431km/hr

Sydney :: Australia

Bigger, faster!

Places: Shanghai & Hong Kong

Coolest thing I did: Ate a steak while looking down on The Bund and then made my way back to the hotel one flash bar at a time.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: The Shanghai race track is set in the shape of the Chinese character 'Shang'. This apparently means "above" or "ascend" but I can't confirm that, or that it even looks like a 'Shang'. I wouldn't know a 'Shang' if it bit me.

While the breakneck pace that China is currently growing at is probably more evident in places like Chongqing and Shenzhen, Shanghai is the face of modern China that the government would most like you to see. A work colleague of mine tells me he was in Shanghai in the late 1980s and if you looked across the Huangpu River at night all you saw was complete darkness. It was only in 1990 that the government christened Pudong a Special Economic Zone and started a rapid urbanisation that is probably one of the most spectacular in history. While the skyline looks much like a random collection of signature skyscrapers were dropped at random it's still an amazing sight, even for those of us that have been to places like New York and Tokyo. Manhattan wasn't a swamp in 1990.

Much of my knowledge of Shanghai comes from J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun, his basically autobiographical novel about coming of age in a Japanese prison camp in the city during WWII. The Bund was the location for the start of the book, he watches the Japanese takeover of Shanghai start from a room under the green pyramid roof of the Peace Hotel, which is currently under renovation. During Shanghai's last big boom in the inter-war period neo-classical and art deco hotels and banks were thrown up along the waterfront, the Bund of the time attempting to give the Americans a run for their money in skyscrapers per square mile. Starting with the development of Pudong over the river there has been a boom in buying up and renovating these old buildings, filling them with posh bars, Michelin star-ed restaurants and luxury brand boutiques. As foreign money made it's way into mainland China it used Shanghai as it's beachhead and you can be sure the ex-pats present saw the opportunity to convert that particular Western nostalgia for old stone buildings into cash, something that doesn't seem to appeal to the Chinese, who want everything flashy and new.

My favourite building on the Bund was the old headquarters of the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank, who were forced out when the communists came out on top during China's last civil war and are now more popularly known as HSBC. It's a huge domed place, flanked on each side by bronze lions but the best part of it is inside. It's currently occupied by the Pudong Development Bank who forbid you to take photos inside, but as you walk in the door and look up to the inside of the dome you see a mosaic that reflect the opulence of the time they were created. It's made up of allegorical depictions of the signs of the zodiac and the key cities of the British Empire, and like the lions outside only dodged complete destruction during the Cultural Revolution by sheer luck. The architect managed to convince the Red Guards to cover the mosaics rather than chip them out, preserving them in the process. The lions outside were taken away by the Japanese during the war to be melted down for munitions but by luck that never happened. They lived in the basement of the Shanghai Comedy Troupe for the next 40 years before they were handed over to the Shanghai Museum.

Taking the train through the transit tunnel under the river, with it's epilepsy inducing light show takes you to a different world, as you blink back into the daylight under Shanghai's first modern landmark, the futuristic Oriental Pearl Tower. Futuristic, that is, if you think the future will look like communist party functionaries thought it would look like in 1990. Much like a rocket ship, apparently. The last "tallest" building to be completed over in Pudong was the Shanghai World Financial Centre, which looks like any other big square skyscraper except it's got a big square hole in the middle of the top 5 or 6 floors. This is the one you want to go up and look out over the city from, and it's from that height you realise that the Bund is a very small historical crust on the edge of a massive metropolis of high rise punctuated by basketball courts. The residential blocks, with their faux-tile roofs look like they are made of lego.

The Astor House hotel was the first Western run hotel in all of Shanghai, and had Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein amongst it's past guests. It also happens to be close to original condition, meaning it's probably the closest you can afford to stay to the Bund. I imagine it's only a matter of time before it becomes something far more flash, but it is nice to stay somewhere with that original old world charm. It's also a handy stumble from the last bar on the Bund at the end of a heavy Friday night. I hear.

While the superlative parts of the city line either side of the Huangpu River, the part of Shanghai that makes you think it could actually be lived in by an ex-pat is the former French Concession. During the 1800s, when lots of Europeans were getting rich by selling the Chinese Opium, many of the European powers were given land around the growing port to settle. The French, being the French, made all these crazy laws about only having buildings as tall as the road out front was wide, planting trees along the footpath in a wacky attempt to recreate Paris in China. The legacy of this, combined with several decades of communist apathy towards property development is a quite liveable quarter of the city. This is where you'll find the bars you want to drink in, the places you'll want to eat and if you're in to that kind of thing, places you can buy stuff that won't make you a billboard for Prada. Get in quick, because they're trying to change this as quickly as possible.

The Lonely Planet was almost uselessly out of date in Shanghai, the whole place is a construction site and changing so fast that practically all the advice it gives on shops, watering holes and places to stay is out of date, even if it was only published 12 months earlier. Whole shopping centres are missing, being replaced by holes in the ground that will soon be bigger, flasher shopping centres. If the city had a texture it would be concrete dust. You see building sites, still using bamboo as scaffolding that house construction workers on-site in temporary blocks of high-rise demountables. Apparently urban China is sucking workers out of the countryside and putting them to work on all these project, and I guess if you come from a farm you can't exactly afford to pay rent.

The big excitement around town was the fact that Shanghai was less than two weeks from starting it's 6 month stint of hosting the World Expo. Even now I still have no idea what the World Expo is, but large sections of prime river front south of the Bund has been bulldozed for it. I was able to work out that it was going to be the most ecologically sound World Expo ever (tops!), and that it's mascot was a blue blob not unlike Gumby, but I still don't know what it's all about. But everyone was very excited about it.

For me, nothing sums up Shanghai better than the Maglev train that takes you out to the airport. It's the only train of it's kind in the world, because the Germans who developed the technology were convinced it wasn't safe enough to run in Germany. It only covers 30km, from a very hard to reach spot out behind the skyscrapers of Pudong, but it covers that 30km at 431km/hr. How do I know it goes that fast? When you sit on the train there's actually a display that shows you how fast the train is going at the time. Like most of the people I tried to act like I travelled on trains that go at the same speed as jet aircraft all the time, however when it was at top speed you saw everyone pressed against their seats, looking over at each other with looks on their faces like "yeah, this is pretty cool".

I had enough preconceptions about what I thought China would be like, and thought I was prepared for the crowds and the growth, but both of them exceeded all expectations. You have no idea how 1.3bn people rub together until you actually experience, and you don't know what 10% GDP growth a year looks like until you see coal fired power stations as far as the eye can see. I've never been to India, but I suspect that even they don't have the sheer scale to effect the entire world like China do. During the recent financial crisis Australia spent $4bn to stimulate the economy. China spent that on train tracks alone. What I didn't expect, and I admit I only saw big cities and the richer Eastern areas, but there doesn't seem to be as big a percentage of the population living in abject poverty as all the other places I've visited in Asia.

After Japan I was convinced I'd seen the future, but I now get the feeling that what I saw there was what us Westerners would like a future Asian country to look like. I now get the feeling that China represents what the future actually will look like. Japan is a midget compared to China. Like it or not, China is about to help us dig everything that lies under ground level up and turn it into skyscrapers and high speed trains. It's worth visiting simply for the reason that at some point in all our lifetimes this country is going to affect everyone else on the planet.

Landing back in Hong Kong was kind of like returning to the normal world. You get a contrast with the segregation between the rich and the ex-pats and everyone else that exists within Shanghai with the relative mixing that exists in HK. Riding up the big outdoor escalator to the mid-levels and seeing people out on a Sunday night eating and drinking alfresco you realise that just wouldn't happen in Shanghai. You get dazzled by all the history and the rapid change and you forget that you're looking at a country where people have as much freedom as they do in Cuba. If something is going to derail China, it's going to be when all those new middle class Chinese I kept seeing want to have some say in how their country is being run. I'd prefer to be able to have a beer and talk smack about my rulers right out in the street, where it should be done.

The Dice Game

Shanghai :: PRC(Note: published late due to GFWoC issues)

Climbing the only mountain the weather would allow. Stupid snow.

Places: Qingdao, Laoshan, Hangzhou & Shanghai

Coolest thing I did: Rode a bike the whole circumference of the West Lake in Hangzhou in one lazy day.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: People buy beer right across the street from the factory in Qingdao and take it away in plastic shopping bags. You'd *really* want to check it for holes first.

Back in the 19th century it became apparent that if you wanted to be a proper European colonial power you really had to have a city somewhere in China to call your own. The British had recently won a war to force the Chinese to buy their drugs through Shanghai and got Hong Kong as a bonus. The French & Russians had stakes in Shanghai and even Portugal (PORTUGAL!) had a colony in Macau. A recently unified Germany seemed to think they were getting a short deal in Asia and decided they wanted in on China. So they rocked into a little town called Qingdao and took it over with that Teutonic military single mindedness the rest of Europe was going to struggle with during the following century.

The Germans being the Germans decided that they needed some beer around the place and seeing as the Chinese really didn't do beer they started a brewery. They named it using the town's Western spelling, and with that Tsingtao was born. Now the Chinese love their beer, and if you've ever been to a Chinese restaurant on planet Earth you've probably tried it too. It's inoffensive, it's about 4 1/2% ABV and it's pretty much available everywhere in China. What's not to love?

The thing that I recall most about the Tsingtao brewery (on the appropriately named Beer Street) is they have a Siemens motor that's over 100 years old that still runs that used to be used to mix the mash. Apparently Siemens discovered this not too long ago and offered to buy it from the brewery for over $1m USD but the request was denied. I can see why the Germans would want it, it's hard to get advertising of reliable engineering better than that.

The town of Qingdao still retains some of it's colonial past, but like most of the cities in China that's rapidly being overshadowed by multi-lane roads and high rise. At least in Qingdao much of the original German buildings have been left alone and have decided to start a new town further along the coast. You have to pass through all this to get to Laoshan, the most properly Chinese looking mountainscape I managed to climb on the whole trip. Its what you expect Chinese mountains to look like, with large expanses of limestone jutting out of the forest and temples dotted around the place. Due to the unexpected cold snap that accompanied the whole trip the attempt to climb other sacred mountains in China was foiled twice by there being a foot of snow on the summit but this one allowed itself to be climbed.

Laoshan is famous in China for being one of the early homes of Taoism and pretty much all the holy sites are Tao-related in some way. The very highest point that can be reached using the trails is home to a temple built around the cave of a Taoist hermit who used to live in a cave there and on a less misty day you might have been able to see all the way down to the sea from there, but it was still impressive. The cave is still there but I imagine if you were a recluse you'd have been annoyed by all the monks hanging around your cave and building a temple there, so I assume said hermit has moved on quite some time ago.

At the base of the mountain is a Temple which apparently translates to The Purity Palace, which is like a Taoist Disneyland. It's ying-yang signs and statues of Lao Tzu (he of the Tao Te Ching) all over the place and seems quite popular with the Chinese tourists. My favourite thing there was the young Kung Fu team that were out stretching before practise. It was just like they were a football team or something, warming up in their tracksuit pants and the old grumpy coach watching over them like he'd never seen such laziness and poor flexibility in all his years of coaching. I liked to imagine him having a broad Australian accent "You're kicking like a bunch of poofters! You call that tiger style? I've seen better kicking from my grandmother, you bunch of girls!".

The strangest thing about Qingdao was the weddings. Walking along the many beaches set aside for swimming (you know this because they are labelled "Swimming Beach No. 1", "Swimming Beach No. 2" and so on. Got to love that communist marketing prowess) you might notice a young couple and their photographer having their wedding pictures taken. Then you see another. And Another. There must be something about having your pictures taken on the beaches and rocky outcrops on Qingdao, because there are people doing it everywhere. It's also freezing cold. So you see the brides wearing hoodies backwards to protect their exposed shoulders between photos, and quite often they are wearing jeans under their dresses. They also seem to be rentals as most of the grooms are wearing suits that were already out of fashion in 1972. Either that or Chinese retro fashion is a decade or so behind our retro fashion.

The train trip between Qingdao and Shanghai (on the way to Hangzhou) was the longest of the whole journey and it had everything you eventually come to know and love from Chinese train journeys. There's always an argument about the placement of luggage, always, and one of the best thing about the Chinese people is these arguments usually result in pushing and shoving. I guess when you live with 1.3bn people you give up any hope of having a private disagreement so you'd best embrace it with all your might. The other thing is you get a close quarters how the Chinese babies go about their business. Pretty early on you notice that most toddlers in China wear pants with a bit split from front to back between the legs and no nappies. Apparently if the baby needs to evacuate anything down there the parents simply hold their legs apart and away they go, be it in the park, into the gutter, wherever. On the train this becomes quite urgent if the baby starts, so you get to skip the ever present toilet queue if you are carrying a baby that has already started to push one out.

Besides their obvious superior speed to trains in Australia, Chinese trains are blessed with flowing hot water in every carriage. If you want tea or pot noodles, it's right there. Why doesn't everyone do that? In yet more proof the Chinese have no issue with capitalism the best selling item on the train platforms was pot noodles, I guess to people who hadn't planned ahead for a 10 hour train journey and had been looking at the hot water tap going "if only...".

Hangzhou was like travelling forward in time when compared to practically everywhere else in China so far, including Beijing. Everything is geared towards getting as many tourists to look at it's lovely West Lake as possible, and it shows in things being very clean and working. It was like you'd accidentally gotten of the train in Japan or something. They don't only have bikes for rent, but they have bikes for rent with a proximity swipe card that comes out of a kiosk that runs on solar power. It's like the future, just like Japan.

West lake is as attractive as you would expect, cut along the edges by causeways that allow little arched bridges to be built and give boats somewhere to moor and allow their captains to harass tourists for a trip. As had become the norm the attempts to get white people into the boats were fairly lazy, seeing as most of the captains had English that extended to "boat". The big money was obviously in getting the fatter looking Chinese people into your boat, yet another example of how the new Chinese middle classes are spending their new found money at home, due to the fact they can't get out of the place. We had a lazy day of cycling around the lake, visiting temples and pagodas and generally enjoying the ambiance with about 1.5m of our closest friends.

If you are a woman the done thing would appear to be to go to Hangzhou, get dressed up to the nines and get your picture taken reaching up into a cherry blossom tree in a provocative style. My guess is it only happens in cherry blossom season, but I have no hard data to disprove that.

At the far end of the lake from the town is the Leifeng Pagoda, the town's most famous though only reconstructed in 2002. To show just how up-to-date they are, the pagoda now has a set of escalators to get you right up to the base of it. This apparently didn't just amuse us, most of the Chinese tourists needed a picture riding up it as well. The Leifeng Pagoda is famous because of the Legend of White Snake, which apparently has nothing to do with the 80s rock band. It's the timeless story of Bai SuZhen, a demon who dreams of turning into a goddess by doing good deeds, her human beau Xu Xian who forgets her existence on his return to the human world (which is basic science, really) and a sorcerer FaHai who reckons demons are rubbish and should be destroyed. You know the one. Apparently Bai scares Xu to death by revealing her true self, then brings him back to life with magic herbs but then when everything looks tops FaHai comes along and imprisons Bai in the pagoda for all eternity. The Chinese just love a happy ending.

For me the best spot to view the lake was from one of the hilltops that surround it. If nothing else most of the masses can't be bothered with the whole climb so you get an occasional glimpse of that rarest of commodities in China: a little bit of time without being in line of sight of another human being.

While we had expected Qingdao to be THE place in China for drinking beer, however it was far too early in the season for the tourists to be reaching it. Instead they seemed to be holidaying, and drinking, in Hangzhou. Due to the lack of Mandarin we never managed to find out why they are all out drinking, but beer is what they drink and they do it totally at the mercy of a dice game I could not for the life of me work out. It's so popular the bars provide special shelves under the tables to hold cups and dice but it's inexplicable. Everyone shakes their dice, bluff a bit, look at their dice sneakily, look at each others dice, quite often shake again and repeat. At some point someone will feign disgust and everyone else will cheer and the loser (I assume they are the loser) drinks beer. This goes on all night and everyone ends up drunk and happy. This is probably due to the fact you can buy an entire plastic keg and have it at the table so you can pour your own beer without having to resort to going to the bar or talking to waiters. You also have to plan in several unit lots as to how much more beer you plan to drink. Which many people seemed to be failing to judge.

Hangzhou has been a Western tourist destination in China for as long as there have been Western tourists. Literally. Hangzhou's first visitor from the West was Marco Polo, who like what he saw and went as far as to say it was the most premium of all cities he saw on his travels. The Chinese like this story so much they put a statue of him near the lake and didn't tear it down during the darkest days of communism. However the inscription is in English and most Chinese people walk past it without looking twice.

For all my complaints about getting around without speaking a bit of Mandarin, imagine how hard it would have been for Marco. There wasn't a Lonely Planet back then, there weren't even maps! It's also unlikely they had picture menus at the restaurants.