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Strategies & Market Trends : Asia Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bosco who wrote (9418)	10/26/1999 2:27:00 PM
From: Michael Sphar	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9980

Hard to conceive the idea of staging. For instance, the Lhasa airport is an hour and a half drive from Lhasa, by fast bus (spending more time in the oncoming lane passing, than being passed). During that time you see a lot of territory. The consistency of the scenery - the multiple fields (in the hundreds) with most being plowed by yak power...this type of visualization would be awfully hard to stage. The towns were filled with peoples going about their daily activities this too was not stageable. The only thing conceivably "staged" was the meals and thank god for that as I'm sure the true local diet is something much less palatable to Western tastes. For instance, I had the Malaysian chicken at the Hard Yak Cafe, but I found it to be a bit bland. However the Tee shirts were worth far more (in our eyes) than the $5 we spent on them. Further, our tour guide was too amateurish to have been part of any such conspiracy. He was formerly a meteorologist but decided that tourism was a more enterprising career. His inability to command and control a group of curious and independent minded Americans was the source of numerous comments and jokes. People wandered off in every direction all the time. Wei Ling was just not that captivating. Definitely not part of the government China Travel Service, but hired from a local independent tour operation. He was however very knowledgeable in Buddhist history and would answer all questions posed. Claimed to have been a young boy during the cultural revolution, describing it in horrific general terms. From Tibet we journeyed on to Kathmando in Nepal, then onwards to Thimpho and Paro in Bhutan and then back again through Kathmando and Lhasa finishing as we started in Beijing. A very active and varied trip.