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Published: February 23rd 2010
Hot and Sunny
Shek O beach. Which I thought was Shek beach and very nearby on the road signs.And so, waving our little red passports, we set off once more to escape the winter blues...
But we didn't check the weather. Who would check the weather before heading off on holiday? Tsk, what a preposterous notion. Why check the weather before heading to an enourmous landmass in the middle of winter...?
It all started off swimmingly and Hong Kong was lovely and warm. We caught up with Rob and Charlotte, our friends who have recently moved there, and before you could say 'Factor 30', we were on a beach enjoying the sun and tossing a ball about in the sea with all the smugness of some very smug people indeed. We drank too much, we pranced about in shorts and flip flops and acted like winter was but a fictitious flicker in the mind's eye.
For a couple of days, we were swept up by the charming absurdity of Hong Kong: it's arrogantly high high-rise towers and chaotic streets; a million and one things to see at ground level and even more when you crane your neck upwards. And summing up the work ethic of the city, like a great metal artery perpetually pumping people towards
Pre Nuptials
A couple having their photos taken before making the biggest mistake of their lives. their offices, is the longest escalator in the world, ferrying people down to their work in the mornings, then ferrying them back up in the evening. It stops going down at 10am, then starts the other way at 10.15. We amused ourselves with images of sleepy commuters getting caught out as they come to a halt, shitting themselves and scampering the remainder of the escalator's length before it started going the wrong way, back towards their homes. And we felt for the Hong Kongers who have night shifts, for whom the escalator must always be going in the wrong direction. But most of all we were mesmerised by it, by the way in which one escalator can encapsulate the worker-ant routine of an entire city.
And as we gazed at the people gliding back or forth, but never both at the same time, we dreamt of what lay ahead in China. Images of ancient Banyan trees sprang to mind...Shaolin Monks, rice paddies and hazy hills...
And then we went to China...
First we took a few trains to the border where we put on our best serious faces to go through customs. We didn't know what to
Up Above Hong Kong
With Charlotte and Rob. expect of Chinese customs officials and we certainly weren't about to take any risks by doing something crazy like cracking a smile. They kindly let us in. So then we flew two hours north to the apparently small city of Chengdu. Small, because that's how it appeared on the map. Smaller than Beijing, yes. But larger than Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Sheffield, Bradford and Liverpool combined (4.1 million). And we arrived in rush hour. Our taxi joined the creaking and grinding of a zillion other cars, all coughing their gases into the soupy air. We slowly crawled towards the centre of town, allowing us plenty of time to breath in the reality of a modern Chinese cityscape...then cough it back up again. Construction, congestion, confusion. And the faintest whiff of a chill in the air.
This is modern China. Huge cities being built at breakneck speed with no sympathy for aesthetics or anything else for that matter. In the hour long crawl towards what we hoped would be our hostel, we began to realise that our expectations would need a little adjusting. None of the buildings had those attractive curvy roofs for a start. They were all dilapidated grey rectangles,
even the new ones. The builders had truly harnessed the spirit of 1984, infusing their creations with the heart and soul of practical, determined communism. Chengdu it seemed from our brief experience, was spreading quicker than you could say asbestos poisoning.
Our taxi driver said something we had no hope of understanding, which we took to mean we should get out. Sure enough, we were only four lanes of traffic away from where we needed to be and after assessing the situation from the marginally less dangerous pavement, realised that the best way to cross the road was to march doggedly into the traffic and hope for the best. Our reward - curvy roofs - that's more like it! In fact, the street our hostel was on appeared to be a rare relic of historic China, a small patch preserved for tourists, designed to distract us from the construction site beyond. The buildings were old enough to hark back a dynasty or two and a massive group of oldies doing Tai Chi ticked a few tourist boxes. We found our hostel, Dragon Town, (now we're talking) and set about plotting our next few days of box ticking - namely
Our First Panda
This could be a video. They don't move much. pandas and the Yangtze River. Before we knew it, we'd spunked half our budget but had enough receipts for various buses and trips to keep us going for the next few days, then we set out in search of some Chinese food for Ant (4 yen) and something that Jen could eat (38 yen).
This wasn't to be a relaxing holiday. We were up at 6am to ensure we made it to the panda sanctuary in time for toddlers feeding time (aaaaaw). Well, you have to, really. We hoped that the pandas would be suitably far enough away from the smog and noise of the city, but considering the pace with which Chengdu appears to be growing, it wasn't a great surprise to find it still well within the city limits. That said, the sanctuary is impressive: huge, modern and largely un-zoo like. This is where the occasional baby is born, though it's clear to see why not many make it. When the baby's come out they look like they could do with another few months in the oven and judging by a video we were shown, the mums often don't know what to do with them or what
Raccoo... sorry Red Panda
But it's definitely a Raccoon. they even are. It's clear to see that if they were in the wild, they might have more of a chance of knowing what first time mums should do, but seeing as 'the wild' has been replaced with vast tower blocks and coal burning factories, they've not much hope. We saw some adult giant pandas, then some red pandas which look nothing like pandas at all and we think may be raccoons in disguise, cheekily hoping for a bit of TLC off the back of the panda plight. But of course the money shot was the little 'uns. A reasonable crowd had gathered for breakfast time, all of them pensioners. We had a distinct height advantage over our fellow tourists, so were happy to stand at the back to observe. Out came the toddler pandas who duly lolled around with their bamboo, cameras clicked and old ladies clucked and we were equally amused by both, before the latter were led away by their flag-wielding guide. I'm not too sure why their guide needed a flag though, as they were the only group. Perhaps the people of China only follow guides if they carry flag, I never asked. Maybe somewhere there
Pissed Panda
Didn't make it back from the pub. are groups of lonely guides who have no flags. Certainly tourists are obedient followers of the flag, following it wherever their guide determines. But what if the guide was suicidal and led them over the edge of a cliff? I suppose that's why you never see groups of Chinese tourists at Formula 1...
Individualistically, we went to see some even smaller (and by that token, infinitely cuter) pandas whose age meant that they were still kept in cages, albeit cages with bars wide enough for them to crawl through. Cue more giddiness at these adorable, yet evolutionarily inept creatures (we learnt that pandas were in fact meat eaters once, but gave it up for bamboo, 97%!o(MISSING)f the goodness of which they duly poop straight back out). These ones looked like toy pandas; suspiciously fluffy, their moves (clambering, falling, cuddling) were maybe toooo cute. Big, bold tick in that box.
The early morning panda love-in meant we had half a day to kill in Chengdu, allowing us to sample a bit of local hot pot - think fondu with unrecognisable ingredients - then head to the
'People's Park' where we stumbled across a pensioner's variety show. The highlight:
Kung-fu Panda
Proper wee baby. a rousing army song from back in the day, belted out by three old men in uniforms, while another man ran, crawled and rolled round with a wooden gun. If you thought Dad's Army was an English tradition, think again. Here we had Mainwairing,Wilson and Pike playing their perspective roles, with Jones in support on all fours. It was hard not to guffaw loudly, but it wouldn't have been fair. This call to arms obviously evoked more memories amongst the spectators than we could imagine, and Dad's Army wouldn't have been a show that would have gone down well under Mao.
As expected, language was a large barrier. A very large barrier. The few people that spoke English spotted us a mile off and would come and talk to us or ask us for photos, but generally we struggled by using a mix of mime and hope. The staff at Dragon Town had been really helpful and organised our bus tickets to get us to the Yangtze the following day. They arranged a lift to the bus station where we dutifully followed our lead onto a bus, but hours later, as our bus approached Chongqing, we realised that we
didn't know what happens next. Reluctantly disembarking, we stood on the street with our bags not sure what we were supposed to do, before a girl called Vienna emerged from the crowd carrying a placard with JENNY written on it. Sure enough, she'd been planted in Chongqing (pop. 4.3 million) to find a Jenny, which she duly did. And it was this haphazard method that got us round. We'd begin each journey in the relative safety of English speaking people, who would propel us through a succession of Chinese obstacles, into the waiting arms of another English speaker at the other end. Had we lost our way at any point, we'd have been buggered. But it tended to work, and by that night, we found ourselves on the banks of the mighty Yangtze, wearing every item of clothing we could manage.
Our room was 101: Orwell was watching over us. We'd gone cheap and opted for a six bed cabin, but were lucky to find ourselves in a four bed cabin, albeit with a family of three. Being a family, they neither chain smoked nor phlegmed continuously. Even the confines of a tiny six bed cabin hadn't halted the
Frozen
Ant enjoying the sparse surroundings of the Yangtze boat. incessant puffing of fags, at least amongst the male passengers, who could go about any activity without their fag ever moving from the corner of their mouth.
Perhaps this accounts in turn for the other national pastime, phlegming. Both men and women have embraced the art of the phlegm which of course, doesn't sit well with English sensibilities. We never quite got used to it, even when we convinced ourselves that a good hack, honk and hoc is probably better for you than keeping it in. The skill is to really draw it hard from the back of the nose in the first movement, then compliment that with a frothing of mucus from the back of the throat. Once the two have been drawn together, gathered somewhere towards the back of the tongue, it can be ejected over great distances with a strong, catapult-like gob. Distance and volume can be increased with a repetition of steps one and two until the gathering of mucus resembles a small ball of elastic bands. So strong are these balls, that they often don't even give way under foot.
As I say, we were lucky to be sharing a cabin with a
family. They spoke no English and we spoke no Chinese, but Mr and Mrs Robinson (as we called them) and their daughter seemed very sweet and polite and kept themselves to themselves. The only downside to sharing with the Robinsons was that they spent most of their time in the cabin, the only place we had a chance of keeping warm. The temperature had plummeted and the boat had no provisions for the cold. But being shy, English types, we didn't want to cramp their style, so instead we spent much of our time crouched round a pot noodle, trying to warm up. We'd signed up for all the extra excursions, which as it turned out were largely very dull but provided some respite from the cold. Not that it was any warmer off the boat, but it did give us a chance to get our limbs moving. We visited some temples which may or may not have been significant, we had no way of telling. They did have markedly more appealing toilets though. And it gave us the chance to be a part of the flag-following herd which gave us a small sense of blending in. But we didn't
Ooooh, Temple.
By now, you'll tell that I've only taken photos of the China we wanted to see. Hence this lovely templey place and none of the polluted megalopolises. really blend in. Often, our fellow tourists were more interested in having their photos taken of us than the actual sights which, fortunately, didn't upset the flag-wielding guides too much.
The biggest draw of this trip ought to be, or used to be the Three Gorges; huge, spectacular faces of limestone, towering out of the water. Most of the passengers managed to scurry outside to witness them as they loomed ahead, braving the cold long enough to take a few snaps before diving back inside. And they were spectacular. But we couldn't help feeling it was all probably a lot more spectacular a few years ago, when the gorges would have been even deeper and the river ran fast. Now, it's more like a pond thanks to the gargantuan Three Gorges Dam waiting at the far end. To the tour companies at least, the dam is the highlight, a spectacular crescendo. But for us more sensitive types, it marks an apocalyptic announcement of man's determination to out-do nature. Ho hum. The debate on this one is too big and complex...much like the dam.
Casting our misgivings aside, we managed to enjoy the unusual park that lay downriver from
Jenny, Frozen,
Note the use of two hoods. And the wooden sofa. the dam...or in the
Zone of Imminent Peril as I like to think of it. There, bewilderingly, we stumbled into the
Large Scale Equipment Square and
Quarry Relics. What a hoot!
Somewhat sadly, we were relieved that the bizarre park marked the end of our Yangtze trip. We were more concerned with getting warm and were given an opportunity to do just that when we realised that we shouldn't have left our bags on the boat earlier in the day. We sprinted frantically down to the docks and across countless identically bleak boats until we found ours, grabbed our bags and sprinted back up the hill with them, all watched by a crowd of hundreds. Everything involved a crowd of hundreds.
Bus - confusion - taxi - utter confusion - Wuhan (pop. 4.26 million). At last we got to have a hot shower and warm up, which we celebrated by prancing about in traditional clothes near a large pagoda. Wuhan may have a lot to offer, but all we really experienced was a spectacular demonstration of phlegming by a taxi driver who we suspect may have phlegmed for China in the Beiijng Olympics. We had no hope of
Shoe Shine
Jen booting a peasant in the face. finding out.
That night we boarded a night bus bound for Yangshou and the promise of warmer, clearer air and beautiful landscapes. By way of a reminder of what we hoped to be leaving behind, we waited for our bus in a station so thick with pollution we couldn't see one end from the other. Gleefully we boarded the coach, with me in the '
torpedo seat'. (In a bus where all the seats are bunk beds, three rows across and six deep, this is the top-middle one nearest the front and therefore most likely to launch the passenger, like a torpedo, through the windscreen and onto the road in the event of heavy breaking). It was a buttock clenching night, with every slam of the brakes - and there were many - threatening a launch. But by 6am we were in Guilin, from where we got an infuriatingly slow bus to do the final hour of the trip in two and a half.
But it was worth it. Yangshou was lovely and strangely familiar. (It's currently on adverts for both HSBC and Sharwood's noodles!) And it was warm! For the first time in a week we were able
to shed layers and lounge around, no longer obliged to keep moving just to avoid hypothermia. By Chinese standards it's tiny (just 300,000) and serene (if a smidge garish), with two lovely rivers and surrounded by stunning karst limestone peaks. The air was transparent and breathable...this was the China we'd been looking for! Just as well we'd put aside a few days here.
Being relatively small, and with so much beautiful scenery to discover, we hopped on some bikes and headed for a famous bridge...and got hopelessly lost. It turns out we overshot the turning for the bridge by some distance and spent the next few hours following the wrong river whilst consuming gallons of water. But it didn't seem to matter: we were hot and thirsty and in danger of an altogether different kind of death-by-exposure than we had been for the previous few days, and that's all that mattered. Sporadic villages appeared amongst the fields, where we sought directions and got ever more hopelessly lost. Finally, we decided that the only way of making it back at all was to retrace our route and after 6 hours, we reemerged from the rural confusion, back onto a recognisable
Eaves
Note the contrast between ancient and modern blah blah blah. road. Determined not to have completely failed, we spotted and climbed up Moon Hill, another worthy sight, and that just about finished us off.
Along the way we'd stopped for photos with a few Chinese tourists, and arranged to eat with an English teacher, Kai, and his son that night, then the following night...then breakfast the next morning! It had been the first time we'd actually got to know some Chinese people - it would have been a shame not to have done so, considering there's so many of them. We're as bad as anyone for remaining within our bubble when we're travelling, so it did us good to make a bit of an effort, take some photos, learn something from the locals, and take some more photos. We also introduced them to some of our customs: I taught the boy how to use a knife and fork, and we discussed the weather at great length after the temperature disastrously decided to plummet back to something approaching February in Britain.
Between our boundary-breaking dinners, we followed up our bike ride with a hike. Our cultural progress the previous night was set back somewhat when our frustrations at not
Hmmm.
Look, whatever you were going to say, just don't...alright? speaking the language overboiled amongst a crowd of touts. They all wanted to flog us trips down the river and all we wanted to do was cross it. The breaking point came when they used the tactic of shouting slowly - which I thought was an English form of communication with foreigners. Ten days of frustration boiled over momentarily, until I realised how stupid I looked. It was freezing cold and I was in shorts...my knees were blue. Jen had spotted this and was keeping her distance and I was left to contemplate that hiking in a bad mood and bad clothes is not a good look. Still, we made inroads with some of the rural women, who we found out, find nothing funnier than a westerner wearing shorts in freezing cold temperatures. Some couldn't finish the customary
'hello' without bursting into fits of giggles at the sight of my blue knees. When enough people laugh at you, you have to cheer up.
Even if we hadn't had my knees to keep us amused, we had the map to keep us entertained. All along our route, the hills had names which no doubt referred to something an ancient villager
Torpedo Seat
See how the body would be ejected, feet first. The head would clobber the TV as the legs penetrate the windscreen... had seen back when opium was still popular. We passed
Grandma's Watching An Apple,
Tortoise Climbing Up Hill and
Lion Watching the Nine Horses. Perhaps due to a lack of intoxication, we couldn't see any of the likenesses as we passed by. But it has given us some ideas for when we next spot an unnamed hill at home. Perhaps
Parliament Hill could become
Prime Minister Holding Members in a Headlock Hill.
We didn't have far to go after Yangshou. It was nearly New Year's eve and we couldn't travel very far anyway, as seemingly the whole country was on the move and transport was scarce. We headed back to Guilin, then out of town again to the Dragon's Backbone Rice Terraces. Now we were really getting away from it all, staying in the stunning village of Dazhai, high up in the hills overnight, allowing us to spend New Year's Eve walking amongst the towering rice terraces, virtually alone. We'd learned how rare solitude can be in China, so savoured the scene, knowing that the end of the walk would signal a return to the hustle and bustle until we returned home. If we returned home... we nearly didn't
Yangshou
Oooooh, lovely. make it until a local policeman, arranged by an eccentric German gave us a lift back to town... nothing was ever simple.
We returned to a dumpling-making party at our hostel, which in turn led to a more western way of celebrating New Year - drinking lots of alcohol. For days, firecrackers had been exploding with increasing regularity and vigour and by 11pm, Guilin couldn't hold back any longer. The hour building up to midnight was like the Blitz and we all moved outside, armed with firecrackers, rockets and hundreds of other incendiary devises to make our own small contribution. It was like a public safety demonstration of how to do things dangerously - the stairwell of a nearby block of flats was under constant attack from thousands of firecrackers while our lot staggered round lighting small rockets with cigarettes. Apparently, the Chinese government has cracked down on the private sale of fireworks in recent years but on this issue at least, the public has stood firmly against them. Hurrah!
Alas, Guilin wasn't a great place to kill our final couple of days in China. The guide book bigged it up and we could see that it's certainly
a much more appealing town than many, but in the bitter cold, riverfronts and parks lose some of their appeal. We'd discovered that for us, the China that we were looking for lay beyond the cities, even the smaller ones. We did, of course, manage to to fill our days there with the usual array of confusing faux pas and moments of idiocy, that's par for the course. But apparently we'd need two years to begin to grips with the language and we only had two weeks. We carried our confusion proudly with us to the last, almost sacrificing our beds on the night train back towards the border. Then, somewhat poignantly, the cultural cross-over we had just experienced over the past two weeks was encapsulated perfectly: a hearty flurry of hacks and phlegms from the only other customer in Starbucks. Well, if we will go to Starbucks...
And so back to Hong Kong where we turned up on Rob and Charlotte doorstep a little more frazzled and disheveled than when we'd left. After only two weeks in China we felt we'd been through the mill and were glad of the comforts on offer back in Hong Kong. We
More Yangshou
Pretty perfect. Little did we know we were about to get horribly, horribly lost. still had time for one final flurry though. The four of us made for Macao, a truly whistle-stop visit where we had four hours to sample some Portuguese food and hit the casino. We managed both, winning nearly as much at the roulette table as we'd spent at the dinner table (Rob and Charlotte took the major winnings), the pegged it back to Hong kong for a farewell drink and a dash for our plane. It was a fittingly chaotic end to a chaotic trip, filled with confusion and cold, but also awe at the pandas, at the Yangtze, the countryside and at the lovely people - and the number of them. Even the less pleasant stuff, the giant cities and the pollution, left us grateful to have seen a country in the process of such massive change. There's a lot more to see and it'll be interesting to see what's changed if we make it back.
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