I'm not in Kansas anymore...

Motorcycle Madness Good Morning Vietnam. Or rather, Good Evening! Having waved goodbye to Shanghai, I breezed off the aeroplane and the humid streets of Ho Chi Minh City greeted me in their balmy embrace. Watching the banana trees wave in the night air, I felt glad again to be back in a more 'rustic' part of Asia. The sensation didn't last long. The first impression any newcomer has to HCMC is unadulterated moped, motorbike madness. Pretty soon my taxi was in the centre of the mel é , hurtling along at speed with hundreds and hundred of two wheelers. Upon arrival at the backpacker area, my cabbie got out, took my hand and personally led me across the road into lines of never ending traffic. I would come to realise that crossing the street is an art that requires nothing less than balls of steel: you simply take a deep breath and walk directly into the oncoming stream.  Sampling the local cuisine in Ben Thanh market I found my way down a typical, winding dar...

The Chinese flag is ceremoniously raised & lowered  every day by a guard  of honour in Tiananmen Square I had plans for China. Big plans. But the Universe continued to play a few tricks on me and all of them, it seems, were made to be broken. The country itself had hitherto been uninteresting but I was attracted by the draw of two very special people - my friend Will, based in Shanghai and working for Tesco and 'American Mark', a PhD scholar who was living in the Gansu province. Mark was studying how certain aspects of Chinese culture and social structure helped to support co-operation between individuals and he was doing this in the context of an industrial co-operative. I was going to join him there. It would be a unique opportunity to experience the full gamut of capitalism and communism which I thought summed up modern day China rather elegantly.  Marching towards progress -  Communist scupture in Tiananmen Square However, a few days before my a...