Salon.com > Simon Winchester

Romance in Romania

Fri, 15 Dec 2000 20:00:00 +0000

It was as I was starting to climb the stairs to the bedroom that I first heard her voice. Later she told me she had been calling for quite a while, but I, what with having to go over the details of the next day's drive to Budapest, must have been distracted. It took some time before I realized that Elena, as her name turned out to be, had been trying to attract my attention.

"Please stop!" she cried. "Just for a moment!"

She was standing behind the reception counter. When she saw that she had made contact, she put up a hand, palm out and fingers spread, and waved at me like a child, evidently relieved. Her face lit up with a thankful smile.

I have to admit I was taken with her from the start. She was very pretty, with short and glossy brown hair cut neatly to frame her face, a pert little retrousse nose, and a sprinkling of faint freckles on her cheeks. She couldn't have been much over five feet tall, and so the massive old wooden reception desk that stood between us -- and which had been built in the town's more prosperous days, no doubt -- rather blocked the rest of my view. But she seemed to be slender and trim. She wore a neat white blouse, aged but well washed, and she had twisted a bright pink cotton scarf round her neck, as if she might have been a Parisian.

Trying to stay afloat

Wed, 26 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

The 44 remaining inhabitants of Pitcairn Island -- the tiny British colonial possession in the South Pacific, inhabited for the last two centuries by the descendants of the mutineers from the notorious HMS Bounty -- are currently facing a crucial choice: Pay the full market price for the curious luxury of living lives of magnificent isolation or abandon their rocky mid-ocean home forever.

The British government, which has subsidized the minuscule possession almost as long as it's been a colonial outpost, has in recent weeks made it clear to the islanders that it is no longer prepared to do so. At the beginning of this year, the authorities freed the basic necessities of island life -- electricity and freight, mainly -- from the price controls that made them affordable to an island people who have for years lived no more than a frugal subsistence.

But at the same time, Britain has also held out the vague promise that later this year it might begin work on building a tiny airstrip on the mid-oceanic outcrop. This would allow people who want to remain -- and who will pay for the privilege -- to have at least rudimentary contact with the outside world.

Paradise found

Wed, 19 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

I have just been traveling in deepest, wildest Patagonia. While doing so I stumbled upon a small and simple earthly paradise, an Elysian place of beauty and happiness and peace in which I and my two companions found sublime contentment and serene enjoyment. Although I am more than happy to describe every detail of this place and how I found it, and although in the following paragraphs I will try to do justice to the place -- it is a country hotel, in the valley of a river that is locally well known for its speckled brown trout -- and so make it every bit as alluring for you as it has lately been for me, I will not, I am sorry to have to say, tell you its name, nor exactly where it lies.

I find in deciding to do so that I have become ensnared by the dilemma that all in this trade sooner or later confront: that what makes some places so very special is the public's general ignorance of their existence. And so in all candor, and while it must be in wholesale conflict with whatever principles guide the odious business of travel writing, I have to declare that I simply do not want the general public, despite my warm regard for democracy and prosperity and freedom and such other excellent modern notions, to go there.

Bottom's up

Wed, 05 Jan 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Jan. 5, 2000

ON THE MV OCEAN EXPLORER I, DECEPTION ISLAND; DEC. 31, 1999 --

The cold Antarctic air was filled with albatrosses, terns and skuas; the
seas were alive with flotillas of penguins; in the distance, it was said, a
pod of humpback whales was cutting through the waves. But the small boy on
the boat deck, 8 years old, towheaded and dressed from head to foot in
brand new designer polar wear, had evidently on his mind more pressing
concerns than the wildlife of the Southern Ocean.

"Daddy," he inquired, blurting his question without warning into the stiff
breeze, "just what do the initials YPF stand for?"

His father, who was dressed in a similarly impeccable cocktail of primary
colored fleeces and ballistic nylon, looked down with an expression of
benign condescension.

"Surely not YPF, young man," he replied. "You must be thinking of YPO -- the
Young Presidents Organization."

The Internet comes to the Outback

Tue, 09 Jun 1998 19:00:00 +0000

In a way, this is the story of the arrival of the next century, and another world, in the lives of a young boy named Rupert and his pet lamb, Gidgee. Not to say that their current lives are in any way wanting, or old-fashioned. It is simply that I watched them be enthralled by something they had never seen before, something that brought tomorrow home to them, like they'd never known.

Rupert is 7, and he is Australian, and he lives with his parents and two sisters and Gidgee the lamb on one of those giant cattle stations in Queensland, 1,000 square miles of bone-dry bushland that supports 10,000 cattle and a like number of merino sheep. I drove 16 hours to get there, all on dirt roads; the closest town of any significance is called Muttaburra, and it is 40 miles away. There is one shop and the man who shears the sheep, and that's about all Muttaburra is or ever will be.

Islands only a mother could love

Fri, 06 Mar 1998 20:00:00 +0000

Some years ago I stood on a high headland on the far northern tip of the Japanese island of Hokkaido, and through powerful binoculars -- costing 100 yen a minute -- I gazed across the sea to one of the strangest and most unyielding legacies of the Second World War. A couple of miles away, shimmering in the sea-haze, rose a tiny island, and on the island was a small wooden hut. A ragged flag flew over it, and a couple of men could just be seen idling by the door. They seemed to be in uniform, and they were carrying guns.

What kept me and a score of Japanese tourists all gazing through the binoculars, pumping in coin after coin, was that the flag was the tricolor of the Russian republic and the men were soldiers of the Russian army. They were standing on an island that until the very last days of the war had been indisputably Japanese territory: They were so close you felt you could shout at them. Several Japanese tried to: Get out! they cried. Go home!

Hong Kong Diary: June 30, the day of the handover

Mon, 07 Jul 1997 19:33:00 +0000

and so the rewriting of history begins. It was only 10 minutes, maybe less, into the long-awaited resumption of China's superintendency over Hong Kong, when we heard a new and very curious phrase -- a reference, by Chinese President Jiang Zemin, to the "vicissitudes" that Hong Kong and its people have supposedly suffered during the last century and a half of British colonial rule.

Perhaps it was the translation -- perhaps the president actually meant "difficulties" or "trials" or "periods of turbulence." We won't be sure until the official English version of the speech is offered, in a day or so. But whatever the phrasing's imprecision, it does seem abundantly clear that the new ultimate leader of Hong Kong thinks, and is telling his new subjects to think, that the past century and a half have been difficult times for the territory, and that now China has taken over, everything is going to be just fine.

Most of us who were listening to his speech -- which the president made just after jackbooted Chinese soldiers had raised the Chinese flag and goose-stepped down from the podium -- were mildly surprised, to say the very least. For wasn't it in fact China that had suffered, or had weathered, most of these supposed vicissitudes of history?

Hong Kong Diary: June 27, three days to handover

Mon, 30 Jun 1997 08:18:00 +0000

all of a sudden today, the situation here has started to look just
a little bit darker. The party people are still pouring in and officials are still towing the celebration fireworks onto their launching pads in the middle of the harbor. But in the late afternoon a fax came in from the new chief executive's office, reminding us all of some sterner realities, and for a few moments the hubbub was stilled.

The People's Liberation Army, the fax announced, had now formally
decided just how and when it would send in its first men. And basically the news is not so good: An awful lot of them are coming, and they are coming very soon.

For the last few days a very small number of PLA men -- just over 100 -- have been allowed into Hong Kong, helping plan the arrival of the others. There have been strict rules about this first contingent: no guns, no uniforms outside the barracks, no bad behavior. And generally the rules have been observed. A pint of beer in a Wanchai bar sets a soldier back about a week's salary, so they've been keeping well away from the colony's notorious fleshpots.

Hong Kong Diary: June 26, four days to handover

Fri, 27 Jun 1997 19:58:00 +0000

the planes are coming in half-empty, most of the hotels are lying half-full. Everyone is saying of Hong Kong today that it is much like Los Angeles was during the 1984 Olympics; unnaturally empty, because all the ordinary would-be travelers were scared off by the gloomy talk of last spring, when the received wisdom was that everything over the handover period would be full, totally full.

The great and the good are pouring in nonetheless, preparing for what they expect will be the party of a lifetime. Actresses and models and society grand dames are here in abundance. Lauren Hutton is here, for some undefined reason. So is Yo-Yo Ma, who has come to play at the reunification concert. Margaret Thatcher is expected, taking a suite at the Mandarin for $10,000 a day. The trio of Jennings, Rather and Brokaw are all here, standing on street corners and making serious faces into expensive cameras, mouthing their customary platitudes, live from the exotic Orient.

The king of Tonga, a man so massively heavy that his hotel has to give him a bed reinforced with iron, has arrived. Tony Blair is going to look in briefly, as is, from Washington, Madeleine Albright and a junior bureaucrat named Richard Boucher, who will attend the Communists' swearing-in that the White House had earlier said it would rather boycott.

Hong Kong Diary: Typhoon!

Thu, 26 Jun 1997 19:44:00 +0000

the weather is suddenly causing the greatest concern. It has been raining so
much and so heavily here in the past few days that Old China Hands are
beginning to think the unthinkable: What if, they say, there was a typhoon on
the handover day?

A Hong Kong typhoon is a terrible thing to behold. It is also a phenomenon
with which the territory, on the basis of decades of bitter experience, is now
more than amply organized to meet. And yet that very organization could spell
the death of any celebration due to be held next Monday, should the weather
turn really ugly.

There is a steady gradation in both the levels of climatic ugliness and
the measures Hong Kong has designed as a response. It begins when a
typhoon -- the word comes from the Cantonese for big wind -- is spotted on
radar, hundreds of miles out in the Pacific and coming in the general
direction of the colony. Once it comes within 500 miles
of the coast, the Royal Observatory announces to the public the so-called
Raising of Signal No. 1. People are told to watch and listen, that a
storm is in the offing and may possibly cause the territory some trouble.