A Bird in the Bush

I'm going to do something I've never done before. I'm going to pull back a corner of the curtain on what I am thinking of writing next. The key word is "thinking". There's not a word on a page, and won't be for months, if ever. I don't know if I can make a story out of this idea.

I'd been planning on finishing my boring novel before starting an entirely new story, and indeed, I spent three weeks in March revising what I'd written last year; giving a character more character, rearranging some incidents, and generally sprucing up all 35K words of it. But standing in the shower a week ago, I realized I was too bored with it to continue. I hadn't settled on an ending. All I could see was that it would drone on and then fizzle out. So much for embracing boredom. So I called it a day on that and instead I'm working on the second draft of the Poison-Pill Will and The Pawns' Game instead and thinking about what's next.

The idea I'm exploring began as a fantasy novel, since fantasies outsell science fiction like ten to one. But since I can't bring myself to write pure magic and dragons, it has to be one of my pseudo-fantasies, i.e. a fantasy because the narrator is unfamiliar with the technology of the lost advanced civilization that proceeded his present age. This still counts as a type of fantasy. 

I had began exploring this story idea as I finished up the Poison-Pill Will, but decided to get back to my boring novel first. Thus I had the world - a moon, actually - already sketched out in my mind. It's base loosely on India under the British Rah, and the Grand Trunk Road (pictured above) that crossed it. I'd have an "empire" of consisting of many small, technologically backward, and deliberately isolated diverse states under the nominal rule of one central authority. All of these states are linked by a great road, and its offshoots. The narrator of the story would be a widely traveled young courier of the central authority.

In the foot hills above the central authorities' capital city stands a vast iron gate set into the stone of the mountain, which is understood to be the gateway to the largely mythical, and often considered supernatural world that this world is ruled from. It is know by the people running the empire that this is a real gateway to a greater empire, and there is a regulated amount of trade between their little empire, and this greater empire beyond the iron gate.

Now, our narrator would know that there is a real vast empire beyond the iron gate because he is part of the central administration, and his grandmother, the governor-general of this empire, actually arrived from beyond the iron gate. However, the true extent of what lays beyond it, is kept a secret, in part because of the treaty between the various throw-back, dissenting societies and the greater entity, the Unity, (if you know, you know) that created the rules for this "empire" 30,000 years ago. The dissenting societies wanted to keep themselves isolated from the Unity, and the Unity wanted to use that isolation to study the evolution of a great number and variety of human societies. And thus everyone is content to let what lays beyond the iron gates remain a myth. 

Just because it seems like most fantasy stories involve wars, I am going to have my empire at peace for all 30,000 years. That's the way I roll. This means that my story will have to be another small, relatively low stakes one, i.e. the type I write.

My current story idea is that a very limited number of the best art that is created within these very unique and deliberately isolated societies is purchased by the Unity, which then it is sold beyond the iron gate, at vastly inflated prices to wealthy collectors throughout the Unity of the Nine Star Nebula. Only three or four pieces a year are purchased, and elaborately authenticated so that copies can be easily identified, making the art very scarce, and hence very valuable to collectors with the wealth to afford them. However, at a recent art auction of a wealthy family that faced an reverse of fortune, it was found that a dozen of the pieces of this type of art were both authentic and (nearly) properly authenticated, but they  were not sold through the proper authority, i.e. that they had not only been somehow smuggled out, but they also had apparently been supplied with proper authentication as well, making them all but indistinguishable to anyone without the access to the complete list of items stretching back all those 30,000 years. And this smuggling appears to have been going on for thousands of years. 

In response, the Unity sends a team to this moon to track down just how this is being done from ground zero; where the art is being created. The Unity team would consist of a Patrol officer, someone like Vaun Di Ai of the Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventure series, though a new character. The other would be an old spacer/enlisted man to act as her aide. Our narrator would then guide then to several of the throw-back societies of this moon to track down the smuggling ring. Adventures would ensue... Move along folks, there's no story here yet, just as premise.

But then I got an idea. What if I made the enlisted man Rafe d'Mere, the narrator of those Nine Star Nebula Mystery/Adventure stories? I could set this story a few years after he left the Alantzia System, with him having been roped back into the Patrol. 

And yet again, what if I made him the narrator as well? 

There are three pluses. The first being that I could then describe the world through his eyes, as someone new to it. This would make world building a lot less telling and more experiencing. Secondly, I like the character and could have fun with him. Third, I could toss in a few opening chapters about how Rafe gets snagged back into the Patrol by his admiral parents as he transits his home system. And I could use those chapters to set up the details of the smuggling activity by having Rafe investigate the trail of the smuggled artifacts from the moon, and then use his special info-system skills to get assigned investigation on the moon. In short I could set up the premise with action rather than all telling.

Alas, there are minuses as well. First, having him as the narrator would make this a science fiction book rather than a fantasy, since we'd be seeing it coming from my sf universe. And secondly, it would make this novel past of my Nine Star Nebula Adventure/Mystery series. I have said on several occasions that writing sequels is for chumps, and here I am again, writing yet another sequel, the fifth, in fact, rather than a new standalone novel, which is what I really wanted to do.

Of course, it may not matter. This is still all in my head, my dreaming up a story phase, and it is far from certain I'll come up with enough of a story to make it into one. I don't have enough yet. And if I do develop enough of a story to write, I won't be writing it for months. My plan has been to write a novel a year. I've been working ahead. I think I'm caught up to 2029, so I have no deadline to meet, and I'm going to write it as a novel, not like the novellas I've been doing recently, so it's likely going to take a while if, or when, I start. 2027 at the earliest.

We'll just have to see. What I can say is, don't hold your breath for that boring novel.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 179)

 

Alas, my exploration of KU titles has been going pretty much like I expected, given my taste in books. Which is to say, I am not a fan of contemporary writing. This time, however, we have a book that was originally published in 1995 and republished as an ebook in 2025. But it is yet another sea story. That was the search category I was exploring.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.

Waterfront by Richard Woodman  DNF 19%

Well, at least I can say that I really like the cover of this edition of the book. I also like that the story is set aboard a tramp steamer in the early 1900's. I love the lore of tramp steamers, so it should have been a winner. But... 

I make no claims to be a patient man, and this story tried my patience to the breaking point. It just meandered aimlessly around for the first several chapters. We start with the prologue; the fictional bio of the early life of the main character James Dunbar. Fine, I guess, if unnecessary. Chapter One opens with our hero, Dunbar, now an apprentice aboard a tramp steamer, and we met an old sailor, Dunbar's unofficial mentor, Williams. After a few pages it changes focus, location, and characters to the captain and mate, discussing their cargo and the Mexican  port they are calling on. And then it shifts focus to the backstory of the captain for a few pages, and then on William's backstory covering his years at sea, before shifting back to the port of call in Mexico, briefly, before going back in time to Dunbar's first days aboard the ship at the start of this voyage. And then back to the present, briefly, before going back to Dunbar's youth and an early romance, of sort. Where it meandered after that I can't say, since a this point I just gave up.

I will readily admit that I prefer stories told in a fairly linier fashion, and stories that focus on one principle character. This story was just too disjointed for me to get into. I came for a sea story, not for all the back stories of the characters that littered the pages for the first three chapters. I think that one could work those stories into an ongoing narrative that drove the story forward without all these asides. Indeed, I have no idea why the story didn't start with incident - a storm at sea - described when the ship was first setting out. It would've made a far more compelling opening than the one the author chose to start with. All the other character building could've been done with incidents on the voyage from England to the west coast of Mexico. Still, as usual, all this is on me, the book wasn't delivering on what I expected, and wanted.

I suppose that this book settled down, eventually. But after sitting on my shelf for a few days in the middle of chapter three, I decided I wasn't going to force myself to push on and find out. The ebook was a two book boxed set, but as I found out when looking him up to see if there are any more in the series (no), I discovered that many years ago, I had read a book or two in his Nathaniel Drinkwater series of Napoleonic era naval stories - but only one or two, as they were not, as I remember, all that good. I think he was the one who had his hero, Drinkwater, crash his little ship into a vast enemy three-decker at the battle of Trafalgar, slowing it down just enough for Nelson's ship to come alongside, and well, the rest is (real) history. That historical invention was just too over the top for me, since,  as you know, I'm a bit of a stickler for somewhat accurate history in historical fiction. In any event, Woodman has written over a hundred naval adventures in a variety of series. It's just too bad I'm not a fan of his stories.

The Mysterious Case of the Case Without Glasses

The glasses in question. If you find them, drop me an email

I've worn glasses since grade school, but these days, without blackboards to stare at, I only wear my glasses when I am driving. And then, only because I don't want to risk flunking the driving test. I prefer seeing the world in soft focus. I keep my glasses on the desk in the great room, where they are handy whenever I want to take the car out for a spin. 

Right. Stage set.

One afternoon this past February we decided to, I believe, pick up some Valentine cards for the grandkids at the Dollar Tree three blocks away. Which we did, and then stopped at the supermarket to pick up some groceries. When I got back into the car, I realized I wasn't wearing my glasses, as I should've been, seeing that I was doing the driving. As unlikely as it seemed, I thought perhaps they had fallen off my face when I was bagging the groceries, so I retraced my steps back through the parking lot to the store and the checkout counter, without encountering my glasses. My wife was unhelpful, as she could not say whether or not I had them on when I left the house. I guess when you've been around someone for the better part of 50 years, you don't need to pay all that much attention to details like that.

Well, I thought, maybe I didn't put them on this time. Though I would've thought I'd have noticed the omission with the stoplights being a little blurry. But I hadn't. And, arriving home, I found that little sleeve on the desk where I keep my glasses was empty.

We had a mystery.

Subsequently,  I searched the car, the house, and several days later, went back to both stores to ask if my glasses had turned up. They hadn't. Though, interestingly enough, the supermarket had a drawer of abandoned glasses...  Two months later they still have not shown up, even after the almost infallible method of having them turn up - I went and bought a new pair.

It seems to me that classic science can explain this mystery in only three ways.

1, For some reason I took my glasses off in either store, and set them down, only to forget them. I didn't just hold them in my hand, or put them in my jacket pocket, I set them down somewhere for something and forgot I did so a minute later. I can not imagine why I would do this.

2. They just fell off my face and I didn't notice it. Now, they were loose enough to fall off my face if I carelessly looked down, but not to notice it... Well, unless I'm more ga-ga than I think - and you are free to think otherwise - I can't imagine this happening.

3 The only other solution is that I used them from some other purpose around the house, put them down somewhere, forgot about it, and they simply haven't shown up yet.

All three possibilities seem very unlikely, so unlikely in fact, that they rival far less conventional explanations.

As I briefly mentioned last week, the normal world we know is based on the statistical likelihood of quantum particles behaving in a predictable manner, but not all of them do so. Just most of them. Most do this, but there are always those that do that. It seems to me that over the billions of years of quantum particles doing this and that, that some of those unlikely "thats" would persist and play a role in our reality. The fact that they would be rare enough not to be scientifically reproducible does not preclude their existence. They might be considered "bugs" in the "matrix" if you will. I'm talking about incidents like people disappearing, or appearing out of the blue, time-slips, ghosts, and apparitions, i.e. things that science scoffs at as supernatural nonsense, if only because they, one, can't be explained by science as we currently understand it, and two, they are so rare and fleeting that they can't be studied.

The thing is that I think most people during their lifetimes have had experiences that they cannot explain. Little things. Things seen or felt that seemed somehow out of place in their everyday life. I suspect that if you ask anyone, they will tell you some event that they experienced that they can't explain. 

In my case, I think something like this is a 4th possible explanation for the disappearance of my glasses. A little slip or flaw in the reality of world. A little bug that erased my glasses at some point during that shopping trip in such a way that I never realized they existed. Until getting into the car at the supermarket. Now, this is only the 4th possible explanation, and I'm not saying it is the explanation, mind you, only that it seems not all that less unlikely than the first three.

A 5th explanation is that my wife hid them as part of a cunning plan to drive me  around the bend so that she can run off with some secret lover with my money. It might work. If it's even necessary.

I'd like to say time will tell. But I don't think it will. 

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 178)

 

The "What can I find on Kindle Unlimited" quest continues this week.

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below. 

Soundings Edge by Adrian Westbrooke  DNF 7%

This is the first book in a six book series (so far). I found it to be boring. This not to say that it was poorly written. Westbrooke had done his research and includes a lot of description of the time and place the story is set; in the 1770's. And he places his hero on a ship captained by Captain Cook, during which I believe was his second voyage of exploration to the Pacific. But three chapters into it, it simply hadn't hooked me. There was a lot of telling, if you like that sort of thing. By the time I called it a day, we had seen our hero grow up, spend two years at a naval academy, and cross the pacific to Australia, i.e. a lot of stuff, without much depth. All of which necessitated a lot of telling, with very little personality or characters.

It is perhaps unfair to compare every sea story, at least of this period, to Patrick O'Brian, but I do. He is the gold standard, in my opinion, for several reasons. The first is that he brings the age he is writing about onto the page in the way he writes. He uses just enough historic words and usages to take the reader back in time, without having to stumble over lots of unfamiliar words and obscure items. There is more to bring a historical period to life than writing a description of scenes. Speech and words should suggest the period as well, without compromising readability. And secondly, for my taste, the story has to feature people first and foremost. We have to see and experience the world through the characters' eyes, not the writer's. In this case, it was just Westbrooke hurrying us along to tell his story, and perhaps to educate us. I assume we would eventually reach a point where our main character plays a more active and important role in the story, so, if I had a little more patience, the characters would likely have unfolded. I mean, with six books, they must have unfolded and grown richer. Or so you would think. But even so, I fear what would not have changed is the writer's style, and style to me is all important. HIs style simply did not click with me.

At the time of writing this piece, it is in the #7000's best selling books on Amazon, with just over 1000 ratings with a 4.7 star rating, so it is a very popular and well regarded book, especially for such a niche category. So, as always, read my preferences above and take my review with those expectations in mind.

Evidence of the Uncertainty Principle at a Classical Physics Level

Typical start of a jigsaw puzzle with edge pieces whose waveforms have not yet collapsed, and are therefore missing until they do so.

I'm not going to claim that I understand quantum theory. Indeed, I think that if you find someone who claims they do, they're liars. What little I do know can be summed up in the uncertainty principle, mainly that before you make an observation, you cannot say for certain what the state of a subatomic particle is in. Only once an "observation" is made does the "wave form" collapse and the particle can be described. It's the old cat in the box thought experiment of Schrodinger. You can't predict if the cat is alive or dead in the box, until you open the box. This quantum action is thought to happen on a subatomic level. But I have found evidence that the quantum uncertainty principle operates at a far higher level in jigsaw puzzle boxes. At the level of classical, real world, physics.

This past Christmas our daughter gave us one of those jigsaw boards that you use to put jigsaw puzzles together on. You know, something that allows you to move a puzzle in progress else where, should you actually happen to need your kitchen or dining room table to eat on. So, with this device in hand as well as some old jigsaw puzzles on hand, some dating back to the 1940's, and a long winter ahead of me, I took up jigsaw puzzling as a better time-wasting alternative to playing mahjong tiles or sudoku, or some such game on my tablet.  

I should first mention that I'm not a patient enough fellow to attempt 1000 piece puzzles. I know my limits, which is 500 pieces. Still, I have found this uncertainty principle observable in 500 piece puzzles, but not, however, in 100 piece puzzles. 

My experiment is simple. I empty the box of pieces out on the board, and carefully separate out by hand, in six to ten piece batches, the edge pieces from the interior pieces. This is a simple operation; edge pieces have a flat side and only five prongs instead of six. If all the puzzle pieces in the box have had their wave form collapsed, then all the edge pieces would be easily identified and sorted out. However, this is never the case. I find that there are always six to a dozen edge pieces missing when I try to assemble the edge of the puzzle. 

Clearly I could not have missed identifying something as easily identifiable as edge pieces. One only needs to look at an edge piece, and it's obviously an edge piece, as described above. I can assure you they are impossible to miss. So, as Sherlock Holmes once observed, when you have eliminated the impossible (missing edge pieces in the sort) what ever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. And the truth is, that however improbable, it seems that the missing edge pieces were not yet present in the box during my first sort. 

This phenomena can best be explained by the theory that jigsaw pieces operate as a quantum-level particle/wave, and that opening the box operates as a observation and thus collapses them into the classical physics universe. But quantum theory is a statistical theory, i.e. it only predicts the outcome as a percentage of all possible outcomes. There is always a fraction of collapses that do not conform to how the vast majority shake out. In the case of pieces in a jigsaw puzzle box it seems that not all of the potential puzzle pieces collapse on opening the box and during this initial sorting process. However, evidence suggests that most do eventually collapse, most of the time, into edge pieces, their proper form in the hours and sometimes days that follow, showing up every now and again when I am looking for other pieces. I have, however, come across jigsaw puzzles where one or more pieces fail to materialize. But that's quantum mechanics for you.

But it is not only edge pieces that fail to collapse upon opening the box. Other pieces also fail to appear until long after the box has been emptied. I don't know how many hours I've spent looking for a particular piece of the puzzle, a piece so obvious that it would be impossible to overlook, if it existed when I was diligently looking for it, only to find it amongst the last dozen pieces left to fill in the puzzle. It seems impossible that it was present prior to my discovery of it.

Jigsaw pieces are very tricky things. 

The scale of this uncertainty principle suggests that we're dealing with  a significantly different quantum process, one that present day quantum theory has yet to discover, much less address. Therefore I feel it deserves further research, and funding.

An obvious next step to verify my theory would be to count the number of pieces during my initial sorting out of the edge pieces. This would definitely prove my theory, as I would postulate that the total number of pieces counted would fall short of the number of pieces printed on the box and only at some time later would all the pieces appear as their waveforms eventually collapse. However since I don't have a grad student to do this counting for me, that experiment must wait for the day I have one. And for the necessary funding, of course.

The Saturday Morning Post (No. 177)

  

I've stumbled on to an efficient way to search for Kindle Unlimited books. I selecta a category and then click the box "Kindle Unlimited" which only dishes up KU titles. Well, I got to thinking that I like seas stories, so what does KU have to offer in sea stories. They have a pretty good selection. This week we're starting with a memoir.

Going forward, for now anyway, I'm returning to one book a week, as my reading has slowed down, and as you can see from last week's entry, it's pretty iffy. I think a book a week is going to be my 2026 rate. 

My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.

Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below. 

The Best of Days A memoir of the Sea by Harry Nicholson  C+

This is the first volume of Nicholson's memoir covering his early life, his training and first year at sea as a radioman at the age of 17 in 1955. I think there are five volumes in all. 

I came to this book wanting to read about his life at sea, per the title. However, the first 20% or so was about his ancestors, family, and growing up in England in the 1940's and post war years. I must admit that I was impatient to get through these chapters, as they weren't what I was looking for in picking up the book. That, plus his writing style is what I think you'd call first person present tense,  when he's talking about himself and even when he is describing events in the past. He also tends to insert asides here and there, making the first part of the book rather a confusing read for someone impatient to get to sea. All of which is to say, I probably knocked off half a grade because of this.

However, when he does get to the sea, you do get an authentic taste of the life of a sailor on a variety of merchant vessels in the mid-1950's. A life that is much different today. For example, ships don't spend weeks in port loading and unloading. Today, they don't spend more than a day or two loading and unloading, as time is money. Freighters that load break-bulk cargo, i.e. cargo in crates, bags, etc, are very rare today. Almost all cargo is transported in containers on thousand foot long ships, except for bulk cargo like grain and ore, etc. So you do get a taste of a bygone past. 

As I mentioned above, he recounts not only his time at sea and in port, but at home as well, which is fine, I guess. It give you a snapshot of life in England a decade after the war, and how different it was from the prosperity of America during that time. I will probably continue on with Nicholson's memories, but not right away. I have downloaded several more and different types of sea stories. A new one, hopefully, next week.

UPDATE: 

Since reading this book a month or so ago, I have sampled the first three chapters of two more autobiographies of fellows who followed the sea in the 1930's to the 1950's. While they were well written and offered interesting details of life at sea, because they were telling stories spanning decades, they tended to clip along, lacking the immersiveness of a novel which I was looking for, so with the clock  ticking on my KU subscription, I moved on to try more books. If I have time and the opportunity in the future, I may well return to them. They were;

Now the Long Tick's Over by Captain Arthur Mathison (11%)

Not Wanted on Voyage by Peter Langton (8%)

I'm not going to count these as books read or DNF'ed, as really, I just sat down and sampled them, but I thought they deserved mention.

Biking Around the World while Never Going Anywhere

Each winter, over the last five or six years I've been exploring the world, virtually, from the cabs of trains while spending half an hour riding my bike-on-a-rack. Hundreds of train drivers have posted videos of the routes they run to YouTube, and using a laptop computer on a rack attached to the handlebars, I've traveled the rail lines of Europe, from Bulgaria to Finland, Norway to Portugal, Britain to Poland, and all the countries in between. I've taken trains in Japan, and last winter I explored the North and South islands of New Zealand, where is seems you can't toss a stone without hitting either a cow or a sheep. I took some train rides in Brazil, but Brazil is a big country, so I saw only a little of it, though I did take some trolly rides through one or two of its cities, which was interesting. I also caught up on a few routes in France that I hadn't ridden on before, and ended up crisscrossing Poland, mostly from the rear carriage, filmed by a fellow who seems intent to ride and film every train in Poland that still has old fashioned trains with carriages without an engine on both ends.

This fall I started out in Australia, taking trains out of Melbourne, Canberra, and Sydney. However, I have to admit that, as an American, the Australian countryside is not very exotic - flat ranch land, a few hills every now and again, and where there are trees, they line the ralline hiding the countryside. Sort of boring. So I went looking for someplace more exotic.

I first took a ride on a commuter train through Manila in the Philippians. Now trains often travel through the backyards of wherever you are, so you're not seeing the best face of any city you're passing through, but, I have to say, the Manila train traveled through something of an urban wasteland. Trash, junk, chickens, and shanties lined the right of way in all stages of disrepair. Exotic? Yes. As well as eye opening to the relative poverty of at least some of the inhabitants. Though while one can live more casually in the tropics than in temperate climate with winters, poverty is poverty. And I should add that this is far from the only country where I've seen trash dumped along the railway tracks. Indeed, there were places where trash had been dumped on the next country I visited this winter.

And that country was Sri Lanka. I really have loved exploring Sri Lanka. It has  the exoticness and beauty I was looking for.

https://www.bradtguides.com/sri-lanka-by-train

Sri Lanka is exotic. Oh you have your shanties along with every sort of housing in every sort of setting, as well as Buddhists shrines and monasteries/temples. The streets are filled with those three-wheeled motorized rickshaws. Ladies carry umbrellas for sunshine rather than rain. In the countryside cows graze at will. And Sri Lanka is the only country I've run across where the people use the rail tracks as footpaths. Where there is a double line, there are always people walking in the other line, and on single lines, you often see people just standing alongside the tracks - no doubt having just stepped off of them to let the train pass.

The trains themselves are varied, and usually slow. In all but the first class carriages, the windows are open, as are all the carriage doors, where people stand or sit as the train goes along, and tourists get their photos taken hanging out of them.

And as for the countryside itself, is can be breathtaking. In parts of the country the steep mountainsides are covered with terraces of tea bushes, and in the low country there are rice paddies and palm trees. In between there are patches of lush jungle. I still have a few more videos to watch covering a route that I saw snatches of, but which I hope will take me back up the tea growing region. They are still being release once a week but I hope they take me to the end of the line.

If you are curious, here's a  3 hours and 40 minute train ride down the western seacoast from Fort Columbo to Galle, near the southern point of Sri Lanka. You can find it HERE

In the meantime, I'm currently taking a commuter train through Mumbai India, and I have a train ride in Viet Nam lined up as well.

Real travelers may scoff at my virtual travels, but I have to say that moving pictures are a thousand times more immersive than photos, and not all that far away from driving in a car with the windows closed. You miss the smells and the ability to gawk around, but you also get to know how trains work. You also miss all those churches, castles, and museums that real tourist feel compelled to visit, but frankly, they're welcome to them. I'll take the countryside, away from traffic and crowds. Plus, in my case, given my poor memory, I'm taking away from my travels just about all I would be if I'd done it for real, so for me, it's the ideal way to travel.