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Published: September 13th 2006
Shao Lin
Movie stars of the future..? Sometime last week we were in a train station waiting room, having waited around 10 hours for our train. A small child befriended us & I decided she was an ideal person to give a small bouncy jetball to play with. She had hours of fun & so did we as she threw the ball around the station. If anyone else had tried to retrieve the ball from the places she did they probably would have been arrested on the spot. At the same time her grandmother & Kylie desperately tried to make conversation through the indispensable phrasebook & once again we felt that China isn't always a frustrating & uncivilised place to be.
Moments later a woman held another small child up and let him relieve himself (yes, number two's) on the crowded waiting room floor.
Welcome back to China.
This episode begins with us leaving beautiful Yangshuo for miserable Guangzhou (around the end of July) on a ten hour sleeper bus journey. Sleeper busses have changed a bit since I was last here. They used
Tea Shop
Another cuppa anyone? to have two levels of double plastic bunks either side of the ailse, meaning that if you were alone you could be sleeping with a random Chinese. Nowdays there are three rows of single bunks meaning the nights of possible random encounters are over. These newer beds are far too short & narrow but are surprisingly comfortable, and very soft. Our journey in the opposite direction had been quite treacherous & although the rains had passed we still had to deal with the potholed road on the way back. Laying down on a bus is a unique experience. If there's a bump on the road you feel it in every organ of your body. It's like some kind of accupunture or perhaps reflexology. Front left wheel hits a pothole equals sudden stirring of the pancreas, Back right hits pothole equals jerked left knee. And so on.
Back then to Guangzhou. We found a place to stay. We found Kylie's Dad, Ting (this is where the previous entry 'Computer says no' fills you in). As it turns out, our return to this city coincided with a new typhoon - the fifth or sixth of the year. Once again there was
Kylie & friend
Kylie's a bit over exposed - but she's busy eating noodles panic on the news & people being evacuated/flooded etc all over again. If this happens every year you'd expect them to be better prepared, but then I'm sure I've said that many times in the UK & NZ.
We (including Ting) wanted to be out of this city ASAP so we opted for Zhaoqing a few hours down the road. To be honest there's not a lot going on in Zhaoqing but it was a great escape & a nice place to be with someone who could speak the language. Two things that stand out from our time there are tea & food. If you think Kylie & I are tea obsessed then you will find we are nothing compared to Ting. We had been keen buy some decent Chinese tea & thought having Ting with us would make it a lot easier. We went on to spend a pleasant afternoon in a tea shop while we tried various brews & Ting ended up leaving with around NZ$100 worth of tea. There was one particular Pu Er that really took his fancy that retails at around NZ$240 per kilo (GBP80). I have to admit it was a mighty fine
brew.
With Ting onboard I was able to get some genuine vegetarian food - there really were no bits of meat or meat stock floating in it for once.
We seem to spend a lot of time in supermarkets here - I think you can learn a lot from them, and one of my favourite parts is the fresh meat section (strange contradiction I know). There's something I like about being able to buy a bag of still living toads, turtles, crabs or prawns - perhaps I believe that if you're going to eat meat you should have the guts to kill it too. Perhaps I don't. There's always a few trying to escape - it was hard to tell if the turtles were working as a team but the more they climbed on top of each other the easier it looked to get out. The toads jumped as hard as they could, but none quite had the legs for it. Somehow one lucky prawn got away, but it was probably a suicide mission - he wouldn't have survived long on the floor.
From Zhaoqing we had to travel back to Guangzhou, from where we said farewell
Shanghai
Pudong at night to Ting (he's back in NZ) & finally we moved on properly, to Shanghai. Last time I was here we skipped Shanghai, this time I was looking forward to finally getting there.
Someone once said something about the journey being more important than the destination. I wouldn't agree entirely, but when your journeys drift into days then anything is possible. The 27 hour train trip to Shanghai began as usual - fighting our way through the crowds at the train station. Memories of our debut mammoth train ride aren't as epic as they should be - just pot noodles, air conditioning & small children. Before the journey began I'd started to develop a cold, but sleeping on a top bunk with my face next to the air-con vent which constantly blew cold, recycled smoky air pushed me into bird hype flu territory.
Apparently at any given moment in time there will be at least 10 million Chinese people travelling on a train in China. These people will be split into various classes - but mainly hard seat & hard sleeper. Hard seats aren't really hard, they are moderately soft - however there's no limit to how many tickets
Cicadas
Apparently people keep male cicadas in cages so that the can enjoy the cicadas' songs will be sold in a hard seat carriage. Hence your journey could be like the rush hour train into London - but for 24 plus hours. By the middle of the night there's likely to be people sleeping wherever they can, including the entire floorspace. Hard sleepers are carriages full of sets of 3 levels of bunks. Again these are fairly comfortable, although if you're on the top you may spend much of the night thinking you'll fall off. Depending on who is in your carriage it can be quite a lively affair. If no one speaks English there's still a fairly good chance you'll end up with a conversation with someone through your phrasebook & sign language.
For most of the journey our only Chinese friend was a girl of about 5. She took great delight in trying to amuse & be amused by us while her mother looked on scornfully.
There's a constant supply of hot water on trains (as well as around stations & random other places) meaning that tens of thousands (millions?) of pots of noodles are consumed daily onboard - along with millions more gallons of tea. Everyone in China seems to have
Yuyuong, Shanghai
Not as old as it looks been issued with a clear plastic flask, that although rather cheap looking, will keep tea hot for hours. We have a rather flash one, but since I accidently threw out the strainer with the tea leaves it hasn't been the same.
Finally we were in Shanghai, my cold may have worsened but at least the sun was shining. It's so refreshing (& rare) to be in a big city in China & to see beautiful clear blue skies. Shanghai is a place where history barely seems to exist. If you see an old building it's either about to be pulled down or actually brand new. I exaggerate a little - there is one historical place, The Bund which is never likely to be pulled down. But then even the Bund's not that old - it's a parade of giant European colonial buildings that shadow the Huangpu River. Impressive as they are they just reminded me of parts of London. Across the river is where the future really lies. Pudong used to be desolate but is now full of space age towers & big big money. A walk along the river is a pleasant way to spend an afternoon or
evening, as long as you can handle the thousands upon thousands of Chinese tourists checking it out.
You could easily be fooled into thinking that the Yuyuan area of Shanghai really is a step into the past. It's a vast shopping area of quaint old looking wooden buildings concentrated around a picturesque stream, bridges & traditional gardens. At a glance it looks old, but all it takes is a look at the shops to realise that although some of the shops are interesting it's all brand new & big show for the tourists.
However not far from Yuyuan is the 'Old Town' This is a small but fairly surreal part of Shanghai that consists of small single storey old style dwellings that linger in the shadows of the typical giant cloud reaching towers of flats that surround them. There's random shops & cafes, laundry hanging out & people going about their daily business. It's hard to imagine that these people will live here much longer - they live on prime real estate land & will I am sure, soon be moved out to who knows where.
Beyond the 'Old Town' is a handful of streets selling all
Asleep
A fairly typical scene - you want to buy a ticket but the person behind the counter is asleep kinds of Chinese antiques. Well they say 'all kinds' & they say 'antiques' but really it's an excuse to sell more Mao & Communist memorabilia with a few Ming vases thrown in, most of which is probably fake anyway. That said, there's some great stuff. I would say that one of my best purchases to date was my Mao watch - were it not for the fact that it's already broken. I bought it in Guangzhou for around NZ$5/ GBP1.65 after my Ho Chi Mihn watch broke (see a pattern here?), even though I already have one somewhere in a box between NZ & the UK. The beauty is that Mao's hand waves with the passing of every second. It's obviously made for toursists & I wasn't sure if Chinese people would be amused or offended, but everyone who noticed it (of which there were many - strange as no one's ever noticed my watch before) absolutely loved it. They often call to friends to come & look too. Sadly it always either gained or lost time & when we reached the point that Mao was a few hours behind I gave up on him. A Chinese friend (who also
loved the watch) told me that there's a saying in China about Chinese made goods - something along the lines of ''looks good, works bad; looks bad, works good'' And I have to agree that this is often true, and sadly most of the good stuff that's made here is then sent for sale overseas.
We found a great (if a little pricey) tea house near 'old Shanghai' - I wasn't sure that we could even afford it. Then some music came on - a piece of French influenced Chinese music that is played every day at 9am on our Radioactive radio station in Wellington, NZ. This may seem quite irrelevant to most, but it was one of those surreal coincidences - I've no idea what the music is (I asked but we got nowhere), & will perhaps never hear it again. But for a second it was 9am & I was at work in Wellington. The tea was great as were the snacks (spicy corn nuts thats we hunted for but never saw again). And no, we couldn't really afford it.
I decided that I would try not to talk about the weather so much, so all
Another Mountain Experience
Photo obviously does this no justice at all, but this is part of the path down from Damo's cave. Very Wellington on a foggy day. I'll say about Shanghai is that although it was still stupidly hot, it was now a dry heat rather than a wet & humid heat. That of course didn't stop us sweating - you will of course be pleased to hear that we were still constantly dripping with sweat. My body was so pleased to be always covered in damp clothes that the fungus I shifted in Thailand came back.
We haven't really been sticking to a standard tourist trail so far, which could be part of the reason that my rant a few blogs ago was so long. From Shanghai we decided to head to Huang Shan - a supposedly beautiful mountainous area famous for its tea. Reading the guide book it looked like a great idea - we love tea & we quite like to look at mountains. However when going on a detour to 'nice places' to 'drink tea' in China it's worth thinking about just how far you are going, how long it will take & cost & how you will get to the next place afterwards. The guide book isn't really much help when it comes to questions like these & with no one
speaking English we found ourselves doing the vague equivalent of travelling from Cardiff to London via East Anglia or New Plymouth to Wellington via Napier.
Huang Shan is indeed a beautiful mountain - well what we saw from the bottom was. It was phenomenally expensive to get to the top & seeing as we'd only come for the tea, we stayed put where we were. When it came to tea, all negotiations were done through the phrasebook & sign language (as well as some tasting of course) so we hope that the tea we eventually bought does actually come from the slopes of Huang Shan.
There was some beautiful relief from the intense heat thanks to a dip in the nearby river & waterfalls too - it wasn't until we'd left that we found out parts of 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' were filmed there.
Our arrival at the base of the mountain coincided with me seriously losing my temper with, and verbally abusing our bus driver who wanted more money than we had agreed to pay. I have to admit that it was a serious low point & despite my frustration & anger, I decided there &
Parking
Outside Huang Shan Market then that I would be more tolerant in future. As our fury raged we'd thought about leaving again ASAP but an American with a banjo & no money approached us & recommended a place to stay. The guest house owners tuned out to be extremely friendly & full of help & advice - once again yin & yang in perfect balance in China.
Time for another sleeper bus, not as comfy as the last one & with the loud driver & his mates (& horn) that I mentioned in a previous blog. The bus was overloaded - people sleeping wherever they could, including the floor. The bus took us to Wuhan, where we arrived in the early hours. I always fancied a trip to Wuhan, something about the name attracted me I think. But according to the guide book there's not much going on there - how different our lives would be if we ditched the guide book.
From the bus station we taxied through all the red lights to the train station in order to move on straight away. Five or six hours in Wuhan and all I can tell you is this:
- The train
Shao Lin
It's all in the facial experssion... station toilets are very disturbing
- Someone in Wuhan is now wearing my stylish Aotearoa hoodie that I was using as a pillow & left on the bus.
Both of these things left me very depressed at the time.
And so onto another train - just six or so hours to Zhengzhou. More tea & more noodles. I was wondering if I'd find any or many veggie versions in China - knowing I'd live on them on trains. Most pots have the ingredients entirely in Chinese, but back on day one in Guangzhou we saw some vegetarian pot noodles in the equivalent to a 7-11 store. I was so excited that I presumed I'd find them in other similar stores. For weeks after Kylie took great pleasure in telling me I should have bought them when I saw them, because not only did we never see that store again, we also never saw the noodles.
Zhengzhou - from another train station straight to another bus station. A couple of hours later we were in Deng Feng. Still not quite where we were heading but close enough. Destination was Shao Lin & Song Shan - the birthplace of
Song Shan
If you look through the cloud you can just about see paths & bridges in there somewhere Kung Fu.
Around this time we lost faith entirely in the Lonely Planet guide book. Deng Feng is apparently where 'most travellers base themselves for a visit to Shao Lin' Well if most travellers is just us & no one else then that is entirely true. Not only were there no other Westerners there (which we are fairly used to & is generally a good thing), but there were also no Chinese toursits there either. Of course no one at the hotel spoke English, so once again, the phrasebook, drawings & sign language were the only way forward.
Deng Feng was a large but somehow peaceful city. Our street was lined with random people selling all kinds of vegetables such as gorgeous bright purple eggplants & giant 3 foot spring onions.
Shao Lin, the birthplace of Kung Fu is today just a tourist circus. The Temple & academy sit at the base of Song Shan (Song Mountain). Today the whole area is awash with copy cat kung fu schools - I noticed at least 15 as we passed through town. What's most noticeable about the approach to the area is the highways - endless new roads cross
& split as they wait for the arrival of Olmypics 2008 tourists. With so many kung fu schools there must be tens of thousands of students. You have to wonder where they all go when they finish. Bit parts in Jackie Chan movies?
Fortunately we arrived at the temple & academy complex very early, before anyone else was there. We wandered freely & soon enough stumbled upon scores of youths in red Shao Lin track suits doing what must have been an early morning warm up. They were scattered everywhere - all ages, both male & female. They were waving sticks in the air, flying upside down across landing mats, fighting each other with (obviously fake) swords & generally stretching & running around.
Having watched for awhile (& feeling like we'd distracted them long enough, many were as interested in us as we were in them) we moved on. Next up was a Kung Fu show. We'd seen a Shao Lin show in Wellington some time ago & to be honest that was far more impressive. It was still good to see it there where it all began though.
By now the tour busses had arrived. We
took a quick look around the actual Temple but there were no Monks just pushing & shoving Chinese tourists. The book said there was a quiet retreat off a side path nearby where a Monk lived for nine solid years. And so began our first accidental mountain escapade of the day.
We never imagined that the monk, Damo, would have retreated quite so far. The first sign said '500 metres' so we started walking. Soon after another sign said '3000 metres' but we chose to ignore that one. After awhile we decided to turn back, but at that same moment a tractor type thing came along & we hopped on expecting the ride to take us to the cave he lived in. We climbed off & far ahead up the mountain side could see the vague outline of some very steep & precarious looking steps. Again we thought about turning back, but for some reason we went on. And so began one of those comedy mountain adventures where you think every corner or plateau is the last. Except it isn't, it's just another spot for a local entrepreneur to be selling water, coke & postcards.
Frankly the view
Follow the Leader
...and another Chinese tour group destroys the peace & quiet from the top was similar to a typical 'airport closed' day in Wellington, so pretty dismal. I'm sure it would have been quite staggering on a clear day. However Damo's tiny cave was peaceful & cool, and we made friends with a nun who had apparently been there about 10 days.
Now I'm not sure what if anything your idea of Shao Lin is. Somehow I had created my own 'Shangri La' version. I don't know if my image comes from a movie, a tv show or my imagination, but I can clearly picture what I think it looks like. There's a temple high on a mountainside, a bridge leading to nowhere & monks performing kung fu in the bamboo trees. Having seen the touristy temple (on flat ground) & surrounds I was pleased to learn that there was in fact another mountain & a swing bridge at the top.
And so begins accidental mountain adventure of the day, number two. The journey begins with a cable car, supposedly the longest or highest in China. We were deposited at the top of the mountain - once again the guide book let us down here as there was no info at all, and again there was no one local to ask. We assumed that there would be a short walk to the swing bridge & then we'd be on our way back. It's hard to imagine the scene that follows unless you've been there. We were already at the top of a mountain - the path is carved into the side & the views as we began the walk were quite stunning. But within minutes we had disappeared into a cloud. We had umbrellas & still naively thought it wasn't far so walked on. The path went up & down, round & round. The rains came, we were soaked & at times the path was flooded. We had no food, no drink & were wearing cheap Asian sandals with no grip. At first there were plenty of people walking, but gradually the numbers declined & the only people were going the opposite way to us. We were determined to reach the bridge, my Shangri La. Finally we made it. It was of course nothing like my vision.
On the way back the rain stopped & the clouds cleared a little. I still spent the entire walk panicking that we would miss the last cable car down & be sleeping up there. Despite being soaked through, pretty stressed, and utterly exhausted the scenery was still magnificent & it was well worth the effort.
The cable cars were all parked up & the place was deserted. Finally I found someone having his tea & he sent us back on our way to reality.
By the following day Kylie was looking like she may be well on her way to bird hype flu territory so we decided to skip any more unplanned moutain escapdes & head to Beijing. After the usual 'no we have no tickets no no no' scenario we jumped on the bus to Zhengzhou & bought one ourselves there & then. Ten hours later we were on another train, and eight or so hours after that we were in Beijing waiting for a bed to sleep in - listening to Westlife where this episode ends......
in case you are wondering we are now a few days into Vietnam, but more China episodes will follow soon
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laura kemp
non-member comment
pot noodles
would you like me to send you some veggie noodles, my love? loving the blog, glad you're there doing the hard bit and i'm here reading all about it, great photos too xxxxxxxxxxx