In 1950, 30,000 Chinese troops invaded Tibet. With outdated arms & equipment, the tiny Tibetan army resisted bravely but was soon overcome. In the years of Chinese occupation, more than a million Tibetans are believed to have perished, by starvation, execution, imprisonment & in abortive uprisings. Many thousands including the 14th Dalai Lama, were driven into exile in India. There are reports of Tibetan women being forcibly aborted & sterilized and of healthy babies being killed at birth. Thousands languish in prison and suffer appalling torture. The Chinese policy of one child per couple does not apply to the "Chinese" in this land. On the wall of my hotel are the rules for foreigners informing us how we should behave in Tibet. Here it describes the Tibetans as the "minority people". Sad they should be the minority in their own country. In the street the Tibetans smile at you & say "Tashe delay" that means hello & welcome, it is spoken softly & with warmth. As for the Chinese in Tibet, well they just ignore you.

"Roulette"
On my way from Saigon to Hanoi I stopped at the "DMZ" (demilitarized zone) this is where most of the bombing took place during the war. Here the fields are still heavily mined and when the Americans left, they buried their munitions and equipment rather than have it fall to "the enemy".
For many in this part of their beautiful country digging for scrap metal is their only source of income. Using worn out metal detectors, the diggers have no idea what they have located. One lucky fellow found a tank. Several hundred a year however, from this township find unexploded mines or shells and lose their lives. The hunting for scrap metal in this game of "Vietnamese Roulette" continues to this day. This wee lass was at a bus stop.

"Paradise"
If it exists then I believe I found it here at Lang Co, on the China Sea. I left home with no ties and knew that if I found somewhere better than home I could stay. Here the people were lovely, the landscape beautiful the food delicious and for a Scot, the weather most agreeable. I found however that there is for me only one home and that is as they say "where the heart is" and despite the rain, that was Scotland. Often when the rain, the cold and the long nights arrive I wonder if I made the right decision, the doubts however don't often last more than a lifetime!

Cambodia
It's Sunday morning in Cambodia, although I heard gunfire last night all is so peaceful this morning, I've been here a week now. I am staying with the local tax collector, who has just told me that he doesn't declare his B&B income. The garden of the house is a fruit basket, there are coconut, custard apple, and mango trees and I've been told to help myself. I'm sitting on the patio and have just finished my breakfast of French bread and cheese. Later in the day I'll hire a motorbike and driver (foreigners are not allowed to drive as there are many unusable roads due to uncleared land mines) to take me to Angkor Wat again. All I can hear at the moment is the noise of children, birds and the odd bit of "D.I.Y.". When I think back to a week ago when I was worried about coming here thinking there would be bandits from the Khmer Rouge behind every tree I feel daft.

Upon taking Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge implemented one of the most radical and brutal restructurings of a society ever attempted. Its goal was to transform Cambodia into a peasant dominated agrarian cooperative. Thousands were systematically liquidated, branded as "parasites" simply because they spoke a foreign language or wore spectacles. At least one million Cambodians were killed between 1975 and 1979. Ten miles from the capital are the killing fields of Choeung Ek. The remains of 8985 men women and children have been exhumed from 43 of the communal graves, a further 86 such graves have been left untouched. So shallow and so full are the graves, that as you walk across the fields fragments of human bone, teeth and bits of cloth protrude through the soil. Nowhere on earth seems so silent, so full of despair for here one can feel what man is really capable of. As I left the "fields" as they are so simply known this child gave me a smile. The killing has stopped here at least.

Cambodia
"Journey to Phnom Penh"
I left town in the dark at 4:30 am and got a lift by motor bike to the river. The roads got narrower and narrower, until they were just mud tracks. It was the start of the rainy season. The noises of the jungle were changing from the night chorus to that of early morning. As we passed them, the villages were beginning to awake. We finally arrived at a place where the road just ran into the river. It was now 7:30. I got a lift about 15 km down river in a dugout wooden canoe to the lake that I was going to cross in a fast boat. As the Khmer Rouge were still said to be active in this area I was told to stay below deck in case there was any shooting. Before the boat departed I left my passport details with an official, the bureaucracy seemed impressive until you learn that this was "just in case" the boat failed to reach Phnom Penh.

A famous travel writer described Guatemala as ugly, brutal & dull, yet for me this is the country where the rainbow got its colour. I met this chap at Santiago on Lake Atitlan, a volcanic crater surrounded by volcanic peaks. So impossibly beautiful the Indians believe it to be the navel of the earth. Travel here is on "chicken buses" which chug their way around. So packed was the bus to the lake that I sat on a bag of maize on the floor. To my right a lady was breast feeding her baby, on my left sat an elderly man with a cardboard box with four cockerels on his lap. The woman sitting in front of me had her child tied to her back in a shawl and she was clinging to a cloth with two screaming piglets wrapped inside. There were so many humans, animals & birds packed onto this former American school bus that it smelled like a zoo, still, only another 3 hours to go.Brilliant.