blogger rant, catching up

My blog having been frozen for over 3 weeks now, it's time for a brief rant about Blogger's spam filtering functionality. Apparently, my writing resembles spam so they locked my account and required that I request a "review" three times before confirming that I am in fact, a human being. After finally giving up hope, I created a new blog at Wordpress just moments ago, only to discover that Blogger's promise to unlock my blog was not empty. Fantastic, but in the meantime, I've lost weeks of precious posts to my early AD. Grr.

In the coming posts I will attempt to access some of the spared memories while they're still relatively fresh, but they may trickle in slowly. My last post places us in that magical land of Japan, which already feels like years ago. In the past few weeks we've trekked westward to Hiroshima, then through China from Beijing to Hong Kong and Chengdu, and finally arrived in Kathmandu, Nepal yesterday. Since China isn't fond of the concept of free speech and blogger.com was inaccessible anyway, I suppose my posts may have been limited even without the spam tag.

The contrast between Nepal and China is stronger than I expected, while that between India and Nepal is negligible. It seems that the further west we go, the more chaotic and well - dirty - the lands become. However, there's something comforting in the familiarity of the incessant honks and bells, roaming cows and aromas of spice and tea. Although our itinerary isn't exactly working out as planned, I don't think we could have chosen a more exciting time to visit this part of the world. With China pulling the reins on Tibet, they have closed the region off to visitors with the (unlikely) promise to reopen borders May 1. So while we've been unsuccessful sneaking into the country, our flight from Chengdu to Kathmandu yesterday plopped us right into the Lhasa airport for an eerie layover. The only flight at the abandoned airport, we were fortunate enough to sneak a peak at the surrounding mountains and breath a couple breaths of Tibetan air. I must admit that my anger towards China grew exponentially every minute in that airport. And Nepal is no less politically "vibrant" right now ...

Hmm ... apparently we've OD-ed on this internet cafe for the day, so more to come soon on "free" Nepalese elections and tracing our recent footsteps through Asia.