The land of Mao no more!

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In Kunming, after the operation with was, in hindsight, successful, I was kept in the Nr 1 Peoples Hospital for three days for observation, mostly on a drip and with a batch of pills periodically. On the second day I was allowed to walk in the passage and on the third day, a Saturday, I was discharged. Ann took care of the finances which amounted to R30.000 or 3000 Euro and that included a batch of pills for one month.
We went back to the youth hostel where Ann prepared to go, for a few days, to the Tiger Leaping Gorge and I would stay in our room to rest and get better. When Ann returned from her trip, of which she will tell you everything in her website (www.vrolijksontrek.com), I felt a lot better and we started to plan our exit from China, back to Pakistan and our car in Sost.
We left Kunming on Saturday the 6th of September for Xi’an (33hours) and proceeded after a short delay in the station’s waiting room to Lanzhou (9 hours) where we booked into a hotel for two days to catch up on our sleep.

At this point I must tell you how I experienced the massive earthquake that caused so much damage and loss of life on the 14th of May 2008. I had written it soon after it happened but lost it when my external hard drive with this part of my blog fell and got damaged. But it was a scary experience, so here it is:

I arrived at Lanzhou after a long train journey from Hami (16 hours).
Long, but not very stressful. This time I had decided to try the sleeper coach option, and that worked very well.
Two days before I had traveled 16 hours on a hard seat amidst what we would call “rural people” with all their sacks, bags and smells and that experience had begged for another option.
So, after a good night sleep and a relaxed ride during which I was approached by Bessie, a Chinese housewife who had a few words of English, it was agreed I would accompany her to an all-Chinese hotel, usually closed to Europeans. We booked in but within half an hour I was asked to leave, because . . .
In another hotel (4-star, nogal) I was able to get a room at a vastly discounted price of Y200, on the 17th floor.
This was one hotel where the bathroom held what it was intended for: a bathtub. No sooner had I noticed that or I prepared a foam bath (courtesy of the management), something I had been missing since the day we left South Africa, with one exception in Holland.
It was just after four o’clock in the afternoon (local time). Suitably relaxed I was disturbed by the sudden motion of the building: it swayed from left to right, to and fro and in tune with the motion swayed moi, in the bathtub.
It wasn’t real frightening, more unearthly, literally
Later that day I learned that a strong earthquake (6,8 on the Richter scale) with its epicenter a few hundred km to the South, had caused a lot of damage and a great loss of life. An early assessment included the collapse of a school, burying 900 pupils under the rubble.
Life can be cruel sometimes.

I recall this section because also this time, in a different hotel at a much lower price, the bathroom was equipped with a bathtub and once again I could relax as one can only do lying half emerged in hot water.
On Wednesday we railed to Urumqi (21 hours) where we stayed in a hotel for one day. The last part took us from Urumqi to Kashgar overnight (24 hours) where we arrived on Saturday the 13th. Here we will stay for three days and move by bus to Sost on Tuesday the 16th. That will take two days and by the end of that trip I’ll be ready for a boat cruise, I think.

As we come near the end of our stay in China, there are a few things that merit mentioning. The railway system for instance, is a marvel. Of all the trips we made, sometimes over distances of thousands of Km, we never had to change trains. The way large groups of passengers are “processed” is another example of good organization. As I mentioned in a previous blog, the railway stations are huge and passengers are guided in dedicated area’s where they can wait for their train to be ready for them. In the waiting rooms are a shop where most people by their bottled water and instant noodles, (very popular in China), a toilet and hot water. Hot water is also supplied in all trains for those noodles and tea. Mostly all floors in waiting rooms and in the train itself are kept clean with brush and mop, not once a week but several times a day. The runner in the passages of sleeper coaches are rolled up near the end of the trip after having been brushed (I have never seen a vacuum cleaner at work in China and that would be tragic if brushes were not used so often) so that the vinyl or linoleum floor can be mopped properly. The floors in all public places I’ve seen are tiled with either natural polished stone or large ceramic tiles, facilitating easy cleaning.
When you say the Chinese are obsessed with cleanliness, you’re not far from the truth.
Something else that caught my attention is that all streetlights and lights in trains, hotel lobby’s and -rooms, all aircon units everywhere (with their heat exchange units outside and remote-controlled fan-units inside, connected by a hosepipe only) work, all TV’s in busses, hotel rooms and -lobby’s work and generally everything that is supposed to be in working order does work properly. That is even more remarkable when seeing the massive neon advertising lights on buildings where whole walls of 22 floors sometimes light up with beautifully changing light images of all kind, not just Coca Cola, thank you. In fact I’ve never seen the use of advertising in various forms more intensely as here, where TV ads for instance may be repeated, maybe with one or two other ads in between, for 10 or 12 times! It’s not just telling you something, it’s rubbing it in thoroughly.
And the Chinese are a proud people, they love China and for many Mao tse Dong is a hero. They have little knowledge of history it seems which tells us that he had millions of Chinese killed and brought the country to its knees twice economically. He was “the Helmsman” for them and his Mausoleum next to Tiananmen Square is visited by droves of worshippers each day. Which brings me to the fact that tourism in China is not what it is in most European countries: here it’s the Chinese that visit China and buy souvenirs. At all the places we have visited it were groups of Chinese that swamped the sites, following the flag of their guide and queued at entrance gates and often obscured the things we wanted to see: murals, statues and other artifacts that were of interest to us.
Apart from historical sights they have at least two modern engineering projects to be proud of: the Three Gorges dam that has tamed and regulated the flow of the Yangtze river, will generate electrical power equal to 18 nuclear power plants and will prevent flooding that has cost the lives of over 1 million people in the past 100 years. (courtesy Lonely Planet). The dam is over 2km long and 185m high. It was built by Chinese engineers and financed by Chinese capital, both of which the western world had serious doubts would be possible to achieve. Not only that, but the project was finished ahead of schedule, a feat overshadowed by the a host of concerns that have been raised about the cost, the flooded archeological sites and the more than 1,5 million people that had to be relocated after their homes of generations were washed away, and find them a new way to make a living. The dam will back up the river for 550 km.
The second project that the Chinese are proud of is the railway line from Lanzhou to Laza in Tibet. It’s the highest railway line in the world and travelers are fed oxygen during the trip. In the Western world it was seen as an impossible project but in the end the railway is there and although restrictions are in place to travel to Tibet freely, it can be done. 2,5 days from Beijing is all it takes.
Small clever things are also very much visible. Builders for instance use a sort of clamp that can hold 4 bricks at a time, making the use of their hands unnecessary. While walking along the street you will notice scooters and bicycles glide by without making a noise. They have a low-voltage battery-powered motor in their rear wheels that makes this possible. We once hired such a moped and it worked beautifully, carrying us over a distance of some 50 km before the battery had to be recharged.
Plugs in wash-basins and bathtubs are mostly fixed little gadgets that can swivel to open or close, can’t be taken away by someone who needs it for himself and vanish without a ripple. It’s really very clever
And everywhere buildings, bridges and other projects are going up. I noticed that every building under construction, in fact everything that’s under construction, has workers busy with it. Nothing just lies there to be finished some other time. The outer skin of scaffolding is used to cover the construction from top to bottom with green shade net to prevent anything from falling from the working platforms. And the cranes are supported by the project, making it virtually impossible to topple over.
All sidewalks wherever you go are paved, yet another feature only part of the rest of the world in accustomed to.
Beijing and other big cities like Shanghai call up other things worth mentioning, like the magnificent design of many buildings. Instead of “Russian” inspired massive blocks of concrete, there are scores of buildings where architects obviously went out of their way to create something fresh, something playful or imaginative. I’ve seen round buildings (resting on one side), three-cornered buildings and massive “gate” buildings with a sort of arched connection between two twin buildings. In some cases you ask yourself what the cost must have been of constructing details that have no function other than making the building different from others or more attractive? It’s amazing what an inventive mind can do with glass and aluminum when allowed to live out his fantasies.
I left Beijing just before I could take a picture of the new CCCTV building which is destined to become famous.
And the sheer size and volume of it all!
And than hospitals. I’ve been in the unfortunate situation where I needed medical help and where better to go than a hospital. In those cases where I needed it most a hospital was nearby, attention to my problem was given straight away and the treatment was efficient. There was no lack of facilities and no shortage of help. What surprised us was the fact that starting at 7am onwards the ward was filled not only with patients and nurses but also with family members of patients who came in to wash their fathers or sons and mothers, feed them and comfort them. I had to explain to the nurses that my wife would come at 10 am to attend to me, a chore not part of nursing staff obviously. Generally speaking I’m glad what happened to me happened in China instead of South Africa or Europe! Even in Kathmandu, Nepal where I needed some attention to a problem I encountered, and poor as the place may be, the treatment was first class and helped me to understand that sometimes not everything can be cured completely.

As a kid I was in England in 1945, yes that is along time ago, and was surprised to see signs telling people not to spit. Especially in busses and bioscope buildings, the “No spitting” signs were everywhere. It seems to me that countries in the far East, not only China, should make men (and women) stop spitting as well. It seems more habit than necessity, because the Chinese don’t chew tobacco or anything else. It’s not the depositing of slime on the pavement only, but the sound that precedes this, the long and loud hawking that is so objectionable and can be heard everywhere. The spit mixes with dust on the ground and forms a black spot that, as seen on Tiananmen Square, is hard to remove by groups of students or other workers, armed with plaster knives and rags. In busses and trains the habit seems to be fairly well under control, although waking up in the middle of the night by someone having to “clear his or her throat” in not unusual.
It seems to be the only thing I really have a problem with in China. The other thing that bothers me is the language problem, not their fault! For four-and-a-half month I now have been in an environment where communication, intended or not, is impossible. You never understand what people around you are talking about, you never know what they want to tell you if they address you and reading of the Chinese language is equally impossible. It goes both ways because although many headlines in magazines and many signs in China tell you in English where you are, what you must do or not do (“No driving while sleeping”) and “No occupation while stabling” in trains, telling you not to use the toilet when the train is stationary, it means nothing to the Chinese unless accompanied by the Chinese equivalent. Even China is not a word the Chinese understand. Their word for China is completely different. Ask a taxi driver to take you to the station means noting to him, although there very often is a sign near the railway station to say that’s where you are. “Waiting room”, “Ticket office” and many other words are used, only for the benefit of the foreigner. And it becomes even more difficult when you want to be taken to places you come from, as a tourist, on the other side of the world to see things like “the Forbidden city” or “the Summer Palace”, places which have a unique meaning in our knowledge of China. The average Chinese doesn’t know what you want from him.
Otherwise the people are friendly enough, helpful and courteous unless they want to have that one seat in the bus they can see from the queue outside. Then they can shove and push in order to get there, but I would call that an exception. They will try to find out where you come from and little kids will come up to you to say “hello!”, much to the admiration of their little friends. We were once approached by a young girl who asked us if she may ask us a few questions and after having conducted a simple conversation with us went back to report to her proud parents who were sitting on a bench nearby. She must have come especially for the occasion to the youth hostel where she could expect a foreigner to be around.
Policemen carry no weapons. That is another thing that will catch you when you come to visit this “commy country” where allegedly the people are suppressed and can not demonstrate. It may be true, but for the outsider there is not much if anything to indicate that the population is suffering. It is a subject I have discussed with a number of other tourists and they all agree with me that the Chinese we see seem to be happily pursuing their quest to make money.
And what about sex? We know Chinese families are allowed one child. They marry young and get their first and only baby when the mother is still about 22 years old. Chinese women are mostly slim with small breasts and look after themselves very well, but there is hardly an indication to show that sex is important in China. Yet, there usually is a packet of condoms in the hotel room, to get a phone call there at night around ten where a female voice disconnects the connection when a female voice answers is very common. I once answered the phone when a female voice just wanted me to say “yes or no”. It is that easy! And when looking at the shelves in pharmacies with all kinds on condoms displayed you get the impression it would take at least a solid month of fornicating to try them all out.
But on TV, in advertising and films, soapies and chat-shows (*) there is no getting further than brushing lips while fully clothed).
(*) As far as TV is concerned, there are over 70 channels, all filled with Chinese productions. There is a dedicated feature film channel that shows foreign and local productions and some channels will show a feature film at night, but all films are dubbed in Chinese and only the films on English CCTV (9) are in English. There is also a channel where dubbed foreign feature films are shown with English subtitles but that kind of English is mostly just understandable by Chinese: The translation is awful!.
To bring this report to a conclusion I would say that China has impressed and surprised me enormously. It has so much to offer both as far as sights as well as it’s people and achievements are concerned that it is really quiet impossible to sum it all up in one short blog entry. But anyone thinking of a far-away holyday should put China high on the list. Keep your eyes open and enjoy the smells of eateries, visit market places and mix with the locals, eat kebab and noodles from street vendors and look in awe at the fantastically up- market shopping malls. The variety of things to see and to do are endless. Keep in mind not to litter: China is clean and organized. If you enjoy the combination of all this things, China is your place to be!
Good luck!

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