平

Am posting using AnchorFree VPN - virtual private network - which creates a tunnel between me here in China and their server somewhere in the internet free world -

Hotspot Shield creates a virtual private network (VPN) between your laptop or iPhone and our Internet gateway. This impenetrable tunnel prevents snoopers and hackers from viewing your email, instant messages, credit card information or anything else you send over the network.

- thus enabling me to hurdle the Great Firewall and enjoy sites deemed bad for the public Chinese mindset, which at the moment appears to include the Blogger posting page.

Just noticed some Chinese language graffiti on the West Bank Barrier, on the last photo in this Guardian audio slideshow.

It's the character 平 - "Píng" - which means "Peace".

I've now visited probably the three most famous walls in the world - The Great Wall of China, the West Bank Barrier and the Berlin Wall. They are all laughably small compared to the environments around them, even the Great Wall, which lies like a very long piece of string atop huge crags. But symbolically they are big - really big, even defining. I wonder if sections of the West Bank Wall will be retained in the future as a kind of museum or memorial, even if we are talking way way into the future after years of it serving as an international border.


Enjoyed this in the Observer:

Chilling out with Charles Bukowski and Lord Jim

The backpacker
By William Sutcliffe

Looking back on all the times I went backpacking, and all the hours I spent agonising about what I should cram into my pack, I now realise that my clothes were usually ditched in favour of ethno-tat, my toiletries usually got lost and my medical kit was never opened. Only one thing really mattered: my choice of books.

No other activity can approach backpacking for the amount of time spent waiting: for trains to arrive, for buses to leave, for broken-down buses to be mended, all in order to get to some remote spot where you can 'chill out' (i.e. wait). In these circumstances, your choice of reading matter is extremely important. Without a good book, backpacking can resemble an obscure punishment.

Novels are the hard currency of a book-bartering economy that thrives in backpackers' hostels all over the world. The books you take have to be not just good, but swappable. The first thing to be aware of is that there is a Backpacker Canon, which is rigid and unchanging. These books have been read by every generation of backpackers since the Sixties and are, for no apparent reason, compulsory.

The chief pillars of the canon are Catch-22, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, On the Road and Steppenwolf. These books all fulfil the criterion of changing the way you see the world, often for up to a fortnight. One of these four titles is an obligatory accessory for any self-respecting backpacker.

The value of a book in the backpacker barter economy has nothing to do with its cover price. The gold standard of swappability is set by classics of the late 20th century set in backpacker-friendly countries: say, Midnight's Children and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Shortly behind this come novels either about drugs, or by authors who are known to have taken drugs, or which make no less sense when the reader is on drugs. Favourites authors in this category are Hunter S Thompson, Carlos Castaneda, Will Self, Irvine Welsh and Charles Bukowski.

It is a mistake to think you have to read about the country you are visiting. Backpackers spend much of their time complaining about the place they have chosen to visit. The job of your reading matter is often to take you away from where you are. I once spent three days on a bus crossing the Gobi desert and, frankly, I needed a book about something other than sand. I read Lord Jim and The World According to Garp and the two books are forever curiously miscegenated in my head. Because of the movie, Robin Williams is somehow in the mix, too. I feel almost as if Williams, Joseph Conrad, John Irving and I spent three days together hanging out on a bus in the desert, with me as host, proud to have introduced them to one another. I hope they keep in touch.

You will never have more time to read than when you are backpacking - until you retire - so if you have any sense, you will use it as an opportunity to read books a little longer and more challenging than you are likely to pick up when earning a living intrudes. No trip will ever be entirely wonderful or relentlessly terrible, but if you get back home having read Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, A Suitable Boy, Earthly Powers and Underworld, or even just a couple of those, your journey will have been worthwhile. You will have travelled the world in your mind, regardless of where you have been.