions and purposes. Sam geared up to begin talking and found no audience. Eric was 100 yards away laying on his back, capturing the underside of a pigeon atop the Monument to the Heroes of the Republic. Matt was off interrogating a perplexed Chinese plainclothesman about the relative merits of the Cultural Revolution, and Nancy was chasing Josh in the direction of Chairman Mao. The rest of us were standing around in awe of the world’s largest public square, 90 soccer fields in size and capable of containing at least half a million at a People’s Party rally. Walter is already floating around finding things to buy for us. I fear if he adopts Kasey and Josh, Nancy will have to buy a ship to get everything home.

Sam was at first a bit perplexed by our lack of cohesion, but things will get better the longer we are on the road. We are not yet the smooth running touring unit we will be by day’s end. I had forgotten that the family is not tour-hardened like one of our busloads of octogenarians. We actually have individual expectations and plans for each site. That is hard to break. We are also bringing in at inordinate amount of background information; there are a dozen different guidebooks among us, which have actually been read. Questions lengthen tours and the family has never been known for a paucity of inquiries. Now that I think back on that fact, we were lucky to get out of the Forbidden City by dark.

The 72 acres of Forbidden City were home to thirteen Ming Dynasty Emperors and eleven from the Qing (Manchu) Dynasty. It’s actually pronounced Ching just as the first Qin Empire is pronounced Chin. The Ming Capital had been Nanjing from 1368-1421, but was moved to Beijing by the great third emperor Yongle during the latter part of his reign (1360-1424). The Last Emperor left the Forbidden City in 1911.

You enter the Inner City through Tiananmen Gate, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, today draped with the five-star flag of the People’s Republic of China and a giant picture of Chairman Mao Zedong. The flag has a large star symbolizing the Communist Party and four smaller ones for the workers, students, office workers and soldiers. Inside the Gate of Peace you enter another world, of imperial power and despotism, euphemized by terms such as tranquility, harmony and union. It is a world that was forbidden to commoners, and, after dark, everyone else except Emperor, wives, concubines and eunuchs. If you stop to think about it, the municipal absence of testicles may indeed promote increased levels of tranquility.

The Meridian Gate is the true entrance to the Forbidden City, rather than Tiananmen. It was so named by the Emperor because he asserted that the Prime Meridian ran through his house rather than Greenwich, England. We laughed at that when Sam reported it, but why should we casually accept the arrogance of the British Empire and not the Chinese? I am perfectly willing to accept both since I can’t see any way that it affects my happiness in Fairfield, California. I’m for giving everyone his or her own meridian if it will keep them in balance.

The Golden Stream meanders through the Forbidden City, crossed five times by a series of three bridges. Only the emperor used the middle bridge, tried by others at the risk of their lives. The royal family walked to his right and the court officials to the left. There were dozens of things in the Imperial world that were permitted only to the emperor—the number 9, the colors purple and gold, the 5-clawed dragon. Certain trees and flowers were royal perquisites. Only the Emperor could display a dragon in front of his house. The common soul lived or died in a complicated world of taboo and restriction, capable of losing his head a thousand ways. But apparently the Emperor himself was far from immortal. Trees were banned from his city since it was feared they might harbor potential assassins. Outside the Hall of Supreme Harmony the brick flooring is fifteen layers thick to prevent tunneling.

Annie led the family over the middle bridge, a vibrant symbol of her modern age.

Life for the Emperor in the Forbidden City was largely symbolic and ceremonial. He came to the Meridian Gate to give out moon cakes at the Spring Festival. Twice a year he traveled to the Temple of Heaven to pray for favorable crops. He prayed at the Hall of Supreme Harmony at the Ceremony of the Winter Solstice, at New Year and during the Summer Festival.

The Hall of Supreme Harmony is the picture symbol today of the Forbidden City, the most often photographed of the royal halls. It is the tallest of all the halls, built on three levels, symbolizing the heavens, the human world and the earth. Sam hit us with a torrent of statistics. There are 308 huge water jars in the city, 18 bronze incense burners and 18 bronze jars, one for each province in Qing days. There are two bronze storks and two tortoises, royal symbols.

As you wander toward the Emperor’s throne, the harmony halls progress from Supreme to Complete to Preserving Harmony. At Complete Harmony, the Emperor checked seeds, the land’s and his own, reviewing his family tree to find out exactly whom he had fathered over the past year, important if you worried about relatives tunneling or climbing trees. At the Hall of Preserving Harmony he married off princesses and reviewed student examinations.

Outside the Hall of Preserving Harmony there is a famous dragon carving, sixty meters long and three meters wide. Quarried at Fang Shen, it weighs 200 tons and took a year to drag to Beijing. It depicts nine dragons (the 5-claw royal ones). Originally it was carved during the Ming Dynasty and re-carved in 1761 by the Qing. In size, weight and conception the Dragon Carving is perfectly Chinese—artistic, elegant, imaginative and achieved only through nearly inhuman toil, a microcosm of Great Wall, Terracotta Army or Forbidden City.

The Hall of Heavenly Purity is the entrance to the private domain of the Emperor. Here he resided with only the Empress, his concubines and eunuchs. During the Ming Dynasty, the Hall of Heavenly Purity was the actual residence of the Emperor, but was demoted to an audience hall under the Qing.

The Emperor and Empress only lived together three or four days at the beginning of their marriage. After that they occupied separate halls in the Forbidden City, and the concubines generally filled the Emperor’s nights, usually providing him with an undetermined number of princes or princesses. A large wooden tablet fills the wall behind the throne in the Hall of Heavenly Purity. From the third Qing emperor on, the name of the prince who was next in line was placed in a box behind the tablet, the name not revealed until after the emperor’s death. In a land of a thousand concubines, the succession was no sure thing.

The Hall of Union came next, a place visited by the empress only twice a year, on her birthday and for Spring Festival. By this time I noticed that Tommye was always wandering off to the right side (southeast corner) of each hall, and I decided to follow her. There she was, nestled against the columns.

They’re warm! she explained, patting the column. Indeed they were, sun-heated on a 25° day. We decided to call them Tommye-warmers.

The last hall was the Palace of Earthly Tranquility, the bedroom of the Ming Empresses, certainly a misnomer in the unsettled family life of the monarch, but this whole city is a study in verbal euphemism, and what better way to end the tour than on a note of tranquility?

The royal garden completes the Forbidden City, a garden of man-made rock mountains, intertwining juniper and cypress trees and exotic plants. The royal family probably found more peace and tranquility here than in all of the elaborate halls of the city. Here they could stroll in peace, free of palace cares and political machinations.

Our peace shattered completely when we hit the bus parking lot and a voracious army of peddlers, selling roasted sweet potatoes, kites, sticks of sugared fruit, tea sets, books, postcards, swords, and a peculiar one-stringed instrument called an erhu. Like a herd of musk oxen, we circled, protecting Kasey and Josh in the middle, our backs presenting a united front to the insistent merchants.

Off to lunch, our first Chinese meal, at the Tiananmen Fangshan Restaurant. The first real sign of the power of the State showed up when we tried to get off at the restaurant. A policeman very forcefully told us not to even stop and we had to go around again, and park some blocks away from the restaurant, which stood just opposite the old city gates at Tiananmen Square. This is a three-day New Year holiday, and they are expecting protests on the square. Much later I heard that there were numerous arrests at Tiananmen, which has become the focal point of protest since that memorable day in 1989 when that still undiscovered man name Wang Weilin stood alone before a monstrous tank and stared it to a stop. 400 men by that name have been turned up in Beijing, but none fit the description of the Wang Weilin who made Time Magazine’s list of 100 Most Important in the century. That is the official story.

On foot we reached the Fangshan Restaurant, and entered the first of what would be a succession of private dining rooms arranged by Walter, and came face to face with our first Lazy Susan. It is amazing how fast a stranger can settle into the chopstick-Lazy Susan style of eating. Several appetizers are usually on the turntable as you settle into your seat, and it is expected that you will begin eating as soon as everyone is comfortable. These are usually small bites of food, usually cold, perhaps some Lima beans, shrimp, thin cuts of liver, etc. They often have peanuts because that gives the visitor chopstick practice, China now worries about us Westerners, who have to become accustomed to chopsticks, and it takes a few minutes to get your fingers and hands operating properly. You can always tell a foreigner, or barbarian, because the table cloth is usually dirty next to his/her plate where the chopsticks were poked to get them even for the next bite. Also the Chinese anchor their napkin under the plate by one corner, making a very effective lap-netting for dropped food.

In short order, a bewildering variety of dishes descended on our turnstiles, and just as quickly, hunger was a grand teacher in helping us dispatch almost everything. After a few inquiries as to the nature of things, most of us stopped asking and just poked around. We learned another thing about Walter’s style of hosting a meal. As soon as your beer, tea or coke glass was even slightly empty, it was filled again. At one point in the trip, Kasey was drinking coke and after each sip, it was immediately filled. With a confused look on her face, she turned to me, pleading. Papa, every time I look around, the coke is back on top. I can’t drink anymore. Eventually she learned to finish and turn the glass over to stop the service. None of us beer drinkers ever learned that lesson.

It was a good start.

Lunch concluded we drove south, still within the city, to Tiantanyuan, the Temple of Heaven. Here during the winter solstice every year, the Emperor would lead a procession south from the Forbidden City to pray for the welfare of China. He would stay three days, supposedly without food or fun, and then return to the City. Sam intimated that this was not always the case.

The Temple Park dates back to the 15th century and the reign of the Ming Emperor Yongle, whom we will later meet as Chong Ling and a variety of other names. It is composed of three main parts all in a north-south axis. The Circular Altar, a three-tiered open altar built in 1530 and enlarged in 1749, saw the burning of bundles of silk cloth as an offering to the heavens. A sound stone in its center is supposed to magnify the voice for distant listeners, and reduce it for those near at hand.

The second structure to the north is the Imperial Vault of Heaven also built in 1530 to store imperial tablets. It is circled by an echo wall, which is roped off to visitors today. But in front of the hall are three echo stones. If you clap your hands on the first stone, you hear one clap. On the second you hear two, and on the third you are supposed to hear three. We can verify the first two.

The crowning achievement at the Temple of Heaven is the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, a magnificent circular hall built entirely of wood and hand-pieced together. Its three blue-tiled roofs, supported by twenty-eight massive pillars, raise it to a height of 125 feet. It is 98 feet across. The tower is the symbol of Beijing, and indeed perhaps of all of China. It was built in 1420 and remained until 1829 when lightening burned it down. The modern reconstruction was done with great care, using timbers imported from Oregon by shipping owner Robert Dollar. Today the interior is closed to the public.

Having the need to use the toilets, the girls wandered off in the gardens. Nearby was a stage where the Beijing Opera was being practiced. A few of us went to see what was making all the racket. We would learn that later. I walked about in the trees looking for birds, so far disappointed by the scarcity of anything except pigeons and crows. There were numerous black-billed magpies, which I had seen on my first trip, but here in the park I added a new one, the azure-winged magpie, looking very much like our scrub jays, with a black head.

My new Field Guide to the Birds of China sheds some light on the scarcity of birds I was noticing. Birds in China fall into four categories: pests, food, medicine and pets. All four are inimical to good bird health. In 1958, the officials in Beijing declared that all sparrows were pests and citizens were ordered to eliminate them, banging drums and shooting guns to keep them from perching, causing them to die of exhaustion. 800,000 of the little critters were massacred in three days, precipitating a subsequent horde of insects that caused an official change of heart. My book says that by contrast, 4,000,000 birds are consumed daily in America by house cats. There are few cats in China!

Our day was almost finished, and we would miss the third of Beijing’s ancient masterpieces, the Summer Palace. But shopping constraints require other plans and we next stopped at the Cloisonné factory for a quick look at this wonderful Chinese craft with the French name. Six steps go into the process: the molding of the item in red copper; the soldering on of a fine filigree completely around the piece; enamel filling of the filigree; firing; polishing or sanding; and finally gilding. The end product is a wonderfully colorful piece of art that may range from bowls and vases to chopsticks, cigarette lighters or wall hangings. This was our first exposure to Chinese crafts, and everyone took home a souvenir or two.

The last stop of the afternoon was a walk through the Silk Alley, an outdoor market of faux finery. Here, nestled in the shadow of the American Embassy, every sort of phony designer label can be found, from Gucci and Pucci to Beanie Babies and Rolex watches. Mary was thrilled to buy the Maple, Germania and Brittania Beanie Baby Bears that are at least $300 back home. Here she purchased all three for $4.25.

Are they real? she asked me.

Were they made in China? I asked back.

I think so.

Then they are real.

She is now convinced that they are real and that is all that actually matters.

The same is true for Matt and Eric, who began what would become an ongoing challenge to see who could buy $5,000 Rolex watches for under $10. And keep them running for more than forty-two seconds. At the end of our day, Eric was in the lead by a full five seconds. This battle would continue.

Is everyone back on the bus? Sam asked.

Two dolla! was the affirmative answer we had learned. If someone was missing we would have said "Wan dollal! or One dollar." Our Chinese was fast becoming fluent. Walter had also taught us tai guela!, too expensive, which would really be put to use in the days ahead.

Everyone gasped when they were told we only had an hour to get ready for dinner. We were heading for the traditional Beijing culinary cliché—Peking Duck Dinner at the impressive Quanjude Restaurant, which our groups also use. It is the reality of touring. If you want to see and experience everything, you have to maintain a tight schedule.

I didn’t write down the menu for our Peking Duck dinner because that’s it. Just about everything is duck—the appetizers, the soup, the main course. The highlight is the carving, done at the table with flair, precision and a mighty sharp knife or cleaver. Then the morsels are dipped in plum sauce and rolled into pancakes or stuffed into rolls. Kind of like Chinese burritos and pita pockets. The result was the same as always—too much to eat. Tonight, the chef also sliced the duck’s head in half and presented it to each table. It would be Eric’s and Patrick’s first taste of duck brains. They are now the designated tasters for the whole group.

It was about this time that Walter taught us another useful word— "Gambei! It is always spoken with an exclamation point. It is the German gsuffa!"—bottoms up. Except in Walter’s world, it is performed with whatever liquor is at hand, be it a liter of beer, pijou, or a flask of beijou, a burning liquid that the Chinese have the nerve to call rice wine. It is nothing short of double-distilled grappa, and tastes just about as bad. But in his quiet voice (which I suspect is quite dangerous), Walter picks up his glass, clinks a neighbor or two, offers a toast of some sort, shouts "Gambei!" and downs it. Then he turns the empty side horizontal for the whole table to see it is empty. And finally, he taps the glass on the side of the Lazy Susan. That takes the place of clinking glasses. All who witness this are expected to do likewise. Having been exposed to this tradition and the liquor on my last trip, I watched and took notes as Patrick, Deb, Jim, Donna, Matt and Kristi gambeied and shook violently. Then they made the mistake that Kasey had already learned: they put their glasses down! From some hidden recess, the waitresses snaked out a bottle and before they could stop shivering, their glasses were full again, lying in ambush for Walter’s next "Gambei!" From that night on, some folks were very careful to watch which table Walter sat at. Those with a death wish chose his table; others moved to the next room.

What a day! Forbidden City, lunch on Tiananmen Square, Temple of Heaven, Silk Alley, Cloisonné Factory, Quanjude Peking Duck, Gambei!. Another such, and we will be carted home on a stretcher. Tomorrow is the Great Wall!

DECEMBER 31

MING TOMBS / GREAT WALL

You haven’t been to China if you haven’t stood on the Great Wall.]

Mao’s statement is inscribed on a plaque as you climb onto the wall at Badaling.

The Great Wall! It has such a monumental sound. Today it extends over 3,000 miles, but once was almost 6,000. I think that of all the things you come to see in China, the Great Wall tops the list. And as exciting as its mere name is, and as great as your expectations are, nothing prepares the first-time visitor for the actual experience. That first glimpse from the Badaling Expressway is thrilling. There it is, climbing an impossibly steep mountain side, crawling over a distant peak, running across a sharp valley. This section of the wall at Badaling Pass, one of three accessible from Beijing, is the very spot where the Mongols under Ghengis Khan poured through into China. But the wall is not just a single line of rock barrier. Twenty-five feet high and twenty feet wide, it splits and turns and laps back on itself in its journey across Northern China. From any one point, it can be seen topping several peaks, seemingly wandering in every direction without apparent plan. When Qin Shi Huang consolidated various walls in his empire, he did it with packed earth construction. It was the Ming who transformed the wall into stone. 600,000 workers are buried within its stones. Hundreds of thousands more labored to make it a reality, from the 3rd century BC Qin to the 17th century Ming. It is ironic that this Great Wall, designed to keep barbarian foreigners out of China, is now the main attraction drawing them in.

Our day actually started before the wall. After a brief stop at the Jade Factory, we went directly to the Ming Tombs near the small town of Changping. Thirteen of the sixteen Ming Emperors are buried in a broad valley beneath the Tsianshou Mountains. A red gate at the valley entrance protects the tombs, the first of which was built in 1409. The formal entrance to the tombs is the Spirit Way, extending four miles from the entrance gate to the first tomb. We entered the Spirit Way along the Avenue of Stone Animals, a delightful path for all ages, between twelve pairs of gigantic animals ranging from elephants to camels to mythical creatures, and six pairs of public officials. How many editorial writers have commented over the ages on the propriety of putting creatures and governmental officials together? Some of these sculptures date to 1435.

After passing through the Dragon Phoenix Gate, said to separate the living from the dead, we visited the grandest of the tombs in the valley, that of Chang Ling, the 3rd Ming Emperor (1360-1424). He is also known at Zhu Di, and Chongzu and has an Emperor Title of Yongle. How on earth are we supposed to figure out who did what back then? At least one of those four built the Forbidden City and perhaps by the name of Yongle constructed the Temple of Heaven. He also sent fleets to the Arab world to open trade, dispatched emissaries to India and Africa, and codified the language in the Great Encyclopedia. Chongling-Yongle-Zu Di-Chongzu was a great Emperor and his massive tomb is evidence. It also contains the grave of his Empress Xu, and ten separate graves of favorite concubines who are said to have been buried alive with him. He certainly is the star of the valley, outshining neighbors at Chang Ling, Zhao Ling and Ding Ling. In the region there are also the Eastern Qing tombs (Dong Qing Ling) Jing Ling and Ding Dong Ling, the mausoleum of the Empress Dowager Cixi.

About this time, Kasey had mastered her numbers and was starting to put them to good use. With a huge smile, she would approach someone, hold up her hand and yell, "kai wa u! (Give me five!) Asked her age, she would calmly answer, Liu." What I wouldn’t give for a bit of that memory back.

From the Tomb of Changling, we drove a few miles to the Old China Restaurant in the village of Chengzhang near the mountains. The restaurant has the flavor of the Gobi or the Spice Road, reminding me of a Turkish caravansary-restaurant I stopped at several years ago. McDonalds it isn’t. For one thing, the bathrooms didn’t get a very high rating from Nancy and Donna, barely reaching a 1, thus putting it on a level only fractions above the Forbidden City. They haven’t yet been to the Wall. But lunch as always, was filled with mystery and surprises:

Cabbage with pork

Dumplings

        Spinach

        Garlic

        Vegetable

        Pork

Duck

Boiled peanuts

Fish, prepared in a sweet and sour sauce.

Winter melon

Garlic cakes

Duck necks

Duck livers

Duck shaped pastries.

They don’t actually have desserts in China. Oh, they stick some sweet things on the table that Vicki calls dessert, but usually it is masquerading as bean curd or rice of some sort. And they positively don’t have fortune cookies. Often the last thing to be placed on the turntable is the tureen of soup, which can be made out of almost anything, like dropped eggs, corn, bird nests, duck. Usually the soup is rather viscous or greasy or both, and has not generally been well received by our group.

There is nothing fancy here, unless it is the tassels of the camel that Kristi insisted on riding. When Josh and Kasey climbed between the two humps, camels and horses started materializing out of the dust. We escaped to the Wall just as the caravan arrived.

Today a modern cable car can take you to the Great Wall, saving visitors a steep hour-and-half climb from the highway. Even with that mighty assistance, there is work to be done. If ever you are to form an appreciation of the construction effort required of the ancients, you need to walk a couple hundred yards on top. There is nothing flat! Steep, uneven stairs take care of the cliffs, but even the flat spots wear you out, especially on a winter-cold, windy day like today, where the temperature is about 15º F and the wind chill much colder. By the time we had taken our group picture and climbed to the nearby defense tower, most of us were ready to retreat to the bus. Matt and Eric would have stayed for a day or two, but they weren’t willing to jog back to town after dark.

Speaking of town, in China you have to rearrange all of your concepts. Downtown fills up about twenty square miles of a Chinese city. I always laugh when our clients naively ask, Is the hotel in the city center?

Well, yes! I answer with confidence because a Chinese city center is as big as Rhode Island. Beijing with eleven million people is a hamlet as Chinese cities go. Shanghai has sixteen million; Chongqing somewhere over twenty-five million. I figure any place, like Shenzhen where we are going on Friday, with only four million, is a Chinese town. Under a million is a village not worthy of being included on maps or given road signs. Under 100,000 is a family grouping. But it doesn’t take long to progress from one to the other. Eight years ago, Shenzhen had only 400,000 souls. Shanghai’s Pudong District has increased two and a half times in five years from a million residents. In a nation of 1.26 billion people, you can’t fool around with little places like San Francisco or Boston. All of the Bay Area would be gobbled up by China’s capital.

We got back to the hotel at dark to get ready for New Year’s Eve. This is our only dressy occasion on the trip, so out came the dark suits and black dresses, the rings and rocks. I even splashed on my Safari cologne. And of course, Kasey, in a long red gown, donned her black cape. Our evening has been a real mystery, neither Vickie nor Walter giving out much information about the program. I know they want to surprise us.

We drove into the light-suffused inner city pulling up at the gleaming China Nights Theater. Inside, the theater staff was primed to escort us up three stories to private rooms, where we divided up into parties of six. Gifts were spread for each of us—stuffed Panda bears awaited the ladies, musical rabbits for the kids. For each of us there was a jade necklace with our birth sign. Walter and Vickie had been at it again!

A musician played in the corner in each room, traditional instruments—the flute, the one-string teapot erhu and the four-string pi pai. The dinner was another flight of Chinese culinary imagination, beginning with the customary six appetizers, this time arrayed on the plate as a fanciful pheasant, with slices lined up in neat rows across the platter. They consisted of cucumber, chicken rolls, lettuce-wrapped crab, shrimp, egg, pork and beef slices, and a gelatin we couldn’t identify and Vicki couldn’t explain. The dinner was shorter than usual, but certainly the most unusual of our trip:

Shark fin soup

Abalone covered by quail egg whites

A huge mushroom with a goose foot plopped on top

There was dessert, and I definitely heard a number of quiet prayers of thanksgiving from our group.

At 8:00 the preliminary New Year show commenced, and precisely at 8:00 Kasey, removing her elegant mom-manufactured cape, exited the dining chamber to her theater box, there to preside like a reigning princess over the festivities. For four hours she sat there, straight and regal, hair coifed, red-gowned, glowing, never taking her eyes from the singers and dancers who performed on the stage below. She was the perfect six-year old image of Audrey Hepburn, thrilled by the theater.

Josh slept on the floor the whole time.

The first two hours were filled with a wide variety of games, drawings, dance and song, emceed by two of China’s beautiful people who looked very much like TV or radio personalities. Of course, everything was announced only in Chinese. We had to guess at most of the proceeding, but did get very good at laughing at whatever the audience down below thought was funny. They introduced each distinct set of entertainers, interspersed every so often by children’s games and drawings. Teenagers performed lively, athletic dances. Singers ranged