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Published: October 1st 2006
Panda Cubs
Just weeks old. Yes - I think that is a smile We were planning to spend our first full day in Xi'an admiring the world famous Terracotta Army. Instead our day revolved around buying train tickets. We may have reached the 'tourist trail' but there's still plenty to keep us challenged. The highlight of the day's episode was perhaps when I found myself leading a solitary round of applause in the ticket queue (not the first time this has happened to me).
I've tried hard to defend the Chinese - harping on about their tolerance for each other and so on, but at times you just want to scream out at them 'WHY!?' But when you remember that these people tolerate so much from their government then tolerating a few people in a train ticket queue is nothing.
We had a simple task - to buy tickets from Xi'an to Chengdu. Rather than go to the actual station to get the tickets & rather than pay our hostel an extortionate booking fee, we opted to go to a local train ticket booking office. We met people who had queued around twenty minutes the night before. We queued for around two & a
half hours. The reason it took so long? Not because it was a long queue, but because people will constantly push in at the front while everyone stands around & watches. One man took one hour to get his tickets while he let numerous people push in & interrupt his transaction.
Why did these people stand in line for over two hours, letting people push in? Apparently people just don't want to make a fuss. Buying train tickets or persecution & torture of members of a peaceful religion, it doesn't matter what it is, they will just sit by & watch.
When the guy who had been there buying his ticket for an hour finally left I coudn't help but applaud & cheer. I had no idea what the crowd's reaction would be, but it seemed to be favourable. Later I plucked up the courage to approach a man who was trying to push in. I tapped him on the shoulder & pointed out that there was a queue that he seemed not to have noticed. He left quite rapidly.
I felt like I had started a revolution.
Much as I love Beijing, by the time
Dafo - Leshan
He's pretty big (check out the size of the people by his feet) we left we were ready to move on & see something different. After a week of smoggy haze we were also hoping to see the sky again. The train was hardly out of the station when I noticed hills far on the horizon. Having not seen more than a few hundred metres around us for awhile it was a pleasant surprise. After an hour or so we were treated to a magnificent picture postcard sunset.
The main reason people visit Xi'an is for the Terracotta Army. The lifesize terracotta figures purpose was to stand guard over the mausoleum of Emperor Qin Shi Huang, built over two thousand years ago. The army of soldiers, horses & chariots numbers over 7000. It's hard to put what you are seeing into context - for example each figure has different facial features & is believed to be modelled on the people who built them. To look at it is an amazing sight, but you really need to try & understand just what it is you are looking at to realise what a collosal place it is.
There's other things to see in Xi'an but our other highlight was finding the Muslim quarter
Terracotta Warriors
The whole area is still a work in progress & their food. I had some delicious dumplings & we had some very nice bread. Sadly there was also an unfortunate incident with what looked like divine fried potato but turned out to be a vile jelly substance.
Having had such issues with the train ticket our reward was that we travelled the 18 hours on to Chengdu in Soft Sleeper. I've never experienced the top end class before & will probably never afford to again. We had a four berth cabin, shut off from the outside world of cigarette smoke, spitting, noise & lack of any space. There's even a special waiting room at the station which has a special entrance to the platform, meaning NO PUSHING! Heaven. We shared our cabin with two British people & having hardly spoken to Westerners in weeks, proceeded to talk almost non stop until we all drifted off to sleep. I'm sure I bored them senseless.
The reason for visting Chengdu is to see the giant pandas. There were a few other sights - including our first up close & personal encounter with a giant Mao statue. I would have expected to come across some earlier in the trip.
Fallen Terracotta Warriors
Still waiting to be excavated.... The pandas may not be wild, but there's only a handful left & to see a wild one you'd probably need to wait around for a lifetime. Pandas don't do a lot, they are famous for lazing around, eating & not a lot else. They are however pretty impressive & pretty cute. Our timing was good - in the past few weeks five panda cubs had been born, including two sets of twins (apparently a miracle). It seems that pandas need as much help as we can give to stop them becoming extinct. When gving birth to more than one cub, mothers don't really know what to do & more often than not kill one cub.
Sad for pandas, good for us tourists as it means that a couple of cubs were being looked after in an incubator & we got to see them. They are very small & they are very cute. They are also subject to the constant bombardment of camera flashes & auto focus lamps. There is a big sign saying 'no flash' but Chinese people don't really go in for obeying signs. A number of westerners were commenting on the Chinese use of flashes, but
what they didn't seem to care about is that most digital cameras have a red auto focus beam that shines on the subject - in this case the eyes of a few week old panda cubs. You can easily turn these off, but no other westerners seemed to notice theirs.
Anyone who has ever travelled will know all about the many 'small world' coincidences where you run into random people from the depths of your past in the most unlikely of places. I knew there was a very vague chance we would run into someone, probably an STA Traveller, but having not been in the habit of booking people's flights myself for awhile, I thought it would be Kylie who saw lots of people. One night in Xi'an we were quietly playing cards or reading our books when someone asked if we had a light. Kylie's said that we should take up smoking a few times as that's a good way to meet people. Probably true, but I value our lungs more. We were tired & had an early start so made little effort to be much more friendly to the guy. But he persisted. Turns out I booked
his flights to China almost a year ago. I didn't remember him to be honest, but he seemed to remember me - I'd been telling him when he booked that I was taking Madarin classes. Shame that we failed to learn anything at those classes at all.
We had a very vague itinerary in mind when we came to China. Sometimes it included the Silk Road, other times Xanadu. Chinese beaches were written off early on. Tibet came & went daily. There's often discussion about whether you should or shouldn't go to Tibet - although there's rarely discussion over whether you should or shouldn't go to China. The new rail link to Tibet is still somehow included in the news here almost daily & I understand that it's made the news in other parts of the world too. The Chinese genuinely believe they are doing Tibetans a huge favour by building roads & railways & by increasing investment & industry. Perhaps they are helping Tibet as a region, but it's mainly the newly arrived Han Chinese that benefit, not the local Tibetans. But this isn't the place for a Tibet debate & we'll save the Han Chinese issue for
Taxi
They are very proud of their pandas in Chengdu. next time. For us today, the Tibet railway means that Tibet is full of Chinese tourists. It's still summer holidays & with the railway & Tibet documentaries being on TV daily, Tibet is apparently full to bursting. Hence for that (& various other reasons) we are not in Tibet. Not this time anyway.
Rather than travel from Chengdu to Lhasa which was briefly the plan, we travelled just a few hours south to Leshan, where I started another revolution. Leshan is a pleasant town, famous for the Grand Buddha, known as Dafo. Dafo is the biggest of his kind in the world - he's carved entirely out of the side of a cliff at the confluence of three rivers. Over a thousand years ago it was common for boats to sink at the junction of the rivers. Dafo was built over a period of 90 years, with the intention that he would watch over the waters & boats passing by. As it happens he did manage to stop the boats sinking - perhaps because the excess rock carved away all landed in the river below, making it a less dangerous place to be. Dafo is a staggering 71 meters
Panda activity
Eating. Resting. Another hard day. (230 feet) high, & has 3 metre long fingers.
You used to take a boat across the river to see Dafo from the water, then get off the boat to see him in person. We jumped on a very expensive boat only to find that you can no longer disembark. Already being late in the day & with a bus to catch the next morning, I wasn't impressed. To know Dafo you need to see him up close. Somehow I convinced the boat to drop us off. Another revolution. It was no surprise that other people got off too - no one wants to pay a fortune & not even see what they really came to see.
To the Chinese this giant Buddha has little spiritual significance. He's just a big carving in a rock, and for them the highlight is to have a photo taken so it looks like they are picking his nose. We were far more sensible about the whole thing. I have a photo of Kylie & Dafo mid hongi.
Bureaucracy in China is quite special. The amount of paperwork, receipts & jobsworth that goes into simple tasks is often quite staggering. I'm
always intrigued by the way one task can be done so differently one place from the next. Most of our funds are carried as Traveller's Cheques & we are changing these on an alarmingly regular basis. You can only change them to cash at the Bank of China, so you would expect a standard procedure across most of their banks. But there's not - the only constant is the paperwork. Some places require everything in triplicate, others nothing at all. All bank tellers have a name 'chop' - a personal stamp that they use to mark things rather than sign or initial them & rather than staple or paperclip papers together an elaborate gluey paste is normally used.
Today the bank teller didn't want to cash my US$100 traveller's cheque because she thought the signature I made on the cheque when I bought it in NZ & the signature I made today were a little different. I admitted it - they were a little different. But I tried to explain that as I bought & signed over 60 cheques at the same time, my signature was bound to deteriorate after awhile. She still wasn't happy. If you've signed a
Lion
Our favourite souvenir cheque at the bank, you can't take it away & use it elsewhere so I was determined that she cash it. I'd been using my UK passport, so produced my NZ one as extra identification back up. That also has a very slightly different signature. She said that the picture didn't look like me. I admit I was pretty spotty that day, and my hair was a different colour (another story there) but it's pretty obvious that it's me. It wasn't until I pulled out a total of eight forms of ID that she gave in & cashed my money. Perhaps it was my rather dubious looking Cook Islands driving license that finally clinched it.
In direct contrast to this, Kylie normaly has no trouble cashing cheques - even though the signature on them has her married name & her passport has her maiden name. Same story at airports, tickets say one, passport says the other & almost no one even notices.
Had a great dinner in Leshan, a point & cook meal on a street corner. Often some of the best meals are the ones that don't involve a menu - you just point at the food
you fancy & it all gets thrown in the pan. Very useful when no one has any idea what anyone else is talking about.
From Leshan we left the beaten track again. As we weren't going to Tibet we decided to get as close as we could without leaving China. And that episode will be coming soon...
But before we move on, a few words about Chinese toilets. It's hard to talk about China without talking about toilets, but if you are not into toilet talk then I suggest you leave us here until next time.
Contrary to popular opinion, the Chinese are believed to have been the inventors of flushing toilets - over 2000 years ago. Strangely they have progressed little since then. Most toilets in larger Chinese towns & cities are much the same as the rest of Asia - a squat toilet. When used sensibly these are fine - in fact studies apparently show that squatting on an Asian toilet rather than sitting on a Western one is better for you. You find squat toilets in most hotels, hostels & public WC's. A squat toilet is a real toilet just a different shape from
WC
...and this is a clean one what we are used to in the West. It has the normal toilet accessories (although paper normally goes in a bin rather than down the hole) and they normally flush away any evidence you may have left.
The more you stray from the bigger towns though, the more rustic the toilets become. They may morph from individually closeted hideaways to an open plan trough. The trough more than likely runs very slowly downhill, and a stream of water may or may not run through it. The stream may from time to time hit a dam & cause a small tsunami. It may also wash past other people's deposits as you glance down.
If it has cubicles at all, they will simply be a small wall, positioned at just the right height so that you can see other people's heads beside you. As for doors - most unlikely.
When these are clean they aren't really so bad. Once you get used to sharing such normally intimate moments that is. However the main problem is people's failiure to stick to basic toilet rules. I won't go into detail, but we have seen some despicable things in toilets. We have
images that will be with us until we relieve ourselves for the very last time. People will do the most abominable things in the toilet, things that make you question everything you know about common sense & hygeine.
What never seems to suprise me though is that they then go on to wash extremely thoroughly. Waiting to wash in a toilet can be a time consuming affair & of course people will push & shove to get there before you as well. The washing doesn't just stay with the hands -suddenly it's a full body wash. Arms, face, any skin that's available. And once they finish washing - they start again.
I will leave you with one image. Just thinking about it again makes me feel quite ill - I've come close to losing my composure a few times when I've seen these in some of the worst toilets. At a distance they are fine, but up close & personal they are just too much. The image is that of maggots slowly making their way towards me....
in case you're wondering we're in Vietnam but not where typhoon is!
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ben
non-member comment
Hongi????
What does mid hongi mean??? If its what I think I don't think Kylie's mouth would be big enough. Have fun in Nam.