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Published: September 9th 2006
are you standing to attention?
Tiananmen Square ... nice place for a stroll with thousands & thousands of other folks.Ni hao women de pungyou ... jintian nimen gaoxing ma?
And for those of you who cannot understand the above... hello to our friends, are you happy today?
Time to put our Mandarin lessons into practise! First, and possibly the biggest challenge travelling in China is obtaining a ticket to get to your next destination.
Trains are often full & you can spend days waiting for tickets ... if you're English & have been brought up to queue properly. When in a Chinese railway station the trick is to forget any etiquette you have ever been taught & find a way to push in the queue/mass of people, as close to the front as you can. Ticket counters are sometimes quite entertaining places as it's the scene of much angst & melodramatics, but once you are at the front of the queue someone shouts at you from behind the glass & then is the time to entertain the others with a mixture of our Hanyu & charades ... which fortuneately has proved successful for us so far: not at getting exactly the tickets we want, but at making ourselves understood! That's why we spent 13 hours on a hard seat
I spotted a great pie on the wall!
Quite a hike up to this part of the wall, but the reward was a relatively rare experience, a piece of peace! with the (usually very kind) locals squashed in with us, others standing in the aisles & food / tat sellers walking up & down continually. It's very cosy, but bottom numbing, so for long journeys, especially overnight, hard sleeper is best, which is basically like being on a bunk on a boat .. space to put you things & stretch, but horizontally rather than vertically.
Although we are not understood that well the lessons have definitely helped us at times .... particularly when ordering food as we can communicate chicken, beef, pork and 'we like spicy'... etc! So at least we know very vaguely what to expect when the bowls of food arrive.
When in Beijing one has to try Peking Roast Duck ... four of us went out to share a duck... we think that's what we ate because there was a power cut during the meal which meant we ate in the dark! I think that opening night at the new club next door was sapping all the electricity from the restaurant to leep it's mass of meon lights illuminated. Likewise, when in Inner Mongolia, hotpot should be your order of the day ... this was fun
catching up with Andrew & Jennie who we met in KL
our last night in Beijing ... having bargained a good price for beer we went into the bar & found some interesting wallpaper! to 'cook yourself' & eat, similar in style to steamboat cooking. Our favourite staple became suanla tang ... a hot & sour soup, so spicy it will get rid of most germs!
Beijing has lots to see & do: you could keep busy signseeing for a couple of weeks, but there aresome 'must dos':
The worlds' largest, and perhaps famous for the wrong reasons, public square- Tiananmen.
It certainly is 'public friendly' and the kite sellers were definitely making good profits there.
The largest & best preserved cluster of ancient buildings in China is accessed via the 'Gate of Heavenly 'Reace' which presides over one end of the square ... behind it is a realm of decadence: Halls, Temples, Gardens which were off limits to us mere mortals for 500 years until recently. But the mystical experience one might expect to feel from being in the 'Forbidden City' was somewhat diluted owing to the fact that the place is simply packed with flag bearing, loudhaler wailing tour guides with their bands of techni-coloured cap (to match the flags) tribes in tow. The domestic tourist industry is definitely booming! The Hall of Tranquility was more like a brush in
Which wall is the door on!
Home sweet home... if you're from Inner Mongolia with the paparazi where elbows were being used for greatest leverage & photo angles. I feel sorry for anyone with shares in Kodak, and the poor women sitting waiting for their next film sale and I have silently cursed the advent of digital cameras which makes for a phototaking frenzy at all of the tourist sites we have visited ... must everyone have a photo of EVERY exhibit in the musuem?
The Musuem of Chinese History is temporarily closed for what the display sign described as 'updating' of history ... maybe a better translation might be 'revising' of history, in the light of the 2008 Olympics when more foreign tourists will likely pass through. The Military Musuem was open however & had some interesting accounts of history over the last couple of centuries & earlier, but in certain exhibits the English information was somewhat (conspicuosly) lacking. The ground flow displayed a treasue trove of war boats / tanks / planes - a great place for little, or larger boys to look at war toys. The Chinese made missile Well, it must've been the biggest / best / fastest / deadliest .... ever.
Another display of the military might,
Think I'm ready for the traditional horse racing now
I have my feisty steed under control, for a few moments or maybe cowardice, is at Beijing underground city, which might not be open to visitors for much longer judging by the cranes which are stacking up new blocks of swanky pads fast, as if they were stacks of giant jenga blocks. I think that these will have made there way to the entrance to the underground city in a few months' time. It was interesting to see (and to get away from the heat & fumes of the city for a while) a glimpse of part of the network of tunnels which were built underground in around 1969, when China was slightly concerned about a potential nuclear attack. The tunnels had a capacity to hold 300,000 people nearly: seemingly a huge number, but it'd be quite a tight squeeze for the city's 14 million population.
Just like the personal pilgrimage we made to find 'Frank's Bar', out of respect for a dear landlord in KL of the same name. It is described in the guide book as a great pace for a swift, thirst quenching half (or two). I took a while & lots of map / people consulting before we got to the correct location & found that
Aiya! Get off my foot!
One of the big buddha carvings at Yungang Caves. Frank's Bar is now under a big pile of rubble.
Having done, biggest square and the largest cluster of ancient buildings, the next venture had to be world's LONGEST wall! In 2003 the myth that the Wall could be seen from space was dispelled when China's first astronaut went up & had a look for himself & confirmed that he couldn't see it. We couldn't see much of it, as it was a particularly foggy day, but we did find an amazing tour opportunity which by-passed the masses & went to a quiet part of the wall ... although it was quite a effort to get up the steep slopes & mount the wall. Incidentally, the Chinese Great Wall branded wine is worth a try: not the 35yuan bottles as there is absolutely NOTHING great about that, but the 88yuan is worth a try.
I would never dream of going to Methyr Tydfil on my holidays, but we based ourselves in Da Tong, one of the main cenres of the coal mining industry, for a couple of days. The Yungang caves can be reached from here: these caves are not a 'Cheddar Gorge' like experience but a collection
Hong Kong Fuey ... quicker than the shutter's eye
The famous Shaoling monks show some gravity defying stunts of hand dug grottoes ... over 1000 of them 7 each one contains buddhist carvings.
Another stop, Pingyao, is a relatively well preserved town inside some old city walls, & we stayed here for a few chilled days. It has retained charm & there are many local characters, traders & craftsmen living life as it must have been for about 100 years, but with mobile phones, internet access and the odd satellite dish can be seen above the higgledy-piggedly backstreet rooftops!
The Shaolin monks showed us there kung fu action in a dislay which included some gravity defying stunts & shows of strength. Clare could have done with some martial arts moves herself when catching a vagabond type trying to get into my bag at a market in Xi’an. A long scary stare had to suffice.
A fusion of cultures can be found un Xi'an. The population is predominantly Han Chinese, but their faces are slightly different shape from the Beijingers, but there is also a Muslim minority and influences from further a field as Xi’an claims to be the start of the Silk Road. It was a base for lots of trading with the west: perhaps
it explains the existence of a very good curry house there! Simon was able to quell his curry withdrawal pangs.
The main higjhlight of a trip to Xi’an is a visit to the Terracotta Warriors - this is a real treat & is the best example so far of a Chinese Historical landmark which it is not eager to exploit too readily for the tourists. Only a small fraction of what archaeologists know to be under the ground has been uncovered: this is because it takes so long for them to piece to together the fragments that have been uncovered thus far, and because the statues were actually painted very brightly & exposure to light makes this fade, so until they establish how to prevent this, the majority of the pits will remain covered. There is still plenty to see however, and you do this from a raised walkway above the statues… unless you’re the Queen or a member of the Clinton family which allows you to ‘get up close’.
Another stop in the itinery (which keeps changing) was the 'most polluted city in the world' .... clearly this was the highlight of the journey so far &
we simply wanted to stay there & breath in the air: but we had to keep moving. Personally, I thought that Mexico held the top spot, but I haven't been able to clarify the claim by searching the internet as searches thus far have been unsuccessful, just like the attempt to keen up to date with news via the BBC website, but 'auntie beeb' is obviously far too controversial.
The last week has been spent breathing in fairly 'fresh air' & we have been blessed with blue skies as we have moved to out of large towns for a while. Adapting to the cold weather & high altitude (upto 3600 metres, or about 12,000 feet in old money) in the Tibetan village of Xiahe for long walks, chats with the monks, spinning about about 1200 prayer wheels ... never quite escaping the smell of yak butter & feasting on 'Big Yak' burgers ... a tad chewy! This is a truly spiritual place where to catch of glimpse of Tibet without actually going there ... pilgrims come from near & far to prostrate themselves around the monastery: they are so devout you can see these people have a hard life
from the expressions on weathered faces 9as well as their odour1) & command respect.
We were very fortuneate on one day to witness a ceremony which begam with the monks gathering on sime steps & their chanting became louder as more joined in ... up to 400 of them I would guess. Their mantras built into a sound not unlike a mixture of choir boys & didgeridoo sounds- it was very consuming ... what a treat! We were then invited unto the temple while they continued their ceremony inside, in the dark - the hairs on the the back of our arms stood up & the sense of smell & sound were evoked.
The Tibetan theme will carry on in the next blog .... coming your way soon (or when local IT facilities allow!) Hope you enjoy this for now - best wishes to all x
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Franco
Franklin H
Also noticed Chinese faces in Xian differed from those in Beijing and more so, Shanghai. Many did look like those of the Terra Cotta Warriors, I thought.