One of the great pleasures about traveling around Greater India (over the past twelve months I have visited India eight times, Sri Lanka twice, and Nepal and the Maldives once) are the gem dealers that set up shop everywhere and are so prevalent. Highly knowledgeable they are too, often being family businesses that have remained so for several generations. They vary from the wooden stores and wizened Muslim dealers in Katmandu, to the efficient, well-meaning and dynamic Sri Lankan traders, many with their own mines, to the grand, such as the gem dealer in the Taj in Bombay. Experts all, they have prices for all budgets, so one doesn’t need to be alarmed by the prospect of entering. All I have found genuinely helpful and educational.   

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Weekends in Bombay are always fun, the city connects with its coast much better than Shanghai or other coastal Chinese cities do. In fact, often flying out of Pudong and heading south, the coastline of eastern China is intensively dotted with scattered islands…sailing around those – if it were allowed – would be great. But the Taiwan issue and a fear of lots of Chinese people getting out of their depth on lilo’s has put the kibosh on that. Bombay, however, is an archaic, but charming maritime paradise. The cities wealthy and elite all have yachts, and have vessels of different shapes and sizes, or at least know someone who does. My office building landlord is a case in point. Having served as a skipper in the merchant navy for many years, he set up his own tug boat operation in Bombay and that did well. Retiring a few years ago, yet not wanting to give up his nautical freedoms for a medium sized apartment with walls, he purchased a 1980’s Dutch trawler. As one generally does when faced with retirement.

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Weekend sailing in Mumbai. You don’t get this in Pudong.

I’ve been in Mumbai the past ten days having flown in from Shanghai,  and the contrast is almost immediately apparent. Mumbai’s new international arrivals terminal deposits you at the taxi queue after just 20 minutes, and although the drive to Colaba is still a pain, it’s no worse than doing the Pudong trek to Puxi. While Shanghai – a city I lived in for five years and always enjoy visiting – was good, it remains relatively quiet. Expats have been leaving, and locals are not shopping as much. It’s hardly a surprise, China’s exports account for 40% of its GDP, so people are bound to be suffering, and the Governments stimulus plan isn’t geared at residents of cities like Shanghai. The city is ticking over, but it’s lost the dynamic entrepreneurial can-do attitude it took over from Hong Kong back in 1996.

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The Royal Bengal Tiger has been spotted for the first time in twenty years in North Bengal’s Dooar forests. Two Tigers were spotted, in a sign that mating may be occurring in the region. Tigers are solitary animals, who only come together, now during the spring, and occasionally in the late autumn to mate. Less than 3,000 Royal Bengal Tigers are left in the wild, down from 40,000 at the beginning of the last century. The species is known to have four markedly different sub-species, veering from the classic gold and black striped animal of the jungles, to almost pure white in the Himalayan regions of India.

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Przewalksi’s Wild Horses

I’ve been speaking at a United Nations Development Program event in Ulaan Baatar, the capital of Mongolia. It’s a city I know well (I wrote a best selling guidebook about traveling throughout Mongolia two years ago) and I’m pleased to be back, old friends to see, and some catching up to do. The conference is fine and goes off well. Mongolia is a beautiful country, and although I know the weather is going to be chilly, I’ve tacked on an extra four days to go see the Mongolian wild Pzrewalski’s Horses in Hustaai, to the west of UB, and then to take a quick trip south into the Gobi. The horses are endemic to Mongolia, and are quite different from domesticated horses. They also very nearly became extinct – the world population was down to just 17 animals (3 stallions) in the 1970’s. Still very rare, there are about 350 of them in the Hustaai reserve.

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Unawattuna

It’s only a short hop from Chennai, on India’s south-east coast to Colombo in Sri Lanka, and the home of my good friend, Simon and his wife Pauline. Retired now from positions in both Kenya and China, Simon lives in Kandy, Sri Lanka’s central city, and is slowly building for himself on about 10 acres of land at Nuala a ranch from which he can pontificate upon life, the comings and goings of the local wild elephant, the remarkable plumage of the Indian Pita, and all while downing a chilled pink gin. Lucky bugger. However, I don’t have the time to catch the train to Kandy, and am instead to meet with him in Colombo, but not before I’ve taken a five day rest in the wonderfully named Unawattuna resort in the far south of the island, a little further on from Fort Galle.

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Mumbai Recovers

After the media frenzy of my published comments on China Briefing concerning the unintentional leaking of the Chinese governments RMB/US exchange rate position, February was spent mainly in India assessing our local market position and reflecting on business confidence, particularly in Mumbai following the November terrorist attacks on the city. My firm has been investing in India – we have five (albeit small) offices there, and the global financial crisis, coupled with the Mumbai attacks, had lead to questions over how much progress we would be able to make during 2009. Happily, I found Mumbai in a resilient mood, albeit one that was still showing off its scars. The Taj Hotel, wish had been the scene of much bloodshed, has reopened, and Leopold’s café, a popular haunt amongst locals and tourists alike, was packed, even with bullet holes in the pillars, plate glass windows and holes in the floor where grenades had gone off. The attitude was a mix of defiance, and of fatalism. Still, it was sobering as I knocked back a lime soda to think of what had happened to the people directly in the firing line of the bullets. 

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Tchaikovsky’s Operas  

This winter has taken on a distinctly Russian theme, as temperatures plummet to -10, and the lake at Chaoyang Park (opposite to where I live) freezes over. In watching the perennial Tchaikovsky ballets that do the rounds at this time of year, I was struck – and not for the first time, about how seasonal there are. Further research lead to me Tchaikovsky’s operas, and an entirely new world opened up. 

I used to sing amateur opera (once even for a British Opera North production in Leeds many years ago) and am a natural tenor. Meggie also has a love of opera (well, she is Italian), so it was with some delight we purchased, from the State Music Store at Wangfujing a collection of various operas that had been held at St. Petersburgs Marinsky Theatre, a building described by my friend Alan Babington-Smith as “the most beautiful building in the world”. So, armed with Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades, and Mazzepa, we settled in for some long winter nights and a series of Russian classics. Several things struck me when comparing them with Italian opera – firstly, the sheer length – the Russians love to talk and the average opera extends for well over three hours – and the far higher degree and competency of the choral singing, as opposed to the Arias for which Italian opera is so rightly famous. Plus, of course the dread of Russian winters – their operas always seem to hinge on tragic pistol duels at dawn during which the hero gets mortally wounded. The count down during Eugene Onegin as the second counts out the paces – one – two –three – and then a shot rings out, is utterly chilling. Then the simple words “Mort” to signify the death of his opponent and the end of act two. It doesn’t get much more somber, and of course Pushkin, (on whose poem the opera is based) wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs in describing the lot of the average Russian in the days of the Tsar. But still, it is a wonderfully morbid piece, and quite suitable for melancholy, cold evenings. 

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