h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Yes, you must. It was very interesting.

El is planning on going to Kangding on Saturday. It's a small city up in the mountains of Tibetan Sichuan. She has to get a fast train for 2 hours, then a 9 hour bus journey to Kangding.

At an altitude of 2,500m, it's quite high up in the mountains and rather Tibetan without actually being in Tibet (she can't easily get to Tibet because of border restrictions).

She plans to fly back. Because Kangding is at the bottom of a deep valley, the airport is about a 2-hour bus journey uphill from the city - it's at 4,280m above sea level and is the third highest airport in the world. That should be quite an experience.

Apparently these ultra-high airports need very long runways because the plane needs to get up to a very high speed before the thin air can lift it.

The two higher airports are in the same part of the world - one is in eastern Tibet and another is in southern Tibetan Sichuan; all within a few hundred kilometres of each other.

Oh, I'm so jealous. I did once take off from a small airport in northern Ethiopia and when the pilot came round with the boiled sweets (it was a very small plane)asked why the red warning light was flashing. It was a stall-warning light for when the plane went over its ceiling. "Shouldn't you do something about it?" "No, at this altitude we're above stall ceiling when we take off."

I just checked. The main runway in Dublin airport is 2.8km. The runway in Kangding is 4.1km.

El is on her way home from China now, after 11 months in the place. She should be landing in Dublin in about 3 hours.

Will she be in culture shock, or is China now Airportland like everywhere else?

A friend of mine taught for a while in Bhutan. She said that buying a bar of chocolate on arrival home brought on sensory overload. She asked for a bar of chocolate in a shop in the airport and was gestured to select one from the twenty-five varieties on display. She just wanted chocolate, and couldn't begin to choose.

Wen is she going back? It gets into your bones if you can stand the politics. What souvenirs did she bring home?

She has no plans to go back at present. Or ever to teach again. For the moment.

Some aspects of China are very strange. She met one girl who didn't have a name until she was 6 and had to go to school.

She brought me a musical instrument called a Xun (shoon). It's a sort of hard-to-play ocarina with a blowhole like a flute rather than a recorder.

Pythagorean pentatonic?

Ocarinas are very flexible in their pitch so they can be made to conform to any sort of scale over a very limited range.