Oreada, my first stop in Romania. Five hours south via super slow train seemed like it would be enough for one day, and it was.

The town is said to have been at its best in the 1300’s. Before the Turks flattened it. The first time. They flattened it again in the 1600’s. Everyone in the neighborhood has ruled it over the years. The Hungarians, Habsburgs, the Ottomans, etc.

Oradea has some nice buildings. Lots of churches. And as many coffee shops per-capita as Seattle. Here are some photos. Around town.

Romania is poor. The infrastructure from the Communist past is run down and broken and ugly. Bacos, the bartender at the wine bar Tapta is leaving with his brother to find work in Manchester where “the wages are better”.

Work is underway to restore this city. They are rebuilding the pavement in the central square and it looks like it will be beautiful when complete.

There is a nice pedestrian only street.

But more work is needed. There are too many closed shopfronts and crumbling buildings.

People who allow themselves to be bored would certainly be bored here in this little country town. I had a fine time. Nice walks along the river.

Good food and wines.

The prices are amazing. Unlike some poor countries (e.g. Portugal, Argentina) where prices are inexplicably high, prices here are in proportion. In a pub had a bottle of a fine Romanian Pilsner beer for a dollar 4 cents. A Cepressa salad is 3 dollars. A good bottle of wine in a restaurant is between 6 and 16 dollars.

At the restaurant “To Chefs” I had one of the best dishes I have ever eaten: a bacon wrapped Tenderloin heaped with black truffels. For eleven dollars and 50 cents.

Some random indoor pictures.

Everyone I have met has been friendly and welcoming.  There is plenty of English. In fact almost all the indoor “Muzac” backgroung music is in English.

A few observations:

Like Texans, the women who can, dress up, but the men don’t bother. The women paint their eyebrows a startling black. And wear false eyelashes.

Service is spotty. Excellent in some places. Pretty bad in most, where working seems to involve standing (or sitting) around talking with the other employees.

Cigarettes are smoked everywhere. Here is something we have forgotten, ash trays and a cigarette menu in the coffee shop.

The Balkans !

Such a tumultuous history that even the name is a metaphor for fracture and strife.

A crossroads between Asia, Europe and the Middle East the borders have been redrawn over and over throughout history as the area has fallen in continual conquest to every migrating tribe, expanding city state, nearby country, or empire. Not to mention the intra area conflicts.

In my lifetime the formation and then dissolution of Czechoslovakia. In almost everyone’s time the emergence of new countries from the Bosnia war.

I arrived a few days ago in Budapest, once with Vienna the twin capitals of the Habsburg empire. Today the Capital of Hungary. Have been hanging around the Marriott getting over jet lag and mostly sampling the food and wines. Will be back here in a month or so with Cathy, so no need to do serious sightseeing museums etc.

I was very surprised by the Grandeur of Budapest. The city seems more Grand than say Paris. It makes Rome look shabby, and cities like Prague a discarded peanut. Here are some random photos of grand buildings.

Budapest has emerged from the coma of communism and is alive. There are countless cafes pubs and restaurants. Crowds of tourists but also locals out everywhere enjoying the city. Also shops, supermarkets, malls and fancy shopping.

The city has an extensive metro system coupled with trams and busses. Very orderly. The taxis are spotless. The metro stations have spacious underground areas al la Moscow. Some underground photos.

There are still lingering communist hangover traits:      Occasional inept and surly service. Spurious charges on bills. Lots of leather jackets. And an incredible number of cigarette smokers (outside only).

This is a low income country and the populace have not yet recovered elegance. But the city seems elegant nevertheless from the legacy of the endless grand architecture.

One particular note. The streets are very very clean. No litter, some but not much graffiti.

And no dog poop. Quite a contrast from many European cities (e.g. Paris) where it seems to have rained dog poop. Perhaps not many dogs, but also these dog convenience stations located here and there.

I am currently on a train south to Romania. Trundling at Russian train speeds (slow) across an endless plain. Flat as a pancake. The villages look like Germany 40 years ago.  But with new investment.  New train stations, electrical infrastructure, road construction.

Will be continuing as this “Around the Balkans in 80 Days” tour continues.

Some train pictures.

It was a rainy day so I went over to the National Museum.

Sorry, no pictures allowed.

But if you are ever here don’t miss it. This is one of the great museums of the world. 6500 years of Chinese history.

When the Nationalist government fell to Mao it did not happen over a weekend. They had plenty of time in their retreat to Taiwan to run trains south with the contents of the museums and their homes and the banks.

I was told that the National Museum can display less than 15 percent of what they store at any time. They have rare books, 400,000 documents, bronzes, porcelains, jewelry, art objects, clothing. Most of which would have been destroyed by Mao’s red guards if left in the North.

Every year when I come they have a new special exhibition or two. The calligraphy section seemed to be reworked, an exhibit on ancient book binding, and a porcelain exhibit of flower pots, which sounds dopy, but was good.

They have the best technical exhibit on bronzes. As an old Engineer who got an A in metallurgy, and like museums with the bronze work of different cultures, I love it.

They explain the ancient formulas for combinations of tin and copper so that arrow heads are sharp, while cooking pots are strong, and bells ring without cracking, and mirrors are shiny. And complicated constructions like a copper core for a sword for toughness with a high tin overlay that can be sharpened.

Unfortunately with busloads of Northern Chinese every day it is almost impossible to visit anymore with really a hundred people in lines for the most interesting exhibits.

But it is still a world treasure.

Went by train up the coast on a pilgrimage to the city of Quanzhou.

Expected a small town but encountered yet another big sprawling Chinese city.  At 6 million people the biggest city in Fuzhou province. When China was open between say 1000 and 1400 this was one of the largest and most important ports in the world.

There were trading ports up and down this coast, but Quanzhou was by far the most important. The great Chinese discovery voyages left from here. The Khan’s fleet to invade Java left from here. And Marco Polo departed China for home from here, and that is why I came.

There were perhaps 100,000 Arabs living on this coast at the time, and in retrospect Quanzhou was named the beginning of the Arab Silk Road. Exports of silk, porcelain, tea were the Chinese trade goods. The city state of Venice had the monopoly with the Arabs for ongoing shipments into Europe, hence the great wealth of that city during this period. Hence the tremendous efforts of the Portuguese to find a trade route around Africa and around the Venetians. Entrepreneurs like Marco’s father and uncle attempted overland routes to China.

There were Portuguese here by the 1300’s. Great sailors. I have journeyed to Lisbon to pay homage to Henry the Navigator. But they were pretty much despised in Asia. Their flavor of twelfth century Christianity afforded them huge arrogance and over the top acts of savagery against non-believers. In Calcutta they filled a boat with hands and feet and promised one every day until the city was opened to them. Here in China, the Kahn was finally so pissed off over their raiding and murdering that he ordered the Portuguese to be “killed on the spot where they are encountered”. Their garrison at Quanzhou was attacked and the survivors fled to Macau.

I became interested in the stories Marco Polo told when I found myself spending a lot of time in some of the cities he described. Especially two of my favorite Chinese Cities, Hangzhou and Suzhou.

He arrived at a very interesting time in Chinese history. Everyone does. I was in a museum last week looking at 5000 year old artifacts. And once visited a 6500 year old village where the pots were marked with the origins of Chinese writing. While we had Mesopotamia and the Greeks and the Romans and all the rest, they were here independently going on with their own civilization.

Anyway, so a group called the Jin invaded China from the North and the Song Dynasty (say 650 to 1300) moved down the Grand Canal and set up the capital of China at Hangzhou, where the Grand Canal reaches the sea. This is around say the mid 1200s. But the Jin were overextended, and the Great Kahn, Kublai Kahn, came down, kicked them out, moved into Beijing, and began to rule the north of China. Marco Polo’s father was just arriving in China about this time and was reported to be the first westerner the great Kahn ever met. Anyway, they hit it off and Marco’s father brought a fortune in goods back to Italy and met his grown son Marco and they turned around to go back for more.

Marco Polo arrived in Beijing around 1270 to 1275ish. But he spent a lot of time down the Grand Canal around Suzhou and Hangzhou for reasons I do not know. The Song were falling to the Kahn around then and the capital would soon move back to Beijing. We know that Marco got caught up in some military advisory capacity, so perhaps this was it.

Everyone knows about the Great Wall of China. But it is a surprise to me that another of the truly magnificent achievements of the ancient world: the Grand Canal is hardly ever mentioned. It is both gigantic and astounding. It is an artificial river, wide enough for two very large barges to pass and it runs for 1100 miles connecting Beijing with 5 interior rivers and the sea at Hangzhou! It was completed in about 600 AD, and allowed China to have a safe interior transportation and trade route for centuries.

When Marco arrived in Hangzhou in the late 1200’s it would have been as he describes it a magnificent city. The Imperial Capital, the southern harbor, open to the sea and via the canal to the interior. With around a million people easily the largest city on earth.

But back to Quanzhou.

Marco Poly was allowed to leave China and came to Quanzhou to join a fleet of 14 Junks carrying a 17 year old Mongol girl to be a bride to the ruler of Persia (roughly Iran), a relative of the Kahn. Here are some photos of a model of the kind of Song Dynasty Junk he would have left on.

And here is the keel of an actual Song Dynasty Junk recovered from a ship wreck that gives you an understanding of the size of these fully ocean going vessels.

There is nothing left at the ancient harbor. But some nearby pagodas and this ancient temple. So I sat here with the Buddhists for a while.

And indulged my self with the thought that Marco might have visited here before his fantastic journey home. Around Thailand and Malaysia. Around India. Up the red sea. By caravan to the Mediterranean Sea then by boat to Italy. Facing that he might have come here for a few good luck prayers. A few joss sticks. Sitting here dressed as a Mongol Baron. His fortune converted into precious jewels and sewn into his clothes.

Besides overlapping with Marco in Beijing, Xian, Suzhou and Hangzhou I have even dragged Cathy to the edge of the Gobi desert where the great wall ends, where Marco Polo entered China and to follow some of his route southeast. That journey turned out to be more interesting than I expected because this is also the route through which Buddhism entered China, leaving a plethora of very ancient historic sites.

With this pilgrimage to Marco’s departure site I have pretty much completed this little quest of mine.

Today is my last day in China. I am looking forward to hosting myself to a really good farewell dinner. And moving on.

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Some random musings about Suzhou and Hangzhou.

I used to love visiting Hangzhou. Today it is effectively a suburb of Shanghai, quickly accessible by train. But my first visit took me 5 hours on dirt roads to arrive at a little one to two story village on the north end of the famous west lake. Today the city circles the lake with high rises. I guess I have been there every 8 or ten years or so, watching it change. First responsible to establish a manufacturing joint venture, years later to buy a local company. A few times just to visit.

Even 30 years ago there were 200,000 tourists a year visiting Hangzhou. Because the west lake is the most romantic site in China. The moment of the full moon rising over West Lake is by tradition the most romantic moment on earth. It is a special place with warm memories for me.

Marco described Suzhou as the Venice of China. Much of the old areas are being torn down as Shanghai inexorably creeps to take it from the east. I once took Cathy to these cities. In Suzhou we hired a boat and poked around the old canals. Walked some ancient streets. Visited some remaining garden homes of the Scholar Officials. Suzhou is a very old town occupying a strategic position on the Grand Canal with an amazing history. One chapter is worth a quick summary. Probably not perfect, but here is the way I remember it.

With the collapse of the Ming Dynasty in the mid 1600’s the new rulers, the Manchus were suspicious of the power of the Mandarin Scholar Officials. Since these Mandarin had the virtual monopoly on reading and writing and transmitted all imperial decrees, proclamations and information throughout the country the Manchus were probably right. So, they set about to weaken and circumvent the Mandarin system of high official selection based upon a hierarchy of intelligence and knowledge tests and a consensus around a person’s competence and ability. This was a thousand plus year old system.

Many ministers saw the writing on the wall and took themselves off to early retirement. A good number went down the Grand Canal a distance out of easy reach from Beijing, to Suzhou. They were very very rich and from their positions we can guess very competent brilliant people. So after building their houses and gardens they could only spend so much time painting, making music, writing poetry, and admiring nature, their traditional areas of ongoing learning when not governing.

So, as the generations passed these families built elementary schools, trade schools, western style universities. Undertook civic improvements, roads, lighting, and security. Sent students abroad for study at foreign universities, and delegations to study of foreign industries. Established local banks, manufacturing of silk, dying, silk products.

And the most interesting story (maybe only to me) is how as the French and Americans expanded their trading city at nearby Shanghai, the Suzhou families leveraged the nearness of the trade and technical and financial opportunities. This continues to play out with Suzhou today having a standard of living comparable to Portugal. If I could write, this is a story I would like to tell. But it is probably already on the internet somewhere.

Spent a month last week in Fuzhou. Ok place but pretty BORING. Did get to eat a lot of dumplings.

But, it was total language immersion. No English for a week. In fact to brag a little, I was just with the Concierge, who does not speak English, arranging a pilgrimage for tomorrow and actually for the first time in my life wrote to someone in Chinese. But before you are really impressed, it was only chu (go) and hui lai (return).

Came back by fast train.

Had to return to Xiamen because getting from China to Taiwan is very difficult. I have to fly from here 2 and a half hours south, stay overnight in Manila and then fly two and a half hours north to Taipei.

Anyway, back to my apology.

This is a key learning for me for this kind of travel. Last time I was here I opted for a too cheap hotel, and it was bad, in a bad area surrounded by people living very hard. That with a little bad weather and I trashed the entire city on this blog.

Sorry.

Now I have move up market into a very good hotel.

In a beautiful area. I am on the river.

And have a great mountain park just next door for walking.

That with sunny weather in the 70’s and Palm trees, the city looks entirely different to me. The people are still pretty stiff. I passed two westerners walking this morning and both times got the big smile and a “good morning”. A few hellos from the locals, but not much.

BUT, look at all these places for dinners and perhaps a glass with the locals. These are in two blocks directly on my doorstep.  These pictures were taken at 9AM when they are almost all closed, but I have high expectations for them come dinnertime.

OF course it is still China with the milky air, but so it goes.

A fine day today in Fuzhou. It rained and then this morning sunshine. First I have seen in China this trip.

Took a long walk out to West Lake Park. There is a central “island” in the lake .. connected with a causeway. On the island is a thousand plus year old temple.  Lots of people enjoying the day and the spring weather.

To see this backwater Provincial Capital so modern and built up enough to rival say Chicago is astounding to me.   There are many canals with quiet walkways along them, and plenty of parks and trees, making it an enjoyable city to walk in.

I have never been here before but I will tell you what it looked like 30 years ago. Concrete. Everything made of concrete. No buildings over four stories because no elevators. Uneven sidewalks of cast concrete pavers. No lights at night. Nothing in the few shop windows but industrial wares like generators and pumps and pipes.

Heaps of food at the intersections, brought rough straight from the fields in Army trucks and dumped onto tarps on the ground and sold using a hand balance. Almost no cars. A river of bicycles, all the same copy of a 1930’s British design.

Everyone wearing a blue or a green suit. With a cap, some with red stars on them. No sign that a dentist or a barber had every lived here. Very difficult to tell the women from the men and you wouldn’t care anyway. A very few grey suits which with a cheap ballpoint pen or two in the pocket designated you as a manager.

Only a few big trees. No bushes or little trees or grass. No cats or dogs or songbirds. Because they ate them all during the famine Mao launched with his great leap forward program in the 70s.

If you lived here you lived in a communal building with common toilets and a kitchen on each floor. No hot water. The communal houses were organized into blocks. Every block had overseers whose job was to know everything every family did and did not do.

Extremely backward industry ran around the clock. The language had evolved such that a discussion of time involved being on shift or off shift. Your company fed you your one substantial meal of the day, rice with the topping of the day (tsai). Your housing was assigned to you through your work. Plus your papers allowing you to have housing and stay in the city. When you were not on shift you were in your rooms.

Yes, it is a surprise to see this city so modern and prosperous.

China has doubled the living standard of the poorest 200 million every decade for 30 years, with the upper income levels doing even better. They are currently building housing units at a rate such that they could replace all of the housing in the USA in 6 years. I have been here for one reaason or another to watch this unfold: the greatest rural to urban migration and wealth creation there will probably ever be.  And the unfolding environmental disaster.

Yesterday went to the old section of town, built between roughly 1400 and 1800. Restored and restored, but still the “original” buildings. Full of lots of interesting things to buy. Some pictures.

The Xiamen train station is new and huge and looks out at a very large mountain park I wanted but did not make it to.

There are perhaps 200 people on this (one of two) waiting floors and as far as I can tell one foreigner.

I am feeling a bit guilty. Was so tired of my hotel in Xiamen. The dirty carpet, the noises and the smells. Couldn’t wait to leave. They on the other hand knowing I had complained about their noisy (broken pressure tank) water system, waived all my laundry charges. Then gave me a bag of four boxes of four differing flavored pineapple cakes. And four of them took me and my luggage to the taxi and stood by in a row as I departed all the time thanking me for staying in their hotel. Asia.

A huge mob gets on the train with plenty of line cutting, etc.

The first class car (17 dollars) soon fills up and we are on our way.

They are a pretty well behaved crowd. Eating various things. A little cart comes down the aisle and sells food and drinks.

Rolled out of the city at 70 MPH, then cruised around 120 MPH. Don’t quote me on this but I think that the fast trains in Taiwan hit maybe 175 MPH and maybe close to 200 in Japan. But we are moving!

I thought that this was interesting.  Children fares by height.

This is an eroded costal topography with hills and silted valleys. The hills are green with trees. In the valleys there are always buildings. A countryside landscape but with more buildings than one would expect. All the buildings are rectangular and look self-designed. Agriculture and canals/streams wind through the settlements.

The young fellow beside me is a student at the Fuzhou University. Studying Urban Design. He helps me read on my ticket the correct station. They have four, which I did not expect.

We make a few stops and after every stop a person comes down the aisle with a long handled dustpan and a broom and tidies up. Every station is huge, new, and mostly empty. There are many of these trains passing and in the stations.

Fuzhou looks like another unexpectedly big city. With traffic and other problems. I will have a look around and put up some pictures later.

How time flies. Chinese New Year was so late this year that although it is hard to believe it is almost time for the Spring Festival.

I am leaving Xiamen tomorrow to take the bullet train up the coast to Fuzhou, and will post a few pictures looking back.

Xiamen has been recorded as a city for around a thousand years, but apparently little ever happened here. During a period around 1000-1200 when China was open this was a major export city for tea. That’s about it.

General Koshinga retreated to here with his Ming army in the mid 1600’s when the Manchu were overthrowing the Ming Dynasty. He apparently stayed here quite a while. Maybe a decade. This is interesting (probably only to me) in that when the Manchu began to pressure him, he crossed the straights to Taiwan, besieged the Dutch Trading Port at Tainan, and threw the Dutch out of Taiwan. Apparently then living happily ever after.

It has been quiet for me too. My hotel turned out to be not so good, and in a not so interesting area. It has been cold and drizzly with grey skies every day. And going around the city the people are sullen and act as if they are being watched or afraid of something. So I will be glad to go.

Interestingly, this the major city in China for returning Chinese, those who made their money in the west and then returned to their own culture. They can surely live like kings here.

The city is quiet, clean. Has great seafood everywhere. Nice shops and markets.

I took some bus trips. 17 cents US.

There is one little not so interesting museum.

A huge university.

Plenty of beaches with walking trails. . A good place for a bicycle ride or some wedding pictures.

Nice suburbs.

A little old city near the beach. I did not make it into the actual old town. I have to return to Xiamen to exit China in a way that I can get to Taiwan, and will stay in the old town in a week or so.

I cannot imagine how many restaurants there are in this city. Thousands and thousands. They line the streets.

It was cold and rainy this morning, and I live in an area that has some shopping malls, so I went down to just one for an indoor walk around, and took some pictures of the restaurants in there. Many of these are mall food, but some are pretty nice. We could use a few of these in Bemidji.

I have not been doing much, but wanted to post some things and keep in touch.

I am living in Xiamen, on the south east coast of China. For China this city is paradise.  Good weather, pretty clean air (almost blue sky). The city is as clean as Tokyo. Sidewalks everywhere. Parks. Flowers.

It is so quiet and peaceful here, like a big country town, and it took me two days to figure out why. There are no motorcycles!! No roaring, smoking motorcycles, darting everywhere, driving around the cars, on the sidewalks, against the traffic, through the red lights that they have had everywhere else I have been on this trip. There are very few two wheelers here and they are either manual or electric. What a difference this makes.

There is even a large pedestrian only area downtown near the river.

I have a big and OK hotel room.

Acres and acres of breakfast.

But no internet. I am behind the great firewall of china that stops all foreign news and so I have no connection to outside China news of any kind. But I do have a little window that my smart wife set up for me that I can open now and then, which I will use to send this post. But I am really cut off.

So, if I were young and single I would go for rollicking Vietnam. But the quiet life here is fine for now. I have been here three days and have not seen another westerner. There is no English anywhere, unless things like this count.

99 percent of the people respond in a friendly way. They are just so serious. One interesting thing is that the little children who I presume are learning English in school like to say hello and good morning to me.

Some pictures:

My morning staple: bread with red bean paste.

Some bonus pictures.

The stock exchange (and boy is he hung)

The strawberrymobile

Color

Writing tools

and a little cutey

This is a communist country. If you don’t believe it these women will shoot your ass off.

Ho and the Marx brothers watch over everything here, including traffic intersections.

I was always amazed to be in the back back country in China where they had not seen a foreigner for decades and go into a conference room and encounter big pictures of Marx and Engels. Two old Europeans watching over the proceedings. Their extrapolation of the future based on a foggy analysis of industrialization in the 1800’s was silly before the ink was dry, but it sure gave a good theological underpinning for dictators.

As to Ho Chi Minh, we can hate him or whatever, but he was a giant of a man.

The War Museum

I really did not want to go to the war museum. But being here I kinda had to. It was worse than I imagined. No matter how Hollywood spins it we lost a war here, and the victors always get to tell the story. The museum as I expected was propagandized but it was still shocking to see the terrible photos and our country and our soldiers portrayed as war criminals and heartless, savage killers.

There were two people I went to university with who I know came here and returned in a box. After five years of engineering school. An example of why at the time we called our casualties:  wasted. But it is so long ago I cannot recall their faces. And I am older now and understand loss.

I was living in London through the hottest of the war and the wrap up, and missed the demonstrations and most of the news and the uproar. To me the war was just a sad thing, but we were all in a global struggle with communism then, each of us fighting in our own way. I believe to this day that communism enslaves their population, but maybe not in the domino theory, as we did then. This was a grim, deadly serious struggle. We lived under the risk of a preemptive nuclear attack every day.

The museum did surprise me in that although it was primarily about the conflict with the USA, it was presented as a fight against foreign aggression. They, for example, displayed captured US ordinance: planes, tanks, etc. (they look so primitive now) beside a reproduction of an infamous French prison.

Here is one thing I guess I did not appreciate and will give them. Napoleon III sent the French army to invade their country and the French ran things here for 6 decades. It is hard to deny that they enslaved the country for the collection of natural resources for export and French profit. By any measure: life expectancy, education, literacy, home ownership, the people were worse off after the 60 years than before.

Another thing I did not appreciate was that the USA had a military contingent here from 1950. Supporting the French. And when the French were thrown out and the country partitioned (North and South, like Korea still today), we took over the cause of supporting the South. Which led us into a land war in Asia against a people struggling to throw out the foreigners. What were our politicians and generals thinking?

I am sure that all sides in a war do bad things. We did bad things.

We bombed and bombed and bombed.  Targeted bombing. Carpet bombing. Air Force Chief of Staff Curtus LeMay was quoted in the museum with his resolve to “bomb them back into the stone age”. I remember that quote because LeMay graduated from my University and Engineering school and I was proud of him until that moment.

All significant buildings in North Vietnam were destroyed. All factories, train facilities, bridges, roads, ports. And (I myself believe by accident) some churches, schools and hospitals.

According to a study done by Columbia University we rained maybe 100 million liters of poisonous chemicals on the country. Napalm, phosphorus bombs, combat gasses, defoliants, dioxin.

I got to see examples of the horrible little “anti-personnel mines” that we would sow over areas. They would last for years waiting patiently to indiscriminately kill or maim.

And I was convinced that as the war rage got higher and higher we went over the line with the torture and execution of prisoners.

I cannot look back through any lens of time and understand how our leaders could believe an end so important as to unleash these means. But they did.

And I cannot buy the premise of the museum: that we abandoned our principles and aggressively abused a people yearning to be free.

The facts are that we wasted 60 thousand American dead and wounded 300 thousand. The Vietnamese losses are staggering: 3 million killed of which 2 million were civilians. 2 million injured. Hundreds of thousands missing and presumed dead. What a tragedy.

There are not many pictures in this blog. I could have put up some of the shocking and horrific ones from the museum, but why? Perhaps this terrible affair should just recede into the history books alongside the long list of other tragic war histories.

I just hope we are learning something from all this.

Anyway, at high tide the coconut barges are coming downriver.   The rainy season will start any day. It is time to move on.