khao lak - and home

Such a good place to end our tour, just lazing about in the pools or long walks along the beach.   

Behind our hotel the jungle rises up, a great green wall of pristine forest, from which a continuous range of sounds emanates, changing with each hour of the day.  Now the sound of doves, now an upwelling of chirruping insects.  At half past four on the dot every day, the evening shift starts up with what sounds like a hundred circular saws, provided by the crickets.  Then as darkness falls, it’s the frogs’ turn – redoubled if there’s a rain shower. As soon as the sky darkens, a waxing moon appears, dappling the still water with a trail of light.  The tide recedes, leaving a wide glistening strand of firm sand, onto which the crabs emerge for a busy few hours of feeding and arm wrestling.

Just north is Bang Sak Bay, an even more pristine stretch of white coral stand, with big shady pine trees at the back, and a lambent green sea.

We also took a day trip to Khao Sok National Park about 60km NE.  This is virgin forest, well protected it seems, draped across a mountainous landscape.  Said to be the oldest rainforest in the world (though this is also a claim made by areas of Malaysia and Queensland), it is well worth a visit. 

So I’ve had almost ten weeks away from home, and it begins to feel like travelling is my life.  I will be glad to be back for Christmas, but this has been the most varied and rewarding trip for me for a long time – meeting many very different people, visiting varied and stunning countryside and cultures.  I am more and more comfortable with the scenery and the leisurely rural walks, and less and less interested in the cities as I get older. In Asia the cities mostly are unthinking, badly planned, polluted and traffic-jammed, and the cultural offerings – at least those accessible to a foreigner – thin on the ground.   

London for me is everything that a city should be, and nothing compares.  I look forward to getting back to the theatres and pubs, to long walks along the river or through the parks – though not to the weather and getting dark by half-past four!

david cameron copycat

I reckon that David Cameron must have been reading my blog.  A few weeks after my visit to Chengdu, and he goes to  all the same places including Du Fu's garden and the same hot pot restaurant.  Not to mention the pandas... which gives me an excuse to post another picture of the baby pandas!  Awwww!
Now Mr C is back in London and trying to compete - but not a patch on the real thing!

Pandas, Chengdu

Not pandas... not Chengdu

south to the isthmus of kra and beyond

My Thailand destinations

 If Thailand is a sleeping flamingo, Khao Lak is the knee.  This was our destination for the last leg of the trip, driving down from Bangkok, with a couple of stops on the way. There is this long trailing slice of the country that slides past Burma then emerges onto the Andaman Sea, with the foot resting on Malaysia.

After negotiating Bangkok’s urban expressways with only one misrouting, we continue through the capital’s hinterland.  One of the ugliest things about Thailand is the way its cities sprawl out along the highways for mile after mile, endless factories and shophouses and mean looking road towns with vast advertising hoardings signaling the next fuel station or hyperstore: seemingly no planning restrictions at all and the architecture uniformly grim.  This stretches almost all the way to Hua Hin, so it was a relief to check into the Dusit Thani there after the first day’s drive: nostalgia for me as it was only the second grand hotel I ever stayed in, twenty years ago (the first being its sister hotel in Bangkok, a few days earlier). 

Though now perhaps showing its age a little – but in the way of a grand duchess, still magnificent and stylish and unconcerned by modern trends – its huge public spaces, all marble and vast chandeliers, embrace us.   It also has extremely good restaurants – we ate Thai and Italian very profitably.

Route 4, squeezed between the Gulf of Thailand and the Burmese border, continues down to Chumphon, our next stop.  We arrived at a strangely deserted Novotel in a gale, that continued throughout our two night stay.  Apparently this goes on here from November to February every year.  The endless wind agitates the sea so that the white-topped waves are brownish with churned up sand.  In the open lobby for dinner we seem to be the only guests; huge canvas wind breaks flap and crack: it’s like being on the Marie Celeste at full sail.  On the beach there are a few fishermen in their makeshift huts, but they seem to be staying put on dry land as the waves crash ashore.  Otherwise the shore is deserted: then we see a quick flash as a huge lizard over a metre long makes straight for the water.  In it goes, swimming very effectively, head up, and seems to surf the crashing waves, then dives under the water again. 

We continue on, and Route 4 now crosses the Isthmus of Kra (which sounds like something out of Frank Herbert) to the Andaman coast, through beautiful mountainous countryside, lush and green, with many waterfalls, towards Khao Lak.  A much more pleasant coast: gentle sea breezes at most, soft sands and a blue calm sea.

We’re hearing the sad stories of the riots in Bangkok, as two oligarchies slug it out once again, using the poor duped people as pawns.  We were intending to spend our last few days there, but may have to divert if this continues.

i'm an eco-tourist, get me out of here!

We were told that this is the now place to go: a former French colonial seaside town, abandoned in the Khmer Rouge years, but with the shells of the old villas now being slowly restored.  We decided to try an eco resort up in the jungle above the town, not without some misgivings given the warning in some of the reviews.

But first we had to get there.  We had a car with driver to take us.  There had been a few heavy thunderstorms over the previous couple of nights.  On the morning we set off, we could hear some localized donner-und-blitzen-ing in the distance.  Hitting the airport road it soon became clear that there had been a major downpour.  Water was shooting in torrents off the roofs of the buildings.  The road was flooded to a depth of several inches.  Everyone was trying to drive in the slightly less flooded crown of the road, in both directions at once (and in other random directions).  Chaos, as the saying goes, ensued. 4WDs were ploughing fast through the grey waters, splashing everything in sight. Motorbikes were breaking down by the dozen.  Our unfazed driver ploughed on through this: the waters lapping against the chassis so that it sounded like we were in a rowing boat.  Somehow we made it, and off we went across the vast waterlogged plain south of Phnom Penh, all rice fields and drainage ditches, with houses clinging to the causewayed highway.   

Then passing through the town of Kampot, just before our destination, we hit another snag: a huge traffic jam, apparently immobile.  The driver seemed happy to just sit: so Ian went to investigate.  Ahead of us, a bridge was being replaced.  A temporary single lane crossing had been constructed of hardcore and gravel, and right in the middle of this, a large flatbed truck, attempting a crossing, had sunk into the mud, and slid onto its side, completely blocking the way in both directions.  Eventually our driver made a few phone calls and backed up.  Following a route through all the shanty towns and back alleys of Kampot, and eventually along a muddy, rutted track in the middle of a rice-field, he eventually emerged triumphant just past the obstruction.  The final snag was getting up to the resort, via another highly rutted narrow track, that seemed impossible in this low slung ancient Datsun – but we made it.

So to the resort itself.  Let me say at the outset that this was a positive experience.  But quirky.   Perhaps any resort that advertises that it has a philosophy should be approached with caution.   

It is located in the most beautiful heavily wooded valley, with jungle noises all around; arranged as a series of straw-thatched huts, some on the ground, some built up into the trees, like a hill tribe village.  The staff are all local and the greatest thing about the place: incredibly warm, friendly and helpful.  But as for the accommodation, even the Spartans would find it spartan.  Our room is open to the outside, to provide ventilation at the roof level, because there is no A/C.  Power is limited to a few 12V bulbs and a half hearted fan, powered by a battery linked to a solar panel: and, we are warned, if this runs out that’s it for the night.  And no hot water.  The hotel notes say that the water is ambient ‘and most people think this fine’, but the supply seems to come from some deep aquifer with a direct link to the Himalayan plateau.  There is a pool – but its water is muddy, the colour of milky tea, and its approaches slimy, with fish and who knows what else in it: not a single guest dared to use it while we were there.  I’m reminded of those vegetarian restaurants of the 60s, where you were made, by the bearded and be-sandaled owner, to feel that an essential part of the experience was to make you suffer. 

But here there’s a lovely restaurant, with a wood burning oven and lovely non-veggie food; and, perhaps the saving grace, an array of interesting and lively guests.  As we are all essentially stuck at the end of that track once night falls (this would be a great setting for an Agatha Christie) everyone stays in and eats in the restaurant around a big table faced with broken tiles, Gaudi style, and the whole thing turns into a house party.

 There’s Brian, the most liberal American you will ever meet, on his first holiday for seven years. Ellie and Stefan, a British-Swiss couple with two very young girls, Anna and Aimée, on a five month Asian life-changing tour: the girls very friendly, lively and articulate (‘So you speak two languages?’  ‘No, four!’  ‘No, five!’).  And a delightful Australian lady with a remarkable history, who is giving English classes to the staff, part of a continuing program that makes me want to take all the negative comments back about the place.  So each night we sat and chatted around many and various topics and by the end of a few days had solved all the world’s problems.  Why can’t politicians do this?   

Then to bed in the profound darkness of the forest, drifting off to the sounds of creatures of the night, blurting toads from the pool, restless night birds, the sad falling cry of the geckos; trying not to think about odd furtive rustling sounds just outside.  Then you're asleep, to be woken at dawn by the light from the curtainless windows and a whole new daytime soundscape.

phnom penh 2

 We also visited some more pleasant sights in our few days here: the elegant, airy old art deco central market (pictured) and the the temple that gives the city its name, Wat Phnom, built on an artificial hill surrounded by mature trees.   

As usual when we are in cities, we walked and walked at random, usually the best way to see how a place ticks.  More difficult here than in many cities though, as the pavements have been colonized by the properties they front, and are full of cars, and at every street corner there’s a bunch of tuk-tuk drivers insistent on taking you on a tour of the city.

Though there has been plenty of development recently, very little of it is positive.  There is a a particular style of modern Khmer residence that is hideous, with sort-of-Greek columns, stainless steel balconies, lots of gold excrescences and shiny bright blue roof tiles.  Think Bishops Avenue, double it, and you’re getting close.  However we stayed in a very tasteful little boutique hotel in one of the leafier areas of the city: an oasis to retire to in the late afternoon and cool down with a rambutan mojito.

phnom penh

It’s seven years since I was in Cambodia’s capital and it still feels very poor compared with Thailand.  Whether this is due to the after effects of the Khmer Rouge days – there is a distinct absence of people in the 40s to 50s age range – or its current kleptocratic government, it’s hard to tell.  Ian and I visited the Tuol Sleng genocide museum.  This was a school, which was converted after the evacuation of Phnom Penh to a prison cum torture facility cum execution centre.  Pol Pot had members of his own party taken there when they fell foul of his paranoid regime – not just the party officials but their whole families.  Almost none survived, after ‘confessions’ were wrung out of them.  It’s been kept just as it was when the city was eventually liberated.  It’s almost unbearable to see the photos of frightened people including small children, all carefully documented by the regime as they passed through.  It’s an important thing to see though: a reminder of how easily a population can be taken over and cowed by a few maniacs.  It’s happened in Europe within the last hundred years and it’s happening today in several parts of the world. 

loi krathong

Our final night in Jomtien, and it’s Loi Krathong, the Thai festival of lights, held on the day of the twelfth full moon of the year.  We went down to Jomtien beach to find it swarming with thousands of people, locals and tourists. Little family groups were praying together, then launching intricately constructed bamboo leaf boats with candles and joss sticks into the lapping waves.  Fireworks were going off all along the beach, and people were sending off those big tissue paper balloons, powered by candles, that drifted up into the sky in their hundreds as far as the eye could see, up towards the full moon there beaming down on us from a clear sky. 
 

r&r

 Now Ian has joined me for the distinctly more laid back phase of the trip.  We are spending a few days in Jomtien, Pattaya’s slightly more decorous little sister a little further down the coast from Bangkok.  We are in a little resort hotel where our affable host, the Jim (or maybe that should be hostess, given his long history, as Madame Jim, as proprietor and performer at one of Pattaya’s premiere show bars)  is always there with a quiet word, his Glaswegian tones only slightly modified by years of expat living.  Now he has moved on from the razzmatazz of Boystown and created this elegant little oasis.  

It’s a good place to cool off in the pool, or chat with fellow guests, or just walk down to Jomtien beach, where for a few baht you can get an umbrella and a deckchair, and a cooling drink or even a hot lunch.  Ian and I also decided to explore some of the restaurants rated by Trip Advisor, and we did eat extraordinarily well, and cheaply.

On one occasion, leaving Ian back at base, a friend suggested I go with him on the little ferry over to an island, Ko Larn, just offshore, which has great beaches: palm fringed, white coral sand, azure blue sea – all the usual accoutrements.  My guide didn’t tell me before coming over that the beaches are some way from the ferry landing, and persuaded me to go by motorbike taxi on the island’s narrow tracks, scarcely more than footpaths.  So three of us on the bike – the driver, my guide (fortunately both of typical Thai rakish proportions) and me (not).   It was a bit of a switchback ride, with more thrills than a theme park, but arriving at the quiet beach it seemed worth it.  Just the place for a cooling coconut juice, spicy prawn fried rice, and a splash about in the aforementioned azure blue waters.  But the trip back proved more troublesome.  As we approached one of the hills, a Russian youth came zooming down and around a bend on the wrong side of the road, straight for us.  Correcting too late, his bike went over and came careening down the slope towards us right across the width of the path.  Our driver braked hard and turned right to the edge of the road but couldn’t avoid crashing into the fallen bike.  There was a slight pause, then our bike began to topple over sideways into the bushes at the side and there was nothing for it but to let it happen.  The land dropped away but the bushes held us and we all emerged without a scratch: which is more than can be said for the Russian, who skinned all his knees and elbows and looked a little dazed. 

So it wasn’t quite the uneventful interlude I’d hoped for, but by and large it was still a relaxing stay. 

hong kong - and china conclusion

For more HK pics click here

My days in China were coming towards their conclusion.  Hong headed back to his home in Chongqing and I spent a day in Guangzhou (fogbound again) but was coming down with a heavy cold,e so I just wanderd around along the river banks a little bit and through a couple of parks, and across the city’s iconic bridge.  Then next day I took the express bus to Hong Kong, through the endless mega-conurbation of the Pearl River Delta region.  Nearly 50 million people live here, and whizzing along through this vista of belching chimneys and factories, power stations and refineries, and pungent industrial smells, half hidden in the mists, I was reminded of my childhood driving along the East Lancs Road through what was then a Lowryesque landscape of mills and mines before the days of the smokeless zone.  But this is on a whole new scale – the new workshop of the world.

It was good to be back in HK, where I worked for most of 1998, and somehow it felt like returning to civilization.  At least, a different civilization, much more western influenced, with bars and restaurants; cars that stop at pedestrian crossings (and drive on the left!); an internet that works normally; all ring-fenced for now by the one nation-two systems policy.  I met up with Ken and Wallace, friends from 15 years ago, and reminisced about those post-handover days, and I walked and walked, through the areas I knew in those days.  Hong Kong Park, still an immaculate island amidst the soaring blocks of Central and Mid-Levels; across to Kowloonside on the Star Ferry; up on the old cable tram to the Peak; and I even visited Fairview Height, my old apartment block on Robinson Road, right by the Escalator.  All very nostalgic.  Hong Kong has sprouted lots of new towers – even whole new districts – but is still very familiar, and quite unique, with many of its old landmarks intact.  Very different from the huge new cities of China, where almost every scrap of the past has been swept away in the haste to modernize. 

So – conclusions about China?  This is where I make broad assumptions about a quarter of the world’s population based on a fortnight’s holiday! 

I felt there’s something rather mean spirited about life in China.  A few examples:

·       Many restaurants charged for the napkins – because if they just put them on the table they would all disappear.

·       A toddler was pushing a trolley right out into a busy road, having got away from his mother, who was running up and shouting from some distance away.  Everyone else seemed to be ignoring this.  I just put out my foot and stopped the trolley. 

·       The huge number of western websites that are verboten or subject to long delays or failures.  These include google, gmail, flickr, blogger and even wikipedia!

·       Appallingly selfish driving.  As bad as India but here the speeds are faster and the vehicles more high powered. Constant ‘get out of my way’ honking all day and night.

·       Waiters and receptionists are generally surly and haphazard – maybe because no-one tips.  But there were honourable exceptions to this.

On the other hand, I will remember the old people, having a lot of fun for free in many and various ways: dancing and singing in the streets, exercising and playing games in the parks, sipping tea all afternoon in the lakeside houses.  I will always remember the spectacular sights I have seen: the mountains of Guilin, the terracotta warriors, Du Fu’s garden and of course the pandas.  And above all, I will remember the alien culture.  Dynasties came and fell, but China reasserted itself time and again, a continuum of two thousand years of history, content in its own terms, self confident, assured.  Perhaps in a thousand years the Communist party will just be listed as another dynastic phase. 

China is not really ready yet for tourists, except in the most carefully managed way – bus tours with guides.  As an independent traveller without a knowledge of the language it would have been impossible without the help of Hong, who steered me through the maze.  All the hotels I stayed in seem to have a death wish as far as fire regs are concerned: fire doors propped open, piles of laundry stacked in the fire stairs...  Mention this to the staff (or other deficiencies) and all you get are blank stares.  Perhaps western chain hotels are better, but there’s a sense that these things don’t matter.

One interesting thing – and I think symbolic – is that in Chinese your address is backwards:  “China, Sichuan Province, Chengdu, Republic Street 127, Lucky Apartments no 316, Mr Mason Keith ”.  It’s as if you are just a cog in this huge machine that is China, whereas we start with the individuals and place them in their context. Even the name order puts the personal name subordinate to the family name. 

So my tour is at an end, and in Hong Kong the fogs finally lifted and bright, clear sunshine suffused the city as I looked out from the Peak right across to the mountains on the border with the People’s Republic.  There’s a metaphor in there somewhere. 

guilin and yangshuo

Up early and fingers crossed.  We are on our way to what’s billed as the best river cruise in the world.  But the endless fog has continued and during our short stay in Guilin has greyed out all but the closest mountains, leaving us feeling short changed.

We had explored the town and its parks and pagodas, and legged it up the nearest precipitate mountain to a tiny pavilion perched on top, but when we get there it’s just a sea of grey.  The town is pretty enough, but all this grey is starting to get to me.  Hong is convinced the air is wonderfully fresh, because that’s what everyone says about it.  But sorry, not when it’s full of fog and the fog smells of coal-fired power generation.

So waking up the next day and looking out of the window, we are prepared for the worst.  Not helped by the early start and a prattling tour guide, who manages to talk continuously in Engrish and Mandarin for the full half hour to the ferry terminal.  I’m allergic to organized tours at the best of times, and all that stuff about mountains shaped like camels and the one that Chou En Lai said was like nine horses, and the one that’s on the 20 yuan note, and the biggest this and the oldest that, made me a little grumpy and wondering if I had done the right thing.

We get herded on to our tour boat, one of many that make this trip at the same time of the day, and pretty soon we cast off.

Well, all that grumpiness soon falls away.  Out on the roof you can escape the commentary and just watch the countryside drift by.  And miraculously, the mists start to lift and the vast mountains show themselves.  I’ve visited limestone karst country before – in southern Thailand, Halong Bay in Vietnam, but this is something else.  The River Li slashes though this mountain range, sometimes nudging against cliffs hundreds of metres high, sometimes bending to give a distant view of extraordinary profiles.  Many years ago when Chinese scroll landscape paintings became known in the west, they were thought to be fantasy images, but not so: they are realistic views of this country, its high domed peaks, its wizened trees and the lingering mists.  As we progress for several hours through this countryside, the sun forces its way through the grey and I actually see blue sky for almost the first time since arriving in the country.  The mist still fades out the more distant mountains, very prettily, in delicate water colour shades, and in the foreground, small fishing boats dart about, water buffalo wallow, and the green river grasses shimmer in the clear current. 

We are headed for Yangshuo, which appears before us after several hours, a fantasy town wedged in the gaps between several huge mountains that loom above it, and spilling down steep slopes to the river pier where we dock.  Inevitably this town is tourist central, and there are swarms of trinket sellers and food stalls as we tug our luggage through the narrow lanes.  Hong has found us the hotel room with the best view in the world, and we sit quietly on the balcony as the sun sets and the mist starts to reassert its hold, drinking it all in. 

china pictures now posted

 
> I've now uploaded 
   the best pictures 
   from China to flickr ---
   click here to see them!

warriors

 26 October

And it’s off to the warriors today, one of the things I most wanted to come for. Well worth the hassle of the 306 bus!  We arrived at the railway station to find an enormous snaking queue right across the forecourt – all Chinese stations seem to have huge forecourts full or people waiting, or watching, though not clear for what or whom –  but with a bus every four minutes we didn’t have to wait too long, and the one hour journey is interesting, passing hot springs popular with Chinese tourists.  Still the mist/smog everywhere, though, and the mountains that back this area were almost invisible.  Like the pandas, the warriors are provided with an immaculate park leading up to the site, although you have to pass through a chicken run of traders selling resin models first.  The Terracotta Army was discovered by accident about a kilometre from the first emperor’s mausoleum, a rammed earth pyramid that still dominates the area, although less than half the height it was when built.  There are written records of the contents of the mausoleum itself (amazingly, given that it was built before 200BC), but no-one knew about the warriors.  Then farmers digging a well in the 1970s unearthed one of them by accident, and the archaeological work has been going on ever since.

The main dig is covered by an arched single span roof bigger than those vast airports.  A large proportion of the figures has now been restored and placed back in their original positions.  They were all lined up in defensive battle formation, ready to defend their emperor against any opposing army of the spirit world. 

Elsewhere on the site, other amazing finds have been made from separate pits – groups of acrobats, two huge bronze and gold chariots, ponds full of geese and cranes, and so on – but much of the site remain to be excavated.

The warriors themselves are complete in every detail, each with a different face and hair style, supposedly modeled on the real soldiers: and the effect certainly is realistic, down to the fingernails and hair of each individual.  The emperor’s Qin ancestors had had their household killed and buried with them when they died. Religious orthodoxy having moved on and accepted clay substitutes for corpses, Qin Shihuang’s army must have been much relieved. These terracotta soldiers are full scale, in fact tall by modern Chinese standards. (Later at the Shannxi Museum we saw mausoleum armies of later Tang warriors at much reduced scale, and, by the Ming period, reduced still further to mere table ornament size – no longer warriors but armies of pot bellied mandarins in flowing robes. 

With the Qin warriors are many full scale horses pulling chariots, also beautifully lifelike.  There are pikemen, archers, charioteers, all battle ready, and led by their officers and generals – thousands filling the hall.  You enter from a darkened space to look out over this vast array, several metres below ground level, and it really is a magnificent site, even with all the hype and excpectation.  Even with thousands of visitors, the building can cope comfortably and everyone gets a good view.  You can also see areas at various stages of restoration, from the smashed remnants lying as uncovered, through groups being painstakingly put together, to the final completed platoons all in their original places.  They must have looked even more impressive new, as they were fully painted in natural colours.

Though you cannot get close to the warriors in situ, some are displayed in a museum on site and in Xi’an’s Shaanxi Museum, where you can really marvel at the realistic detail, produced 2200 years ago. 

xi'an

Xi’an is way up in the middle of China, and was the original capital, from the time of the violent unification of the Six Kingdoms by the first emperor, Qin Shihuang, before 200BC, until it was moved to Beijing about 600 years ago.  It has the world’s biggest city wall, a modern rebuild but encasing the earlier work, a 12km rectangular perimeter, and very impressive too. At its centre is the Ming-era Bell Tower, which used to chime out to regulate the hours of the great city.  From it, wide avenues radiate to the city gates north, south, east and west.  Of course, the city now spills out well beyond the centre, and major construction is as evident here as everywhere in China.

Quickly through two more new mega airports, and a Wacky Races style taxi drive, and we are in the centre of Xi’an.  First impressions: a bit more down at heel than Chengdu, cooler, more dusty.  More edgy, more exotic.  On a first walk round, we found ourselves in the area occupied by people of the Uighur nationality (or Hui to Hong and Chinese people generally), a Turkic muslim people from China’s distant west bordering Kaskhstan.   

This district is full of old shop houses selling dates, rose-flavoured peanut brittle, freshly squeezed pomegranate juice, and meat, chopped up for you right on the street.  More middle eastern than far eastern, in atmosphere and in the look of the people.  There is also China’s oldest surviving mosque, founded in the 7^th century AD, complete with a pagoda style minaret.  A series of quiet outer courtyards lead to the mosque itself, all very like a Chinese temple in layout and detail.  In the evening we sample Uighur cuisine, very meaty, spicy, and exotically flavoured.

After becoming the capital, it developed as a major trading centre: it was the eastern end of the Silk Road that saw rare goods carried back through the deserts to the west, to Lebanon, Egypt and from there to Europe, with European products such as iron goods coming the other way.  The Uighur presence here no doubt owes its origins to this trading route. 

the people's park

 It’s late afternoon.  The sun has finally penetrated the smog, though there;s still a smell of coal-smoke in the air.  Warm and still.  And very noisy.  This is the People’s Park, in the heart of the city of Chengdu.  Hawkers crowd near the entrance, calling their wares: snacks and gewgaws and your fortune foretold.  Apart from the thunder of traffic, there is a cacophony of music, all mixed up and badly amplified: time to investigate.   

Push through the jostle at the gates, into the deep shade of the trees and you find the park swarming with people: mostly old couples, entertaining their single pre-school grandchild; or in groups or singly up to all sorts.  Here a large group practising tai chi; and up a shady lane, another mature lady doing some sort of exercise with a sword.  Then there’s a tea garden: every table is filled with intent mah jong players.  Another little enclave is full of card players, mostly old men here, who fling down their long narrow Chinese style cards with a defiant thump.  There are tourists of course, mostly around the obelisk commemorating the 1911 tram workers’ strike, posing with heads on one side and two fingers in the air.  The noise is getting even louder:  we are reaching the centre of the park.   There is a large central plaza and about 50 old ladies, led by a couple of younger men in vests are line dancing to a local pop song.  Suddenly the music changes: it’s gangnam style! – and these grey haired dears, some of them maybe in their 70s, launch into the whole routine!  

Arranged in deep shade around the plaza are improvised open air stages, and in each some amateur group has set up, to perform their latest set piece: Chengdu traditional opera; or even cultural revolution era opera complete with red guard uniforms.  In another, a wizened man is singing some old pre-war song a capella: his vibrato so wobbly it elides several semitones either side of the target note.  Next, some strictly old-time tango.  And finally, a group of very jolly looking matrons in long red dresses performing a spectacular fan-dance.  All at high volume so the sound spills over from one stage to the next and across the park.  In the farthermost dark corner of the park, I’m nonplussed to find a group of men, mostly 50s to 60s, standing silently with placards.  A political  protest?   No, says Hong: they’re bachelors advertising for a partner.   

I soon realize that most open spaces in Chinese cities are like this: full of people doing whatever they love doing, without inhibition in public – physical exercises, dancing, singing, playing games – they certainly know how to have fun for free.  ‘Old people!’ says Hong, with a shrug.  ‘All they want to do is dance!’

chengdu - more

24 October

There are several areas of old style back alleys, supposedly from the Ming era but I think heavily reconstructed, but no less charming for that – especially Jin Li, which has a host of bars, restaurants and street food outlets and a little garden.  At night it is beautifully lit with many lanterns.  Nearby, we found a big Sichuan restaurant arranged round a big courtyard with ginkgo trees and a waterfall –  charming and with unusually (for China) friendly staff.  So good we went back on my birthday.  Another such area is called Quan Xiangzi, or ‘the Wide and Narrow Alleys’ in guidebooks.  Of course, these areas attract lots of tourists, mostly Chinese though.  For a change we also walked along the river to a newly built night life area, called Lan Kwae Fong after the similar set up in Hong Kong.  Pleasant enough but fairly characterless.  It features a Bavarian style micro-brewery: beer tasted authentic enough.  Crossing a very ornate bridge from here, we found a line of bars in shacks facing the river, all neon and blaring K-pop, but rather more real, so we had a couple of drinks there.  An odd phenomenon of night-time China is the ear cleaners.  They come around constantly, clacking their long metal instruments together, offering to de-wax you for a small charge.  Despite my occasional problems in this area, I declined. 

lost in translation

Signs in bizarre English found on my travels have always been a guilty pleasure.  China has provided a rich crop...

Especially for vampires

They will ban anything in China!

Yes - take it out on the wall like normal people!

I gave this tempting dish a miss...

Sign of the times for us oldies - detailed instructions on how to use a dial telephone!

Losing Theme Hotel- perhaps they mean the interior design theme!

Unfortunate brand name for an in-flight neck pillow

In case your phone needs a pee!

...and in case it seems a bit unPC to make fun of other nations' English, here's one from closer to home!

Liberal democracy in Cambodia

Ministry of Magic next door

Yummm

chengdu and du fu

23 October

Another day, we visited the site of the home of Du Fu, China’s most revered poet, whose poems from the 7^th century are still known widely today.  I suppose he holds a similar place to Shakespeare’s in our culture.  He is revered as a defender of the poor, to te extent of giving up his privileged position and going into exile.  His poems make many references to the area were he then lived, and this is thought to have been preserved over the many centuries since, right here in these gardens.  Very recently, archaeological remains of the period have been uncovered on the site, giving the story some credence.  The current buildings are actually 19^th century or later but aim to emulate the sense of his work.  In the centre is a thatched timber framed cottage, which is an idea of what his cottage would have looked like.  (The fact that this is all a reconstruction, and nothing like the 7^th century, is skated over in most of the tourist guides.)   

However ersatz, the very extensive park is definitely a serene haven, with its high wooden halls, covered walkways, flowing water, rocks and mature trees in the best Chinese tradition.  We spent an hour in a tea house sipping our glasses of the clear amber liquid, frequently topped up by a friendly waitress, as Hong taught me how to crack open melon seeds with my teeth for a perfect accompanying snack.  A little traditional music wafted across the lake from somewhere, and fish occasionally broke the surface looking for tidbits.  I’m sure Du Fu would have put it better – but definitely a high point and a calming break to Chengdu’s manic lifestyle.  Here’s an example for late autumn and what we call the hunter’s moon. In translation you miss the careful rhyme scheme, each line seven syllables, and seven characters in Chinese, so that it also looks good in written form.  Hong declaimed it for me, rather gracefully.

Above the tower -- a lone, twice-sized moon.
On the cold river passing night-filled homes,
It scatters restless gold across the waves.
On mats, it shines richer than silken gauze.

Empty peaks, silence: among sparse stars,
Not yet flawed, it drifts. Pine and cinnamon
Spreading in my old garden . . . All light,
All ten thousand miles at once in its light!

chengdu

 21-22 October

On to Chengdu.  This journey would have taken eight hours, 20 years ago.  Now on the high speed train it takes two, and as we leave the station we can see the concrete columns for the new superfast train viaduct that will cut it even further.  And we agonize about HS2!  The line tunnels and spans its way laser-like through the mountainous landscape. 

Chengdu is another megalopolis, but on the flat (where Chongqing is built on the steep slopes of river revetments), with orderly wide tree-lined boulevards and good cycle lanes everywhere.  It’s reckoned to be one of China’s most popular cities, with a mild climate, happy and friendly people, and many parks, rivers and lakes. Still that sooty brown smog though: supposedly more common in autumn.  Also a former capital and one of China’s oldest, though you wouldn’t know it now apart form the few trophy enclaves that have not been overbuilt by soaring glass-clad developments. 

Chengdu is of course home of the panda research station.  Despite dire warnings from our taxi driver that either (a) it would be closed because of visiting foreign dignitaries and/or (b) it would be incredibly busy because of all the visitors to the big trade fair starting tomorrow, we found it easy to enter and not all that busy, at least in the first hours.  The buildings and compounds of the centre are set in a beautiful park, with a lake full of black swans and ornamental carp and stands of huge bamboo plants.  The pandas are kept separately by age group (adult, juvenile, mothers with young) in heavily wooded paddocks, where they lie around lazily consuming their 15kg a day of bamboo leaves and shoots, mostly just lying on their backs and pulling down the leaves in bunches.  If they do lumber around, it seems to be mostly to mark their territory by rubbing their bottoms against the odd rock or tree trunk.  A slothful life compared with their ursine cousins, and no-one seems to know why they switched to veggies at some point in their history.   

We saw quite a number of adults singly or in pairs, living this amiable life.  Then we were shepherded through the nursery, to see five identical teddy bear sized toddlers, with the same markings as the adults.  They could have been toys, but they did shuffle about a bit, obviously destined for the same lazy lifestyle as the adults.  Cue lots of oohs and aahs from the assembled visitors, including your easily swayed author.

chongqing

 19-20 October

Kunming is best passed over, apart from its huge airport that makes T5 look like a tin shed.  I arrived in Chongqing to be warmly greeted by Hong, who is going to be my guide and companion for the next 2 weeks.  Already in Kunming it was clear that his help is going to be necessary.  His city is one of those megalopolises that we have scarcely heard of in the west, but it’s got a population of 13 million already – and growing fast, judging by the vast amounts of construction.  Hong took me around the centre at night.  A very few older buildings (by which I mean mostly mid 20^th century) survive a ruthless rebuilding, with tower blocks, flyovers and skytrains in every direction, all covered in electronic billboards, vertical stacks of brilliant red Chinese calligraphy, and exuberant light displays, and the whole thing bathed in a coal-flavoured mist.  The streets teeming with hawkers, street vendors, gawping tourists from other regions, parties of work colleagues out for a fun night, and groups of old people waltzing in the open air to strains of Chinese pre-revolutionary music.  I felt like I’d woken up on the set for Blade Runner.  Not another European anywhere to be seen: in fact, not since I boarded the plane in Kunming.

Chongqing at night

We walked down to the point where Chongqing’s two great rivers meet, before the epic journey through the three gorges region and on to Shanghai.  All around are estates of 30 and 40 storey apartment buildings, with synchronized animated light shows.  Up on the left is the new opera house, completely swathed in glowing panels; and circulating on the water, a number of restaurant boats like small cruise ships, dressed from stem to stern in electrical hardware.  Someone has attached a few strings of small kites to the promenade railings that reach up towards the full moon, wan in the brownish haze: once so central to the Chinese that their calendar is still based around its phases, now no match for the rioting neon below.

We had a great dinner in a small ‘country-style’ restaurant.  The staff certainly looked the part, and with the serving skills to match, but the food was wonderful and a good intro to this part of China.  Chongqing and Sichuan food is spicy.