Author Archives: James

Box Ticking

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We have been to Japan before. A two week holiday a few years ago whetted our appetite for all things Japanese, hence our desire to shoehorn a return trip into the gap in our itinerary caused by the immovable blocks of Christmas and, er, the North Korean National day in September. We loved it last time, and we loved it this time. But we had some chores to complete.

Last time we were here we ranged all over the country, we skied in Hokkaido, we took the Japanese equivalent of the Orient Express (for which you have to win tickets in a lottery), we temple bashed in Nara, misery touristed in Hiroshima, monastery stayed in Koya-San, and Kabuki-ed in Tokyo. We ate everything we could get our hands on and stayed in a range of high and low class hotels the length of the country. But we missed out on a few things – seasonality, time constraints and mild case of culture shock prevented us from doing everything we wanted to. Hence the requirement for a little box ticking.

Well, you know your life isn’t too bad when your mandatory box ticking involves going to a Sumo tournament and tasting poisonous Fugu puffer fish. Life is tough, yet again.

Sumo. Well. It’s amazing. The bouts typically last less than ten seconds, but that misses the point. It’s the mandatory four minutes per bout of facing off, warming up, strutting and posturing that really make the occasion. Our American friends won’t know what the hell I am talking about at this point, but do you remember that time when the Scottish ladies’ curling team got a gold medal at the winter Olympics? For about three days everyone in the UK suddenly became world class curling experts, able to discuss at length the tactical implications of scrubbing vs polishing ice, stone positioning and the correct usage of the slippery and spiked shoes. It was bizarre, and it overtook us at the Sumo:

“Oh, look at that decisive foot stamp. He’s so aggressive. He’s definitely got the upper hand”

“What an effective ceremonial-salt-chucking there – the Yokozuna’s overhand salt toss. Punchy!”

“My lord, he leaned so far forward on his hands there in warm up! How can the opponent possibly respond?”

“Did you see the half-hearted honorific brow mopping there? His fighting spirit must be broken!”

(and, my personal favorite, from Lucy) “He’s wearing lovely green pants. I think he’s definitely going to win.”

Sumo is deeply bizarre, heavily tied up in ritual, almost perfectly opaque to outsiders, and definitely worth a visit if you happen to be in town when a match is on.

Eating Fugu on the other hand, is deeply bizarre, heavily tied up in ritual, almost perfectly opaque to outsiders and worth doing just once in your life for the sole reason that you can say you have done it. We journeyed to the spiritual home of Fugu in Shimonoseki (where even the manhole covers have cartoon blowfish on them) and tried a full “setto” of blowfish in a specialist blowfish restaurant. Our English friends won’t know what the hell I am talking about at this point, but … well … Meh. It was just chewy sashimi without any of the famed mouth numbness that signifies near-poisoning (interestingly the Japanese word for “sashimi” isn’t actually “sashimi” but “o-tsukuri” – who knew?).

Perhaps they don’t serve the good stuff to foreigners; perhaps we don’t know the Japanese for “hurt me, chef”; perhaps we had too much beer for lunch. Anyway – tick.

Short Runs in Strange Places – Kyboshed in Kyoto

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I find one of the more enjoyable aspects of growing older is getting to know yourself better. And for me as an engineer manqué, this covers not just how I react to situations but also getting a proper understanding of how I work. For example: how I learn best (I have to understand the underlying mechanics of anything, then it sticks for ever), how I respond to jet lag (badly – the free booze and music documentaries on the planes get me every time), how  much sleep I really, really need per night (below two I tend to hallucinate a little after lunchtime, more than four if I want to make sense without adrenaline, a regular six if I want to perform properly – so now you know!).

One thing I worked out when I was at university was a basic universal cure-all. Whenever I was feeling low or stressed out I prescribed myself the following: lots of water, some reasonably strenuous exercise, two pints of bitter, light comfort food, an early night and everything will be better in the morning. It worked surprisingly well, right up to the time I hit the City, at which point exercise and early nights went straight out the window. The basic cure-all was then replaced by a more complex structure suggested by a savvy girlfriend of mine involving fresh night air, brown bread and running up and down the street (she had been a junior doctor, and sleep deprivation was a common factor in both our lives).

So when we got to Kyoto I was feeling a little low. Kyoto is beautiful (if you have never been to Kyoto, go to Kyoto (hi Jason!)). But to be honest, nearly six months of travel had been taking their toll. There comes a point at which constantly trying to work out where you are, how you are going to get there, how to read the strange script on the menu, what to eat and how to order it in mime / pidgin English become a little dull. On one level these difficulties are an intrinsic part of the cultural experience of travel, but their enjoyment very much depends on your mood. Standing in front of a queue of Japanese commuters trying to work out why the ticket barrier is steadfastly refusing to let you through can be either an interesting challenge or a bit of a chore (the answer is to insert all of your tickets for your complete journey at once, even if they are issued by different train companies – the machine will riffle through them and spit back out the ones you still need. Dead easy once you know, but deeply counterintuitive anywhere other than Japan).

No matter, thought I – just break out the classic cure-all: drink lots of water, head off for a run round Kyoto, eat a nice seasonal Kaiseki dinner in a good restaurant and spend a long night in a Western bed in our hotel.

I also tend to play myself my all-time favourite tune. The Cinematic Orchestra at their very finest.

And the run was lovely: seven miles round Kyoto, through the imperial park, out to the Eastern suburbs where the wooded hills come right down to the city’s edge, meander down the ancient Philosophers’ Path along one of the charming streams that are a feature of Japanese towns, navigate around a few gorgeous temples fringed by bright autumn foliage then cut back across the river through the shopping district and home. Well, back to the hotel anyway.

Part one complete, we then went out to a modern Kaiseki restaurant for ten courses of exquisitely sculpted seasonal cuisine, an elegant sufficiency of sake and a cab ride home, being honorifically bowed out of the restaurant not only by our own personal waitress but by the receptionist as well. It was, I think, our best meal in Japan and as such I am slightly hesitant to attribute the next 24 hours’ experiences to crushingly overwhelming food poisoning.

It was terrible. I haven’t felt so bad since a bruising introduction to chicken a la banana a few years ago (hello mate!). I won’t go into the fine details, other than to say that Lucy was utterly lovely, looked after me extremely well and I don’t know what I would have done without her.

One other (minor) upside: Japanese toilets truly are world beaters. If you are ever in the situation where you are deciding between going to the loo; being violently, noisily sick; or passing out on the floor I can heartily recommend the self-deodorizing Toto model with the heated seat. That said I would counsel against the interesting water spray features, particularly if you are staying in a hotel with wildly superheated hot water. Ouch.

36 hours later (most of which I spent asleep) I was largely mended and we were on our way. Next stop sumo wrestling and blowfish

Possibly the Best Cocktail Bar in the World

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Ladies and Gentlemen, we may have found it. Having spent an enjoyable few years conducting what I like (somewhat euphemistically) to call “research” I think we have found a contender for the world’s best bar right now. And I don’t mean the world’s coolest bar – to be frank I would never find out about that, and even if I did they would never let me in. And if they did, that would be the end of their period of cool – seriously, whenever a suited type like me turns up in a bar it is a sure sign the management have decided to cash in their cool chips for high volumes of paying customers instead. (or, as Harpo Marx memorably quipped about joining members clubs – arp arp arp ARP! honk).

Anyway, I digress.

A cocktail-loving friend of mine (hi Cabe!) has a section on his and his now wife’s blog (hi Caroline!) describing (in loving fashion) Old Fashioneds he has met. Now, there are many varieties of Old Fashioneds, most of them sticking to a core of bourbon or rye whisky, orange peel, sugar and bitters, but many also playing around with dark rum, grapefruit peel, cliché cherries, tobacco infusions and the like. I have tried many of them, but I had not to date experienced the following: the waiter plonks a standard, old fashioned Old Fashioned in front of you – perfectly balanced, soft yet punchy with the required overtones of fruit and manliness – and then, with no fanfare, also plonks down a conical flask like your chemistry teacher used to drink out of, corked and full of some kind of heavy smoke. The smoke, you see, is for pouring over the cocktail. And it smells of … golly … marshmallows and fire and autumn, and rich sweetness and sweet richness. And it is heavier than air and it pours, coiling hypnotically out of the flask over your glass and infusing the whole affair with intense flavor and with magic. And it’s incredible.

And they come with more. Centrifuged Bloody Maries (clear – but of course!) and lemongrass-infused vacuum-redistilled gin and tonics, and foamy concoctions bobbing with spherulized Earl Grey tea globules. The bar is covered in chemistry equipment that you are not allowed under New York licensing laws: the partial-vacuum still is a definite invitation to the police where I come from. They are the Heston Blumenthals of cocktailry and they confect, carbonate, combust and combine with the best of them. If you are a fan of cocktails, you HAVE to go.

And I can’t remember the bloody name of the place. You see, we were in Hong Kong with our good friends Kean and Nyree. They extremely generously put us up in their rather swish apartment in Repulse Bay and had put together a cunningly planned itinerary taking in the very best of Hong Kong. We had been 104 floors up in an elegant hotel for hot chocolate, we had seen wet markets and white witches and both sides of that famous skyline from the Star Ferry. And that evening, we had started with hot damn chili crab, chicken feet and two excellent bottles of wine and finished with huge cigars in a hidden speakeasy washed down with “corpse reviver” cocktails (I have no idea). And we were hammered. We blame the months of no drinking, and the jetlag, and the amazing hospitality, and stuff. We got truly and thoroughly Keaned (or, as it is nowadays, Kean & Nyreed). And it was bloody marvellous.

No, I have no photographs of the occasion, or the cocktails. Yes, I could look the bar up in a minute on google, remind myself of the name and tell you all. But that would spoil a good story, wouldn’t it?

Expectation Management

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And so we fell ignominiously out of the bottom of Tibet and into Nepal.

Our experience in Nepal started much like our experiences in many other places – we successfully negotiated ourselves into a taxi from the border at such a cut price rate that the driver felt obliged not only to pick up a girlfriend of his on our dime (complete with actual, real life, actually projectile puking baby) but also to stop for a puncture, a tire repair and a fifteen minute stop (just five minutes from our hotel) to pick up spare parts for his car. So far so James-&-Lucy travel standard, we thought. In fact, so far so easy, as the wheels actually stayed on the car this time.

But then our ruggedness completely failed us. It’s not that we weren’t trying mind, it’s just that Nepal is so … erm … nice in comparison to some of the other places we have been.

We bounced through Kathmandu (nice hotel; taxis turn up on time; food’s pretty good if you like curry; people speak English; and machetes aren’t a fashion accessory) took a plane to Pokhara (they sell white toblerones at the airport; there is actually an airport; we didn’t have to hire our own plane or anything) and checked into our hotel (honeymoon suite with a balcony for $55; laundry, mineral water and cheap beer within easy reach; working internet; and a sunny roof terrace with a view of the mountains for a spot of yoga). It was all so … convenient. Things worked. There were restaurants near the lake with proper Illy espresso machines. We couldn’t believe it.

So, feeling the need for a bit of rugged, we headed off on our trek. Now, trekking in Nepal has a deserved reputation for being pretty hardcore – the views are spectacular; the accommodation is pretty basic and the treks are steep, high and hard work. Our particular trek to Poon Hill took us over 3,100 meters in five days – well high enough to bring you down with altitude sickness if you’re unlucky. So, as we set off for the mountains (brushing off the street hawkers trying to flog us … warm freshly baked croissants) we were pretty fired up!

Actually … perhaps we were a little too fired up. You see, we had just come from ten days on the Tibetan plateau at altitudes up to 5,000+m. Our easy acclimatization days (complete with a little light jogging) had been in Lhasa above 3,500m, and we were in Nepal because we had balked at the prospect of a Tibetan trek involving ten hour days walking behind yaks over high passes and possibly camping in the snow. So when our guide suggested that we stop after about four hours on the first day we were politely surprised. When our room had a private hot shower we were amazed. And when the restaurants served flaming roast chicken and had bottles of Bordeaux for sale we were shocked.

It was all very pleasant, but it wasn’t really what we were there for. We were as altitude acclimatized as perhaps we will ever be in our entire lives, we had failed at our ambition of hardcore trekking in Tibet and we were on a mission. Our poor, beleaguered guide (who didn’t really help himself, to be honest) kept tacking on bits and pieces of trail as we kept walking further and further each day. He kept trying to hold us back – would we like some tea? Would we like to stop for an early lunch? Would we like to stop for the day at 1pm? – but eventually we simply ran out of trek.

And so, after bashing round his suggested five-to-six day hike in four days we found ourselves back in Pokhara eating delicious vanilla gelato and feeling very happy, if ever so slightly deflated.

Incidentally, Pokhara is where I had my best meal ever, anywhere. I had spent the best part of three months in India as an 18 year old gap year student on £6 a day and due to fine Indian budget cuisine I had lost the best part of three stones in weight (about 42 lbs or 19kg – incidentally, I am doing better this time, and have only lost about one stone). I had just spent three days flat on my back in Varanasi watching dead bodies floating down the Ganges just under my hotel window and being about as sick as it is possible to be without going to hospital. Having come to the slightly teenage and melodramatic decision that if I didn’t get out of India I might die, I hauled on my backpack, crawled on my hands and knees up the steps outside the hotel and caught the first bus to Nepal.

My best meal ever? It was a buffalo burger, chips, coleslaw and a beer in a nameless reggae joint in Pokhara. It was hot, hearty and h-delicious, and I was the happiest man alive. And when I woke up in the middle of the night and was violently sick because my stomach was so unused to food? I was still the happiest man alive – you see, I had stashed a mars bar just in case.

Decisions, Decisions (Hello Jamie!)

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This is Jamie. He is awesome.

One of my oldest friends, Jamie is now a semi-professional explorer with a ground-breaking business bringing expeditions to the classroom and vice versa. If you ever have a bad day at work and want to daydream about yomping off round the world, the page on his website showing current, past and future expeditions is guaranteed to put some tingling hairs on your chest. Or something. He also has a real beard. Did I mention the awesome?

Jamie is exactly the person you want on the end of the telephone when you have a Proper Travel Dilemma. Need to know what kind of satellite phone to take with you when you are off on a truly remote holiday tomorrow and an investment banking transaction is cratering around you? Call Jamie. Need to know somebody trustworthy in Antarctica with access to a ski-equipped plane? Call Jamie. Need to know how to tell your real Buddhist Thankas from your standard mass-produced rubbish? Call Jamie.

OK, so his advice is sometimes a little hardcore (regarding the Thankas, the answer is apparently to befriend an artist with careful inquisition about the monastery he was apprenticed to, and then commission him to paint one of that specific monastery’s patron deities, because that way you will get something both high quality and individual. Oh, and be sure to get the Thangka blessed by a high-ranking lama to make sure it attains proper religious object status). Regarding Antarctica, his advice was that the Argentine air force will fly you out in the back of a cargo plane if you hang around Ushuaia for long enough, and most expedition bases will be glad for the company if you kinda turn up on their doorstep. All, may I be the first to say, top quality and utterly correct advice, but enough to scare the pants off a wimpish ex-investment banker with a predilection for good coffee and high speed internet access

Anyway, I digress. As usual.

We are in Tibet, and we have just had THE quintessential Tibetan trekking experience. Namely, we have loaded up a Toyota Landcruiser to the gunwhales with food, tents, sleeping mats, propane, a cook, a driver and a guide; we have arranged for yak transport; we have painstakingly acclimatized ourselves to the altitude; we have bought copious amounts of warm clothing to cope with the oncoming winter at 5,000 metres; we have procured about half a dozen official permits, all stamped and signed; we have driven from Lhasa to the start of our carefully planned (and, although we don’t normally mention it, extremely expensive) trek, and … the f***ing Chinese have decided that because they are choosing their new leader in some stage-managed rubber stamp of a farrago five thousand miles away in Beijing it is too dangerous to allow any Westerners to contact village Tibetans (who don’t speak any English) and they have cancelled our permission to go. Boy we were mad.

So, we were offered another trek in a less arbitrarily politically sensitive area, but this one went higher, faster and colder than the one we had chosen. Winter is setting in, the high passes are getting hairy, and having climbed Kilimanjaro a few years ago I know that altitude sickness at 5,300 meters is seriously not something to play with. We have a very difficult decision to make, very quickly. So what to do? Call Jamie, of course!

As we are time zone constrained we text him, very briefly setting out the situation, the altitude and the trek our guides are now suggesting and asking him to call us when he wakes up. And what comes back is one of the finest text messages ever sent. I will repeat it here in its entirety so as not to dilute the epic Jamieness of it all:

“Did a similar ascent profile crossing into Zanskar. Had to organize casevac of member of another party back to Manali with AMS [Acute Mountain Sickness]. Also one pack horse slipped on snow and had to be killed. Um… Doable but may not be enjoyable”.

Wow.

We are grown ups and we know when discretion is the better part of valour. We cancelled the trek, we got some of our money back, and we set a course for Nepal. Jamie, we love you.

 

At a Loss in Lhasa

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Ah, Lhasa. It’s difficult to know what to say about Lhasa. When Lucy and I originally worked out where in the world we wanted to travel, one of the key criteria was “places that we will never be able to go again”, either because they are too difficult to reach with a family or, perhaps more pertinently, because they may not exist in future. We don’t mean literally not exist (although North Korea may end up nuked off the face of the earth before we – and they – know it) but rather that the places and cultures are changing at such a rate that it may not be possible to experience them as they are meant to be seen.

Ce Pays, qui n'est pas le mien...

 

And in Lhasa, I fear that we turned up too late. Don’t get me wrong – Lhasa still has some amazing highlights. Although the phrase is a Lonely Planet cliché, the first sight of the Potala Palace really does take your breath away (and not just because of the altitude – boom boom). The interior of the Potala is then a maze of exquisite art and sculpture, blended with esoteric beliefs and an ancient yet still living culture. The Jokhang Temple is utterly amazing, as much for the building itself as for the extreme devotion of the pilgrims waiting for hours to get in, then filing around the various side chapels assiduously chanting, praying and filling butter lamps. And the old town is still Tibetan-charming, although struggling slightly to assert itself in the face of the rapidly expanding construction site that is Chinese Lhasa, all slab sided concrete buildings and general stores.

And the security. More police than you can shake a stick at, although I wouldn’t want to try doing something so provocative. Airport-style x-ray machines scanning anyone going anywhere near any of the monuments and confiscating anything flammable. Permits, multiple passport checks, metal detectors, police, army, you name it. All Han Chinese, and all perfectly civil to us Westerners. As an example of how pervasive it all is, we were posting a painting home: the lady behind the counter was inspecting our box and suddenly demanded whether we had used any newspaper as packaging material. It took us a while to realize, but you see newspapers are tightly controlled out here and must not be sent abroad on pain of God knows what. It boggles the mind rather.

And yet the Tibetans still go about their pious business, walking around the holy pilgrimages, praying at the temples, burning their incense and putting up with it all. Who knows how it will end, although I fear that the nice, gentle guys may not finish first.

Incidentally, Lucy came up with a new concept while we were in Lhasa: the “Buddhist Shopping Experience”. It is a state of mind you reach after a period of strolling past dozens of identical Buddhist tat shops all of whom are calling out to you to buy their prayer flags, rosaries etc.. If you concentrate hard enough at this point then all desires and all worldly attachments (in particular any desire to purchase anything ever again) magically vanishes. Om!

Short Runs in Strange Places – Potala Palace, Lhasa

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I am a lot less fit than I used to be. Either that, or going for a run at an altitude of just under 12,000 feet is a really, really stupid idea.

We have been in Lhasa for three days now, and are starting to get used to the altitude. We had a relatively smooth ride on the train from Xining, despite reaching over 5,100m during parts of the trip. Our altitude sickness strategy involved lying on our soft sleeper bunks for 24 hours, drinking mineral water and eating packets of Oreos, and I am proud to say that it worked rather well. The Chinese people across the compartment from us seemed to be relying on ginseng and chewing herbal remedies that looked remarkably like genitalia, and from the nosebleeds and nausea I suspect they had a considerably worse time than us. Tourists 1, locals 0!

But there is a considerable difference between happily wandering round the sights without getting too out of breath and jogging the pilgrims’ Kora around the Potala Palace. We had visited the inside of the Potala the day before, and had been suitably overawed by the place, despite the ever-present security. We had also joined the flood of pilgrim grannies and walked around the Kora. Did I really need to run the thing? Well, as George Mallory once said about climbing Mount Everest: “Because it’s there. And it will make an excellent blog post.” Also, my running shoes were giving me the (very non-Buddhist) evil eye. So off I went.

It was a very Tibetan mid-morning – warm and cosy on the sunny side of the street; cold enough to freeze the skulls off a protector deity in the shade. I ran down (nattily and traditionally named) Beijing Street, through the pedestrian underpass, past a deeply surprised security check point (no I didn’t need to have my ipod xrayed, and I wasn’t carrying a cigarette lighter) and onto the Kora itself.

At this point, the pilgrims’ progress became a potential problem. You see, there were hundreds of them, mostly pretty old, hobbling along with their prayer wheels wheeling in their hands and stopping every now and then to admire the architecture and ponder all those sins that were being forgiven by virtue of their being there. And they got in the way. Now, from my limited knowledge of Buddhist thought, I am guessing it is particularly bad for one’s karma impatiently to trample on a granny doing a holy pilgrimage. So I was forced to be patient.

And this was no problem whatsoever. Given the lack of oxygen, after the mile or so it took me to get to the circuit itself, jogging more than about 100 yards at a time had me hacking, coughing, hyperventilating and generally feeling like the poor, struggling kid bringing up the rear of the cross country runs at school (which was always me, since you ask).

So yes, I happily waited while pilgrims meandered about in front of me. I positively enthused when old ladies decided to prostrate themselves in my path. I was the model of politeness when elderly gentlemen paused to admire the (admittedly extraordinary) view. And when we came to the end of the circuit and they all turned right to continue their circumambulations? I made a nifty left and headed for home.

Lhasa Lhasa Lhasa Lhasa Lhasa Lhasa Lhasa Lhasa...

Lhasa Lhasa Lhasa Lhasa Lhasa Lhasa Lhasa Lhasa…

 

Coals to Newcastle – Proto-Tibet

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There is a mathematical theory that is a particular favorite of mine. As roughly stated, the problem is as follows: you are looking to hire a new employee, you have 100 candidates to interview but (and here’s the constraint) you have to hire the winning candidate on the spot at the end of their one interview. Thinking this through, the first candidate may be the best of all the 100, but if you hire the first candidate on the spot you never get to see any of the others (and how do you know that all the others aren’t even better?). Alternatively, if you don’t hire an early candidate that you think is excellent … you might end up kicking yourself because you never get anyone of similar quality and you might be forced to settle for a less good candidate later on (in extremis, you may have to hire candidate number 100 no matter how good they are, because you have no other choice). So what do you do? How do you get the highest probability of hiring someone good?

Is anyone still with me? Excellent. The answer (apparently – I no longer have the maths to prove this myself) is that you interview just under one third of the candidates without hiring anybody, then hire on the spot the next person who is better than all the candidates you have seen so far. And if nobody is as good, hire candidate number 100.

Err, hang on, relevance please? This is a pretty wild digression even for you, James. So…

We are on the outskirts of Tibet, although still officially outside the Tibetan Autonomous Region. The countryside is mountainous and starkly beautiful, monks and monasteries abound and the smells of juniper incense and the squeak of prayer wheels are a constant reminder of where you are. And we are on the lookout for a Buddhist Thangka painting. There are a whole load of art galleries in towns that we are going to visit – once – over the next couple of weeks. We are heading up to Lhasa, which is of course the historical home of all that is excellent in Tibetan art, but history gets pretty convoluted in this part of the world and this may no longer be the case. And we can’t be sure that we won’t end up having to buy Thangka candidate 100 on our last day in Tibet. (see what we have done there? The theory is actually pretty widely applicable – one of the reasons I like it so much)

First stop: Labrang monastery in Xiahe. The monastery itself is perched amidst a small Tibetan enclave at the top of a typically charmless, rapidly growing Chinese town. As a first taste of Tibetan culture it is a dilly – deeply chanting monks, dark mysterious shrines, more deities than you can shake a prayer wheel at and a kora pilgrimage around the monastery walls that doubles as a pleasant stroll for a pair of altitude-acclimatizing westerners.

Next stop: Tongren. And it is here that we have our mathematically resolved dilemma. Tongren (cookie cutter Chinese hole in the ground medium-sized town – don’t bother) has a famous Thangka painting school attached to the Wutun-Si monastery about 6km out of town. And the Thangkas are great. Really great. But are we really about to buy a large Tibetan Buddhist painting and then carry the bloody thing the 1,000+ miles to Lhasa, where there must be more Thankga shops? We ummed and ahhed, we looked at dozens of paintings, we haggled, we negotiated hard … and we bought an awesome painting of a particularly fierce looking bloke on a horse (we discovered later that our fierce looking bloke is in fact a she. And it’s a mule. To be precise, her name is Sri Devi, and she is one of the only protector deities that you offer beer and wine to instead of holy water. Result!)

I would like to say that the mathematics played a part in our decision, and maybe it did. More likely, however, we were so stung by our Tashkent Experience that we would have kicked ourselves hard enough to draw blood had we missed another early opportunity to pick up something high quality and ended up spending another five days hunting for second best. Anyway, we picked up our painting, slid it inside a cannily acquired chunk of sewer pipe and headed off to Lhasa with our fingers crossed that we would never see anything as beautiful again.

What Would Michael Palin Do?

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I don’t know about you, but when Michael Palin’s first travel TV series came out I scoffed a little. I mean, what qualifications (other than past fame) does Michael Palin have to make a travel show? It took half-watching a few series for me to realize the genius of it: it wasn’t that people followed him round the world doing silly walks and offering him dead parrots (although they did) but the fact that Michael Palin is truly, truly world-class at non-verbal communication. Whether it is in the background of Monty Python sketches or high on the Tibetan plateau non-talking to nomads in a yurt: he gurns, he gurgles, he falls over, he makes funny faces and he is absolutely hilarious. And, whether you are going around the world in 80 days or eight months, unless you are prepared to learn the language of every single country that you visit for a few days at a time, non-verbal communication is where it’s at.

Lucy and I are not complete Alan Whicker-style post-imperialists. Between the two of us we can muster English, conversational Spanish and French, enough German to get around (and, bizarrely, to negotiate with one particular Kyrgyz guest house owner) and enough Japanese to order food and train tickets. We can also handle hello and thank you and the names of common foods, railway stations etc. in just about every country we go to. However, we are currently in China, and we are completely stumped. It’s the tonality of the language, you see – even if you know the words it is damn near impossible to make somebody understand you when you say them. We have a piece of paper from a hotel with “railway station”, “airport” etc. written on them in kanji, but they are no help when the taxi drivers can’t read, and no help at all when the taxi drivers steadfastly refuse to believe you don’t speak the lingo and stop the cab in the middle of nowhere to demand that you renegotiate the fare, in Mandarin. So I regularly find myself asking, when faced with a blankly uncomprehending hotel owner, a taxi driver, a waitress: what would Michael Palin do in this situation?

I have smiled until my face almost fell off; I have mimed buying train tickets; we have pointed at food others are eating; we have taken iphone photos of things and shown them to people; we have drawn diagrams of double and single beds (a Lucy inspiration – it looks less like a toilet sign and more like a double bed when you draw the pillows as well). I once found myself actually mooing loudly at a cabbie to get him to take us to the animal market. I carry a pencil and paper to write place names, draw clocks and write down dates. It doesn’t help that Chinese sign language is actually different too – two crossed fingers meaning ten, anybody? (Also, if you are miming eating, you have to mime using chopsticks, not the traditional knife and fork sawing and chewing – simple once you know how).

As a pop quiz, think how you would mime the following requests, drawn from our day to day interactions:

  • Do you have Wifi?
  • What is the wifi password? (and the IP address, while you are at it)
  • Where is the ticket office?
  • I would like a long enough length of your plastic sewage pipe to pack this Tibetan Thangka painting back to the UK, please (actually quite easy)
  • What time does this office open after lunch? (Also actually quite easy, but try to catch the mimed answer: “No, it’s the Uzbek National Teachers Day bank holiday”)
  • Please would you impersonate a CNN foreign correspondent for my friends’ wedding video?

Michael, if you are reading, you are more than welcome on our next trip, and we promise not to mention the parrot incident.

Metal Fatigue – Crossing the Torugart Pass

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Those of you who know me personally and professionally may be surprised to learn that insurance was not my first intellectual interest. That dubious honour goes to engineering – four happy years at Cambridge studying everything from the performance of jet engines to the design of transistors and all that falls in between. And a topic that has sprung to mind recently has been metal fatigue: the process by which a metal body is stressed repeatedly (although not quite to breaking point) until it suddenly gives way without warning well below its design limits. This process leaves a distinctive fracture: bright, shiny and beautiful where the repeated stress has worn away at the edges of the body, then matt, dark and ugly where the final catastrophic failure occurred.

We have just crossed the Torugart Pass. Wildly scenic, this pass winds its way from the rugged south of Kyrgyzstan through the snow-capped Tian Shan mountains to the far western reaches of China. It is remote and deserted, and sees relatively few foreigners due to the extraordinary bureaucratic procedures required to get across it. No fewer than five separate checkpoints, with gun-toting soldiers at each checking your documents, luggage checks, x-rays, form filling and long waits (including one spent standing alone outside the closed gates of China – in case you are wondering, they are high and desolate with five-pointed communist stars and lions on them). You need two drivers, two cars (one Kyrgyz, one Chinese) and all the right documents, and it is an expensive pain in the arse. And you can guess where this post is going, yes? The metal fatigue analogy is all a build up to some spectacular bureaucracy-induced sense of humour failure, right?

Wrong. Lucy and I were actually pretty chilled about all the bureaucracy, as we had employed a specialist travel agent and had managed our expectations extremely hard before we set off. We literally (and by “literally”, I once again mean “literally”) sat back and enjoyed the view. The Big Issue was that once we had got over the pass and were speeding down the road to Kashgar … the back wheel of our car fell off.

Nobody was hurt; nobody was killed. The wheel was – very, very, very fortunately – trapped by the brake disk and the brake pad and merely got stuck at an angle to the car, thereby bringing us to a screeching halt. Indeed, it wasn’t immediately apparent that the back axle had sheared completely off until the driver and I removed the wheel and stuck our heads under the car. There I saw the distinctive (textbook even) pattern of shiny and matt fractures across the inch-thick metal shaft and had a cold sweat moment when I realized what had happened. The driver was still making reassuring noises about “problem with the brakes” when we left him, picked up by the only other tourists who were crossing the pass that day. How the driver got his car picked up we don’t know, and we will never know – you see, we agreed to pay him the $170 for the Chinese side of our trip once we reached Kashgar and, while we made it in one piece in our third car of the day, we have never seen him since.