Day 57

The last celebration of the "50 days" is taking place at home, on day 57, a week later than originally planned. Joern, Markos, Toni with Silvia, Eva, Jano, Angela with Massi, Abdul, Lucero with Jan, and Ana Maria with Giovanni and Luca bring the number of friends who helped celebrate to exactly 50 (not counting partners). We serve Raclette, as on day 1, and let the 1877 pictures and videos from the trip pass by on the wall. Reminiscences of various high- and lowlights of the trip sprinkle the evening, and I end up confessing that I feel more European than before. Why did we embark on this crazy itinerary at all? It's Carlos' fault, since he suggested that I visit my friends for my birthday, given that I cannot gather enough of them in one place. And then, of course, there is Wanderlust, or the Anatomy of Restlessness. Good to be back!

A Passage Through India

The last country that we are insulting on our trip by rushing through is India. We fly from Bangkok to Chennai (Madras), from where we originally planned to take the train to Mumbai (Bombay). However, several people discouraged us from doing that, and the alternative plan to fly to Goa and take the recommended train trip from there to Mumbai (13 hours) gets scratched as well, mostly due to insetting travel fatigue. Chennai offers us a lively beach at sunset and a delicious southern Indian dinner. Yet, Carlos' antibiotics-stressed stomach dislikes the spices, and we spend the next day recovering in the comfy Ramada hotel and catching up with things like phone calls (among them to my mother) before flying to Mumbai. There, we are in the good hands of Sumit, who facilitates our travel and takes us to a nice dinner after we have explored Elephanta island and its cave temples. The final day in Mumbai should have been spent in the relaxing hill-top setting of Matheran, but while the driver gets lost in the middle of nowhere, I receive the call that my mom passed away during the night. As planned, we fly back to Europe in the evening, but I go to Zurich instead of Vienna and Prague. Thus, on October 8th, Trudi's last journey begins and our trip ends unexpectedly. And today, on the 50th day after the 50th birthday, we are saying good-bye to a special friend on Friedhof Enzenbühl, in Zurich's Grossmünster Helferei, and in Zunfthaus Rüden. She loved traveling - but she thought that our 50 days idea was overdoing it.

Thai Food, Temples, Vehicles

Our venture into Thailand was mostly motivated by our love for Thai food and we get to enjoy some delicious dishes, particularly salads combining various fruit and seafood. But the culinary experience is not that different from the better Thai restaurants where we have eaten in other parts of the world. Most memorable is a fine dinner at a cosy, dimly lit back street restaurant, sitting on the floor amidst flowers: the spicy northern Thai sausage waters the mouth remembering it, the Snake Head Fish adds to our list of 50 animals eaten (sorry, Jano), and the vegetable and shrimp curry tastes fabulously. A discovery for me is the succulent Langsat fruit, and breakfast at the conveniently located Grand President hotel in Bangkok is the richest we have ever had. Yet, we will mostly remember the four days in Bangkok and Ayutthaya for the beautiful Buddhist temples and for the vehicles that move us between them: tuk-tuk (rather scary in rush hour traffic), taxis driven by a broad range of characters, mini buses and big tourist buses, ferries and cruise ships, the efficient sky train (the vehicle of choice in this city of eternal traffic jams), the subway - and not to forget our feet. Among the temples, the Grand Palace is certainly the most impressive, and its mural paintings are some of the finest classical art I have seen. Also, Siam Niramit, the fantastic show of Thai history and festivals at the Thai Cultural Center in Bangkok, done to perfection and including live elephants, tells us a lot about the country in a short time.

Taking a break from sightseeing

Hong Kong, a very different and much more homogeneous cultural environment (95% Cantonese, the guide says), gives us a welcome pause. Martin, Teresa, and Jennie host us comfortably in their superb apartment, overlooking the bay to the south of Hong Kong Island from the 23rd floor (and including the roof top). Carlos spends the first day in bed with the COSIT bug, while I have just recovered enough to get some work done. No need to go out anyway, as spectacular fireworks get displayed at night from seven boats in the bay at our feet (for no apparent reason). The remaining two days turn out equally relaxing, one spent walking around the top of The Peak with its breathtaking views, the other on the boat that Martin shares with friends, just being lazy and spoilt with a fine BBQ. The evening in between we enjoy at the great show of the Australian Circus of Oz. Overall, the three Hong Kong days felt a bit like getting some rest at home - maybe also because of the (marked) Swiss German spoken. We catch up with tourism on the last morning, though, by visiting the huge Buddha statue and the Po-Lin monastery, in a great landscape setting close to the airport on Lantau Island.

"Nur Fliegen ist schöner"

Given the bad reputation of air travel these days, the flying experience of this Star Alliance Round-the-World trip merits a blog post of its own. I am spending 4 of the 50 days on airplanes (83.5 hours flying time, to be exact, plus some waiting on runways), using 13 different airlines. The longest flight takes 23 hours (from Buenos Aires through Santiago and Toronto to San Francisco) and also includes the longest segment without time change (11 hours from Santiago to Toronto). Though the trip is not monotonic in longitude, it is in terms of time zones. Only after five weeks of traveling are we delayed for the first time (3 hours out of Singapore) - my first 14 flights have all been on time! By the way, newspeak for "delayed" is now "re-timed"... With only one Lufthansa flight so far, service has also been much friendlier than I am used to. The only consistent hassle has been air conditioning, with unpleasantly cold temperatures for most of the time on almost all the flights. The worst chill was on United from San Francisco to Hawaii, though this September 11 flight also topped all others in comfort and fun: we were upgraded to row 17 (our lucky number) in spacious Economy Plus, ate Sushi de luxe that we took on board, and I won the random draw in the mid-way game (guessing when we reached mid-point between San Francisco and Honolulu) without even playing it. The distinction of offering power outlets in economy, on the other hand, goes to Air Canada (Toronto to San Francisco). Lufthansa and Swiss both manage to sell us their round-the-world tickets with an invalid segment (United takes no passengers just from Sydney to Melbourne), but we will get refunded for the Qantas ersatz flight, which gets me into Melbourne only 20 minutes later than originally booked on United. Finally, airports in Australia and Asia win our award for ease of use and spacious design. Hongkong's airport even has free Wi-Fi, which comes in handy, as we need to skype to Switzerland to find out Martin's phone numbers on arrival (and tell him that we are about to visit...).

Hidden talents revealed

Daeni and Myriam welcome us to Singapore at the opening of an exhibit with paintings by diplomat's spouses ("Hidden Talents"), including two captivating works by Myriam (Fire of Flowers, and Global Warming - probably no causal relation implied). Later, over a pleasant meal at the beautiful Swiss residence, we learn more about Singapore (as well as about the Woker roots near Muenster) and chat about sundry travel adventures. The city impresses us through its proverbial orderliness ("The Fine City"), its efficient cultural blend (we stroll past a Chinese and Indian temple standing next to each other, then through a huge electronics market to charming Little India), but also the amazing amount of green space and vegetation in a state the size of Lake Geneva with over 4 Million inhabitants. Difficult to judge whether a tightly controlled one party state is too high a (temporary) price to pay for living crime-free, without visible poverty, and in a thriving business and science environment.

A country my age (and considered very young!)

We don't seem to get enough of traveling: after an eight hour flight from Melbourne to Singapore, we pause for sight seeing and dinner in China Town, then take the night train to Kuala Lumpur (departing from the railway station, not the train station!). Christine's friend Gilbert walks us through the city, from its own China Town, which still sleeps early morning, through the old town with the muddy river (= kuala lumpur), up to KL Tower (with 421m the third highest telecom tower in the world, though the observatory is "only" at 276m), and around the twin towers of Petronas. A bustling mixture of cultures and their religions appears to live together happily here, reconciling conflicting social and legal systems. A 2.5 hour car ride takes us over a pass and down into the home town of Malaysia's first king. Near to his old and new palace, in a remote and thinly populated Malaysian kampung (village), Christine and Roger occupy a traditional house "on legs", surrounded by goats, chicken, and monkeys in the trees. They host us (in addition to Roger's mother and her friend) very warmly and we enjoy a relaxing rest in nature after having visited four big cities in a row. Just as we get up in the morning, a baby goat is borne, and Carlos becomes goat godfather, baptizing it to the Nahuatl name of Yolot. After breakfast with home-baked bread, delicious mango, and coconut jam, Christine drives us to Seremban, where we catch the train back to Singapore: seven hours of palm trees on the left and palm trees on the right, with one quick glimpse of a temple. In all other aspects, this was a memorable trip to meet up with Christine again, after 35 years!