Travels: China

Cranky computers!

The server is being all sorts of cranky. . . which is why no new updates. Though I have them all written and ready on my palm pilot. Hopefully I will have it solved soon. Am in Beijing now . . .

Advice We Have Yet to Avail Ourselves Of

Whenever you request money out of the ATM, it gives you a nice cheery "Your transaction has been approved." Then before it gives you your money it says: "Do you want advice?" So far I have always pressed no. . . but I'm thinking I may be making a mistake.

Sep 9: Early Morning Conversations, take Two

"I think I'm going to wear a skirt today for the pandas."

"Yes, they like it when you dress up for them. . . I think my stuffed hippo would like to come."

"Of course. He would be mad if you didn't bring him."

(This conversation shared with you, lest you thought we were all cosmopolitan all the time.)

Guides

Today, as we walked through a small museum that was once the palace of the Princes of Guilin, we were confronted with our first entirely non-English displays. We went through about two rooms trying to glean what we could from the photos and paintings, when a museum worker beckoned us from a room further away. She did this with urgency and so we came quickly, to find that there was a two-person dance going on for what was now the five visitors in the room. (Again with the live dioramas -- it's almost discomfitting. I mean, the two women weren't actually standing behind glass. . . but still.)

Suddenly the woman took us under her wing. She started in halting English, and then she just snow-balled and next thing we knew she was giving us a detailed tour of the palace and the grounds.

Eleni and I had no idea what to make of it. There's no tipping in China and she had never suggested she wanted to be paid as a private tour guide, which is what I'd expect in most countries . . . when she walked away 15 minutes later, I said: "I'm so confused!" To which Eleni responded: "Was she just doing her job?"

The answer appears to be yes. We have repeatedly found an over the top friendliness from people who are in service positions, that this Capitalist girl can't quite grok. Our guide on the Li-River-cum- Live-Action-It's-A-Small-World tour was a sweet young woman named Miss Cheng. On the thirty-minute bus ride between two stops she a) sat on a bench facing us on the bus and sang a song to us for entertainment, and then b) very solemnly taught us how to play Scissors, Paper, Rock before telling us we could now chat amongst ourselves for the rest of the trip. She sang a song for us! And not because she wanted a tip. I just, I just don't even know what to do with this.

There is, however, an emphasis on guide culture. Even the Chinese tourists (of which there are overwhelming numbers) always travel with guides. It seems to be seen as a politeness -- as well as an "obvious" necessity -- to be given a guide at any location. And despite years of trying to ward off the people who hawk tours, or the guides who come up to you at tourist spots, we are finding ourselves falling into the same pattern.

It helps that everyone we've encountered exhibits a low-key non-pushiness even if they are on commission. Everyone offers us tour options in which you honestly feel they are offering you the most interesting thing in their opinion -- not the most expensive. They tell you all the options, including the ones like, "hey, you can take the city bus" and they aren't offended if you turn them down. It's the way tour guides should be. They're actually facilitating the whole process.

Which is not to say that they're not making a buck doing it. The tour coordinator in our hotel in Guilin handed us off to a tour coordinator in Chengdu--surely for a kickback that I don't begrudge him in the least. The new guy, Jimmy, picked us up at midnight tonight in Chengdu, took us to a hotel in the center of town, and arranged for us to get to Chengdu's Panda Research Center bright and early tomorrow morning in time for panda feeding time. It sure as hell beats our arrival in Guilin.

AND Jimmy's already announced he's going to hand us off to our next guide in Xian. . .

Sep 7: Minority Theme Parks

It turns out that our tour package to the Li river included an additional tour through a place called Shangri-La, decked out as a stylized local village of the Zhuang people -- referred to simply as a "minority" by the Chinese -- adjacent to the real village.

"They don't wear clothes," said our guide before we got there. "They wear animal skins!"

In fact, what they wear is animal print cotton, but who's noticing? I was far too busy trying to figure out -- as we were slowly ferried around a lake stopping in front of various platforms to see costumed girls dancing, leopard-print-wearing men sounding hunting horns, and warriors jumping out of the brush to shake a spear at you -- why it seemed so familiar.

And then it came to me. . . It was It's a Small World -- except the puppets were alive. If that sentence just gave you the heebie jeebies, I assure you, the ride was still worse.

Sep 7: The Li River

The mountains along the Li River today were everything they are touted to be. Mesmerizing, beautiful, unique.

This is what the mountains look like:
--dromedary humps, dolphin fins, rhino horns
--wet sand, plop-drop sand castles
--something out of Dr. Seuss
--morel mushrooms
--Bose Einstein Condensates
--giant ant hills
--stalagmites
--medieval fortress towers
--a boa constrictor eating an elephant

But most of all, they look like Chinese paintings of mountains. Tall, narrow peaks round and smooth covered in feathery foliage with the occasional jagged edge of a cliff.

Which makes sense. There isn't, really, anything to do when confronted with this geology except figure out how to paint it. It is a bygone conclusion that someone would put in the time to develop painting just the way the Chinese did: textured brush strokes to draw the trees, minimal details to echo the simple lines of the mountain, and chiaruscuro shading to show the mist-mellowed horizon.

All day long I had the last line of my bat mitzvah haftorah portion running hrough my head: "The Lord G-d hath spoken, who can but prophecy?" The Li river exists, who can but paint?

Useful Advice

Useful Advice We've Been Recently Given, But Probably Won't Use:

Once you've been quoted a semi-exorbitant price for the pleasure of picking a poisonous snake for the restaurant to kill and cook for you, be aware that the price quoted was not the whole price, but per kilo.

But they do throw you a bone and weigh it only after they've decapitated it, bled it into a shot glass for you to drink the blood, and cut out its gallbladder -- which, when eaten, will increase your virility.

Sep 7: Welcome to Guilin

Last night, Eleni and I landed in the Guilin airport at 9 PM. We've been reading up before a city about a day ahead, so we knew a little about the region--that it was known for its gorgeous limestone mountains and its adventurous cuisine that includes snake and rat. Unsure if we would be able to get a hotel at that hour, we had made a reservation that morning at the only mid-range hotel that had answered the phone. Content that we had everything under control, we hopped in a cab, ready for a good night's sleep, after the previous late night.

Yeah, right.

We got to our hotel, and had our first -- minor -- setback. They wanted payment up front, and didn't take credit cards. We'd planned on changing money in the morning, but luckily had enough Chinese cash on us to pay for one night.

It was up in our rooms that we hit the second, bigger set back. It wasn't just grungy, it was kind of worse than that. Maybe our clue should have been on the phone when the receptionist defensively boasted that they had TVs in every room, and 24-hours of hot water. But, as Eleni put it, they could have, say, saved their money on the TVs and invested it in giving us toilet paper. Or mopping up the water on the bathroom floor. Or putting a mattress on the wooden box that served as a bed.

Eleni and I have each done our share of budget travel, and we can roll with the punches, it's just that we hadn't planned on going budget this time. We started getting infectious giggles, as we checked the rooms to make sure there were no bugs, and decided maybe we could both just hold it for two days. I announced we just needed a breather from the room -- we should go for a walk, get our bearings in town, and figure out how to solve the problem that we had no cash, no one took credit cards, and we wanted to get on a boat at 8 AM the next morning before the banks opened.

We walked up the street, weaving through sidewalk restaurants, still crowded despite the late hour. We quickly noticed that all the restaurants had bright red plastic bins filled with live cockles, turtles, mussels, scuttling crabs, and fish, all available for your eating enjoyment. It took a moment longer to notice the cages in the shadows behind these -- I spotted pheasants and big furry mongoose-like things before I decided I really didn't want to know what was in them.

We wandered up the street and walked into another hotel that we figured from our Lonely Planet map was a three-stars hotel called the Golden Elephant. Using sign language we established they couldn't change money for us, and then communicated that we wanted to see a room. "The bathrooms aren't much better" I muttered under my breath to Eleni as we checked them out. We decided that three stars wasn't better enough that we would change our rooms that second, but we would check into this new hotel in the morning.

Now we needed to find an international ATM somewhere, and we set out for a Bank of China -- the one bank that sometimes, but not invariably, has a heart-warming Cirrus logo on their ATMs. We had walked about a block when Eleni glanced up at a neon sign to our left and said with a great sigh of relief: "Oh, wait, THIS Is the Golden Elephant." We walked into a much brighter lobby and greatly amused the two men behind the desk as we all communicated in about 20 English words and established a) that these rooms really were much nicer and worth checking into right then at 11:30 at night, b) that they would let us pay with a Visa, c) that we could book tickets at 7:30 the next morning for the river tour, but only if we had cash, d) no they didn't change money and e) they had no idea where an international ATM was.

Eleni and I walked back to our original hotel -- past all the doomed sea creatures -- and told the startled cashier we were checking out. We forfeited the $10 we had paid for the room without a second thought. Back through the restaurants, now rolling our luggage, and we were soon ensconced in our new, clean, toilet-paper-friendly room.

One problem solved.

The money gods were with us, too. While the two fancy hotels we stopped in couldn't give us cash since we weren't staying there, the ATM -- at the end of a dark lonely road that I might not have been able to bring myself to walk down alone, so I take back everything I ever said about not being sure about traveling in twos -- happily spit out piles of colorful Yuan for us.

Half-past midnight, and the second problem solved.

The only thing left to tackle was the fact that after all of this we were now hungry. There was nothing for it. . . On our fourth time past all the caged animals, we stopped for dinner. We walked with our waiter over to the food, glanced around, and then pointed decidedly at the largest eggplant we could see.

Grilled and spiced, our freshly-killed dinner was wonderful.

Advice for Others

Places we stayed and things we did:

Nathan Hotel: At US$100 (700 hk $) for a swank double, this was a really nice mid range option in Hong Kong. It was hip, incredibly comfy, and located conveniently on Nathan Road in Kowloon. We got a free upgrade -- better room and free breakfast -- by filling out a form for a Corporate account. (Which included such questions as whether we'd be staying in Hong Kong under 50 days a year or over. . . )

378 Nathan Road
Kowloon
Hong Kong
www.nathanhotel.com
info@nathanhotel.com
852 2780 9798
fax: 852 2770 4262

The Hong Kong Art Museum in Kowloon was fantastic--well-detailed with interesting information and stunning jades and paintings.

Club Feather Boa was our favorite (secret) ex-pat bar. It's an antique store turned into a bar. No sign on the door but really friendly once inside the comfy, Roccoco room. Members only on the weekends, though.
Club Feather Boa
38 Staunton St.
Central, Hong Kong
tel:2857 2586

Afternoon cream tea at the Peninsula Hotel is considered touristy, but still really yummy and worth it.

Advice We Could Have Used

Someone might have told us that there is pretty much no way to get a train from Hong Kong, well, to anywhere. Except -- if you really push and you go to about 5 different travel agents and you finally get to one that services mainland China -- you can get a ticket to one of three cities, but only with five days advance notice.

We sucked it up and bought a plane ticket instead.

Sep 6: Hong Kong by Night

Whether or not you come to Hong Kong as the first port of call, you really should show up at night. In daylight, it's just another city with tall buildings. At night it's divine. Who knew that neon and laser light shows could be classy?

Eleni and I began yesterday climbing up to the top of Victoria's Peak. We took a 20-minute bus most of the way and had a half mile walk straight uphill to get the much-touted view over the whole city and the harbor beyond. Walking back down, sweat everywhere, and trying not to slide on the steep path, we started talking to a pair of British naval officers and a French girl. The three of them -- Sean, Guy, and Sophie -- had just met that morning, and we joined them for a drink at the bottom of the hill. Sean and Guy were on a six-month tour-of-duty through Asia, and had naturally gravitated towards each other as two sailors on the ship who had some interest in seeing more of the cities they visited than the inside of the ex-pat pubs and the local talents' bedrooms. So after hearing tales of everything from Brunai's fierce Nepalese soldiers who must draw blood if they draw their knives, to how Sean lost his golf ball the previous day to a cobra in a bush we got invited to a cocktail party on board the ship -- the HMS York -- that night. This was, for all of you who are now snickering, a bona fide cocktail party for Britishers in Hong Kong, not some made up excuse to get us on board. (Let not the fact that once we got on board they barely let us near the cocktail party and kept us hidden away in the officers' mess the whole time distract you from that premise.)

Which brings us back to Hong Kong at night. What you wanna do, is see Hong Kong at night from a battleship docked in Kowloon. All the buildings -- great big sky scrapers that stretch pretty much as far as you can see in either direction -- are all lit up throughout the night. But at eight, it turns into a coordinated full city show. Lights blink on and off in concert, electric triangles dance up and down the glass facades, and from the top of five or six of the buildings come staccato bursts of bright green lasers that beam out across the harbor over your heads.

Have I mentioned recently that Hong Kong rocks?

The battle ship was pretty cool too. We got a full tour and met a lot of really nice men in uniform: Sean and Guy, our hosts, were that wonderful kind of funny and smart that makes them insta-best-friends; there was the older gentleman who policed other people's language and uniforms while simultaneously talking about how much he loved Washington and then listed every shopping mall in a 20 mile radius of the Capitol; there was the guy who'd gone briefly AWOL for a few hours when he'd passed out lying on a Turkish toilet at a Brunai night club and had to break his way out at 7 AM to get back to the ship.

And then there was, well, the guns. Missiles and lasers and those things where one person stands behind a major gunbarrell and shoots it up into the sky. At the end of the evening, as we were taking a last set of photos, Sean said: "Do you want to take a picture in front of the gun?" And, without missing a beat, we two peaceniks jumped at the chance. (Prompting Eleni to say "Hmm, I wonder if that makes us boys or girls?")

Sophie, Guy, Eleni, and I then went out into expat heaven to drink sangria (Have you tried Sangria with star fruit in it?) for many more hours and finally collapsed in a cab at 3 AM for home. Though only after Guy slurrily told us that we were the most fun guests he and Sean had ever invited back to the boat ever -- and while I did, of course, respond with "I bet you say that to all the girls", I have to say that the British navy rocks about as much as Hong Kong.

Sep 6: Hong Kong by Day

Hong Kong is a city you can smile in. This is a big deal for an American -- especially one who automatically flashes a smile any time she makes eye contact. Here's why smiling doesn't work in most countries: First, it could be the kind of country where smiling marks you at best as a too-emotive American (I.e. Sweden where the natives will only be nice to you if you frown at them and don't say a word) or at worst as mentally slow (I.e. in South America). Second, and by far worse, it could be a country where a smile is seen as an invitation to follow you down the street for three miles -- either pressing you to buy a sarong or agree to dinner.

In Hong Kong, you can smile. The whole city is such a Westerner's dream of a travel destination, that it almost makes one a little embarrassed to love it so much. It's like Travel Lite. You get comfortably lost, pull out your map, and instantly someone walks over and asks in flawless English if they can help. The streets are dappled with about 40% Caucasian faces -- a different ratio than you're used to, but not so's you'd notice. And look! Weird food being sold on the streets -- but it's all written in English on the menus.

And the smiling. It's just like home. People smile back. Or if I was smiling while saying "No thank you" to the guy who wants to sell me a fake Rolex, he smiles too and then walks away.

Different guide books gave us different suggestions on whether to use Hong Kong as your port of entry to China. One said it was best to go after you'd seen mainland China, because only then would you look past the superficial bits and see how Asian the city really was. Another said it was the best way to start, a nice way to segue into the culture. I am going to back the latter view.
I know my German backpacking friends would be disappointed in me for not slogging through the back alleys to find the cheapest bowl of shark's fin soup to truly immerse myself in local life. But I cannot tell you how nice it is to get to jump into another culture in half-steps, to be able to see what's similar first, and then slowly open yourself up to what's different.

I've said it before, and I'm sure I'll be saying it again: Hong Kong rocks.

Sep 6: Morning Conversations

Sleepy, mumbled morning conversation at 7 AM upon noticing that Eleni was awake too:

"Hong Kong ROCKS."

"I know. . . I can't believe we were on a British battleship last night."

Pause.

"I think I need an advil."

September 4: Traveling in Twos

Catherine drove Eleni and me to the airport this -- well, I guess it was yesterday -- morning. We had scheduled to meet at 5:10; Cath showed up at ten of, given, she explained, her own fears of Oh, no, something will go wrong and I'm going to be late because I'm going to not hear the alarm clock, I'm going to run out of gas, the lights aren't going to be with me, etc. As Eleni and I are equally concerned with being on time, this made total sense to us. . . and so we ended up sharing all of our travel anxieties on the --surprisingly easy since well, no one is on the road at 5 AM-- drive to Dulles.

Catherine has dreams that she shows up at the airport and her passport has expired. (Which led her, poor girl, to start worrying about that even though she was only flying to California.) Eleni quite simply doesn't like the length of time she has to be on a plane, unable to get up and move around. And me, here's what I'm anxious about. After years of these travelogues in which I talk about my occasional concerns traveling alone, I'm suddenly worried that maybe I won't be interesting if I'm NOT traveling alone. Really. Swear to Buddha, I couldn't sleep the night before I left, because what if I didn't have anything intriguing to write here? I mean, what if the whole trip was all just simple and easy and painless? Eleni and Catherine explained, of course, that I was being an idiot, and that was the end of that.

And, well, the fact is that the trip so far has been simple and easy and painless. We landed in Hong Kong five hours ago. Together, each of us catching signs the other one missed, we made it through the bustle of the Hong Kong airport. Once through customs, we divided chores. Eleni exchanged money; I called the hotel to confirm our reservations. Then, since there were two of us, we were brave enough to hop on the city bus, instead of taking a taxi, which was a great way to see the city at one tenth the price.

Once we'd checked into our hotel, we went for a walk down Nathan Road, which is a shopper's heaven. Imagine Times Square, except for with that much neon and ad space decorating a street several miles long, with corridors branching off for several blocks in every direction. The guide book said that no matter your intentions, you will purchase something here -- window shopping gives way to price comparisons gives way to buying something you didn't intend to. I scoffed, as I am the least shopping-oriented person in the world.

I bought a new pair of shoes within 15 minutes.

I blame Eleni. She was wearing these cute green suede sneakers all day, and I had comfortable-shoe-envy. I don't know, we are just going to have to see how this whole traveling with someone thing works out.

Advice We Were Given

Advice people gave us before we left, mostly dubious, some useful:

--If you can't read the menu, don't order the cheapest thing assuming it will be rice. It could be fish heads.

--Boil any water you drink. (You know, with that cooking stove we brought.)

--Don't bring the anatomy coloring book along with the 72 pack of colored pencils, because c'mon, you're really not going to use it.

--As much as you like sushi, you might want to stick to cooked foods.

--The best way to handle non-Western style toilets is to always wear skirts. (This, weirdly enough, given by a man.)