Our world offers many seas, lakes, oceans and rivers and they are all there for all of us to explore, enjoy, admire and visit.  When I realized I had never been to any of the islands of the Mediterranean Sea, I right away got on the internet to research this area of the world and to choose a few islands to explore.  I love islands, all kinds of islands, from those that are hot and tropical to those in the colder climates but I discovered that the islands of the Mediterranean offer something for everyone.

The island chain off the coast of Spain, the Balearic Islands, offer a variety of vacation choices from Ibiza, which is well known for its clubbing, to Menorca, the island of tranquility with isolated coves and beaches.  In the eastern part of this sea are the Greek islands.  Off the west coast of Greece lies the island of Mykonos which is part of the Cyclades.

I chose this island for its turquoise waters, white buildings doting the hillsides and the stylish nightlife found there. I found the south beaches are where the night life thrives but I also enjoyed jet-skiing, windsurfing and para-sailing. You too can get your travel guide to Mykonos online so you can check out the private northern beaches of this island or choose to do what I did and save up your energy for the evening and all it offers with party life.

My visit to the island of Crete had me noticing that Crete is not just another Greek island but more like a small country. This diverse and fascinating island is one I will return to again for its remarkable history of old mosques, monasteries and of course its natural beauty. I found the Cretans to be friendly and proud people who retain both their customs and culture along with their strong musical tradition.

`Till not long ago,’ said the Chairman, whose name was Chai Hwa, ‘we had no definite place.’ Of all the things he told me about their former nomadic life this matter-of-fact phrase perhaps summed it up best of all. ‘We had no settled place to live in or to keep our beasts. We had to move all the time because the grass was eaten up. In winter we had no reserve of fodder for the animals so we lost a lot of them every year. Then there was the tax man from the old govern­ment’ (the Kuomintang). ‘We had nothing except our animals to pay the taxes with, so we moved away when we heard he was coming; over the mountains with everything we had, towards Chinghai.’ Chinghai is the region of the lake called on maps Koko Nor. The jurisdiction of the Kuomintang never effectively reached there.

As we sat round in the tent I learned a lot about those pathetic forced migrations in the face of weather, starvation and rapacious tax men. ‘We can laugh now,’ Chai Hwa said, showing his yellow teeth and taking a gulp of buttered tea. ‘I can’t tell you how hard it was in those days. But this morning we have food to offer you. Now we have houses for the first time, and good herds and fodder for the winter.’

Kneading tsampa in our palms, we talked for several hours. It was a delicious meal, exactly right for the chilly climate, starchy like the food of all highland people, and weighing com­fortably on my stomach as we walked across to the mud-house village where the herdsmen lived. The village sheltered in an embrasure in the hillside. Long white prayer-flags snapped in the wind at the top of tall bamboo poles, one to every house. Large mounds of yak-dung lay beyond the houses, insurance against the winter, for this is the major fuel in a treeless land.

At first sight I found it hard to realize what a haven—as they had called it again and again—this primitive place was. Only life in conditions of extreme hardship can teach you that.

The village was busy. A trio of yaks were being harnessed by the Chairman’s wife, bags of seed being strapped with home-made braids on their unwilling backs. ‘We are beginning to sow grass in sheltered places to help out with pasture,’ Chai Hwa said as he went to lend her a hand.

His father, an old man in a brown Tibetan robe, came out of their house carrying the Chairman’s youngest child. As I went in my head was brushed by a small silk banner nailed to the lintel, on which a Tibetan Buddhist prayer was written. There were two rooms, one with a fireplace where a woman was cooking, and a big mud-platform bed which in China is called kang; the other also had a bed, a large brass tray of charcoal to burn on cold nights, and a shrine with a butter lamp burning and a few cheap tankas—Lamaist paintings of the Buddhist pantheon. On one wall hung the Chairman’s best hat (`the one I got married in’); and a couple of decorated chests contained the remainder of their belongings.

Playing with the baby and talking to them I got some feeling of what this mud but meant to them when the day’s work in the penetrating winds was over and they could come back to the glowing brazier and the good smell of cooking from the hearth.

The houses were all similar, each with its front courtyard sheltered by a mud wall, each with its flag sending prayers up to heaven. Rambling around I came on a yellow box fixed to a wall and, beyond it, the smallest shop I ever saw. The yellow postbox was emptied once a week, and the shop was full of women with long black plaits and striped skirts, gossiping as people do everywhere in the village store. Civilization had come to the windy valley at last.

By the time the road reaches Yung Teng—a large village 100 miles north-west of the city almost all vestiges of the present century have dis­appeared. Villages are surrounded by high mud walls and most of their houses are of the same warm yellow substance. The roadway is alive with peasants carrying produce, and farming implements which went out of date in Europe several hundred years ago; donkey carts loaded with mud and straw for bricks, children with loads of brushwood, grandmothers riding small Chinese horses—all cluttering the road. The dust kicked up by hooves and feet and wheels rises like wood-smoke in the wake of every moving thing; for this part of Kansu lies at the western extremity of the triangle of yellow earth (or loess) which broadens like a fan over the north China plain towards the distant Yellow Sea.

Beyond Yung Teng the river is left on one side, running rather thinly in summer on its bed of blue pebbles. The fertile loess irrigated by its water gives place to grazing-land covered with dry tussocks of grass and swept by a wind which I suddenly realized had a keen edge to it. Sheep, goats and, finally, great clumsy yaks with fleece blowing, appear in fields. The peasants are all wearing padded clothes despite the hot summer sun. Standing a few minutes in the shade talking to some of them I understood the reason; for we had been slowly climbing all day and the difference between sun and shade temperatures must have been about forty degrees. Long before we reached An Yang, our destination, a range of 12,000-foot mountains grew out of the northern  horizon, white and unreal against the sky.

An Yang is the administrative hub of the Tibetan Autonomous County called Tien Chu, one of many such small groupings of minority races within the confines of China. It is really a village, its greatness having been thrust upon it like a stone façade on a mud hut. The original An Yang lies down the end of the single street which has been elongated. The one provision shop of old times has turned into a small department store and a few smaller shops have appeared here and there. The people are mostly peasants—Tibetans, Mongols, and the Hwi nationals who are Chinese Muslims. But the advent of local government and of a teachers’ training college has added a leavening of intel­lectuals, not the least surprising of the recent changes.

There is no hotel in An Yang and I was given the room of an official, who kindly vacated it for me, in the mud compound of Government Headquarters. Its floor was pounded mud and its furniture sketchy, but the bed was piled with numbers of quilted covers of embroidered sherbet-pink satin, much beloved by the Chinese.

To the surprise of my hosts—for they always expect to coddle foreigners in China—I set out immediately down the village street and encoun­tered a crocodile of children in blue padded suits and red neckerchiefs, sturdy ruddy-faced kids with hands chapped from the bitter winds. One boy carried a flute and I asked him to play for me. His friends nudged him saying: ‘Go on! Play for the foreigner.’ And at last he overcame his shyness and played a haunting Tibetan tune for me as I stood in the mob of slant-eyed youngsters completely blocking the street. I heard its counterpart on the following day.

The next morning I set off in a Land-Rover and drove straight into the open country to­wards the white-toothed range of mountains glittering on the northern horizon. It was a tremendous landscape, dotted occasionally with a single figure on horseback crossing the great sweep of the grazing-land like a courier of Genghiz Khan. The wind whistled past your ears and froze your fingers.

There are some days apparently destined for remembrance. They come unheralded, as did this one, which I spent with the herdsmen of the Tibetan Cooperative at Hegetah. Fording an icy stream we saw in the distance a fur-hatted figure with earflaps flying, who waved us on. A few yaks were grazing here and there, pausing to fix us with their blank eyes. A couple of them were jousting, ramming their great heads together with a thud and a bellow. A harlah or two—rodents like hares which the herdsmen were trying to eradicate—observed our passing from safe distances. A tent of black cloth with inset white panels stood in the midst of the landscape. The man in the fur hat ran towards it and greeted me as we pulled up.

From the tent emerged the Chairman of the Cooperative, his assistant and a few other notables, all Mongols and Tibet­ans with crushing handshakes. They had set up this ceremonial tent to welcome me and as a fit place to entertain the foreign guest. Inside, it was warm. The white panels let into the black yak-wool cloth made it light as well. The ground was covered with brushwood on which they had put down yak-wool blankets; and the whole village had contributed its best things—tables and dishes—in honour of the occasion. I was quite overcome.

As the herdsmen plied me with thick chapatis of maize flour and with tsampa—roasted barley flour which they taught me to mix in the palm of the hand with Tibetan tea on which lumps of yak butter are dropped—we talked about life in this bleak reach of the world.

How to get there:

Routes and Fares: Hegetah is reached from Peking by taking the train or a plane to Lanchow (rail fare about £10, air travel slightly more). Here a car may be hired through China Intourist for the return journey to Hegetah, at a cost of about £30. Air travel from London to Peking, via Moscow, is quite straightforward and costs about £400 return. It is also possible to travel as far as Moscow by one of numerous surface routes, or a combination of air and surface travel, and to continue by Trans-Siberian Express. From Moscow a 2nd-class return, including sleeping accommodation, costs roughly £100, and 1st-class £150. The journey takes eight days each way and meals on the train cost 30s. to 40s. a day. Alternatively Peking may be reached by train from Hong Kong via Canton.

Formalities: A visa to enter China must be obtained from the Chargé d’Affaires of the People’s Republic of China (see below). Appli­cation should be made a good three months in advance. Smallpox vaccination is compulsory and typhus and plague inoculations are strongly recommended. Transit visas will also be needed by those passing through East Germany, Poland and the U.S.S.R. The only formality required of British travellers entering Hong Kong is small­pox vaccination. British travellers’ cheques are accepted in China, but your journey and hotel accommodation will be booked for you by China Intourist.

Accommodation: There is a large new hotel at Lanchow.

Information: This may be obtained from the Chargé d’Affaires of the People’s Republic of China, 49 Portland Place, London, W.1. General notes on travel to and in China were given in the June 1960 number.

IN an age of jet-hops from one side of the globe to the other, the two days spent in travelling by train from Peking to Lanchow in Kansu Province of China lend a comforting intimacy to a journey which by swifter means would be just another impersonal trip; and it comes as a surprise to realize, after such a long journey, that Lanchow lies not at the western extremity of China but almost in its geographical centre: it is on the desert margin and there are another 1600 miles of China before the Russian border.

Lanchow is the Chinese version of the boom town. Formerly it was the western terminus of the railway, but in the last few years since rich deposits of oil and minerals have been exploited in the Tsaidam and Sinkiang regions the track has probed out into the deserts for hundreds of miles. Now, more than ever before, Lanchow is the collecting centre for the products of this vast new-rich country and its staggering influx of workers and technicians. Once a charming, dilapidated place of 200,000 inhabitants lying at the western end of an elliptical plain on the banks of the upper Yellow River, it has become a great industrial city of about a million people. A boom town, but, in the modern Chinese manner, the boom is wholly industrial and not specula­tive.

Embedded in the growth of new buildings on the outskirts, there are still plenty of little dark shops selling incense or exotic skins of snow leopard, bear, chinchilla. Others are filled with the favourite headgear of Mongolian, Tibetan and other minority people’s taste, and with the bizarre silver jewellery they like to wear. And, sign of changing times, the kerosene pressure-lamp, the rubber tyre for an old cartwheel, have their prominent place amongst more local merchandise.

The swift current of the Yellow River at Lanchow is still best crossed on a raft made of inflated goatskins; and the sole bridge is that built by American engineers in the early years of the century, although a plaque recounts that its structure has been strengthened by Chinese.

Overlooking the sprawl of factories and the huge new oil refinery, a delicate pagoda on the brow of a hill is a reminder of former days. In a park I found school-children collecting roots and herbs to sell to a Chinese medicine shop whose pharmacopoeia normally includes such medica­ments as essences of snake-skin and ground tortoise-shell.

Though the railway has stretched out beyond Lanchow and new roads start off in several directions, you do not have to drive far from the city to feel you are a very long way from the comforts and safety of civilization. Westward there is a road following the Yellow River for some miles, and then going along with one of its tributaries. Driving down it I was more conscious of progression into the past than of miles ticked off on my way. On the banks of the river are huge wooden water-wheels, many of them fifty or sixty feet in diameter, revolving lazily. They creak and groan, but with a dogged mediaeval efficiency they carry up the troughs of water which spill into runnels at the top. The fields are full of water-melons in whose pink juicy depths I had seen many small boys and girls in Lan-chow eagerly munching. And there are miles of bright yellow rape-seed traversed by elegant rows of silvery poplars, backed by a magnificent cyclorama of lilac-striped rocky mountains and a fine blue sky.