Over The Counter Culture

Stats:

• Time spent in China: 30 days
• Spending whilst in China: £570 (£18/day)
• Photos added to album: 500 (maxed out Google’s limit!)

Stops:

• Beijing (the whole 9 yards – vibrant, friendly, fantastic treasures, cool art scene, fantastic eating, thoroughly modern and efficient post-Olympics infrastructure; shame about the air pollution that all typically deprives it of blue skies)
• Zhengzhou (a mallrat hell hole with non-English-speaking locals largely unreceptive to foreigners, pricey electronics superstores, ugly signage and dilapidated concrete housing)
• Xi’an (lovely open city with great eating, a lively Muslim Quarter, the tedious Terracotta Army, great trekking to nearby sacred mountains, warm people and good nightlife)
• Nanjing (a buzzing but not altogether pleasant city, home to the gut-twining Nanjing Massacre memorial and museum
• Suzhou (relaxed, open, ever so pleasant canal-veined town home to preposterously manicured, finicky Chinese gardens copied all around the world)
• Shanghai (a busy, charmless metropolis too caught up in its affairs to offer a backpacker much – but after the sun sets, blessed with great nightlife, though you have to seek it out)

It may be a post-Olympics afterglow, we felt very welcome indeed (and not for our money!), and were surprised by how much curiosity awe were generating; I’d imagine China’s extremely safe to travel in, too, no matter how far from the beaten path you stray – we saw very little in the way of scams (beware overly long taxi rides, and unexpectedly expensive menu items in watering holes the locals aren’t too fond of) and rarely if ever worried for our safety. Transport is largely flawless – clean, modern, reasonably cheap, and serving the right routes at the right times; though taxis can be expensive around the big cities – best avoided.

United as a country very early on and a real crib of advanced human society throughout the ages, China’s cultural wealth cannot be understated. But having lived under authoritarian Communist rule for so long, there’s clearly a lot of aspects to Chinese society that casual observers such as us will have missed despite spending a month there – a veil that I guess only more permanent arrangements (working/living there) provide you with an opportunity to lift the veil a little.

Present-day curiosities

• Gigantic, luxurious Internet cafes wasting thousands of man hours every day as spotty Chinese teens play World of Warcraft curled up in their rented armchairs
• Culinary curiosities- silkworm, sheep’s spine, various penises (“Sheep’s Dick” listed on one menu we saw)
• Insane table service – lining up, sometimes three waitresses-abreast, waiting for you to peruse the menu – sometimes jumping in and pointing, turning pages (from your hands!), garbling some Mandarin at you…
• Mao’s Mausoleum – the most elaborate, revered waxwork setup you’ll ever encounter. Shhhh!
• Overly ‘renovated’ (read – reconstructed in the style of’) tourist sights
• Tourist groups – everyone wearing the same hat and dumb/astounded expression, herded by a sqawking megaphone-wielding lecturer – grrrrrrrrr
• Everything shrouded in persistent grey mist – modern urban sprawl, barren countryside, sharp mountains and beautiful national parks alike
• KFC. The Colonel’s everywhere.
• You love it. Suzhou’s best club night.
• Bizzarre modern art. Trying too hard? Too little to say? Or too much?

Verdict? Loved pretty much every moment there. It’s a country in the ascendant as a fiercely strong economy and world power, its people love it and take pride in it, and it has so much to offer the foreigner – I’d expect myself to return at least for deeper tourism; or more likely seeking a move there if work allows it.

I feel terrible not posting more regularly but like my scrappy travel diary, falling behind on travel writeup is all too easy – like New Year’s resolutions. We’re in Japan now so time to cut my losses on China, rush a couple of posts on it out the door, and get back to fresher things. Here’s a summary of our big city experiences in China – Beijing and Shanghai.

—- Beijing —-

Definitely somewhere I’d like to live+work. There’s little doubt that the preparation for the Olympics played a strong role in transforming the city, but for me the most significant positives are longer term chanegs than even the 10 years or so since China readied itself for one of the greatest Olympics ever.

Beijing’s a cool mix of small but clean hutong (traditional quarters) and wide, efficient (but slightly alien) boulevards, a regular grid of four- or six- (or eight!-) lane roads populated by modern cars, buses and electric scooters (we really didn’t expect the latter – but it turns out China is the world’s number one market for electric vehicles – the two-wheelers alone sell 20 million units a year, and are more common on the streets of Beijing than bicycles. Towering skyscrapers line the financial district – elegant, not oppressive as might have been expected as symbols of financial power in a communist country. The Forbidden City is too beautiful and deeply amazing an experience to be adequately put into words. You can glance through the photos here.

Like the rest of our China adventure, communism was more conspicuous by its complete invisibility in the world around us, than by its presence or interference in our travels. I can’t speak for the average Chinese person, but we saw no obvious cause for complaints; and amongst the natives with whom we were on good enough terms with to bring the subject up, none had a bad thing to say about it, astoundingly. Chinese nationalism is strong, which is not something I normally like to see in a country, but doesn’t appear to carry the negative/competitive/defensive baggage frequently espoused by the BNP in the UK, or patriotic citizens of the USA or Russia. Curious.

We happened to be in Beijing, visiting its many national treasures like the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, Chairman Mao’s mausoleum, the Olympics sites, the Temple of Heaven, and several of its famous shopping streets right in the middle of ‘National Day Golden Week’, which causes a nationwide tidal wave of domestic tourists larger than the entire populations of England and France put together. And Chinese tourists, as we repeatedly found out, like snaps with foreigners. There were one or two days when Daz, Tom and I were in more photos added to the cameras of giggling Chinese, than I took that day. Astounding! We’ve had nothing like that from the Japanese

White Rabbit - maybe a little *too* much fun for some

There’s a lot to Beijing that we didn’t get to know or see but that would come in due time with residence there. We chanced on the discovery that clubs can get surprisingly busy on Wednesdays (we went to a deep house / electro night at a pretty good club called White Rabbit, DJ’ed in turns by a laconic Swede and a pair of talented too-cool-for-school Chinese DJs). We’d have loved to have seen more of Beijing’s Underground City, currently deemed a state secret and sealed off, built during a tense period with the USSR to house 300,000 of Mao’s darlings through a nuclear winter of 6 months or more (replete with bars, rollerskate rings, factories, temples and theatres). The food on offer was delicous and came in quantities designed to be shared between tables of small Chinapeople (i.e. big enough, as main courses, to feed Tom and I, hungry hippos though we are).

—- Shanghai —-

Shanghai is not a city for good first impressions – largely charmless, built up, smoggy and smelly, irritatingly equally (if not more) expensive but less cared for than post-Olympics Beijing. But it grew on us, despite not having as much to love as Beijing, Xi’an or Suzhou (though the latter’s proximity to Shanghai – a short blast along the 350km/hr CRH (Chinese bullet) trains is a definite bonus for quick breakaways). It had a very cool club – Shelter – which we returned on Saturday for a more mainstream, buzzing tech house night, after an odd, sofa-bound Thurdsday night club sesh along with perhaps just a dozen punters in the converted air-raid shelter listening to too-cool DJs spin clicky, glitchy IDM, breakcore and abstract hip-hop records…

We spent our last night in Shanghai – and our last night in China – with a splurge: an all-you-can-eat buffet consumed in turbo mode (having left ourselves just 45 minutes til closing time) in a rotating restaurant overlooking the whole of Shanghai (or at leat, what’s visible of it through the haze, at night). Evidently, we took *full* advantag of the buffet’s offerings, despite repeated pleas by the waiting staff for us to get out. The two most vivid memories of Shanghai will perhaps be the World Financial Center – a perforated blade-shaped skyscraper beautifully tracing its way into the night sky – and the Maglev, a five minute, 30km, four quid, 431 km/h blast to the airport on a system that will never (over the expected life of the system) recoup even its capex, let alone day to day running costs; a thrilling communist vanity project.

Bad pun, I know. Nihao y’all. It seems we’ve been enjoying our Chinese leg so much, blogging about it has taken a dramatic back seat – time for a little update. After a long, empty flight (stretched out on rows of seats we had to ourselves) via misty Hong Kong we landed in Beijing just as the sun was setting. The modernity and cleanliness of Beijing airport left us stunned & excited – and heralded the stark contrast between China and India, which we had greatly underestimated.

The immediate difference is in wealth – Beijing’s streets are awash with pretty women, sparkling Audi’s, glittering skyscrapers, highly fashionable clothes shops, hairdressers (ugh) and shopping malls (ugh^2).

The 2008 Olympics still echo everywhere – products proudly proclaim their endorsements, posters still line the streets, public transport is efficient and obsessively clean, the mascots are still all over the state-run TV programmes, and security is tight and well-drilled at all the recently renovated tourist spots (in a few cases over-renovated, losing some of the authenticity that’s so vital to the enjoyment of a visit to an ancient relic of China’s immense cultural baggage – though it does make for nice photos!). There’s no sign yet of a hangover from the party the country had hosting the events.

What a relief it is to have left a dry country. Alcohol is everywhere in China, served rather warm (highly unfortunate since Chinese beer’s pretty bland) in tall green 600ml bottles that wll set you back 40-80p (more in bars). Bars are few and far between away from tourist areas, but its not uncommon to see tables in restaurants with half a dozen or more empty bottles stacked up at one end as groups of drunken middle aged chinese men see in the night with noodles, noise and smiles aplenty.

The food is brilliant. I eat Indian and Chinese food in equal measures back home but whilst the food in India left me preferring the sloppier, spicier and sweeter English take on curries, Chinese food has far, far exceeded the predictable Chinese takeaway menu classics of back home. The quality of the street food here is the first thing to mention – eating on the cheap is a really enjoyable and diverse experience and though you don’t often have a clue what you’re being handed, it’s not often an unpleasant surprise, and the large crowds that form and sit at makeshift tables around the brightly lit, fuming foodcarts give you an easy way to pick out the best ‘establishments’ as well as provide plenty of banter whilst you wait for your food to cook.

The prevalence of meat dishes in Chinese cooking was a welcome change to the primarily veggie Indian fare but the Chinese are certainly less sqeamish about their animal intake – chicken feet, duck neck and lamb spine are just some of the horrors on show, and we weren’t particularly impressed when an expensive hotpot was brought out for us stacked over the brim with actual spines, broken into short rib-sized pieces bubbling away in a smelly brown brine, by waitresses wearing Inter Milan, AC Milan and Celtic football shirts!

Barely a day after posting my diatribe to Indian driving, I decided to set off on a 5 day trek into Goa’s neighbouring state, Karnataka, having been recommended a special spot called Hampi by a fellow traveller in Goa. Hiring a bike proved a little difficult, not simply because it had to be a private bike to travel interstate, but because word had spread that I’d trashed a scooter earlier that week. But in the down season, money moves mountains, and for the princely sum of 350Rs/day (4.50 quid) I had a bike to take me to Hampi – a solid 150cc with new tires, dodgy electrics but most importantly, a decent engine, good brakes and good suspension.

I set off early the next day down the Goan coast, heading inland (east) after about 20km. The Goan roads are mostly new and well tarmacked, and the government has severely limited construction along them; so for the most part they carve through a dense – almost tropical – forest. I’d opted to get off the national highway (NH) road when I turned east, taking a small lane through a nature reserve north of the NH which most local maps didn’t list (but Google Maps did, oddly enough).

What a decision! That 70km leg was the sort you dream of whilst trundling along London traffic – for the most part a well tarmaked single lane winding up and down hills high up above a beautiful lake in undisturbed forestation closing over the road in parts then breaking into sunbathed clearings. The road banked beautifully on turns, the bike having to brake hard into hairpins, then jumping down the next 20-30m open stretch. Ninety minutes passed in the blink of an eye, depsite occasional pauses to admire the scenery when I came to one of several waterfalls lining the road. The pace was good (if a little foolish, due to the clay and broken branches/leaves littering the road, but I was unscathed as I came out).

The rest of the trek to Hampi was an exhausting and monotonous trudge along a rough, straight NH populated by cattle herds, kamikaze public transportation buses, and arsehole industrial truckdrivers, with aggressive and powerful jeeps keeping me on my toes – they were the only vehicle that had the pace to overtake me, or all my focus could have been devoted to the road aead of me and the many, many hazards it can present (see previous post).

– Hell and high water –

I stopped for the night in Gadag, a ‘mere’ 90km from Hampi, as the sun set. I was exhausted, and unwilling to face Indian roads at night with dodgy lights. Gadag is perhaps the worst place I’ve ever set foot in. A dusty, dirty, chaotic truckstop town completely unaccustomed to foreigners - devoid of any appeal whatsoever. The room, smaller than a British prisoner’s cell, had a very odd indian-western ‘fusion’ toilet – the image of someone squatting on one of these, half a meter off the ground, struck me as I showered facing it, and left me feeling dirty despite the cold water scrub. I certainly was dirty – the dust off rocky Indian roads, and the beating sun, had left black and red traces on my sore face that wereundisturbed by the scouring I had attempted. I flicked idly though the 30-odd Hindi channels, mainly bad pop/bangra fusion music TV channels, carbon-copy flashing news stations all constantly announcing ‘breaking news’ with graphics spinning madly off into every corner of the screen, and Bollywood movies of TV dramas. There’s much to love about India but Bollywood is bloody terrible.

The next morning the monsoon struck and rained down hard on me just 1km along from where I set off. The printed maps in my pocket were instantly ruined, the bike stuttered and stalled, progress was slow and potholes hidden – or were believed to be worse than they actually were by the trucks that would swerve suddenly into my path to avoid them. By the time I arrived, my legs were covered in a dull reddish paste from the mud off the road, and everthing was soaking.

To my relief, even under the rain the hotel I was headed to – the Garden Paradise, which the Pole had told me about - was even better than I’d pictured. I stretched out in my steaming socks next to a fire under the treecover along the river on which Hampi was built, and bantered with the other travellers; some French girls, two Oxford undergraduates that we had met in Goa (small world…) and a hippie English couple, as well as the jovial indian hotel owner and his newest employee, the Pole (arrived the previous day).

The Garden Paradise is built on 100m of riverbank that has belonged to the hotel owner’s family for generations. The opposite bank is totally virgin of any construction, the loval government so keen to see it remain so that it dyamited its own brand new bridge just a few years after the previous government had completed its construction (only in India…). The hotel is just a collection of reinforced bamboo huts with ensuite bathrooms, kingsize beds with huge mosquito nets hanging over (a steal at 4 quid a night). The staff is a Nepalese family; as well as being excellent cooks they’re friendly, dilligent and trustworthy.

– Hampi’s extraordinary relics – stone and human –

The next day I set out to see what else Hampi has to offer. I crossed the river by the small motorboat that ferries people across, and rented a mountain bike to head out to the Hanuman temple, a temple perched atop a steep hill inhabited by monkeys. To the other side of the town lie sq km upon sq km of ruins of an ancient breakaway Indian empire that appears to have been particularly fond of building grand stuff. That made for a long, exhausting and sunbaked walk/ride-hitch that afternoon.

The night was spent in the silence and candlelit darkness of a blackout eating tibetan momos and sharing a joint with a crumbling French-speaking Crocodile Dundee type I inadvertently befriended by offering some antibiotics I had lying around to take care of his sniffles. He was a forest ranger (on sick leave with a broken wrist on the mend) hired by the India government on the books to manage India’s sprawling forests and off the books leading a struggle against tiger poachers that have left many of India’s ‘Tiger reserves’ totally devoid of tigers, a fact all backpacker sites and guidebooks alert you to but still manages to elude the (admittedly dwindling) masses of family vacationers who visist India. When pressed to explain what he meant by ‘leading the struggle’ and how it tied in to his upbringing in the Congo (his father was a mercenary general, he claims), he chillingly admitted that he gets paid by the severed hand he or his trainees bring back. Totally silent when eating, a later blackout weirdly prompted him to breakout into French oldie pop music for the benefit of a French pair playing chess on a nearby table, his yellowing teeth twinkling in the candlelight, a bizarre experience that I recorded on the sly on my mp3 placed on the table in the shadow of a pepper pot. The conversation meadered, from global politics to Diana/Al Fayed, forestry to self-immunisation against snakes (by taking in very small quantities of their poison, apparently). The very pleasant (albeit odd) experience was largely repeated, this time with a traditional Indian hash pipe passed round a larger circle of people, the next night; blackouts are almost welcome in a hotel where not a single other building is visible and a river gushes noisily down below the cafe area.

– Dodgy police on the make –

The departure was unremarkable, as was most of the day, spent once again trying to stay alive in the face of ungenerous odds as I covered 200 or so km to the town of Yellapur, before stopping for the night to be well rested for the highlight leg along the lake. Little did I know that the next day, my bike would be gone from outside the hotel and I’d be dealing with a very dodgy police force. Having gone to the station to report the missing bike (after walking around the tiny, pleasant town) I was told they had it, in their impound. Upon asking why, I was informed that it had been towed due to ‘not having the steering lock engaged’. The clincher? A fine of 500 Rs (admittedly only 6 quid, but 3.5 times what I’d paid to stay in a hotel that night – an outrage).

I don’t like dealing with bureaucracy and its enforcer arm, the police. You never know just how much troubled you’re facing. Forcing politeness, I enquired as to what law allows fines for no steering lock. I was told that if I had a problem, I could take it up with the station commander, who was expected in 1hr30. I was keen to get home, but pulled out a book and made myself confortable. A mere 5 minutes later the station suddenly whipped itself into a comical frenzy of shirt-tucking, collar buttoning, back-stiffening and heel-snap saluting as a haughty but young commander strode in, baton under arm and daily paper in hand. I was summoned, explained my situation, upon which I was corrected as to the nature of my crimes – a missing rear number plate. Aghast, I whipped out my camera and showed a photo (taken three days ago but announced as yesterday’s) showing a plate bolted on to the rear. A phonecall to the owner of the bike later (whom I said had ‘lent’ me the bike, a large notice on the insurance docs clearly stating no cover for rentals) and I was dismissed.

I later learnt, whilst a photocopy of my passport was taken as a matter of routine (compensated for my time by biscuits, tea and false smiles from the very same officers who had pressured me for a crisp yellow 500 note) that the station commander, several years their junior despite his age and rigour, had taken charge just yesterday!