The Incidental Tourist Read online

  We’ve also had the experience, particularly on the trans-Pacific route, of waiting to board, and then being told that there’s a mechanical problem and the flight will now leave the following morning. When that happens, the airline generally prefers to retain your checked bags, and so it’s a good idea to have whatever you need to hand for a night in a hotel in your roll-aboard.

  Most people take too much with them when they travel. If discipline is lacking on the first round, a ruthless second pack is a good idea. Every too-frequent flyer has his/her strategy for packing, and here’s my list. If there’s an invitation to an event that requires a ‘business suit’ – why does anyone inflict this on people in the twenty-first century? – it’s generally possible, if you’re not a main attraction, to get away with a black reefer jacket and black trousers. I always carry a couple of big, black office foldback clips that go over the bar on a standard clothes hanger – they work better than plastic clothes pegs for situations where there is no dedicated trouser hanger. Quick drying underwear is a good idea, and hotel shampoo is usually great for washing stuff through in the bathroom sink. Carry a light plastic hanger if you’re aiming to wash shirts. For those establishments that are too fancy to offer a retractable cord over the bath, a length of dual-stranded elastic clothesline with hooks at each end can always be rigged somewhere, and there’s no need for pegs.

  I wonder at times whether some hotel rooms are actually designed by a human being who has ever spent a night in one. Apart from the trickery associated with the endless variations in plumbing technology, which need to be mastered before it’s possible to take a hot shower, there’s also the mystery, late at night and exhausted after a long flight, when you search endlessly for that last electronic switch to turn off a glaring light. And do you just pull the blinds, or is there a cord somewhere, or a switch that operates a motor? Why is it that, even if there is an electronic clock with a lit display, these products are always unique and have some incomprehensible mechanism for setting the alarm? Those printed information books that used to be in every room seem to have been consigned to history – we’re now expected to navigate our way through some obscure and unfamiliar menu on the TV set. Is it even possible to get the hotel TV off the paid movie channel so that you can actually see the news? First, though, if the TV is playing hideous elevator music when you reach the room, you have to work out how to turn it off!

  My favourite hotel is one where I know the ropes, there is a fantastic view from the window, they offer a hot breakfast in the room rate, and there’s a glass of port and a chocolate before you go to bed. But, even if this place does exist and it isn’t a fantasy, I’m not going to tell you where it is as it too often gets booked out!

  CHAPTER 10

  The Tea Horse Road

  ENCROACHING YEARS BRING EVERYTHING to an end and, at three thousand plus metres in the foothills of the Himalayas, I had to finally abandon any illusion I had of equestrian competence. My youthful memories of being up on tall stock horses (Walers) in the Queensland backblocks, enhanced by a lapse into tourist-brain mode during a three-day post-conference tour, led me to accept the challenge offered by the high-plains horse hirers of Yunnan province’s Lashi Lake. I had somehow forgotten the possibility of taking a tumble! A photograph provided by the conference organisers shows me perched precariously on a dun-coloured mount that looked no bigger than the ‘sturdy mountain pony’ that figures in Banjo Patterson’s Man from Snowy River.

  A major difficulty was that the stocky horsemen, whose ancestors likely traversed the caravan routes of Yunnan’s ancient Tea Horse Road, were using a rope knotted at a length suitable for a flat-race jockey instead of stirrup leathers. It would have been fine for someone who was 1.4 metres tall, but I suspect that even Patterson’s redoubtable Clancy of the Overflow would have found the seat challenging. My memory of staying on board through that last canter is of bouncing around like one of the more improbable cast members of Blazing Saddles. Being 2006, I didn’t even have the excuse of choosing to mount up because of some odd coincidence with the Year of the Horse (2002, 2104) in the Chinese Zodiac!

  China is a vast, varied and fascinating country where, like many Australian scientists, I’ve been an invited visitor on several occasions. This time it was for a meeting on viral immunity in Kunming, where my role was to give the opening keynote overview. Accepting had been easy – the main speakers were people I knew and liked, and we’d never been to that part of the country so there was the added attraction of that short, post-conference tour. Not having read the preliminary papers properly, I hadn’t realised there was a secondary agenda to have us visit the Kunming Primate Research Centre, but that would not have changed my decision.

  While the Philadelphia-, Memphis- and Melbourne-based influenza research programs I’ve been involved in for decades have focused on mouse experiments and, more recently, on observational studies in humans, many of the people attending this meeting were attempting the (to date impossible) task of developing a vaccine against the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Such studies can’t be done usefully in laboratory mice, experiments in people are obviously out, and the most relevant model is one or other species of rhesus macaque. As China aims to sell drugs and vaccines globally, their biomedical R&D enterprise operates under best-practice ethical and review guidelines that are acceptable to US and European granting and licensing agencies. The primate centre in the hills near Kunming looked to be a quality operation, at least in the areas accessed by casual visitors, but I don’t know if any of the attending US and European HIV researchers followed up on the possibility of getting their work done more cheaply, but remotely.

  Kunming has long had a different and somewhat romantic fascination. During the Second World War, heavily laden, underpowered C47 transport aircraft struggled up and over the Himalayan hump from British India to offload their supplies in Kunming. And it was the main base for Claire Lee Chennault’s ‘Flying Tigers’ US fighter group that, equipped with the P40 Curtis Kittyhawk/Warhawk used extensively by the RAAF, provided air support (from early 1941, well before Pearl Harbor) for the Chinese resistance to Imperial Japan. Flown initially by ‘on leave’ US military pilots, Colonel (then General) Chennault’s American Volunteer Group was soon (late 1942) absorbed into the US Army Air Force.

  The Kunming of that time is long gone and the modern city is home to more than three million people. Along with my other experiences of visiting the People’s Republic of China, the hospitality was great, we ate too many banquets, and the well-organised scientific meeting was both interesting and intense. Though there was some time to walk around, my main memory of Kunming is being confronted by a massive statue of that communist revolutionary, Mao Zedong. But surely, by 2006, the ‘great leader’ had long been relegated to political disfavour? Perhaps, with later revision in mind, that did not extend to expunging all public monuments. Mao is, of late, somewhat rehabilitated, and there are certainly memorable quotes in his The Little Red Book, a gift from our first visit to Hong Kong.

  The meeting ended and, leaving Kunming to spend three days as tourists in rural Yunnan, there was the sense of travelling way back beyond the 1940s of the Second World War and Mao’s decade-long Cultural Revolution (1966–76) to a China of much earlier times. We all understand that Chinese civilisation is ancient and has persisted through many different eras. But, with the enormous industrial expansion and rapid urbanisation came the loss of many historic buildings and precincts, and it can be difficult to gain an on-the-ground sense of antiquity among the bustle and gasoline fumes of a modern Chinese city. There is, though, much that survives in more rural areas and museums.

  The Forbidden City in Beijing is, of course, spectacular and partly funded by overseas Chinese. It has been undergoing a great deal of sensitive restoration and repair. Visiting this rambling imperial complex on a later trip made me think of the Palace of Versailles, the magnificent edifice designed by Louis XIV to contain the untrustworthy French nobility in isolated,
structured, meaningless routines that could be readily monitored and controlled. Ultimately, as for China’s Qing dynasty (1644–1912), that continued focus on separating the landed gentry from the people went badly for the ruling class when Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and many of the aristocrats suffered the final solution of Madame La Guillotine. The Qing deposition was much less murderous than either the revolution of the eighteenth century sans-culottes or Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

  Apart from the Forbidden City, other places where I’d gained some sense of an old China were in seeing the cultivation and drying of green tea, and in visiting the traditional Chinese medicine precinct in Hangzhou in east China. Now, from Kunming, we were heading off to Lijiang, the 800-year-old town in the region of the Na’xi, who are closely related to the people of Tibet. Arriving in Lijiang by air, we checked into the modern Lijiang Hua Ma Super 8 Motel, which was to be our base for three nights. To any American, Super 8 means ‘budget’, and the ladies in the party were a bit horrified when they encountered only squat toilets in the lobby area restroom. Fortunately, when we accessed our more than adequate rooms later that day, the plumbing was fully Western.

  That afternoon we walked around old Lijiang. Organised along both sides of a narrow stream, turning two massive water wheels, there was a definite sense of antiquity, though, as the buildings were wooden, the question of possible fire damage over the centuries came to mind. And, in 2014, some 600 square metres of this old town did indeed burn. As was the case after the 1996 earthquake (ten years before we visited), I suspect much of the tourist area, at least, has now been restored.

  Recalling the opening scenes from Western movies like Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter, we saw what looked like Chinese gauchos ride laconically into town and tie up their mounts. Walking past the restaurants (a roast suckling pig turning slowly on a spit) and craft stores along the waterfront was a charming, though very touristy experience. But where, as is the case in Lijiang, there are hills sloping steeply to a watercourse, it’s never hard to leave the crowds behind by just heading up a side street. This allowed us to gain just a little sense of the realities of domestic life there.

  I have a vivid memory of an old lady cooking in a side yard over a simple stove fired by a single, cylindrical coal briquette. Outside kitchens are a good strategy to avoid the inexorable, progressive chronic obstructive pulmonary disease caused by constantly breathing particulate matter from open fires indoors, but it did make me think about the challenge China (with 1.3 billion people) faces in limiting greenhouse gas emissions. The other recollection I have is of looking down on a continuity of timber buildings and overlapping, tiled rooftops – these wooden towns are highly vulnerable to fire!

  That night we were treated to an intriguing concert of ancient Na’xi music. The members of the large orchestra of men and women, young and old, were dressed in brightly coloured traditional costumes and, while a few of the instruments were unfamiliar, it was easy to identify drum, flute and mandolin variants. Some of the players also sang, with the fascination being very much in the different registers and sounds that the Western ear associates with the Asian musical tradition. The following evening we viewed a more acrobatic and stagey Yunnan–Minorities entertainment, featuring both traditional and more contemporary Western performances. Both experiences were highly professional and memorable.

  Our second day took us to Lashi Lake, with the coach ride showing us traditional villages and farms in Huangshan County, both as we drove by and made food and rest stops. The realities of small-scale agriculture in high country areas may not be that different to anywhere else. My memories of rural Yunnan coalesce into a set of mind pictures enhanced, in some cases, by photographs taken at the time. The old established farmhouses and fields looked much as they might have done for decades, even centuries. Other recollections are of old people playing Mahjong in the villages, of a welder repairing damaged wheels by a dusty roadside, of those two-wheel tractors with varied attachments, and of labourers placing what looked to be hand-cut stone borders to newly constructed highways. Fleets of ubiquitous blue trucks carried the road building materials, with some loading at supply depots extended to form primitive camps. Clothes drying on lines suggested that these were home to many of the workers and, perhaps, their families. Aggressive rural road building is emblematic of a nation that moves steadily forwards. Apart from transporting goods to and from the major centres, roads facilitate the spread of education, opportunity, national identity and political control.

  Which brings us to the ancient connections of China’s Tea Horse Road. As early as the sixth century, caravans of mules and horses traversed a network of human foot- and equine hoof-defined trails that linked, in one direction, the tea-growing areas of Yunnan to Tibet, Nepal and countries south of the Himalayas and, in the other, to Chengdu and beyond to Beijing. Especially in the late Qing dynasty, local lords used ‘tribute tea’ to curry favour with the Emperor. It took six months to transport the Pu’er ‘teacakes’ – tea preserved by being compressed into small discs – to the Forbidden City. After figuring recently in an investment bubble, Pu’er tea continues to be both expensive and highly valued by those committed to China’s cultural heritage. Lijiang was one of the trading points where, among other transactions, tea was exchanged for horses.

  On the final day we became acquainted with the mighty Yangtze River, as we took a ninety-minute road trip to see it flow through Leaping Tiger Gorge. Named for a pursued tiger that escaped by making a 25-metre jump at its narrowest point, the constraint of the Gorge’s high walls causes the stream to become fast flowing and incredibly dangerous. The longest river in Asia, and the third in the world (after the Amazon and the Nile), the Yangtze’s fertile plains support the lives of more than 450 million people and provide some 20 per cent of GDP for the country. Fed by rainfall and snow and glacier melt from the Himalayas, the big worry is that the progression of anthropogenic climate change could greatly compromise downstream agricultural productivity. Currently, the winter snowfall stores water until the spring thaw. Even if precipitation increases with global warming, the problem is that winter rains may simply drain away and be unavailable for the optimal growing season.

  The same concerns apply to the other great rivers that originate from the Himalayan slopes, particularly the Indus and the Mekong. An obvious, simplistic solution beloved of politicians is to build more dams. Such construction is both planned and aggressively debated. Dams have, as water specialists and environmentalists constantly warn us, the potential to cause other major problems. The US Army Corps of Engineers has had, for example, to undo some of the apparent ‘solutions’ put in place to control the Mississippi, which is about the same length as the Yangtze.

  Leaping Tiger Gorge is about 15 kilometres long and, to see it properly, demands a two-day commitment from fit and experienced hikers. Our visit was, of course, much shorter and, though there were rickshaws for hire by those too frail to make the distance, the part we traversed was relatively easy. Blue clad and capped older women toting supplies along the trail in big wicker-basket backpacks passed us in both directions!

  The Gorge is spectacular, with the brown river rushing below and mountains looming to 2000 metres above. We walked through at least one big tunnel, and along a well-formed path that was evidently not without risk. Keeping towards the water, we observed the sign that read, ‘within 200 m notice the rockslide, please is run about by cliff’, and hoped that we were doing the right thing. Most of the other warnings were in Chinese, but there were guides to provide advice. The cliffs were, as I recall, mainly limestone and sandstone, while the stone paths and occasional steep climbs would clearly have been slippery when wet.

  Returning to the bus parking lot, we found a trailside stall offering locally sourced souvenirs, including a set of antelope horns. Even if they might have been desired by some passionate pseudo-hunter, there was no way that they would have been acceptable to (at least) Australian customs and quarantine inspectors!
The drive back gave us more views of the Yangtze, flowing wider, though still rapidly between green river flats, with villages on higher ground and hills behind. It was altogether a very satisfactory conclusion to our short tour. The next morning some of our party went on a further trip to Tibet, while we headed from the heights of Kunming to sea-level Beijing and on to the coastal lowlands of Melbourne, Australia.

  CHAPTER 11

  United we stand

  THE 2003 INVITATION TO speak at the 5th Options for the Control of Influenza conference was hardly unexpected, as I’ve been part of that particular science club for years. But, because it was to be on Okinawa there was, as a Second World War baby, no way I was going to miss the opportunity to visit. Okinawa was the last, and biggest, battle of the 1941–45 war in the Pacific. Most of that final push was made by US troops, and Okinawa still looms large in the consciousness of, at least, elderly Americans.

  The numbers who died (92,000 plus soldiers and 40,000 plus civilians) during those eighty-two days of fierce conflict (from 1 April 1945) convinced the Allied powers that any attempt to invade the main islands of Japan would lead to the loss of more than a million lives. As a consequence, US President Harry S Truman made the decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leading to the immediate surrender of Japan. Since then there has been a strong US Air Force presence on Okinawa, though I don’t recall that we saw a single airman or military vehicle in our short time there.

  Emerging in 1985 from the annual series of Keystone Symposia meetings in biomedical sciences (always held early in out-of-season ski resorts), the Options conference is a triennial get-together for the global influenza R&D and science-based policy communities. One of the many reasons for holding these international events at different venues around the world is to share the workload and some of the expense, as much of the fundraising and effort falls on the local organising committee. The latest held in Australia (Cairns in 1996) was run primarily by people I now work with at the University of Melbourne and Melbourne’s WHO (World Health Organization) Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza, while former St Jude Children’s Research Hospital virologist colleague Yoshihiro Kawaoka led the team for the Okinawa event.