I’d been trying to go to Hangzhou not too far from Shanghai for several years, but had always been deflected by inconvenient bus or train connections. In the summer of 1993 I finally managed to make it there and had more than the usual amount of trouble finding accommodation. A small reference in a guide book pointed to a guest house outside of town and I finally found a bike rickshaw driver who was willing to pedal me out there – which is where the memories are getting intense…

The old man is pedaling hard to get the rickshaw across a steep hill. I can see the bulging muscles in his legs, but also his smiling face as he turns around as he reaches the top, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth bobbing up and down.

“This is tea!” – he points at the deep green fields all around us, his Chinese with a thick local accent barely understandable. And indeed, we are surrounded by tea plantations. Row after row of tea plants cover the steep hillsides and valleys all around us.

The guest house is another hill further down the road and on the final climb we enter a deep forest, a mixture of bamboo groves and thick-leaved trees. I thank the driver profusely since only now I know how far it had really been. He laughs, takes the money and bikes back down the hill, disappearing from view in seconds.

The guest house consists of several dark, squat buildings, each in a small clearing of the forest. The walls are overgrown with ivy and green patches of mold cover the white plaster. It’s been raining daily and the air is humid, heavy and full with the sounds of cicadas and other insects.

It’s easy to get a room – I’m pretty sure the guest house is not licensed to host foreigners, but it is probably a hotel for party officials and the local police has better things to do than to check the books. It’s also very empty. Later in the dining room I meet two more backpackers that made it here, Craig from the UK and Jürgen from Germany. That’s it. No Chinese guests at all as far as I can tell.

Dinner was not bad and the three of us spend a long evening in the dining room and later in the lobby talking about our respective trips through the country. As darkness falls, it becomes obvious how remote this place is. There are no lights beyond the small parking lot in front of the lobby. The world ends abruptly at a wall of bamboo swaying in the wind, leaves rustling, the stalks knocking against each other with gentle, oddly melodic sounds.

I finally go back to my room and turn on the TV which surprises me with functioning controls and several channels to choose from. While I prepare for bed I flip randomly through the channels and suddenly see a title sequence that is strangely familiar. It’s the beginning of “A Chinese Ghost Story” – I’d seen the movie just the year before at a cinema in Munich during a foreign film festival.

For the next ninety minutes I’m enchanted by this movie – I’d liked it in Munich, but to see it here, with the sounds of the wind and rain in the trees outside of my room, in a dark, remote forest in the middle of China… it takes on a whole new dimension.

After the movie I put on my shoes one more time and go out in front of the guest house. I don’t walk far, just to the edge of the light. It’s after midnight and the night is very dark. Heavy drops fall from the leaves as the wind shifts the bamboo stalks.

Deep in the forest, I can hear the tree spirit move.

In the early nineties it was still very common in China to see steam engines pulling freight trains. I vividly remember the first time I saw these huge, smoke-black trains lumbering through a station, white clouds of steam escaping from the valves with a loud, hissing noise.

But what I really remember on a much deeper level is this…

Being on a night train, sleeping under the hot ceiling of a hardsleeper carriage in the topmost of three bunks. The trains often stop in nondescript stations in the early morning hours to switch engines and the carriages shudder and bang against each other as the engine decouples, followed by eery silence.

The silence is only disturbed by the snoring from other passengers and the odd clank and hiss of the carriage breaks as the pressure on the lines slowly decreases. It is two or maybe three o’clock in the morning, the station is dark and whatever town lies on the other side of the tracks is invisible. There could be a million people sleeping nearby or maybe only a few hundred.

I usually wake up at this point, since the sudden silence is disturbing and strange, alerting the subconscious mind as it had adjusted to the constant rumble of the train, the blaring of the horn, the rhythm of the clickety-clack of the wheels on the rails.

And just as I am about to fall asleep again, there comes a deep, throaty, whooshing noise, a rhythmic, mechanical breathing with a bass note that rumbles through your gut. A freight train rolls into the station and comes to a slow stop next to my carriage. The world is suddenly filled with a loud hissing noise. The steam engine on the next track is only meters away, a mighty “ka-chooong, ka-chooong, ka-chooong” vibrates through every bone.

No other machine sounds so alive as a steam train late at night.

Here is a gorgeous look at the 56 ethnic groups (long page with big photos), from the western deserts to the eastern ocean shore and from Russian enclaves in the far north to tribal villages in the jungle near the Burmese border.

I wasn’t able to find much information about this amazing photo shoot, but it is obvious that serious funding and much work was involved in creating these unique tableaus – each of the photos must have taken several days to prepare and clearly much care was taken in selecting the members of each community and in encouraging them to put on their traditional clothes.

My first thought was – “Well, that makes my commute look insignificant!” and the second thought was – “Wait – if I speed up a little bit through Sausalito, I can see these guys!”. So off I went, biking at full speed (not as fast as you may imagine, trust me) up the hill to the bridge, and there they were – they had just passed under the bridge and were surrounded by a small fleet of boats, guys on surfboards and even a news helicopter:

I figured that they would probably go towards the Marina, and I kept an eye on the group of boats while I crossed the bridge and rolled down through Crissy Fields. As it turned out, the timing was perfect:

Meet Mick Dawson and Chris Martin, who in their boat Bojangles just finished rowing across the Pacific Ocean from Japan to the US. It took them 189 days on the open ocean to complete this amazing feat.

Yesterday evening I spent several hours reading through their very entertaining blog Golden Gate Endeavor and it is just amazing to follow along from day to day with their struggles. The Pacific Ocean did not make it easy for them, that’s for sure! The weather was often brutal, and on a number of days the wind and the currents did everything to push Mick and Chris back towards the East.

So Congratulations to the crew of the Bojangles! And thanks for taking us all along on your expedition across the ocean – the blog and the pictures of your adventure are quite fascinating and very inspirational.

We traveled by sleeper train across the Alps and woke up to a hazy Italian landscape glowing in the early morning light, only a few kilometers away from Florence. We had been to Florence before, and so we just switched trains there to continue on to Pisa, which was a new place for both of us.

Pisa was only a short stop-over on our way to the real destination for this trip, but we did spend a few hours walking around, checking out the sights, and for a late, lazy, second breakfast in a small alley amongst an Italian crowd getting ready for the day. Here is a short audio piece I’ve recorded in the outdoors seating area of this café in Pisa.

After another two hours on a local train we finally made it to Sestri Levante, which is a small beach town north of Cinque Terre, a national park renowned for its picturesque fishing villages that are hanging precariously on cliff sides above the blue waters of the Mediterranean.

Here is a gallery of some of the photos we took in three days in the villages of the Cinque Terre, a few hours in Pisa and, at the end of our trip, half a day in Venice.

Through this all too short time, our hosts and everybody we met was fantastically friendly and welcoming. We couldn’t have hoped for a better time in this sun-drenched country and our love affair with Italy has been renewed for another trip, hopefully very soon…

Memories just came flooding back, the smells, the sounds… the view along the Bund through the hazy air, heavy with thick smoke from the ships.

There were the banners, held high.

And the faces. Sweaty excitement in the faces of the young students, many of them looking like they were still in high school.

Bold, colorful characters put down with a heavy brush. White banners. Red characters, rippling in the wind.

The faces, so open, so happy with the sudden empowerment. Shouted slogans filling the air.

Crammed between other onlookers, shoulder to shoulder with thousands of people on the old Garden Bridge. Marching students ahead, coal barges on the water behind. The steel girders of the bridge digging into my back.

So much applause, people clapping in the rhythm of the marchers. Arms raised, fingers pointing at banners.

The infectious excitement of the crowd. Waves of emotion passing through us like the wind through trees. Laughter, shouts, chants picked up by group after group of marchers.

Students. Workers. Teachers. So many faces.

Happy, excited faces.

Even if only for a brief moment,

Freedom.

Sooner or later it dawns on the visitor that there must be a massive industry for artificial food items in Japan, where huge amounts of fake sushi, spaghetti plates and curry bowls are produced. But for the casual tourist there is usually no opportunity to visit one of these factories.

Tony McNicol is a journalist and photographer in Tokyo and he visited one of the plastic food factories at the outskirts of Tokyo and has a great slideshow and article on this subject on his site.

While looking at the photos I started wondering how often one of the plastic food artists catches themselves licking their fingers while shaping epoxy into the shape of a dessert…

I love these kinds of projects that take on a mysterious life of their own. On first thought it sounds like a ridiculous idea. A photo of every street corner? But once you click your way into the galleries, and move from photo to photo and from corner to corner, suddenly it all starts to make sense.

The photos are presented in a widescreen format that lends itself well to the subject, with every street corner revealing a panoramic microcosm of life in Manhattan. There is yellow taxis everywhere, bike couriers, businessmen out for lunch, hustlers and shoppers.

Many of the corners have well-known brand stores in the downtown areas, but further along the island there are many unique local cornerstores and sometimes quite exotic businesses that add so much to the charme of the big city.

The galleries offer an autoplay function that invites to take effortless, dreamy strolls through parts of Manhattan that many tourists never visit.

If you are an unreconstructed map-fetishist like me, you will love this site: strange maps

This site is a treasure trove of very unusual maps with very thoughtful descriptions and I found it to be quite an inspirational place for the tired creative mind.

The sidebar article features ten audio recordings from places around the world, including my Competing Chinese Operas, that has before been listed on the Quiet American.

I’m pretty thrilled about this and I will definitely do more recordings in the future. It’s in fact such a nice medium to go along with travel stories, that we have just added it as a feature to Mapskip.com. You can check out the same recording on that site, too.