China - Final Thoughts

China surprised me in many ways. I think perhaps the biggest surprise to me was the food. I went into the trip scared to death that I would starve. I have never been one to like rice and the very few culinary experiences, besides pad Thai into Asian/American cuisine had left me running. But in the end and after over two weeks in China, I believe there was only one dish on the entire trip that I did not totally enjoy (the meat pancakes in Beijing). The food takes a little getting used to, but I thought it was absolutely delicious. I'll be interested to try the American version at home sometime. I may yet still run from it, but the real authentic Chinese food was great.

China also surprised me by showing just how modern it has become. The days of Chairman Mao and the hardline Communist economy is over. China is moved as warp speed into the 21st Century. It is happening so swiftly that even the Chinese government or the rest of the world knows where this will lead. The world needs to take notice because China is quickly becoming a superpower.

But with China's swift and unfettered growth, the pollution was everything I imagined. China truly has an environmental catastrophy on hand. Much of the country reminds me of Los Angeles on one of its worst days. Clean air is difficult to find. Clean water is no different. Desertfication threatens to claim Beijing and the country has major water shortage and other environmental issues over vast areas of the country. How will China cope as they continue to grow at a 8 - 10% clip. How will they manage as the population becomes more affluent and the number of vehicles double, triples, etc, over the next few years?

And I'm not even touching the subjects of news censorship, the heavy handed rule of many of the minority groups and religion freedoms.

I feel like I barely touched the surface of China knowing there are so many favorable places to see within the country, but at the same time I have learned and have experienced so much.


Canada's Baffin Island and the Arctic Ocean from 35,000'

Kunming

Kunming was to the final leg of my journey. The 20 hour train ride in the overnight couchette/sleeper was to be the final train leg. I thoroughly enjoy train travel and especially the overnight trips. They are a great way to wind down, enjoying both the countryside at a leisurely pace and also a chance to just sit back and read, eat, play cards and chat without any worries. It's also a great time to catch up on blogs and to also for the next few days and their activities.

Our group arrived in Kunming early on Sunday morning. Kunming is located far into the South of China, very far inland from the Pacific Ocean and not all that far east of the Tibetan Plateau. It seems the further south you travel in China, the more relaxed the pace is. Kunming is another Chinese megacity of 6-7 million people. The air here in Kunming was cleaner, the traffic more peaceful and the pace of life slower. I wouldn't compare it entirely to the West, but it is as close as I've seen it so far in China. Kunming is very ethnically diverse. There are 26 different distinct Asian ethnic groups that reside in the area. It is not far at all from the borders of both Laos and Thailand and has a sub-tropical climate that they call an "eternal spring" both due to the low latitude and also the city's elevation (6,200').



On our final day, our group took had a local driver take us out into the countryside to see the Stone Forest, which was recently named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The "forest" is made up of colorful limestone ride spires that reach up into the sky. Most of the rock spires were of various light colored shades of blue. The spires were a bit surreal and reminded me of fake-painted toy rocks...maybe a creation you mind find in a theme park. The park was crowded, but most of the groups were guided and we quickly broke off to explore the windy and twisting paths among the maze of spires on our own. Once we got off the main trek, it took over an hour to find the path back to the throngs of tourists. In one of the main assembly areas, there were ethnic dances and music being performed by some of the locals dressed in colorful costume.



That night, our group of five got together for a delicious final meal and to say our goodbyes. We had clear, blue skies that evening after an afternoon thunderstorm and it was perhaps the only time on the trip we could see the bright blue sky from the clouds or the smog. Kunming certainly was a pleasant one day stopover.

Ahead of me, I had a grueling day of travel ahead of me. I left the hotel at 5:30a on Sunday, taking a flight from Kunming back to Beijing (over 1000 miles and 2.5 hours). I had to clear Chinese customs and recheck my bag again. The flight back over the northern polar regions was another 13 hours. Which also followed more US customs checks and another security bag rechecking in NYC and then a final leg to Atlanta after a 4+ hour layover in NY. My flight didn't make it back into Atlanta until 11p the same day, all daylight and covering 30 hours from the time I woke up in Kunming. And yet, I still had the four hour drive back to Knoxville.

Chengdu

After another 16 hour train ride, we arrived in another massive city. Chengdu is the fourth largest city in China with about eight million people. It's the capital of the Sichuan province, which is very well known for it's hot and spicy food. They do love their hot chili peppers here. Chengdu is considerably more laid back than the other cities we had visited to the North. People are more relaxed with their free time. It's less about business and more about fun. The traffic isn't as aggressive either. You can actually cross the street without the feeling that someone is gunning for you. And as we continue to move further south, the climate is a little warmer still (60s to 70) and continued wetter. Chengdu is somewhat close to the Tibetan plateau and gets alot of the cloud cover and showers that come out of the mountains.

Chengdu is also the focus of the conservation effort to save the giant pandas. It features a world class center, much like a nice zoo, where you can view the pandas and also red pandas. We took a guided trip to the center and saw about 15 of these giant pandas and also about ten of the much smaller and raccoon-like red pandas (the Knoxville zoo actually has a couple). Giant pandas are down to about 1500 in number world-wide and the center in Chengdu has about 80 in captivity, where they successfully breed pandas and they also live about ten years longer than they do in the wild.





We also had a hot pot dinner in Chengdu, much like the one in Zhongwei, but with a much spicier heat option in the center boiling bowl. I was afraid to even put my chopsticks in the center ring in fear that they might burst into flame from all of the chilis floating inside. Hot pot can include just about anything meaty or any vegetables that you can imagine. Think of it as a giant boiling soup and you just pick out the items that you want to eat.



Another activity in Chengdu took us to an ancient village that has been spruced up. The Chinese have also discovered the tourist trap and have dressed up this village much like you would expect from a Gatlinburg (but more tastefully done). There was lots of shopping and snacks along the streets.

We also finished our visit to Chengdu off with a stop at a Chinese disco on the final night. Disco isn't much different than a noisy smoky bar for the younger crowd. I think I was the oldest person there. It was very, very noisy and boisterous with lots of Chinese pop music. I was mercifully thankful that we got kicked out after 90 minutes because we weren't spending enough money to satisify the local establishment. The Chinese have just recently been getting their freedoms since about 1990 and have jumped into the new modern culture headfirst.


a little open air dentistry

Xi'an

I am at the midway point of the trip as our train pulls into the city of Xi'an. Unlike Beijing and Zhongwei, it is a bit greener here in Xi'an as it is a little warmer and considerably wetter. Xi'an was an ancient city of tremendous importance back around 1000-1500 years ago. It was the terminus of the famous Silk Road that traveled inland from Europe all the way to China. Xi'an at its peak of importance was the largest city in the entire world with a population of over 2 million people. The modern Xi'an still retains a few of it's ancient past, but like most of China, it has grown up into quite the modern city.

We had two full days in Xi'an and three of us got together to ride bikes along the top of the ancient city walls. The entire central area of the ancient city is encircled by this enormous wall that takes nearly two hours to ride by bike. And unlike the city, the wall was nearly deserted which made for a nice peaceful ride and several great picture opportunities.





My original plans were to visit the ancient/holy mountain of Hua Shan, with some of its daredevil steps and walkways, but it rained the entire day and daredevil stairway climbs aren't the brightest thing to attempt on rain-soaked steps. Instead, our entire group went for most of the day to visit the famous Terracotta Warriors. The very first Chinese emperor, Qin, is buried in a tomb nearby over 2200 years ago. He was the first to unify the Chinese nation and built the original 4500 mile section of the Great Wall. He thought of himself as a deity and desired to have immorality and to extend his rule into the afterlife. He had many of his officials and comcubines buried alive with him. And for protection he had over 500,000 help him build an army of stone, called the Terracotta Warriors to protect him in this afterlife. Over 7000 individuals "soldiers" have been discovered since the original discovery was made back in 1974. The warriors are lifesize and made of stone and built in great detail. They surround the tomb in military formation with horses and chariots, archers, calvary and infantrymen. Each was a reallife representation of an actual soldier and were each individually handpainted. Not all of the soldiers have been uncovered yet and archelogical digs still continue.





On the last morning in Xi'an, a couple of us went to visit the Wild Goose Pagoda, which is an ancient 7th century towering Buddist Temple.



Traffic in Xi'an is pretty spectacular. The ride back from the pagoda featured some really bad congestion. Chinese drivers and pedestrians are just daredevils. It's frequent to witness some amazing manuevers individual drivers will make. You really have to be on your toes crossing the street and it's really difficult to watch when you're riding in the taxi. Chinese drivers make up about 3% of the vehicle traffic in the world, but they make up a staggering 25% of the traffic fatalaties.

Desert Safari

This morning we met up with our hired locals for an overnight camel safari into the desert. I wasn't sure how authentic the experience would be since the surroundings in Zhongwei are really dry, but they used the land extensively for farming. We met up with the two local farmers/guides on the edge of one of this greenhouse farms where eight camels were waiting for our group.



There weren't any lessons necessary as we hopped right onto our camels and were off. Camels aren't the smoothest ride. I don't even care for riding on horses, but they are pretty manageable to work with. We worked in caravan style...one camel tied to another in a line. We rode out of the farm and were into sand dunes within an 30-45 minutes where we spent the rest of the next 24 hours...totally in isolation and the surroundings very much like you might envision in the Sahara with lots of sand with an occasion dry shrub.



We rode for about 4-5 hours with a one hour stop for lunch, mostly fruit. Camels are very tiring to ride. We had plenty of padding, but camel riding uses leg muscles you would never think about using. When I would get off of mine, I could barely even stand.

We pulled up to our campsite around 4p...in a bowl surrounded by high dunes in all directions to block out the wind. We played cards and had a great feast that night. Our feast consisted of pork and veggies and rice, all Chinese style, which is hard to describe how tasty it was. We also had grilled tofu and sweet potatos and spiced lamb and pork on the grill that night.



It got a little chilly during the night, but our campfire kept us warm until bedtime. Thankfully we didn't freeze. I think it got down to about 45 degrees.

Who would have thought of a camel safari in China?

Earmarks

So as the Chinese discovered capitalism in the 90s, they have also discovered government earmarks. Maybe they are indeed becoming more and more like the West. I'll explain why later.

We freshened up on Friday morning after a long train ride at our locate hotel in Zhongwei (population of about 100,000, which is "small" enough not to register on a Chinese map when there are nearly 100 cities of over 1 million people). We discovered the quickly that the city was not the tourist attraction, but WE instead were the tourist attractions. Zhongwei probably isn't visited very often by Westerners. The Chinese probably have not seen too many of us to often, so this group of five are quite the oddity in the city. The older population in particular had a fascination with us as we got total stares and all eyes were upon us as we made the brief walk to our hotel (no hostel this time). I, being the only male in the group, get an entire room to myself at each stop. That's a pretty nice luxury since I can dump the entire contents of my 40+ pound backpack and 10 pound daypack all over the room.



We cleaned up and had lunch. Again, we had some locals peering into the window initially when we were seated to see this fascinating creatures huddled around the table. Our meal was hot pot. I had no idea what hot pot was before today. It's essentially a big table with a stove in the middle and a big pot of water and some really good food is dumped inside to cook. Ours was loaded up with lamb, beef, lotus flower roots, some green stuff that was good, bamboo shoots, among other things. It was very good. I'm getting better with my chopsticks. My friends, Haiyi and Joel, will know how honorary Chinese I am if I can prove my chopsticks worth when I return.

When this had our local taxi guide and driver take us out into the desert for a view of the desert landscapes and a view of the Yellow River. We are far inland so the mightly Yellow River is not quite so mighty from here, but it is still powerful. It is the second longest river in China and holds an unimaginable quantity of silt from the desert and other places (not to mention the pollution as well).



We took a sheepskin raft float trip for a few miles down the Yellow...Class I only. The sheepskin raft was a rickety framework of "sticks" held together and floating on top of several "balloons" of sheepskin podlike things. You'll have to look at the pictures to get an idea. Let's just say we had a day to kill today.



We then visited a local outdoor amusement desert(ed) theme park. The Chinese had this brilliant idea recently to invest money in this area to help bolster their economy. Maybe it was stimulus money or a government earmark but the brilliant idea was to built some tourist infrastructure to bring people out into the sticks...er...sand to visit. I'm not sure if this park was a result, but the results were pretty humorous. The Chinese have built this little desert-like park with gates and turnstiles and attendants and a complete staff to man it...and yet there is hardly anyone there. They called it a 5-AAAAA tourist attraction. I suggest they stick to promoting their ancient cultures. They had dune buggy rides in the "park" (pay extra). They had camel rides (extra), which we are already doing tomorrow anyway. There were safari rides on top of jeeps and ATVs (extra) on top of the fees you already paid to enter and walk on the sand dunes. The worst part is that at each station you were greeted by Chinese attendants in military desert camo and ladies in blue hotel-like suits that would try to talk you into trying out each of the new different adventures.

I tried the buggy ($6) and got to ride for about 3-4 minutes covering two laps of their park. I wasn't about to try more.



The other side of the park had a chairlift descent down the dunefield to the Yellow River where other "attractions" awaited and there was also a zipline descent to the river along with a bungee tower. We left!

It was an interesting couple of hours trying to figure out what we had just seen. Proof that we didn't miss much..there were no tour buses of Japanese tourists pulling up to snap pictures of this AAAAA attraction in the outskirts of the Gobi Desert.

Train Travel

We left Beijing on Thurs morning headed deep into the interior of China and the outskirts of Inner Mongolia and the Tenneger Desert (or the edges of the famous Gobi desert). To get there we had to endure a 22 hour train ride in an overnight "hard" sleeper car. I had done several overnights when I was in Europe but was not sure what to expect in China. Ended up that our "seats" on the train were in fact the six person sleepers. Our group of five got a "room" about the size of a king bed (really) with three berths on the left side stacked to the ceiling and three to the right side also stacked to the ceiling and a tiny aisleway in the middle about about two feet wide. There was a tiny compartment for luggage under one bed (about a foot and another tiny compartment near the ceiling. That was it! We were to spend the next 22 hours together in this room with our luggage starting at noon and going until 10a the next day. Just be thankful you were the lucky #6 that got to share the room with us on the trip, which a couple of fortunate souls got to do on a couple six hours shifts. The train had an aisleway outside of our room that ran the length of the train car and was about 30" wide...that was the loitering area outside of the room unless you wanted to go visit the dining car or the haze-filled smoking area between cars. I was very thankful that the interior of the cars themselves were non-smoking. Consider that China inhales 1/3 of the entire cigarette consumption in the world and you can imagine what the streets and restaurants are like.



Oh, and let's not forget that we have restrooms too. Each railcar had a bank of three sinks in a room where the sink drains inexplicable drained right into the floor at your feet. So if you stood to closely while washing your hands or brushing your teeth, you went back to your sleeper with sopping wet shoes. The Chinese find Western toilets a foreign concept. I've been told they see them as unsanitary because they are used to not find the restrooms cleaned frequently. You can understand that you would would not want to use a infrequently cleaned toilet seat either. Of course, the alternative is the "squat toilet". They are not as widespread in China in the tourist zones since the Olympics came about but they can frequently be found in almost all other areas. Trains are heavily used by the locals and by few tourists, so we were fortunate to be served 22 hours with the squat toilets. Thankfully I took care of pressing needs before the train. A squat toilet is nothing more than a hole in the ground emptying out onto the tracks. Don't cringe too much at that. Eastern Europe trains do the same with their wastes. You just aren't allowed to visit the potty when you are approaching a station. If you have riden a train with any frequency you can imagine the difficulties of performing the squat while the train is in motion. Good luck indeed. Oh, and when you are done, there is a bucket of fresh water to wash away any of those who didn't quite hit the target precisely.



Our group did quite well surviving our 22-hour ordeal. We had a few informal Mandarian Chinese lessons along the way. I read about 150 pages of a book (Bill Bryson type travel adventure) about Chinese culture and travel as well. We rolled into the next part of our adventure in the town of Zhongwei the next morning. You'll have to look really hard on your map to find Zhongwei. Maybe a better search would be to Google "Yinchuan, China" and that will give you an idea of the location. So that is part I of China train travel down. We have three more overnight adventures still yet to come.


Pumpkin soup