By way of Australia.
In late 1986, after I had broken up with a gal, I decided to go see the “Americas Cup Races” in Australia, the first time they had been hosted outside the United States. Four years earlier, the Australians had won the Cup in an upset series of racing victories in Newport, Rhode Island. I was 40 years old; I had just angrily quit the “formal” practice of law, cold turkey; I had no obligations to anyone; and I had a need to travel. I needed to get the Hell out of Dodge! However, I had just lost a religious liberty case in the Supreme Court of Virginia (as expected), and I had to get an appeal filed for my atheist client with the US Supreme Court by Tax Day, April 15. I was just gonna “wing it.”
So, I put myself into the hands of an experienced travel agent in Northern Virginia, and she worked up a very nice itinerary. I was to spend a week in Sydney then travel west to Perth for the Races, scheduled for late January or early February of 1987. I figured I had about two months all told to “burn,” so I decided to schedule a trip to Hong Kong and China thereafter, since I was gonna be “in the neighborhood.” That left me with at least 5 weeks in Australia, and I was really looking forward to it. I had to pack my “summer” clothes for semi-tropical Australia, and my “winter” clothes for my other travels in China! China is every bit as far north as is the United States, and it was really WINTER there!
Australia is about the same geographic size as the contiguous United States (as is China), but most of it is arid desert. Very dry. Open fires are banned by law there, so when someone throws “shrimp on the barbie,” they have to cover the cooking coals with a sheet of steel and cook everything on the sheet. I also had to learn to look to my RIGHT before crossing a street because, with right-hand drive, they drive on the left, and closer traffic is going to be to a pedestrian’s right, EXACTLY opposite of the United States! I almost got run over a couple of times! Another neat thing I noticed is that people in the Southern Hemisphere are “upside-down” from those of us usually in the Northern Hemisphere, so the crescent Moon is “pointed” in the opposite direction! Observing the phases of the Moon was difficult.
The sailboat races were being held in Fremantle, the small fishing village on the coast of the Indian Ocean about ten miles from Perth, which was further inland. Perth is a very clean and neat medium-sized city and reminded me a lot of Richmond, Virginia. I spent most of my time in Fremantle and very little of it in Perth. I was rooming with a nice family in a small suburb of Perth, about halfway between Perth and Fremantle, and they tried to teach me the vagaries of cricket. They were watching a big tournament on the “telly.” The rules are really bizarre, but the game is quite interesting, once one gets the “hang” of it! The adult son in the family was a legalized betting “bookie”! Australians love their cricket and their horse races!
There was a very handy local trolley running back and forth between Fremantle and Perth, so I did not need a car. I did a lot of walking, but I rode that trolley a lot, too. I got to Perth a few days before the defending series was finished, so I got interested in the defending semifinals between a New Zealand challenger and an Australian defender, who ultimately won, but I have since forgotten their names. Dennis Connor, the American challenger, rolled into Fremantle and demonstrated his sailing prowess. He won the Races four straight. The poor Australians won NOTHING! The Races were over almost before they had begun!
It was February of 1987. It was a wonderful time to be in China, smack between the “Gang of Four” and “Tiananmen Square.” Things were wide open! I was on a “tour of one” when I went into China from Hong Kong, complete with my own private train compartment (or so I thought). I had already spent the four days in Hong Kong before boarding the train for Guangzhou. Predictably, the Chinese railroad had re-sold the remaining berths in my compartment and pocketed the money, even though I’d already paid for the whole thing.
I spent a bit more than two weeks traveling up and down the eastern seaboard of China by train, with stayovers in Guangzhou (Canton), Shanghai and Beijing. As it was winter, there were almost no “gringos” in China, at least not until I got to Beijing. I had my own car, driver and tour guide in Guangzhou and Shanghai, and I got to choose pretty much whatever I wanted to see. But I got lumped in with those other “gringos” once I got to Beijing.
I first spent a day traveling north to Guangzhou, then another two days and a night traveling to Shanghai thereafter. The others in my train compartment could not speak English, so I spent my time reading or clumsily demonstrating my nascent magic tricks with cards, which I was studying and practicing at the time. Communication involved a lot of hand gestures and grunting! I drank a lot of tea and avoided the dining car, as I had been thus warned. Instead, at each stop I was jumping off the train and hastily gobbling snacks at the kiosks and then racing back to my compartment.
The “toilet” in the passenger car was a hole in the floor with a handle on the wall to grab as one squatted over the hole! Anything that went through the hole was just left on the railroad ties, clearly visible through the hole, but blurred! That mightily discouraged eating anyway! After mostly starving myself on the two-day trip back to Hong Kong from Beijing, I was taken by some compartment-mates to a dim sum breakfast across the street from the train station in Guangzhou, and I ate like a monster! That is where I developed a strong craving (to this day) for steamed pot- stickers!
Dim sum is an interesting concept. Most Chinese restaurants are on the second floor of buildings, and most are in large rooms with big round tables, shared by unrelated diners. Wait-staff come by, pushing carts laden with various dishes of different foods, and one chooses whatever one wishes to eat, and as many dishes as one wishes. When it comes time to leave, the wait-staff write up one’s check, counting the various empty dishes on the table, and the resultant total is one’s bill, paid at the cashier’s desk by the door. It’s like a mobile cafeteria! All you dare eat!
I returned to Hong Kong for another four days and finished fittings for a beautiful tailored suit. There was a lot of chatter at the time about the expected handover of Hong Kong to China ten years or so thence (and now we are seeing the aftermath). Hong Kong was a British colony at the time, with a lot of international banking. I made friends on the plane from Bangkok with a Chinese fellow working for a Swiss bank, who was born in Shanghai but became a naturalized American citizen when he attended graduate school at the University of Kansas.
He spoke excellent English and was quite interested in my discovery of Chou en-Lai’s 1941 Buick sedan I had seen when I visited Chou’s shrine in Shanghai. Chou had driven around Shanghai (where the Chinese Communist Party was founded) in the Buick, as was common at the time in postwar China. I was quite interested in it since I have a 1941 Buick convertible! My time in Shanghai was magical. I will never forget it, and I was truly privileged to experience it.
After I left Hong Kong, I flew to Maui and got out my summer clothes again. I spent a week SCUBA diving with a buddy from Fairfax, Virginia, who met me there, then we flew home via LAX. I had to call a friend to come pick me up in Fairfax and take me back home to Orange, Virginia. I had been gone over two months!
Above all, I had learned from my visit in China not to ask what I was eating until after I had finished it!
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