February 2015: If I am counting correctly, this is my fourteenth visit to India, starting the first time in 1971, again in 1982 & 1983, again in 2002, and finally practically every years since 2005 on tour with Mynta. It is very gratifying to have made so many great friends here, that my social calendar is filled with trying to connect with everybody. . .
We began our China tour in the capital city of Beijing. Though Beijing is a city of 21 million people, it is very clean and efficient...much above my expectations which were colored by my experience of the crowded cities in India. We toured the famous Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square on our first day, and on the second day we toured a section of the Great Wall of China.
The city of Hue is located approximately in the middle of Vietnam and was the seat of royal power from the 19th and into the 20th centuries. There were thirteen kings who reigned from Hue. Many of the ancient structures were destroyed during the Vietnam-American War, which have since been restored. The photos show scenes from the Imperial Palace as well as the three hundred-year-old Buddhist pagoda.
Several blog readers have requested a description of our cruise life.
Our parents’ generation all remembered where they were when Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941. I was in high school in Columbus, Georgia, when Kennedy was assassinated in 1963…at Florida State University when Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in 1968. On September 11, 2001, I was in Reno, Nevada, with my wife Susan, and a nurse friend, Rosemary, who was visiting us from Oregon for the purpose of recording guided imagery meditations with Susan’s and my music. . .
Ireland had always been on my “bucket list.” So I’m ecstatic to have gotten the opportunity to visit, even without long prior planning.
Columbus, Georgia, is the place I spent the first two decades of life, where I attended public school. But my real "ties to the land", my "roots", are actually to the forty-acre "country place" over the stateline in Alabama across the Chattahoochee River from Columbus. It's somewhat bittersweet to visit the place, since the memories of my departed parents are everywhere. But there's still a smell, a legacy, a longing to hold onto the past, that I feel every time I visit, which is only once or twice a year.
Malta is nicknamed the “navel of the Mediterranean” since it is in approximately the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. Its location has made Malta the object of conquest, starting with the Phoenicians, and followed by the Carthaginians, Romans, Greeks, Arabs, Normans, Aragonese, the Knights of St. John, French, and finally the British in 1813-1974, when Malta became an independent neutral country.
Following our two weeks in Germany and Sweden, we flew into Oslo, Norway, one day early before the flight to join our Hurtigruten cruise around the Svalbard island chain. Upon the recommendation of my old friend Per (who is Norwegian but lives in Germany), we . . .
Our Viking China cruise continued to three port cities I had never heard of before. The Chinese government seeks to increase tourism, and our cruise is one of the first collaborations with the Chinese government and Viking Cruises. The ship's staff is 100% Chinese, and the entertainers are all Chinese. So this particular cruise is different from the usual Viking multi-national staff.
Our ship, the Yi Dun, is named after the first Chinese commercial ship launched in 1872, the Yi Dun.