Day 13 – Suzhou – The Final Post

Today isn’t quite our last day, but tomorrow is a free day, with just a river cruise in the evening and then we head to the airport first thing on Saturday, so this is my final post for this blog.  Wow what an action packed and educational two weeks it’s been.

Today we are off to Suzhou, and small city of 6.4 million people about 100ks, or half an hour’s train ride from Shanghai.  We took the Maglev train in from the airport and hit 301kph, but this is just a fast train, which isn’t as fast.  Well, actually, let’s not split hairs, but we were doing 276kph on the outward trip and 289kph on the return journey.  The ticket for the journey costs about $8 each way, which sounded pretty good value to me.

Suzhou, although a big city, didn’t feel very big, and we never saw much traffic in the times were were travelling.  The city has experienced phenomenal growth over the last 25-30 years, going from a city of about half a million, to the 6.4 million inhabitants today.  The itinerary for the day was visit one of the city’s famous gardens, go to a silk factory (again), have lunch, go on a canal trip (SuZhou is known as the Venice of the East), and then go to the Embroidery Research Institute.  The day was a bit of a re-hash of stuff we had done before, so there was nothing that was going to get us too enthused, other than the train ride.  We’ve been to gardens many times, had seen the whole silk process in Beijing, and Venice is under no threat from this particular canal.  We were pleased to see a boat doing rubbish collections on the canal, and the number of apartments and houses on the way out that had solar heating was also impressive from an environmental perspective.  The smog today was quite bad though, although nothing like what we had experienced in Beijing and Xian. 

Our canal trip was on a boat with seating for 32, with just Anne and I on board.  It was about a half hour trip – out and back – along a long wide canal, with no particular points of interest en route.  The trip to the embroidery factory was enjoyable, and the skill of the craftswoman was certainly something to behold.  There was as usual many items on sale, and the guide ensured us that the price was appreciating by 10% per year.  He showed us one piece that had been on sale 3 years ago for $10,000 3 years ago, and now it was on sale for about $14,000 – highlighting the 10% appreciation.  I wondered, if it hadn’t  been sold in those 3 years, if it was possibly available for $5,000, and had infact depreciated  by half over the time.  As I didn’t have any particular interest in buying the piece, or have $5,000 in my pocket, even if I did, I kept my views on price appreciation to myself.

The highlight of the day was being left alone in the SuZhou train station with time to work out how the system worked.  This was the highlight because while it has been great having guides everywhere, there were a lot of things that we could have done ourselves.  Having a little bit of time at the train station gave us time to figure out how hard it would be if we were left there by ourselves.  Because there is a reasonable amount of English signage, we figured out that it wouldn’t be too hard to organise ourselves.  Also knowing that all you accommodation can be booked on the internet and that most restaurants in China have picture menus means that you can cover off two of the main tourist activities without too much hassle.

I think I have finally figured out the Chinese traffic signals and road rules.  If you are facing a red light, you have options.  If you are facing a green light, you have options, and you may or may not have more options that someone who is facing a red light.  If you are on a road with arrows indicating the direction, the cars, trucks and buses will follow the arrows, but scooters and bicyclists may or may not, depending on where they are trying to get to.  Cars, trucks and buses accept the scooter and bicyclists right to make things up as it suits them.  Lane markings are irrelevant for all road users.  The two major rules of Chinese road use, are don’t hit anything, and be prepared to concede to everyone.  There is no such thing as having the right of way. 

For pedestrians, red or green men, mean virtually nothing, but may indicate the amount of traffic that will  have the potential to run you down.  All the above rules that apply to cars, buses, truck, scooters and cyclists means that you are on your own as soon as you step off the footpath, so ensure you have eyes in the back of your head and the bottom of your feet.  The main rule for pedestrians seems to be “do nothing fast, particularly not moving or changing direction”.  If you see a local, stick to them like glue when you are crossing the road.

Michael our guide in Beijing told us about the importance of some numbers in Chinese culture, particularly the numbers 6, 8 and 9, which indicate longevity, wealth and an easy life.  We were amazed on the train to and from SuZhou how many new apartment buildings had phone numbers made predominantly of those 3 numbers. 

Anyway, that’s about it for this trip.  We’ve had a great time.  The two week timeframe is really great for a short sharp look around a place and we’ve got a bunch of ideas about other places we can get to for a shorter timeframe, so are looking forward to more of these types of holidays in the future.

Ciao,

David & Anne.

Day 12 – Shanghai – The People’s Park and the Financial District

Phew, a bit of a quiet day today, after being on the go so much recently.  We have nothing organised, so took the opportunity for a lie in, late breakfast and then a peaceful walk around the People’s Park, a large park in the centre of Shanghai, about a kilometre away from the hotel.

Since we’ve been in Shanghai, we’ve been accosted for the first time on the holiday by the dodgy gear touts.  When it first happened, we were walking down the Mall on Nanjing Road, when Anne said to me that a nice man had told her to watch her bag.  I had seen him doing it, and thought it was odd, because he didn’t look like a nice man, but appeared decidedly undesirable, as if he was selling something that wasn’t really above board.  Anyway, all was revealed two minutes later when a similarly charming looking character said “watch, silk scarves” and then it all became clear that the first man had been offering us copy watches and handbags.

The temperature today was 35 degrees, so it’s really hot, and not that conducive to wandering around in, so being neither mad dogs nor Englishmen, we spent a few hours in the hotel in the afternoon reading and catching up on the blog.  We headed out later in the afternoon, and for the first time on the holiday had to navigate our way through the public transport system ourselves to get across to the other side of the river and new Shanghai, as we wanted to be on that side of the river to see the night scape.  As usual, the public transport was very easy, the hardest thing being finding the one English word on the first screen we came to.  That word of course “English”.  Fortunately, with two of us looking, Anne found it.

The other side of the river is a totally different experience – and I mean totally - all the buildings are much closer, and there is a huge elevated circular walkway, so you get up quite high and it gives a totally different perspective on things.  Because the buildings are closer, there is no smog, so everything is much clearer. The different types of high rise architecture – all built in the last 25 years – are amazing. Actually, Shanghai is by far the cleanest place we’ve been to in China and the smog is not much of a problem at all.  We did read in the paper that the Government is doing a crackdown on the worst polluting cars, and they have set a target of getting 160,000 of them off the road in Shanghai.

Walking round the elevated circular walkway, we saw what was obviously an outdoor bar on the top of one of the buildings.  It was a low building, but since we’ve been in China, we haven’t really had many places where we felt that the ambience was what would make the occasion, but the umbrellas on the roof, looking out towards the Pearl Tower made it look like it could be the place, so off we went to find it.

All the Restaurants in Shanghai are upstairs, which took us a little bit of time to realise.  When we first walked down Nanjing Road we didn’t see any, then we started seeing billboards advertising them as being on the 6^th or 7^th floor.  Once we knew that, it was easy, as all the malls have restaurants on their upper floors, presumably where the rents are cheaper.  All the ground floor shops are the pricey designer brands. Anyway, we found the restaurant / bar on the fourth floor of the mall, and sat outside on the Terrace looking straight at the Pearl Tower for a couple of hours having drinks waiting for it to get dark and for the light show on the high rise buildings to start, which it did on the dot of 7pm and what a show!!.  After enjoying that for an hour or so, we headed off to find another restaurant (Thai), on the same level but on the other side, which also had an outside Terrace dining area, looking at more of the colourfully lit buildings. It was a memorable night! Back across the river we went using the Metro and back to the hotel. 

Things get back to normal tomorrow, with a full day tour to Suzhou, the so-called Venice of the East.

Day 11 – Shanghai – City Tour and Acrobatics Show

Google is a bit of a hit and miss affair, with the internet having some sort of filter placed on it.  It usually works ok, but every so often it seems to throw a hissy fit and no matter what I do, I can’t get it to work.  Today I was asking google to convert Japanese Yen to New Zealand dollars, which is obviously outside acceptable behaviour, so I just got “The webpage is not available message.  To get around this problem I have taken to using Ask Jeeves, which seems to suffer less from this sort of thing.

Tracy and Sam collected us at 9am, in Sam’s big people mover.  Shanghai traffic seems more structured than Xian’s, which was more structured than Beijing’s, however as a pedestrian the street lights still mean nothing and a green man on a pedestrian crossing means that you look each way before you step off the pavement.  Cars in New Zealand are supposed to leave 4 metres between themselves and pedestrians, but here 4 inches is about enough for any car, bike or scooter to squeeze through on.

First stop was the temple of the Jade Buddha.  Actually, there were lots of Buddha’s, all in different poses, with different looks on their faces.  It is a working temple, so there were also people there to worship, so we enjoyed the grounds and the buildings of the temple that were particularly beautiful.  After that we went down to the Bund for a walk around on the waterfront.  Although it was a Monday, there were half a dozen bride and grooms running round doing their pre-wedding photo shoot.  Tracy explained about the British, French and Japanese concessions, which were specifically designated parts of the city that were set aside for those countries as a result of winning the opium wars in the 19^th century.  The part of the Bund we are on is in the British Concession and it is evident in the architecture of the buildings. 

On the other side of the river, is new Shanghai, the part that 30 years ago was farm land, and now has over 3,000 high rises, and 4 bridges and 8 tunnels joining it to the old part of Shanghai.  There are a number of interesting buildings on the other side of the river – the TV tower, which is shaped a bit like Thunderbird 3, with 4 support legs at the base, holding up a large ball, which then has a needle on top of it, with two smaller balls further up the needle, and finally the long point at the peak heading skyward.  There is also a building with a big square hole at the top, which is called, and looks very much like a bottle opener.  Finally, there is the new Shanghai Towers which is still under construction, will be over 600m tall when it is finished and towers over everything else on the skyline.  Thinking of the man having to work in the crane over the top of the building is enough to make my stomach turn.  At night the skyline is particularly amazing with many of the buildings doing their own light show to light up the sky and provide a free show for all the people promenading on The Bund on the other side of the river

Lunch today was at a traditional Chinese dumpling restaurant, and it was nice to have Tracy there to tell us what to do.  Not that it’s hard, it’s just that without local advise I would have just used chop sticks, but Tracy said to use the spoon underneath it while holding it with the chopsticks.  You then bite one of the sides, so that the boiling hot juices escape into the spoon rather than burning your mouth – now that is useful local knowledge.  The lunch menu was in the middle of the area known as the Yuyuan Gardens, which we then spent a couple of hours walking around.  The gardens were created over 450 years ago when a public official from Beijing decided to retire in Shanghai, and created the gardens on the 8 acres of land that he bought there.  I said to Tracy that I would be pretty horrified if any of New Zealand’s public officials were buying up 8 acres of land in the middle of a big city when they retired.  She said that corruption in China was a big problem, and had been for centuries, but the current president is making a bold stand against it, and many public officials are being sent to prison for it.  Tracy also told us about the lot of women in China centuries ago, who had their feet bound as children, and their feet were so small that they were no longer able to walk.  The wife of this official would never have left the gardens, nor would she have had any friends because any women that would be her friend would also have their feet bound, and be locked away in their husband’s houses.  It sounded like a pretty horrible society, if that isn’t being too judgemental.

In the evening, we went to the ERA acrobatic show, which was absolutely brilliant with a whole range of very flexible and talented performers doing a great range of incredible tricks and stunts.  The grand finale was 8 motorbikes circling round the sphere of death, but the whole show was incredibly clever and we were amazed at the talent and bravery of the many performers.  The show was an hour and a half long, and Anne and I couldn’t stop talking about the acts when we were being driven back to the Hotel by Sam.  At 9:30 the traffic was a lot lighter than when we had gone to the show, and Sam seemed to be in a hurry to get home, so it was a pretty exciting trip, with several what I would call near misses, but Sam seemed to take it all in his stride.

Day 10 – Travel Day – Shanghai

We’re moving on from Xian today, and heading to Shanghai.  Our flight is at 11am, so we’re heading out from the hotel at 8am.  It’s not like getting to the airport in Wellington, so we’re essentially leaving for the airport 3 hours prior to catching a domestic flight.  The trip to the airport was as slow as you would expect in a small city of 6 million people, who are all trying to get to work first thing on a Monday morning.  No dramas getting to the airport, through the airport, and all the way to Shanghai.  After the previous security overkill, I had re-arranged all my stuff so that I could pull it all out and present it as simply as possible, so this time round I didn’t even have to pull out my laptop. 

Tracy, our Shanghai guide met us as well, cleared baggage claim and then we got onto the train into the city.  The train travels at different speeds at different times of the day, and our time of the day meant we were on a slow train.  Watching the slow train sit on a steady 301 kph for the 8 minutes it took to get into Shanghai was quite a sight to behold.  Apparently when we return to the airport on Saturday morning we will be on the fast train and this will travel at 431kph, bringing the trip down to 7 minutes. We then had a 20 minute trip from the train station to our hotel with Sam our driver in Shanghai. 

That was basically it from an organised perspective, so we spent the afternoon wandering around Nanjing Road, the main shopping pedestrian mall and down to The Bund, the walkway down by the river.  Shanghai is China’s second biggest city with 24 million people.  I’ve never heard of the biggest one, which is near the 3-gorges dam in the centre of China.  We had a lovely Chinese dinner in the 8^th floor of a building on Nanjing Road, and apart from a wayward piece of beef that destroyed the cleanliness of both my shorts and shirt it was an uneventful dinner.  After dinner we headed back down to the Bund to take some photos of the beautiful night time cityscape.

We’ve been hearing a lot about China’s one child policy that was implemented in 1979.  Apparently it has worked very well, but now China is suffering from an ageing population and needs to take the brakes off a bit.  When they started easing off, if both parents came from a single child family, they were allowed to have a second child, but now if one of the parents comes from a one child family, they are allowed to have a second child.  Girls are now preferred to boys, because the men’s family are expected to provide the house for the women, so if you have a son, you will be having to provide a house for your future daughter in law and grandchildren.  Girls are cheaper because the parents just have to pay for the wedding, although at an average cost of $NZD300k, it’s no cheap affair.  We’ve seen lots of couple having their wedding photos taken on the Bund, and these are usually taken months before the wedding and the bride will rent 7 or 8 dresses to be photographed in.

Fashion in China is also quite different to what we are used to, and some of the trends are quite concerning.  On hot days, the men roll their t-shirts up to their armpits and walk around with their tubby little bellies showing.  I have so far, and will continue, to refrain from participating in this practice.  Women are also guilty of some fashion sins, no greater than the ankle high stocking worn with a above the knee dress.  I’m not sure on what planet this is deemed attractive, but it’s certainly not one that I’m ever going to get comfortable on.

Finally, we’ve just read in the newspaper about a shop in Shanghai called “Shanghai Sick Notes”, which offers slackers a “legitimate” sick note from one of the local hospitals so that they can extend a holiday, take a day off from a job they hate, or slope off work for a day to watch their favourite team playing in the Football World Cup.  This is, of course, decidedly dodgy, so it’s disguise it that you go to a wedding invitation site, and in return for providing your details that will go on your “wedding invitation”, they will provide you with the appropriate sick note.  Hopefully there are options other than the wedding invitation one, as the happily married amongst us might have difficulty explaining to our wives, employers and the fraud prevention unit why we are applying for wedding invitations on the internet.

Day 9 – Xian – The Terracotta Warriors

Today we are off to see the Terracotta warriors, Xian’s main tourist highlight.  We left the hotel at 9am to miss the worst of the morning traffic, which we may or may not have, but it still seemed pretty bad to me.  The Warriors are about 50ks to the West of the city, and we had a couple of stops on the way, so it was another full day of sightseeing.

The first stop was the Banpo Pre-historic village, which is the site of a village that was inhabited about 6,000 years ago.  The site was fascinating for the historical remnants they found, if not overly for what a layman like me got out of the actual site.  As I said to Helen, “you’d have to know what you were looking for”, because to me it just looked like a bunch of holes in the ground.  As the site was an excavation site, it was kind of like layered holes in the ground, and when your digging a hole in the ground, I’m not sure how you recognise a hole that someone else dug in the ground 6,000 years ago.  As you can tell, I’m not an archaeologist, but when you see the photos you will see what I mean. 

What was interesting, however, was the tools and technology they had developed – the kiln for firing pots was particularly impressive – the structure of the society – it was matriarchal, so the women were in charge, and the burial rituals they had.  Babies were buried in clay pots outside the house, and they found 83 of these clay pots.  Some people were buried face down, if they died of natural causes, other face up, others in a kneeling position.

The site was discovered in the 1960’s when they were building a power plant, so the plans for the power plant had to be amended while they figured out what to do about the site of the village.  We heard about the power station on the way in, but didn’t ask what type of power station it was.  We learnt on the way out that it was a coal fired power station, as we drove past truck, after truck, after truck waiting outside the gate to unload their coal.  I don’t know if the power station is the cause of it, but Xian is a very smoggy city, smoggier than Beijing, even though it only has a quarter of the number of inhabitants.

Our next stop was the Warrior / porcelain / lacquer factory.  The Terracotta warriors are the most famous thing in the district, and are one of China’s main tourist draw cards.  The factory was not responsible for making them originally, as they date back to around 210 BC.  They do however make replicas of them today and you are able to purchase pieces that range in height from a few inches to up to 2 metres – the height of the actual warriors.  As well as the warriors, the factory also makes lacquer furniture and fine Chinese porcelain.  The tour gave us a demonstration of how they created the warriors, and the kilns they used to fire them after they’d dried for a couple of weeks.  There are 5 different warriors figures – kneeling archers, infantrymen, officers, generals and the emperors.  As well as those figures, there are also horses and carts, as part of the overall Terracotta Army.  The full sized warriors are built in two parts – the body from a mould in one part, and the head separate.  This heads are separate because each head in different, so the warriors, like us, are all individuals.

Not having room in our suitcase for any 2 metre high warriors, although they would have shipped them home to us, we moved through the Lacquer furniture section (not really our thing) and into the fine Porcelain china section to check out all the beautiful pieces that could tempt us. 

After lunch, which was in a restaurant today and accompanied by other people, we headed out to the Terracotta Army.  For those of you that don’t know, this army of some 8,000 individual pieces was built and buried to protect Emperor Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, in the afterlife.  The following is my recollection of what the guide told us, so if I’ve got it wrong, apologies, but hopefully you’ll get the general gist of what we saw. 

 

 

The Emperor is buried in a tomb under a mountain, which has been known about for a long time. This is what we visited first, and it is a large park and gardens, and we were able to walk around the area.  The tomb hasn’t been opened because the technology doesn’t yet exist that would enable them to preserve the things that are buried there.  Although the tomb has been known about for a long time, there was no knowledge of the buried army.   There had been discoveries of some pieces of terracotta in the past, but it was only in 1974 that a group of farmers digging a well that made what was the discovery that would be the start of the excavation of the terracotta army.  After the tomb park area, we headed into the exhibition centre for the warriors, and to our surprise, one of the farmers who had discovered the warriors in 1974 was there (he’s there every other day apparently) signing the book about the warriors, so we got a signed copy from him. 

We then headed into the third of the three pits to start looking at the exhibition of the warriors.  Helen our guide was taking us through the pits in the reverse order, which was a good idea, because the warriors in the last pit have not been restored yet, so you just get to see bits.  It’s still interesting to see how they were laid out though.

The warriors were buried in corridors several metres under the ground.  To do this, they dug large deep trenches with brick lined sides.  The warriors were then put in the trenches in lines, and then a roof was put over them, and then the whole lot was buried.  Some of the trenches were broken into almost as soon as they were covered over, and the warriors smashed up.  Archaeologists are working to restore each warrior. 

In pit two, we saw what is the command centre for the army, as all the warriors are all looking inwards, as if they are receiving instructions, and there are more generals and officers in this particular pit than in the number 1 pit, which is where the main army is.

Finally, we visited the main pit, and saw the lines of warriors.  Again, there is a lot of restoration work required on the soldiers that have been excavated.  There are thousands more warriors that could be excavated, but they know that they are all painted in vibrant colours, and that those colours fade very quickly when exposed to the environment, so until they figure out how to preserve what they unearth, they are not going to unearth any more.  They know about the colours because when the first started excavating, the warriors were all very colourful, but after just a few years, the colour disappeared and now all you have is just the black coloured warriors.

 

As I said, the army was built for the first Emperor of China – the man who originally unified china in the 3^rd century BC, but the venture was a typically egotistical folly, as it cost so much that it broke the monarchy, so after a bit of a power struggle, the Qin dynasty was pushed aside after just 15 years, and the Han Dynasty installed to rule for over 400 years.

 

 

Day 8 – Xian – Museum, Art Gallery & Cycling the city walls

Xian traffic might be more in control than Beijing traffic, but that doesn’t mean that it in any way resembles the sort of traffic we have in New Zealand.  Looking out our hotel window, we look down on the town’s central roundabout, which has roads entering it from the 4 points on the compass, and rotating in about 4 separate lanes.  All manner of vehicles and pedestrians negotiate this large round about, scooters, cyclists and motor cyclists – all without lights at any hour of the day or night.  The same take a very liberal not only to which lane they should be in, but also which way the traffic lanes have been designated to flow in.  I can’t see down the street, but there is obviously something fascinating that the scooters, and 3 wheel mini vans have to get to, that is straight down the lanes heading in the opposite direction.  Traffic does travel quite slowly, and the main rule seems to be don’t do anything rash or quick, but don’t worry about following any particular road rules, and don’t worry about what other drivers are doing, but just don’t hit any of them. 

One quite cool thing in the traffic is that beside every set of traffic lights is a count down clock that tells you how long until the light changes – the numbers are red for a red light, and green for a green light.  When you stop at the lights, the counter starts counting down from whatever phase time has been set – the shortest we’ve seen in 16 seconds, the longest 96 seconds.  You can also see some of the other clocks, and there are quite big differences between them, so the light for one light might say it has 30 seconds until the green, but your one says there is only 15 seconds until it turns red, this is our equivalent of the turning arrows, and gives one particular light time for the cars who are turning across the traffic to go about their business.  It sounds organised, but there is a certain amount of “don’t be the first to blink”, with drivers barging through right behind the car in front, so nobody else can move.  It’s all fun, but I’m glad I’m not driving in it.

Helen and Wu arrived to pick us up at 9 o’clock this morning to take us on what turned out to be a very full and information packed day of sightseeing.  First stop was the provincial museum, which traces life in the district going back over 1 million years.  There were many interesting exhibits that demonstrated the sorts of societies that existed many millennia ago, and how people had developed societies, built tools, houses, made clay pots, farmed and even things like how they buried their dead.  Chinese society has always been focused around staying in one place and developing agricultural and horticultural solutions to enable them to survive and grow.  This is in direct contrast peoples like the mongos who were much more nomadic, and because of that, much more willing to go to war to expand the size of the territory they could roam in.

Our next stop was the Xian city walls, with its four main gates – North, South, East and West.  We arrived at the East Gate, took the steps up to the top of the wall, and hired a bike each to ride the 13 kilometres around the top of the wall.  The top of the wall is 12 – 15 metres in width, so about wide enough for a 3 lane road.  The trip round the wall took us about an hour and a quarter with lots of stops to take photos and look over the battlements, and over the inside wall into the city inside the wall.  Obviously, the city is much bigger than the area covered by the wall now (it’s over 6 million people), but all the buildings inside the wall are low-ish rise, and outside the wall are many high rise apartments.  Anne really enjoyed the ride, which was great because the top of the wall is all somewhat uneven cobble stones, so it wasn’t the ideal riding surface.

Lunch was an interesting affair, as we were taken to a theatre restaurant, which is where they do a local dance show each night and we had been offered the chance to see the show both by the travel agent in New Zealand, and by Helen when we met her.  Both times we had turned down the opportunity, but it seems you can’t avoid it in some way, so we were taken to the theatre for lunch.  And so there we sat, me and Anne, the only two people in this massive theatre, chatting quietly to ourselves.  The lunch was very nice, and the rather odd environment was just a bit of a laugh really.

After lunch, we went to a couple of different places – a museum of stone tablets with ancient Chinese calligraphy, a local market, the local Muslim quarter and its Mosque.  We’d done a lot of exercise, and taken in a lot of information over the course of the day, so were quite tired by the end of it all.  To  relax, we went out and found a bar to sit and have a couple of beers for a few hours.  We finished at about 9am, and then went off to find a restaurant, but the people of Xian obviously don’t eat late, because all the restaurants we went to were closed, so we settled for enjoying our beer dinner for the evening.

Day 7 – Travel Day

Today we leave Beijing, and head South West to the ancient Chinese capital of Xian (pronounced She – Arn).  Leaving Beijing means also the end of our time with Michael, our guide, and our still unnamed driver, who we are forever saying shareshare to and smiling whenever he opens the door for us.  I made a bit of a gaff this morning when Michael told us that his next trip was going to Tibet.  I asked if he was going to Lhasa, the capital.  “No”, he said, “Beijing in the Capital”.  Ooops that’s right, it’s only the rest of the world that views Tibet as a separate country.  I’ve just googled how to spell the capital of Tibet, and Google came up with all sorts of red in the results, so hopefully I won’t have the police beating down the door any time soon.

The trip out to the airport was uneventful, but when we arrived at the airport, security had been significantly beefed up over night because of a terrorist attack in the western part of China that had killed 31 people and injured 91.  As well as the usual laptop search, today they wanted to separately scan all the cameras (3 of them) battery chargers (3 also), all the credit cards in my money belt, and give every person a complete scan with their wand.  Anything that beeped got investigated, and put back through the x-ray scanner.  There was a man and a woman at each security machine, so everybody got the same treatment.

If you are looking at the photos on Flickr, let me apologise if the order of them seems a bit illogical.  The internet here isn’t completely open as I’ve mentioned, and one of the things that is suffering is that I only have partial access to Flickr.  I can upload photos ok, and put them into sets, which is how they attach to links on the blog, but I can’t see the order they are going into the sets in, so they look to me like that are a bit random.

One of our concerns before we left for China, was would there be any English spoken at all, and how would we cope when we were left on our own.  So far, we’ve done pretty well, as I’ve mentioned all the menus have pictures, all the ones we’ve come across so far also have English titles, Chinese use numbers for numbers, and most restaurant staff know how to say some numbers, so communicating has been quite easy.  Sitting in Beijing Airport, all the announcements are also made in perfectly clear English, so it hasn’t been a problem at all.

The flight to Xian, was on China Eastern Airlines on a brand new AirBus A321, so that allayed one totally unfounded fear about what the quality of the planes might be like.  We did feel a bit sorry for the Chinese locals because the seat numbers are also written as 24A,B,C,J,K,L etc, so the numbers are Ok for them, but the actual seat is often a character they’ve never seen, so we did see a few of them holding up their tickets to the numbers on the overhead lockers to try and figure out which was their seat. 

Arriving in Xian, we were met by Helen, our guide for the next 3 days, and Wu our driver.  Xian airport is about an hour away from the city centre, and immediately on our journey, we got the feeling that Xian was a more loveable city that Beijing.  The buildings were much prettier, the traffic more ordered, and the place just generally felt cleaner and more inviting than Beijing ever really did.  We always felt safe in Beijing, but just driving around it, it always just felt like one big unstructured, unloved mess of buildings, shops and offices, which was only saved  by the wonderful historic monuments, and the old world charm of the Hutong District where we stayed.  We were sorry to leave our hotel, which was such a wonderful sanctuary right in the middle of Beijing.

Our hotel in Xian, is the Bell Tower, and is oddly enough right beside the Bell and Drum Towers in the centre of the city.  Directly over the road is a massive shopping mall, and just 300 metres down the road is the South Gate of the city walls.  Xian is a completely walled city, and the walls are a 13km trip, which you can hire a bike and ride according to Helen, and we will have the opportunity to do that if we wish.  The hotel itself is very nice, clean, a bed made of a single piece of solid granite, but by the second night we were getting used to it, and so handy to restaurants, bars, markets, and the Bell and Drum Towers, which are beautifully lit up at night.

 

Day 6 – Jang Shin Park, Zoo & Lama Temple

Today is our last day of sightseeing in Beijing, and we have a travel day tomorrow to head to Xian to see the Terracotta Warriors.  We’ve rearranged our schedule on the advice of the guide, so it’s meant that we’ve been full on for the first 5 days, and would now have had a free day, but there are other things to see, so Michael has organised a full days itinerary for us.

First stop for the morning is Jing Shan Park, which is right at the back of the Forbidden City.  The park contains the only hill in central Beijing, and it is a man-made hill as a result of all the soil that was dug out to create the 52m wide moat around the Forbidden City.

Being a public park, there were lots of the elderly doing their exercises.  Today’s variation were a group of elderly gentlemen who were doing calligraphy with a fine tipped mop thing using water on the paving stones on the path.  It was quite a clever way of doing it, because the water hung around long enough for them to write quite a few stones, but there was no lasting impact of it.  There was a tutor there helping then with their calligraphy, and they would form into discussion / chat groups to talk about whatever took their fancy, presumably sometimes calligraphy. 

Another group was doing Tai Chi, and another group was doing a tai chi type thing, but with a racket and ball which you waved around, the object being not to drop the ball off the racket.  I got roped into doing that for 5 minutes, which was quite fun, although I would need a lot more practice before I could be part of their group.

Yet another group was doing amateur opera, although I must admit that Asian music is an acquired taste, that I have yet to feel the need to purchase.

Jing Shan Park is famous for two things – a tree, at the base of the hill, and the views from the top of the hill that gives a magnificent view over the Forbidden City.  The tree has a dark past, because it was here, one night, in 1644 that the last emperor of the Ming Empire committed suicide, by hanging himself.  The people had risen up and had sacked the Forbidden City.  The Emperor had already forced his wife to commit suicide, and murdered his daughter.  As a last ditch attempt to save his kingdom, he fled the City, and at night he sounded a bell, which was to call all his advisors to him, so they could plan a final bid to re-capture the City.  When no one showed up, he and his last Eunuch topped themselves.  The soldiers found their bodies a few days later…… and so began the Qing Dynasty – China’s last.

From there it was the hike to the top of the hill to see the magnificent views over the Forbidden City.  As you will see from the photos, Beijing was having a normal day, and we could only see about half of it.  It was a nice walk though, but as the temperature was around 35 degrees, it was a fairly hot exercise.

Next stop was The Zoo.  We don’t like zoos, but we wanted to see the Pandas, and this was our best opportunity.  There is a place in China where you can visit them at their breeding park in another part of China, but we weren’t THAT keen, so the zoo it had to be.  Also, we’d heard the Pandas are by nature lazy lethargic creatures, so a side trip to go and see some cute animals at best lying around eating bamboo, but more likely sleeping didn’t seem justified.  There is apparently virtually no chance of seeing Pandas mating, even in a breeding park.  As we suspected, we were able to see Pandas, but most of them looked like they had been shoved out into their enclosure and taken two steps before collapsing in a heap and sleeping for the day.  We had some free time, so we wandered around the zoo, which confirmed our view of zoos, although the elephants in the pool, the hippos in their pool, and the birds looked pretty happy.

Lunch was at a magnificent Chinese restaurant.  I say magnificent because the whole building is designed like a royal palace and has all the lanterns and decorations on the front of it.  It is very popular, and even though it is 4 storeys high, and we arrived at 1:30, we still had a 10 minute wait before we could get a table.  The food was delicious, but it was unfortunate that Anne didn’t see the sign for the beer sorbet until we were walking out the door.

The final excursion for the day was to the Lama Temple, which was formerly the Palace of a Manchurian Prince, one of the Qing Dynasty.  The Qing Dynasty was the first Dynasty not to maintain the Great Wall, because they realised it wasn’t working, and would never work.  Their approach to protecting the nation was through diplomacy, and inter-marriage with the people from the North, which was where the aggressors always came from.  The other thing they did was to work closely with minorities, because China is so vast it has something like 50 odd different nationalities within its boundaries, and it was the non Han-minorities that caused most of the problems.  The Lama temple, which is a part of Buddhism was there way of doing that.  Religion has never been my favourite topic, so the rest of the visit was a bit lost on me.  There were lots of buddhas, all with different hand gestures.  There is one 26 metre sandalwood one, and the Lama Temple has something to do with the Dalai Lama, although the current one obviously isn’t best friends with China these days.

Day 5 – Back to Beijing

After our amazing smog free day on the wall yesterday, we awoke this morning to a more normal hazy day.  The sleep in our Tibetan hut was very comfortable, although on the walk back from the restaurant to the hut we were fortunate to be “saved” by one of the young Tibetan staff who miraculously appeared with a torch just as we were having to decide which fork to take in the path through the forest.  The resort really is out in the wopps, and the town we are in only contains about 600 people, so a total change from the 23 million people in Beijing.

After breakfast, we took a walk on the “Wild Wall”.  This section hasn’t been restored, and the wall is not a complete trail, so we walked on the less technical part of the wall.  The village we stayed in is in the bottom of a valley, and we were offered the chance to do a walk up either side of the valley wall – we chose the easier option.  The option we didn’t chose is the one you can see in the photo.  As we were taking our “easy” walk, we saw a whole group of people walking up the other side of the valley on the more technical section of the wall.  Michael told us these were local tourists making their pilgrimage to the great wall, and they chose to walk on this part of the wall because, without the cable car, it was much more affordable for the local people.

After an hour clambering up and down the wild wall, we headed back to the village, and because we had some spare time we did a walk around the town.  The first thing that we noticed was the sign saying that the town had been established to offer accommodation to local people, and this whole idea was very new to Chinese people, who are travelling much more than they ever used to because of their increased wealth, and the access they now have to cars.  In this small town, there were 19 places that were offering accommodation to local people.

The next thing we found on our walk, was the exercise equipment that was part of a park on the side of the road.  This is all part of the Chinese push to keep the local community fit and healthy.  Anne and I tried all the equipment, and created an instructional video of how to use each piece of equipment, but in hindsight, now that we’ve reviewed the video, we think it’s probably best if we keep the video to ourselves.

Leaving the small town, we passed an area where there were thousands of new fully grown trees being planted.  We could tell they were just being planted because each tree was supported by 4 large poles to hold it in place.  A mile or so further down the road was a golf course that was being constructed, and off in the distance we saw a large semi-circular shaped building, that Michael told us was a new hotel.  As we passed yet another new futuristic looking building, Michael said and that is the Conference Centre for the APEC Conference that is going to be held here.  “When is the conference”  we asked expecting the answer to be about a year away.  “In September”.  We’ll be keeping an eye out for the conference, to see how the facilities have bedded down in the four months until it takes place.  Seriously, the conference facility wasn’t even fully enclosed, but we have no doubt that it will all be finished and good to go by the time the delegates arrive in September.

The trip back was very quick because of the newly constructed APEC motorway.  We were impressed to see all the driver safety signs along the new motorway with a little caricature to pictorialize the things you shouldn’t be doing - No Sleeping, Drinking, Texting, Littering, speeding.

I mentioned yesterday that the Government restricts the number of people who can buy cars.  The other thing that they have told people they can’t do is buy houses.  The house price market has been growing really quickly in recent years, and the solution to that is simply to tell the people to stop buying houses.  In Michael’s view, this is a perfectly acceptable and normal response from the Government, and the people are all more than happy to comply with the Government’s wishes.

The only other thing that we’ve seen that is slightly odd from our perspective, is that whenever we go to a restaurant for lunch, it’s always a lottery as to whether Michael and the driver will dine with us.  We are always happy for them to join us, but the funny thing is that it’s not us or Michael that decides if they will eat with us, but the restaurant.