China
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Folks,
2 weeks in china already - haven't written for a while because (1)
we've spent a lot of time in transit on trains, boats, buses, even
2 flights (distances are huge in china), and (2) we've both been
sick with a gastro type bug we caught on the yangtze boatride.
Took a bus ride accoss the border and then an overnight train to
the quaint little town called Yangshuo. The journey just confirmed
all my predjudices about China - everything just seemed to turn
grey after the border, loads of high-rise housing, factories and
smog. But seriously, once the weather improved and it stopped raining,
it suddenly got a lot better!
"One country Two systems" is the official line here so
now: everyone is equal but some people are more equal than others!
The most suprising thing about China is how much money there is
here! Some people are fabulously wealthy. I've seen dozens of plush
gated-communities each containing maybe 100 mansions!! 200 million
people live in a sanitised shopping-malled 'paradise' and the rest,
the other 1.2 billion live in smoggy factory towns and villages.
Using the internet here is a bit big-brother, even needed my passport
to use a cafe the other day. Can't access to any proper news site
- they're blocking the BBC news site and CNN, even football sites
in some places!
First stop was Yangshuo - a little backpacker town set in the limestone
mountains of Guanxi Province in the south-mid-west. Did some mountain
biking in the villages around the town and took a short course in
the local lingo - Manadarin chinese! Fun and very useful especially
numbers!
Saw some rats on sticks in the local market, crispy and delicious
- there's a saying that goes something like: the chinese eat anything
with 4 legs except the table and chairs! So far we've eaten snail
and snake...
From Yangshuo (Guilin) we took a flight to a city of 10 million
people called Changqing on the banks of the Yangtze.
China's full of huge cities and towns I've never heard of!!
Spent a day in the city, sight-seeing before joining a boat to take
us down the Yangtze to see the 3 gorges damn project!
The 3 gorges project involves blocking the Yangtze river with a
mammoth dam 2km wide creating the biggest head of water in the world
- apparently by damning the river they're planning to raise the
water level 100 metres and the controversial bit is that this involves
displacing 1.2 million people living in towns along the river to
do it.
The dam is already complete and they're raising the water level
in phases building whole brand new towns 50 metres higher and demolishing
the old as they go. Oh yeah it also involves loads of historical
sites getting flooded too....
Anyway, the chinese have turned the whole project into a national-pride-technical-achievement
thing and turned into a huge tourist attraction. The scale of the
project is very impressive especially when an entire new town only
takes 6 years to build!
We visited the "city of ghosts" soon to be flooded, a
half demolished town like a scene from Saving private ryan. Visited
a couple of temples they've saved or purpose built hard to tell
which.The chinese are hastily trying to re-assemble the cultural
heritage they destroyed since the 50's.
New buddist temples are popping up all over the place. We've only
seen a couple of genuinely old ones in 2 weeks.
After the boat trip we took a flight to Shanghai for a few hours
before taking an overnight ferry to an island in the South China
sea called Putuoshan. More of a theme park than a national park
with lots of new temples to visit complete with monks who smoked,
spat and used mobile phones!! Landscaped photo opportunities galore
- had a few nice beaches too and it was a nice break after the smog
of the Yangtze.
A fast boat and then a bus to the beautiful lakeside city called
Hangzhou for a couple of days - visited some genuinely ancient temples
with stone carved laughing buddahs, gold-leafed pavillions and even
a french supermarket - lovely.
Another train back to Shanghai where we've spent the last couple
of days - brilliant - there's a weirdly american feel to the city
and some areas like the 'french consession' seem like anywhere but
China.
Loads of money here, awsome oriental skyscrapers, a big youth culture,
loads of shopping malls, museums, galleries, Shanghai has 128 KFCs
and 20 odd Mcdonalds - there's even a copycat fried chicken chain
fronted by a chinese looking Colonel Saunders(?)
Leaving town tommorow heading towards the terracotta army and Beijing.
More soon
Arrived in Xian this morning on the sleeper from
Suzhou (prenounced 'Sue-joe'). Off to see the terracotta army tommorow
morning and then take another sleeper north to I'm not sure where!
Suzhou - famous for its beautiful chinese style gardens full of
rocks, pavillions, water, bonzai and sometimes concrete boats! The
city is hosting a world heritage conference in July so typically
they're demolishing the whole place by hand with sledge hammers
and re-building it all again! Quite liked it in spite of the choking
dust - lots of quirky little shops selling all sorts of goodies
for nothing prices from factory overruns/seconds to discontinued-toys.
Xian - another massive city and relatively prosperous since they
discovered the terracotta army buried 30km away in the 1970s.
Xian is situated in China's interior close to where the famed spice
route begins/ends. An ancient walled city with a large muslim community
- as ever the city's monuments and landmarks have been moved about
a bit to make way for a big roundabout but its still an impressive
place with a lot of history.
Dumplings - back on the local food now after our near-porcelain
experiences! Dumplings are the best and safest food we've had in
china. Some are like japanese gyoza filled with celery + pork while
others are like fuffy buns that can have chopped green vegetables,
pork or even some sort of sweet black bean stuff in 'em.
Had a weird lunch today in a popular local muslim-chinese restaurant:
two large disc shaped rice dumplings arrived at our table which
were taken away by the waitress and crumbled by a machine (she realised
we didn't have a clue what to do! - this is an optional extra officianados
crumble their dumplings by hand - we just nibbled ours hungrily!)
then she took the bowls to the kitchen where they added mutton and
beef soup. Not too bad after we added the coriander and chilli to
flavour it a bit more!
Internet cafes here are massive: the one were in at the moment has
150 flat-screen stations full of chain-smoking teenagers and old
blokes playing networked games. Cafes here seem to be used by gamers
mostly because eveything can be filtered + monitored, but at home
users can access any site they want! (assuming they can afford a
computer in the first place).
Off to hike the Great Wall of China tommorow 10 kilometres mostly
uphill - leaving at 6:30am so we don't get sun-stroke (its been
a scorcher in Beijing today) Sarah's gone to the Opera and I've
been doing practical stuff like shopping for breakfast as we leave
too early to get it at the hotel: 2 bananas, 2 Packets of Biscuits,
a loaf of Bread, some butter and 2 bottles of water! It has to be
said that the food has been pretty dismal in mainland China so far
and it's a far cry from the cantonese style chinese food we all
know and love in the rest of the world, come back MSG, all is forgiven!
Beijing - a tale of two cities... Arrived yesterday by train. Like
so many big towns and cities in China Beijing is like a film set
behind the front row of glitzy high rise office blocks, restaurants
and shopping plazas of Main Street are piles of bricks with corrugated
iron roofs where people live!
One of our guides told us face value is very important in china
and he's not kidding, superficially Shanghai and Beijing both look
any thriving city in Europe or the States but just behind the facade
its very much back to basics!
At the moment whole neighbourhoods of people living in huge low-rise
communes are being forcably paid off and relocated in some distant
suburb then the land is redeveloped into malls and hotels just in
time for the olympics - quelle surprise!
Beijing is vast (in parts) - Our hotel is just off an enormous 18-lane
road lined with buildings each as big as Liverpool Street Station
for as far as the eye can see in either direction! Tienamen Square
on the other hand was much smaller than I'd expected (but not Sarah)
- I thought that the building with Maos portrait on it would be
a tiny pin-prick at the far end of a massive square but in fact
Mao's mausoleum and huge a cenotaph thing seem to be slap bang in
the middle!!
There's no getting away from people in China and the Forbidden city
is the most extreme tourist experience - at first we found the 40-strong
chinese tourist groups a bit irritating but hey it is their country
afterall! and besides we've found they're usually a friendly bunch!
A pale complexion and my near-white hair makes me a celebrity in
China. Yesterday a whole railway-work-gang (in a fairly remote part
of whatever province) actually jumped up and cheered wildly when
they saw me looking out of the train window. The average chinese
tourist can't hide their curiosity and I swear we've both had people
starring open mouthed at us say in waiting rooms or tourist attractions!
Say hello in chinese and they crack up laughing but that only gets
us into more trouble when they respond with a question or two in
fluent mandarin and expect us to understand. People generally have
been pretty fair and honest with us pesky tourists.
On the train ride from Datong yesterday we saw some arrid but consistently
populated scenery. Villages aren't really villages at all but quite
large communes of longish one storey terraced/joined houses usually
built in brick, tiny windows, if any, with tiled roofs a bit like
pit- villages built during the industrial revolution in England.
Saw around 20 excellent buddist grottos dug into a hillside just
outside the industrial city of Datong to the west of Beijing lots
of carved buddahs - all sizes.
Stayed a few days in the ancient banking capital of China called
Ping Yao where the earliest forms of money evolved and cheques were
invented - a walled city with typical and original building of the
ancient chinese dynasties.
Visited a hanging monestary too perched on the side of a cliff.
Breaking News - they're actually selling Peking Duck at covenience
stores in foil bags with Donald duck on the wrapper - Viva Beijing!!
Woke up at 4:30 this morning and popped down
the road to see the Peoples Liberation Army raise the red flag,
at dawn, in Tiananmen Square. Crowds gather easily in China and
not so incredibly there were a couple of thousand patriotic Chinese
tourists already there when we arrived!!!
A handful of skinny teenage soldiers kept our tourist rabble at
a respectful distance in a straight line as the honour guard marched
out briskly and raised the flag to the national anthem! The whole
thing took 2 minutes :)
Dragged ourselves back to the hotel for breakfast before heading
back to Tiananmen again to visit Chairman Mao's mausoleum. The queue
to get in was surprisingly fast considering it must've been at least
2 kilometres long when we found the end of it!!
We shuffled along for about an hour before reaching the mausoleum
doors and when the time came to buy bunches of fake flowers locals
used the opportunity to jump the queue! These were laid and then
unceremoniously dumped and squashed into two large chests to be
recycled to more eager queue-jumpers!
Three chins and an orange face but not bad for a dead guy! - Mao
lays horizontally dressed in a typical blue tunic suit tucked into
a red flag with hammer & sickle on it. A couple of layers of
armoured glass protect his body with an outer bit that's a huge
glass box and an inner bit that's like an oversized fighter cockpit.
After shuffling past the next room is full of souvenirs!! lighters,
badges, jewellery, you name it and they'll sell to you with his
face on it!
Other than that we've been to visit the Summer Palace in the suburbs:
a huge Ming dynasty place with a lake, gardens, pavilions, pagodas,
bridges and drifts of jumbo size pollen floating around like snow.
One more whole day in Beijing tomorrow and then we take a flight
down to Shenzhen which is just over the border from Hong Kong. After
that a fast boat to Hong Kong in a few days to catch our flight
for Brisbane.
Something I forgot to mention the other day is that we spotted a
Starbucks in the Forbidden City!
Off to munch some more delicious dumplings tonight in the best and
cheapest dumpling house in Beijing and the beers not bad either.
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