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Published: September 23rd 2006
(blog by Bronia) For both of us, arriving in
China was a dream come true. Back in 2005, when this trip was still on the drawing board and we were tossing country names about in the same casual way you toss about what you fancy having for dinner that night. Many of those initial countries like
Australia, Russia, Nepal, Tibet were gradually scrapped from our world trip due to time, feasibility, political instability but the one that has remained there ever since the beginning is
China. Along with
India, China was the other top country on our list we were determined to see.
Wonders such as the
Terracotta Army and the
Great Wall as well as ancient Chinese culture held a fascination for us and we often spoke at night after returning from a particularly frustrating day at work and talk of sitting on the
Great Wall together watching the wall and the day disappear into the distance. Silly romantic notions probably but it was these early grandiose thoughts that fired our imaginations to do the trip in the first place.
So when we drove across the border from
Macau to mainland
China on a coach bound for
Guangzhou we looked eagerly out of the window looking for paddy fields, traditional Chinese buildings and signs of the
China that we had grown up knowing from story books, tv programmes, die-hard stereotypes and the continued reflection of the
Asia we had seen in
Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam continued.
It was therefore a shock to us that the roads we were on were brand new enormous highways with a clinical sterility that we had never seen before. Straight, long three or four lane highways that went off into the distance slicing through fields that were indeed agricultural, but modern agricultural - not the traditional water-logged paddy fields with weathered peasants working under the shade of their conical straw hats ankle deep in water or driving oxen along the road with carts overloaded with produce.
GUANGZHOU Guangzhou formerly known as
Canton and original seat of
Cantonese language and cooking, had been chosen from our trusty
Lonely Planet guide as our first port of call as it seemed a fairly decent sized city of 3 million people (bearing in mind that with a total population of 1.3 billion people, most average towns in
China are this size and larger) but
with enough parks, historical museums and hidden treasures, as small piece of land, separated by a narrow canal known as
Shamian Island which was reputed to be bursting with colonial architecture which we felt offered plenty of opportunity to keep the camera snapping.
When we arrived mid-afternoon on the outskirts of the city we stared out of our bus window in horror at the city that was unfolding around us. Concrete, cranes, dust, smog, road works, people, dirt and some of the ugliest architecture we have seen during our travels was everywhere.
We get dropped off at a the posh five-star
Garden Hotel, an imposing hotel with a sweeping driver and doormen waiting to help us with our backpacks. We declined the assistance knowing that we were going to be looking for accommodation on
Shamian Island for about the price of one of their entreés.
With the aid of our
Mandarin phrasebook, something we come to value and depend a great deal over the next few weeks, we find a hotel tout who is willing to help us find an affordable hotel on
Shamian Island which is said to be the most idyllic, peaceful, and quiet (always
a bonus!) place to stay.
Shamian Island is indeed fantastic. Measuring only 800m by 350m it is the former British and French concession after the two famous
Opium Wars and one of the few places we soon learn that
'old Canton survives. Some of the architecture has been maintained beautifully whilst some of it has decayed gracefully over the years still showing signs of its original function as banks, trade buildings and official residences. Streets are tree lined and shaded and small recreational park areas have been made in the squares where we watch Chinese families play badminton, do Tai Chi, play on swings or sit on park benches and chatter. Occasionally we see a Western couple pass by with a chinese baby in a push-chair. They are here waiting the required one month before being allowed to officially adopt and fly their baby home, in particular the
USA. The overall scene on
Shamian Island is peaceful, serene and a real sanctuary from the rest of
Guangzhou that we had been dumped in only hours earlier.
For the next two days we got up in the morning, had a leisurely breakfast on
Shamian Island and then headed out
across a footbridge linking the island to the mainland to discover what
Guangzhou could show us of Chinese culture and history.
We walked and we walked. We got lost and we walked some more. We crossed six lane roads, dodged buses and honking taxis and tried to decipher Chinese signs for directions. We approached people with our phrase book and using hand signals galore we sought directions to the sights we hunted.
We found a
Tourist Information Office and raced towards it with a pathetic whoop of joy until we realised that they had no brochures, they had no city maps and none of them spoke english and simply shrugged their shoulders in nonchalence. A tourist office with no brochures? And no other language than Chinese? The more we wandered the city and the more we hunted for history, the more we realised that what may have been once a historical part of
China has now been torn down to make way for grey concrete construction projects.
We did manage to find, after much hunting and walking,
Yuexiu Park covering 93 hectares of land. We dove into the park, after having paid our entrance fee (an entrance
fee for a public park?), seeking the sanctuary of some green foliage.
The park is indeed attractive and held within in the famous
Five Rams Statue which as the name suggests is a statue of five rams perched on a mountain crag from which the city of
Guangzhou supposedly got its name. We also visited the
Zhenhai Tower (see pic) and the
Guangzhou City Museum. We walked along many of the parks concrete paths and passed by service buildings, a swimming pool complex, a TV tower, a few service roads (also concrete) and even a massive police station.
Whilst we enjoyed our wander we were left feeling that even here the park hadn't escaped the concrete contagion. This 93 hectare park was in fact a bunch of buildings separated by a few trees and ponds.
When we first arrived in
Guangzhou we didn't have a fixed plan as to how long we'd spend there before moving on, but after 3 days of choking dust, city mahem and very little history to be found dotted around this construction site of a city we decided to move on.
To move on to the next city we needed to
find a travel agent. Up until this point on our travels, if we needed a travel agent, all we needed to do was wander along any main road and wait for the shouts from doorways of the dozens of travel agents competing for your Western money.
Not in
China. Here communism still has a firm controlling hand on the movement of its own people in and out of the country and even restricts movement of its people from province to province. The concept of travel for pleasure is a novelty still and there is not enough demand for independant travel agents to set up shop. This is why many Westerners travel to
China on package or pre-booked tours and why those travellers who
do travel on their own steam say it's one of the toughest places to travel. In fact, whilst we were in
China we heard that for the first time ever the Chinese government have approved a Chinese travel TV channel to promote Chinese destionations to Chinese residents. A way of encouraging domestic tourism spend to remain within the country.
So, for us to find a travel agent to simply book a train or plane to
our next destination was a challenge. Using our
Lonely Planet we set out hunting for a couple of the ones listed in the city. No luck. The first was gone and the second had moved but no one could remember the address. This was after a couple of hours walking in the heat and dust so we headed back to the sanctity and peace of
Shamian Island where we eventually found a small travel agent in another hotel who asked us when we'd like to leave for our next destination. With no hesitation we said, "ASAP" and with that we hopped on a plane the next morning for a 1.5hr flight to the coastal city of
Xiaman.
XIAMEN Our timing to go to
Xiamen was just about right. Had we gone a week earlier we would have hit
China's biggest typhoon this year, Sao Mai which caused the evacuation of over a million people along the coast near
Xiamen and still ended up killing several thousand. By the time we made our way there they were in the clean up stages and so several towns were 'out of bounds'. Looking at the best way to travel along the
Man pulling cart down street on GulangYu Island
With no motorised vehicles allowed all materials and goods are still carted round this small island by men pulling these carts behind them.
Xiamen - South coast of Chinacoast we ended up choosing to fly from
Guangzhou to
Xiamen. Having looked at bus and train schedules we realised that it would be 23 hours of travel on a train and only a few dollars cheaper than flying with China Airlines which would get us there in 1.5 hours. No a difficult decision after memories of our 27hrs on an Indian train ran through our heads!
We stayed at
J-Inn in the main city of
Xiamen just off a main arterial road in and out of the city that was 6 lanes wide. We're beginning to see a pattern to
China's modern cities. Their city planning for the future involves alot of concrete and alot of room for cars. That's great foresight if you are planning for a city of the future that is going to be filled with cars but not great on the environment, or for that matter on the visitor/pedestrian that wants to walk from Point A to Point B. If you don't have a car in Xiamen you feel lost and very small indeed.
Our first evening was spent wandering down enormous straight sections of highway right in the centre of the city
searching for food. We had a map in our
Lonely Planet with English and Chinese names in it but it didn't seem to correlate with any of the streets we wandered along. Our attempts to ask people directions in the search of fodder for our stomachs yielded incomprehending looks. We suddenly realised how little English was spoken here in
China, even in the big cities. In comparaison, even when travelling through the most remote parts of Laos we'd encountered at least a few people who could understand and help us. We eventually found a restaurent with pictures that we could point to and order something we knew. After much menu pointing and indicating of
'big' 'small' 'only one' 'two please' using hand signals we got what we wanted. But we felt a little like cheats. We were at a McDonalds!
The main highlight that you come to
Xiamen to see is
Gulang Yu Island. Taking a five minute ferry across with a boat full of Chinese tourists we arrived at this sleepy island full of small narrow lanes with old European colonial residences abounding. It was here that by the 1860's it was a thriving Portuguese, British, French, Dutch
stronghold with churches, hospitals, schools, hotels and consulates built up by trade between
China and
Europe since the 16th century. We spent a day wandering around in the stiffling 40C degree heat and humidity enjoying various styles of European architecture, walking along the quiet cobbled streets and alleys. The island allows no motorised vehicles so the peace was a delight after the noise and pollution of the mainland. To get goods around the town men still pull hand drawn carts around the island carrying fresh water, food supplies and building materials (see pic).
Feeling slightly disillusioned at the amount of concrete and lack of Chinese history we'd seen so far in
China we decided to move on from
Xiamen after three days to our next port of call,
Shanghai.
SHANGHAI Having realised how cheap flying was and the time/discomfort (ok, call us soft!) in travelling over 25 hours by train we again chose to fly.
On the flight to
Shanghai we read an article about how
China was trying to make it the next and better
"Hong Kong". The article spoke about how the Chinese government has been encouraging in recent years financial institutions and international
investors to base themselves in
Shanghai rather than
Hong Kong. By making
Shanghai the new
Hong Kong it would place financial matters under much closer scrutiny and influence of the Chinese communist government based in
Beijing and prove to the rest of the world that
China was capable of making a home grown success story rather than the colonial legacy that is present day
Hong Kong. Food for thought as we came into land at
Shanghai's airport.
The city itself is indeed impressive. On the banks and canals of the
Huangpu River and
Yangzi River delta tall beautiful glass skyscrapers that make you crane your next in admiration of their soaring modern angles and unusual buildings of triangular, circular and bulbous proportions are crowded next to one another on the
Shanghai mainland and the newer
Pudong District, formerly a flat farming area on rich river delta land, now the new business centre. A big bonus is also the leafy green parks and avenues that designers included in their city plan, something that the planners of
Xiamen and
Guangzhou forgot.
Simply the name
Shanghai conjures up images of seedy alleys, opium use, the exotic and heady mix of heat,
oriental culture combined with gambling joints and brothels that were once the heart of
Shanghai life.
China however has worked hard in recent years to clean the city up. Crime and prostitution has been clamped down on firmly, the old alleys and buildings have been razed to the ground to make way for modern high rises and leafy parks.
As we wandered the streets orientating ourselves and looking for sights of traditional
China we couldn't help feeling that in their attempt to clean up
Shanghai, they are cleaning up and removing their history. There are definitely areas where temples, palaces and old markets reside that have been left in their traditional setting and architectural style but much of the
China that once was is now a Western copy of
New York, London, Vancouver... pretty much anywhere in the western world.
Determined to find these historical areas we marked out areas to go and hunt down and spent a lovely week exploring the old areas of the city hidden in the shadow of the new.
We wandered along the famous
Bund District which is a strip of old colonial trade buildings that run for about a mile or
so along the
Huangpu River in the heart
Shanghai. The
Huangpu River itself is like a wide canal, a bit like the
Thames River in
London, along which large freighters, barges and small pleasure cruises can be seen sailing back and forth along the river.
The Bund is beautiful and hints of the grandeur that must have once been in its heyday.
Our first couple of nights we stayed at an awful hotel where cigarette smoke hung permanently in the air in thick clouds, the fire system leaked water on your head as you walked down the halls, and the housekeepers seemed only to only know the volume of
very very very loud and nothing below to talk to one another. Realising that we couldn't stay there for a week we found a lovely hotel down a side street right next to the popular shopping prescinct of
Nanjing Road was once
Shanghai's Golden Mile and is now lined with shops and restaurents and a big area of neon lights that light up in a visual spectacle that is popular with tourist cameras including our own (see pics).
We found a lovely terrace on the roof of the
Shanghai Municipal Urban Planning & Exhibition Centre
It was here that we spent a few hours wandering around looking at the plans, models & info about all the construction and redevelopment Shanghai is doing of itself for the 2008 Olympics & 2010 World Expo
Shanghai - China Captain's Hostel where we spent an evening eating good cheap hostel food and watching the lights of the city's
Pudong District light up along the river front (see pic).
There are a plethora of museums, galleries and exhibitions to see in
Shanghai so we spent a number of hours educating ourselves about the development of
Shanghai's future and what it is doing to prepare for the World Expo in 2010 in the
Shanghai Municipal Urban Planning and Exhibition Centre which contains a scale model of the city which occupies a whole floor of the building. We also spent not nearly enough time in the stunning
Shanghai Museum where we gazed at exhibits of bronze works, ceramics, calligraphy, stamps (seals), Ming and Qing furniture that dated back as far as 3000 years. We've included a couple of pics in here to give you a feel of some of what we saw and highly recommend it as one of the best, well laid out, informative and pleasurable museums we've ever seen or been into in our lives.
Simply standing in front of a ceramic vase and wondering how it could still be there in all it completeness and colour after
3000 years is just mind boggling. How have they remained intact so long? Whose hands created and crafted these exquisite artifacts? Who did they belong to? and how many hands and generations have they been passed down to before ending up behind this glass case? We spent an afternoon, and could have spent days wandering.
One night we found a movie theatre showing the latest
Mission Impossible 3 movie with Tom Cruise in English with Chinese subtitles which is unusual because most are dubbed. The theatre was a tiny one with only 56 seats which made it very cosy and as the film began we both nearly fell out of our seats as we realised by complete coincidence that a portion of the film takes place in
Shanghai and showed the very buildings we'd been admiring that day (see pic).
One afternoon we took a ride up the elevator of the
Oriental Pearl Tower (the main
Shanghai TV tower) to a height of 263 metres above the city and gazed at the city below. You could see narrow canals where low houses and buildings lie in the way of the 'big plan' of development and the new high
rises under various stages of construction along the river bank.
Shanghai itself suffers from a big problem. Being built on the marshy, muddy banks and land of the old river delta town planners realised some years ago that the city and its buildings were suffering from subsidence. This however doesn't seem to have stopped the rate or ambitiousness of the buildings here as each new one races to outdo its neighbour in height and design. Instead, they simply build enormous concrete rafts on which the skyscrapers supposedly 'float' on the mud. A solution for now but one has to wonder about the potential effect of earthquakes and rising sea waters from global warming.
There is a lovely old section of
Shanghai that is being preserved for tourism and posterity surrounding
YuYuan Garden a famous traditional classical Chinese garden upon which the one in
Vancouver's Chinatown takes its inspiration. The garden is beautiful with temples, rock formations, ponds full of turtles and koi and red chinese lanterns swaying gently in the wind under the eves of sloping chinese buildings. The streets surrounding
YuYuan Garden are full of history, curio shops, old fashioned tea shops and the inevitable infiltration of the
odd McDonalds and Starbucks. It's interesting, because despite the massive censorship of news, opinion, internet access and the outside world by
China, large corporations like McDonalds, Dairy Queen, Starbucks, Coca Cola, Nike have managed to make it in and dominate street fronts in a large way.
On August 24th, a day or so before we left
Shanghai we took a bus trip to
Zhouzhuang, a small and delightful village about two hours from
Shanghai, which has been recognised as great tourist potential and therefore saved from the bulldozers and concrete. It is a village of canals, a sort of chinese 'Venice' and it was one of our highlights of
China up to this point. This was the
China of our imaginations and stereotypes. This was the traditional
China of waterways, old women in doorways, dogs and chickens running around... this was the old
Asia that
China is rapidly leaving behind and we loved it. There is so much to admire and love about the traditional Asian lifestyle and its sad to see so much of it has gone in the cities we've visited so far.
Our last morning in
Shanghai we meet a Canadian, Jim, from
White Rock, Vancouver. We have a chat over coffee at breakfast. He tells us he's here on business visiting steel industries across
China for trade with
Canada. Apparently
China produces 438 billion tons of steel in
China per year. As a comparison,
North America only uses 100 billion tons/year. That's a lot of steel. Why is this worth mentioning? Apart from anything he said that
China is in a real state of transition. Some of the steel factories he visits are the oldest he's ever seen and date back to the early days of steel production, and some are the most modern in existence. He also spoke of a "west/east divide" in that
China is very wealthy, modern and advanced in the East and along the coast where we are visiting and yet the west towards
Tibet is still incredibly pastoral, agricultural and poor. To ensure that there isn't a big influx of peasants and poverty to the rich cities the government prevent residents from moving between provinces or from east to west. They do this by not giving them rights, jobs or ownership if they move.
Ahhhh.... For Dave and I the penny of realisation dropped. This is why we
are seeing so much modern growth in the cities and so little tradition of agriculture and chinese history. It is these kind of insights and learnings that you very rarely get a glimpse of when you are simply travelling from place to place like the tourists that Dave and I are so speaking to people like Jim gives you a new angle on a country that you don't read in the guidebooks.
It's now August 25th and it's time to leave - off to a new city
Xi'an the home of the famous
Terracotta Army. Again we choose to fly as a train/bus would have taken over a day of travel and was double the cost of the short 2.5hr flight. We leave from the ultra modern
Pudong Airport which is the 2nd of two airports in
Shanghai and more than an hour away by taxi so we get to see some of the outskirts of the city and the massiv construction of new homes in the American white picket style that is becoming in vogue amongst the nouveau riche. See you in
Xi'an.....
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Tricia
non-member comment
Guanzghou
How funny....this is where our factories are all located!!! Bronia you described it to a T!!! It's a DUMP!!!!!