End of the Burma Road
Tuesday, December 3rd, 2002
Sunday Dec 1-3 2002
Arrived at Kunming from Guilin after 23 hours on the train. We had gained considerable elevation throughout the night. We took a taxi to the Camellia Hotel where we booked a triple room. Driving through the city�s nice clean wide streets in the cool fresh air at high elevation, we were reminded of Denver Colorado.
Jana went to the Kunming Museum. She was given some pictures and documents by a former co-worker that his father had saved from thetime that he worked as an engineer on the Burma Road…the road ended at Kunming and Jana thought there might be a depository of artifacts in the museum. This was the famous 1000km dirt road that was carved out of the mountains from Lashio Burma to Kunming in 1937-38 during WWII with virtually no equipment. It would provide the US forces, in a bid to keep China from falling to Japan, a way of getting supplies into China. Today, Renmin Xilu marks the end of the road in Kunming.
Jana was invited to an inner office to talk to the curator who was very pleased with the addition to the museum collection and of course Jana was extremely pleased that her mission was successful!
At a nearby Pizzeria/used book/cafe for dinner and I found �Behind The Wall,� a travel book about China in the 80�s by the British author Colin Thubron.
Wednesday Dec 4
We feel we have yet to experience local Chinese peasant life…the large cities of Guangshau, Guilin and Kunming are very western cities full of commerce and big upscale hotels and restaurants….all close to the business centers of Hong Kong. We are anxious to get into the countryside. We have seen very few Western tourists-certainly no Americans-but there are many Chinese tourists.
My original plan was to take a boat up the Mekong River in Cambodia to the Lao border and then on up through Laos but I kept hearing reports about the opening and closing ... 
September 24 2002
Bob left Hanoi right away on the train for Sapa near the Chinese border to do some trekking among the colorful minority villages and then to spend three days in Halang Bay ... 
In a monsoon rainstorm we climbed off the train in this cool wooded hill station built during the British occupation. The locals laughed (with me) at my little paper sun umbrella I carried that ... 
The geographical configuration of the city of Cape Town at the foot of Table Mountain is as beautiful as everyone has said it is. We took the cable car to the top of ... 
June 12, 2002 To the South African Border
In the morning before we leave camp, three guys walk up to our campfire as George is frying bacon; I walk up and introduce myself. Two ... 
On the way back to Maun Botswana in the Safari truck, Rod explains that the area around Maun is in the fastest growing area in the southern hemisphere because of the discovery of diamonds ... 
Sun May 25, 2002
Up at 5:30 for the sunrise micro-light (motorcycle with wings) ride to view the falls and the geologic formation left by them over thousands of years. The half hour ... 
In Australia, New Zealand and South Africa your car "hoots" not honks. Hoot, I tell them, is what an owl does! Rod says Geese "honk" and cars "hoot!" We laugh. ... 
May 11-15 2002 City of Stone Town Island of Zanzibar
The tropical island of Zanzibar has a more cosmopolitan and warm and open ambiance than other African countries we have been in-more like the islands ... 
The Ngorongora Crater is a conservation area and National Heritage Site. After breaking camp in the Sarangeti, we drive another two hours up to the Crater rim where we set up camp so ... 
A week before picking Bob and me and another 3 people up in Nairobi, the WorldWide Adventure Company had taken about 15 others across the Masi Mara into Rwanda to see the Gorillas. ... 
Zoe