CemeteryVille

I've deleted my Facebook account. I set it up about a year ago to make it easier for editors and potential book buyers to find me.

Admittedly, I never worked it, but the whole thing seemed, for me, a waste from the outset. The care and feeding of a Facebook page felt silly and time-sucking, and I've wanted to cut the cord for a while.

Then along came FarmVille, all I needed to kiss Facebook goodbye.

A few months back I started getting Facebook friend requests by the dozens. High school acquaintances. Wow, I thought. I'm one popular chick all of a sudden. What gives? Did somebody buy my book and tell 10 friends who told 10 friends? Did somebody see my byline in a magazine and say, "Lori Hein! I went to high school with her! I'll find her on Facebook and find out more about her writing career."

Nope. None of my new-old Facebook friends cared a whit about anything I'd written nor anything else about me -- marriage, kids, life in general. All they wanted to do was plant corn.

Fake corn. FarmVille corn. I was getting hourly Wall updates about virtual cows and soybeans from people I hadn't communicated with in 35 years. I didn't know what FarmVille was until the Class of '75 launched a collective agricultural assault on my Facebook Wall, and suddenly I couldn't escape it. It was like a kudzu infestation, growing bigger by the hour and choking everything in its path. Joel Castanza, you are one heck of a cyberfarmer, dude, but the thrice-hourly blow-by-blows of every seed you'd sow were killing me.

(Yes, I know I can block the application from infesting my Wall. But if people are only friending me to FarmVille me -- they didn't get in touch before FarmVille, and people who really do want to catch up can and do find me with a quick Google search -- then for me, Facebook, with or without FarmVille feats plastering my Wall, is a waste. FarmVille simply proved the point.)

Can you delete a Facebook account? Yes, you can!

While FarmVille -- and, now that it's overtaken (overgrown?) it, Facebook -- isn't for me, I'm thinking that Zynga, the game's creators, might want to consider a spinoff product for the Chinese market: CemeteryVille.

In China, ancestor worship and veneration of the dead are core cultural traditions that go back 5,000 years (photo: an antique ancestor figurine for a home altar that I picked up at a shop on the island of Cheung Chau in the South China Sea near Hong Kong).

Each April during the Qingming festival, Chinese tend to the graves of their forebears, weeding and remounding dirt, and leaving gifts of alcohol and tobacco for the ancestors' afterlife enjoyment. (Peter Hessler has a great article on the topic, "Restless Spirits," in the January 2010 issue of National Geographic.)

Because so many Chinese have moved to big cities for work and can't get back to their native villages for Qingming, websites have sprouted that allow people to tend "virtual tombs."

If Zynga launched a CemeteryVille game in China it could be Qingming 24/7/365. People could plant virtual flowers, leave virtual offerings and, during the intermittent spells when the Chinese government does not block Facebook, they could enlist the help of their "friends" in taking excellent cybercare of departed family members.

www.LoriHein.com

Tiananmen: Don't sit down

Today is the 20th anniversary of the Chinese government crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, a crackdown that killed hundreds.

June 4, 1989 was a bad day in Tiananmen, but the vast space, the largest city square in the world, is strange and unwelcoming even on its best.

If the builders' intent was to create a space that glorifies government power and makes people feel small, insignificant and even intimidated, they succeeded.

You can't get comfortable in Tiananmen Square. Its endless, nearly-benchless concrete screams, You can't relax here. It's forbidden. Keep moving! Don't gather. Don't congregate. Don't stop to chat. The folks in the photo at left had nabbed the only bench I saw in the square's entire sterile 440,000 square meters.

The only places in Tiananmen where I saw people congregating were in the long queues outside Mao's tomb.

I'd planned to picnic in Tiananmen but found no comfortable place to sit, so I squatted on a concrete curb near the mausoleum and ate my can of sardines while watching uniformed attendants with megaphones shout orders to the waiting tomb-goers to keep them in straight lines.

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Hutong rubble

As Beijing continues to tear down the old to make way for the new, reducing the city's stock of traditional courtyard neighborhoods called hutongs to endangered species level, it's not uncommon to walk down the street and see straight into the remains of what a week ago was somebody's bedroom.

What do you think, boy's room?

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Wampsutta, monkey meat and other Thanksgiving thoughts

Unless you're a Native American, Thanksgiving is a happy feast day. In Plymouth, not far from where I live, there's food and celebration. But if you look deeper, you'll also find members of the Wampanoag tribe gathered for their National Day of Mourning, held since 1970 when Frank James, a Wampanoag known as Wampsutta, was disinvited to speak at a Thanksgiving dinner when organizers discovered his speech was about the real history of relations between the so-called pilgrims and the native people whose land they landed on. Read James's speech here. No mention of turkey or fixins'.

Thanksgiving. Giving thanks for the blessing of being able to get together with others to buy, cook and eat way too much food, store it as leftovers, and, a week later, figure out what to do with the still uneaten remains. (Pitch it. If you freeze it, it will still be there next Thanksgiving.)

Allow me to use Thanksgiving as a segue into a travel post by sharing with you some of the things I've eaten around the world: monkey stew in Peru; yakburgers in Tibet; boiled, mashed manioc root softened (I swear) with human spit in the Amazon; roasted guinea pig in Ecuador; octopus in Greece; rotten black eggs in Hong Kong; gelatinous green yolk balls in Taipei; tea brewed with coca plant leaves in the Andes.

OK, I didn't really eat the manioc mess -- I pretended to take a taste as the bowl was passed around -- it was probably still full when it returned to the hands of the Yagua Indian woman who'd made it. But all of the other dishes were at least marginally palatable. Some, like the monkey and guinea pig, were culinary treats.

I can't say that for the eel chunks in broth that I was served on a train from Hong Kong to Guangzhou. And positively foul were the snake bits I found hidden in half the dishes on nearly every lazy susan set in the middle of the table in most big-city Chinese restaurants. The Chinese habit of sneaking slices of slithery serpent into my food made me turn to the Power Bars and canned beans and tuna I had in my suitcase. Otherwise I might have starved.

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Wishing well

I don't have time to write a story today, so I offer you a photograph.

Whenever I look at this picture, taken in Beihai Park in Beijing, I consider it for a long time, wondering what these young people are thinking about as the coin drops into the water.

I love the girl second from the right. She's intent and thinking deeply. About what? What is she wishing for?

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Shanghais and Lows: Read Ryan Hagerty's blog

Ryan Hagerty, a kid from my town who's now a junior at Boston University, just landed in Shanghai, where he'll spend the coming semester, and Ryan's blogging while he's there.

Good for us. Check out Ryan's blog, Shanghais and Lows, which, besides being insightful, informative and entertaining, is incredibly well-written.

Thanks for sharing, Ryan. Good stuff.

www.LoriHein.com

Beijing: Olympic-size smog

Enough has been written and broadcast about Beijing's horrid pollution and its impact on the upcoming Olympics to make you choke. It'll be interesting to see how athletes competing in outdoor events -- especially the marathoners, who'll spend an average two and a half hours at intense exertion levels plowing through the noxious soup -- will fare. I don't know how they'll cope. I know I wouldn't -- indeed, didn't -- run in Beijing.

When I travel, one of my favorite activities is a 6 AM run through new territory. I use the run as a reconniassance mission, scoping out streets, sights, neighborhoods, parks, rivers, trails, markets to visit later, sans sneakers and iPod. Not in Beijing. (This photo shows the Forbidden City on, I swear, the clearest, "sunniest" day of my stay.)

When I'd awake in Beijing and look out my hotel window, I often couldn't tell if it were pre- or post-dawn. Had the sun risen, or was it still the tail end of night? The sky was always too dense and gray to tell. I saw only one outdoor runner during my week in the capital, and when I looked down at him from my window perch in the Trader's Hotel, two words popped into my head: death wish.

I took my Beijing exercise at a health club in a hotel next to mine. My Trader's room rate included a daily pass. There weren't many people using the treadmills at that club. Instead, they were doing low impact things like lounging in hot tubs and steam rooms.

I remember walking into a dark, scent-filled area off the ladies' locker room and finding a half-dozen startling beautiful Chinese women arranged, naked, across vibrating massage chairs. They were all tall, slim and elegant with flawless skin and silken hair, quite unlike the average Chinese woman you'd meet on the street. Kept women? High-priced call girls? I eased my clothed, short and not too elegant self into an empty massage chair in a pitch black corner and watched them chat and luxuriate in the buff. Weird but fascinating end to my workout.

Well, here's to the athletes. Good luck to all. Don't forget your inhalers.

www.LoriHein.com

Get me out of here! Tourists trapped

At yoga the other day our instructor, Anne, complimented the class on having attained a level of limberness that let us execute crunches on balance balls without rolling off and crashing onto the studio's wood floor. We students patted ourselves on the backs (a few of us literally, as further demonstration of our increased flexibility).

Over in the corner, Kathy commented that our workouts had also improved her lung capacity. "I went along on a field trip to the Bunker Hill Monument and climbed all the way to the top without getting winded. I was so excited!" She compared that visit with a previous Bunker Hill foray that had left her gasping for air on the narrow staircase that leads to the monument's observation deck and panoramic view of Charlestown and Boston's harbor and skyline. "The staircase keeps winding and turning, and people are coming down while you're going up. And there are no windows."

"Like the Statue of Liberty," said Lucia, unfolding herself from a perfect cat stretch. "I climbed up the Statue of Liberty once and got claustrophobia. Real claustrophobia. I had a panic attack. I was perspiring. I started crying. My son was five, and he didn't know what was happening." A fellow sightseer came to Lucia's aid and guided her to an open air platform where she was able to regroup and steel herself for the trek down.

I felt pangs of sympathy hyperventilation as Lucia recounted her clammy excursion into Lady Liberty's innards. I rolled around on my balance ball and thought about some of the weird, uncomfortable places around the world that I'd stood in lines and paid money to enter. Small, close places I'd have been better off viewing from the outside. High, dizzying places I'd have been better off contemplating from the ground.

The world offers the tourist many places to have a panic attack. Among them:

* Chichen Itza -- I had no problem with the steep climb to the top of the Pyramid of Kukulkan at this remarkable Mayan city in Mexico's Yucatan -- I even sat, smiling, in Chac the Rain God's lap for a rest and photo op when I reached the summit. But when Mike and I ventured inside the chamber behind a staircase at the structure's base for a look at the priceless jaguar statue it held, I freaked out. I imagined the entire pyramid collapsing on my head and pinning me inside the airless, unlit tunnel. A gringo sacrifice to the Mayan gods. I never reached the jaguar -- Mike tells me it was breathtaking -- but before I turned to grope my way back to the exit, I saw two luminescent green balls floating eerily in mid-air at the end of the pitch black passageway: the jaguar's jade eyes.

* St. Paul's Cathedral -- What could be cooler than a climb up into St. Paul's dome, one of the highest in the world? Imagine the sparkling views of merry old London I'd get from up there. I started up the stone staircase, following two 90-pound Japanese girls in stiletto heels, thinking, Piece of cake! London is my oyster! Then the cakewalk turned from broad, stone steps surrounded by reassuringly thick walls to an exposed metal catwalk with near-vomit-inducing gaps between the steps. I couldn't close my eyes, because I'd surely trip and go hurtling over the thin wrought iron armrails and splat unceremoniously onto the stone floor of the nave, a mile below. But I couldn't look, either. A see-through catwalk suspended a hundred feet in the air? Are you kidding me? I need an air sickness bag! I turned around, slowly, and picked my way, squinting, which was a compromise between keeping my eyes open and shutting them tight in terror, to ground level. And way, way up there, the two Japanese girls I'd earlier mentally dismissed as powder-puffy lightweights, pressed onward into the dome, bravely planting their toes and forefeet onto the metal grates and lifting their heels to keep their spikes from getting caught in the gaps.

* Sears Tower -- My architecture cruise on the Chicago River was a highlight of my visit to Chitown. I sat on the boat's top deck with my head tilted back, soaking in the amazing march of magnificent towers that lined both sides of the curving river. When we passed alongside and under the breathtaking endlessness of the black-glass Sears Tower, I couldn't see its top. So, of course, after the boat docked I decided I had to see -- no, stand in -- the top. I walked to the Sears, bought a Skydeck ticket and waited for my group to be called to board the elevator. As we shot up through the shaft at a speed I thought would surely launch us through the roof and into Indiana, the attendant told us about the gargantuan rollers in the 1,353-foot tower's basement that allow it to sway with the prevailing Windy City wind, that literal wiggle room essential to keeping the Sears from breaking in half and crumbling into Lake Michigan. The elevator opened at the Skydeck, and as I made my way toward the windows that faced Lake Michigan, one or more of those Great Lakes-spawned prevailings pummeled the tower. Which, in response, rolled on its gargantuan ball bearings. I was 1,400 feet above the earth in a moving building. I never even looked out the window. I turned tail and took the next elevator to terra firma.

(In July 2007 construction began on Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava's Chicago Spire, an immensity that will dwarf the Sears. It will be a residential building. I assume it will have its own version of basement ball bearings that will enable the mega-skyscraper to roll with it and blow in the wind. Just the promo video on the Spire's website scares me to death. I can't imagine living in it. Or even going to a dinner party in it. Imagine the host announcing, "No worries, everyone. When the building quiets down and your wine's stopped sloshing up out of the glass, Jeeves will come around with refills.")

* Ming Tombs -- I should know by now that I do not have the fortitude to handle tourist attractions with the word "tomb" in their names. But when you've spent thousands of dollars and flown three-quarters of the way around the planet to get to a place, you sometimes tune out the voice of experience. In the name of adventure, into the tomb you plunge.

No doubt many Beijing Olympic-goers will take the day trip from the capital -- if only to escape the city's toxic smog for a few hours -- and head to the Ming Tombs, eternal resting place of 15th-century Chinese emperors. I enjoyed the clear air (Whoa! What's that? Blue sky?!) that surrounded the tombs' 40 hilly park-like acres and the 24 larger-than-life-sized animal sculptures

that line the Sacred Way leading to the crypt. When I got to the crypt itself, the fun was over.

I followed my guide and a herd of tourists down a ramp into a smotheringly horrific underground space. As I stared at the lineup of royal sarcophogi, the walls started closing in. The ceiling got lower and lower. My eyes rebelled at the strange, thick, gray-dark of the chamber. A fetid stink -- death rot mixed with a noxious-smelling air freshener -- snaked through my nasal passages and attacked my lungs. I told my guide I had to leave. His task was to keep his assigned foreigners in a group and keep his eye on them, so he was disinclined to let me go. "Few minute more. Few minute more." A few minutes more would have rendered me insane, so I apologized to the guide and fled, pushing up the ramp against a new incoming stream of mostly Chinese visitors. To be ebbing when everyone else was flowing defied the cosmic order, but people saw the panic in my eyes and let me pass.

I must not be the only one to have clawed my way, sheet-white and gasping, from the clutches of the Ming Tombs. One online guide to the crypts contains this caveat: "We feel it necessary to remind visitors with heart problems to consider carefully whether they should enter the underground chambers. The atmosphere and dull lighting can be a problem."

I'd add: "If you don't have heart problems when you arrive at the Ming Tombs, there's a better than even chance you'll have some when you leave."

www.LoriHein.com

Chengdu's little stars

Many of the victims of this week's earthquake in China's Sichuan province were children. In Chengdu, the provincial capital, and in nearby cities, multi-story concrete school buildings filled with students collapsed and buried the small victims who, in most cases, were their parents' only children.

When Mike and I were in Chengdu, after she'd shown us obligatory tourist sites like the Chengdu Zoo's giant pandas and the cottage of Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu, our guide took us to visit her son's kindergarten class.

We walked three flights up a dark stairwell and came to the classroom, where a beaming group of kids dressed in bright reds, yellows and blues sat, hands clasped, at wide aqua-painted work tables. As we entered, the two teachers, dressed in smocks with big patch pockets, nodded to the children. They stood, faced us, and, through the biggest smiles I'd ever seen, bellowed, "Hello, hello, hello!"

Then they gathered in the middle of the room and sang: Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, in English. They clasped their hands above their heads and spun on tiptoes in tiny circles. When they'd finished, they sat on a long bench that ran against the room's back wall and sang a clapping song in Mandarin.

When our too brief visit was over, we followed our guide back down the stairwell and into the school's front courtyard. "Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye," shouted 30 voices from above our heads. The teachers and all the children were waving from the third-floor classroom's open windows. The guide laughed and waved up at her son, then led us back out into the street.

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The race for Tibet: Saving Shangri-La

When a country bids to host the Olympic Games it says, de facto, that it wants the spotlight, that it welcomes the eyes, ears and attention of the world.

China got the Games -- and the spotlight. And the glare is harsh. As it should be.

On the roof of the world, a relative handful of Tibetan monks and nuns have succeeded, at a cost almost certainly to be paid with many of their lives, in sending out a global SOS. If the world's free people don't or can't use the upcoming Beijing games as leverage to force China into halting the gradual, systematic obliteration of Tibetan religion, culture and freedom that began with its 1949 invasion of Tibet, we may not hear from Tibet, the true Tibet, again. This may be the last call.

If you have the time, please visit the websites listed below for an overview of Tibet's 2,000 years of rich, independent culture centered on peaceful Buddhist principles; its last 59 years of repression under Chinese occupation and rule; its religious and political leader-in-exile and Nobel Peace Prize winner Tenzin Gyatso, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama; the Tibetan government-in-exile in Dharmsala, India; and organizations dedicated to helping free Tibet from Chinese oppression:

International Campaign for Tibet: http://www.savetibet.org/


Official site of the Tibetan government in exile: www.tibet.netTibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy: www.tchrd.org

The Beijing Olympics and The Race for Tibet: http://www.racefortibet.org/


Official site of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet: http://www.dalailama.com/



Spend some time on these sites, and you'll begin to feel the uniqueness of Tibet in our world. We can't lose it. For a more in-depth look at Tibet and Tibetans since the Chinese takeover, read John Avedon's 1997 book, In Exile from the Land of Snows.



The Dalai Lama no longer has hope that Tibet will again be a sovereign nation. He is a 72-year-old realist who knows that he is Tibet's -- and the world's -- last Dalai Lama. His goal now is to save his people's culture and restore their freedom. What he wants from China at this point, after a half-century of quiet struggle, is a peacefully negotiated agreement that will give Tibetans a measure of autonomy and self-rule within the Chinese state and essential human freedoms of religion, expression and movement.

The Dalai Lama has already laid out a roadmap for the governance of that freer Tibet, a society based on the Hindu/Buddhist/Jainist principle of ahimsa, a Sanskrit word that means no violence. The Dalai Lama has lived and led by ahimsa, non-injury toward all, and his vision for future Tibet calls for, in part and in his words (read his entire governance plan here):

"Nature of Polity


The Tibetan polity should be founded on spiritual values and must uphold the interests of Tibet, its neighbouring countries and the world at large. Based on the principles of Ahimsa, and aimed at making Tibet a zone of peace, it should uphold the ideals of freedom, social welfare, democracy, cooperation and environmental protection.

Fundamental Principles of the Government

The Tibetan Government will observe and adhere to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and promote the moral and material welfare of its citizens.

Renunciation of Violence and Military Force

Tibet will be a zone of peace, based on the principles of nonviolence, compassion and protection of the natural environment. Tibet will remain nonaligned in the international communities and will not resort to war for any reason. "


I took the photos displayed in this blog post when Mike and I visited Tibet in 1987. Even then, before the wholesale transfer and migration of Han Chinese into Tibet accelerated the eradication of nearly all things Tibetan, I knew I was documenting a way of life that was perched on a precipice and about to be pushed off into the void. Even then, the sense of fear and loss hung heavy.

I can only imagine how heavy it hangs today.

www.LoriHein.com

Bookstore souvenirs

I traveled to Cape Cod last night to see a dear friend and to sign books at a fundraiser for her daughter's school. The event was in Falmouth, one of my favorite Cape Cod towns, and was hosted by Inkwell Bookstore, a beautiful shop on Falmouth's Main Street. If your travels take you to the Cape, pop in and browse and say hello to owners Kathleen and Michelle.

Books make wonderful travel souvenirs. Forays into stacks and along shelves of booksellers around the world have netted me a collection of interesting and quirky titles. Among them:

From Jamaica: Mi Granny Seh Fi Tell Yu Seh: The A to Z of Jamaicanisms, with advice on topics like Grief, Family, Confidence, Patience and Aspiration. From the chapter on Opportunity: "Hog wash enna de fus wata 'im ketch." Translation: "A hog washes in the first water he sees/Take advantage of the first opportunity."

Also from Jamaica: A Code of Conduct For Police-Citizen Relations. The "Attitudes of Approach" section offers this advice for citizens approached by the police: "RUNNING AWAY: Whether you have committed an offence or not, irrespective of how frightened you may feel, DO NOT RUN AWAY! TO DO SO MAY MAKE YOU APPEAR GUILTY."

From China: A dutifully well-thumbed, pocket-sized copy of The Quotations of Mao Zedong, known in the West as the Little Red Book. I can't read the copyright date because it's in Chinese, but it's clearly Cultural Revolution-era, when carrying the book and studying it daily were compulsory. I bought it from a sidewalk bookseller and paid him his two dollar asking price without haggling. Pleased with the ease and profit of the transaction, he threw in a free antique porcelain teacup.

From a Bergen, Norway souvenir shop (photo) that stocked trolls and kiddy lit: colorful chapter books with blond, rosy-cheeked tots on their covers and Il-Vjaggi Ta' Gulliver. Gulliver's name's the same, but, being plurals, Lilliputians become Lilliputjani in Norwegian.

From an antique and used book shop in Eton, England, home of 15th century Eton College and a short footbridge walk over the Thames from Windsor Castle: How to Lay a Nest Egg: Financial Facts of Life for the Average Girl, copyright 1950. It begins: "Ladies, this book is about You. Some girls (that includes the author's wife) have long wished they could lay eggs instead of having children the cumbersome human way... But laying a nest egg is something else again; something quite within your power -- yours alone, no daddy required, not even a sugar daddy."

From Kenya: Wisdom of Maasai. The introduction tells us "these proverbs reveal the knowledge inherited by the speakers of Maa. It is good that the children read this wisdom so that they do not forget completely. Proverbs are an integral part of the Maasai language. A Maasai hardly speaks ten sentences without using at least one proverb." A sample from the "Conduct" chapter: "Menyanyuk enchikati enkutuk o eno siadi/ The odour from the mouth (words) is stronger than the odour from the arms."

In Perros-Guirec in Brittany, a region in northwest France that sits on the sea and has deep Celtic roots, I picked up a little green book of Breton proverbs, Krennlavariou Brezhonek. The book delivers its gems in Breton, French and English:

"A bep liv marc'h mat, A bep bro tud vat/ De toute couleur bon cheval, de tout pays gens de valeur."

Translation: "Good horses come in all colours, good people come from all countries."

Hey, isn't that Pablo Wendel?

A few weeks ago, German performance artist Pablo Wendel, clad in a tunic that looked like it was made of baked clay, hopped into the burial pit in emperor Qin Shi Huang's mausoleum in Xian, China and stood silent and motionless beside a line of the site's famous terra cotta warriors.

This was a pretty audacious stunt, because the Chinese take their terra cotta warriors, buried with the emperor about 2,200 years ago and discovered in 1974 by a few farmers digging a well, very seriously. Xian, capital of China's Shaanxi province, is a city full of ancient sites that you can walk or climb on -- ancient brick structures like the old, wide city walls and the mustard-colored Yellow Goose Pagoda.

But you can't mess with the warriors. Pablo lasted a few minutes before Chinese police spotted him and pulled him out.

Security is tight at the emperor's mausoleum, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and there are eyes everywhere. I'm amazed that Pablo managed to make it into the building that covers the mausoleum, never mind into the actual pit. After all, he was dressed unconventionally, and I'd have thought his circa 246 BC military attire might have been a bit of a red flag.

Every visitor to the site is watched, and you feel the eyes on your back as you move along the railing that separates you from the platoons of soldiers and horses standing in the football field-size hole below you.

When Mike and I visited, no photography was allowed, which irked the die-hard photographers in the group we were traveling with. I felt cheated at having flown to the other side of the world to see one of the planet's foremost archaeological wonders and not being allowed to photograph it.

I channeled my anger and disappointment into an illicit act. As I circumambulated the pit, I intermittently rested my Nikon on the railing at a slight downward angle and clicked the shutter and cocked the advance, using fake coughing jags to mask the sounds. I hoped for the best as I worked my way around the site popping off these surreptitious shots.

The best would be to not only not get caught, but to also end up with one or two decent pictures of the warriors' ghost-eyed faces.

Alas, the best was not to be. I didn't get caught -- the air is so bad in China and bronchial conditions so prevalent that my coughing bursts aroused no suspicion. Everybody coughs in China. But I didn't get any good photos, either. I ended up with a dozen fuzzy, unfocused images of dirt, with an occasional discernible eye or nose or arm.

Russell Thompson, a wiry, 75-year-old, denim-clad New Yorker who was traveling with our group, was not content to take his chances and shoot from the hip, as it were. Russell, a professional photographer who shot in black and white, wanted perfect pictures, and he knew the only way to get them was to raise his camera to his eye, frame his subject, and slowly and deliberately coax his Nikon's manual focus and light settings to create the image he was after.

Russell cased the joint for the perfect warrior-horse grouping, and, once he found it, planted his feet slightly apart, brought his thousand-dollar precision instrument to his eye, worked its rings and settings, and clicked away. Within 20 seconds, three policemen were on him, two at each arm and one separating Russell from his Nikon. They took him away -- perhaps to the same room they took Pablo -- and we waited, killing time in the museum next to the mausoleum, for Russell to reappear. He rejoined us after an hour or so, having been relieved of the film that was inside his camera.

But the authorities gave him his camera back, and they let him keep the 20 rolls of Kodak pro-grade film in his backpack. Not wanting to risk another visit to the interrogation room -- now perhaps known as the Pablo Wendel Room -- Russell joined me at the souvenir tent, where I was busy photographing the miniature clay warrior knock-offs that filled the vendors' tables. Russell liked doing portraits, so while I shot the souvenirs, Russell was recording the faces of the souvenir sellers.

Want a life-size terra cotta warrior for your front lawn or living room? For two thousand bucks, The China Terra Cotta Warriors Company will ship you one, and they'll throw in a deck of terra cotta warrior playing cards as a special thank-you for your order.

www.LoriHein.com

Happy Birthday, Dalai Lama

I wasn't planning to post today. I just finished an article on deadline and was looking forward to a day or two of writing absolutely nothing. And, OLN's Tour de France broadcast starts in 25 minutes.

But I just heard on the radio that today is the Dalai Lama's 71st birthday, and I couldn't let the day pass without wishing one of the planet's kindest souls and gentlest peacemakers a happy birthday.

Wherever we went in Lhasa and across Tibet, people would whisper, "Dalai Lama pic?" hoping we westerners had tucked a forbidden photo or two of His Holiness in our backpacks. We, the tourists, hadn't. We'd been ardently advised not to in the travel documents provided by our tour company. Attempt to enter China with photos or writings about or by the Dalai Lama and prepare to potentially spend a whole bunch of time in a cold cell was the message.

So we left our Dalai Lama pics at home. But our tour guide hadn't.

He stunned us when, at a monastery outside Lhasa, after a gaunt monk in a crimson robe peered around a painted pillar and uttered a hushed but hopeful "Dalai Lama pic?", he produced one and handed it to the monk. I shot a photo (which I'd inserted in this post then deleted, knowing this blog is read in China) of the guide giving the glorious contraband to the monk, and I held my breath from that moment until we crossed the Nepalese border two weeks later, knowing that if, for some reason, my film were seized and developed, the guide and I might go to jail. And the monk might die.

When we got to Kathmandu, I bought a bright red t-shirt with an embroidered Tibetan flag on its front, under the words, "FREE TIBET." We'd been in Kathmandu two days when I picked up a newspaper and read that, the very day we'd crossed the Tibetan-Nepalese border, two 20-something Americans had been arrested in Lhasa's Barkhor Square and imprisoned.

Their crime? Wearing "FREE TIBET" t-shirts.

www.LoriHein.com

Hong Kong: Walled in in Kam Tin

Hong Kong is one of the most exciting and visually stunning places on the planet. Kowloon and Hong Kong Island, where most visitors spend their time, are nonstop feasts that engage all the senses. A day trip to the less-traveled New Territories offers slices of relative calm and a break from the bright lights of the big city.

Mike and I rode the Kowloon metro north to the end of the line and hopped on a Kowloon Motor Bus headed for Yuen Long, a New Territories district. Our goal was Kam Tin. I’d read about a 500-year-old walled village, Kat Hing Wai, one of the village settlements, or wai, that dot Kam Tin town. We’d been riding Hong Kong’s hyperkinetic wave for days, and I needed a rest, a place where we could ratchet down the pace a few hundred notches. Where better than a remote Ming Dynasty walled village of a few hundred souls?

Bus 64K climbed up into breast-shaped mountains covered in forest and wooded parks. We hopped off the bus before Kam Tin and made a short detour to Lok Ma Chau, a New Territories lookout point that crowns an area sprinkled here and there with rice paddies and duck farms. From the top of Lok Ma Chau, dubbed "Look Ma, China!" during Hong Kong’s run as a British colony, you gaze from Yuen Long district across the Shenzhen River to mainland China and the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, a massive, characterless city where platoons of cheap labor churn out mountains of cheap goods.

After we reached downtown Kam Tin, we walked 15 minutes down a dusty, straight street lined with low, flat-roofed brick houses. Laundry flapped in the blue air and just-made firecrackers dried atop neck-high bamboo racks that ran much of the length of the road.

We came to the walled village, which sat in a sea of weeds and scraggly trees, and tall grass grew in what was once the moat. We found the village’s only entrance and stepped into a tight, close world of brick walls and charcoal fires, narrow alleys and dark doorways, greasy windows and small shrines, smoking joss sticks and bicycles at rest. The place is a fascinating, claustrophobic labyrinth of tiny houses, some modern, some dating to the Ch’ing Dynasty.

The first settlement at Kat Hing Wai dates from the late 1400s, the Ch’ing-hua period of the Ming Dynasty. The 18-foot-high walls were added in the early Ch’ing (Qing) Dynasty to protect villagers, members of a family clan called Tang, from roving bands of thieves and pirates. The clan’s Hakka descendants live there today, and Hakka women in bright printed blouses, black slacks and flat shoes pose for pictures for a few yuan. I invested in some shots of Mike bookended by the gap-toothed grandmas in their black lampshade hats.

After an hour in the village’s walled confines, I needed air, and I needed out. When we stepped through the gate into the sun, a Hakka woman seated on a kitchen chair asked us for a small donation. We made a contribution to the preservation of this ancient place and made our way back past the racks of newly minted fireworks to Kam Tin’s bus stop.

Some two hours later Bus 64K deposited us into the bustle of Kowloon. Neon and traffic and skyscrapers and clogged sidewalks and vendors and hawkers and crammed apartment buildings and junks and harbor ferries and clouds of food smells and jars full of snakes sitting in apothecary windows and everybody moving, moving, moving. A wonderful, welcome frenzy.


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1,000 years of pain: One girl's take on Chinese footbinding

Today, I bring you a guest writer. My 13-year-old daughter's social studies teacher gave this assignment: "Write a poem about footbinding in imperial China." (I think Manolo Blahnik lifted his design ideas from the Chinese... ) Here's Dana's opus. She got an A+:

The Chinese tradition of footbinding was thought to bring a woman beauty,

But many consider it an act of cruelty.

To break a woman's toes and cause so much pain --

But at what cost?

To attract a man?

But what is so attractive when the poor woman can barely stand?

Imagine the pain of your foot being forced to take the shape of a lily.

I must say, I do think it seems quite silly.

The peasant women,

Yes, they have it good!

Their feet are free to grow just as they should.

It is the wealthy women who have their feet bound,

In hope, by a man, they will be found.

I do not agree with this,

I see it unfair.

These poor women spend most of their hours confined to a chair.

I would not want my feet to be broken and bent,

Inside the house most of my time would be spent.

The pain they go through with their feet half normal size,

This tradition is not a very wise enterprise.

However, it symbolized nobility, beauty and wealth,

While at the same time not good for their feet's health.

LoriHein.com

Tatopani: Balloons and boiled potatoes

We'd been traveling across the Tibetan plateau for some two weeks. Tibet, the raw, rugged roof of the world, is one of Earth’s remotest and most exotic destinations, but travel there is physically punishing. Tibet fills you up and saps you utterly, all in the same moment. Our journey was nearing its end, and we all looked forward to crossing the border into Nepal. In Kathmandu there’d be hot food and hot water, and we dreamed of these. We had savored our trek across Tibet, but we were spent.

We’d had our share of broken roads and landslides. We’d helped Pinzo, our strapping driver with his thick shock of black hair and patient twinkle in his eyes, push our little bus out of countless mud holes and swollen streams. We’d dodged rabid dogs. We’d been eating cold stewed tomatoes straight from the can for days, sucking down the juice to relieve our dehydration and to take in every possible gram of vitamin C we could get our lips on. We couldn’t remember our last shower or change of clothes.

At Zhangmu, Tibet, we made our way down a mountainside to the Friendship Bridge that links China to Nepal at Kodari. The hike was too steep and grueling for a few older members of our group, so they hired nimble-footed porters to carry them across the border on their backs. Our itinerary called for a bus to meet us in Kodari and take us to a site where helicopters would ferry us over a wide, severe landslide area. Once over the slide, another bus would meet us and take us to Kathmandu. That was the plan.

But plans go awry. We had inept tour guides who squabbled amongst themselves and failed to consider that helicopters don’t just appear from thin air to pick up tourists. Somebody has to call them first. And nobody had. We’d end up walking over the slide the next day, a challenge that would take 10 hours.

But first, we had to find somewhere to spend the night. We were driven to Tatopani, Nepal and left in the middle of the town’s dirt main street. Trekkers on Nepal’s Annapurna circuit use Tatopani as a rest stop, and when we arrived there weren’t enough rooms in the town’s few basic lodges to house us. We were filthy, frustrated, hungry and exhausted, and there was no room for us at the inn.

Then something remarkable happened. The people of Tatopani opened their hearts and homes to us. A handful of farmers and herders and merchants found space for us in the lofts of their wooden houses. They rolled crude mats onto the straw-covered plank floors and told us we were welcome.

After we’d all laid claim to a mat somewhere, we gathered in the street. We hadn’t eaten since morning, so we made plans to buy and share whatever meager edibles were available on the dusty shelves of Tatopani’s few tiny stores.

But before we could start shopping, a man called to us from a narrow wooden house. He opened the door and windows as wide as they would go and invited us all inside. A woman stood over a kettle that hung on a tripod over a wood fire. Steam billowed from the pot, and something smelled fresh, hot and wonderful. The man had set up a few tables in his front room, and we all sat down. After a few minutes, the woman set a huge platter of boiled yellow potatoes on each table. And a bowl of salt. We had no plates or cutlery. Just fingers, beautiful, round, creamy, butter-colored potatoes, and salt. We picked up the hot, skinned potatoes, dipped them into the salt, and ate the best meal of our lives. I will never forget how those Tatopani potatoes tasted, coated with healthy chunks of salt, as they slid around my mouth in that dark, smoke-filled room turned into a makeshift restaurant just for us.

Sated to our bones, we thanked the family and moved outside. By now, everyone in the village knew of us and our unplanned overnight stay, and they smiled and nodded as they passed us in the street. A group of children, some with tiny brothers or sisters in bundles on their backs, stood studying us. One of our fellow travelers reached into his pack and pulled out a bag of yellow balloons. He began blowing them up, and the children moved closer. Within a few minutes, nearly every kid in Tatopani held a yellow balloon.

Some of the balloons got away and bounced down the dusty road. I watched them roll away, like giant, magical, yellow potatoes, and thought how lucky we were to be stranded in Tatopani.


Where shall we go next?

A little China, a little Russia...

Back from Moscow and St. Petersburg. Thoroughly wonderful experience. I'll share more about the trip after I've developed my slides. I'll give you a hint, though: This ain't your mother's Russia! Babes, not babuschkas, and intense positive energy everywhere.

I have a million things to do before I take off for the New Hampshire woods for the weekend, so I thought I'd post a link to my story about a Beijing back alley that's running now in the July issue of Tom Schueneman's excellent online publication, The Traveler. Enjoy this walk down Wonder Alley.

Shangri-La Express: Slow train to Tibet

Have a spare 17 grand that’s been burning a hole in your pocket? Book a berth on the Shangri-La Express, due to roll from Golmud, China to Lhasa, Tibet beginning in 2007. For $16,995 single occupancy, you can take a deluxe International Railway Traveler Society rail tour of China that begins and ends in Beijing and includes a 20-hour ride on the 713 miles of track the Chinese government is currently constructing to link Golmud with the fabled Tibetan capital. (The UK’s Trans-Siberian Express will operate the train, and National Geographic Traveler magazine reported that tours starting at $5,600 are available through the operator’s booking arm, GW Travel. That may be, but in this blog, I link you only to sites that pass the Lori Hein test, and gwtravel.co.uk, didn’t. Once on the site, a look at their price list requires a download, a step I didn’t appreciate. If you’re interested, you’ve got the URL.)

When completed, the tracks between Golmud, in Qinghai Province north of Tibet, and Lhasa, will be the world’s highest railway line. For most of the journey, passengers will roll along at over 13,000 feet, topping out at 17,146, and pressurized cabins will mitigate the effects of the low-oxygen environment. (Effects like brain-piercing altitude sickness headaches. Mine reduced me to a weeping pile of flesh, and I ate painkillers and sucked on the hose of the oxygen bottle in my Lhasa hotel room to no effect. I waited it out, all the while thinking my head would surely explode and I would die on the floor of the Lhasa Holiday Inn.)

The advent of the Shangri-La Express is remarkable not only for the wonder of its engineering, but because it will make more accessible a place that has, for ages, been among the world’s most difficult to reach. And it’s Tibet’s remoteness that has helped protect and nurture its gentle 1400-year-old Buddhist culture and has given the land its powerful aura of mystery.

This train to Shangri-La is a watershed railroad. A turning point that signals a point of no return for Tibetan culture and no hope of independence from Chinese occupation. In 1958, seven years after they invaded Tibet and a year before the Dalai Lama fled to exile in Dharmsala, India, the Chinese began construction of the Xining-Golmud section of a planned Qinghai-Tibet Railway. That first link opened to traffic in 1984. The Golmud-Lhasa stretch is the final link in the chain. By laying track through Himalayan plateaus and sacred peaks, landscape heretofore considered virtually impenetrable, and establishing a Chinese rail terminus in Tibet’s ancient capital, the Chinese make a statement: Lest anyone still doubt, Tibet is not merely linked to China, it’s chained.

Now for the upside. I’d choose a 20-hour luxury train ride to Lhasa over the two and a half-hour white-knuckle flight Mike and I took from Chengdu to Lhasa any day of the week. Chengdu, in Sichuan Province, is the key air gateway to Tibet. Starting in 2007, Golmud, which is a road gateway, will also be a rail gateway. It’s nice that travelers will have a choice, because our flight was one of the four scariest of my life. (The others? Fodder for another post...)

We took off from Chengdu. The CAAC flight attendants were getting ready to distribute sad little passenger “box lunches” when a voice announced that the plane had “mechanical problems” and we were returning to Chengdu. One of the four engines had shut down. We circled Chengdu, the pilot using the Chinese flying techniques that had been scaring me to near-death on every flight we’d taken in the country. I was sure we’d never see Tibet. We were going down, our quest for Shangri-La doomed to end in a Sichuan vegetable field.

We landed, I kissed the tarmac, then we sat in the Chengdu terminal for two hours. We talked with some businessmen who’d earlier taken off from Chengdu for Chungking (Chongqing), a 40-minute flight. They’d gotten all the way to Chungking but couldn’t land due to fog at Chungking airport. So, the plane flew back to Chengdu, where passengers and crew sat waiting for the fog to lift so they could try again. Fog talk. An ill omen, I thought. I knew the Chengdu to Lhasa flight wouldn’t leave if there were but a hint of fog in Lhasa. Each moment spent repairing our engine gave the elements more time to blow fog toward Tibet. Hurry up! No, never mind! Don’t hurry up! Take your sweet time fixing that engine, and please do it well! I was a bundle of nervous emotion.

We took off again. I was flying to Lhasa, Tibet, the Roof of the World, a place I’d dreamed of seeing since I was a kid devouring copies of my grandmother’s National Geographic. That I was on my way to this fabled place was blowing my mind, but as much as I tried to relax and let the glorious anticipation wrap around me, I couldn’t help fixating on the engine outside my window. Was that the one that had blown? Did they really fix it? Would it die again, causing the insignificant plane to smack into a 20,000-foot ice-encrusted Himalaya? And the pilot. The guy used reverse thrust and other techniques that felt horribly alien. He was going to land us between Himalayas on a short strip of tarmac at the world’s highest airport? Whoa, baby. Never mind the box lunch. Get me a cognac.

About two hours into the flight, on the plane’s left side, a scene of unparalleled beauty revealed itself. We were some 7,000 feet above the highest peaks of the Qionglai-Minshan Mountains (see post below), an eastern range of the Himalaya. My fear and anxiety found new partners, awe and wonder, when I saw what I believe was 24,790-foot Gonga Shan (Minya Konka in Tibetan) – if not her, a near neighbor – pierce the clouds and seemingly rise to meet the plane. Terrifyingly beautiful. Overwhelming, brutal, magnificent.

The sea of glorious peaks we flew over separate the Sichuan Basin from the Tibetan Plateau. A staggering, powerful, vertical white wall that heralds and holds back the magic that is Tibet. Part of this landscape is Kham, (Chamdo in Mandarin), land of strong, quiet horsemen. Part of this landscape was traversed and explored by Joseph Francis Rock, a botanist and adventurer who led the 1927-1930 National Geographic Southwest China-Tibet expedition. His photographs, many of which were published in National Geographic, are a window to the true Shangri-La. That Rock penetrated such a remote piece of the planet to study plants, geography, people and culture still amazes, and in preparing this post I found a wonderful blog by a present-day Rockphile. Click and enjoy.

We cleared the high Himalaya. I exhaled. We neared Lhasa. I inhaled. I girded myself for another strange Chinese landing, and the pilot obliged by delivering a horrible gut-girding reverse thrust maneuver, then practically diving for the tarmac. Hey, this isn’t a helicopter, pal. I dug my nails into Mike’s arm and prayed we’d live long enough to see the Potala Palace (above).

Next time, I’ll take the train.

Beijing: A walk down Wonder Alley

I have a piece in this month's issue of Go World Travel Magazine. Click here to take a stroll down Beijing's Wonder Alley.

Click here to read the issue's Contributors page.

Enjoy.