Yunnan: China's Back Porch

After a month in Kunming and reading about Yunnan province in the months leading up to our move, I’ve come to some realizations about the place that i wanted to share with everyone. It’s of course influenced by my time at Stratfor as well as reading several books about this area of China and talking to people here. Obviously, this isn’t academic writing, but I still feel compelled to cite my sources a bit just to give credit where it’s due.

Right now I’m reading From Mandalay to Momien. It’s a report written by a British naturalist who accompanied a British exploration force seeking out overland trade routes from Burma to China via its southern Yunnan province in 1868. This is the physical area that we’re talking about here.

I’ve learned two major things from this book. First. that, historically, Yunnan province has had good access to the rest of the world via trade along the Irawaddy River in Myanmar. Second, over the centuries, Yunnan has passed in and out of Imperial Chinese rule. During periods of Chinese rule, authorities tend to block Yunnan’s access to Burma. However, Yunnan has been under control of several Islamic kingdoms and during those bouts of autonomy, local rulers sought out access to international trade. In 1868, when the British expedition set off up the Irrawaddy from Mandalay, southern Yunnan had recently fallen out of Chinese control and was an Islamic kingdom.

The greater context of this expedition was Britain and the west’s ongoing struggle with Beijing in the 19th century to increase foreign access to the interior of China. Britain and other western powers were limited to a few coastal concessions along the Pacific coast where they could buy spices, raw materials and other goods from merchants. But ever the businessmen, the British were interested in increasing their access to these products in order to cut out the inflated costs the middlemen charged in the coastal concessions. Interior China also generated excitement as a marketplace for British sellers. Expeditions like the one in 1868 to southern Yunnan province were an attempt to find a profitable “back-door” to China through which the British could access inland commodities directly.

It’s no surprise that the British had Yunnan in their sights. Yunnan is China’s geographic extension into Southeast Asia. As Robert Kaplan points out in Revenge of Geography, Yunnan and and its capital, Kunming, offer China a gateway to southeast Asia and vice-versa. Yunnan is either the source of or contributes significant tributaries to the Yangtze River, which flows onto Shanghai; the Mekong River, which flows on through or borders Laos, Myanmar, Thailand,  Cambodia and Vietnam. The Pearl and Red rivers start in Yunnan and form two of Vietnam’s major rivers. Finally, several of Yunnan’s western rivers flow through the mountains to the Irawaddy: Myanmar’s core transportation artery. One of those rivers, the Taping, was the principal route that our 19th century British explorers followed to traverse the mountainous border between Burma and southern China. Seventy years later, American, British and local forces built a road approximately following the Taping to supply Chiang Kai Shek's Chinese nationalist army in opposition to the Japanese, who had cut off China's maritime access during WWII. That historical example is evidence that Yunnan is China’s second best entry port behind the Pacific Ocean. It’s a far, far distant second place, but nonetheless an option.

All of the river routes connecting landlocked Yunnan to ports along the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean naturally draw Yunnanese business interests to the south rather than north towards Beijing. Granted, many of these rivers are too small to carry significant traffic in Yunnan, but they at least cut a path through the mountains that offer natural road and rail routes. Once the Taping river valley hits the Irawaddy in northern Myanmar, for example, moving goods by boat to the rest of the world via the Indian Ocean becomes much more viable - hypothetically, at least. The political situation in Myanmar and its port facilities still make it difficult, but China is actively trying to improve both. Passable segments of the Irawaddy river are about 500 miles from Kunming whereas the major southern Chinese port of Guangzhou is about 900 miles away. Via the Yangtze, Shanghai is over 1500 miles away, but due to dams it’s not a viable river for shipping goods from Yunnan. Yunnan’s geographical estrangement from the rest of China and its natural proximity to southeast Asia has historically presented a political problem for Beijing.

Ethnic Han Chinese have historically not made up the majority of Yunnan’s population. Yunnan’s distance from China’s more traditional east coast core means that it’s not imperative that China hold Yunnan, but given Yunnan’s geographic position, it certainly helps to have it.

Yunnan claims to have the most minority groups of any province in China. In today’s politically correct world, embracing “minority groups” is synonymous with political openness and compassion. China certainly trumps up its tolerance of minority groups in Yunnan; for example, there’s a whole theme park dedicated to Yunnan’s minority groups in Kunming, but it’s the equivalent of saying that Disney embraces Alpine culture because they feature The Matterhorn at their theme park. Chinese tolerance of minority groups in Yunnan goes as far as the government is able to exploit them for the sake of tourism. As history shows, those same minority groups (many of which are Muslim) have challenged China’s control over Yunnan for centuries. As far as Beijing is concerned, these groups are much safer as exhibits than actual, functioning cultures.

Nowadays, Chinese culture dominates in Yunnan and that’s the result of intentional “sinofication” by encouraging members of China’s dominant Han ethnicity to move to Yunnan. This is extremely evident in the capital, Kunming.

A good metric to measure China’s confidence in its control over Yunnan will be its willingness to build infrastructure linking Yunnan with southeast Asia. One hundred years ago, Beijing’s control over Yunnan was tenuous and external links via British controlled Burma and French controlled Indochina helped indigenous groups in Yunnan maintain a level of autonomy by giving them access to foreign patrons who were more than happy to challenge China. But as Yunnan has become more Han (and thus more mainstream Chinese) and the foreign powers to the south of China have weakened since the end of colonialism, Beijing will be more willing to expand its connections to southeast Asia via Yunnan. Now, the back-door is an opportunity rather than a liability.

It’s become important to China to link Yunnan with southeast Asia. As China’s east coast has grown immensely over the past decade, inflation and competition over labor is driving prices up. China is feverishly trying to develop interior provinces like Yunnan to alleviate the pressure on the East Coast to produce. But Yunnan’s land-locked geography means that delivering goods to ports on China’s east coast is expensive. Yunnan is only marginally closer to Indian Ocean ports like Yangon in Myanmar, but Yunnan’s access to so many major southeast Asian river networks means that there is a great potential for cheaper routes to the south.

Additionally, the United States and China are very different geographically. One of the main differences is the US’s direct access to two of the world’s oceans, giving it direct access to Europe and Asia simultaneously. China, on the other hand, only has direct access to the Pacific Ocean. As of now, if its ships need to access the Indian Ocean, they must sail through the Strait of Malacca - a highly strategic waterway that snakes its way between Singapore and Indonesia that in a dire situation (such as war) could be blocked. However, if China can develop access to the Indian Ocean via another route, such as Yunnan province, then it can hold an insurance policy in the extreme case that it loses access to the Strait of Malacca or its Pacific Coast. It may seem far-fetched now, but it wasn’t 70 years ago.

It’s been proven time and again that China can’t “lock” its back door in Yunnan. So instead of ignoring Yunnan and allowing rivals to sneak in and out of it, China is trying to open it up for business, firmly under its own management. Now that I’m aware of the geopolitical opportunities China has in Yunnan, it will be fun to keep a watch on how it unfolds. As we travel through southern and western Yunnan, we’ll definitely keep our eye on development and see how China is building infrastructure links to the rest of southeast Asia via Yunnan.

1. Mandalay to Momien by John Anderson
2. Forgotton Kingdom by Peter Goullart
3. Revenge of Geography by Robert Kaplan
4. Pretty much all of the China and SE Asia coverage at stratfor.com

Death of the Bicycle in China

One of the most stereotypical images of China is a street full of bicycles. They're supposed to be ubiquitous, right? I'm pretty sure that the English language transliterated "Peking" to "Beijing" so that China's capital city would alliterate with "bicycle". That way we could say things like, "this car's got more rust than a Beijing bicycle", or "he's redder than a Chinese fireman on a Beijing bicycle" when referring to someone with excessively leftist political opinions. There are many more such sayings that I may include in future blog posts, but I trust that you get my point sufficiently for the purpose of this post: Americans have traditionally associated Chinese transportation with bicycles.

As an avid bicyclist, I was bursting with excitement to purchase a bicycle of my own as soon as I got to Kunming. I had the privilege to ride a bicycle in Urumqi back in 2011 while I was there. Riding bicycles in China is cathartic. With all 1.3 billion people perpetually trying to go the same way you are, you have to be very aggressive to get anything done. You have to cut people off in order to cross the street and you have to look for every little opening to maintain forward progress. I don't consider myself a very aggressive person, but get me on a bicycle in China and I'm a downright ass-hole. I swerve around pedestrians loitering in the street, I butt out in front of on-coming traffic ignoring their red-lights and I hop from sidewalk to street and back looking for the clearest route. It's a game of inches and in a place like China, the margins are hotly contested. For someone as calm as me, a ten-minute bicycle commute to school every morning can be pretty cathartic.

But as a bicyclist, I am sadly a minority in China. The streets are still full of two-wheeled vehicles, but they are electric powered instead of pedal powered. These street demons are referred to in English as "e-scooters" or "e-bikes". I have no idea what they're called in Chinese. Despite their environmental friendliness, I despise these vehicles and, as of today, am at war with them.

When I think of scooters in Asia, I associate them with an ear-piecing whine, or obnoxiously loud "put-put" as their dinky two-stroke engines strain to move entire families, their chickens and their sofas up the road. Ever looking for a way to improve their pollution problem, China (or at least Kunming) appears to have switched over to electric propelled scooters. I haven't seen a single hydrocarbon powered scooter or motorcycle in Kunming. We've seen one or two outside of town, but they are mysteriously absent from the streets. It makes me wonder if gas powered bikes have been outlawed all-together. There are outlets in most scooter parking areas where people can charge up their bikes and you can buy one used for around $500. If you're sane, you carry no more than one other person on the back of your scooter. But if you're the majority of Chinese e-scooter drivers, you are perpetually moving your living room furniture around town on the backseat. Bungee cords are amazing.

They certainly carry the hero's curse in that their greatest virtue is also their downfall. True, gone are the days of noisy, smelly, puny motorbikes and scooters. But in their place are lethally silent predators who sneak up on you and attack with as much noise as the drop of a feather. AND, since they don't move as fast as car traffic and they have two wheels, they use the bicycle lane! They are the big fish in the small pond, which makes them even more petulant predators.

You may be thinking, "Wait, Ben, bicycles are pretty quiet, too, how are the e-scooters any different than them?" To that I answer, about 200 pounds of mass. Plus, the bicycles here (as alluded to in the first paragraph) are rusty and squeaky and, therefore, actually easier to hear than the e-scooters. I remember when, as a youngster, our family cat (Lucy) kept catching live birds and bringing them into the house. We put a bell on her for a while to give the birds in the yard an edge over her. I feel like the e-scooters should all be fitted with a bell so that we could hear them coming. It's a lot more pleasant than a lawn-mower engine, right?

Just today, I was crossing the street and almost got hit by one. Already familiar with the fact that they often go the wrong way on one-way streets (I admit, I do it too sometimes on my bicycle) I checked to my left just to make sure none were coming. The coast being clear there, I looked to my right to check for traffic there. I had looked to my right for maybe... two seconds, but as I started crossing, an e-scooter stealthily zoomed past me going the wrong way and clipped my knee. That was the last straw. I was wary of these devil machines before, but that incident put me over the edge and I am now firmly against these things. If there are any physicists or electrical engineers out there reading this, about how strong of a magnet would I need to disable these e-scooters? I'm thinking about packing a super-electro-magnet in my backpack and zapping these things as I ride down the street. I'll let you guys know how that works out.

I shouldn't be so hard on China. The universal use of electric scooters here really is a huge improvement over the motorbikes of the past. They're stealthiness is great for urban noise pollution and the use of electricity instead of gasoline certainly contributes to clearing up the smog. They're so great, in fact, that everyone appears to have turned in their bicycles for e-scooters. Often, when I'm debating the morality of cutting people off as I'm bicycling down the street, I console myself by saying that I'm just fitting into the traffic culture here. Maybe I need to get with the program and join e-scooter culture myself?

*****
For those who haven't been updated, my girlfriend and I moved to Kunming, China Feb. 26 and we'll be here for about the next six months. I've been trying to write an introductory blog post but we've been having connectivity issues. It looks like we've resolved those though, so keep an eye out for more!

The Survival Instinct

WARNING: There are no pictures in this post, but check out the flickr page. I uploaded a few hundred in the past few days.

I've been in India for about 5 weeks now - the longest I've stayed in any one country by about 2 weeks. I feel like India is a worthy recipient of my extra time since it's just so big and diverse.

I can tell that staying here longer has done something to my personality, too. Actually, it's hard to say whether it's the five weeks in India or if it was the 6 months of travel leading up to India, but I feel sharper - more aware and much more aggressive here in India. You run into enough Pushkars and eventually, your body goes into the offensive to seek out and destroy (figuratively, of course) people who have no problem fleecing you down. 

I partially learned this new-found aggressiveness from others. In the book I'm reading now, Shantaram, the narrator talks about how you can't really apply moral norms to India. People here do what is necessary to survive. Whether that means cursing, kicking, punching and gouging your way to a 3rd class seat on the train or apologizing profusely for accidentally tapping someone else's shoe on that same train once everyone is seated. (Those are his examples, not mine.) He argues that Indians switch back and forth between raw physical assault and saintly diplomacy in order to survive with their 1.2 billion other compatriots. You can see similar behaviors in China, but India is a little more intense, I think.

Another lesson I learned was from a friend of Rohit's - Raksha - who told me that you can't get anything done here without yelling at somebody. India is so full of clamoring voices and opinions that it takes a combination of volume and creative swearing to make things happen to your liking. It's not my style at all - I prefer to let the meaning and logic of my words speak for themselves, but that is a lost cause in India, so I've learned how to yell.

As I've gotten over my fear of confronting strangers in yelling matches, I've discovered that Indians take these confrontations surprisingly impersonally. As an American, I've been trained to take others' feelings into account and acknowledge that their emotions are just as important. Indians are much more egocentric because, I think, they can't afford to take other people's emotions into consideration. Sure, they are much more considerate with close friends and family, but not with strangers. I respect how well they can roll with the punches. I've seen so many situations here that would have turned into full-on brawls in the US but were resolved with just a bit of yelling, instead.

The trick, I think, is to learn how to be angry. I was never taught how to be angry. Instead, I've usually just let irritations fester until my emotions got the better of me and I explode. Basically, that's what has happened in India, too, it's just that those irritations mature into full fledged anger MUCH more quickly here than anywhere else I've been. So you learn to be proactive about it. Instead of waiting for the emotional anger to kick in, you generate it yourself once you see a situation going against your wishes. I've found that I have a little reserve of angry energy set aside in my brain for immediate use when a guard hassles me, or when someone insists on driving me after they've had 5 beers, or when a beggar starts reaching for your pocket, or when a rickshaw driver tries to rip me off. Instead of following my American instinct and giving the other person the benefit of the doubt, I shut it down immediately with a nasty look, a pointed finger and some choice words.

It's not like India is the only place that is like this. I remember everyone in the Balkans told me that they were the best at cursing because that's how they dealt with people. It's like that in the Caucasus, Central Asia and I'm sure lots of other places around the world. But I wasn't confronted with the necessity of doing it myself until I got to India. I suspect that the 6 months of travelling I did before India contributed to this, but India is also the most confrontational place that I think I've ever been. You won't get anywhere here if you don't learn how to say "no" and convince others that you mean it. I'm sure if I lived in the Balkans or Caucasus or wherever long enough, I would have picked up the same attitude eventually, but India really accelerates it.

It'll be interesting to see how long I retain that little pocket of reserve anger after I leave. I hope that I can keep it. Fighting with someone creates a bond that politeness never will. You haven't really measured yourself against someone and figured them out until you've confronted someone with a disagreement and resolved it. In America, people are much too eager to avoid confrontation, but I say bring it on. 

Adventures in Kashmir

Below is an actual conversation I had with a guy I met on the bus on the way to Kashmir. His name is Pushkar and, as he likes to tell EVERYBODY, he is from Punjab state of India. He is very proud to be from Punjab and touted his sharp intelligence as evidence that he is Punjabi. Imagine the voice of Abu, from The Simpsons, whenever you read his voice.

Pushkar: What are you reading?

Ben: A Train To Pakistan by Khushwant Singh - a novel I picked up in Pune. I think it's pretty well known here, right?

Pushkar: Never heard of it. I don't read novels. I read scientific texts and communication journals. Since I am a communications officer on board a ship, I must maintain knowledge of such important subjects.

Ben: That's good, but novels can teach you a lot about -

Pushkar: I am an expert in communications and I can solve any communication problem that could arise. Ask me a problem.

Ben: Ask you a communication problem...? I'm not sure what you mean.

Pushkar: Say you are stranded in the forest with no tools. How would you communicate with others.

Ben: I guess I'd build a fire and hope that somebody saw the smoke.

Pushkar: No, the forest is too thick. They cannot see your fire. Besides, how will you make the fire? You have no tools!

Ben: I suppose I'd rub sticks together, but ok, what's your solution.

Pushkar: Radio waves travel through the troposphere, so all one needs to do is construct a tower into the troposphere to send out a radio distress signal.

Ben: Wait. Build a tower? How are you going to do that? I thought you said you didn't have any tools?

Pushkar: Yes, I will use a sharp stone to cut down trees.

Ben: Ok - so how tall does this tower need to be to reach the troposphere?

Pushkar: 200 meters high.

(At this, he rests his case with a confident smile, leans back in his chair and looks at me like I'm a struggling freshman engineer student.)

Ben: So you're telling me that you're going to build a 200 meter tower - roughly equivalent to a 60 storey building - by yourself, using logs cut down by a sharp stone?

Pushkar: Yes.

Ben: You realize that it takes quite a bit of engineering and design raise a structure up 200 meters and that it would take quite a bit of steel or concrete to make it stay up, right?

(At this point, I was ignoring HOW he would transmit radio signals if he could get the tower up. I assumed he could fashion a microphone and wires out of pine cones and grass, or something.)

Pushkar: The human body can do amazing things when someone is in danger. I have read about women picking up automobiles to rescue their babies! Therefore, I could build a 200 meter tower if my life depended on it..

I dropped the conversation at this point. The two of us had MANY arguments very similar to this one. Pushkar embodied the danger in giving someone who was otherwise superstitious and acted on emotion access to something like the Discovery channel. He had picked up some scientific jargon from his studies and, mixed with a little Bear Grylles, he thought he was master of the world.

I met Pushkar and his father in a jeep from Jammu that went over the mountains to Srinagar - the largest city in the Kashmir valley. Our trip should've taken about 5 hours, but after 11 hours of traffic jam caused by landslides, our jeep stopped in Banihal for the night, about 3 hours short of Srinagar. I liked Pushkar's Dad. He was a teacher in a little village in the Kashmir valley and seemed to know his way around. I happily took his invitation to stay with them for the night. I have found that it is very important to make friends when travelling alone. Especially in a place like India, people prey on lone travellers and will scam you. I've found that it's better to move in packs here, and I'd rather choose my travelling partners on my own terms.

The above conversation occurred that night in the Himaliya Hotel in Banihal. Despite his father being a confident, silent, austere man, Pushkar, I came to learn, was an out of control brat who craved attention and wanted everyone in that little almost-Kashmiri truck stop of a town to know that he was from Punjab. Pushkar's sermons at the dinner table about how worthless Kashmiris were also unsettled me. He dismissed my protests to him to be quiet by saying that nobody there spoke English. He was probably right.

India is full of regional rivalries and, while the Punjabis and Kashmiris don't necessarily have it out for each other, given the situation in Kashmir, I thought it would be best to just lay low and keep quiet. Pushkar's father thought so, too, but he didn't seem to have any control over his chest-thumping, 20 year old piss-ant of a son.

The next morning I rode on with them to Srinigar where we parted ways. They went on to the father's village of Bandipore and I stayed in Srinigar to stay the week with my couchsurfing host. Despite Pushkar and his father's invitations to me to come visit, I really didn't plan on going to see them. Pushkar seemed way too volatile and way too much of a liability in a place like Kashmir. Even thought it's pretty quiet there now, I didn't want to take the risk.

But my host in Srinigar turned out to be a wash. He was a tour guide who was just using couchsurfing as a medium to attract business. After two days with him, I was disgusted by his constant attempts to get money out of me, so I started reconsidering the Pushkar option...

I called Pushkar's father and discussed the situation with him. He ensured me that it would be perfectly fine if I went up to spend a couple of days with them. Srinigar was just another city full of tourists and Kashmiri tour guides starving and ravenous after 20 years of bad business. I wanted to see the Kashmiri countryside, so I decided to give it a chance and go see Pushkar 2 hours away in Bandipore.

I came to find out that Pushkar and his father lived on a Border Security Force base in Bandipore and that his father was a teacher on base. Staying with them, then, meant that I also got to stay on base - a bonus as far as I was concerned, as not many travelers to India get such an inside peek.

The first 24 hours on base went well. I met a lot of the officers, ate mess with the enlisted guys and got lots of tours around base. But then, on the second day, when Pushkar and I tried to leave to go hiking in the mountains nearby, the guard stopped us and started asking questions about me. Later that day, when I was refused access back on base, I found out that during that morning interaction, Pushkar had called the guard a "sister-f***er" and many other bad names that don't translate as well from Hindi. Pushkar assures me that his name-calling was not the cause of my banishment from the base, but I am pretty confident that it is. The next day, even Pushkar had trouble getting back onto base and had to call his father to come let him in.

Luckily, Pushkar had a friend who was local and lived near by. After learning that I couldn't come back on base, Pushkar sent me to stay with this friend. The friend's family was a traditional Kashmiri one that lived in a traditional Kashmiri home. That means no furniture. I was directed into the front room and offered a pillow to sit on. It had been an exhausting day of hiking and dealing with a drunken Pushkar. My banishment from the base was only the last in a string of offences that eventually made me blow up at Pushkar for his arrogance. I was extremely tired and mentally frail when I sat down on the pillow in that Kashmiri house. All I wanted was some water and some sleep.

But seconds after I sat down, the whole family - 9 of them, I counted - filed in and sat around the wall on similar pillows. And stared at me.

I have grown accustomed to people staring at me. It happens to every foreigner on the streets of even big cities in India. We're just fascinating, I suppose. But this was a more extreme case. After my long day, I was not prepared for dealing with this. Hardly anyone spoke English, either, so all we could do, really, was smile and nod back and forth to each other. It felt ridiculous.

Luckily, or so I thought, the electricity went out and it was dark. I could deal with that much better than with 18 eyes staring at me. But then, the woman sitting closest to me turned on a flashlight and set in front of me so that my face was lit up and they could see me better. I could only laugh.

Later on, I thought that it would have been funny and it would have broken the ice much better if I had stood up and danced or something wildly silly but, as I said, I wasn't all there mentally. The best thing I could think of at the moment was to show them pictures on my camera. Indians are fascinated by romance, so I pulled up a picture of Bryn and passed it around telling them that she was my girlfriend. I think they were more fascinated by the digital camera than by the picture of Bryn and me in the Ukraine, but at least it stole the attention away from me and diverted it to the camera. It put a big, goofy grin on my face to think about Bryn and how silly the situation was and how funny and un-tense it would have been if she had been there. I relaxed and let go, and suddenly the staring didn't bother me anymore.

Eventually, they lost interest in me and filed off slowly to go make tea or finish some chores or put babies to bed and from that point on, I was able to deal with family members individually, or in groups of 2 or 3 instead of all nine at once. Despite the initial discomfort, my unexpected stay with that family was wonderful and they were all incredibly kind. They had a beautiful home and surrounding farm that I'll post pictures of later. I'm sure that my last 24 hours spent in Bandipore with them were much better than they would have been had I stayed with Pushkar.

But Pushkar embodies a lesson of travelling. You can't always be with people that you like or want to be around, but sometimes you need to deal with unsavory characters to access unique opportunities. He was just a stupid, insecure kid trying to be a man the Indian way which, unfortunately, is very similar to being a man the 15 year old way in the US. I think it's more important to know how to deal with these kinds of people rather than to dismiss them entirely. Part of the fun of travelling is being exposed to new people, and you can bet that you aren't going to like all of those people.

A Brief Vacation from Travelling

I arrived in India one week ago today, flying from Seoul, South Korea to New Delhi. This, obviously, broke my vow to never fly yet again. Opposed to the past flights, when my only option for pushing further east was to fly, I had other options to get to India. I could have taken the ferry from South Korea to China, taken trains across China and then taken a jeep over the Himalayas to India. It was actually a leg of the journey that I was very excited about before I began, but 6 months of travelling had caught up with me and I was feeling very fatigued. Also, I wanted maximum time in India. Taking the land route there would have cut at least 2 weeks into my allotted time for India.

I was greeted in New Delhi with news that a bomb had killed 11 people outside the High Court in the capital. Great. About an hour after I arrived in New Delhi, I felt the building I was in shake violently for about 3 seconds. I was convinced that another high powered bomb had gone off in my vicinity, but I later found out that it was "only" an earthquake. 4.2 on the richter scale. That was actually the first earthquake I'd ever experienced, so it was a little exciting. It didn't cause any significant damage or injuries, which is the perfect kind of earthquake to experience. 

View from my balcony in New Delhi the morning after the quake

The next day I took the train 20 hours south to Pune, where my friends from Austin, Rohit and Caroline live. They moved here a few months ago after living and working in Austin for 4 years. Rohit has been the perfect host here. He's an indulgent person and he's been a welcome addition to my relatively austere lifestyle the past 6 months. Compared to past locales that I've visited, I've done precious little in Pune but man, it's been so great. I've read the newspaper everyday, getting back in tune with what's going on in the world and India. Did you know that Pune has the highest murder rate of old ladies in all of India? 

The Duronto Express, 20 hours from New Delhi to Pune

I have also made up for 6 months of practically zero shopping by going on a few shopping sprees here in Pune. I've bought myself clothes to replace the now monotonous wardrobe of 5 shirts and 3 pairs of pants that I've been carrying around. It's amazing how a new t-shirt or a new pair of underwear can lift your spirits. It's also made me realize that shopping can be educational, too. Going to the bazaars and haggling over $2 scarves and $5 t-shirts has exposed me to an integral side of India: commerce. 

I was shocked to find that India's neighbors to the north (specifically Kazakhstan) do not haggle. From my experience, they give you a price (usually exorbitantly high because you're a foreigner) and then don't come down. Even if you walk away, they just watch you go to the next stall until you inevitably find someone who will sell it for the right price. Not so in India. The sellers here have INVITED me to haggle with them. They really enjoy it and laugh and pat you on the back at the end. I've gone with locals on most of my shopping excursions to get a feel for it, and I don't think I've gotten ripped off yet. 

Napping rickshaw driver

The casual life of Pune will end tomorrow morning though when I board a flight to Jammu, up in the north. Then, on Friday, I'll get in a jeep and drive 5-6 hours north through the Himalayas to Srinagar, the main city of the Kashmir Valley. This will probably be my most adventurous journey yet, as Kashmir can be a bit dicey. But I've done my research and am staying with a trustworthy host so I feel comfortable with it. It'll be a good experience to see and experience life in an area as unstable as Kashmir.

I have a feeling that internet will be limited there, as it was in China, so I'll probably not be able to update again until the week after.

Cheers!

Video Blog from the Tien Shan mountains

I recorded this back on August 14th but haven't had the opportunity to post it yet. This summit was only about 3 hour bus ride and hike from my host's apartment in Urumqi. Probably the most amazing day hike I've ever had. It started hailing about 5 minutes after I recorded this.

Entering the home stretch

Well, here it is, September and I'm in South Korea. Technically, I've made it across Eurasia, which was my original goal. When I saw the Pacific Ocean (or Sea of Japan, close enough) I felt finished. My original plan was to go back to China from South Korea and head down south to Laos, Thailand, etc. on to Jakarta. But I've changed plans.

Instead, I'll be flying straight from South Korea to India. I know, this breaks my key rule of "no flying". If there's anything I've learned on this trip, it's that sticking to principles in the face of overwhelming logic to the contrary is dumb. Travelling through China by myself was exhausting. Achieving the smallest thing like finding the right bus was a monumental task. I want to resume my travels through China at some point, but not next week. I want to learn a little Chinese first and then do it.

Meanwhile, in India, I've got friends waiting and an entire sub-continent of craziness to explore. It will be so good to see some familiar faces after two months on my own (Bryn's was the last familiar face I saw back in June).

India will also be my last country before returning home, so that makes it the homestretch. Even though I'll be there for a while, so don't start baking welcome-cakes and grilling welcome-steaks quite yet.

This past week has been very busy. The Jeju swing camp was a success, even if the best night by FAR was not even a sanctioned event, but just a weekly dance held by the local Jeju club. I had some pretty late nights with those dancers, eating more dried squid, drinking rice wine and mocking my chop stick skills. Tuesday I arrived back on South Korea mainland in Busan and then took a train up to Daegu where I am right now. But later this afternoon I'm taking a train on to Gangneung up in the northeast. Hopefully I'll get to go see the border with North Korea some point this weekend.

I'm sorry for not posting more pictures - I really do have lots of good ones. Computer access is much more convenient in South Korea, but I've just been busy since I got here and haven't had time to sit down and load/label all my pictures. They'll come though, just be patient.