9 days in China and no rice!

Well, almost no rice. We had rice porridge the night we arrived in Beijing (Bernie's came with liver!), fried rice as part of our breakfast once at the Mao'er Hutong B&B, and a casserole of rice with preserved duck leg and spare ribs. But absolutely no white steamed rice, and we didn't see many Chinese people eating rice either. I guess that's northern China--they like dumplings and fried breads instead.
There's lots of stalls that sell crazy food to tourists both Chinese and international, like seahorses and silkworm larvae, but we weren't into that gimmicky stuff. Stefan enjoyed some squid on a stick though!
And we went to a restaurant in Shenyang in northeast China (aka Manchuria). No English menu, no pictures on the menu, we smiled and pointed to our menu and to the other tables and to the waitress and asked her to pick for us. She chose three dishes and they came out one by one: a small plate of cold sliced green vegetable, a large plate of diced silken tofu swimming in butter. And finally a huge bowl with a large fish swimming in a clear liquid. Soup? No, when she skimmed off the dried red chili peppers covering the entire top of the bowl we saw that the fish was in a gallon or so of bubbling hot oil sprinkled with mouth-numbing Szechuan peppercorns
People say that real Chinese food isn't as greasy or salty as what we get in the US, but they're wrong!
Other

Nice Goan

Our last week in India was spent in the chill zone of Goa (this is the type of lingo they use in the Lonely Planet). Stefan used to think that Goa was a city when he heard about it in his electro music days during the mid-nineties, but quickly learned that it is actually the smallest state in India. There are several towns that are slightly inland from the ocean, and that is where the majority of the Indians are. We spent a day or so exploring the biggest city known as Panjim (or Panaji), which has a Portuguese past and is also close to the abandoned Portuguese city of Old Goa which is little more than a collection of old churches nowadays.
We then headed off to Anjuna beach, one of many beaches in Goa, where we chillaxed for several days. Bernie got stung by a jellyfish our first time in the water, but it was pretty minor. We can highly recommend this beach of anyone is thinking of goan to Goa.
Our last day in Goa the surf was really big due to a tropical storm (05-A) in the Arabian Sea.


Before leaving India, we spent one more evening in crazy Mumbai before our flight to Seoul (connecting to Beijing) left at 4:35 am! We took a taxi to one of the beach areas called Juhu beach where we ate some Bhel Puri and cocunut water and drank a cold coffee.

Some photos you may wish to enlarge

Did you know that if you double click on one of the beautiful photos in our blog, it will open in a new window in a much larger size? try it, it works for us at least!

One of the pleasures of travelling on Air France is passing through Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris and being packed into shuttle buses from terminal to terminal, from main terminal to remote terminal, from remote terminal to plane etc etc.

Here's a sign that caught our eye while we were stuck on a bus--can anyone translate it? The top part is French, but the bottom half starts out in English and then switches to...Latin??? Is this the famous Gallic wit? Some comment on the new Europe? Please explain.

I think we all can agree that the French know a lot about cheeses and wines...and it turns out they know where to find good beer too--in Milwaukee of course! This self-service bar on our flight from Paris to Mumbai (Bombay) was picked pretty thin, but it still had a warm can of tasty brew on the top shelf!

More dust in northern India

After a few days in dusty, crowded, and did I mention smoggy Delhi, it was a relief to get on an air-con train for a 20 hour train ride west, almost to the Pakistan border. (and while we were on the train there was a bombing in Karachi, Pakistan that killed 130 or more people: http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/10/27/pakistan.bhutto/?iref=mpstoryview

The four of us (Stefan, Bernie, Bernie's father John and John's partner Sue) had our own private compartment, so what if there were a few cockroaches crawling about? For more on train travel in India, see this site that was a great help for us: http://www.seat61.com/India.htm

Our destinatation, Jaisalmer, was once an important stop on a trading route, and is far smaller than any other city we've seen in India: a good part of the 60,000 or so residents live inside the old fort, and you can see the town ending and the desert beginning just a couple km away.

After a day chilling in the desert, it was back on the train for another 13 hours, heading east to Jaipur. But we were so tired of dust and crowds that we didn't explore too much of the city: John and Sue went to a temple outside town where there are separate bathing areas for men, women and monkeys, while Bernie visited the City Palace of the maharajas of Jaipur (they were expert polo players), and Stefan stayed at the hotel and worked on his thesis!

Delhi

Delhi is very different than Mumbai. It's all spread out and transportation is via bicycle or auto-rickshaw instead of by taxi. There are far more touts and harrassment in general. We visited the spots where both Indhira Gandhi and Mahatma Gandhi were assassinated. We went on a day trip to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, we saw India's largest Mosque and spent a lot of time trying to navigate various modes of transportation and haggling with autorickshaw drivers.

Mumbai

In typical Indian fashion we arrived late in the evening in Mumbai, and our one checked bag had not made our connecting flight from Paris (I guess a long connection is just as dangerous as a short connection for losing luggage). After some strange customs formalities regarding the missing bag, we were now in India. There was bumper to bumper traffic at 1am in Mumbai, perhaps partially due to Ramadan, but probably just generally the way things are. It was hot and humid all of the time in Mumbai.

We spent several nights there and were led around town by Rafique Baghdadhi, a Hindi film critic who writes for an Indian economic magazine in Mumbai. It was sort of a friend of a friend of a friend sort of thing. Rafique showed us all around town, and familiarized us with the joys of drinking at the Press Club, and eating Mughlai (muslim, non-veg) cuisine in the muslim quarter of Mumbai after dark during ramadan. We also tried some Paan, a sort of fibrous, chewy concoction made up of the narcotic beetelnut, which was sort of gross. After a few days we took the overnight train to Delhi and met up with Bernie's father John at the train station.

Mauritius

Sorry for the long delay in postings.

We left Cape Town around October 1 on our marathon journey to Mauritius via Amsterdam and Paris. Of course, this would not go smoothly as we only had a couple of hours for each layover and upon arrival at the airport in Cape Town we were informed that our flight from AMS to CDG had been cancelled. Not too big of a deal, we were put on the next flight to Paris which left us with a short one hour layover at one of the world's most absurd airports, Charles du Gaulle. Long story short, we missed our flight to Mauritius and spent several hours working with Air France to get us there on the next flight which was operated by Air Mauritius. Luckily, we got seats on that flight and were on our way to the Indian Ocean with only a 5 hour delay. We found the service onboard Air Mauritius to be superior to that of Air France.

After arrival, very little time was wasted with Stefan jumping into his open water scuba certification course. He did the entire course in three days (including reading several hundred pages of text) and his german instructor Larissa did a great job even though she was suffering from a cold. After Stefan finished his class we rented a car and drove around the island a little, visiting the central highlands and a Hindu holy lake with a gigantic statue of the god Shiva the destroyer.

We later went on a dive together (Bernie's first dive in nearly 10 years) and saw lots of beautiful coral and sponges.

We said goodbye to Mauritius after one short week on the beautiful island and flew back to Paris where we would spend the night before flying the next morning to Mumbai. As our 747 was about 150 meters above the runway at CDG, our jumbo jet aborted the landing in what was the most knucklebiting flying experience of our lives. For several seconds we weren't sure if our jet was going to be ripped in two or not. Apparently these are called "go-arounds" and are relatively common at large, busy airports when the runway hasn't been cleared fast enough of the prior aircraft. In my mind, that is a near-miss.