My train reached China in darkness, and after the bogies on the carriages were changed, and our passports inspected and stamped, I went to sleep. In the morning I knew at once that I was back in China - there was no mistaking the deeply carved loess soil, the villages with their courtyard-style houses, and even the trees were unmistakably Chinese. Despite the fact that I don't speak Mandarin, in fact will probably never speak Mandarin, I felt that I had come home.
Unfortunately, National Day was only a week away, and millions of Chinese would be traveling to or from their homes for the long holiday. I had registered this as a potential problem when planning my itinerary, but then it was months away. Crossing Russia, it became a more immediate concern, and I finally asked Passport Travel to arrange my rail tickets and hotels through to Xi'an. They subcontracted me to CITS, formerly the government travel organization, and I wound up in soft-sleeper class on the trains and tour-group-style hotels in the cities.
My first stop, Datong, is not on the usual tourist circuit, In fact, the carriage attendant hadn't realized I was getting off there, and I had to track her down in her compartment to retrieve my ticket (in China, you exchange your ticket for a plastic token after boarding, and no, I don't know why). My hotel had plenty of comforts, very welcome after the rigors of Russia, but essentially no English was spoken. Alas, my pronunciation of Mandarin clearly left much to be desired, despite the Chinese tutoring I had had back in March and April, and the staff did not read pinyin (used to express Chinese characters in the English alphabet). I needed a better phrase book, with characters, but meanwhile the pictures in the menu helped.
Since Lonely Planet does include the characters with place names, I was able to find the nine-dragon screen and temples I wanted to see in Datong. I enjoyed the colored ceramic screen, but found the temples thickly coated in dust. Datong is a center for coal mining (and formerly for the manufacture of steam locomotives) and suffered from all-too-visible pollution.
Next day, I went by car, with a guide, to the nearby Buddha caves and hanging monastery. I found the caves, clearly popular with the Chinese, reasonably interesting, but less extensive and less extensively decorated than those at Dunhuang. The monastery, however, perched as precariously on its cliff-face as in the photographs. The long vertical poles, clearly visible, don't support the weight of the building, which actually rests on horizontal poles driven into the cliff face. The river which used to run below the monastery has been dammed and steps have been cut into the rock, but the monastery itself still feels high and isolated, and as if it might fall at any moment. My young guide had recently returned from graduate study in Australia, and was trying to return there as an immigrant - no good jobs to be had in Datong, he told me.
The last stage of my Trans-Mongolian trip, into Beijing, was an anticlimax, with the Great Wall only intermittently visible. A Chinese woman on the train had written my hotel's name in characters for me, and my taxi driver zipped straight there with no trouble, but next morning I discovered that Beijing's cars now outnumbered its bicycles to the point of frequent gridlock. I took a taxi to the Vietnam embassy to apply for my visa, but it would have been faster to use the metro stop right outside my hotel and then walk.
While I waited the four days for my visa to come through, I took care of some business - picking up my next train ticket from CITS (train tickets can only purchased in the departure city, and I would have to pick up the rest along the way), dumping my photo flash cards to CD, Fedexing the CDs home - and did some sightseeing.
I revisited the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven and Prince Gong's palace in the small remaining hutong section, and I enjoyed them much more on my own than I had on organized tours. At the Temple of Heaven especially I seemed to see much more. I also tracked down the Museum of Architecture and the altar to Xiannong, as far southwest of Tiananmen Square as the Temple of Heaven is to the southeast. I had this place pretty much to myself, despite some beautiful displays that reminded me once again just how old Chinese civilization is - and how much I prefer the old-style buildings to the concrete and glass that is taking over more and more of Beijing.
Finally, I paid an expensive visit to the dentist. In contrast to the Polish dentist he claimed that I had no tartar buildup, but he did point out that my upper left canine was cracked. He advised eating on the other side of my mouth. Somehow I didn't think that I would be taking that advice, as I had another five months of travel ahead of me - I reached the halfway point of the trip October 1st, National Day, in Hangzhou.
Tiananmen Square had been lavishly decorated for National Day, including an artificial mountain covered with flowers and with two waterfalls, but as many people were leaving Beijing as arriving and the station was mobbed. Hangzhou, one of the most popular sites in China for both locals and foreigners, was also packed. Good thing I had reservations!
Despite the crowds I found East Lake and its islands truly beautiful, and well worth revisiting at a quieter time of year. Crowds also filled the grounds and buildings of Lingyin Si: the Temple of Inspired Seclusion was anything but secluded. In most Buddhist countries visitors are required to walk clockwise around temples and stupas, keeping their right shoulders turned towards the Buddha, but not in China, resulting in collisions and traffic jams in the impressive temples with their elaborately decorated statues, and even in the huge, cross-shaped pavilion housing imaginative statues of the arhats.
Strolling the promenade beside the lake at a slower-than-normal pace because of the crowds, I was surprised to detect an attempt to steal from my day pack. In the past I have felt particularly safe in China, where crime against foreigners is harshly punished. This would-be thief was a young girl - perhaps younger people have different attitudes, or maybe those losing out under the new economic system are turning to crime.
Scattered across China are a number of sacred sites: mountains and islands, Taoist and Buddhist. From Hangzhou I took a bus, a car and a ferry to Putuoshan, a Buddhist island. Again, I loved the place despite the crowds, and want to revisit. While I took pictures in the temples, the Chinese burned incense, apparently the bigger and more numerous the sticks the better. Great clouds of smoke rose from the big burners, and trays filled with water caught the wax dripping from the racks of red candles.
Somewhat to my surprise I had a part-time guide in Putuoshan, and she took me to a small fish restaurant hidden behind my rather posh hotel. Plastic bowls full of water were lined up on the concrete floor, holding fish, eels and shellfish. At lunch I made the mistake of ordering crab, which proved difficult to eat even using fingers instead of chopsticks. For dinner I settled for the safer fish, easy enough to eat with chopsticks, and bean sprouts, which I enjoyed more.
None of the temples in Putuoshan are individually impressive compared to Lingyin Si, but the pools, pagodas and bridges around the main temple are beautifully landscaped, and the overall impression of the rocky, tree-covered island is one of serenity.
The crowd waiting to board the ferry to Shanghai was definitely not serene, and I actually saw a fight break out as we were allowed to board. Regardless of whether or not they have reserved seats, or cabins in this case, the Chinese all aim to be the first to board, although this usually only results in a lot of discrete pushing and jostling.
Lonely Planet had suggested the overnight ferry to Shanghai: the local CITS office had been horrified, just as Geo Ex had been opposed when I wanted to ride the steam train up to Darjeeling, In fact, I found nothing wrong with the ferry itself - my cabin was bigger than the compartments on the train, and came with an attached bathroom that included a shower. The problem lay in the route - it turned out that the ferry docked somewhere way out of town.
I was able to travel alone across China, despite my inability to speak Mandarin, partly by pattern-matching the characters, and partly because of the kindness of strangers. In this case, the woman sitting next to me as I waited to board called her father in Shanghai to find out which bus (actually two buses) I needed to take. When I asked the people sharing my cabin - a young couple, their child and a brother - where I should catch the bus they insisted on giving me a lift to my hotel, and while I was away eating dinner they called my hotel for directions. Finally, the young woman next to me in line in the crowded cafeteria helped me order and then invited me to eat with her and her friend. I learned that she was a travel agent living in Chengdu and specializing in Tibet, a useful future contact. I was overwhelmed, and couldn't help wondering how a similarly language-deficient Chinese might fare in the west.
Shanghai made my itinerary only because I wanted more time in its remarkable museum. The city itself is growing outward and upward at a fast clip, and I had difficulty recognizing areas I had visited only seven years before, aside from the Bund, the riverside promenade lined with cleaned-up, colonial-era buildings.
The museum, however, was just as I remembered it, a big, open building filled with well-lit, well-labeled, well-organized exhibits, a true rarity in Asia. I headed straight for the top floor and the jade, old (7,000 years old) and not-so-old, but all exquisite. On the same floor I found the captions for the exhibit on "minorities" seemed patronizing, and noticed that almost all the items on display - clothes, fabrics, boats - were 20th century, mostly late 20th century.
Next day I took a double-decker day train through flat agricultural country to Suzhou, famous for its gardens. CITS put me in a hotel in a partly-finished complex where I felt very isolated, although I was able to figure out the bus system, thanks to the big maps at the downtown bus stops.
A visit to the otherwise not-very-interesting Tiger Hill was rewarded with a free cultural performance - drummers, dancers, cycle acrobats, plate balancers - and a procession of big and little dragons. But I had come to see gardens, and was glad that I had. Perhaps my favorite was the first, the Garden for Lingering, where I could indeed have lingered longer, wandering winding paths between trees and pagodas, a new view around each bend. For me, the charm of a Chinese garden lies in the way the layout makes the small seem large, so the much bigger Humble Administrator's garden was less interesting. I learned that it's famous because of one of its former owners, not because of its design.
I preferred the Master of Nets garden, small and with plenty of water, and returned for a magical evening with soft lights reflected in the pool and musicians and dancers performing in the pavilions. The less-visited Yi Yuan and Canling Ting were also small, quiet oases in the bustle of an otherwise charmless city.
In addition to specific gardens, and the touristy Silk Factory, I had told my guide that I wanted to visit the Museum of Embroidery. He hadn't been there before, and seemed to enjoy it as much as I did. Only one room could really be considered a museum, but the workrooms and shop were fascinating - the embroidery is done with very fine, straight stitches in silk, and looks like painting. The temptation to buy disappeared when I saw the prices - justified, but still high. I settled for photos.
Another night train, another kind stranger. In the morning I discovered that I was sharing a compartment with the president of Xi'an university and his wife. After I had declined his offer of a lift to my hotel, he insisted on escorting me through the crowds and rain to the taxi rank, where he queue-jumped me into the first available cab. I must admit that help in finding the taxi was welcome: it seems that every railway station in China is being rebuilt, with the forecourt blocked off and taxis forced to stop some distance away.
Again, I revisited a tour group site on my own, taking a local bus out to visit the Terracotta Warriors. The vendors that had mobbed my group on my first visit were more controlled, a manicured park surrounded the buildings, and photos were now allowed. Otherwise the big pits with their ranks of silent men and horses seemed unchanged, impressive in their numbers and their variety.
The big mosque in Xi'an's Muslim quarter also seemed largely unchanged, perhaps a little shabbier, perhaps a little more popular, but the Taoist Temple to the Eight Great Immortals had acquired an impressive new coat of paint - an array of pictures spread over the walls and under the eaves. The Muslim quarter itself had suffered some gentrification, along with an invasion of Han Chinese, and thereby lost much of its charm, although some streets still hosted outdoor butchers and sweet vendors.
I had enjoyed exploring Xi'an on my previous visits, loving the sense of history, the feeling of difference, but this time I found it just another big Chinese city with too many glass and concrete buildings, too much traffic and way too much pollution. Still, Beijing, Shanghai and Xi'an all put Moscow to shame, with their clean, intact pavements and almost first-world feel. Except - go behind or beyond the gleaming new high-rises, and the crumbling, crowded houses of the poor, the dirty, bustling street markets, are still there. At least in China these areas feel safe.
Originally sent from Auckland, New Zealand, 4 Feb 2005
Site design and content Copyright 2001 - 2010, Wilhelm's Words
Contact: wilhelmswords.com
Home