We have 325 guests and no members online
This was previously a slide show but that option has been removed by Google Photos giving me a lot of work to fix the broken links. But you can now go to an external link and choose the slide show option; or simply view the album. Click on the image below:
Following our Japan trip in May 2017 we all returned to Hong Kong, after which Craig and Sonia headed home and Wendy and I headed to Shenzhen in China.
I have mentioned both these locations as a result of previous travels. They form what is effectively a single conurbation divided by the Hong Kong/Mainland border and this line also divides the population economically and in terms of population density.
These days there is a great deal of two way traffic between the two. It's very easy if one has the appropriate passes; and just a little less so for foreign tourists like us. Australians don't need a visa to Hong Kong but do need one to go into China unless flying through and stopping at certain locations for less than 72 hours. Getting a visa requires a visit to the Chinese consulate at home or sitting around in a reception room on the Hong Kong side of the border, for about an hour in a ticket-queue, waiting for a (less expensive) temporary visa to be issued.
With documents in hand it's no more difficult than walking from one metro platform to the next, a five minute walk, interrupted in this case by queues at the immigration desks. Both metros are world class and very similar, with the metro on the Chinese side a little more modern. It's also considerably less expensive. From here you can also take a very fast train to Guangzhou (see our recent visit there on this website) and from there to other major cities in China.
'I was recently restored to life after being dead for several hours'
The truth of this statement depends on the changing and surprisingly imprecise meaning of the word: 'dead'.
Until the middle of last century a medical person may well have declared me dead. I was definitely dead by the rules of the day. I lacked most of the essential 'vital signs' of a living person and the technology that sustained me in their absence was not yet perfected.
I was no longer breathing; I had no heartbeat; I was limp and unconscious; and I failed to respond to stimuli, like being cut open (as in a post mortem examination) and having my heart sliced into. Until the middle of the 20th century the next course would have been to call an undertaker; say some comforting words then dispose of my corpse: perhaps at sea if I was travelling (that might be nice); or it in a box in the ground; or by feeding my low-ash coffin into a furnace then collect the dust to deposit or scatter somewhere.
But today we set little store by a pulse or breathing as arbiters of life. No more listening for a heartbeat or holding a feather to the nose. Now we need to know about the state of the brain and central nervous system. According to the BMA: '{death} is generally taken to mean the irreversible loss of capacity for consciousness combined with the irreversible loss of capacity to breathe'. In other words, returning from death depends on the potential of our brain and central nervous system to recover from whatever trauma or disease assails us.
To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream:
ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause:
… But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
When I first began to write about this subject, the idea that Hamlet’s fear was still current in today’s day and age seemed to me as bizarre as the fear of falling off the earth if you sail too far to the west. And yet several people have identified the prospect of an 'undiscovered country from whose realm no traveller returns' as an important consideration when contemplating death. This is, apparently, neither the rational existential desire to avoid annihilation; nor the animal imperative to keep living under any circumstances; but a fear of what lies beyond.