Nihao! (pronounced nee-how! right up there as one of the worlds perkiest hello's).
China is indeed under construction at a level that would be difficult to comprehend had we not just ridden through it, over it and under it for months. I've had it in my eye's, my nose, my mouth, my lungs and (at the risk of sounding like a school teacher on the edge) up-to-here!
After what was probably the swiftest, most orderly entry to a country ever (no one else was trying to get in) through China's pristine, quiet border and riding along a lovely quiet road devoid of traffic the reality of riding in China took a few days to hit us. China is truly a country of yin and yang, one day it can be all great and lovely, all smooth roads, buffalo and rice paddies, next day you're having you bum spanked on shattered concrete highways (not aided by trying to break in new brooks saddles), choking on black exhaust fumes with the only view through the smog of smoke belching factories and machinery grinding the limestone hills to rubble and cement dust...
... and as if that wasn't bad enough the ice lollies tasted like wood chip. For me if there is a hell, this is it.
On dusty, crusty days riding I sometimes thought China would like to be colourful... that colour would mostly be red, the rich red of the earth which formed the terracotta warriors; the auspicious red of ribbons fluttering from wing mirrors; the red of the ever present lanterns adorning houses and businesses; the red of the neckerchiefs on school children, not to forget the red of the flag of the communist, socialist, capitalist, not-quite-sure-what-it-is republic of China.
However, the colour of lowland China is mostly, sadly, grey...
...cement grey.
The trees are grey, the grass is grey, even the rice is grey.
The sky is grey with thick smog and the red lanterns are dimmed to slate with a veiling of coal dust. Freshly washed laundry which hangs out to dry on hangers and railings is coated in a steady mix of vehicle exhaust particulates and grime until it looks more like the rags you see hanging from the back pocket of a mechanic than clothing.
And by mid morning we too are coated in a layer of coal dust, cement dust and grit. Its been a grimy ride.
The China we passed through (a small section in the south east running from the Vietnam border to Shanghai in a straightish line, huge country for a bike and 30 day visa) was regularly dotted with open cast coal mines. Coal provides much of the countries power and small independent coal merchants set up depots for delivery and collection along the roadside. Much of the street food stalls also use coal briquette's for cooking. This means that for us, and the rest of the population whose homes line the roadside, regular visits by coal carting trucks with no tarp in use, blast through with coal dust blowing off in the breeze or with every pothole in the road (of which there are many). The homes are so caked in soot they made me think of Dickensian London, the villages could have been sets for an Oriental Oliver Twist.
The construction of China is on overdrive. The news in China is filled with positive finance stories, how much money is held in reserve, how China has been prudent when the western world was living it up and how they now will stave off unemployment by initiating home grown, government paid, civic improvement projects, so that when the world gets out of its recession, China will be not only insulated from the worst of the effects but will be bigger and better than ever... Cool.
But there seems to be little coordination for these improvements, the roads being resurfaced are already good roads (you can tell because the construction workers leave random gaps where you drop down from the lofty 6 inch thick layer of new tarmac to ride on sections of old, perfectly smooth, unblemished tarmac for a few hundred metres before bumping back up to the (not really) improved section). The beautiful trees which line the old road edges providing shade from the intense heat of the sun are being felled to widen the roads a couple of feet which seems nuts when the only traffic using them are the trucks hauling aggregates for the construction of the road.
Meanwhile college education remains accessible only to those who can afford the fees, much of the population remains illiterate and the housing being erected is the same communist block reinforced concrete styling that in 2 years time will be damp and mouldy from exposure to the elements and have red rusty stains dribbling down the front from the corroding security bars on the windows; and all those new concrete roads being laid will be cracking under the weight of the aggregate hauling HGV's they were never designed to support.
In China I hoped to discover a land of antiquity but the cultural revolution saw off much of that and subsequent modernisation and development has finished off nearly everything else. In its place is a land of harsh sprawling concrete and ugliness... I have never seen such a lack of beauty on such a large scale. Whether people are too scared to create anything of ascetic value for fear of any bourgeois backlash in the future (Mao even banned flowers in his day for being too bourgeois) or whether having been surrounded by such harshness people have lost their eye for beauty I don't know. The buildings being thrown up faster than you can blink are all of the same mould, reinforced concrete, cheap metal framed school type windows, maybe a bit of grey or brown zigzag tiling for decoration on the front, and in cities and suburbs ubiquitous bars on the windows. Nothing is built to last, what will they do when they run out of mountains for materials.
OK. So that was the bad bit, the good news is that despite this you can find beautiful things in China and for much of our time we did just that. If you were on tourist coaches you could zip around from the great wall to historic villages and possibly even be able to say, as one traveller did to me 'Well, I thought there'd be a lot more factories!' (stunned I tell you, stunned I was).
There are little pockets of old China hanging on in the countryside though you do need a bike to see them without embellishment, or your own wheels at any rate.
Amidst the concrete block housing, old horsehead gabled houses remain standing, ignored by peasants, who, during the cultural revolution engineered to do away with anything 'old', had more important things to do like growing food and keeping a roof over their heads. At times these pockets are a solitary home at others they are fairly substantial clusters, however, because they are not on the tourist circuit the homes are often dilapidated and crumbling with age.
Beyond these properties there are entire villages, including Little Likeng where we spent a lovely couple of days, which somehow remained relatively/miraculously unscathed. As a result rather than letting them crumble they have been saved as tourist destinations...'Visit Bygone China'.
Regardless of the motives in saving these villages (entrance fees are pretty hefty, as are the entrance fees to visit most things worth looking at in China, from villages to mountains) they are very lovely. Here you can see old buildings preserved and new buildings in keeping with traditional architecture, complete with paint jobs to make them look ancient, 'New - Old'. These villages are teaming with domestic tourists in tour groups which handily stick together in matching hats, so if it gets too much just step back from the main drag and you can experience quiet moments in old lanes with fluffy chickens pecking at the ground, and admire the golden carp we would pay a small fortune for back home to put in ornamental ponds in nets awaiting dinner time... goldfish for supper anyone?! James did, but he didn't realise til he saw them in their nets the next day, he looked sorry.
There are also arts and traditions which have survived modernisation. On the road we witnessed traditional fishing going on including the bizarre cormorant fishing though this has all but died out (probably a blessing for the cormorants). For those who don't know the cormorants are raised by the fishermen as little chicks and are trained to hunt for fish which is what a cormorant does best, however the fisherman do this by tying a piece of string around the cormorants neck so it can't physically swallow the fish, so once the bird has caught a fish both are reeled back to the boat, the fish retrieved from the cormorants beak and the cormorant heads back out again to fish some more...I assume the birds get fed well at the end of the day.
We were also surprised when riding along a quiet country road one day to come across a drive through open air theatre with a full blown opera in progress. Seriously this place was in the middle of nowhere, not even a tiny village nearby, the middle of the harvest and the place was packed with people on motorbikes, chatting and watching and happily munching on things on sticks. No one was taking money for the performance but the building was a permanent, specific structure, so I don't know how it was working but I'm glad it was. Chinese Opera is a pretty distinctive art form, the actors convey most of their intentions not only by talking and singing but through exaggerated facial expressions and the singing is, erm, very Chinese Opera. Its a great sight but can be a bit piercing on the ears!
A highlight of our trip (and a turning point as the landscape improved at this point) was a trip to Yangshuo. Yangshuo is karst limestone land (similar to that found in Thailand and Halong Bay, Vietnam). Although this scenery was nothing new to us as we have been riding through it on and off for months it was still stunningly beautiful and all the more so for coming in from the industrial landscape which precedes it. It was so lovely here I didn't want to leave, aided by the fact that we ate some of the best food we'd had on the trip and that we found a little restaurant where they would let us eat up on the roof top alone, overlooking the towns lights AND they had apple crumble on the menu, the memory brings a tear to my eye.
In Yangshuo we hired a tandem to pootle round the countryside for a day. I had a romantic notion of the two of us working together, bonding, chatting happily as the birds flitted through the fields and the rivers meandered through the rice paddies. It is actually a testament to James's overall easy going nature that we are still together today. If you love someone and you both ride a bike DON'T get a tandem. We discovered that we both have completely different riding styles, which is a shame because on a tandem you have to do exactly the same thing and obviously we both wanted to do the same thing, just as long as it was OUR thing. The tandem was also designed for really just ticking along on tarmac, however a slight miscalculation on the map had us off roading on the tandem equivalent of a gearless shopper bike down trails that everyone else was taking mountain bikes over. It was a treat. Lovely. I'll leave it at that.
Whilst in Yangshuo we splashed out to see Impressions, a sound and light show by Liu Sanjie, who did the opening for the Beijing Olympics. Truly amazing, fairy lights on an epic scale, the show is performed over a massive area, most of it on water so every little light (of which there were millions) was reflected and sparkling on the lake, with the karst peaks illuminated, there must have been hundreds of performers including very calm buffalo on floating piers. It made my face hurt from smiling.
From Yangshuo we hoofed our way to Ji'an so that we could catch a train to Hong Kong to extend our visas. A word on Chinese cities...they're all the same, you know where the centre is as they all have ornate lampposts lining the main strip which is great if you're new in town. Chinese towns and cities have all been swiftly modernised, they tend to have really wide boulevards with trees, shops to satisfy every need and cycle lanes (teeming with electric bikes...they're great but a bloody hazard, a granny nearly took me out on one as she was doing about 30km/h but riding like she was doing 2.5), there are central parks and squares where everyone congregates in the evening to dance and chat, sounding good? Considering most people in the countryside are still dragging around handcarts and threshing rice by hand you can see why everyone's moving in. However whilst it all looks nice and shiny, if you take a look at whats going on higher up you can see its still the same rag tag mix of concrete its just that a new facade has been put over the front of the old buildings to make it all new and shiny!
I loved Hong Kong. I'm a sucker for cities, I can feel the excitement build as I enter, I love the press of people, the lights, the possibilites. Hong Kong is where you get to experience the thrills of being in a really hot exotic country/vibrant city but still have the pleasures of home.
Hong Kong is a city designed to never let your feet touch the ground...literally.
At first we just thought it was hell to walk around but that's because we were trying to do it at street level, but the street is for smelly cars. The people ambol along on flower trimmed covered walkways above the traffic and noise, protected from the glare of the sun and monsoon rains. Admittedly much of the walkway system cuts through malls so its a shopahlics nightmare/paradise. But effectively you can cross from one side of the city to the other without ever touching the ground. Whilst in Hong Kong we were graciously looked after by Jo, a friend of 2 cyclists we met in Pakistan. Jo was just lovely, inviting us into her home and colourful life, making our stay on Lamma and Hong Kong both pleasurable and painful (oh lord the hangover). We also got to witness the fireworks to celebrate 60 years of the people's republic. Watching from the avenue of stars we got to view the huge display reflecting off the glassy surfaces of the skyscrapers making them shimmer like a hollywood A listers dress. But its not just the sparkle which makes Hong Kong, it also has some of the most beautiful, compact parks I've seen and, because its so hilly, stunning forests and beaches cover much of the land so there's no forgetting you're still somewhere truly exotic.
After Hong Kong our China trip seemed to feel better than it had initially. Admittedly we still passed through some mad max style landscapes and at one point we actually went right through an otherwise closed off expressway construction site which lasted for about 6km and at the end we had the motorway to ourselves, its a surreal experience to ride down the middle lane of a deserted motorway, the occasional bit of litter blowing through, all we needed was some zombies to complete the scene.
We road on quiet rods through patchwork paddy fields and villages time forgot. We visited the impressive Tengwang Ge Pavillion, one of those rarities that is in fact origional, surrounded by beautiful gardens in Nanchang. We also experienced a great afternoon drinking tea at a traditional tea ceremony. Making tea is more complicated than you could ever imagine.
Talking of tea, we cycled over a stunning mountain pass through lush tea plantations and old forgotten villages to visit the home of the most famous tea in China - Dragons well. It's named for the spring which waters the bushes which resembles a dragon. Dragons well grows on the slopes of the mountains rising from the stunning West Lake in Hangzhou and a happy day was spent wandering in the tea museum, sipping more tea, admiring the flowers and generally wiping out any further plans we had for the day. Its not a bad way to spend time. Hangzhou itself is a lovely city and has been a spot for Chinese contemplaters and holiday makers for centuries with good reason. It is also home of the silk museum, a visit to which had me knowing more about silk that I'd even considered though I had to actually enquire of the staff if silk worms survive the proccess of silk production...they don't, to get the silk of the cocoon the worms inside are either boiled or baked otherwise the silk would dissolve as the pupae metamorphosed... feel terrible about the silk I bought in Vietnam.
One of our last stops before leaving China was to visit the famed gardens of Suzhou. The gardens are impressive from their use of tiny spaces, constructed around properties, the gardens are interconnected with hallways which, along with the rooms of the houses, are fitted with windows which not only allow you to glance through to the next space but frame the views like classical paintings. The overall effect creates a maze of what feels like endless spaces from what is in fact very little. It was a fine closure to our Chinese expedition before our departure from Shanghai to Japan by ferry.
Overall China was definately an interesting country to visit. The contrasts between the polished to an idea of perfection tourists spots, the enormous cities and the forgotten countryside are extreme and telling. Some things were better than expected, we had thought that the trade in wild birds for cages would mean none in the wild, but we rarley saw a caged bird and the skies were not empty. However China of old is forever changed and you have to take it as it stands, neglected or theme parked as it is. The scale at which change is happening in China is awesome, who know's where it will be in 10 years time. I can only hope for something positive for the planet.
tx
Monday, 9 November 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
