I had worked on my trip through South China for months, talking with everyone in my office who had travelled there, with my travel agent, and going through countless web sites to create the perfect trip. The SARS dilemma surfaced several weeks before my vacation was to begin, but it seemed at first to be mainly a Hong Kong-Singapore phenomenon. Then the Guandong Province situation was revealed, and suddenly the Beijing nightmare began. I still thought our trip would be relatively unaffected, as I was going only to “SARS-free” regions, remote from Beijing. I never thought the government would suddenly forbid all travel to China’s countryside.

When my travel agent called frantically to tell me the hotels she booked for me had closed, I knew I had to change plans fast. My friend was with me, and this was supposed to be a very special time for us. We still had 20 days together, but China was becoming impossible to deal with, with its closed restaurants and hotels and tourist sites, and very little to do. We finally decided to skip over to Thailand, despite the pounding heat, and we have been having a great time here.

One interesting comment on SARS and Thailand: We had trepidations about coming here because Thailand has issued very strong statements about their stringent anti-SARS policy, which calls for medical check-ups every 3 days and/or wearing a mask constantly, under pain of a six-month prison sentence! I told my friend I couldn’t imagine the Thais actually enforcing such draconian measures. When we got there, all they did was take our temperatures, ask some questions, hand us a surgical mask and wave us goodbye. No mandatory anything. This was a great relief for us, but if it becomes common knowledge the Thai government is going to look might silly.

We are off to Chiang Mai in a couple of days. Being out of China is an indescribable relief, even if it’s hot and noisy here in Bangkok. The last couple of days in China were pure hell, and there were moments when I thought we simply wouldn’t be able to get out. It’ll all be in my book.

I have just canceled my entire vacation in South China, and my friend and I are scrambling to figure out a way to get out of the country to a place we can afford to stay for a couple of weeks, without having to be quarantined most of the time.

China is virtually closed down, even in SARS-free zones. I appreciate the fact that they are trying to prevent the spread to rural areas. But closing down outdoor parks and open-air boats seems heavy-handed. Next post will most likely be from a different country.

I watched a 10-minute CCTV-9 special last night on what a great time quarantined students in Beijing are having playing badminton. Some students were interviewed, each expressing his/her joy at being quarantined and how delighted they are about it. As I so often say, only in China.

Scathing article in the International Herald Tribune on what the Chinese government should have learned from its botched efforts to cover up the SARS epidemic. Among its insightful conclusions:

[….]

The half-baked reform of China’s health system is nothing short of scandalous and the country is now paying for it. Peasants — who can least afford it — must shoulder their entire medical burden, while the wealthy party elite and state employees enjoy a lavishly subsidized health system that consumes most of the state health budget.
.
Only those who can afford to pay can expect treatment for SARS, AIDS or other modern plagues. The Communist Party should be taxing the rich to subsidize the poor, not the other way around.

I know I’ve dwelled on this topic a lot lately, but I find it monumental. I was working on a report on AIDS in China just as the SARS cover-up blew up in the Party’s face, and the similarities between the two scandals is uncanny. There is one major difference between them, however, and that is what stands out the most: AIDS is still neglected and swept under the carpet in China. No officials have been fired for the cover-up, for the suppression of data and the quashing of efforts to inform the vulnerable public.

Reason? While I can’t state it as a categorical fact, I think I have studied the situation closely enough to offer an educated guess: With SARS, everyone is at risk — the young, the healthy, the elderly, etc. SARS is an equal-opportunity virus. It threatens tourists and businesspeople; it could even infect Party members. AIDS, on the other hand, selects as its victims those who, to the CCP, don’t matter very much — sex trade workers, impoverished peasants who sell blood in remote rural provinces, injection drug users, and of course, the group that doesn’t even exist in China, homosexuals.

At the moment, millions and millions of Chinese citizens are at risk of contracting AIDS, and the government is doing next to nothing, especially compared to what it is doing, finally, about SARS. Long after the SARS epidemic has been contained, the AIDS threat will continue to mount, even to the point of turning China into “the next Africa” in terms of AIDS devastation. This neglect, this silence, this willful denial of a tragedy utterly without precedent in terms of lives affected — this is the greatest sin that the Chinese Communist Party will have on its conscience.

My plan was to go back to Beijing after my three-week tour of South China, but conditions there seem to have deteriorated to the point that I simply can’t return. I have rebooked my flights to go to Singapore from Shanghai, where the SARS infection rate has, for some mysterious reason, remained low. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Tomorrow we fly to Yunnan, the highlight of the trip and a place I’ve dreamed of visiting for two years. Now I’m worried that, like Guilin, entire areas may be blocked to tourists, making the trip an exercise in frustration. Too late to change things now, so we’ll just have to go with the flow and make the best of things.

Meanwhile, the Chinese media continue with their usual propaganda, at times making the SARS menace seem more a nuisance than anything else. Earlier this week China Daily held “interviews” with students quarantined on Beijing university campuses. Each had the same comment: It was dull at first, but then it was actually kind of fun, with TV and games and a great opportunity to read and meditate. No one had any complaints. Then there were threee “letters to the editor,” all of which congratulated the government for its courage and stressed that now was the time to stand behind these brave leaders in the fight against SARS. The letters expressed annoyance that the Party had fallen under criticism for the Beijing cover-up, and stressed that it was time to “put all of that behind us.” Then I saw at the top of the same page a lengthy editorial that said, more or less, exactly what the three letters said. Coincidence? I don’t know, but I found it all too reminiscent of the government’s heavy-handed, clunky attempts to “maintain social stability” by repeating the same rosy scenario again and again and again, until the public finally despairs and accepts it as Truth.

SARS may be more insidious than any of us had imagined, according to a new article in the NYT. It starts with an ominous lead: “Dismaying developments in three nations yesterday underscored the capriciousness of SARS, the respiratory virus that had seemed to be coming under control in many countries.”

Reading the article, I realized just how little we know about this pathogen, and that it may hold many surprises in store for us in the future.

For the first time, traffic to my site in April passed the 5-digit mark. (I know, to most bloggers that’s pretty low, but I never intended to have any readers, let alone 15,000.)

Thanks for reading; I’ll be back full-time once my vacation ends and I get settled in Singapore at the end of May. Until then, posts will have to continue to be few and far between.

The best-selling tourist item here in Guilin is a T-shirt that says, in English and Chinese, “I Survived SARS 2003.” It’s funny, but it’s also telling. Everyone, especially those whose destinies are linked to tourism, is feeling battered by SARS. It’s got the country in a death-grip.

Even though I am far from SARS-ravaged Beijing, the disease continues to cast a pall over my vacation. Tourist sites are closed, flights are cancelled and everyone’s depressed. My hotel in Guilin somehow got it into its head that since SARS doesn’t like the heat, it would be a wise move to turn the hotel into a sauna. They have stopped the air conditioning and, despite complaints from a few very vociferous customers, turned the entire hotel into a hothouse. This is a huge hotel, and there are at most 20 customers. My hotel last week in Xi’An is a veritable fortress, and my guess is there were 8 to 12 people. You really have to see this to believe it. The staff just stand(s?) around as though everything is normal, the huge buffet laid out each night with no one to eat any of the food. How long can this go on?

Good blogging requires lots of surfing, reading, absorbing, rejecting, questioning, checking, picking, choosing and responding, and right now, in my smoky Internet cafe in Guilin, a spectacularly beautiful gem hidden away in Guanxi Province, south China, I can’t do much of any of those things. So please bear with me as this blog continues its holding pattern. The most I can do for now is offer some observations as I travel through the country on my way to Singapore, my new home.

Last night I saw yet another dimension to the evils of China’s censorship machine. I was watching CNN in my hotel when a guest was introduced to discuss how China’s lies about SARS in Beijing were damaging the nation’s political system. This sounded interesting and I sat up to listen. Suddenly, to my utter amazement, the screen went black. It stayed black for about ten minutes with no sound. Then, just as suddenly, the picture and sound came back, just in time for me to hear the announcer thanking the speaker for his time. China is still obsessed with censoring the news and will go to any lengths to keep people in the dark about its crimes, whether we’re talking about Tiananmen Square or SARS.

For anyone who wants to believe that China has actually learned from its experience of the past few weeks, for anyone who wants to believe China now understands how dangerous it is to smother the voices of others and suppress information — I invite you to come to China and see what it is really like. I have tried to give them every benefit of the doubt, and still they emerge as paranoid thugs whose automatic response to criticism and/or scrutiny is to stifle it.

I won’t go into this topic any more, as I am on vacation and want to keep my blood pressure at a safe level. All I can say is that any changes the government is attempting to demonstrate, any new-found spirit of ‘glasnost,” is strictly cosmetic. Same old brutes, same old party.

I am in Xi’An now. Due to impossibly slow Internet connections and other headaches I will be posting infrequently for at least the next few days.

Leaving Beijing two days ago was like an escape, as though I were climbing over the Berlin Wall. I can’t go into all the frustrations and agonies of my last couple of days there. I’ll try to get back to this soon, but chances are there will be no opportunity until Wednesday. Thanks.

For the past 8 months I have tried to tell readers about Beijing the way I see it. There’s no way I could just end all of that and not feel some nostalgia, some sense of loss, some poignant emotions. But I would be lying if I said I wasn’t also relieved. Beijing is not an easy place to live during the very best of times. But during a veritable panic, when the city seems to hover on the brink of total breakdown, closing its schools and businesses and hospitals….during a time like this, it’s hard not to feel as though you are being slow-roasted on a spit. With the flames being turned slowly but continuously higher and higher.

Today I oversaw the movers as they carted away my things, and tomorrow I am off to Xi’An, Yunnan (Dali, Kunming, Shangrila, Li Jian). Guilin and Hangzhou, then off to Singapore via Shanghai and Hong Kong (yes, I am actually going to HK to see old friends and pick up some belongings).

For those of you who have come to read more about SARS in Beijing, I might disappoint you tonight. My brain is too fried, and I’m too busy to keep up with it. Let me just say that tonight it seemed as though Beijing has become resigned to its plight. The mood everywhere seemed subdued, almost reticent, philosophical. (Although this, of course, may have been merely a reflection of my own mood.) The long lines at grocery stores are over, the palpable sense of fear has melted into one of acceptance. It’s still a sad city, under enormous strain, but it appears at least to be coming to grips with the nightmare.

I finally went to the Great Wall today for the first time. Gorgeous, of course, but my friend and I had it all to ourselves, just as we had the Forbidden City yesterday. Tourists are nonexistent, and you can cry looking at the desperate shopkeepers whose fates are tied to the traffic to Beijing’s tourist attractions. Yes, it’s a sad, sad city, and I can’t say I am sorry to be leaving now. Sure. I will miss the excitement of knowing I was helping to provide breaking news to readers thousands of miles away about one of the scariest stories since 9/11. But it’s definitely time to move on.

I’ll probably post for the very last time from Beijing tomorrow morning, provided my Internet connection is working. (It is down about 40 percent of the time.) In any case, thanks for adding an incredible new dimension to my life by coming here, and I hope I was able to shed just a bit of light into a country that still, for all the propaganda, thrives on keeping its people in the dark.

I know I will never, ever have an opportunity that can approach the one I had here. China, for all of your harshness, your inscrutable ways and your daily hardships, I can’t say that I do not love you. I will certainly never, ever forget you, and I thank you for making me a more tolerant and knowledgeable person. Thank you, and goodbye for now.