Hello everyone.  Well, 2000 has just about passed.  It was a year of surprises and sorrow, of sickness and health, of birth and death.  Like most years of course. We're looking forward to 2001 with the usual excitement.

We began the new year, some might say the millennium, in Hong Kong on Victoria Peak. Gerry awaited gleefully the moment when the much-touted Millennium Bug would strike and everything would go dark, but it was not to be.

As dawn broke over the hills behind Central (district), we were sitting on a pier waiting for the ferry to take us back to our temporary home, chez Tilbrooks, on Lamma Island. Because of our travels and the advent of email, for the first time in a dozen years we did not send a printed year-end letter pleasing some perhaps but this year we are reviving the tradition for the e-impaired.

January was a great month for renewing old ties, reviving old memories, and visiting long-remembered haunts from our four-year stint in HK in the '80s.  We ate a lot, rested up and emerged refreshed and ready for some new adventures.  We were, however, surprised by the form those adventures would take. 

In early  January a friend from New Jersey recommended Gerry as a consultant to ZTE, a Chinese telecoms company that wanted help improving the way it developed software.

Their headquarters are in Shenzhen, across the border from Hong Kong; Gerry got up early one morning and took a combination of ferry and train to get there for a first vist.

Before speaking with ZTE we had decided to go to Vietnam.  Two days before we were to leave Gerry was still negotiating with ZTE and, quite dramatically, right until almost the last moment, we did not know if they would make an offer we could accept, in which case we’d come back in three weeks to work, or if we’d go off to Vietnam for an open-ended stay. 

As you can guess, it was for three weeks, and we committed to ZTE for late February through March. Little did we know that it would last, on and off, for most of the year, still going even as we write this year-end missive.

We left our ZTE negotiating session and went and bought tickets for Hanoi. Soon after our arrival we realized that three weeks would not be anywhere near enough to fully discover Vietnam . Among the many surprises we have had in the last 18 months is how something or other always comes up to make us leave a place before we have drunk enough of it.

We were both charmed by the place. Luckily for us, it is not so far along on the road to development as China and so has much less pollution and much lower prices.  We loved the ruins of ancient Indian cultures, known as Champa.  We found Hoi An quaint with its narrow streets and village feel.  But we were most impressed with the old capital city of Hue with its imperial tombs seen on a memorable day tour by boat on the Perfume River. And Jan was delighted after almost a year "on the road" to finally find herself in a real beach resort!

In late February we returned to China and spent the end of the month and most of March  touring ZTE software Institutes in Shenzhen, Nanjing, and Shanghai. We both enjoyed seeing China at work and working closely with people from many different parts of the country.  Jan's strongest memory is how cold all of the offices were.  In spite of freezing weather outside, open windows were frequent reminders of English habits pre-central heating days. 

We ate every day at ZTE cafeterias, which ran the gamut from good to horrible. At one Shanghai ZTE cafeteria we were seated in a special dining room which was so cold that we had to open the doors to the outside in order to get warmer. After one look at Jan’s reaction to the cafeteria in Nanjing, our colleagues and shepherds from Shenzhen found us a nearby restaurant. The main problem? — tables covered with fish and meat bones that other diners had discarded.

During these travels we both picked up again on our Mandarin Chinese studies, which we had abandoned during our Hong Kong and Vietnam visits and were surprised at how much we had forgotten;  we were relieved to find how quickly it came back.  Jan has always had much more time available to study and so has always been a bit ahead of Gerry, but progress even for her is painfully slow. Now, with her good accent, we can reserve a hotel room over the phone and do other minor chores.

At the end of March we had to rush back to England.  Jan's Mam was succumbing to emphysema in her one remaining lung.  This rush home was almost exactly three years after we had suddenly left Lucent in April, 1997 when she was diagnosed with lung cancer.  Jan had subsequently helped see her through the lung removal operation and spent months helping in the recovery. 

We had last seen her in August, 1999, between Paris and Beijing, when she seemed to be gaining strength every day. It came as a shock to hear how quickly things deteriorated. During our last two weeks in Shenzhen, as Gerry was writing his final report for ZTE, we continually wondered if we should go to England. When we did, in spite of our efforts, we arrived just a few hours too late.  The next two months were spent in Darlington helping to deal with the after-effects of her death and going through the grieving process.  A special thank you is in order to all the friends who sent words of comfort and made memorial donations to Cancer Research.

A s May began, Gerry found himself in negotiations again with ZTE. In spite of the fact that he was to be paid a down payment one week after starting work in February, Gerry had received no money by the time we left for England and none while in England. After repeated apologies and promises that the money was coming, Gerry took a gamble and finally accepted more work. 

So mid-May found us en route to Hong Kong , where to facilitate payment we set up iTech Consultants (see http://www.itech-consultants.com), bought a new laptop (PIII700 with 256 MB Ram!), and lots of technical books. There we used a friend’s apartment for a week (Thank you May!) and saw lots of old friends in the hours that Gerry wasn’t preparing for his new consulting. 

A great day-trip took us on the ferry to Tap Mun (Grass Island) where we got in some hiking. Jan is the second from the left; admire her backpack — its the best

A few weeks later we came back to HK and spent more ZTE lucre on a Sony DCR-PC100. Its his best toy ever: it combines a digital camcorder with a digital still camera. Many of the photos attached to this letter were taken with it. The still camera is only 1.1 megapixels; what a wonderful day it will be when a new model has 4 megapixels. 

Gerry’s first round of consulting had been to assess ZTE’s current situation and needs. In his March final report he recommended they hold a course on software management and object-oriented programming.  ZTE asked him to give this course to two groups of software developers and designers at a resort an hour from Shenzhen. In all, we spent five weeks there just across the bay from Hong Kong. The beach was only ten minutes walk away from the hotel so every day between the end of class and dinner most of us would troop over there. 

Even the myriad jellyfish couldn't quite dampen our enthusiasm.  Jan was quite amused to find that none of the ZTE people had any experience of jellyfish even though a good handful of them lived in Shenzhen.  We both well-remembered jellyfish spotting from the upper deck of Hong Kong junks so that we could warn swimmers in the water. 

The two courses went well, at least in the opinion of their teacher. The participants had an evaluation process afterwards, but in typical Chinese fashion they shared very little of what they really thought. 

For us the most interesting aspect, after all the hard work (it’s hard to teach six hours a day; it takes lots of preparation which kept Gerry up late) were the meals. We ate almost every meal, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, in a group of 14 or 15. The lazy Susan in the middle of our table usually held a dozen or more dishes. By the end we had experienced just about every thing a Chinese kitchen can produce, including duck beak and sea snails. Too bad we didn’t or couldn’t learn most of the Chinese names of the dishes. Two of our favorites were Riben dofu (Japanese tofu) and Che-zi (braised eggplant).

W e’d planned a long break after the end of the teaching and the end did not come too soon to please Gerry. So after a quick business trip to Nanjing in the first week of July we took three weeks and fulfilled a long-time dream to take a Yangtse river cruise. Before boarding we toured Wuhan for one day and saw the lovely Yellow Crane Tower and Mao Zedong’s retreat, Meiling Villa, which is now a badly maintained wreck. We also went on an unplanned hike with one of our young colleagues. As 35 he could not believe that old, bearded Gerry could make it up hills by himself.

We had been reluctant to sign up for five days of a regimented cruise so were both surprised by how much we enjoyed it, though unhappy at how much three big meals a day can add to an already bloated waistline! 

Along the way we stopped at the Sandouping   (Three Gorges Dam) construction site and were tremendously impressed.

The gorges themselves were and are worth the trip. Having seen where the water level is now and where it will be, we don’t think the gorges will be ruined.

We sailed upriver rather than down — fascinated by the current running against us so swiftyly — and so ended in Chongqing, which deserves its reputation as an oven in summer. This was our only time where the weather kept us from our rounds as tourists. We ended up taking two and three hours for lunch to escape the heat. Nonetheless, we did see a museum about the Flying Tigers and flying over the Burma hump which impressed as much for how many signs there were about American-Chinese friendship and cooperation as for the museum itself.

To the west of Chongqing we’d heard of Dazu and its Buddhist cave carvings and set off for a two day trip there. Because it is off the beaten tourist path, neither as famous as Luoyang or Dunhuang, we felt like real explorers.

On first view of the Dazu-Beishan caves we were astonished and thrilled. Then when we saw the Dazu-Baoding caves we were even more impressed.  Baoding is 15 km out of town and up in some hills. We rode back to town — two of us — on the rear of a small motorcycle. It was exhilarating. Later, in September we saw the Luoyang Longmen Grottos and found them not as much to our liking. Now we wonder when we will see Dunhuang (its far to the west and we have no immediate plans to go there) and what we will think.

After Dazu we took two long train journeys -- the first was to Guiyang, a lovely high-plateau town with some interesting natural sights nearby, including China’s highest waterfall.

After three days we continued on by train to Guilin. We wondered if it’s famous Li River could match what we were seeing — magnificent green valleys, broken peaks, peasant towns and villages.

Our introduction to Guilin came at 4:00 a.m. as we got off the train and were taken round and about and round again by a taxi driver to a hotel that we didn’t want. When at last we got to the right hotel and paid him the right amount — very low by what the meter showed — he went angrily away. The rest of Guilin was marvelous, if still very hot. Unbeknownst to us were some magnificent caves in the area and we toured three of them

But still the highlight was our day long cruise on the Li Jiang (Li River) and seeing its fabulous mountain scenery.  It is justifiably famous, exceeding in beauty the train trip, but perhaps not by much.

By the end of this trip we were beginning to feel like experienced China hands and were finally learning slowly how to order food in restaurants.

But it was August and time to go back to work in Shenzhen. This time Gerry had agreed to head up a pilot project to demonstrate first hand the new software development methodologies he had been teaching.  The work was to develop a new version of a GUI for a network management system for an SDH transmission. That’s probably gobbledy-gook to most of you. As it happens, though, for Jan it was like coming home as she had acquired lots of the requisite vocabulary while working in 1998-1999 for Tellium documenting their optical transmission system. SDH, or Synchronous Digital Hierarchy, is a particular way of encoding transmitted data. It’s all the rage today and most of the world’s data now flits about on an SDH system or its American cousin,  SONET. A GUI is a graphic user interface; since the Xeror Start and Apple Mac introduced them they too have been all the rage; Gerry wrote the first one for a network manager while working at Bellcore in 1988.

The original schedule called for the work to commence in August and end in mid November. Like all good software projects it failed to meet its schedule and now should end December 22. The network manager, or NMS, was to be a new, more advanced version of a product that had been scheduled for completion by July of this year. But there had been a lot of problems and in August it wasn’t finished. So the team that Gerry had been meant to direct was instead still working like mad to deliver their late software. After six weeks of self-education while waiting for his team to arrive, it became clear that it would be a while, so our project was put on hold.

The great side effect, as far as we were concerned, was that we could go off and see some more of China while the weather was still good. And so off we went for five weeks on a trip generally east to west across the middle of China.

Half of the places we saw had shan (mountain) in their name; in order, they were Putuoshan, an island south of Shanghai with dozens of Buddhist temples; Huangshan, the most famous mountain in China; Jiuhuashan another holy Buddhist site; and Huashan, a craggy peak near Xian.

Befitting their Buddhist heritage,  Putuoshan (above) and Jiuhuashan (below) were quiet backwaters.

We liked Jiuhuashan the best and were reluctant to leave it. We hiked the above hill from bottom to top, marvelling at the temples and cliffs. At the top right of this photo there is a small stone rail-less bridge that we crossed with our hearts in our mouths as we looked at the 1000 ft drop.

Huangshan and Huashan are hikers paradises — if you are a hiker that likes endless stair-like stone steps. Many of them were so breathtakingingly steep that we astonished ourselves by descending them.

Besides the mountains we saw the cities of Ningbo, the cleanest city we have yet seen in China; Hangzhou, where we made a second trip and this time Jan got to see it since she wasn’t sick; Hefei, an interesting second-tier city; and Luoyang where we saw the Longmen Grottoes.

After Luoyang (the best is shown above) and Huashan we made our second visit to Xian, the first being in 1984; everything was changed – what struck us most was the traffic, modernity, and pollution?and the great buys.  We did much of our Christmas shopping there.

We came back after these five weeks to find the ZTE SDH team was still struggling with the July project. So Gerry worked on preparing the new project as much as he could. Most days consisted of explaining something that had been explained at least several times before. It began to be a real grind for Gerry. Jan had her studies of Chinese, but mostly became pretty bored going in to work with Gerry as she had very little to do.

In early November there was another break of one week, this time made with negative notice: Gerry was told the news in a call in the evening. This made no sense at all, since the contract was to expire on November 22 and there was no way the asked-for work could be completed. But the decision for the break was made and we used the week to see more of Shenzhen -- we saw the botanical garden and made a mystery bus tour (we got on not knowing where we’d end up) -- and have now seen more than almost all of our Chinese colleagues.

About this time we heard from Jan’s brother, Dave, that he’d be in Thailand at the end of November. His work is managing welding construction and it has taken him for long durations to Malaysia, the Philippines, Greece, and most recently to India. While in Malaysia he met and later married Jhep, who comes from northern Thailand. We decided it was time to try to see him in the new home he’d built in Phayao, northern Thailand, and to meet Jhep’s family, who all live in the area. So when it came time to sign the almost obligatory contract extension we insisted that we have a two week break and set it for November 22, December 8. We would come back and finish the project as best as possible and write a final report, now due December 22.

For our first week we visited the north, seeing Phitsanulok, Sukhothai, Chiangmai, Phayao, and Chiangrai with Dave and Jhap as our guides and hosts. They treated us wonderfully, as did Jhap’s extended family. 

While there we got Dave a little farther into the computer age by helping him select a laptop. You probably don't think of Chiangmai as a place with great buys on computers do you? Well, the prices are better than in Hong Kong. 

After a week we came south, passing through Bangkok, to the royal beach resort, Hua Hin. Here we mostly lazed about the  pool, which was twenty feet from our door. It’s the life that Jan wants to live. We spent a lot of time catching up on newpapers and books. Gerry finished Sven Hedin's "My Life as an Explorer", which Jan had read on our previous trip and Jan started "The Odyssey", which had been Gerry's readings. Both are packed with adventure. 

We had to come back, so went to Bangkok for one night. There we walked along the river and saw Wat Pho, a mightily impressive temple. 

We’ve now come back to Shenzhen, via Hong Kong. A highlight of the flight back was getting to see the Mekong River from the air. How Gerry would love to raft down it!

We now have two more weeks of work and, perhaps once again, Gerry will be retired. After a week of packing, shipping, celebrating Christmas and New Year, we think we’ll be off through southern China for repeat visits to Vietnam and Thailand and  first visits to Laos and Cambodia.

Until we next hear from you, and you from us, our fondest wishes for an exciting and happy new year (and, at last, a third millennium).

Jan and Gerry