Ting bu Dong

One of our reasons for travelling to China this year was for Lillia and me to practice our Chinese.  Both of us have learned a ton since our previous trip.  I made a big push to learn to read, and that really paid off.  I now know a little over a thousand characters, which may sound like a lot, but it’s nowhere near enough to, say, read a magazine article.  It is enough, though, to read a Chinese map, or a menu, or street signs, billboards, and business names.  I also learned a lot of new words, every day.  If you know how to pronounce one character of a two-character word, it makes it easy to look up that word.  I won’t go into the mechanics of this; just take my word for it.

Another thing that paid off was listening to Popup Chinese.  My one-year subscription was the best $99 I ever spent.  We watched a lot of movies on the long-distance buses, and it was amazing how many phrases turned up that I learned from Popup.  Mei shi, mei banfa, wu suo wei, zenme hui shi, all these everyday conversational phrases that elementary textbooks don’t seem to cover.

What I still lack, however, is listening comprehension in conversation.  So often, I would ask a question and then get an unexpected high-speed barrage of words back.  So, I would be left standing there like a deer in the headlights, synapses firing way too slowly as I struggled to decode what had just been said.  Lillia, however, would often get it right away.  “Mom!  She says there aren’t any more tickets for the 9:30 bus!  You have to take the 11:00 one!”  And I would give myself the “doh!” forehead slap, and think, yes, of course that’s what she said;  it just took me too long to process.  After a few situations like this, when I didn’t understand something, I’d ask Lillia, “did you get that?”  And, more often than not, she did.  I have no doubt that however hard I study, Lillia’s Chinese will far outstrip mine in a few short years.

Finally, Some Pretty Pictures

Okay, the trip was not an unremitting parade of misery.  We did see some pretty things.  Here are some of them.

We'll start in Kunming.  These are lotuses in Green Lake:

While in Kunming, we made a day trip to Shilin, the Stone Forest.  This is scenic area of bizarre karst formations.

Here are Tom and Lillia in one of the narrow slot canyons there.

This is a Chinese mosque in a Muslim area south of Dali.

Near the mosque, an old largely abandoned Buddhist complex.  It was full of amazing sculptures and carved and painted doors.

(Look out behind you, Lillia!)

This is a qilin, known as kirin in Japanese.  This is the same critter you see on bottles of Kirin beer.

In the same area, minority women in a market.

A side street in Dali.

A riverside house in Lijiang Old Town.

The Zhongyi Market in Lijiang.  Does anyone know what that long white-tipped pink thing is?  I've never seen it before or since.  If you know, leave a comment.

Mangosteens and other fruit at Zhongyi Market.  Mangosteens are one of my favorite fruits and I hadn't seen fresh ones in thirty years.

More Zhongyi Market.  Lovely mangoes.

A Tibetan temple in Lijiang.

At the same Tibetan temple.  I love the kid sticking his finger in the Buddha's belly button.

Instead of staying in the tourist ghetto of Lijiang, we stayed in the charming nearby town of Shuhe.   There were plenty of tourists there too, but it wasn't overrun like Lijiang.  Here are some riverside cafes in Shuhe.

One of the soggy but cute yaks in the fog and drizzle of Yak Meadow on Snow Mountain.

Wildflowers at Yak Meadow.

Scene from the bus from Lijiang to Shangri-La.

World's largest prayer wheel in Shangri-La.

The Zhu Family Mansion in Jianshui.  Jianshui wasn't on our original itinerary, but we added it to break up the long trip from Kunming to Yuanyang.  It turned out to be our favorite place.

Sewer covers in Jianshui.  And here I thought Japan was the only country with decorative manhole covers.  The amazing thing was that we saw no two alike.

This was our favorite restaurant in Jianshui, and probably our favorite of the whole trip.  These jugs were full of homemade wines.

And finally, the Yuanyang rice terraces.  I couldn't stop taking pictures here.  Most of these were taken from the roof of our guesthouse.

Wow.  If this was the only post you looked at, you'd think we had a great trip.

Conversations with interesting people

One of the nice things about our trip was the long conversations we had with people we met at hotels or on buses.

One of them was Joe, a French-Canadian marketing guy who has been living in China for twelve years.  He had lots of stories about great business ideas he’d had that were outright stolen from him. He bemoaned the fact that he was “addicted to China” (his exact words).  I tried to probe the nature of this addiction, which was inexplicable to me, given his experiences there.  But he was never able to articulate his reasons.  He said when he first came to the Lijiang/Shuhe area, where the air is so clean and the landscape so beautiful, he felt tremendously relaxed and rejuvenated, and immediately moved there.  He’s been there for two years now.

Casey was a young mother from Shanghai who was staying at our hotel in Shuhe.  Lillia had great fun playing with her seven-year-old son.  Casey had recently left her job to help care for her parents-in-law, who are both dying of cancer in neighboring Jiangsu Province.  Her father-in-law has stomach cancer, and her mother-in-law has lung cancer, though she had never smoked in her life.   Casey was pretty convinced that the toxic environment in eastern China was at least partly responsible for their cancers.

Tina was an Austrian woman in her early thirties who has been living in Shanghai for the better part of a year, studying Chinese.  When her boyfriend finishes his Ph.D. in Austria, he’s going to join her there.   She says that on a really good day in Shanghai, the pollution index is more than double the worst pollution ever recorded in her hometown near Vienna.  Even so, she too seemed addicted to China, although she didn’t put it that way.  But she’s wondering what to do when she wants to have kids, which she’ll have to do soon.  Is it right to raise kids in such a toxic environment?  She told us about the joke that was going around Shanghai this spring when all the dead pigs came floating down the river: “Isn’t China a great country?  You can smoke all the time without ever having to buy cigarettes, and now when you turn on the tap, you get free pork soup!”

Elaine was a thirtyish woman from Shenyang in the Northeast, vacationing in Yunnan with her parents.  She had gone to college in Canada and had stayed on for a total of ten years.  Then she returned to China to take a job in Beijing.  She has been there for two years, and now plans to get back to Canada as soon as she possibly can.  She said the pollution in Beijing this year was so much worse than she had ever experienced before.  Also, she was a little tired of the mind-set in China right now.  She said everyone is just focused on making money, to the exclusion of everything else.  Maybe in twenty or thirty years people will start to care about other things, she said hopefully, but right now it’s all about the money.

It was amazing how all these different people came around to the same themes.  There seems to be an awful lot of discontent in the Middle Kingdom these days.

I Have My Reasons

In case my Shangri-La rant has left you with the impression that I’m just a complete crank, let me catalogue some other things about this trip to illustrate where I’m coming from:

Every restaurant we ate at had people smoking in it.  Some were chokingly full of smoke.  If we tried to escape the smoke by eating at an outdoor table, we were usually within smelling distance of an open sewer.

Every long-distance bus we were on had a vomiting passenger (EVERY bus, I’m not kidding).  Our assigned seats on one bus had suspicious brown stains on the seats (we sat elsewhere).  On at least two buses, the driver smoked non-stop, right beneath the “smoking strictly forbidden” sign.

The toilets in Yunnan were horrifying.  The squat toilets I used thirty years ago in India were pristine models of hygiene by comparison.  I won’t even describe them, lest I give you nightmares.  Except to say that at some of the bus rest stops, the toilets were separated only by three-foot-tall knee walls and the fronts of the “stalls” were wide open, so you had the pleasure of shitting in full view of anybody who walked by.

In rural areas, people don’t seem to know what to do with non-biodegradable trash, so it just piles up.  Markets, villages, bus rest stops—they all had piles of smelly trash swarming with flies.

Our last stop was the village of Duoyishu, in the Yuanyang rice terrace area.  We were stunned by the beauty of the landscape.  Well, we saved the best for last, we thought.  Until we went for a walk around the village.  As we walked past one house, a little girl ran across a terrace to spit at us; Tom took a direct hit.  Later that day, other little kids were so hostile to Lillia that she started crying and said she wanted to go home.  Lillia is so friendly and warm, she could make friends with a stone, but not with these feral brats.

Even the food was disappointing.  Usually the food is one of the great pleasures of travelling in China.  And don’t get me wrong—we did have a handful of really great dishes.  But mostly it was rice noodles, with the same ingredients every time.  We love noodles, so at first this was fine.  But after rice noodles for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a few days, we didn’t care if we never saw another rice noodle for the rest of our lives.  When we returned to Kunming from Shangri-La, to our hotel surrounded by rice noodle restaurants,  I needed to take action.  I went to the reception desk and managed to say in Chinese, “Excuse me, is there a good restaurant nearby?  We really like Chinese food, but we don’t want to eat noodles.  We want to eat rice.”  The restaurant he sent us to really was pretty good.  It would have been even nicer if it hadn’t been hot, noisy, and full of smoke.  Also, Tom reported that the men’s bathroom was appalling and there was a guy vomiting in it.  See a theme here?

What with all this plus all the illness, some of which I’ve already chronicled, we were more than happy to be leaving.  When we got back to the airport in Kunming, we felt so happy and relieved.  For about ten minutes.  Until we found out that our flight had been cancelled.  Now, no one at the airport seemed to speak much more English than I speak Chinese.  So we were in a confused state of anxiety for about the next hour and a half.  A woman at the Hainan Airlines desk made multiple phone calls and ran around with our passports to argue with people at other desks, before finally producing boarding passes for us on another flight.  I’m sure when she got home from work that day, she had to lie down and take some Tylenol.  We then had about 20 minutes to get through security and out to the gate, which of course was the very farthest one from the ticketing area.  When we arrived, gasping, at Gate 59, we found that our 9:00 flight had become a 10:00 flight.  Then we sat on the tarmac for two hours.  When we finally took off, the passengers erupted into applause.  We were lucky to make our connection in Beijing.

We are thinking now about next summer.  Canada’s looking really good. 

Lost in Translation

I know that half the time I speak or write Chinese, I sound like a complete idiot.  So I have great sympathy for the people here who write signs in English for tourists.  It’s not at all like translating from, say,  Spanish;  it’s more like translating from Klingon or Mimbari.

Here are some signs we’ve come across on this trip.

 This one has the simple typo-like error.  You can find ones like this all over the world.  Actually, they could have saved themselves the trouble of translating it;  it wasn't the English-reading tourists who were spiffing all over the place.

Here’s an interesting example of choosing the wrong meaning of a word.  I’m sure I do this all the time when I look up a word in the dictionary.  What is a yak angle, you may ask?  That third character, jiao, means corner, angle, or HORN.  (Why Salisbury?  I've got no idea.)

This one was at the Yak Meadow on Snow Mountain.  They were trying to say “stay on the path; don’t trample the meadow”.  If you look up those last two characters, the dictionary does indeed say “lawn”, but a real lawn as we think of it in the west is a pretty foreign concept.  Chinese gardens generally have trees, flowering shrubs, water features, and in between, elaborate stonework rather than grass.  How they came up with “stampede” is anyone’s guess.  It makes me picture a herd of startled tourists galloping across the meadow in a panic.

Here’s a translation that was just too literal.  The Chinese literally says, “caution fall water”, but it came out sounding like a command in English.

Now here’s a real head scratcher:

 It starts out making sense and then just goes careening off the rails.  When I have access to a character dictionary again, I’m going to look up all the words and try to decipher the meaning of this train wreck.

Shangri-La!

If you’ve ever seen the movie “Lost Horizon” (or read the book), you know that in this Himalayan utopia, there is so little stress that no one ever gets sick, and people commonly live well past a hundred.

We arrived in Shangri-la yesterday.  It used to be called Zhongdian until some clever marketing people decided it closely resembled the enchanted valley described in the book.  We arrived in the afternoon after a slow and tedious, albeit scenic , bus ride.  We were a bit the worse for wear; I was recovering from a nasty bout of food poisoning that had emptied out my digestive tract from both ends, and Tom and Lillia had been complaining of vague flu-like symptoms for a couple of days.

So there we were at the bus station.  According to my most recent email exchange with Kevin’s Trekker Inn, we could call them and wait 20 minutes for them to come, or get a taxi.  We had no phone, and a Tibetan fellow was very keen to take us, so when I got him down to 15 kuai, I said fine.  He was right here, right now, and seemed to know where to go.

Well, he stops at the end of a very long pedestrian-only street and waves a hand “down thataway”.  Tom wasn’t born yesterday.  He isn’t going to hand over any money until we are at the door of the inn.  So we all start dragging our luggage (WAY too much luggage) down the cobblestone road.  When we’re nearing the end, our taxi driver is looking around left and right, and gets on his cell phone.  Oh my God, I thought, this is a replay of our Taxi Ride From Hell at the Beijing Airport three years ago.  Except that that time we were actually in the taxi the whole time our driver was lost, not dragging our luggage all over the place.  I show him the phone number in the guide book, and after several misdials he gets it right, but the call doesn’t go through.  So I go into a nearby antique shop and ask the proprietor, showing him the Chinese characters for Kevin’s Trekker Inn (Long Men Ke Zhan).  Ah! Yes!  He knows it!  Up the road this way about 30 meters, on the left.  He points back the way we came.  So we turn around and drag our stuff back to…Dragon Cloud Guest House (begins with the same character, long, meaning dragon).  I know this is the wrong place, but I stick my head in the office and ask in English, ”I’m looking for Kevin’s Trekker Inn?”  The guy answers in perfect English,  “This isn’t it.  It’s down the road that way, about 20 meters”, and points back the way we have just come.

When I come out and tell Tom, he says, “how could we have missed it?”  By now a little knot of locals have gathered around us and are having an animated discussion about our situation, most of which I’m not catching.  Another guy tries the phone number, but doesn’t get through.  He holds the phone up to my ear so I can hear the beeping sound.  By now I’m close to that tipping point between hysterical laughter and abject weeping.  Tom goes back into the Dragon Cloud and asks English Speaker, “Duibuqi, but could you show us where it is?  Because we don’t see it.”  So, he leads us back down the street once more, and then says, “Oh, I made a mistake.  This is N’s Kitchen, not Kevin’s Trekker Inn.  Kevin’s is over on that street,  to the left, around 400 meters.”  I confirm that “that street” is Dawa Lu, the address given in the guidebook.  Finally, we’re on the right track.

So we haul our luggage (did I mention, WAY too much luggage?) back up to the taxi, and a few minutes later we’re there.  We pay our hapless taxi driver the 15 kuai that he worked much harder for than he ever imagined.  We’re shown into a nice clean room, where we all collapse.

So, all’s well that ends well, right?  Not quite.  Almost immediately, Tom starts having shaking chills, and soon has a temperature of 103.  Plus diarrhea.  Lots of it.  I have rarely seen him this sick in the twenty-one years I’ve known him.

That night, Tom continues to run a fever despite alternating doses of Tylenol and ibuprofen ever few hours.  I am battling nausea and intestinal cramps, and my diarrhea returns.  I’ve just nodded off around midnight, when I’m awakened  by Lillia crying.  She doesn’t feel well.  I take her temperature and it’s normal but she has a headache, so I try giving her some Tylenol.  We didn’t bring any children’s, because we thought at eight years old, she would be able to swallow a pill.  A few days ago we discovered our mistake.  So I crush a tablet in a little bit of water, but it doesn’t dissolve.  I advise her to give it a good shake and toss it back in a big gulp.  Instead, she looks at it dubiously and takes a couple of diminutive sips.  I am sick and crazy tired and not in Good Parent mode.  I tell her that if she can’t take the medicine she should just try to go back to sleep.

While lying awake for the next four hours, I was struck with a feeling I’d never had before:  I WANT TO GO HOME.  Mind you, I’ve been sick as a dog in many exotic locales. But whether shitting my brains out in Bangkok or Calcutta, or coughing up a lung in Lhasa or Cuzco, I’ve always thought that this will pass in a few days and I’m still excited to be where I am.  Not this time.  I’m not entirely sure why.  Maybe it’s because this is my sixth trip to China, so it’s not new and exciting any more.  Maybe it’s because all three of us are sick.  Maybe it’s because everything on this trip has been unreasonably inconvenient and uncomfortable, way out of proportion to its meager rewards.  Or maybe I’m just getting cranky in my old age.

In any case, I think this may be my last trip to China.  If we decide to spend a year living in a Chinese-speaking country, I think it will have to be Taiwan, even though the accent there almost makes me break out in hives.  After all, it’s way cleaner, the food is safe, the people have more of a developed-country mindset (e.g., they care about the environment), AND you can buy onigiri at the convenience stores.

The Downfall of Dali

I first went to Dali in March of 1986.  I had spent a lot of time in big Chinese cities with grey skies and grim Stalinist architecture, so I was thrilled to arrive in this sleepy little town.  It was filled with traditional architecture and enclosed within a massive stone wall with impressive gates facing the four cardinal directions.  Surrounding it were fields of rice and other crops, and fruit trees in full bloom.  I remember that when I arrived, I thought, “this is what China should look like!”  The town had only opened to foreigners a few months earlier, and there were just a handful of hotels and restaurants.

Fast forward 27 years.  Word had quickly spread about Dali’s charms, and the tourist throngs descended on it. Millions of Chinese tourists from all over the country now come to Dali by the busload.  Foreigners from all over the world are there also.  The town is now chock-a-block full of guesthouses, restaurants, and trinket stalls—hundreds and hundreds of trinket stalls.  We stayed at a place outside the walls, and Lillia would say, “can we go back to the shopping mall?”  Which is exactly what the Old Town has become.  And all those pretty farms that had surrounded the town?  Now replaced by an ugly new city that has grown up around the walls like barnacles on a boat.  I have always felt a bit leery about going back to a place I loved, decades later.  In Japan, it was OK; Kamakura was as lovely and peaceful as I remembered.  But I’m never going to do this in China again.

The Lost Garden

                                                                       

We arrived in Kunming yesterday an hour and a half late, due to a long wait on the tarmac in Beijing.   We were impressed on our way to the guesthouse with how GREEN this city is.  So many Chinese cities are grey, grey, grey.  The streets here are lined with Southern magnolias, ficus, and huge bougainvilleas trained into trees, plus many other trees I have no clue about.  Some of the smaller streets have trees that arch over and touch, forming cool, shady tunnels.

The Lost Garden Guesthouse, which was billed as a “boutique hotel”, was kind of charmingly funky, but “boutique” was not the first word that came to mind.  It could have been any backpacker hangout in Bangkok or Kathmandu, with lots of white kids sitting around eating pancakes.  We made the mistake of eating at their restaurant, which was overpriced and entirely forgettable.  But the staff was very friendly, so we happily settled in.

We went for a long walk around Green Lake Park, just a couple of blocks from the guesthouse.  It’s a lovely place, with weeping willows, bamboo groves , lotuses and water lilies.  Unfortunately, since it was Sunday, half the population of Kunming seemed to be there, and the revelry was deafening.  There were many groups of people dancing, with dueling amplified music.  We decided we would come back when there were fewer people there.

It was an unusually steamy day in Kunming, and our room was very hot when we went to bed.  We left the window open and trained the little electric fan on us.  I fell quickly into REM sleep, and then began having very noisy dreams.  Then a horrendous clanging, banging, crashing crescendo jolted me awake.  “What the...?”  It was half past midnight.  I lay in bed listening to more crashing and banging, along with the idling of a huge truck.  Tom stirred beside me and said, “we need to find a new place to stay tomorrow”.  I suggested at least closing the window,  but Tom had already tried that, and had found that the window frame was swollen so that it could not be closed.  Since sleep was clearly impossible, I went out to see what was going on.  Below us, a stone’s throw from our room, was a huge dump truck, idling noisily.  A front-end loader was roaring back and forth, scraping up and dumping huge loads of construction debris into it.  I went back to bed, put on my noise-cancelling headphones, and read on my ipod until the noise stopped around 1:30.  I guessed they had filled up the truck and driven it off, and I prayed it would not return that night.

Lillia slept through the whole thing.

Coatis and Hummers and Monkeys, Oh My!

After La Fortuna, we spent three days at a resort in the middle of the rainforest. It continued to rain on and off (imagine that?). But it was warm and sunny often enough for Lillia to play in the pool a few times. If that girl could grow gills and fins, she would. We also went horseback riding, another first for Lillia. It was a pretty place, with charmingly minimalist cabins, but I was a little disappointed with how little wildlife we saw. Maybe it was the weather.

Anyway, from there we took the jeep-boat-jeep trip to Monteverde. It was drizzling most of the day (are you seeing a theme here?), but it was still a stunningly beautiful trip. We didn’t get to see Arenal reflected in the lake, but the deep green hills covered with meadows and forest on the Monteverde side were so lovely.

When we arrived in Santa Elena, it was briefly sunny, and we happily settled into the Arco Iris Lodge, just uphill from the town. Arco iris means rainbow in Spanish, and we did indeed see several while we were there.

Now, the Santa Elena- Monteverde area is the place to see wildlife. On Christmas Eve, we did a combination hanging bridges, hummingbird, and butterfly tour at Selvatura. First, the hanging bridges in the cloud forest, in the rain, during which Lillia went all pouty on us. It cleared up while we were having lunch, and just as we were finishing, the restaurant garden was suddenly invaded by a couple dozen adorable coatimundi.

Next we went to the hummingbird garden, where the feisty little birds fight over the many feeders. You wouldn’t think they’d need to; I guess they’re just innately aggressive.

For me the highlight of the day was the butterfly house. They collect all the cocoons and hang them in special cabinets. So, if you want to see butterflies that have just hatched, there they are. Many butterflies were still hanging from their chrysalises, and others were sitting on the bottom, letting their wings fully dry. We were allowed to let these ones climb onto our hands.

The following day, we were in a nice café in Santa Elena, when the barrista pointed out the back window and said “capuchin monkey”. Sure enough, there were two capuchin monkeys in the tree next to the back porch. We returned to this café the morning before we left for some prime birdwatching.

I will upload more photos after I get a larger hard drive. Soon, I hope.

Comida Tipica

Tom and I were in Costa Rica in 1995, and we remembered the food as being bland and uninspired. It still is, only now it costs twice as much. Tom recently said that comida tipica (the term for traditional CR food) should actually be called ‘comida sin sabor”.

We’ve pretty much given up the quest for tasty food and are just trying to eat as healthily as possible, which is enough of a challenge. Sticking to our low-fat vegan diet is simply impossible. Tico food centers around meat and cheese, with generous sides of white rice, white bread, and potatoes. A veritable diabetic nightmare. They know about vegetarianism, but not veganism, and would probably consider it a form of mental illness.

What they lack in quality, they make up for with quantity. I thought restaurants in America served ridiculously large portions, but the quantity of meat on the plate here is simply staggering. This heavy meat diet is probably one of the reasons Ticos are so heavy-set. In most of the places I’ve traveled, the locals are normal sized, and the tourists are great lumbering walrus people. There is no such distinction here.

We had a dinner in La Fortuna so dreadful that, as we were leaving the restaurant with half the food uneaten, Tom pronounced it the second worst meal he’s ever had. I didn’t have to ask which was #1 on the Bad Food Hit Parade. This meal was perpetrated not in CR but in Cuenca, Ecuador. Our Ecuadoran hosts took us to a restaurant that specialized in spit-roasted guinea pig, a delicacy in Andean countries. Maybe the little rodents can be good in the hands of a more talented chef, but this was the specialty of the house! We found it strange that they weren’t even skinned, because all of us norteamericanos found the singed fur rather off-putting. Then we discovered that they weren’t gutted either, so we amused ourselves by identifying internal organs (“hey look, I’ve got a lung!”, “I have a kidney with the ureter still attached!”). The cuy (guinea pig) was accompanied by unseasoned potatoes and the kind of starchy corn that is fed to livestock in the US. Yum.

But I digress. For Christmas dinner, we made a reservation at a restaurant in Santa Elena run by a Spanish couple. This was the first great meal we had here. The Andalusian gazpacho was such an explosion of flavor, I was ready to go to Spain for our next vacation. We also had fideua, which is basically a paella made with capellini instead of rice. It was fantastic. We washed it all down with sangria and had a very merry Christmas.

Flying Girl

This morning we again had nice weather and went to Ecoglide for some ziplining on the lower slopes of Arenal Volcano. There were 15 cables and an optional Tarzan swing. Lillia was too small to go by herself, so she went tethered to one of the guides. It was amazing how unafraid she was. She is so trusting. “You’re going to go with this guy, and he’s going to make sure you’re safe” is all she needs to hear from us. She had a great time on the cables. When we got to the Tarzan swing, she went first. When they dropped off the platform, I was startled by how far down it was. A mother of three young boys pronounced her “awesome” when she displayed no fear and didn’t scream. Tom went next, looking off the edge and thinking, “OK, my 6-year-old just did this, so I guess I can”. He cracked up the whole group by doing a Tarzan yodel as he swung. I went next, and I have to say it was one of the scarier things I’ve done, although I didn’t scream. But screamers there were aplenty, both adults and children. We have one brave, and yes, awesome little girl.

Costa Rica

Okay, I never did get back to Taiwan, but I will, I promise.

Anyway, we are now in Costa Rica. Costa Rica has basically two seasons, the high season and the wet season, the latter renamed the “green” season by some clever marketing person. This is high season, so we were surprised when it rained almost non-stop for the first few days. At our first stay, near San Jose, it was downright cold, and I was wearing up to four layers at a time. Lillia was a little sniffly before we left and after a day in CR, she had a full-blown cold.

On Saturday, we rode from the San Jose area up to La Fortuna in the rain and went out to buy umbrellas. There is a huge volcano next to the town that was nowhere in evidence. I was beginning to doubt the wisdom of coming here, because CR is strictly an outdoorsy place. You don’t come here for the fabulous cuisine (there is none) or charming architecture (ditto) or any other cultural attraction. Fortunately, it mostly cleared overnight, and we woke to a splendid volcano view from our room yesterday morning.

There are many hot springs near the volcano, which sounded very appealing after several days of cold. So we headed off to Ecotermales Hot Springs first thing in the morning. Aah, was that nice. Ecotermales is probably the nicest hot spring I’ve ever been to, and I’ve been to a lot. Several large pools lined with river rock are nestled in dense rain forest; they range from cold to Japanese hot, and are connected by little waterfalls.

Lillia has been gradually learning to swim over the past couple of years, and had gotten up to taking about four strokes before having to stop to take a breath. But yesterday for the first time, she figured out how to take a breath without stopping, and swam all the way across the pool unaided. We were all thrilled. But she was a little miffed that I kept getting distracted by the antics of a howler monkey in a nearby tree. It’s hard to compete with a creature in possession of a prehensile tail.

All's Well That Ends Well

Our last day in Taiwan was pretty hectic, packing up and buying last-minute gifts. Then a taxi to the airport and trying to find food near the gate for a hungry little girl (and tweaking my ankle again in the process). And then the long flight. At first we were seated in the last row of Elite, which meant that the seats didn't recline to their full extent, and since we were right across the aisle from the bathroom, anytime anyone went in or out of it, a slice of blinding light would fall across my face. After an hour or so of trying to sleep like this, I asked to be moved. They did find two seats together in the middle section, and after we moved we both slept pretty well.

For some reason, there was only one runway open at the airport, so we spent a long time on the tarmac, waiting to take off. So we arrived at LAX about an hour late, which cut our layover to two hours. At first I thought this was a good thing. Then, after standing in a stationary immigration line for about twenty minutes, I started to worry. Finally, it began to move, but it took a full hour to get through. Then we had to get our bags, and had trouble locating the car seat. Then another line for customs. By now I was thoroughly frantic. We rechecked the bags after customs, but were told we needed to take the car seat to United, in Terminal 6. Picture me, sprinting to the shuttle bus, dragging a carry-on, carrying a computer bag, a purse, and a car seat, and exhorting a tired little girl wearing a backpack to keep up with me. Got off at Terminal 6, and was told I actually needed Terminal 7. Ran up to the United counter at T minus 30 minutes, on the verge of hysteria, to be told that they were not accepting check-ins for that flight anymore. And there were no more flights that day. So, after getting boarding passes for a flight the following morning, we dragged all our stuff back to the

international terminal so that the Eva people could book us into a hotel. We shivered while we waited for the shuttle. Yes, it was cold! In LA! In the summer! We had a lousy meal with a terrible waiter, and then fell into bed.

Despite the time change, we slept like the dead. We put our dirty clothes back on (note to self, pack some useful things in the carry-on, like toiletries and a change of clothes). Check in was a breeze, and we had breakfast and coffee at the airport (well, Lillia didn't have coffee). On the way down the jetway, we met the co-pilot, who fell in love with Lillia (doesn't everyone?). He invited her to come up to the cockpit and have her picture taken sitting in his seat. Then we discovered that we had been upgraded to Economy Plus for free, by the kind United lady at LAX. Tom had taken the day off to spend with us, so he was at DIA to meet us, and we both fell into his arms.

P.S. This is not my last post about Taiwan. I still need to write about Lukang and Taroko Gorge.