Left to right: Nancy Pearson, Ann and Don Van Winkle, Dave and Bobbe Mootchnik
Beijing
We were off and running the first day, visiting the Summer Palace.
The palace stretches around a lake to the foot of a Buddhist temple, making it cooler in the summer. The temple was barely visible from the entrance through an all day rain
Fortunately, most of the walk around the lake was sheltered by ornate covered walkways.
Most historic sites in China are guarded by ferocious beasts.
The Marble Boat at the Summer Palace never goes anywhere, but on the other hand, no one has ever gotten sea-sick on it.
Because of the rain, we postponed Tian An Men Square and the Forbidden City and visited a Cloisonné factory. This was only our first "Shopping Opportunity".
Clang, bang, gong! ~ it was the Peking Opera that evening. In the Scene below, "The Hu Family Outrage", the bad guys attack a good village. Good girl defeats the bad guys, hangs the evil leader from a pole. All is well again.
Not all blood and guts. The next course was a ribbon dancer:
followed by another short play "Havoc in the Dragon Palace".
The next day the weather was fair, and it was on to a state run jade factory and the Ming Tombs. The Way to the tombs is guarded by many animals.
Half the animals are in resting positions.
But there is no rest for the human guards.
Next came The Great Wall.
And just to prove we all made it:
Don, Anne, Dave, Bobbe, John, Nancy
We used part of our free day to catch up with Tian An Men Square and the Forbidden City.
The Tian An Men Square entrance to the Forbidden City
Here are a couple of 360 degree Panoramic views (you'll have to scroll to the left to see all of these photos):
Tian An Men Square
That afternoon, we did an extra tour to the Hutong area of Beijing, partly via bicycle rickshaw.
Hutong is an old area of the city.
Our tour included a bell tower.
Arrangements were made for us to visit the Wu family. The Wu home housed Mr. Wu and wife and two sons and their families.
Some of the group in Mr .Wu's sitting room
On the way to the train station we checked out the Temple of Heaven. The raised circular stone is reputed to be the center of the universe.
The train ride to Jinan was fine. The promised air conditioning turned out to be what ever windows you get open. The AC did appear to begin functioning just as we arrived in Jinan.
The cable car ride up Mt Tai was great.
Particularly, given the alternative of hiking up the mountain.
This artifact of the Confucius Temple has been restored after being destroyed in the fervor of the Cultural Revolution. Note the repair patch right through the middle of the stone tablet.
We visited a small farm commune and met several families.
I was most impressed by the little private truck garden plots that grow an large amount of the produce found in the markets of China. The people were friendly, glad to see us. We left them with small gifts of candy and crackers.
Here are a couple of scenes from the train station.
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Toilet paper is not a high priority in Chinese toilets. Here, Don demonstrates his adherence to the Boy Scout Oath.
The night train was really pretty comfortable. The bathrooms were "down the corridor". Like all Chinese bathrooms they were easy to find, just follow the smell. At one end of the car was a Chinese style toilet, at the other a western toilet. Western style toilets are not too common, and the Chinese obviously don't enjoy taking care of them. Ours was a victim of obvious neglect.
I dubbed this contraption "old Sparky" in honor of its complex flushing mechanism. It didn't really flush -- just dumped the contents on the tracks. I don't believe anyone actually used it.
The Grand Canal is a major transportation waterway running westward from Shanghai.
Peaceful gardens obviously were a rich man's pastime in old China. We visited several on the tour.
Roz and Ellen, two of our fellow travelers. Roz was our senior traveler - 83. She embarrassed me with the ease she coped with the physical aspects of travel.
We visited a big embroidery institute (factory) where beautiful work was done and put on sale.
This embroidery sample is on a translucent cloth, about 3 feet by 4 feet. The scene is the same on both sides.
Wow! Shanghai is really impressive. It has undergone quite a renaissance since the end of the cultural revolution, and rivals Hong Kong as a major East-West interface. I wrote:
Fortunately, some 50-100 year old buildings in Shanghai, dating back to the British influence have survived, adding to that city’s charm and balancing the incredible, modern construction that has come to dominate Shanghai in the last twenty years. Like some mysterious anachronism, a massive statue of Mao gazes out over the port, the Bund and one of the busier streets in the world. I thought Mao looked somewhat bemused by it all.
The Oriental Pearl (TV tower)
The Bund at night.
Mao surveys the Bund.
Children's Palace - an English class
The Shanghai Museum is a very modern building, Well done.
One of the more interesting museums we visited was the Wuhan Stone and Bonsai Garden Museum! Here are a few of the naturally occurring stones that caught our eye...
Chrysanthemum stone.
The sun, moon and stars are all in this stone.
The Yangtze Prince.
Well, there are several dam projects that vie for the claim of the world's largest. However you slice it, the Three Gorges Dam is going to be huge. It's too big to get into a photo. Besides it was raining.
Here's a shot of a model of the dam when completed.
Five locks (right) will lift boats 145 meters to the new level of the lake behind the dam. A trip through the locks will take 5 hours.
Shendong Stream -- Yes we actually got pulled up the stream manually, however our crew was clothed.
Peapod boat similar to ours.
The trip was very picturesque. 2 hours up stream, and 20 minutes to drift back down the same route.
The Yangtze river was in early flood stage. This "speedboat" is really a stationary buoy.
The scenic gorges went on for days.
Once we got off the river boat, things weren't too bad. The following two photos were provided by Ron Hinker, who visited China a couple of years ago. I was too upset by the debarking process to get any photos of our bridge and steps.
Commenting on Ron's pictures, I wrote back:
Yes, those pictures of Ron’s are pretty representative. There had been a lot of rain, and the river was somewhat higher, and faster, this May. The sand bar you see in the lower part of the pontoon picture was under water at the stairwell we used, so we had to walk the plank further, right onto the narrow steps. I suspect we used the same bridge, but it was moored at a different stairwell because of the conditions.
I take it Ron did the reverse of our cruise, since people seem to be boarding the boat, in the picture
The coolies didn’t use balance poles, perhaps they did later on the checked baggage. Or perhaps it was just too damn slippery for them to carry two bags
We saw porters everywhere in Chongqing. It is so damned hilly that most people refuse to carry stuff, and hire porters. Not unusual to see a guy trucking down the street with a medium sized refrigerator roped on his back.
I found it surprising both that the guy was carrying such a heavy weight, and that they had refrigerators. As I said before China wasn’t what I expected.
"China's lesser wall:", photo by Ron Hinker
Chongqing (Chung King) is a very hilly place -- so hilly that bicycles are a rarity. Chongqing has grown from a few hundred thousand to 30 million since WWII! It is an important inland port in China now and will be become more important when the dam is completed.
So far as we were concerned, the star of Chongqing were the Pandas at the zoo. Their baby panda was particularly pleasing. It seemed to be a natural borne showman.
Xian is one of the few city's whose wall survived the looting (for building materials) of the cultural revolution
Xian's city wall at night.
The terra cottas were amazing. The 8000 terra cotta soldiers can blow your mind. You have to admire the workmanship and effort, while wondering why in the world anyone would squander wealth and resources on such a project...
There are also several bronze chariots. They have numerological features like 30 spokes in the wheels to represent the number of days in a month, etc.
I guess I am willing to sign another confession over this. I just couldn't resist.
My first photo oxymoron.
Guilin is sub-tropical, being far south, very near Vietnam and Thailand. It offers several attractions: Cormorant fishing, Chinese foot massage (Nancy and I both got one), Reed Flute Cave, the beautiful Li river and one of our most pleasant, informative, well spoken and skilled local guides, Frank.
A cormorant waiting for dark.
The Li Karshs, subject of many Chinese Paintings.
Frank -- the sacrificing generation, one of our best guides.
I wrote about Frank:
The big cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Xian, etc.) are impressive hotbeds of the Chinese version of “capitalism” which does allow some free trade. As a result the people are incentivized and business appears to be growing by leaps and bounds. Not everyone works for the government (although they must lease land and buildings from the government). Things are so dynamic, they could almost be described as scary. If you could have gone to China 500 years ago, you would have said that China would soon rule the world. China may have struggled back to that state again - great potential, if they just don’t screw up.
I guess my view of China is that they are teetering on a knife edge, about to be destroyed by the population bomb. They have a harsh plan in place to control, and eventually reduce the population. If this plan doesn’t succeed, they’ll be another India. If they succeed, they could become a very powerful economy. Another of our local guides, Frank (24 years old), in Guilin, described his generation as a sacrificing generation, sacrificing themselves to save China. Indeed, he is right, that’s what they will have to do. Perhaps in 50, or 100 years, a Chinese version of Tom Brokaw will publish a book about “China’s best generation”, and how they saved China from itself.
It felt almost like home, returning to Shanghai. We crammed in some last minute shopping, collected items we had left in storage at the Ocean Hotel, and packed for the trip home. Like all return flights seem to be, this one was shorter and easier than going.
It's always good to have additional impressions. Dave Mootchnik wrote a very good summary of the tour, and I am going to steal it and include it here:
I've been asked several times what I thought was the most interesting sight I saw. The answer is that there were a whole kaleidoscope of sights all equally interesting. But the word that keeps coming to mind is “motion.” Poverty is the next.
Where ever you went there was a tremendous amount of activity. In the major cities like Beijing and Shanghai there were buildings going up wherever you looked. Those tall balance cranes seemed to be everywhere erecting new skyscrapers. Other buildings nearing completion were encased in scaffolding made out of bamboo and plastic straps. I think we saw a 20 story tall bamboo scaffolding structure. The skyline in both these cities was impressive, I thought Shanghai skyline was a somewhat scaled down Manhattan.
Every city street was a mass of humanity. Small shops and sidewalk vendors reminded you of Tijuana. Imagine a Tijuana of 14 million people. Sidewalks full of people and streets crowded with bikes, motorcycles, handcarts, cars and taxis, buses and trucks of all kinds from primitive to luxury.
Traffic is a major issue and traffic rules seem to be more suggestions than requirement. Crossing into the opposite lane to get around a slow or parked car is common. Near misses are very common, measured in misses per hour. At one point our bus headed down a one way street the wrong way on purpose in order to avoid making a u-turn. Now this street was not an empty street; oncoming cars, bicycles and motorbikes went helter-skelter around us.
Pedestrians are free targets. Both cars and bikes don't give ground to each other or to you. No one stops until absolutely forced to. Left turns are made by approaching the corner without slowing down until you have got your vehicles nose far enough into the cross street to force someone to stop for you. Then you proceed to complete the cut-off.
At one point our bus was in the right lane and stopped. A pedestrian crossing in front of him did not look when he got past him into the middle of a street. Meanwhile a car was coming alongside the bus (at slow speed) and hit him. He bounced off the car, got up and limped away. The car and our bus driver opened their windows and started yelling at this guy. No lawyers in sight.
The Hangpu river goes through Shanghai and on to the East China Sea. That's got to be the most busy river I've ever seen. A lot more than the Mississippi or Hudson. One thing the Chinese government did to support river commerce was to encourage individuals to own small (estimate 50-70 ft long) powered barges for hauling grain, construction material, coal etc. So now there are thousands of these privately owned mom and pop barges going up and down the river. The barges are the family business as well as home. You see them tied up with clothes hanging out the back or heading along the river with the man at the helm and the wife on the bow as lookout.
In the country other types of activity and a slower pace. But in the USA you could travel through miles of farmland and not see a worker. About half the population are farmers. That's 600 million farmers. There everything is by hand which means very labor intensive and as a result most all the fields had workers doing something. Weeding, seeding by hand, plowing behind a water buffalo and spraying insecticide by hand. We never saw a major piece of farm machinery. The most we saw was small tractors and a sort of a motorcycle/tractor machine used to plow. Outside Xian, and Guilin water buffalo were very common place. At one point we were on a back road to the Li river and buffalo got in our way several times. Mostly they seemed to roam freely and graze. But we saw them pull occasionally.
Coal is still a major source of power for industry as well as home. Coal is mined in the vicinity of the Yangtze and transported by barge. The process of loading and unloading is interesting. The coal is trucked to the river and dumped into these large open air “bins” on the side of the river. Most of the river shoreline is steep sided (45 deg) embankments maybe 50-100 feet high. At the top would be a road or the trucks and just below the road these coal bins. A barge would moor at the bottom and there would be a long open chute that would be used. Workers would step into the bins and by shoveling and directing with the aid of gravity get the coal; down the chute.
At other places the trucks would be able to get to the barges directly via a floating ramp. We saw NO piers or docks on the Yangtze. They use floating pontoons with ramps on top to get to an anchored boat. In some cases they semi permanently moored a barge at the end and a boat could tie up to the barge. We used that each time to get to shore and back. Slippery ramps and lots of steps up the embankment were not looked upon favorably by many of us.
Now these trucks could usually load the barges by driving on out to them. But at one point the trucks had to stop about 30 feet short. I watched as laborers hand carried the coal using the shoulder beam contraption. (a beam carried on the shoulder with baskets hanging from each end) much used over there.
The big dam is in progress on the Yangtze. It is a massive undertaking and maybe the largest of its kind in the world (according to them). So maybe its the second largest. In any event we toured the site and it is BIG. When complete it will displace 1 million people they say (maybe more). All along the river they have been moving people out which means construction of homes and facilities for that many people. The future water level is marked along the shore upriver and we could see lots of ghost towns and buildings and all the new construction on higher ground.
Even with their one child policy they expect the population to grow by about 300 million in the next several decades. That's the equivalent of 1.2 United States. Housing this mass is a major undertaking. And on top of that ,trying to industrialize. Imagine if mechanization on the farm improved production and farmers all moved to the cities to get jobs.
Let me end this by describing what I think was the most unbelievable event on the trip. While cruising the Yangtze we had a side trip to the Shendong river, a small tributary to the Yangtze. We left the cruise ship and first loaded onto a smaller river boat and headed upstream about 10 km to the mouth of the Shendong. The mouth was nothing more than a sandy beach and the Shendong a shallow stream of fast-moving waters. We all transferred again to a flotilla of shallow draft open wooden boats each about 30 feet long, max beam of about 5 feet. Sort of big rowboats. But no oars. Our party of 13 tourists, our national guide and a local guide got seated two abreast in one boat. The crew consisted of a rear rudder man, a bow rudder man and four others.
Also attached to the boat is a post about 3 feet high at the end of which is a heavy line made of braided strips of bamboo. The line was about another 40 feet long. At the end is a set of looped straps used as harnesses for those four other crew. Method of propulsion- the crew got into the water and into the harnesses and pulled us upstream. This was the ancient means of navigating this stream, now done just for tourists and other light loads. (We saw one boat going upriver this way with cargo but we also saw motorized craft). I estimate the current was about 10 mph so this was not a Sunday walk for these guys. Part of the time they walked in the riverbed and part of the time along shore. It was all very chaotic with a dozen boats and crews pulling against a complex current, switching back and forth to the best side of the stream, different team speeds made boats change position and lines get crossed. There seemed to be a competition to get to the destination ahead of the others. But at crucial points single file was mandated.
In the middle of all this a guy pops up standing in the middle of the stream selling postcards. He walks out to the boat while the crew is straining to beat the current. The crews are forced to work around this guy and he has to walk up the stiff current to get to us. It was such a sight that several of us bought post cards from him (one dolla). We laughed and took pictures.
Wanna buy a post card? Photo by Dave Mootchnik.
Someone gave him a "dolla" but the boat pulled away before he could deliver the postcards. We all tried to reach but it went too fast. We thought the buck was lost. Instead the salesman crossed the stream and ran ahead on the other shore to get to us and deliver the cards. We all cheered and he sold a bunch more cards. He made out great that day. Along the way a puller from the boat behind who was alongside of us would reach down from time to time and hand us a pretty river stone. He just smiled to be nice and moved on.
Now even more unbelievable, at one section the stream got too deep to wade and the shore changes to vertical rock cliffs on both sides. The mode of propulsion changed. all the crew got into the boat and each grabbed a bamboo pole, the end of which had a steel hook about 4 inches in size and with a moderately sharp point. The boat was swung against the cliff. Then by turns the crew man took his pole, stretched it in front of him and hooked into a notch in the rock. With this they would pull in the pole so-by pulling the boat ahead a few feet. Then the next of crewmen repeated the process until we had moved ahead a few hundred feet and out of the steep canyon. The canyon walls were not straight but had lots of crevasses which we had to hug in and out.
We traveled this way about 3 km upstream which took about 1.5 - 2 hours. At the end was a small rocky beach. We disembarked and were met by the inevitable trinket peddlers. Fifteen minutes later we get back in the boat with the crew and float back down. The trip downstream was fast and quiet. About 20 minutes to the starting point.
Dave Mootchnik
Hope you found this interesting and useful.
John and Nancy Pearson