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Published: November 25th 2006
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Shanghai
China's home grown rival to Hong Kong as the country's economic powerhouse. It's an impressive vibrant city. Although centered on the ex-colonial waterfront (the Bund), the new Shanghai skyline across the Huangpu river in Pudong dominates. The huge new style skyscrapers, including the bizarre Jetsons style Oriental Pearl Tower and the enormous Jinmao Tower. As well as adding a funky skyline they symbolise Chinese commercial intent.
The new skyline comes to life at night when neon dominates in all its many colours with a syncronised light show similar but not quite to the scale of the daily showing in Hong Kong Harbour. In many ways I prefer the Shanghai skyline to that of Hong Kong although much smaller the cool futuristic buildings give a real unique feel to this hectic city.
The construction of new Shanghai continues at pace, the building work never stops. Sites are in operation well into the night, annoyingly something we discovered first hand as the workers directly outside our hostel never stop or sleep, seemingly making as much noise as humanly possible 24 hours a day!
On arrival we checked into Captains Lodge Hostel, a good clean place to stay where
we met a good bunch of lads from around the globe. One of which Roger a Kiwi who seemed to be a target for the rip off merchants - He narrowly avoided paying for a hefty bill for 'The Tea Con' but somehow ended up paying a small fortune for some flashing roller skates! The nightlife is good here; we all had a couple of good nights out on Bar Street and then followed the crowds to the packed Windows 2 club.
We were lucky enough to be in Shanghai at the time of the national holiday... Literally thousands upon thousands of people walked the main streets causing chaos, roads were blocked and the underground stopped. Each member of the crowd was armed with inflatable mallets and base ball bats. I'm not sure what they did or where they went it, seemed like they just wandered the streets aimlessly in gangs hitting each other with their mallets!
Forgetting we were on a backpacker’s budget we ventured to The Grand Hyatt Hotel. This flush hotel is the highest in the world. After shaking off an Alton Towers style head rush from a lift which reached an incredible 62 floors
in less than 10 seconds we arrived at Cloud 9 Bar. On the 89th floor it's the highest bar in the world. Whilst in the highest hotel in the world drinking in the highest bar in the world it seemed only fair that we paid the highest price in the world (probably!) for some Mojito's! Well were else can you get this view? Offering staggering 360 degrees sweeping views of Shanghai normally only capable from the window seat in an aeroplane. We only had one drink each, suddenly realised how much we had spent - our budget didn't cater for this and promptly left before the waiter asked for a tip!
There's not that much to occupy you in the day time as this booming city thrives from commercial business rather than tourism. I would recommend Shanghai's Modern Art Gallery which has thousands of astonishing exhibits from giant Buddha's made from pills to dinosaur skeletons housed in futuristic neon space rockets! This museum was well worth a visit and much better than the very random Chinese sex museum which is only worth visiting has a last resort!
One thing that is a must in modern day Shanghai is
the hilariously bad Bund Sightseeing Tunnel - An underground train ride under the Huangpu River. In typical Chinese style it’s been neon-ed up to the eyeballs, it hard to describe - A tunnel full of crazy neon lights and inflatable clowns, it's almost like somebody's bad dream. London Underground could take some pointers...
Hangzhou
While waiting for our train to Beijing we had a couple of days to kill and after reading the rave reviews in the lonely liar (Lonely Planet) we decided to go to Hangzhou with Roger the skate boy. For Chinese it's kind of like Mecca - everyone it seems wants to say they've been to Hangzhou. It's the second biggest tourist attraction in China for the Chinese. I'm guessing this is because of the history rather the natural beauty as this place used to be a little weekend retreat for the long line of emperors.
There is a Chinese saying to the effect: 'In Heaven there is paradise, on Earth Hangzhou and Suzhou'. In my humble opinion Hangzhou is not paradise by any stretch and I can't understand why the Lonely Planet rate this place so highly. Hangzhou is most famous for its
West Lake. It is a big lake full of lotus flowers. It is ok but nothing special. Unfortunately due to pollution or the bad weather I'm not sure which, you can barely see the north shore of the lake which is only 3km away.
For an extra forty Yuan you can jump on a boat and visit the Main Pagoda in the center of the lake. It was ok, more strange that it had been constructed over the preserved and displayed remains of several former pagodas that had been sacked, repaired and rebuilt several times over the years from various wars. Obviously steeped in history, attracting plenty of tourists the Chinese have capitalised on this by turning it into a tacky souvenir shop. Honestly, though, hold on to your 40 Yuan.
A good chunk of the Chinese tourists seemed more interested in us than in the lake, not since India have so many people pointed and blatantly stared at my skin in wonder. We must have posed for over a dozen pictures with random Chinese tourists. What Dave previously called 'Tony's Disease' Alan has affectionally renamed this phenomenon 'Giraffe syndrome'!!
After the long walk we all headed
off to the infamous Tea Village and had some local brew. Not bad. But we had a nightmare trying to get back to the bus station, with few people speaking English, the huge queues for buses and not one taxi driver would stop for us! We ended up missing our bus back to Shanghai!
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