INTRODUCTION
ASIA - What an enormity of landmass and population combined with impressive diversity of cultures and languages! No other continent is as large, nor a culturally diverse as Asia, ranging from the Arab world at the continent's western edge through the sparsely inhabited taiga in the north of the continent, steppes and nomadic tribes of Central Asia, the mountain and valley dwellers in earth's highest mountain regions, the population masses in India, China and South-East Asia, to the peninsulas and islands in the Far East and ending finally at the shores of the great Pacific Ocean with its multi-cultural, multi-ethnic island fringes.

Asia has been close to my heart for most of my life. As a youngster, I was intrigued by the cultural mix I saw in published articles and, checking out a globe or a world map, by the mountains, deserts, immense cities, contorted shorelines and the many islands and island nations fringing this continent. Over the decades, that fascination has turned into multiple exposures: I lived eight years in its confines - 3 years on a continuous traveling job an an international bank auditor ("Inspectors" we were called at that time) covering the area from Pakistan in the east through the Malay and Indonesian archipelago all the way over to Japan and living out of the suitcase, having in effect no abode. At the end of this term I got married in Hong Kong to Susan, my wife of now 50+ years. After an 8-year interlude in Canada, we were again stationed for five years in Hong Kong, and I enjoyed visiting and working in a few Asian location off and on even when subsequently stationed in North America. When not working out there, we often chose a corner of this vast continent to explore on our annual vacation/exploration trips, and I am happy to say that for the area east of the Arab world and west of the Pacific Island nations, I missed thus far visiting only handful of countries (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, the Maldives, Papua New Guinea and North Korea - and there is hope for the center 3 countries yet).

I already posted three series on Asia here on UHH, actually my very first series was on the "Stans" of Central Asia, followed by Iran, both posted in 2016. Then in the summer of 2020 I posted a series on the Arabian Peninsula with Oman and Abu Dhabi/Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

We undertook the trip I am going to cover in this major series eight years ago, in the fall of 2013. It really covered four distinct phases which we cobbled together touching four countries and lasted 46 days- given that long duration you can see that I was by then retired. I will present these sections chronologically the way we visited them. We started out in CHINA's southwestern SICHUAN province. While we visited China many times before, Sichuan was still unknown to us, except for the reputation and appreciation of its fiery food. Susan being Chinese of course had a deeper knowledge and had been yearning to visit the mystical Jiuzhaigou (Nine Villages) Valley - the name reflects the fact that 9 Tibetan villages are strewn along this Y shaped set of valleys, famous for the inordinately blue waters displayed by some of its lakes. Sichuan is also well-known for its Giant Panda research station which we also visited in the vicinity of the sacred Mount Emei.

After a few days rest in Hong Kong, we headed for our next destination: The quite reclusive MYANMAR, formerly known as Burma. In the middle part of the last decade, it had finally opened up under the guiding hands of the perennial freedom fighter Aung San Suu Kyi, the military junta had somewhat retreated and it looked possible and positive to visit this marvelous country. We set foot in Myanmar at a very opportune, peaceful and progressive moment when its future looked bright, unfortunately in early 2021 the military sized power again and rules anew with a iron fist.

For our third country visit, we headed to THAILAND, with just a brief stay in its capital city Bangkok before continuing overland to visit the NORTHERN CITIES of Thailand, mainly Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai, but also Ayutthaya, Sukhothai and smaller towns and villages on the way, including Mae Sai in Thailand's Golden Triangle area famed for its opium production at the northernmost corner of Thailand bordering Laos and Myanmar.

On our final stage we spend a couple of weeks in HONG KONG, which of course was very well known to us. My wife Susan was born here and we got married here in 1971. While I worked on my Asian tour from 1968-1971, I often stayed in Hong Kong; then we also lived here from 1979 to 1984 and have since returned many times - it is one of our "home towns" that we always enjoy revisiting.

PHOTOGRAPHIC INFORMATION: Just about all photos in this series were taken with my cropped-sensor Nikon D90 with a Nikkor 18-200 mm lens. A few, mainly food pictures were taken with my small Canon PowerShot pocket camera. At that time I shot the pictures in jpeg and used the rather basic Picasa software for minimal processing which did not include level and perspective adjustments. Thus the picture quality both from the equipment as well as from the recording and post processing angles will be less than stellar renditions, but I do hope that you will see past some possible inadequacies and enjoy the scenes and objects presented. Obviously, I would process many of these shots quite differently today. I did contemplate adjusting them for this presentation but realized that this would be an enormous job, so decided to leave the images as I originally processed them. I will also include some pictures of lesser quality if I find them to cover a special interest or insight. - BTW, this was my last trip using this rig, the following year (2014) I upgraded to the full-frame Nikon D610, commenced to shoot in raw and started to process in Lightroom.
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TODAY'S POST:
This is my organizational starter page: Over the years I have developed a layout that presents all the maps, information and title samples in this introductory page, and I will provide a link to this page on the subsequent post for ease of reference and orientation. Thus the "real picture stories" will start in tomorrow's post.

Thanks for visiting, I hope you enjoyed today's starter set and invite you to drop in whenever your time allows, or even follow the entire series as it unfolds over the coming months. I recommend viewing the downloads and look forward to and enjoy your comments and questions.

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Not to worry about image quality too much in your present project, Joe. On my travels through 8 African countries, many years ago, I took pretty terrible photos while trying to learn about serious photography from others during and after that. Nevertheless, the images I brought home are far too precious for me not to show them to anyone who wants to have a look. We all start somewhere and keep improving. Pictures, good or bad, tell their own story. I have greatly enjoyed your east European travel story, and your photos were excellent.

Thank you Dick for looking in on the start of my new travelogue where I sort of prepared the groundwork for the many episodes to follow. It is good to see you on another of my tours. In the meantime we are up to 18 episodes, but really still quite at the beginning. I hope you will have the chance to review the recently posted sets and come along as the tour progresses. At the moment we are getting towards the end of one of the highlights in the Chinese National Park Jiuzhaigou with wonderful lakes and autumn color, but many more highlights are to follow in China before we move on to our next country: Myanmar. Welcome again and I hope that you'll find the tour interesting.