One World Insight Blog | Douglas "Las" Wengell

One World Global Air Traffic Video

The Iceland volcano halted flights across Europe and the Atlantic, a humble reminder that  our lives are still at the pleasure of nature. Whether it’s people, cargo or digital bits, our planet gets smaller by the day. Check out this stunning video of global air traffic patterns, and note the seemingly lost continent of Africa.

Asia Power Unifying: Rail link from China to Singapore

In the planning stages is a rail network that will connect China, into Vietnam, through Cambodia, into Thailand, down Malaysia and to the southern tip of mainland south-east Asia, Singapore and its huge port. Much development is required. The French built Vietnam’s rail line a century ago and anyone who has traveled on it knows that it is cumbersome and slow. Cambodia’s rail network collapsed over decades of war and neglect. (Phnom Penh, the capital, lacks a train station.)

 

It’s completion will be a major boon for Asian commerce and supply chain manufacturing efficiencies. It would also be a pleasure as a traveler…

Fellow Woman Warrior Traveler

In Cambodia met Megan, from the UK, who recently traveled solo through Pakistan. Her stories put my sense of adventure in perspective. Here she is posing with American soldiers in Pakistan (notice the woman warrior on the Megan’s left).

Meandering Down the Mekong River, Laos

 The Mekong River, 3,000 miles through China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam before emptying into the South China Sea.

Eat, sleep, play cards, watch the shoreline. Repeat. Laos time. Arrive Luang Prabang at sunset, two days, eighteen hours in passing.

Hanging with Sweds on the boat I learn a lot about Scandinavia and marvel at their ability to travel internationally with much frequency, despite modest work back home. The old saw, “Europeans work to live, Americans live to work,” rings true. Our priorities are different.

Train between Chiang Mai and Bangkok

 Heading for the hills and delighted to get out of Bangkok. The overnight train to Chiang Mai inspires. By dawn, the train makes its way up the mountains, through valleys, forests and rivers.

Shanghai’s Magnetic Future

For fun today I took a spin on what I believe is the world’s only Maglev Train, in China. It levitates above the track. Connecting downtown and the airport, we reach a giddy 430 km/hour. A German I meet up with in Bangkok later tells me that she believes the whole system was bought by Berlin, who ran out of money to complete the project. As for America, if you’ve ridden Amtrak, you know where we are in rail technology.

Farewell Beijing. Train to Qufu

Spent yesterday preparing to leave Beijing. I grapple with a mixed feeling about leaving after five weeks in the capital, meeting people, seeing sites, attending business and networking meetings, dancing at Salsa Carabi, coffee conversation at Bookwarm. I fell for the city. World class. Positive, forward-oriented, vibrant.

This early Sunday morning I scurry to catch the D31 Express from sprawling Beijing South Station. The construction continues 24/7. I will be getting off half-way between Beijing and Shanghai, at Yanzhou, to explore the home of Confucius, in Qufu, before jumping back on 24 hours later, to finish this leg in Shanghai.

Beijing’s goodbye did not disappoint. South Station was as breathtaking as Grand Central, elegant arches, escalators reaching high, glimmering signage, natural light illuminating epic columned ceilings. Not what you expect from a train station.

The platform is immaculate, the train sleek, complete with flat screen digital displays, clean lavatories and a spacious food car with round cushions to buttress your behind while eating at the bar tables as you jet toward Shanghai.

We role out to the minute. Not Germany, China. Westerner’s perception is outdated.  I am mesmerized, yet again – Beijing’s farewell is as grand as its arrival. If America is so far ahead of China, then why isn’t our country full of high-speed, modern rail and selling China the technology? Cranes and emerging skyscrapers line the forefront. General Electric sells its electric engines to China, and it may be powering the train, but we don’t have these ambitious any more, like taking a man to the moon and inspiring a generation. I wonder who wrote the software running the engine and network, the Chinese, the Indians or the Americans. On the other road, an ordinary Chinese man carries a bundle on his back, the old and the new on display. The steal beneath us was not made in America.

Next to me, a mid-aged, slightly overweight Chinese woman untangles a KFC-labeled white plastic bag and devours a large McDonald’s fry. Its pungent, salt-and-oil aroma permeates the olfactory glands of her neighbors.

Arrive Beijing

Beijing Central, 4000 km and 48 hours later.

How the cityscape changed in just two weeks!

The energy is infectious.

The Mind Meanders Down the Tibetan Plateau

8:30 a.m. Capital Express, T28, heading back to the capital 3,000 km down the 12,500 foot mountain, through Xi’an, along the Silk Road, then Eastward, to the industrial and populated coast, landing in Beijing, forty-eight hours from now. Tibet has been an adventure.

I’m glad to have the time to look out the window. It inspires free flowing poetics. The sun is rising over the sand-swept mountains, leaving behind China’s most isolated province. Lhasa is now a distant spoke connected to heart of the center, Beijing. Before long, vast, spacious valley’s emerge, miles wide, surrounded by snow-draped mountains.  

Small villages cling to the side of the mountains, red drenched Chinese flags float in the air. Small oases of life, a small farm shack, dot the landscape.   Rivers and icy tributaries cross the rails from high. The animal are married to the wind swept golden brush, the white and brown march, the soft permafrost. Sheep marked red huddle. Horses don yellow and orange, their mains flapping in the wind. The graceful, cornered antlers of yak pray upward. A man walks. He is nowhere and everywhere. A truck chugs up a distant road. A black-cloaked woman in a red fur hat tills. The Han man across from me yawns and checks his phone for text messages.

Others play cards, more interested in me than what’s out the window. Another insists I accept a cup of rice vodka. I do.  A river runs through. Does the mountain make the valley, or the valley the mountain. They are inseparable, defined in relationship to one another.

If I were a God, this is where I would live. Where emptiness is wide enough to hold the world, where time is measured in ions and the marriage of heaven and earth is quietly consummated. The Tibetans and Chinese share in life’s struggle, even as one dominates the other. Despotism is a feeble attempt to mimic the imperial grandeur of the cosmos for which we are pawns. 

“We are here just a while. It will pass in time. You might as well smile” Alison Kraus, on queue.

The train’s wheels are like prayer bells, clicking and clacking against the cold steel beneath. The rhythmic motion of the heart and breath, a reminder that opposites hold the world together. It’s no wonder that Tibetans and their form of Buddhism celebrate this truth.

Life and death are inseparable, just as are the white-tripped yak and the marshy grass, the pebbles in the streams. The highest train in the world. It’s a journey between a beginning and an end, pre-determined but only discoverable along the way. It is the journey of one day and one voyage; and it’s the journey of a lifetime. Somewhere along its line, our destiny with death awaits. This much is certain.

We just don’t know where that crossing will be.

8:30 p.m. glide into Xi’an, where I began my voyage to Tibet. Many Chinese travelers debark. In my t-shirt and slippers and tea cup – standard fair among the Chinese – I jump on to the platform with a few other Chinese men who yoke cigarettes. Stretch. Chinese beer is 60 cents. The cold is upon Northern China, much more than Lhasa.

I’m exhilarated and refreshed after 36 hours of transformative motions down the mountain and back to the intersection of the ancient Silk Road that carried goods from Shanghai, north and south, to president day India, Afghanistan, Eastern and Central Europe. The platform bell rings and new passages scurry onboard with their boxes and. A young man from my carriage ushers me from the window, with a great deal of urgency, to get back on the train.

We begin to inch forward, on toward an overnight arrival in Beijing at 7:30 a.m., Monday, when President Obama meets with President Hu Jintao. I’ll be heading back to the pleasant Sanlitun Hostel, a few miles from the American Embassy and where Obama and his entourage will be greeting officials. 

Capital Express Train to Roof of the World, Day 1

We’re heading toward Louznou, the capital of the province,  East of Xi’an, then onto Xining, before veering south-west, past Golmud and up the Tibet Plateau and finally into Lhasa, the capital of what is euphuistically called the Tibetan Autonomous Region.

If you were to keep going east, toward the border with Afghanistan and Kazakhstan, you would pass the vast Gobi desert and enter Xinjiang, now a booming trade and natural resource center with the Middle East and Europe. The Tibetan plateau averages 4,500 meters above sea level and is surrounded by mountain ranges on all sides: the Himalayas to the south, the Karakoram to the west, and the Kunlun to the north.

It is one of the most isolated parts of the world. This is the highest train line in the world, 4,000 km from Lhasa to Beijing.

The stats behind its architecture exemplify China’s ambitions. Four billion in the making (more than Beijing spent on hospitals and schools the last fifty years), 160 km of bridges, 160 km of bridges, most track above 10,000 feet and laid on permafrost. 11,000 migrant workers (90 percent of whom were not Tibetan).

Completed ahead of schedule. Who does this?

The line is flooding Lhasa with Han Chinese. Its also designed to encourage foreign investment, as the region is rich in copper and iron. Two Tibetan monks look out the window. What about them?

In 1949, Mao declare he would “liberate the oppressed and exploited Tibetans and reunite them with the great motherland.” In other words, “we’re coming.” In 1950 they did. Tibetans were helpless, having little defense against a history of invaders who came and went. At the time, Beijing offered goodwill and economic assistance. Tibet’s religious leaders were skeptical and feared losing culture of their orthodox culture.

The 1959 Lhasa uprising forced the Dali Lama and the ruling elites to flee for Dharamsala, a sanctuary provided by India. Nearly 100,000 Tibetans were said to have been killed; temples and monasteries were destroyed. No more nice guy. Beijing held the territory with an iron fist. The 1960s Cultural Revolution did not preserve Tibetan Buddhism any more than other culture legacies. In 1959, there were 2,700 monasteries and temples in Tibet; by 1978, there were just eight.

Even today, political unrest ferments and any sign of dissent is ruthless quashed. Tibetan Buddhism is allowed but it’s said that spies are everywhere. Google anything controversial about the region and you’ll get a blank. E-mails out of the region are carefully monitored by Beijing censors. Don’t be fooled by “Free Tibet” movie stars, however. This was no utopia. The pre-Chinese Tibetan government were xenophobic feudal warlords. Slavery was tolerated. Today, Beijing provides huge subsides, infrastructure, education and healthcare.

Cynics suggest that this is merely a soft strategy to assimilate and defeat. Han Chinese settlers, encouraged by economic incentives, threatens to dilute the Tibetan culture and economy. Beijing argues that it’s providing much needed development to a poor and underserved part of the world.

Either way, the life of Tibetans is harsh. A quarter cannot feed or clothe themselves, one third of children do not go to school and the literacy rate is about thirty percent, the lowest in China. Oppressor and oppressed.  

Guangzhou Train Station, to Xi’an

It’s a balmy, full moon night from the buzzing outdoor square of the Guangzhou Train Station. Three months on the road. A young Chinese woman is heading my way and helps me navigate to the right place.

Everything is in Mandarin.

Her husband is a visiting professor in Louisiana.  “China has made products for the world,” she says, “but now the economy is not good elsewhere but good in China. Now Chinese products are being made for Chinese.” I complement her country and its progress. “But China needs to create global business for itself. The young generation understands this.” I nodded, alluding to China’s encourage creativity and critical thinking.

She tells me a story. “When I was in grade school, our teacher asked us what a half moon looks like, and everyone knows that in Chinese history the answer is a small but growing boat which is China. A classmate, a boy, protested and said that it looks like a banana. The teacher said ‘no, that is wrong, it’s a boat.”

She’s confident.

Among all the fast moving people, I’m always surprised what I learn talking to Chinese citizens. They are reticent at first; there’s a lot more under their stoic continence.  “Today, my young brother in school, can say to the teacher that the moon looks like a banana, and it’s not wrong. It’s ok to think a little for yourself. But only a little. It is very slow in China. It is the Chinese way. President Hu Jintao is smart. He understand that China must open up, but only a little at a time.”

When I allude to political freedom, she reluctantly agrees. “There is so many more people in China, you can’t give everyone the kind of freedom you have in America.” While I meant more the freedom of due process, free speech and non-violent protest, standing in the waiting room of the rail station, with hundreds if not thousands of Chinese making their way to and fro, to destinations with different dialects, ethnicities, and tribal histories, I am beginning to understood what she means.

I am disheartened to hear her conclude: “After my husband gets good experience in America, we would like to come back to China.” But this is the new reality, and a good thing.  China is no longer a place its people want to flee.

Varanasi > Delhi > Hong Kong > Beijing

5 pm, need to make overnight train to New Delhi (AC sleeper car, $25), to catch a plane to Beijing via Hong Kong on Cathay Pacific, in the hope of catching the People Republic of China’s Communist Party 60th Anniversary, making headlines around the one world. The frenetic pace – Varanasi, rickshaw, train, Delhi capital, taxi, Hong Kong airport, onward China, metro, Beijing downtown  – stirs both imagination and adrenaline. I am grateful to be able to globetrot from one capital to the next. The question is, can you pull off the scheduling, not to mention the exogenous events you have no control over. Zen may be just a concept in the West; on the road, in Asia, you live it, or suffer.

On heading from the hotel with backback in toe to find a three-wheel motorbike to take me to the train station, I serendipitously encounter the end of Naviratri on the main streets, where all the many makeshift idols –  Durga and Rama and Hunnamum– are placed on carts and paraded about Varanasi, before the Durgas are submerged in the Ganges in symbolic end. Music and dancing kids fill the streets. It’s packed with joyful Indians. Despite the heavy pack, I become so immersed in the emotional spectacle, the blessing on this place, in this moment, I forget about the train.

When I do find a bicycle rickshaw, the people traffic is gnarly. Mini parades crisscross the streets. The dark Indian, poor and humble, exerts muscle and dizzying acumen to circumnavigate the faithful. Never a dull moment. At the bustling station, five minutes to spare. I limp to the station, darkness descending, but which entrance, which platform, which carriage (there are a staggering twenty-three from front to end)? Welcome to the blissful mania of India on the fly.

I settle into my birth as the train lurches into syncopation, and glides out of the station. You can’t help but feel victory at these little moments. I am next to a Japanese student heading back to his studies in New Delhi. We begin talking about Japan’s new prime minister, and his hope that he will be able to jump-start its twenty-year economic malaise. I haven’t seen an American in what feels like weeks. Resting my head on the overnight birth, I revel in the pleasure of being a global citizen.

Festival Lights on Wheels

Take delight in riding richshaw later in the night during festival.

Riding a rickshaw through Indian streets

Practical and cheap. Just hold on tight.

 

Enroute Varanasi

On way from New Delhi airport to the train station for rail to Varanasi. The traffic winds slowly through the street. A street girl comes to the window, in a hand to mouth gesture, so sullen. What to do?

Construction of the airport to downtown subway is behind schedule for the 2010 World Games, reports the day’s newspaper. The construction is visible.

Arrive Varanasi train station to a huge cow lying inside the lobby; machismo men relieve themselves on public streets; and piles of refuge burn in the gutters. Back in India. Leave luggage at a friendly restaurant in search for a gat (river)-facing accommodation.

The streets are a maze. The map is useless.

The Nepal Bus

Institution and pastime, rickety and goofy, the preferred if only mode of transport in Nepal. It’s common for passengers to take a seat on the roof. To the brave and foolhardy, you can too.

Everyone rides the buses. On one trip, the bus is packed. A young mother, holding one and watching another, leans into me and my bag anywhere she can find a grip. Private space is not private. People help each other. Elders and mothers and children get special attention, without the aid of public signs. Everyone is just doing their best to get by. Nothing fancy.

Motorbiking through the countryside

Rent 180cc motorcycle, 40 km Royal Trail mountain and lake circuit trotted by Prince Charles years back, with Annapurna, rice patties, farm animals as the backdrop. The freedom to stop at will and enjoy the scenery. The Nepali in the outback are less familiar with Westerns, so it’s much more of a pleasure than around Pokhara. These school kids appreciate the writing utensils. I am reminded of motoring around the east side of Bali ten years ago.

Another day I ride up to a nearby mountain top, where stands a Buddhist Stumpa, build by a wacky Japanese entrepreneur and mystic, the same one I will later find in Leh. At the top I met two Spanish women, teachers of English, along its ring.

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We talk about  traveling, politics, the environment, education, the good life. “What is more valuable than a hot shower and washing my messy hair.” So basic.  They give meaning to the saw, Europeans work to live, Americans live to work, as if I need to be reminded. We share water and a cigarette (popular among the traveling set), as the sun begins its decent.

 “The stupa is a monument, shrine and reliquary that traditionally derives from the Buddha’s tomb, but has come to symbolize existence. On a square red base (signifying earth) sits a large white dome (water) with a sort of spire (fire) crowned with a lunar crescent (air) and a solar disc (space); such structures guard the approaches to towns and villages throughout the Buddhist Himalaya.” – The Snow Leapard.

Flying across the Himalayan Range back to Delhi

After a restful sleep, head to the Leh airport to catch a flight to Katmandu, Nepal via New Delhi. An arduous bus ride would take days and I didn’t want to miss the views and the world-famous, mountain top take-off.

 

 

 

 

Indian Trains: A Window into another World

There is something about trains I love. The silk-and-rock movement under your feet, the click-and-clack rhythm, the land passing by at ground level, the forward motion, the ability to walk about.

It’s a window into a place, with gentle geographic transitions that provide the traveler with continuity and context. It’s the preferred way to travel when available.

As transit goes, it’s green, too. Nothing about being buckled to a steel tube at 30,000 feet compares.

Riding a train in India takes adventure to an unsurpassed level. The lives outside the open windows and rear doors, the wind in your face, are in full display – farming, bathing, washing clothes, kids waving, a setting sun. Add some tunes and one can glimpse the childhood fascination beat out of us adults.

 

 

 

 

 

Enroute to Dharamsala

Overnight bus from Rishikesh enroute to Dharamsala. Hold on to seat, no bench. Pitch black. I stop counting roller coaster curves at one hundred. Impossible to sleep.

Navigating the Top of the World

The narrow, winding roads at this altitude tightly hug the cliff. Curves reveal deep valleys that have no visible bottom; there are sometimes no guardrails. One can understand why there are numerous fatalities every year. It’s treacherous and brilliant.

We pass Indians everywhere rebuilding the road because this is no place to build a road. These workers use no equipment. No, they chip away at massive rock boulders by hand, piece by piece.  It might take a yuga to dissolve. But what’s the rush. Time has a different meaning up here.

 

Boys run along the mountain road eager to accept pocket change from the car window. A straggler runs with the taxi and catches one rupee. He smiles wide as the sun, mirroring a thumbs up. Girls are coy and avert contact. 

We stop at Chopti, a tiny village on the long way back to Rishikesh.. From here it’s a four mile hike to the highest shrine in India but the monsoon rain causes us to rethink. It’s hard enough to walk in the horizontal. We rent a room for one hour, just to rest our head. It’s damp and dirty. The simple pleasure of a thick, dry blanket and cup of roadside tea sooths the weary.

 “We take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterrupted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. And this debasement of our vision, the retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters from free-swimming life into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came.” – The Snow Leapard