Long-distance buses were probably my least favorite mode of transportation in China. It is safe to assume that if you saw me on a bus in the middle of nowhere, I was officially desperate to get from point A to point B.

China is large – improbably large – and even with a relatively dense network of trains there are many places that are only reachable by long-distance bus. The services tend to be in private hands and vary from sleek hourly coaches with all amenities to little irregular operated minivans that are at least 100.000 kilometers beyond the last recommended maintenance cycle.

A small bus service was often the very first private business for enterprising families and I frequently encountered buses where the family literally lived on the bus. Dad drove the bus, mom sold the tickets and stowed luggage on the roof, grandma managed the money and the kids did their homework on rickety little seats next to the driver’s seat.

Some of the buses operate through the night on long hauls across provinces and these typically have beds instead of seats. Sleeping on the narrow cots while the bus bounces across unlit, winding country roads with heavy truck traffic was an impossibility and led me several times to question my vacation choices.

On the positive side, bus travel allowed me to see parts of the country that would have been impossible to visit otherwise, and the remote scenery along the way was often breathtaking and unanticipated.

Many of the memories of my bus trips are a haze of sleep deprived disorientation. Fragments that stand out…

…waking up on a sleeper bus somewhere in southern Guangxi  province. 2am, 3am, nobody knows. What woke me from my slumber was the sudden lurch of the bus towards my side. We were leaning heavily with my view out the window just water. A river. Very close. The driver was taking us down along the shore of a river to avoid a construction site and the bus was in serious danger of tipping over into the muddy stream. It took several tense minutes to get the bus back out of the soft dirt and onto what counted as a road in this area…

…running down a hot, humid country road on central Hainan island, late at night in near total darkness with only the moon as illumination as there were no lights. Many drivers on China’s roads try to conserve energy – or light bulbs, who knows – by turning the lights off whenever possible. I was sitting up front and couldn’t sleep, which means I got the full effect of what happened next. We overtook a slow tractor coming over a hill and a small movement on the road ahead prompted the driver to turn on the lights, only to be greeted by the exact same mirrored scenario ahead of us – a bus overtaking a truck coming straight at us with their lights suddenly on. The few of us awake to witness this had barely time to let out a gasp as the two busses swerved back into their respective lanes, with only a few centimeters to spare…

…somewhere near Nanjing, on a local country bus route with many, many stops. The bus was slowly filling up with farmers and their – living – wares for the local market. There were several crates with pigs on the roof, leading to a rain of panic-induced manure down the windows. More crates with chickens and ducks filled the corridor of the bus to the point where passengers had to climb over the seat backs to leave the bus, and my seat neighbor had a huge tank with fish on his lap that nearly didn’t even fit. With every major pothole along the way some of the water splashed over the side of the fish tank and onto my backpack and pant legs. The trip took about six hours, but it felt like the longest bus ride of my life…

…in a bus driving across rural Henan, not far from the Yellow River. There had been major floods in the area and reports of receding waters had been premature. All around the bus as far as the eye could see there was only muddy water with the odd tree or farm house sticking out. Heavy dark clouds were hiding the sun, promising more rain, grey sky over grey water. The road was a slightly elevated dam that at best was barely above the water and often was actually completely flooded. The driver took it slow as the tires only kept tenuous contact with the flooded tarmac. It was easy to imagine that I was on a boat as we floated across the flooded, desolate landscape like in a feverish dream. We passed a sunken truck that had gone off the road over night, the two drivers sitting on their cabin roof. A village on a slight hump appeared as a small island, with locals standing in front of their houses, listlessly gazing at the watery landscape…

I had only very little information about the situation in China before I went on my trip in spring of 1989, this being before the Internet, and the newspaper articles about demonstrations in Tiananmen Square were very light on details and it is in hindsight very obvious that the old China Hands in the press agencies were not paying too much attention to the unrest among the students at the time.

I was also preoccupied with the first part of the trip. Taking a train to Moscow and planning to take another one across the full width of the Soviet Union tends to focus one’s mind.

Once I arrived in China, the situation in Beijing had reached a stalemate and many of the students had left Beijing – as it later turned out temporarily – and during my time there I don’t remember seeing any indication of major trouble on the horizon.

This would change dramatically several weeks later in Shanghai. By the time I had made my way there the situation in Beijing had taken on a much more aggressive tone and thousands of students and others had again taken up station in Tiananmen Square. The demonstrations had found a new, fresh voice that resonated much more with the general population and for a few weeks around that time it looked like the basic demands of the students – an end to corruption and a more open government – would possibly even be considered by the old guard in the Chinese government.

There was a hopeful upswell of emotion sweeping through the country and during my first days in Shanghai, there were daily ever-growing marches of thousands and then tens of thousands of demonstrators. And these were not just students, but also workers from factories and hospitals, all marching together in support of the students in Tiananmen Square.

I very much remember a photo feature in the China Daily -  the  government-controlled English-language newspaper – with photos of soldiers and volunteers handing out drinking water and food to the students in Tiananmen Square. Clearly this was completely off-message, but there was no way to judge how deep the support for the students in the government actually was.

Then things went very strange very fast. On May 20th the hardliners in the Chinese government won the internal struggle and they decided that they could somehow suppress all of this churned up emotion the old fashioned way and declared martial law in Beijing. I was not there at the time, but from the reports from on the scene it sounds like this just validated the position of the demonstrators and essentially made the camp on Tiananmen Square a permanent fixture.

Now both the government and the students were stuck.

Shanghai was empty and eerily quiet during the morning after the announcement of Martial Law in Beijing. There were police barricades across the Bund and Nanjing Lu, but I had to cross them to pick up a boat ticket and the police officers were unexpectedly friendly and relaxed.

The atmosphere was surreal. A couple of US Navy ships had just arrived in Shanghai on the very first visit to the city since before the Communist takeover in the late 1940s and improbably this was the day that US Sailors in white uniforms were casually walking through the streets of the city.

And then in the late afternoon, another march began. It was immediately obvious that this would be the biggest one yet, and there must have been a hundred thousand people marching in support of the students. It was momentous, a never-ending stream of protesters snaking its way through downtown, zigzagging around the police barricades on the major roads, surrounded by at least the same number of onlookers, their cheering a roar through all of downtown.

For much of the march that day I was literally stuck in a huge throng  of people on the sidewalk of the Garden Bridge at the north end of the Bund. The crowd was tightly packed on the sidewalk and movement was near impossible. At the north end of the Garden Bridge, near the Pujiang Hotel where I was staying, the road opened up with a cross street that was running along Suzhou Creek in front of the Pujiang Fandian and the Shanghai Mansions with the Soviet embassy directly at the corner next to the bridge.

This whole area was flooded with people and here there were also some foreigners mixed into the crowds from the two neighboring hotels. The US Navy ships had docked not far from there a few blocks south along the river and American sailors in white uniforms had walked up along the shore to get stuck here with no way forward since the bridge was impassable.

The scene was like something out of a movie. In 1989 this corner of Shanghai had still not seen any changes since colonial times and the classic buildings around the Garden Bridge – the Soviet (nee Russian) Embassy, the Pujiang Fandian (Astor House) and the Shanghai Mansions (Broadway Mansions) provided now the backdrop to a protest march by Chinese students and workers, surrounded and cheered on by locals, foreign tourists and a good number of US sailors in white uniforms. Nothing even close to this scene had been seen in Shanghai since the 1930s.

The marchers held colorful handmade banners high on wooden poles, waved flags and even brought their own ropes to carry along the sides of the march to segregate demonstrators from bystanders. The never-ending row of marchers came in segments, grouped by school or factory association. Many of the workers were immediately identifiable by their uniforms and often also by a sign or banner. The air resonated with the marchers chanting and the crowds cheering.

The local police was everywhere, but on this day – the day Martial Law had been declared in Beijing – they still seemed to have not received any orders to break up marches. I saw a group of policemen sit on the wall of the old park near the south end of the Garden Bridge, passively watching the march while eating ice cream. Others were directing traffic away from the demonstrations and there were at least two lines of police officers who blocked the marchers from continuing down along the Bund towards the building of the city administration and instead forced them into the downtown shopping district. But wherever I saw the demonstrators and the police interact it seemed to be cordial and relatively polite.

The demonstration in general was strangely festive and it seemed that nobody at the time took the situation as serious as it actually was. In retrospect it is not clear what everybody was actually thinking what would happen, but as somebody who was stuck in the crowd in Shanghai that day, all I can say is that people were drunk on a never-before experienced freedom to express their grievances and to see all around them that everybody else felt the same way. The Chinese people had finally found their voice and there was hope for a change. It was exciting and uncontrollable.

Here I’d like to quote myself from a few years back:

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.

There are many memory fragments of this day, but the situation was so chaotic that it is hard to create a clear picture of what it was like. But here is one of the last things I remember about the march on this day:

I had gone upstairs in the Pujiang Hotel to watch the march from the windows of the dormitory where I was staying and it was already late in the day. Suddenly there appeared a model of the Statue of Liberty painted completely white, maybe three meters tall, being carried across the Garden Bridge on the shoulders of the marchers. It was a glorious moment as the statue appeared near the bridge, fully visible to everybody around, unexpected, immediately recognized by everybody, the sudden focal point for thousands of people. I’ll never forget the sight of Lady Liberty majestically floating on a sea of Chinese protestors past the Soviet Embassy.

One of the very unexpected features of backpacking around China in the late eighties and early nineties was how frequent I would end up booking a passage on an ocean liner. Just these words alone feel already unreasonably romantic and one would expect to only hear them in historic novels.

But China had – and probably still has – a network of ocean going vessels that ply their trade along the coast of the South China Sea and the Yellow Sea, all the way from the beaches of Hainan Island near the Vietnamese coast to Hong Kong and from there on to Shanghai and up to Quingdao and ports north.

These ships are several times larger than the typical Yangtze River boat, with space for several hundred or even up to a thousand passengers. Many of them were built in the 1970s and 80s and back when I saw them at the very beginning of the modern Chinese tourist industry many of them were only infrequently maintained and the ships had a general air of neglect and of being understaffed.

The services were frequent, with daily or bi-weekly boats out of all the major ports and the ships were fast and the tickets were reasonable. They offered a welcome relief from a long series of overnight trains and crowded long-distance buses and the quiet days out on sea were great to just stretch out in the sun and read a book in happy solitude.

Food on the ships was included in the ticket price and the quality of the meals was hit and miss. On some of the “international” boats to and from Hong Kong there was at least a chance of a tasty dinner and reasonable western-style breakfast, but on the local boats the food was often incredibly basic with essentially the only item on the menu being  fried rice with egg.

Accommodation was also widely varied, from dormitory-style 10-bed rooms in the lower decks with no windows all the way to nicely wood-paneled two-bed private cabins on upper decks with large port holes and private bath rooms. It was impossible to figure out before going on board what the cabins would be like and after a while I usually splurged on cabins in the highest classes since the tickets were never that expensive to begin with anyway.

There are many vivid memories…

…in 1989 after the student uprising and a typhoon had marooned me with a few other travelers near Sanya at the southern tip of Hainan island, we were brought to Hong Kong on a huge passenger liner that had space for five or six hundred passengers. There were only about a dozen of us on the whole ship…

…on the same trip one evening while the ship was taking a long northward bound route along the Vietnamese coast, we had alternating groups of dolphins and flying fish accompany us for hours until the sun went down…

…being caught in the beginnings of a typhoon on a boat from Hong Kong to Shanghai, with towering waves slamming into the ship and rain sweeping across the decks. There were only very few of us who dared to appear for breakfast that morning…

…a dark, red sunset over the coastal hills of Fujian province, with the Yellow Sea all around us dotted with the brilliant lights of fishing boats, like glittering jewels on the gentle waves…

…arriving in Hong Kong harbor at night, with Kowloon and the island both lit up in a million neon lights…

…arriving in Shanghai in a dense fog one morning very early. The old colonial buildings along the waterfront, all dark and quiet, appearing one after another out of the fog like ghosts from a long forgotten time…

We are here on a regular basis since we have family in town and I enjoy the charm of Katano, as it doesn’t even try very hard and just lives its own life in the shadow of a giant, full of small local businesses that have been owned by the same families for generations.

This year we spent a very pleasant afternoon in an unexpectedly beautiful and serene pocket at the edge of Katano, surrounded by low, green hills and framed on one side by the river – the Botanical Gardens of Osaka University.

It’s a working university garden, so there is semi-agricultural activity everywhere and the plants tend to be ordered by genome and type, but there is enough wild-growing vegetation across the hills of this large facility to forget its artificial background.

There are generous picknick spots with roofed seating areas and views of the surrounding landscape and the hills have a wide variety of micro-landscapes to make the plants from all over Asia feel at home here.

We visited the gardens just at the end of the Cherry Blossom Season (caps intended as this is Japan!) and various cherry and plum trees were in full bloom in all shades from white to red, much to the delight of Luke who ran up and then tumbled down colorful slopes everywhere.

The Hoshigaoka Sewing School must have been closed many years ago but it was then reopened with seemingly little funding as a community center a while back.  Much of the grounds around the old school building have been left in a state of benevolent disrepair with only the most necessary repairs keeping the buildings intact.

The main building now houses an art gallery and several of the class rooms are again being used for regular craft classes, the corridor in front of the class rooms filled with the detritus of many past projects.

Behind the main building though is the secret attraction of Hoshigaoka – the Sewing Table Coffee House. It occupies a small shed next to a pottery class room in a semi-abandoned backyard, surrounded by tall grass, with some small hand-built tables and rickety little stools to sit outside.

Inside the cafe the atmosphere is calm and quiet, with a few tables and a counter at the window to sit, a table with art and books to look at and buy and the coffee counter where the owner of the cafe serves excellent coffee and cakes.

What made us come back was not just the great atmosphere and the coffee, but also the near endless photo opportunities. The buildings are filled inside and out with a wealth of objects of art and nature, with near-random piles of old, rusty tools next to stone sculptures, all overgrown with weeds and flowers. There are mossy goldfish ponds and wind chimes, artfully crafted lights next to bare light bulbs under spiderweb-encrusted ceiling beams.

It’s an endlessly fascinating place, a small island of tranquility in the far suburbs of busy Osaka that makes me want to come back for another visit every time I have to leave.

This was no ordinary morning and not my usual commute. In a few hours I expected to see the Space Shuttle Endeavour pass through the Golden Gate on the back of a Jumbo Jet. Great things were afoot and nothing could have stopped me from seeing this.

My plan led me all the way up along the southern end of the Marin Headlands with a short and very steep hike at the end to the top of Slackers Ridge, which is the first peak in the headlands that you see when you cross the bridge going north.

It promised to be a good day. Just as I arrived at the top the sun rose over the East Bay hills and the fog had never fully made it into the Bay.

I had a few hours before the Shuttle would arrive and while I was sitting there in the stubbly grass between low, wind-blown brush, I started thinking about what this means… “The last flight of the Shuttle era!” as it was announced in many newspapers.

Being a parent gives one a very different perspective on time. By spending all this time with a small baby and then a toddler growing up, it is possible to reach back further in your own memory of your childhood, nearly-forgotten distant shadows coming into sudden focus.

Luke is now two years old and I was two years old when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Too young for any memories, but I do remember standing in front of a TV with grown-ups all around talking about the moon – my guess is it was Apollo 16 or 17 when I was between four and five years old. So my relationship with Apollo – just missed it by a few years – is the same as Luke’s impression will be of the Space Shuttles.

This also means, that in a very meaningful way, the Space Shuttle is the defining feature of space exploration for my generation. Whatever comes next – manned missions to asteroids or Mars, both at least twenty years out – will be a symbol for my son’s generation. I may still be around to watch the Mars landings with Luke, but whoever steps on the red soil will be much closer to his age than mine.

So on this beautiful morning in September of 2012, Luke was still a little bit too young to hike to the top of Slackers Ridge. For him and his generation, the Space Shuttle will forever be a museum piece. Impossibly big and clumsy, with a certain unmistakeable 1970s style. Brute force pushing an airplane into space. More power than brains.

For my generation this is a bittersweet moment, no doubt. We are the in-between generation, the Moon had already been done and Mars was just out of reach.

But we had to spend time in Earth orbit, working out the kinks in space travel, learning how to build complex structures in space. And look at it! The ISS is the real legacy of our generation – a real, full-featured, huge space station with a 6-person permanent crew, bristling with scientific instrumentation and robots. And in addition, robotics has advanced to astonishing levels with the recent Curiosity landing on Mars being an amazing showcase for what we can do now.

So it is time to move on. Time to say goodbye to the Shuttle. It was a good ride, and sometimes a scary and even deadly one. But we’ve learned a lot. And now the kids can figure out how to land on Mars.

30 years is a ridiculously long time in our fast-moving age. But I still remember the tactile experience of typing long Basic listings into the little rubber keyboard of my 16k Spectrum.

I remember the joy of having color and sound in a small computer on my desk – something not even possible with the Commodore PETs at the school lab. The exhilaration of Jetpac and Arcadia, the brain-teasing frustration of The Hobbit.

I remember the glimpses of the future through ambitious programs like Vu-3D and Ant Attack. The long hours learning Z80 assembly language in front of a flickery TV set, compiling long hex listings from assembly by hand.

I remember when I had set up the Speccy for the first time, standing in front of it in the evening and trying to understand how vast 16Kbyte of RAM was compared to the 1K ZX81.

The same feeling six months later when I had it upgraded to 48Kbyte.

Watching sine waves being plotted across its expansive 256 x 192 pixels of screen real estate. Over and over again.

The cool feeling of selling my very own designed games on hand-copied tapes to other kids in school.

I remember listening to the sounds of programs loading from tape. Being able to recognize certain data patterns at 1500 Baud – knowing what was loading without even looking at the screen.

This little machine formed me as a programmer more than any university course later on and even today I identify as a Spectrum guy whenever the early 1980s come up in tech discussions.

For a whole generation of mostly European programmers, the Speccy was – and still is – the origin of their craft.

One of the main themes of the book is that every person has a very different mental map of the city they are living in, based on their daily habits and their experience of the place. This is certainly true and at the same time endlessly fascinating, and the book tries to explore this fact with a number of fresh and unusual maps of San Francisco accompanied by essays that take short, deep dives into the infinite fractal histories that make up the sum of the city.

The book is very inspiring to go back out into the different neighborhoods of San Francisco and to look at the place with new eyes, to try to discover some of the deeper networked layers of historical detritus that are often hidden by not much more than a thin skin of paint.

I’ve lived in San Francisco for a dozen years and still come to the city daily from across the Bay, and this book rang very true. It very much is a reflection of my own experience of the city as I explore it on long walks.

Of course most places where humans have lived for a while will build up fascinating histories and unique life stories, but San Francisco has always stood out for me – it is such a young city: In less than 200 years – after thousands of years as a relatively serene collection of fishing villages – San Francisco has seen incredible growth, heartbreaking disasters, booms and busts.

It is one of the most multicultural cities on Earth that has been gracefully draped across one of the most breathtaking landscapes of the American West, filled with a wild collection of unique personalities that transform every street corner and every bus ride into improv theater.

And you thought this is a book review, hm? Nope, just letting you know that if you haven’t been here in a while or have never been to San Francisco before, go there now. And if you live here, go take a walk!