Harmony Express by Thomas Bird <\/span><\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n The book being reviewed was penned by a local author and so should resonate with Wenvoe residents. Although he was born and raised in Penarth, his parents Bernice and Bob Bird moved to the village some years ago and when he returns from his base in east Asia, it is to Wenvoe that he comes. He writes for the South China Morning Post and the Taipei Times, and he has contributed to many travel books including the Rough Guides to the Philippines, Thailand and China. This is a wonderfully descriptive travel book that deals not only about the author\u2019s travels in China by rail, but how he opens up the whole China experience about the people he travels with or encounters along the way and their beer, food, pop music, a bit of romance here and there \u2013 the whole package in fact. He compares and contrasts the ultra-modernity of the new mega-cities with the almost feudal existence in the rural areas. And when he gets to Tibet, well what a world he describes for us. Tony Hodge<\/p>\n Harmony Express by Thomas Bird The book being reviewed was penned by a local author and so should resonate with Wenvoe residents. Although he was born and raised in Penarth, his parents Bernice and Bob Bird moved to the village some years ago and when he returns from his base in east Asia, it is to Wenvoe that he comes. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[228],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6cWjO-3J2","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":15336,"url":"http:\/\/wenvoe.org.uk\/?p=15336","url_meta":{"origin":14324,"position":0},"title":"“This must be the place” by Maggie O\u2019Farrell","author":"Alan Williams","date":"9th April 2025","format":false,"excerpt":"\"This must be the place\" by Maggie O\u2019Farrell The plot of this book is a love story between Daniel, a professor of linguistics and Claudette, a famous film star, who has decided to vanish from public gaze. 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\nThat\u2019s the introduction, here\u2019s the review.<\/p>\n
\nSoon after starting to read the book, and knowing next to nothing of this vast country, I decided that I needed a map to put the places mentioned into geographical context. After some research I lit upon the Periplus Travel Map of China (published in Singapore) which assisted me enormously.
\nAnd what journeys Bird takes us on as he traverses the rail network (and by bus where there is no railway). He treats us with his insights about the most overwhelming of the new megalopolises to the somewhat edge of existence habitations elsewhere. It matters not that some of these rail routes were initially constructed by the French in their Indo China Empire days or along the super highspeed maglev show stoppers at the cutting edge of modernity.
\nHe presents a writing style that blends the narratives of genre defining travel writers \u2013 from Bill Bryson\u2019s laugh out loud to the offerings of others: Bruce Chatwin (What Am I Doing Here) and Paul Theroux (The Great Railway Bazaar). It is to be noted that both of the latter wrote about the region as it existed some decades earlier, so another compare and contrast exercise naturally ensues. And if this book goes into a second edition, then I suggest that it includes a map of the salient cities and some photographs.<\/p>\n
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\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"