Stanley C. Diamond's Page

If you are planning a trip to the popular sites of China- Beijing with its Great

Wall and Imperial Palace, the incredible port and commercial center of Shanghai,

Guilin and its limestone cliffs and misty landscape, Xian, the site of the

buried army of the Han Empire, and the other most well known sites - you are in

for a series of historical, aesthetic, and cultural wonders. As I write this

blog, China is probably completing the construction of some new road or office… Continue

One common way to travel independently is by train. That is not often the

fastest way, nor the least expensive, and it can even be boring under certain

circumstances. At the same time, trains offer different experiences, many of

which are memorable. I generally prefer to travel by car so that I can stop

where I want and see as much of the countryside as possible. For night travel

and for longer distances, though, trains are often a viable option. The quality

of the… Continue

In my book, What's an American Doing Here?,  I devoted a whole chapter to various pitfalls and

dangers that occurred along the way as I travelled the Third World. I wrote,

"So  what else is there to worry about beside disease and sanitation, running out of

gas or unavailability of medical care!  Well, maybe rockslides and landslides, storms and floods, frozen roads and crazy drivers, marauding bandits and slippery thieves, insurrections and

civil wars,… Continue

We Westerners tend to think of India as one overgrown homogeneous country,

primarily Hindu, brown skinned, ambitious, poor and energetic. That may be true

of the majority of Indians but it certainly does not take into account the

tremendous variety of peoples, religions and subcultures that exist there. Of

special interest are the forty million or so folks who are considered tribals.

That figure is, of course, a drop in the bucket of the more than a billion

Indians… Continue