SHIJIAZHUANG Sometimes national historic sites can disappoint. I'll give you an example. When precocious little Brendan was only about five or six years old, we took him along to visit the Bell Homestead in Brantford, Ontario, where Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. We took the tour, looked at all the exhibits, read the plaques, and were getting ready to go when Brendan piped up to the tour guide and wisecracked (something to the effect of),...

Xi'an The drummers begin their performance with a flourish. Five of them, three men and two women in Tang Dynasty costumes (circa 500-900 AD), begin beating red drums of various sizes and shapes in a very nicely chereographed and arranged percussion piece. We are in the Drum Tower in central downtown Xi'an at 9am sharp. There are two restored ancient Tang Towers: big pagoda-shaped square buildings dating from about 1500 years ago, from which, at dawn and dus...

CHONGQING TO XI'AN Siobhan has fallen asleep again while reading "The Man In The Iron Mask" and, thankfully, the young man in the opposite bunk rolled over on his side and stopped snoring loudly. We are on the train from Chongqing to Xi'an in a second class sleeper car with 64 other passeengers in eleven open compartments of 6 bunks in tiers of three. There are fifteen cars on this train, including several other second class sleepers, one first...

WUHAN IS NOT LIKE WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT IT People keep telling us NOT to visit Wuhan because it is hot, dirty, and boring. It is a working class city, a steeltown. Definitely not a tourist destination. Those denuciations only make it more tempting to visit because that's just what people in Canada say about our hometown, Hamilton. Wuhan has the reputation of being one of the three "furnaces" of China, which traditionally experience very hot tem...

I am the first person on deck this morning. It is 5:30 am and the dawn is rosy pink. Suddenly, a crew member brushes past me. He races down Deck 3, the exercise deck, along the green outdoor carpet, towards the stern. I walk a little faster to discover what's so pressing at 5:30 am. I turn the corner above the stern and witness the crewman raising the red flag of the People's Republic on the flagpole on the great Yangzi River. The river is green, the flag i...