Malaysian (usually a guy, middle-aged with not much to do): Hi
Hedd: Hey
M: Where are you from?
H: I'm from Wales... (momentary pause to look for a reaction indicating he knows where it is) ...in the U.K. Do you know Wales?
M: Ahhh, Wales. Ryan Giggs, eh!
H: Yeah, Ryan Giggs.
M: They beat Azerbaijan. Got (insert next country to play Wales in the football world cup qualifiers) coming up (insert exact time and date), isn't it.
H: Yeah that's right
I used to at this point ask if he liked football but I realised the answer would obviously be yes, and of course it always was. So I changed it to:
H: Have you ever been to Wales or the UK?
M: No, I want to go though, maybe to London. There's this tour company that does trips to the UK and includes a premier league match with (insert which ever team he supports, either Man U, L'pool, Arsenal or Chelsea) so I might do that one day.
H: Do you travel often?
M: Not really, I've been to Indonesia once and China once but that's about it. So where are you going now?
Note that they never ask what I'm going to do where I actually am but rather they assume I want to get out of wherever I am as soon as I can and go somewhere else.
H: I'm here for a few days now, and then I'm off to (insert next destination). I'm in Malaysia for two and a half months all together actually.
M: Two and a half months! Long time lah. Alone?
H: Yeah. Well, I was staying with friends in China and Japan, I was in China for five weeks and Japan for two weeks, and I was staying with friends in KL but now I'm on my own.
M: Japan, eh? Expensive, no?
H: Well yeah, quite expensive, but not as bad as I thought it would be. Not as bad as the UK anyway.
M: UK expensive, is it?
H: Yeah, very expensive.
M: I see. Do you like Malaysian food?
H: Of course!
M: Not too spicy for you?
H: Nope, the spicier the better.
M: And what have you tried?
H: (Trying to remember the names of them all) Nasi Lemak, Ro...
M: You like Nasi Lemak?
H: ...Yep, umm, Roti Canai, bu...
M: You like Roti Canai?
H: Yep. My favourite thing here though is Ais Kacang, it...
M: Oh, you like Ais Kacang, do you? And what about durians, have you tried those?
H: Yeah, and I actually like them too!
M: Oh, you like Durians? You don't mind the smell?
H: No, it's not too bad. But I can't eat much of it becuase it's just so creamy.
M: Yes, very creamy. Best time to visit Malaysia for food, Ramadan. Best time.
H: Yeah, I like all the night markets and everything.
M: So it's not too hot for you?
H: No, it's OK. I like it hot, I just don't like the humidity. Hot and dry I like. It's not as bad here as it was in Shanghai when I got there though, there was a heat wave. Now that was really, really hot.
M: We only have two seasons here, see. Not like UK where you have four.
H: Hmm, although it doesn't feel like we have four these days, it's all just one long rainy season now. I mean, I remember when in the winter you'd always have snow and in the summer you'd always have sun but now you can have anything anytime mixed in with plenty of rain.
M: My friend, he's in (insert British university) says he laughs at the British when they come out to sunbathe even with just a little bit of sun.
H: Aye, they do, it can be freezing outside but they'll all be out in their bikinis with just a little bit of sun trying to get a tan.
M: I don't get it see, why do they want to get a tan? The girls in Malaysia try so hard not to get a tan.
H: I know, you see them walking i nthe street under the sun with these big umbrellas! I don't know, to look different I suppose, it's just fashionable. We try to get a tan to stand out and you tey not to get a tan to stand out. Same thing, really.
M: So two and a half months in Malaysia, you say. And then home?
H: No, then Indonesia for one and a half months and then home, just in time for Christmas.
M: Why such a long holiday?
H: It's a gap year. I finished college a few months ago and now I'm taking a year out and then I'll go to university next September.
M: Oh, next September. So you're in college now?
H: No, I finished college, now I'm taking a year out of education.
M: Why?
H: To travel and to have a break after thirteen years of education.
M: So you're in university now?
H: No, no, I'm not doing anything right now.
M: I don't get it.
H: So I see! It doesn't matter though.
M: So how old are you then?
H: Guess.
M: Umm, twenty-two.
H: No.
M: Twenty-three.
H: No, I'm eighteen.
M: Eighteen! Woah, so young! Hey, you'll have to be careful in Indonesia then.
H: Yeah, I've heard it's not as safe there as in Malaysia.
M: But you're a big man, you'll be fine! Are you going to Bali?
H: Yep, I'll have about two weeks there.
M: Oh, I love Bali!
H: Everyone here seems to love Bali.
M: Yeah, it's a good place. OK, I need to go. Good luck when Wales plays (insert team). I'll be watching it. Bye-bye!
H: See ya!
Wednesday, 10 September 2008
Sunday, 7 September 2008
A Day of Firsts
OK, BIG gap between the last post and this one but I'll try to fill the gap when I can.
I arrived at Zackry's Guest House in a quiet corner of the island of Langkawi in the afternoon on the 2nd of September, having taken a boat from Kuala Kedah to Kuah and a taxi from there (there is no public transport on the island) to the guest house. I wanted to relax in Langkawi and the guest house seemed like the perfect place to do just that. And indeed it is. For the past week I haven't used a single alarm to wake me up, I've lied in, and when I have gotten up I've gone straight to the common area to switch on the TV and catch up with the news or to watch a DVD. The beach is just the other side of the road so when the sun shines I can head over for a dip in the sea or a nap on a lounger. And when the sun doesn't shine I can go and grab some fruit to eat from the stalls at the end of the road, try out some of the
local sea food in one of the restaurants or go back to the guest house and chat with the other guys staying here over a game of cards or a beer (Langkawi is duty-free). Or just watch another DVD. So that's basically what I've been doing here since arriving. There isn't a lot to do on the island - there's a cable car to the top of a mountain, some waterfall called Seven Wells, an aquarium, a crocodile park, an eagle-feeding park and that's about it. So yesterday, my last full day on the island, I thought I'd actually do something and go beyond the couple-of-hundred-metre radius I'd confined myself to. That was my first first.
I decided to rent a bike - I was going to say that renting a bike was my second first since being away, but then I remembered we rented some bikes in Beijing - to go to Seven Wells. The journey wasn't too far, just one length of the island, but the bike only had one gear and so it took a good two hours to get there, past the two most popular beaches, past the airport and past the posh-looking marina. I bought a coke and some peanut biscuits, parked the bike, had a look at the map on a board at the bottom of the steps and proceeded up them. I didn't really know how far it would be - it was hard to tell from the map - but about half way up the steps I could feel my legs take the toll of the bike ride there and so sat down on a bench, ate my biscuits and took a rest by reading Seventh Uncle, a short story from a book of short stories by the English language Malaysian writer Chuah Guat Eng. When I finished the story I continued up and it didn't take long at all until I'd reached the top, supposedly at this place called Seven Wells. I'd heard it was a very beautiful place and that you could swim in the 'Wells', natural pools created as the river water collected in the rocks before it cascaded down the waterfall. There wasn't too much water in the pools themselves though and I thought - expecting something of Rheadr's or Rhiwagor's grandure - perhaps I hadn't got there yet. There was a sign by the pools, a strange-looking map that had two routes. The route to the right, through the jungle, had two 'swimming areas' along it and, having brought my swimming stuff and determined to go for a dip, ventured into the jungle. After a good while in there - maybe twenty or thirty minutes - following a half-beaten track often blocked by fallen rotted trees and still not finding any of these swimming areas I was thinking of heading back. I could, I suppose just go for a dip in the pools I'd just left. The track was getting less and less beaten and when I reached a stream - I thought maybe the sign of running water would mean I'd found it, but no - I decided I'd better head back now before I lost my way. I dipped my feet into the running stream to give them a cooling off and started back.
After clambering over some dead trees and ducking under hanging vines I made it back to the half-beaten track. I was wearing my sandals, as I have been every day since leaving bar three - and suddenly I felt something between the back of my right foot and the back strap of the sandal. It was a strange sort of feeling, as if I had an egg yoke stuck in there. I stood there, unstrapped my sandal and had a look to see what was making this strange feeling. This egg yoke wasn't a rich golden colour, it was black... and moving. It was a great big cluster of leeches, about four or five of them in one place, sucking away at my blood. I was pretty shocked, this was my first encounter with leeches. And then I noticed something I didn't really want to notice: it wasn't just this one little cluster on the back of my foot but they were everywhere on my foot! They were between my toes, on the top of my foot, even on the sole. Turns out dipping my feet in the stream was a bad move! I didn't know what to do. Should I leave them there to have their fill? How long would that take? Should I push them gently away from where they're attached or should I tug at them and yank them of
f? It turns out that what you're meant to do is either leave them for about 20 minutes by which time they'll be full and drop off or if you really want to gt them off then to prise your nail between their teeth and where they've attached and nudge them away. But I did want to get them off, and I didn't have any nails, so I proceeded to one-at-a-time grab hold of them and pull them off and throw them as far away as I could. Not an easy task, I'll tell you, because their jaws are so so strong and they keep wriggling and changing their size, and even if I did get them off my foot they more often than not then attached themselves to my thumb or index finger. Very very annoying! I eventually got them all off my right foot, about fifteen of them in all, maybe more. It also turns out that when they bite into you they excrete something that prevents the blood from clotting there and so my foot was now bleeding from left, right and centre, even gushing out in a couple of places. I didn't mind really, it didn't hurt at all and my feet have endured a lot over the times so why worry about having a few leech jaws stuck in there?! It did look pretty bad though, a foot and a
hand both covered in blood and no sign of it stopping. The smell of it must have been attracting the leeches back from whence they came as I saw them crawling along the jungle floor from where I'd thrown them to (I expect most of them hadn't been thrown but instead let go of their own accord after trying to be violently shaken off my finger) and towards my feet again. I started along the path again and after about a hundred metres repeated the whole ordeal with my left foot. Every few hundred metres after that I kept checking each foot again, tugging at the ones I'd either missed before or had found their way back on. I exited the jungle and got back to the steps that lead up to Seven Wells and found a bench to sit down on for one last scourer just to make sure they were all gone. The state of my bloodied feet was quite comical, I thought, and so I took a picture or two to remember the experience - not a harmful one but not one I'm looking forward to having again. The handful of people going up and down the steps didn't quite see it the way I did and looked by in horror, asking if I was OK to walk, ect. Luckily one of them had some alcohol wipes so I could disinfect the bites and wipe it up. When I got to the bottom again I washed my hands and feet in the toilet, bought a cold coconut to drink and some Oreos to eat and watched the monkeys about the place having fun. They were scraping the used coconuts to get the last bit, making a racket playing on the corrugated steel roofs of the stalls, grooming each other incessantly, all good fun to watch. And then I biked back.
The anti-clotting spit the leeches had used was doing its job well and by the time I got back to Zackry's Guest House there were a good few streaks of red on my feet. But that could wait, first I wanted to eat the cold watermelon half I'd bought from round the corner and chat with the Scotsman and the Cornish couple (by far the commonest nationality I've seen traveling are Brits, followed by North Americans and Australians, then Dutch and German and then Scandinavian and French). Then I went online to check what damage leeches can actually do. They're quite fascinating little things, actually. I found out that their spit would wear off in a few more hours and that any viruses or bacteria they carry doesn't harm humans. Good news. The only problem is the obvious risk of infection, heightened by the fact that because I yanked them off I now have... wait, let me count... 10 little jaws stuck in my right foot and... 15 little jaws stuck in my left foot. Lovely! So after a shower I then did another first since coming here: I used my little First Aid kit I've been carrying around in my rucksack. And with a couple of disinfectant wipes (alcohol-free this time) and a couple of plasters to cover the bites where the spit was working very well my feet were looking in much better shape! Not that my feet are ever in a decent shape to begin with, but there we go. And then in my room I wrote out a Plygain-esque tune I'd just thought up, complete with pauses :D
All in all I've had an amazing time in Langkawi doing, apart from yesterday, basically nothing. This is my first time since last summer that I haven't either been around ACers or been busy sorting things out and so although I haven't seen anything of the island I think spending my time watching DVDs, writing a few long-overdue emails and splashing around in the sea has been time well spent. Maybe in hindsight I should have done that yesterday too! Today I'll be getting the ferry to Kuala Perlis and from there the night bus to Kota Bharu, and after a couple of days there off to some more paradise islands: The Perhentians!
I arrived at Zackry's Guest House in a quiet corner of the island of Langkawi in the afternoon on the 2nd of September, having taken a boat from Kuala Kedah to Kuah and a taxi from there (there is no public transport on the island) to the guest house. I wanted to relax in Langkawi and the guest house seemed like the perfect place to do just that. And indeed it is. For the past week I haven't used a single alarm to wake me up, I've lied in, and when I have gotten up I've gone straight to the common area to switch on the TV and catch up with the news or to watch a DVD. The beach is just the other side of the road so when the sun shines I can head over for a dip in the sea or a nap on a lounger. And when the sun doesn't shine I can go and grab some fruit to eat from the stalls at the end of the road, try out some of the
local sea food in one of the restaurants or go back to the guest house and chat with the other guys staying here over a game of cards or a beer (Langkawi is duty-free). Or just watch another DVD. So that's basically what I've been doing here since arriving. There isn't a lot to do on the island - there's a cable car to the top of a mountain, some waterfall called Seven Wells, an aquarium, a crocodile park, an eagle-feeding park and that's about it. So yesterday, my last full day on the island, I thought I'd actually do something and go beyond the couple-of-hundred-metre radius I'd confined myself to. That was my first first.I decided to rent a bike - I was going to say that renting a bike was my second first since being away, but then I remembered we rented some bikes in Beijing - to go to Seven Wells. The journey wasn't too far, just one length of the island, but the bike only had one gear and so it took a good two hours to get there, past the two most popular beaches, past the airport and past the posh-looking marina. I bought a coke and some peanut biscuits, parked the bike, had a look at the map on a board at the bottom of the steps and proceeded up them. I didn't really know how far it would be - it was hard to tell from the map - but about half way up the steps I could feel my legs take the toll of the bike ride there and so sat down on a bench, ate my biscuits and took a rest by reading Seventh Uncle, a short story from a book of short stories by the English language Malaysian writer Chuah Guat Eng. When I finished the story I continued up and it didn't take long at all until I'd reached the top, supposedly at this place called Seven Wells. I'd heard it was a very beautiful place and that you could swim in the 'Wells', natural pools created as the river water collected in the rocks before it cascaded down the waterfall. There wasn't too much water in the pools themselves though and I thought - expecting something of Rheadr's or Rhiwagor's grandure - perhaps I hadn't got there yet. There was a sign by the pools, a strange-looking map that had two routes. The route to the right, through the jungle, had two 'swimming areas' along it and, having brought my swimming stuff and determined to go for a dip, ventured into the jungle. After a good while in there - maybe twenty or thirty minutes - following a half-beaten track often blocked by fallen rotted trees and still not finding any of these swimming areas I was thinking of heading back. I could, I suppose just go for a dip in the pools I'd just left. The track was getting less and less beaten and when I reached a stream - I thought maybe the sign of running water would mean I'd found it, but no - I decided I'd better head back now before I lost my way. I dipped my feet into the running stream to give them a cooling off and started back.
After clambering over some dead trees and ducking under hanging vines I made it back to the half-beaten track. I was wearing my sandals, as I have been every day since leaving bar three - and suddenly I felt something between the back of my right foot and the back strap of the sandal. It was a strange sort of feeling, as if I had an egg yoke stuck in there. I stood there, unstrapped my sandal and had a look to see what was making this strange feeling. This egg yoke wasn't a rich golden colour, it was black... and moving. It was a great big cluster of leeches, about four or five of them in one place, sucking away at my blood. I was pretty shocked, this was my first encounter with leeches. And then I noticed something I didn't really want to notice: it wasn't just this one little cluster on the back of my foot but they were everywhere on my foot! They were between my toes, on the top of my foot, even on the sole. Turns out dipping my feet in the stream was a bad move! I didn't know what to do. Should I leave them there to have their fill? How long would that take? Should I push them gently away from where they're attached or should I tug at them and yank them of
f? It turns out that what you're meant to do is either leave them for about 20 minutes by which time they'll be full and drop off or if you really want to gt them off then to prise your nail between their teeth and where they've attached and nudge them away. But I did want to get them off, and I didn't have any nails, so I proceeded to one-at-a-time grab hold of them and pull them off and throw them as far away as I could. Not an easy task, I'll tell you, because their jaws are so so strong and they keep wriggling and changing their size, and even if I did get them off my foot they more often than not then attached themselves to my thumb or index finger. Very very annoying! I eventually got them all off my right foot, about fifteen of them in all, maybe more. It also turns out that when they bite into you they excrete something that prevents the blood from clotting there and so my foot was now bleeding from left, right and centre, even gushing out in a couple of places. I didn't mind really, it didn't hurt at all and my feet have endured a lot over the times so why worry about having a few leech jaws stuck in there?! It did look pretty bad though, a foot and a
hand both covered in blood and no sign of it stopping. The smell of it must have been attracting the leeches back from whence they came as I saw them crawling along the jungle floor from where I'd thrown them to (I expect most of them hadn't been thrown but instead let go of their own accord after trying to be violently shaken off my finger) and towards my feet again. I started along the path again and after about a hundred metres repeated the whole ordeal with my left foot. Every few hundred metres after that I kept checking each foot again, tugging at the ones I'd either missed before or had found their way back on. I exited the jungle and got back to the steps that lead up to Seven Wells and found a bench to sit down on for one last scourer just to make sure they were all gone. The state of my bloodied feet was quite comical, I thought, and so I took a picture or two to remember the experience - not a harmful one but not one I'm looking forward to having again. The handful of people going up and down the steps didn't quite see it the way I did and looked by in horror, asking if I was OK to walk, ect. Luckily one of them had some alcohol wipes so I could disinfect the bites and wipe it up. When I got to the bottom again I washed my hands and feet in the toilet, bought a cold coconut to drink and some Oreos to eat and watched the monkeys about the place having fun. They were scraping the used coconuts to get the last bit, making a racket playing on the corrugated steel roofs of the stalls, grooming each other incessantly, all good fun to watch. And then I biked back.
The anti-clotting spit the leeches had used was doing its job well and by the time I got back to Zackry's Guest House there were a good few streaks of red on my feet. But that could wait, first I wanted to eat the cold watermelon half I'd bought from round the corner and chat with the Scotsman and the Cornish couple (by far the commonest nationality I've seen traveling are Brits, followed by North Americans and Australians, then Dutch and German and then Scandinavian and French). Then I went online to check what damage leeches can actually do. They're quite fascinating little things, actually. I found out that their spit would wear off in a few more hours and that any viruses or bacteria they carry doesn't harm humans. Good news. The only problem is the obvious risk of infection, heightened by the fact that because I yanked them off I now have... wait, let me count... 10 little jaws stuck in my right foot and... 15 little jaws stuck in my left foot. Lovely! So after a shower I then did another first since coming here: I used my little First Aid kit I've been carrying around in my rucksack. And with a couple of disinfectant wipes (alcohol-free this time) and a couple of plasters to cover the bites where the spit was working very well my feet were looking in much better shape! Not that my feet are ever in a decent shape to begin with, but there we go. And then in my room I wrote out a Plygain-esque tune I'd just thought up, complete with pauses :DAll in all I've had an amazing time in Langkawi doing, apart from yesterday, basically nothing. This is my first time since last summer that I haven't either been around ACers or been busy sorting things out and so although I haven't seen anything of the island I think spending my time watching DVDs, writing a few long-overdue emails and splashing around in the sea has been time well spent. Maybe in hindsight I should have done that yesterday too! Today I'll be getting the ferry to Kuala Perlis and from there the night bus to Kota Bharu, and after a couple of days there off to some more paradise islands: The Perhentians!
Tuesday, 29 July 2008
Huangshan
I was beginning to get fed up with China, or rather with the Chinese. As soon as I got off the Su Zhou Hao at Shanghai International Ferry Terminal on Sunday afternoon there were taxi drivers galore trying to get me to take a ride with them. A fellow passenger on the boat and I both needed to get to the nearest Metro station and so after trying to say a few times where we wanted to go in both English and Chinese, pointing to it on both the 'Central Shanghai' and 'Metro' maps on the pop-out map of the city I have, trying to explain where we were now on the map, pointing in the direction of the Metro itself and using other various hand-guestures we were finally on our way, heading down a road, turning left, then left, then left again and another left before the driver asked us again where we actually wanted to go. You'd have though a taxi driver should know the map of his own city. This one probably did, it just gets him more money to go round in circles a few times and acting all confused.
Da was in Shenzhen for a few days and so I had to find somewhere to chill until he got back. I could have stayed in Shanghai and seen some of the place, maybe going to one of its many museums. Incidently, having been traveling for over four weeks now I still haven't entered a single museum. Dad, you must be horrified! Yi Hui suggested I go to somewhere like Zhou Zhuang - a river town about an hour-and-a-half's bus ride from Shanghai, where they filmed one of the Mission Imposible films - but I'd already gone there on a day trip with some guys I met in the hostel in Shanghai a few weeks ago. Yi Hui says that it was very beautiful when she went there many years ago but we were sorely dissapointed. True, it looked pretty, but virtually every single building in the Old Town had been turned into a souvenier shop, their owners shouting "you come lookie!" and "this, only [insert rediculously high value compared with what it's actually worth] yuan, look!" as you walked passed. And you had to pay to get in there! They should be paying us. I might be sounding like exactly the sort of people I hate - the ones that when you go canvasing for Plaid say "we moved in to this lovely quaint, unspoiled part of rural Mid Wales from the South of England but now it's just not the same with all these people from the North of England moving in, ruining the community" - so sorry for being hypocritical, but don't they realise that the reason people want to visit a 'quaint' (excuse my use of one of the most quintessentially English words... or maybe 'quitessesntial' is even more quintessential...) Old Town is exactly because it is 'quaint' and 'unspoiled', something people find special, something that has a charm about it, but as soon as it transformes into basically a massive carboot sale selling junk worse than what you would actually find at a carboot sale it looses all its charm and everything that once made it special. That day wasn't a complete dissaster though, as we found a little garden appropriately named 'Paradise' to escape the witch-like (most of these souvenier shop owners seem to be female for some reason) voices of the Old Town and all had a good laugh together.
So there I was in an internet cafe in Shanghai searching the web for somewhere to go for a few days. A couple of places looked interesting, although whenever I saw the words "...has a lovely little Old Town" I quickly closed the window. I stumbled upon a place called Huangshan fairly early on in my searches and after comparing it with a couple of others I thought I might as well go for it. I got a taxi to the main train station, waited in line for a ticket, had a few people barge in in front of me to dodge the queue in true Chinese style, bought a return ticket to Huangshan, left the station to find a bite to eat, got hounded by a few taxi drivers while crossing the street who couldn't understand why I didn't want to use their dodgy services, bought a meal in a Chinese fast-food restaurant, was still hungry so went next door to buy a very tasty custard cream doughnut, made my way to the train, walked past the carrages, walked passed more and more carrages (this train was huge, I have no idea how long it was), found carrage number six, found middle bunk number twenty-one, put my bags on the rack, got out the book (although it's more of an extended essay really) I'm reading about a policeman's reminices of Old Llanwddyn (very interesting, anyone in Llanwddyn who's reading this blog I highly recommend you get a copy) and settled down for the night and the eleven-hour train ride to Huangshan.
I arrived here after a virtually sleepless night just before ten on Monday morning. "You want bus?" and "Here, you want raincoat? You buy map, yes?" were the first things I heard after leaving the train station gates. By now my "Bu yau, xie xie" had gone through the phases of "Bu yau" and just ignoring them to giving them the 'evil eyes'. All I wanted to do was find the Huangshan International Youth Hostel (88% ratings on Hostelworld) which was meant to be just round the corner from the station and have a nice cold shower. Walking down the street I was again hounded by a load of Chinese-style rickshaw drivers who shout "Hello!" as you walk pass (evidetly the only English word they know) to try and get your attention. Now, if a Shanghaiese taxi driver with a metre doesn't know the way to one of the main Metro stations when I have a map in my hand, as if one of these rickshaw drivers would have any chance on earth to get me to where I wanted. You wonder if any tourist is dumb enoughto actually use one of them. Perhaps that's why they haven't needed to learn anything beyond 'hello'. I hadn't booked into the hostel in advance so when I came across the other International Youth Hostel called Koala (92% ratings) and found they had had a room I thought things were looking up. But after paying for the room and a 100 yuan deposit for the key I found that I only had 7 yuan left - about 55p - and was in desperate need of a bank. A fairly large town like this must have a HSBC I thought, but no, only Bank of China. I was in such a rush that I forgot to go upstairs to the dorm to dump my rucksack and so went back out onto the street with all my belongings, round the corner, down some stairs, down a very dodgy-looking alleyway (at least dodgy compared to most of Shanghai; it seems to be the norm in this town) and found the Bank of China with the ATM outside. Card in the slot, select English, PIN number, everything good so far, cash out... sorry, "card communication failed". After a couple more attemps in vain I entered the bank and explained the problem. The manager didn't know what the problem was, phoned someone else to ask and told me to go to the main branch in town. 5 yuan by taxi, he said, but emptying my wallet and showing him how little I had he felt a sorry and gave me 5 yuan of his own, went outside to a taxi, told him where to go and how much it he should charge and I was on my way. 11 yuan is the minimum for a taxi ride in Shanghai, but this is not Shanghai and it was interesting seeing for the first time in Asia a taxi driver not using the metre. I got out a couple of minutes later, entered the main branch, tried their ATM - "card communication failed" - was given a ticket (number 1111 - easy to recognise when it was being called out) to see a representative, had a word with her and found out that a HSBC Solo Debit Card can't be used to withdraw money with them. "Do you have another card? A Visa or Mastercard? A Credit Card?". Sorry, no. No wonder, as Elaine says, a Solo is free. Nobody would ever pay for one. Only one thing for it then - I'll have to exchange my remaining Sterling, all thirty pounds of it (although I have about five pounds in coins that they can't exchange). "Do you have your passport with you?" Umm... I should do... wait a second... where is it... Then I realised I must have left it with the receptionist at the hostel when she was checking it, such was my rush to get to a bank. "Will a driver's licience do?" I asked. "Sorry, we need a passport". So, not having money to take a taxi back, I ask for directions to the train station. She points in some vague direction. I make my way back passing plenty of stalls selling water along the way which by now I could really do with but was not prepared to spend any money at all. I would have to be very thrifty these next few days, I thought, which means that the postcards I wrote to Auntie Jan and Auntie Mary and the letter I wrote to Sophie Deas can't be sent until I get back to Shanghai and find a HSBC, so sorry ladies. Entering the hostel, the receptionist hands me my passport straight away. "You left this" she says. I know. This time I go upstairs to dump my things, head back to the closer Bank of China, exchange my sterling (at a very good rate I thought) with a whole form to fill in before I got my Yuan, head back to the hostel and had that cold shower I'd been waiting for. "We've been travelling China for a while now and we're always surprised with how friendly and kind the Chinese are," said one of my dormmates when I got out of the shower, his voice almost drowned out by the incessant beeping from the polluting cars on the street below. Yeah right, I thought, maybe the ones I've met in AC but certainly not the majority of the ones I've seen in China. So as you can see I was beginning to get fed up with China, or rather with the Chinese.
The town I am staying in is actually called Tunxi and Huangshan (literally Yellow Mountain) is the mountain range close by in southern Anhui province. If ever you've seen any traditional Chinese paintings of a mountain it was probably of Huangshan. You've probably thought 'wow, that's very striking, the artist must have used a lot of his imagination' if you've seen one, but actually it's just as striking as it is in the pictures. It's China's most famous mountain range and is a UNESCO World Herritage Site. Needless to say, it's also one of China's most popular tourist destinations too. I got up at quarter-to-six on Tuesday morning to catch the one-and-a-half hour minibus ride I'd booked that would be leaving at six from outside the hostel doors. I actually woke up at half-past-four when my alarm went off an hour earlier than I expected - I hadn't changed my mobile phone's timezone since coming back from Japan. I was a little unsure of how the day would go; I'd already drunken two out of my four 1.5 litre bottles of water I'd bought from the supermarket round the corner. I could have topped them up with the hostel's tap water and used my iodine drops and neutralising tablets for the first time but thought I'd see how it goes. If I was desparate I could top it up from a spring on the mountain or from a stream as I would be taking my water purification gear with me, and if the worst came to the worst I could fork out and buy some from one of the stalls up there. Food was also an issue: I hadn't really had much to eat the day before as I was trying to save my cash and the supermarket didn't have much suitable mountain climbing grub on sale so I would have to do with a pack of 'French Bread' (strange-tasting brioche), a pack of custard-filled muffin thingys which tasted a little alcoholic, two small packets of chocolate biscuits (the only chocolate on sale was Snickers and some Nestle stuff, both way too expensive), some jellied fruit, a packet of peanuts and two small sausages. A strange selection maybe but it should give me the energy I needed to last the day. Finally I was concerned about timing: the last minibus would leave for the town at 5 p.m. giving me about eight hours walking time. I wasn't going to stay the night on the mountain in one of its many over-priced hotels to watch the sun rise like some other people in the hostel but was determined to make the most of my day by seeing as much of it as I could. There were cable cars to take you from the foot of Huangshan to half-way up it but, again, I didn't want to throw my money away if I could help it. I'd heard it would take about eight hours to walk from the eastern base to about two-thirds of the way up, walk across the range for a while seeing some of the sights and walk back down the western side. But I wasn't too worried. After all, I can be a fast walker when I want to be and I've got plenty of back-up energy stored up inside of me.
We got to the foot of Huangshan and then transfered into another minibus to take us to the eastern base. Here we would have to buy the enterance ticket. The Lonely Planet guide to China says that "No matter how you approach the gate you will be still be shocked by the enterence fee" - a whopping 200 yuan normal price but I got in half-price with my student ID. I had a good look at my tourist map I'd bought on the train and at the one on the wooden plaque by the enterence: 3.5 km until the first 'Scenic Viewing Point'. You're not allowed to stop to look at the view while you're walking which is part Chinese philosophy and part practicality given the narrow steps all the way up. Oh yeah, there are steps to take you everywhere. So through the gates I went at 8:20 a.m. and up the first few steps I climbed. One hour should be enough to get to this first viewing point, if I walk quickly.
Things were going well for the first kilometer or so. The sun wasn't shining, hidden behind the clouds, but it was dry, although some showers were expected later on in the day. I was wearing for only the second time in Asia my walking boots plus my white shorts and white shirt - the coolest and most absorbant clothes I have. The stairs were short enough to manage two steps at a time and I was steaming ahead of all the short-legged Chinese. Slowing down when I got stuck behind somebody carrying food and water ballenced on either side of a long pole perched on their shoulders proved a pleasant break as you had to wait for the steps to get wide enough to overtake. But I knew I couldn't keep up with this speed for long as by the end of the second kilometer I had to sit down and could hear my heart beat two quickly for its own good. I was also drinking more water than I had rashioned for myself and by this stage my first bottle of water was already half empty. I slowed down a little bit and made it to the viewing point in time with a few minutes to spare. The water prices here were already 10 yuan for a small bottle compared with the 2.5 yuan I'd paid in the supermarket for my 1.5 litre ones. The price would inevitably increase the higher up you went although I'm sure they would we up for some bartering.
If I was going to make it up this mountain alive I would have to slow it down a bit. That first section proved to be the hardest though so looking back I'm glad I rushed it. It was another 3 km to the next viewing point and the upper station of the eastern cable car. I could see how far I would have to climb by looking up at the cable above and following it up and up. A long way. I'm not sure how steep the gradient was but my guess is that this next stage averaged about 40-50 degrees. I had some brioche, opened one of the packets of chocolate biscuits and nibbled on one of those, took a sip of water and started walking again, this time only one step at a time but nonetheless at a good steady pace. I could see I was about to enter the thick clouds and about half-way up I was walking through a rain shower. By this time everyone around me (almost exclusively Chinese - although this might be one of China's main tourist destinations it seems that applies for the Chinese only) is wearing their thin plastic poncho-style raincoats like the ones they were trying to flog off outside the train station. I didn't have anything waterproof with me to put on but I wasn't complaining. My shirt was already drenched from my own sweat (and, originally being white, was now see-through) and the rain accompanied by the visable light breeze was cooling me down quite nicely. When I reached this next viewing point, named 'Wild Goose Ridge', I wasn't out of breath at all, had a custard-filled muffin and rummaged around in my day bag for a buiscuit which by now had all fallen out of their packet, took another sip of water and looked at the map to see where I should go next. What's more, it was only 10:15 a.m. It looked like the not-so-slow-but-not-so-fast and steady approach was working better than the blitz attack after all.
The road forked into two different directions at this point and I decided to take the one that would lead me to a lake to see if it was in the same league as Lake Vyrnwy. The steps at this point were slightly more narrow than before which didn't help the fact that there were substantially more people around now that they had all gotten off the cable car. Most belonged to tour groups from various corners of China each wearing rain coats in the colour specific to their group and a baseball had also either with the tour group's logo or that of the hotel they were staying in. After getting to the lake - or what was probably a lake down there somewhere hidden away under the thickening fog - which was only half a kilometer up-hill from Wild Goose Ridge I thought I might as well carry on straight away to the meteological observatory, only another half kilometer. The steps were getting so congested by now that even if I wanted to I wouldn't have been able to go two steps at a time and I somehow ended up in the middle of one particular tour group and walking alongside a Chinese guy about my age who looks exactly like LuZe.
We started talking to each other: where are you from (always a rather pointless question as I don't know the names of anywhere in China apart from the major provinces and cities and they only just about know where the United Kingdom is let alone Llanwddyn or Wales, but that at least gives you an oppertunity to talk about it), where are you travelling to, for how long, etc. It turns out that his name is Char (that's what it sounded like anyway), and he's a twenty-year-old university student from somewhere in North-East China. His English isn't perfect - about LuZe's level - but anything's better than my non-existant Chinese and it was good enough to get by slowly in a conversation. When we reach the observatory he introduces me to his mum who takes a couple of pictures of us together. Like I said, for some reason Huangshan was virtually desserted of non-Chinese and suddenly - maybe because there wasn't much to see over the edge other than thick fog - I found myself the main attraction, more so than the mountain they'd all come to see. I didn't mind at all - anyone from AC knows that I'm used to being surrounded by Asians :P - and was quite enjoying posing for pictures with all the teenagers, especially when they remarked on how handsome I was! I must say that I don't think I was really looking my best, what with my see-through shirt exposing my moobs and hairy chest, but we all know that Asians have different tastes. I was further introduced to his English teacher and her sixteen-year-old son and when the tour guide lead them on I thought I might as well tag along. They certainly all wanted me to join them.
As we continued along the ridge we were all chatting to each other. They seemed to take a shine to me and were asking all sorts of questions about life back home, schooling, work, table manners, gap years and the like. It was giving them all some good practise of their English and I was taught a little Chinese too including the word for 'fir tree', which I've now forgotten. Char's mum gave me her baseball hat to wear, which almost flew off my head several times in the gushing winds we were now experiencing. I was introduced to an eighteen-year-old girl called Dodo too who's English was very good indeed for her age surpassing that of her English teacher - although having had two years of interpreting non-natives is useful experience, such as knowing that 'the bus in the sky' means cable car and being able to guess what word they're trying to say by thinking about its context (the Star Treck harmonica holder incident comes to mind, Ondra) and impressing them by guessing it correctly. "Wow, you can speak Chinese!" Said Dodo as we were walking single-file down very narrow stairs with sheer cliff-faces either side of us after I correctly guessed what word the English teacher's son was trying to say. "No, he's just clever." Said Char. Either one will do for me, but considering I'd just been talking about what Welsh weather was like in Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter it wasn't too difficult to guess the word he was trying to think of was 'season'.
This went on for a few hours whereby they were very impressed that I wan't feeling the cold and wasn't afraid of getting a cold, although my fingertips were incredibly wrinkly. I was also fortunate not to get the dreaded crotch rash which I had after my last bout of long-distance walking in Kyoto. I had no reason to leave the tour group and we were making steady progress towards the western side of Huangshan, passing various 'Scenic Points' along the way. The mountain range is famous for many reasons, most of which were shrouded by the fog. But we were able to see some of the "Strangely-Shaped Rocks" including one which is meant to look like an old mobile phone with a long antenae and also some of its more famous fir trees such as "The Tree to Welcome Outsiders". All the while I felt very much at home with them: I was lent an MP3 player and listenned to some camp Chinese Pop to which I could easily sing along to after only one verse; I was 'nudged' over to the safer side of the path if ever I verged (wow, I just looked up the word 'verge' on an online dictionary to check if I used it in the right context and there are so many different definitions. Still not sure if I'm using it in the right context though) near the edge; and every so often we'd take a few pictures of us four together. Having Dodo explain the meaning behind the names of various places on the mountains was also very useful and proved a lot more informative than the Chinglish signs dotted around the place trying to do the same job. At about 2 o'clock we arrived at the western cable car and finding it cheaper than I'd expected (they thought it was quite expensive but considering the amount of work that must have gone into constructing it I thought it very fair) and realising that after walking through rain for the last four hours or so I hadn't needed to touch my second bottle of water nor the majority of the food I brought I decided to join them on it. As we decended below the clouds we finally saw what makes Huangshan a World Heritage Site: a vast mountain range of many many peaks, seventy-seven of which are over 1000m, the tallest being 1864m, covered from the foot upwards with dense fir trees until the barren granite cliffs take over. And with this as our background we exchanged email addresses and signed eachother's baseball caps. They promised to send me the pictures they'd taken as I hadn't brought my camera with me (my battery charger's broken and the batteries from the supermarket in Tunxi were a waste of money) and Dodo and I said we'll try to keep in touch.
When we reached the bottom they had to wait for the remainder of their tour group to arrive, some of which had decided to walk the western side of the ridge instead of taking the cable car. I bought the bus ticket to get back to the main gate bus seeing as I had another two-and-a-half hours or so until the last minibus back to Tunxi left I decided to stay there until the rest of the group had caught up. They began to eat their lunch - snacks of dried peas and crackers - sharing plenty of it with me. Of course, they refused to eat any of the food I offered them. We continued chatting about this and that while munching away until all the food had gone then, not wanting to stand around in the rain and get cold, we took shelter under a gate where the English teacher's son produced a pack of cards. They asked me if I knew any Chinese card games to which I replied "only one, I don't know its name but you play it like this..." I'd only played it once or twice before with Shu Haur in Coffee Lounge sometime in second term and I've forgotten its name again now after a few rounds and lots of help from the English teacher who was peering over my shoulder and giving me more than just hints as to what I should do I was going out first (i.e. winning) in almost every hand. They were all impressed by how quickly I learned it. "See, I think he's clever as well as strong." Said the English Teacher, although I put my success down to her virtually playing for me. Her son, however, proved not-so-good at the game and gave up after almost an hour of play. A ten-year-old took his place who was almost in tears after his dad kept telling him what to do. "His dad thinks he knows more than his son," said Dodo. "All dads think they know more than their sons!" I said. After another round the rest of the tour group had arrived and it was time for them to continue on their way towards some hot springs, another of Huangshan's attractions. I said goodbye and hopped on the bus. Maybe I was wrong about Chinese people after all, I though as I was driven down the spiralling road away from my new friends.
Arriving back at the main gate I wasn't sure where to go to get the minibus back to Tunxi. I had a good half-hour before 5 p.m. so I walked around to try and look for one. I could see lots of people heading into a big building on one side of the car park area and, assuming is was some sort of waiting area (there were many people coming down from the mountain at this point, enough to fill at least a dozen or so minibuses) decided to follow them inside, up some stairs and into a room with benches all around the sides. A strange little waiting room, I thought, as there were posters of tea plantations on the walls and three big barrells of tea leaves on the floor. I sat down in on the beach near the far corner and, seeing everybody else around me wearing identical red and white baseball caps, realised that I was the only one in the room who didn't belong to this one tour group. A mother ushered her young daughter to sit next to me to practise her English, which was very good considering she'd only been learning for a year, who swapped places every few sentences with her friend so that she could 'have a go' at speaking to me as well. The mother took a few photos of us together with her camera and the children yet more photos with their phones. Once again I was the centre of attention but as always I was enjoying it and made the most of it by encouraging them to practise their English. Then two ladies in a strange hippy-like multicoloured uniform entered the room, one of them rigged with a microphone and speaker, and proceeded to do a presentation and prepare samples of the tea on offer for us all to try. This wasn't a bus waiting room after all but a show room. The teas - one red and two green - were all delicious and watching them prepare it by pouring the teas from one pot into another, pouring hot water over the teapots etc. was interesting. It all had an 'Eisteddfod Tesco Foodhall Tent' sort of feeling to it, whereby everybody looks interested and is more than happy to take the free samples on offer but everyone knows that nobody's going to buy any of it at the end, even if the three tins of tea do come in a golden fabric-lined box.
I left the showroom with everybody else, went through the shop which had every type of tea you could ever want on sale on the way to the exit and saw that, as I feared, everybody around me who were members of this one tour group went to their own bus. I looked at my watch and saw that it was ten minutes past the hour. I'd better find these minibuses, I thought, and fast. After asking at the Main Gate information desk I found out I needed to go onto the main road, round the corner and wait at a junction. On my way I passed two taxi drivers, the first offering to take me to Tunxi for 260 yuan and the second for 200 yuan. I'm sure I could have got that down if I'd tried but I'd rather put up with having my legs squashed between my seat and the one in front of me than paying that sort of money. Besides, I didn't even have that much on me. At the junction there were about twenty of us all waiting to catch a minibus heading in the right direction. We waited... and waited... but it seemed as if this time they really did stop when they said they'd stop. After about half an hour of the Chinese people around me trying to persuade buses coming from Tunxi to come back quickly and pick us up it was obvious that we'd have to find some other way. Fortunately, a girl from the hostel with whom I went into Huangshan with that morning saw me waiting on the side of the road and told the driver to stop. "How much?" I asked. 25 yuan, she says. "That's good enough for me" I said as I clambered into what can only be described as a weird Chinese hippy van turned into a makeshift minibus. There must have been about eleven of us including the driver and crammed into this little space but it was a way back and only a few kuai (another word for yuan) more than the minibus in. We got dropped off just outside the hostel and I went straight up to the dorm to have, you guessed it, a nice cold shower!
The next day I slept in late, checked out of the hostel, stayed inside the hostel all day (it was raining heavily outside non-stop), chatted to the girl (a Chinese girl in her twenties, again from the North East) who stopped the hippy van for a couple of hours, wrote most of this entry and got the night train back to Shanghai. My time in Huangshan made me think about what the 'real' China is. Is it the super-clean multi-storied shopping centres of Shanghai? The desparate souvenier sellers and rickshaw drivers of the towns? Or the welcoming and friendly Chinese vourists travelling their own country that I meet along the way? I suppose in such a massive country with so many different faces there's no such thing as the 'real' China after all.
Da was in Shenzhen for a few days and so I had to find somewhere to chill until he got back. I could have stayed in Shanghai and seen some of the place, maybe going to one of its many museums. Incidently, having been traveling for over four weeks now I still haven't entered a single museum. Dad, you must be horrified! Yi Hui suggested I go to somewhere like Zhou Zhuang - a river town about an hour-and-a-half's bus ride from Shanghai, where they filmed one of the Mission Imposible films - but I'd already gone there on a day trip with some guys I met in the hostel in Shanghai a few weeks ago. Yi Hui says that it was very beautiful when she went there many years ago but we were sorely dissapointed. True, it looked pretty, but virtually every single building in the Old Town had been turned into a souvenier shop, their owners shouting "you come lookie!" and "this, only [insert rediculously high value compared with what it's actually worth] yuan, look!" as you walked passed. And you had to pay to get in there! They should be paying us. I might be sounding like exactly the sort of people I hate - the ones that when you go canvasing for Plaid say "we moved in to this lovely quaint, unspoiled part of rural Mid Wales from the South of England but now it's just not the same with all these people from the North of England moving in, ruining the community" - so sorry for being hypocritical, but don't they realise that the reason people want to visit a 'quaint' (excuse my use of one of the most quintessentially English words... or maybe 'quitessesntial' is even more quintessential...) Old Town is exactly because it is 'quaint' and 'unspoiled', something people find special, something that has a charm about it, but as soon as it transformes into basically a massive carboot sale selling junk worse than what you would actually find at a carboot sale it looses all its charm and everything that once made it special. That day wasn't a complete dissaster though, as we found a little garden appropriately named 'Paradise' to escape the witch-like (most of these souvenier shop owners seem to be female for some reason) voices of the Old Town and all had a good laugh together.
So there I was in an internet cafe in Shanghai searching the web for somewhere to go for a few days. A couple of places looked interesting, although whenever I saw the words "...has a lovely little Old Town" I quickly closed the window. I stumbled upon a place called Huangshan fairly early on in my searches and after comparing it with a couple of others I thought I might as well go for it. I got a taxi to the main train station, waited in line for a ticket, had a few people barge in in front of me to dodge the queue in true Chinese style, bought a return ticket to Huangshan, left the station to find a bite to eat, got hounded by a few taxi drivers while crossing the street who couldn't understand why I didn't want to use their dodgy services, bought a meal in a Chinese fast-food restaurant, was still hungry so went next door to buy a very tasty custard cream doughnut, made my way to the train, walked past the carrages, walked passed more and more carrages (this train was huge, I have no idea how long it was), found carrage number six, found middle bunk number twenty-one, put my bags on the rack, got out the book (although it's more of an extended essay really) I'm reading about a policeman's reminices of Old Llanwddyn (very interesting, anyone in Llanwddyn who's reading this blog I highly recommend you get a copy) and settled down for the night and the eleven-hour train ride to Huangshan.
I arrived here after a virtually sleepless night just before ten on Monday morning. "You want bus?" and "Here, you want raincoat? You buy map, yes?" were the first things I heard after leaving the train station gates. By now my "Bu yau, xie xie" had gone through the phases of "Bu yau" and just ignoring them to giving them the 'evil eyes'. All I wanted to do was find the Huangshan International Youth Hostel (88% ratings on Hostelworld) which was meant to be just round the corner from the station and have a nice cold shower. Walking down the street I was again hounded by a load of Chinese-style rickshaw drivers who shout "Hello!" as you walk pass (evidetly the only English word they know) to try and get your attention. Now, if a Shanghaiese taxi driver with a metre doesn't know the way to one of the main Metro stations when I have a map in my hand, as if one of these rickshaw drivers would have any chance on earth to get me to where I wanted. You wonder if any tourist is dumb enoughto actually use one of them. Perhaps that's why they haven't needed to learn anything beyond 'hello'. I hadn't booked into the hostel in advance so when I came across the other International Youth Hostel called Koala (92% ratings) and found they had had a room I thought things were looking up. But after paying for the room and a 100 yuan deposit for the key I found that I only had 7 yuan left - about 55p - and was in desperate need of a bank. A fairly large town like this must have a HSBC I thought, but no, only Bank of China. I was in such a rush that I forgot to go upstairs to the dorm to dump my rucksack and so went back out onto the street with all my belongings, round the corner, down some stairs, down a very dodgy-looking alleyway (at least dodgy compared to most of Shanghai; it seems to be the norm in this town) and found the Bank of China with the ATM outside. Card in the slot, select English, PIN number, everything good so far, cash out... sorry, "card communication failed". After a couple more attemps in vain I entered the bank and explained the problem. The manager didn't know what the problem was, phoned someone else to ask and told me to go to the main branch in town. 5 yuan by taxi, he said, but emptying my wallet and showing him how little I had he felt a sorry and gave me 5 yuan of his own, went outside to a taxi, told him where to go and how much it he should charge and I was on my way. 11 yuan is the minimum for a taxi ride in Shanghai, but this is not Shanghai and it was interesting seeing for the first time in Asia a taxi driver not using the metre. I got out a couple of minutes later, entered the main branch, tried their ATM - "card communication failed" - was given a ticket (number 1111 - easy to recognise when it was being called out) to see a representative, had a word with her and found out that a HSBC Solo Debit Card can't be used to withdraw money with them. "Do you have another card? A Visa or Mastercard? A Credit Card?". Sorry, no. No wonder, as Elaine says, a Solo is free. Nobody would ever pay for one. Only one thing for it then - I'll have to exchange my remaining Sterling, all thirty pounds of it (although I have about five pounds in coins that they can't exchange). "Do you have your passport with you?" Umm... I should do... wait a second... where is it... Then I realised I must have left it with the receptionist at the hostel when she was checking it, such was my rush to get to a bank. "Will a driver's licience do?" I asked. "Sorry, we need a passport". So, not having money to take a taxi back, I ask for directions to the train station. She points in some vague direction. I make my way back passing plenty of stalls selling water along the way which by now I could really do with but was not prepared to spend any money at all. I would have to be very thrifty these next few days, I thought, which means that the postcards I wrote to Auntie Jan and Auntie Mary and the letter I wrote to Sophie Deas can't be sent until I get back to Shanghai and find a HSBC, so sorry ladies. Entering the hostel, the receptionist hands me my passport straight away. "You left this" she says. I know. This time I go upstairs to dump my things, head back to the closer Bank of China, exchange my sterling (at a very good rate I thought) with a whole form to fill in before I got my Yuan, head back to the hostel and had that cold shower I'd been waiting for. "We've been travelling China for a while now and we're always surprised with how friendly and kind the Chinese are," said one of my dormmates when I got out of the shower, his voice almost drowned out by the incessant beeping from the polluting cars on the street below. Yeah right, I thought, maybe the ones I've met in AC but certainly not the majority of the ones I've seen in China. So as you can see I was beginning to get fed up with China, or rather with the Chinese.
The town I am staying in is actually called Tunxi and Huangshan (literally Yellow Mountain) is the mountain range close by in southern Anhui province. If ever you've seen any traditional Chinese paintings of a mountain it was probably of Huangshan. You've probably thought 'wow, that's very striking, the artist must have used a lot of his imagination' if you've seen one, but actually it's just as striking as it is in the pictures. It's China's most famous mountain range and is a UNESCO World Herritage Site. Needless to say, it's also one of China's most popular tourist destinations too. I got up at quarter-to-six on Tuesday morning to catch the one-and-a-half hour minibus ride I'd booked that would be leaving at six from outside the hostel doors. I actually woke up at half-past-four when my alarm went off an hour earlier than I expected - I hadn't changed my mobile phone's timezone since coming back from Japan. I was a little unsure of how the day would go; I'd already drunken two out of my four 1.5 litre bottles of water I'd bought from the supermarket round the corner. I could have topped them up with the hostel's tap water and used my iodine drops and neutralising tablets for the first time but thought I'd see how it goes. If I was desparate I could top it up from a spring on the mountain or from a stream as I would be taking my water purification gear with me, and if the worst came to the worst I could fork out and buy some from one of the stalls up there. Food was also an issue: I hadn't really had much to eat the day before as I was trying to save my cash and the supermarket didn't have much suitable mountain climbing grub on sale so I would have to do with a pack of 'French Bread' (strange-tasting brioche), a pack of custard-filled muffin thingys which tasted a little alcoholic, two small packets of chocolate biscuits (the only chocolate on sale was Snickers and some Nestle stuff, both way too expensive), some jellied fruit, a packet of peanuts and two small sausages. A strange selection maybe but it should give me the energy I needed to last the day. Finally I was concerned about timing: the last minibus would leave for the town at 5 p.m. giving me about eight hours walking time. I wasn't going to stay the night on the mountain in one of its many over-priced hotels to watch the sun rise like some other people in the hostel but was determined to make the most of my day by seeing as much of it as I could. There were cable cars to take you from the foot of Huangshan to half-way up it but, again, I didn't want to throw my money away if I could help it. I'd heard it would take about eight hours to walk from the eastern base to about two-thirds of the way up, walk across the range for a while seeing some of the sights and walk back down the western side. But I wasn't too worried. After all, I can be a fast walker when I want to be and I've got plenty of back-up energy stored up inside of me.
We got to the foot of Huangshan and then transfered into another minibus to take us to the eastern base. Here we would have to buy the enterance ticket. The Lonely Planet guide to China says that "No matter how you approach the gate you will be still be shocked by the enterence fee" - a whopping 200 yuan normal price but I got in half-price with my student ID. I had a good look at my tourist map I'd bought on the train and at the one on the wooden plaque by the enterence: 3.5 km until the first 'Scenic Viewing Point'. You're not allowed to stop to look at the view while you're walking which is part Chinese philosophy and part practicality given the narrow steps all the way up. Oh yeah, there are steps to take you everywhere. So through the gates I went at 8:20 a.m. and up the first few steps I climbed. One hour should be enough to get to this first viewing point, if I walk quickly.
Things were going well for the first kilometer or so. The sun wasn't shining, hidden behind the clouds, but it was dry, although some showers were expected later on in the day. I was wearing for only the second time in Asia my walking boots plus my white shorts and white shirt - the coolest and most absorbant clothes I have. The stairs were short enough to manage two steps at a time and I was steaming ahead of all the short-legged Chinese. Slowing down when I got stuck behind somebody carrying food and water ballenced on either side of a long pole perched on their shoulders proved a pleasant break as you had to wait for the steps to get wide enough to overtake. But I knew I couldn't keep up with this speed for long as by the end of the second kilometer I had to sit down and could hear my heart beat two quickly for its own good. I was also drinking more water than I had rashioned for myself and by this stage my first bottle of water was already half empty. I slowed down a little bit and made it to the viewing point in time with a few minutes to spare. The water prices here were already 10 yuan for a small bottle compared with the 2.5 yuan I'd paid in the supermarket for my 1.5 litre ones. The price would inevitably increase the higher up you went although I'm sure they would we up for some bartering.
If I was going to make it up this mountain alive I would have to slow it down a bit. That first section proved to be the hardest though so looking back I'm glad I rushed it. It was another 3 km to the next viewing point and the upper station of the eastern cable car. I could see how far I would have to climb by looking up at the cable above and following it up and up. A long way. I'm not sure how steep the gradient was but my guess is that this next stage averaged about 40-50 degrees. I had some brioche, opened one of the packets of chocolate biscuits and nibbled on one of those, took a sip of water and started walking again, this time only one step at a time but nonetheless at a good steady pace. I could see I was about to enter the thick clouds and about half-way up I was walking through a rain shower. By this time everyone around me (almost exclusively Chinese - although this might be one of China's main tourist destinations it seems that applies for the Chinese only) is wearing their thin plastic poncho-style raincoats like the ones they were trying to flog off outside the train station. I didn't have anything waterproof with me to put on but I wasn't complaining. My shirt was already drenched from my own sweat (and, originally being white, was now see-through) and the rain accompanied by the visable light breeze was cooling me down quite nicely. When I reached this next viewing point, named 'Wild Goose Ridge', I wasn't out of breath at all, had a custard-filled muffin and rummaged around in my day bag for a buiscuit which by now had all fallen out of their packet, took another sip of water and looked at the map to see where I should go next. What's more, it was only 10:15 a.m. It looked like the not-so-slow-but-not-so-fast and steady approach was working better than the blitz attack after all.
The road forked into two different directions at this point and I decided to take the one that would lead me to a lake to see if it was in the same league as Lake Vyrnwy. The steps at this point were slightly more narrow than before which didn't help the fact that there were substantially more people around now that they had all gotten off the cable car. Most belonged to tour groups from various corners of China each wearing rain coats in the colour specific to their group and a baseball had also either with the tour group's logo or that of the hotel they were staying in. After getting to the lake - or what was probably a lake down there somewhere hidden away under the thickening fog - which was only half a kilometer up-hill from Wild Goose Ridge I thought I might as well carry on straight away to the meteological observatory, only another half kilometer. The steps were getting so congested by now that even if I wanted to I wouldn't have been able to go two steps at a time and I somehow ended up in the middle of one particular tour group and walking alongside a Chinese guy about my age who looks exactly like LuZe.
We started talking to each other: where are you from (always a rather pointless question as I don't know the names of anywhere in China apart from the major provinces and cities and they only just about know where the United Kingdom is let alone Llanwddyn or Wales, but that at least gives you an oppertunity to talk about it), where are you travelling to, for how long, etc. It turns out that his name is Char (that's what it sounded like anyway), and he's a twenty-year-old university student from somewhere in North-East China. His English isn't perfect - about LuZe's level - but anything's better than my non-existant Chinese and it was good enough to get by slowly in a conversation. When we reach the observatory he introduces me to his mum who takes a couple of pictures of us together. Like I said, for some reason Huangshan was virtually desserted of non-Chinese and suddenly - maybe because there wasn't much to see over the edge other than thick fog - I found myself the main attraction, more so than the mountain they'd all come to see. I didn't mind at all - anyone from AC knows that I'm used to being surrounded by Asians :P - and was quite enjoying posing for pictures with all the teenagers, especially when they remarked on how handsome I was! I must say that I don't think I was really looking my best, what with my see-through shirt exposing my moobs and hairy chest, but we all know that Asians have different tastes. I was further introduced to his English teacher and her sixteen-year-old son and when the tour guide lead them on I thought I might as well tag along. They certainly all wanted me to join them.
As we continued along the ridge we were all chatting to each other. They seemed to take a shine to me and were asking all sorts of questions about life back home, schooling, work, table manners, gap years and the like. It was giving them all some good practise of their English and I was taught a little Chinese too including the word for 'fir tree', which I've now forgotten. Char's mum gave me her baseball hat to wear, which almost flew off my head several times in the gushing winds we were now experiencing. I was introduced to an eighteen-year-old girl called Dodo too who's English was very good indeed for her age surpassing that of her English teacher - although having had two years of interpreting non-natives is useful experience, such as knowing that 'the bus in the sky' means cable car and being able to guess what word they're trying to say by thinking about its context (the Star Treck harmonica holder incident comes to mind, Ondra) and impressing them by guessing it correctly. "Wow, you can speak Chinese!" Said Dodo as we were walking single-file down very narrow stairs with sheer cliff-faces either side of us after I correctly guessed what word the English teacher's son was trying to say. "No, he's just clever." Said Char. Either one will do for me, but considering I'd just been talking about what Welsh weather was like in Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter it wasn't too difficult to guess the word he was trying to think of was 'season'.
This went on for a few hours whereby they were very impressed that I wan't feeling the cold and wasn't afraid of getting a cold, although my fingertips were incredibly wrinkly. I was also fortunate not to get the dreaded crotch rash which I had after my last bout of long-distance walking in Kyoto. I had no reason to leave the tour group and we were making steady progress towards the western side of Huangshan, passing various 'Scenic Points' along the way. The mountain range is famous for many reasons, most of which were shrouded by the fog. But we were able to see some of the "Strangely-Shaped Rocks" including one which is meant to look like an old mobile phone with a long antenae and also some of its more famous fir trees such as "The Tree to Welcome Outsiders". All the while I felt very much at home with them: I was lent an MP3 player and listenned to some camp Chinese Pop to which I could easily sing along to after only one verse; I was 'nudged' over to the safer side of the path if ever I verged (wow, I just looked up the word 'verge' on an online dictionary to check if I used it in the right context and there are so many different definitions. Still not sure if I'm using it in the right context though) near the edge; and every so often we'd take a few pictures of us four together. Having Dodo explain the meaning behind the names of various places on the mountains was also very useful and proved a lot more informative than the Chinglish signs dotted around the place trying to do the same job. At about 2 o'clock we arrived at the western cable car and finding it cheaper than I'd expected (they thought it was quite expensive but considering the amount of work that must have gone into constructing it I thought it very fair) and realising that after walking through rain for the last four hours or so I hadn't needed to touch my second bottle of water nor the majority of the food I brought I decided to join them on it. As we decended below the clouds we finally saw what makes Huangshan a World Heritage Site: a vast mountain range of many many peaks, seventy-seven of which are over 1000m, the tallest being 1864m, covered from the foot upwards with dense fir trees until the barren granite cliffs take over. And with this as our background we exchanged email addresses and signed eachother's baseball caps. They promised to send me the pictures they'd taken as I hadn't brought my camera with me (my battery charger's broken and the batteries from the supermarket in Tunxi were a waste of money) and Dodo and I said we'll try to keep in touch.
When we reached the bottom they had to wait for the remainder of their tour group to arrive, some of which had decided to walk the western side of the ridge instead of taking the cable car. I bought the bus ticket to get back to the main gate bus seeing as I had another two-and-a-half hours or so until the last minibus back to Tunxi left I decided to stay there until the rest of the group had caught up. They began to eat their lunch - snacks of dried peas and crackers - sharing plenty of it with me. Of course, they refused to eat any of the food I offered them. We continued chatting about this and that while munching away until all the food had gone then, not wanting to stand around in the rain and get cold, we took shelter under a gate where the English teacher's son produced a pack of cards. They asked me if I knew any Chinese card games to which I replied "only one, I don't know its name but you play it like this..." I'd only played it once or twice before with Shu Haur in Coffee Lounge sometime in second term and I've forgotten its name again now after a few rounds and lots of help from the English teacher who was peering over my shoulder and giving me more than just hints as to what I should do I was going out first (i.e. winning) in almost every hand. They were all impressed by how quickly I learned it. "See, I think he's clever as well as strong." Said the English Teacher, although I put my success down to her virtually playing for me. Her son, however, proved not-so-good at the game and gave up after almost an hour of play. A ten-year-old took his place who was almost in tears after his dad kept telling him what to do. "His dad thinks he knows more than his son," said Dodo. "All dads think they know more than their sons!" I said. After another round the rest of the tour group had arrived and it was time for them to continue on their way towards some hot springs, another of Huangshan's attractions. I said goodbye and hopped on the bus. Maybe I was wrong about Chinese people after all, I though as I was driven down the spiralling road away from my new friends.
Arriving back at the main gate I wasn't sure where to go to get the minibus back to Tunxi. I had a good half-hour before 5 p.m. so I walked around to try and look for one. I could see lots of people heading into a big building on one side of the car park area and, assuming is was some sort of waiting area (there were many people coming down from the mountain at this point, enough to fill at least a dozen or so minibuses) decided to follow them inside, up some stairs and into a room with benches all around the sides. A strange little waiting room, I thought, as there were posters of tea plantations on the walls and three big barrells of tea leaves on the floor. I sat down in on the beach near the far corner and, seeing everybody else around me wearing identical red and white baseball caps, realised that I was the only one in the room who didn't belong to this one tour group. A mother ushered her young daughter to sit next to me to practise her English, which was very good considering she'd only been learning for a year, who swapped places every few sentences with her friend so that she could 'have a go' at speaking to me as well. The mother took a few photos of us together with her camera and the children yet more photos with their phones. Once again I was the centre of attention but as always I was enjoying it and made the most of it by encouraging them to practise their English. Then two ladies in a strange hippy-like multicoloured uniform entered the room, one of them rigged with a microphone and speaker, and proceeded to do a presentation and prepare samples of the tea on offer for us all to try. This wasn't a bus waiting room after all but a show room. The teas - one red and two green - were all delicious and watching them prepare it by pouring the teas from one pot into another, pouring hot water over the teapots etc. was interesting. It all had an 'Eisteddfod Tesco Foodhall Tent' sort of feeling to it, whereby everybody looks interested and is more than happy to take the free samples on offer but everyone knows that nobody's going to buy any of it at the end, even if the three tins of tea do come in a golden fabric-lined box.
I left the showroom with everybody else, went through the shop which had every type of tea you could ever want on sale on the way to the exit and saw that, as I feared, everybody around me who were members of this one tour group went to their own bus. I looked at my watch and saw that it was ten minutes past the hour. I'd better find these minibuses, I thought, and fast. After asking at the Main Gate information desk I found out I needed to go onto the main road, round the corner and wait at a junction. On my way I passed two taxi drivers, the first offering to take me to Tunxi for 260 yuan and the second for 200 yuan. I'm sure I could have got that down if I'd tried but I'd rather put up with having my legs squashed between my seat and the one in front of me than paying that sort of money. Besides, I didn't even have that much on me. At the junction there were about twenty of us all waiting to catch a minibus heading in the right direction. We waited... and waited... but it seemed as if this time they really did stop when they said they'd stop. After about half an hour of the Chinese people around me trying to persuade buses coming from Tunxi to come back quickly and pick us up it was obvious that we'd have to find some other way. Fortunately, a girl from the hostel with whom I went into Huangshan with that morning saw me waiting on the side of the road and told the driver to stop. "How much?" I asked. 25 yuan, she says. "That's good enough for me" I said as I clambered into what can only be described as a weird Chinese hippy van turned into a makeshift minibus. There must have been about eleven of us including the driver and crammed into this little space but it was a way back and only a few kuai (another word for yuan) more than the minibus in. We got dropped off just outside the hostel and I went straight up to the dorm to have, you guessed it, a nice cold shower!
The next day I slept in late, checked out of the hostel, stayed inside the hostel all day (it was raining heavily outside non-stop), chatted to the girl (a Chinese girl in her twenties, again from the North East) who stopped the hippy van for a couple of hours, wrote most of this entry and got the night train back to Shanghai. My time in Huangshan made me think about what the 'real' China is. Is it the super-clean multi-storied shopping centres of Shanghai? The desparate souvenier sellers and rickshaw drivers of the towns? Or the welcoming and friendly Chinese vourists travelling their own country that I meet along the way? I suppose in such a massive country with so many different faces there's no such thing as the 'real' China after all.
Saturday, 12 July 2008
Arrived in Japan
Kumiko says that Japan is the most wonderful country I've ever been to. Everything is perfect here and I've never tasted such good food, according to her. She obviously hasn't been around Wales much.
Kumiko: I'm sorry Hedd but just in case you didn't know, the UK is world-known to be the worst country for food. British people's taste-buds are literally like... dead
Apparently it's been scientifically proven that Japanese people have the most developed tastebuds in the world. The experiment was probably carried out by Japanese scientists, but there we go.
Anyways, konichiwa from Tokyo! After a long ferry ride, a long-ish bus ride, a short-ish metro ride and a short taxi ride I arrived at Kumiko's appartemnt late at night on Thursday. It's good to be able to understand at least the basics of the language of the country I'm in, even though when I first tried to use my Japanese in Osaka to buy the bus ticket up the only word the woman behind he counter underderstood in my sentence was 'Tokyo', and from then on we continued the conversation in English. The dialect they speak in Osaka is very different from the Tokyo dialect I've been taught, or at least that's what I blamed it on. On the bus up I noticed three interesting things about Japan: they drive on the left side of the road (as does, having just looked it up on Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_on_the_left_or_right - Malaysia and Indonesia, so that will make me feel a little more at home while over there); outside of the cities there's virtually no houses, just miles and miles of forrested hills with a huge expressway tearing its way through, which I found quite surprising given the country's high population density, and; many drivers (as in China too), whether on a pedal bike or in a lorry, wear these white gloves, presumably to protect themselves from the drity steering wheels, making it look like a large proportion of East Asians are lepers.
There'll be something on Tokyo itself when I've seen a little more of it. It's big. It's very big.
Kumiko: I'm sorry Hedd but just in case you didn't know, the UK is world-known to be the worst country for food. British people's taste-buds are literally like... dead
Apparently it's been scientifically proven that Japanese people have the most developed tastebuds in the world. The experiment was probably carried out by Japanese scientists, but there we go.
Anyways, konichiwa from Tokyo! After a long ferry ride, a long-ish bus ride, a short-ish metro ride and a short taxi ride I arrived at Kumiko's appartemnt late at night on Thursday. It's good to be able to understand at least the basics of the language of the country I'm in, even though when I first tried to use my Japanese in Osaka to buy the bus ticket up the only word the woman behind he counter underderstood in my sentence was 'Tokyo', and from then on we continued the conversation in English. The dialect they speak in Osaka is very different from the Tokyo dialect I've been taught, or at least that's what I blamed it on. On the bus up I noticed three interesting things about Japan: they drive on the left side of the road (as does, having just looked it up on Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_on_the_left_or_right - Malaysia and Indonesia, so that will make me feel a little more at home while over there); outside of the cities there's virtually no houses, just miles and miles of forrested hills with a huge expressway tearing its way through, which I found quite surprising given the country's high population density, and; many drivers (as in China too), whether on a pedal bike or in a lorry, wear these white gloves, presumably to protect themselves from the drity steering wheels, making it look like a large proportion of East Asians are lepers.
There'll be something on Tokyo itself when I've seen a little more of it. It's big. It's very big.
Some guideines on how to cross the road in China
1. Don't.
2. If you have to, DO NOT cross when the little man is red. This is when the cars play chicken with eachother, weaving in and out and almost crashing into eachother. The traffic lights at junctions and crossroads don't make any difference to controling their movement. The general rule for a driver is if you can see a gap between two cars, no matter how small, then go for it. They have no concept of lanes.
3. When the little man turns green the real fun begins. This is when the cars play chicken with the pedestrians. It can be quite scary at first, but after a few days it becomes a sort of game. A green man does not mean that the cars will stop in front of you, but rather that they are obliged to avoid you. The safest way to cross the road is to start walking when there's nothing coming and then to keep walking at a slow and steady pace all the way until you reach the other end. That way the cars can see you from a long way back and once the fisrt one starts to swerve around you the rest will follow like a snake.
4. DO NOT RUN! That way the cars can't predict where you'll be and there's so many of them on the road that you'll never find a gap big enough to run through in time. Just go slowly and steadily and walk with confidence.
5. Use Chinese people as bumpers. Three in the front, two to the rear and one to each side of you is a good choice for beginners.
6. Enjoy it. It's more nail-biting than most themepark rides and when you know how to do it safely it's a lot of fun!
Saturday, 5 July 2008
Food Glorious Food...
... hot sausage and mustard. While we're in the mood, cold jelly and custard.
- for anyone who doesn't get that, shame on you!
Perhaps even more important to the Shanghaiese than shopping is food. Life seems to revolve around it and every meal is an experience. For a start, it's a very social event: everybody picks lots of little things from the menu and they're all placed in the middle of the table then everybody eats some everything. It's good that you can then talk about the food because everybody knows what everything tastes like, but my Mandarin phrasebook does say that this culture of eating from the same bowl is the main factor in China's high leves of Hepatitis B. Lukily for me, then, three out of my nine injections I had before coming was to protect me from that, so hopefully I should be OK.
The Chinese don't like to waste any part of an animal, and I mean any part. My first two meals included marinated chicken feet, a noodle soup with cow stomach (not sure which one, though. Maybe the lining of them are all the same) and congealed duck's blood, a fish soup with congealed pig's blood, shredded jellyfish and lots, lots more. Unlike Lin, I can't yet tell the difference between duck's and pig's blood, but give me time!
At Yuyuan Garden on Thursday we had the Shanghaiese speciality: steamed crabmeat dumplings. In the restaurant we were sitting by a window that looked into the kitchen, so you could see how they were being made and how quickly they were being made too. One person to make the dough, one person to roll the dough into perfect small circles and put the right amount of crabmeat on them, one person to wrap it up into a ball and put in on a steamer, and one person to put them into the steamer. There was a huge ball of crabmeat on the table they were working on, and you wondered just how many crabs must have gone into it considering how little meat there is on a single crab. We ordered 24 of these dumplings. I tried to eat my first one and bit off about half of it. That was a bit of a failure, as I hadn't banked on quite how much juice there was inside! Da then instructed me on how to eat it properly: you bite a small hole and suck out all the juice, then dip it into some vinegar and put the whole thing into your mouth. And very tasty is was too.
Yesterday came the most interesting eating experience yet. "Have you ever had hotpot before?" Da asked me in the taxi to one of these massive shopping centres we'd be eating in. "Well, I've had Lancershire hotpot and casseroles and stuff," I said. This hotpot was going to be quite different, though. When we got to the basement of the shopping centre and found the hotpot place we sat down in a row by the bar. On the bar in front of each stool was a metal hole cut into the wood where you were to put your pot. We got a menu each, and flicking through some of the pages I knew this was going to be, umm, different (diddorol-gwahanol iawn sort of thing). For example, there were two pages for meat, the second being your average thinly cut ham, beef, lamb etc., and this is what was on the first page (as it's written), with pictures to go with each one: Pork Brain; Pork Liver; Pork Kidney; Pork Intestines; Deep Fried Crispy Pork Skin; Pork Tendons; Duck's Intestinal; Hollow Throat; Poultry Stomach; Cattle Stomach; Chicken Heart; Chicken Stomach. You'll be glad to know that the only one of these that we had was Hollow Throat and neither Da nor Lin could say which animal it had come from. It didn't really taste of much, but was quite chewey and elasticy. Anyway, we all ordered our own individual hotpot - a metal bowl of boiling water with different things added to it, a bit like a broth - and it was put in our individual holes which keep the water boiling. Mine was a mushroom one. Then we ordered the food to put in it. Da kept asking me what I wanted but, not knowing whether Pork Tendons was tastier that Duck's Intestinal, thought it better to let him decide. He kept putting 1s and 3s in different boxes on the order paper, saying "oh, you'll like this one" each time. I couldn't believe how much stuff he was ordering and I kept saying "don't you think we've got enough now?", him replying with "no, no, lets get some more". After a good 10 minutes he hands the paper to the waitress and the chef gets going with this monster order. In the meantime, as if this wasn't enough, Lin went to another stall to get yet more food and came back with 10 dumplings and a massive bowl of spiced vegetables, tofu and fat. Da doesn't even like spicy food, so it was up to just the two of us to get through this bowl of stuff. We started to eat (I found it odd that you could just get food from another stall and eat it there but the waitress didn't seem to care) and then the hotpot food came... and came... and came. It included (I can't remember it all, I'm just going by what I can see on the photo - I couldn't fit it all into the frame!) a plate of about 20 slices of mutton each; frozen tofu; bean sprouts; some sort of Chinese lettuce; bamboo shoots; mini omlette-type things; mini sausage-type things; Chinese cabbage; shrimp; the hollow throat; some weird rolled-up meatyfishy thing which none of us could remember what it was; and three different sauces. And these weren't just little tasters of each one, these were big portions overflowing from big bowls and plates. And then we began. You basically put the raw meat & vegetables into the hotpot and let it cook. I had no idea how long each thing would take to cook so was asking Da if it was OK to eat all the time. It didn't really matter with the vegetables but I wanted to make sure with the meat. It all tasted quite good, especially the omlettes and the sausages, although fishing it out of the pot was a little tricky at times and each time you dunked your slotted spoon in to have a look you'd find a piece of mutton or something that you missed last time and is now way over cooked. I looked on nervously when Da put two large blue raw shrimp in my hotpot. "And when will these be done?" I asked. "When they turn pink" he said, and after only about 30 seconds in the boiling water he fished them out and put them in my bowl and told me to eat. "Iechyd Da" I said to myself as I started to peel the first one but, not coming out of its shell easily and noticing a little grit along its back, I decided it would be best to wrap the two of them in a piece of tissue and hand it to the waitress before he saw. Somehow we managed to finish almost everything, although it was Da and Lin who ate the most. I can't understand how it all physically fitted inside them! We all needed a long sit down to let our food diguest so headed for the cinema on the top floor. We watched Kung Fu Panda first, which was very funny including for the Chinese who seemed to get a lot of in-jokes. Then, deciding we still couldn't really move, we watched Hancock - some good special effects, but not much of a storyline. All the while, Da and Lin were munching on the biggest bag of sweet popcorn the place sold and after the second film had finished they said they were hungry again and asked me where I wanted to go for supper. "Supper?!" I said, "You've got to be joking!"
Shanghai - First Impressions
Shanghai is a haven for shoppers. It's the financial centre of the World's most populated country and it looks like everyone of its 20 million residents (25 million during the day, and growing) love to shop. Every other building is a gigantic shopping centre at least 9 stories high. They all follow the same layout: the basement will be restaurants and food stalls, the ground floor (or here, confusingly, the first floor) will be cosmetics, the second and third floor will be woman's clothing, the fourth floor men's clothing, the fifth floor sports clothing, the sixth floor accessories, the seventh floor electronics, and the eighth floor a cinema. Having been in this city for 4 days I've been in no fewer than six of these huge shopping centres, all catering to different levels of the new Chinese Middle Class. Advertising is everywhere, as are all the big multinational companies: Starbucks, McDonald's, etc. It makes you wonder how much this place must have changed in the last 20 years or so.
I've been taken around the place by Da and Lin, his girlfriend from Shenzhen who's been staying with him since the evening before I arrived. It's very fortunate that I've had someone who knows his way around and who can speak Chinese, as hardly any of the locals speak any English. In fact, it would seem they don't need to as in my first 24 hours here I only saw one other Westerner. But maybe that's because we weren't in the touristy part of town then.
On Thursday we took the underground to Yuyuan Garden. Not only is the underground very cheap, it's also maticulously on time, arriving to the second that it predicts (there's a second countdown above the platform). Yuyuan Garden, contrary to what you might expect from the name, isn't really a garden at all but rather lots of small streets in the centre of the Old Town where all the tourists go. The buildings are quite impressive and there's a little river with lots of koi carp to one side. It must have been a lovely and quiet place once. Not any more, though, as the buildings have all been transformed into souvenier shops selling anything and everything to do with China: stamps, fans, bamboo flutes, chop sticks, etc. Sorry, but one thing nobody seems to sell is postcards, so you'll have to wait until I go somewhere else to get one. However, they're certainly not short of watches to sell: literally every few steps I took in Yuyuan Garden somebody would come up to me shouting "Watch?! You want watch?!" Always, somebody with "Watch?! You want watch?!" You might get the occasional "Watch? Or Bag?" And if they were really desperate they would come right up to your face shouting "Watchwatchwatchwatchwatch!" Of course, I was already wearing a perfectly good watch which they could easily see. But that didn't seem to matter.
Later that day the three of us walked along the promenade on this side of the Huangpu River, the main river that runs through Shanghai and where I'll get the ferry from on Tuesday. The sun had already set but it was still very hot. On the other side are more high-rise buildings: banks, offices and the famous Oriental Pearl TV Tower. "Chinese people don't really think about environmental problems, they just waste all the energy. Maybe they'll change in about 30 years" said Da as we looked across the river, the countless lights from the buildings brightening up the haze - a mixture of high humidity and pollutuion - that engulfs the entire city.
I've been taken around the place by Da and Lin, his girlfriend from Shenzhen who's been staying with him since the evening before I arrived. It's very fortunate that I've had someone who knows his way around and who can speak Chinese, as hardly any of the locals speak any English. In fact, it would seem they don't need to as in my first 24 hours here I only saw one other Westerner. But maybe that's because we weren't in the touristy part of town then.
On Thursday we took the underground to Yuyuan Garden. Not only is the underground very cheap, it's also maticulously on time, arriving to the second that it predicts (there's a second countdown above the platform). Yuyuan Garden, contrary to what you might expect from the name, isn't really a garden at all but rather lots of small streets in the centre of the Old Town where all the tourists go. The buildings are quite impressive and there's a little river with lots of koi carp to one side. It must have been a lovely and quiet place once. Not any more, though, as the buildings have all been transformed into souvenier shops selling anything and everything to do with China: stamps, fans, bamboo flutes, chop sticks, etc. Sorry, but one thing nobody seems to sell is postcards, so you'll have to wait until I go somewhere else to get one. However, they're certainly not short of watches to sell: literally every few steps I took in Yuyuan Garden somebody would come up to me shouting "Watch?! You want watch?!" Always, somebody with "Watch?! You want watch?!" You might get the occasional "Watch? Or Bag?" And if they were really desperate they would come right up to your face shouting "Watchwatchwatchwatchwatch!" Of course, I was already wearing a perfectly good watch which they could easily see. But that didn't seem to matter.
Later that day the three of us walked along the promenade on this side of the Huangpu River, the main river that runs through Shanghai and where I'll get the ferry from on Tuesday. The sun had already set but it was still very hot. On the other side are more high-rise buildings: banks, offices and the famous Oriental Pearl TV Tower. "Chinese people don't really think about environmental problems, they just waste all the energy. Maybe they'll change in about 30 years" said Da as we looked across the river, the countless lights from the buildings brightening up the haze - a mixture of high humidity and pollutuion - that engulfs the entire city.
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