Word: bitumen
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...there," advised the smiling service station attendant. "It's a sacred place," croaked a gimlet-eyed crone squatting outside a shop where I stopped for water. "Be careful." Thus it was with some trepidation that I turned off the highway and followed the signs along a strip of crumbling bitumen. I passed through the gates of a temple and found the tallest palm trees I've ever seen, jutting skyward from a lush hump of jungle-covered earth in the middle of a weed-strewn lake. It looked like one of southern Thailand's tropical isles had been picked...
...summer of 1954, air-crew briefing rooms at Hong Kong's Kai Tak Airport were abuzz with reports of construction at an air base near Sanya, a town at the southern tip of China's Hainan island. To date, the runway had been all bitumen, a surface suited to propeller aircraft but given to melting if hit by jet exhausts. Suddenly, concrete sections appeared at each end. Pilots flying along aviation routes past Hainan could see new, jet-fighter-sized dispersal bays under construction. One Cathay Pacific Airways pilot suggested to a Hong Kong official that, in view...