Signs of intensive crop farming, especially fruit trees, preceded the outer limits of this small oasis town dominated by a backdrop of desert sand-dunes and pagoda-style hotels dotted along tree-lined streets.

  Closer inspection revealed that these huge dunes were providing a range of leisure activities for the mainly Chinese visitors: long strings of mounted camels, sand-boarding, helicopter rides, jeep rides etc., set against a small oasis of a lakeside wooden pagoda within clumps of well-watered green trees.

  But all this is mere frippery. The real significance of Dunhuang lies a few miles outside the town out into the desert. As you approach a low range of hills rising out of the flat surrounding desert, dozens of niches, which look at first like Tora Bora in Afghanistan, come into sight, carved out of the cliffs. Although the caves initially served as a place of meditation for hermit monks, the Mogao Caves were then developed to serve as monasteries, places of worship and pilgrimage representing the largest and most richly endowed treasure house of Buddhist art in the world. Dating from the 4th to the 14th century, nearly 500 caves reveal wall paintings, painted sculptures and other cultural relics. In the early 1900s, the caves yielded up thousands of manuscripts that had been hidden away in a niche in the so-called Library Cave for safety, a find some have called the world’s greatest discovery of Oriental culture.

  Most of the caves were only twenty feet high, but one cave rose a hundred feet up to reveal a Buddha figure of the same height carved out of the sandstone facing wall. Another stretched to a hundred feet in width to accommodate a huge lying Buddha figure.

  Fortunately, five hundred years of neglect have left these treasures in remarkable condition (though again some images at lower levels had eyes scratched out) and crowd management by the authorities prevents any further deterioration, despite receiving two million visitors a year, ninety percent of whom are Chinese. Small groups are shepherded in and out of different caves under a master controller somewhere, ensuring minimal environmental damage and maximum crowd control.

  ***

  1,700 kilometres southeast from Dunhuang lies the city of Xi’an in central China, once the capital to thirteen Middle Kingdom dynasties covering the golden age of the Silk Road, becoming the final destination for goods travelling east along the route.

  Until 1974, it was a middling size Chinese city with an auspicious history and the best-preserved city Wall in China, but this all changed one day in that year when a farmer digging a well just caught the corner by inches of what turned out to be the major archaeological find of the late twentieth century: the ’Terracotta Warrior site, where the first Qin Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s mausoleum had been built in the third century BC. For the record, it did not change the farmer’s life as he was barely rewarded, but he did get to sign books for visitors for some years.

  The site is now world famous, of course, attracting twenty million visitors a year, thirty percent from overseas, which has brought wealth to the city and a boom in building construction to support its expanding population of over eight million. Two additional pits have been opened up since the first one opened in 1979 and much has been learned from the mistakes which led to damage, especially colour loss, as a result of original excavations. The crowds at the first pit were overwhelming but less so in pits 2 and 3, which are smaller and better presented. It seems that these problems, as well as the possible risk from the mercury used to protect the tombs against being ransacked, may discourage any further excavations, so perhaps it is better perhaps to let sleeping dogs lie, as it were. It is, however, curious to note that the emperor began to plan his final resting place at the age of thirteen, thirty-eight years before it was needed, not something on the minds of most thirteen-year-olds.

  His belief was that with his troops lined up facing south, the direction of his enemies, would continue to carry on the good work even after his death.

  As a sideshow, there is an excellent exhibition in the local museum of wall paintings lifted from emperors’ tombs for which a hefty charge is made unless you are over 70 in which case it is free. That’s the good bit, but then having got your free ticket, you cannot enter unless accompanied by a fit and able under 70-year-old, which can make it difficult for groups of senior foreigners. Elf and Safety, Chinese style. Makes you feel even older.

  ***

  Luoyang, in neighbouring Henan province, is situated ninety minutes away from Xi’an by high-speed train, and though today it is an industrial city, was the capital of China for over 4,000 years covering thirteenth different dynasties. Like Dunhuang, Luoyang attracted early adopters of Buddhism, monks and wealthy followers who wanted to express their faith by filling over 2,000 niches in what is known today as the Longmen Grottoes, dug out of a range of limestone ridges along the picturesque Li River, today adorned with picturesque willow trees.

  Buddha images from a few centimetres high to a hundred feet are either carved into the rock, or stand/sit within individual niches along a distance of several hundred yards, reachable today by a balustrade of walkways along the cliff edge. This obviously absorbed the full attention of our group, but the Chinese, and in particular, three visiting Tibetan monks, seemed as interested in photographing us as the site itself, probably because our collective hair colour was white and theirs black.

  Throughout the trip, we have attended a sequence of lectures from our erudite leader with a PhD from Shanghai University, a fluent Mandarin speaker, a renowned authority on Chinese history and culture, and pretty good at English despite growing up in Australia. As we sat atop a local mountain near an outdoor tea pavilion surrounding our ‘teacher’, the locals went mad with their cameras probably thinking we were some modern-day Buddhist sect.

  This effectively completes the ‘Silk ’Road’ section of the trip. All that remains is a four-hour high-speed train journey to Beijing for a few days’ recuperation after an intensive but absorbing trip and hopefully a fuller understanding of the significance of the Silk Road to the dissemination of goods, cultures and beliefs to and from Europe to China, and China’s adoption of Buddhism and how it differed from the Theravada variation developed further south in Ceylon, Burma and Thailand.

  ***

  A few thoughts thirty-five years after my first visit to Beijing when Mao blue or grey one-piece suits were the norm, women wore no lipstick, and cycles were the dominant means of transport for all except cadre members.

  The food was then generally unappealing to the Western palate, foreigners had to use special currency notes and pay higher airfares than locals, and many city-dwellers lived in hutongs, traditional courtyard residencies in narrow street alleys. Of course, there was no Google then, but then again, there’s no Google now either as it is banned like Facebook and BBC sometimes.

  As a 31-year-old woman told us in Panjiayuan market, Confucian principles were once strong, but today are much weakened, overtaken by the race to accumulate material possessions. The signs of growing wealth and confidence are everywhere: impressive uniquely Chinese modern architecture, international stores and hotels, well-dressed young people in malls, markets and parks with trendy modern haircuts and only a few down-and-outs and beggars near major tourist sites lounging on benches, despite ever-present police on the streets and in parked backup police vans. Employment levels must be high as it is said that one in twenty-five people is paid a nominal sum to keep an eye on everyone else.

  Restaurants are surprisingly difficult to track down in downtown areas, except for KFC or Starbucks, and are often located on the second floor with tucked-away entrances at ground level. And if you want to buy a packet of tea in the country that invented it? No way. It can be expensive in cafés and hotels, especially for premium teas. However, the quality and range of Chinese and other foods is much improved, and I have not to my knowledge been offered bear’s paw since the 1970s: furthermore, they don’t mangle Peking duck like Chinese restaurants do in England.

  The service in the modern-looking hotels, however, still has some way to go Every staff member spends the majority of his/her time scrutinising the mobile phone, even the doorman if asked to track down a taxi which never seems to appear despite his lukewarm efforts.

  Many of the secondary roads are fortunately tree-lined, a boon this year when city temperatures in Xi’an and Beijing have been in the low to medium 40 ˚C for a month, exceptionally high.

  Lane-changing is a national sport for every driver but seems to keep traffic moving quite well by international standards. In fact, the infrastructure over all, airports, stations, roads, signage are all excellent, though security checking of bags is ubiquitous, tiresome and cursory, so probably useless, other than to provide uniforms two sizes too big for officious whippersnappers, looking like six-year-olds on their first day at school.

  It has come as a bit of a shock to now be surrounded by quite significant numbers of foreigners after the earlier part of the tour where numbers were rarely more than a handful a day. English is not widely spoken and no one in the capital wants to take our picture anymore as used to happen in the 1970s. Too blasé. Spitting in the street, once ubiquitous, has also disappeared. Some young bus and underground passengers do still apply Confucian principles, offering up theirs seats to their elders, but generally they just go about their business as if we were not there. At our now regular neighbourhood backstreet restaurant, the group of locals in grubby off-white shorts and vests sitting gambling on the pavement outdoors treat us like long lost friends on a second visit, so I guess we don’t all look the same to them.

  Chapter 34

  East Africa

  Mozambique and Zanzibar

  Fortunately, we and our luggage survived four aircraft changes to arrive simultaneously in Maputo in time to meet our ship for the week’s trip up the Mozambique coast.

  The highlight of the journey was the chance to join the flight deck for the night landing into the small airfield of Arusha in Tanzania, to celebrate having completed 4 million flight kilometres over more than 50 years, equivalent to circling the world one hundred times. The landing requires a steep approach to avoid surrounding mountains including Kilimanjaro and the airfield occasionally suffers from approach landing light failures, but not this time.

  Once aboard ship, I have to say the ship’s crew looked a bit on the heavy side, but this turned out to be because it included ex-SAS armed security guards to deal with any possible piratical intrusions. Quite comforting and a bonus to have their muscular arms (human, not metal) to hold on to getting in and out of the Zodiac dinghies every day, especially in high seas.

  Ahead lay about 2,000 miles of largely uninhabited coastline with appealing white sandy beaches and occasional settlements established by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century, and later by traders from the Arabian Peninsula. This is one of the poorest countries in the world with nationals living on a few hundred dollars a year, perhaps not unconnected to the size of their families, with an average of five children (but often larger) per family.

  Our first port of call, well north of the capital, was the small island of Ihla de Mozambique, a UNESCO World Heritage Site with a population of 14,000, from which the country gets its name. It was the country’s original capital until the railway was built much further south bringing South African gold and goods to the coast at Maputo, then called Lourenco Marques, at the end of the nineteenth century.

  Initial impressions on arrival at the island jetty are focused on huge crowds of beaming children for whom the rare site of a ship has been a day of excitement and opportunity. The north end of this island was built with coral stone dug out and transported by slaves from the southern end, with the result that it lies two metres lower, and today still houses the poorer residents in makeshift shacks. The backdrop for the north is of gentle decline with a few once stately Portuguese mansions in various state of repair or rather disrepair for lack of funds.

  It is dominated by the hugely impressive fortress of Sao Sabastiao which has successfully repelled all-comers over the centuries, including the Dutch fleets active on the spice routes in the 16th and 17th centuries. It also served as the staging post for slaves imported from the interior for trans-shipment to Arabia and the French sugar plantations in Mauritius and Madagascar. In 1507, perhaps to assuage their consciences, the locals built a small white church at one end, reputed to be the oldest in the southern hemisphere.

  The subject of slavery arises everywhere along the coast and continued even after it was supposedly, finally, abolished in about 1880. More on the topic in later reports.

  ***

  First the tourist blurb: virtually unknown to the outside world and undisturbed for centuries, Ibo Island is a place where time has stood still.

  Well, it oozes sensations of bygone times, an ancient Muslim trader site established before the Portuguese arrived in the fifteenth century. There was no love lost when the Portuguese arrived and displaced the Arab traders who refused to trade with them, resulting in Arab life and property destruction. The village is quite spread out, melting back into the lush vegetation, with grand old colonial buildings and a Catholic church and three forts over five hundred years old. Numerous small crumbling mosques and cemeteries were dotted around the island set against flowering flame trees. There were few visible inhabitants, giving the impression it is a ghost town devoid of any sign of human life.

  The only commercial activity is to be found in the forts where a few gnarled sweaty silversmiths wield small blowtorches in dark corners to fashion exquisite and intricate silver earrings and bracelets in unbearable heat.

  This coastal settlement was once a major supply point for slaves shipped in from the interior, in conditions one can barely imagine, involving Europeans, Arabs as well as local chieftains.

  Come the Portuguese revolution in 1975 when Frelimo nationalist movement took over, the expatriate residents were given 24 hours to get out, taking what they could carry, resulting in the elimination of the country’s wealth which had always rested in their hands.

  Our ship had to anchor four miles off the pier because of sandbanks and dubious charts which meant horrendous dinghy conditions in unusually high seas to get back to base. Looking on the bright side, no one was lost over-board and the captain agreed to launder our soaking clothing for free.

  ***

  Zanzibar – what an image the name conjures: the aroma of spices, Arabic merchants’ houses crowding in on narrow mysterious alleys overhung with a myriad of electric cables, finely carved ancient doors strengthened with rows of brass studs, around which a builder would construct the rest of the house. Possibly, the least architecturally pleasing house is the one in which Freddy Mercury grew up, a yellow 1930s style block of apartments but still a shrine to devoted fans of course.

  Control passed from the Portuguese in 1698 to the Sultan of Oman where it remained until the 1890s when it became a British protectorate. The sultans continued to live in their splendid palace with wonderful sea views until independence in 1963, when shortly afterwards, a violent anti-Arab revolution led to Zanzibar being absorbed into the newly named Tanzania (combining the names of Tanganyika and Zanzibar).

  The town teems with human activity, especially around the port where daily ferries from Dar-e-Salaam and the occasional cruise ship disgorge their human cargo creating traffic chaos at peak times. Dress code ranges from full niqab burka for women and long spotless white dishdasha robes for the men on the one hand, and beachwear on quite a few insensitive and disrespectful young tourists at the other end of the spectrum.

  The beachfront is dominated by the massive Sultan’s palace, the 16th-century fort and a collection of exotic hotels converted from earlier buildings.

  And finally, as promised, a few words about what was the last open slave-market in the world, only closed down by the British in 1873, almost in my grandfather’s lifetime. Conditions in the slave market, where residents once wallowed in cramped underground cells without water, food or toilets, are hard to imagine today, and perhaps those that had died or were thrown overboard on dhows heading here from the mainland may have been spared this even worse fate. This is because survivors were lined up in order of size, tied to a tree and whipped with a stinging branch to test their mettle until they cried out. Those who stifled their cries fetched a higher price. A large Anglican Church built in 1885 now stands on the site and was full to bursting for Sunday service during our visit.

  However, it is worthwhile noting comments made by the Sultan’s daughter in her book Memoirs of an Arabian Princess that once the slaves were finally released in large numbers, they were left to fend for themselves. The ‘anti-slave apostles’, as she refers to the British abolitionists, had no follow-up plan to deal with the resulting chaos of mass unemployment, a disinclination on the part of the released slaves to take up work again, and disruption to those who had depended on their labour.

  A moving memorial has been created in the garden, a small pit containing four life size half figures manacled together in iron chains.

  Chapter 35

  Northern India Again

  Traveller or Tourist?

  In our late fifties, it might be assumed that we belong in the second category, travelling in a bit of comfort, all mod cons and a flexible budget. In the 1960s, ‘the GAP year’ had not been invented, and travellers were referred to as hippies, a group we did not then aspire to, but we had a yearning to see if we could recapture the spirit of the independent ‘traveller’ experience so widely taken up today by the younger generation.

  The opportunity arose for us to join our 23-year-old daughter, now a veteran traveller on the Indian subcontinent, for three weeks or so, travelling to various parts of India, but she made very clear, only on her ‘traveller’ terms.

  A certain readjustment of values was called for and started well before our departure. Firstly, what to take: no matching suitcases containing carefully folded smart evening wear, shoes for all occasions, hairdryer, even the laptop. If we could not carry it on our back, or an item was excessively heavy or bulky, it was not going with us. So, we pared the minimum equipment list down to T-shirts, toiletries, medicines and underwear. Then we were encouraged to take on the standard traveller kit: loo-paper, Swiss army knife, torch, sleeping bag, Hotmail address and the most important item by far: a copy of the travellers’ bible, the Lonely Planet. Nothing but nothing was undertaken without reference to the oracle. Its word is gospel, pure gold.