Riding the Capitalist Rooster
July 20-Sept. 4
"May you live in interesting times." I would like to
propose another curse: "May you travel in China in
the height of summer by public transport."
I was glad to take a break from the bike in Dali; the
rain and the constant mechanical problems really got
me down. In Dali I tore the bike apart and cleaned
it, and measured how far the chain had stretched from
old age. 24 links should be exactly 12 inches long,
but mine was 12.5 inches, sufficient stretch to wear
down all my chain rings to funny-looking points,
rather like caimans' teeth. I resigned myself to
buying lots of replacement parts when I got to Hong
Kong.
Dali is one of two famous backpackers' havens in
China, along with Yangshuo, the site of famous karst
peaks not too far from Hong Kong. In some ways, it's
hard to see why; the old town, while pleasant, is
hardly spectacular. The natural setting is quite
pleasant, with a long lake (Erhai Lake) downhill and
forested, cloud-enshrouded mountains uphill, but again
there is little breathtaking about it. The real
reason, I think, for its popularity amongst the Tribe
of the Lonely Planet is its pleasantness; decent
hotels, good Western food, bars that stay open late
and easy travel connections. All these things are
commonplace in Thailand, but as rare as dodo eggs in
China, where expensive, surly hotels, unappetizing
puddles of greasy food and impossible train and bus
connections are the norm. Tourists come to Dali just
to forget that they're in China.
I did very little in Dali other than eat, sleep and
eat some more, making up for the lost kilos over the
past few weeks. I had been riding fairly flat out
since Bangkok and my body was in food deficit. I also
cruised the bookstores looking for brain food. There
were cheap Chinese editions of Marco Polo's Travels,
the Tao Te Ching, Confucius' Analects, Sun Tzu's The
Art of War and, strangely, The Interpretation of
Dreams by Freud. A few Umberto Eco books and Colin
Thubron's Beyond the Wall completed the travelling
library. Earlier in the trip, Joanne and I had both
read Paul Theroux's classic Riding the Iron Rooster,
and Thubron and Theroux became our supplementary guide
books to China.
Once Joanne arrived on a flight from Vientiane,
covering in 2 hours what had taken me 3 weeks to ride,
the Dali-ance came to an end and we went out to see
the tourist sights. We rented a bike for Joanne and
zipped down to the lake to look for cormorant fishing.
We didn't find it, but stumbled into great scenes of
village life. The people who live in Dali are mostly
Bai, a Tibetan-looking semi-matriarchal tribe, and we
found villagers in full Bai regalia fishing or working
in the rice fields or, memorably, playing in the local
Daoist temple orchestra. The music was a bit
cacophonous, but the old folks, with their wizened
faces and engaging smiles, were wonderful.
We then headed up the lake to visit a tribal market at
Shaping. As I had found at Menghun, in southern Dali,
the market was spectacular for the sheer vibrant
colour of the women's costumes and the
character-filled faces of the old stallholders. Using
Joanne's camera and digicam (my Nikon was out of
action and would remain so until Hong Kong) we fired
off ridiculous numbers of photos. The one picture we
didn't take although we wanted to was of the gruesome
sidewalk dentist stalls, displaying blood-stained
teeth recently extracted; the dentists objected
strenuously to appearing on film. Back in town, we
ran into Tanya, a woman I knew from my time at
Harvard; she was still there, taking her time over a
law degree.
The next day was devoted to photography. First we
rode out into the ricefields so that Joanne could
capture the perfect greenness of young rice. It was
interesting that when I got to China a couple of weeks
earlier, it had been planting season in Xishuangbanna,
while a few valleys over it was harvest season. Now
here in Dali it was a couple of months into the
growing season. Each valley seemed to run on its own
schedule. After this, we took photos of Dali's
magnificent town gates, garishly painted red and blue
and yellow, and the huge cigar-shaped pagodas outside
town.
We finally found cormorant fishing later that day. We
knew that Erhai Lake kwas one of the few places that
still practiced this traditional form of fishing, but
we hadn't realized that now it's done exclusively for
the tourists; no tourists, no cormorants. We went
back to the lake with a guide and went out on a small
boat loaded with cormorants, each with a loop of
plastic around its neck to prevent it from swallowing
any fish. We rowed out into the shallows of the lake
with the cormorants perched on the gunwales of the
boat. A tap with a pole and they all jumped overboard
and began trailing the boat, swimming briskly along
looking miffed that they weren't getting a free ride.
Once one dived below the surface, the others would
follow and when they surfaced, the boatman would cast
an eagle eye on them to see if they had caught any
fish. If they had, he would lasso them with the pole
and extract the fish before putting them back
overboard. I was impressed with how quickly they
caught fish and how many they could hold in their
gullets (13 small fish in one cormorant was the
record). The cormorants, with their piercing eyes and
angular faces, looked uncomfortably like pteranodons
and it was quite disconcerting to have them sitting
close to us sizing us up for tastiness. At the end,
the boatman took off the loops of plastic and chopped
up the fish to feed to his faithful fisherbirds. It
was all very photogenic, if a bit staged.
The next day we succumbed to the enticements of the
tourist guides and went horse-riding up into the
mountains. I had climbed up on foot a few days
earlier, and it was faster, not to mention more
comfortable, than bumping uphill on the horses. The
horseman walked alongside the horses, making me feel
like a lazy tourist. The scenery, however, was nice
and the temple at the top was atmospheric, if
obsessively devoted to separating tourists from their
money. We ended up at a marvellous waterfall, where I
proved my Canadian-ness by taking a dip in the frigid
waters. The scenery is lovely, with steep, deep
valleys plunging down from the 4000-metre peaks above,
and peaceful pine forests covering the slopes.
Unfortunately, as all over China, the Chinese tourists
leave their mark, littering the forests, the rivers
and the path with a thick layer of plastic bottles,
film boxes, candy wrappers and assorted junk.
We then caught the bus to Lijiang, another obligatory
stop in southwest China. It has one of the few
surviving old stone towns in the country. Rather than
knocking down the old houses to put up concrete boxes
covered with white bathroom tile (which both look and
smell like public urinals), the Chinese have chosen to
preserve Lijiang. In fact, in 1996 an earthquake hit
Lijiang, flattening the urinal-buildings but leaving
the Stone Town standing. The government then decided
that new buildings should be built using the old
techniques.
Lijiang was lovely, but, like Venice, its loveliness
is its downfall. Even more than Dali, it is overrun
and clogged with huge groups of Chinese tourists,
filling the tiny streets and market squares with
boisterous shouting and ugly neon baseball caps.
China seems to have embraced the Japanese model of
domestic tourism: everything caters to bus tours, led
by young female costumed guides waving an umbrella or
a small flag to keep their obedient, bleating sheep in
tow. It is almost impossible to stop and take a photo
because you will be jostled by the Chinese tour group
behind you. I had never realized how many Chinese now
have the financial means to go on holiday over the
summer; I guess that in a country of 1.2 billion, even
a small middle class adds up to an enormous number of
tourists.
Lijiang is Joseph Rock country. Rock was an Austrian
egomaniac who collected plants and wrote
self-important articles for National Geographic in the
1920s and 30s. The people of the Lijiang area, the
Naxi, look superficially like the Bai of Dali, dressed
in blue and carrying baskets everywhere. They are,
however, supposedly the last truly matriarchal tribe
left in China, with women inheriting the property and
bringing up the children of their alliances with
various men. Certainly the women of Lijiang seemed to
dominate the business scene with the men more or less
invisible.
We went out in search of the famous temple frescoes of
Baisha, a short bike ride from town. What a
disappointment; a tiny handful of dimly-lit, dark
frescoes surrounded by thousands of souvenir-sellers.
The Black Dragon Pool back in town was nicer, although
with low, threatening clouds in the sky we didn't see
the famous vista of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain in
the distance.
The most satisfying experience in Lijiang was the
evening concert of ancient music by the ancient
musicians of the Naxi Orchestra. During the madness
of the Cultural Revolution, the musicians hid or
buried their instruments to prevent them from being
smashed by young Red Guard hooligans. Since then the
Orchestra has devoted itself to saving the old Daoist
classical music of 1300 years ago from oblivion. The
music was occasionally beautiful and occasionally
resembled cats being strangled, but it was refreshing
to see that some Chinese were preserving music that
wasn't sugary karaoke. The sad part of the evening
was the oafish behaviour of the Chinese tourists, who
conducted loud conversations during the music and who
not only didn't turn off their cell phones but
actually answered them and shouted inanities into them
during quiet passages in the music. It must be a
cultural difference; only the Western tourists seemed
to find this annoying and offensive.
Next up was Lugu Lake, another Joseph Rock place high
in the mountains. I really wanted to go there, and in
some ways it was worth it. The bus ride there was
spectacular, crossing the deep canyon of the upper
Yangtze and cutting through mountain villages full of
Yi women in their massive black headdresses. Lugu
Lake itself, 3000 metres above sea level is lovely.
The tribe who live there, a subgroup of the Naxi, are
both loyal to the matriarchal system of the Naxi and,
from more recent times, Tibetan Buddhists. We found a
quiet-looking guesthouse and settled in. I rented a
rowboat and went over to an island with a Tibetan
temple, redolent of butter lamps and full of murals in
bright, primary colours. It suddenly didn't seem so
far from Lhasa.
That night, in the hotel, with rain bucketing down
outside, it didn't seem that far from the big city. A
huge Chinese tour group arrived and filled the hotel,
late into the night, with drunken bellowing and
door-slamming and cell-phone conversations conducted
at full volume until the wee small hours. We got up
groggy, went over to the island again, then hitched a
lift back to the town of Ninglong with a tractor full
of barrels of live fish.
Our next stop was the sacred mountain of Emeishan.
After an endless bus ride down to the Yangtze, into
the industrial hellhole of Panzhihua (China abounds in
these polluted cities of a million or more people,
most of whose names are completely unknown to the
outside world), we caught a night train to Emeishan.
Used to Indian trains, I was pleasantly surprised with
our hard-sleeper berths. Joanne, used to Russian
trains, was aghast.
Emeishan was a welcome respite from towns. I climbed
to the summit, while Joanne caught a bus and cable
car. The climb was steep but pretty, through various
levels of forest. I was on a mission to get to the
top, and I made it in 5 hours, finding Joanne at the
top surrounded by Chinese tourists keen to practice
their English. It was an interesting cross-section of
Chinese pilgrimage life, with porters lounging around
with sedan chairs, waiting to carry wealthy Chinese to
the top for a significant fee. In a typically Chinese
manoeuvre, the highest point of the mountain has been
closed off to foot tourists. You have to pay 50 yuan
(about US$6.50) to take a monorail for 2 minutes to
get to the highest peak. I searched in vain for a
free way to the top, then gave up and headed down with
Joanne to a monastery guesthouse for the night. It
was a peaceful contrast to Lugu Lake, except for the
Public Security Bureau (the cops) waking us up to
check our passports late in the evening.
Joanne caught a bus down while I trotted down the
path, trying to encourage out-of-breath tourists on
their weary way up. We were in Leshan by that
afternoon, admiring the world's largest Buddha (now
that the Taleban have blown up the Bamian Buddhas).
Again it was a zoo of Chinese tourists and expensive
to boot, but we cheapskates decided simply to take the
cheap local ferry past the Big Fellow, take a photo or
two and be done with it. Size does not always equal
artistic merit, and the Leshan Big Buddha is pretty
homely for a major portrait of the Buddha.
The next day we got to Chengdu, our first big city,
full of boutiques, construction sites and expensive
hotels. It took ages to find a hotel, as all the
cheapos had moved because of construction. Booking an
onward train ticket went surprisingly well, given that
Chengdu-Xian is a notoriously crowded route that can
take days to book a ticket on. The booking hall was a
scene out of Dickens, with limbless people and dwarves
queue-jumping to buy disabled tickets to resell to
tourists, and Fagin-like godfather figures touting the
tickets to frazzled Westerners.
Once that was out of the way, we picnicked in Renmin
Park, having been seduced by supermarkets with cheese
and good bread. The park was pleasant enough, full of
tea gardens and Chinese people having an afternoon
siesta. It was hot in Chengdu, and the typical
Chinese male dressed for the heat in a polyester golf
shirt, worn tucked up to expose a hairless bowling
ball of a midriff, with polyester suit pants pulled up
to the knees, sheer nylon socks, aged black leather
shoes and a baseball cap worn askew. A cigarette was
invariably dangling from lips which parted to show
nicotine-stained teeth oriented to all points of the
compass.
We finally dragged ourselves away to go to Chengdu's
excellent museums, full of stone inscriptions and
ethnological displays. In a sign of the capitalist
times, most of the best pieces have been rented out to
museum exhibits abroad, mostly in Japan. That evening
we dined on a smorgasbord of spicy Sichuan appetizers,
which I found an antidote to the usual greasy Sichuan
fare but which aggravated Joanne's chronic
gastrointestinal aversion to Chinese dishes.
The next day we went to the only really worthwhile
attraction of Chengdu, the Panda Breeding Centre. A
long, smoggy bike ride out of town, through foul
polluted industrial suburbs, the Panda Centre is an
oasis of green in a grey landscape. The pandas were
active and pretty, and we were lucky to see the
1-month-old successful outcome of captive breeding,
tiny hairless pink sausages that were heartbreakingly
cute. I actually preferred the orange, raccoon-like
lesser pandas with their black eye-masks and romping
gait. The museum was full of rather depressing facts
about the decline of the wild panda population,
although at least the Chinese are putting a great deal
of official effort into establishing new reserves in
the mountains of western Sichuan and southern Gansu
provinces.
We took the night train to Xian, the ancient Qing, Han
and Tang dynasty capital of China. Our arrival was
pure New China: hundreds of shouting touts, all lying
through their teeth to get us to leave with them to
their hotel. We were actually taken to the wrong
hotel, but it was reasonably cheap for Xian (100 yuan,
or US$12, for a double) and we took it.
The first order of business was to pay our respects to
Xuanzang, the 7th-century pilgrim monk who was China's
version of Marco Polo, travelling through Central Asia
and India for 20-odd years in search of original
Buddhist texts. The Tang Emperor built him the Great
Wild Goose pagoda to house his books when he finally
returned, and we went and had a look at it (from
outside, to avoid the ludicrous entrance fee) before
wandering into the Tang Dynasty Art Museum.
Here we encountered more New China. Deng Xiaoping, in
launching his new economic policies in the 1980s,
famously said "To become rich is glorious." The
little-quoted second part of that is "And to become
rich by ripping off foreigners is doubly so." The
museum was pleasant, although with an underwhelming
display of replica tomb murals. On our way out, our
guide said "Oh, a professor of Chinese painting is
holding a small workshop on painting; are you
interested?" Joanne is learning to paint in the
Chinese style, so she was naturally keen. The
workshop consisted of five minutes of superficial
technique, and half an hour of the hard sell to buy
some grossly overpriced mass-produced scroll
paintings. In the New China, every institution needs
to support itself financially, so this museum had
found the perfect formula.
Two more museums completed a cultural day. The
Shaanxi Provincial Museum was the best museum we went
to in China, well-laid-out, with excellent English
captions (for once) and a great display of
Shang-dynasty bronzes, Zhou-dynasty jade, Terracotta
Warriors, Han grave sculptures and Sui and Tang
murals. We once again encountered museum staff
directing us to "special exhibits" that (surprise)
turned out to be paintings for sale; every time we
passed through the lobby, the staff were insistent in
directing us into the "exhibition". The Stone Forest
museum, in contrast, was quiet and full of important
old stone inscriptions, including one of Xuanzang
carrying his precious texts in a modern-looking
backpack; Joanne got me a rubbing of this for my
birthday, since Xuanzang is one of my travel heroes.
The next day we made the obligatory pilgrimage to the
Terracotta Warriors, the famous army of pottery
soldiers buried around the tomb of the psychopathic
First Emperor of China, Qing Shidihuang. It cost a
small fortune (especially after we wandered into a
"museum" that was near the entrance and turned out to
contain nothing at all to justify the 30 yuan entrance
fee) but I found it quite moving. The swaggering,
self-confident young warriors seemed so life-like, and
to see some of them smashed and half-buried in soil
seemed a potent parable of the futility of war. On
the way back, we stopped at the tomb of the Emperor
himself, now just a small mound planted with
pomegranate trees and souvenir stalls.
The next day found us visiting the tombs of later
emperors out to the west of Xian. To reduce the huge
price tag, we negotiated a deal involving visiting
only some of the "tourist sights" along the route. My
favourite was the monumental tomb of the Mao Emperor
of the Han Dynasty, a huge burial mound preceded by an
avenue of fantastical sphinxes that wouldn't have been
out of place in ancient Egypt. I climbed to the top,
hoping to avoid the persistent souvenir-selling kids,
but they matched my pace to the top and stood below
the lookout tower shrilling out "Hello, you buy? Very
cheaper! Good price!" The view out over the dusty,
smoggy loess plateau was worth the climb, and I
managed to outrun the horde downhill and regain the
bus in safety.
Joanne's favourite site was the Famen Si, where an old
pagoda collapsed this century uncovering a series of
priceless Buddhist relics and, strangely, a solid
silver tea set that shows how the Tang dynasty Chinese
drank their tea (powdered, salted and brewed into a
thick, broth-like consistency). We both enjoyed
seeing the thousands of houses excavated into the
soft, wind-deposited loess soil; according to Theroux,
there are still more than 40 million troglodytes in
China.
Beijing was next, and, as in Xian, the air pollution
was a constant, foul reminder of China's industrial
success. In Xian, we never saw the sun, despite the
fact that there were no clouds in the sky. In
Beijing, the sun managed to punch an anemic hole in
the grey smog, heating the concrete jungle to
unbearable temperatures. The crowds of tourists were
denser than anywhere else, and the overall effect was
one of agreeing with Sartre that "Hell is other
people" (especially tens of thousands of other
people).
The Forbidden City was the nadir of Beijing. It took
hours to get there through the epic traffic jams, and
finding a way into Tian An Men square took more time.
It was almost as though the Chinese government had
decided that, should they ever want to machine-gun
demonstrators in the square, it would be handy to
restrict entrance and exit points. There must have
been 30,000 tourists in the Forbidden City and the
heat, the sheer size of the place and the constant
press of people sapped our enthusiasm. The highlight
was probably the Tibetan exhibit, although the
constant propaganda in the exhibit captions was a bit
hard to take. The National History Museum was almost
entirely closed, except for another Tibetan propaganda
exhibit, marking the 50th anniversary of the "Peaceful
Liberation" of Tibet in May, 1951. Once again, we
found touts, this time posing as "art students"
approaching us every five minutes to try to drag us
into art galleries to buy paintings.
The rest of Beijing, the Temple of Heaven, the Great
Wall, the Summer Palace and Beijing Train Station,
were similar experiences: traffic jams, heat, huge
crowds, persistent touts and frustration. My
favourite experience, hiking several hours along the
wild, unrestored Great Wall, was at least partly
ruined by having a postcard-seller accompany us the
entire way, constantly and optimistically saying
"Hello water? Hello cold! Hello postcard? Hello
book!" when we really just wanted to admire the view.
The scenery over which the Great Wall stretches is
spectacular, craggy desert mountains separating the
cultivated fields around Beijing from the sandy wastes
of the Gobi Desert, and the Wall is an amazing
engineering feat, the sort of the thing the Chinese
love. The Great Leap Forward, the Three Gorges Dam
and now the Lhasa Railroad are all modern examples of
the same sort of impulse that led to the Great Wall
and the Grand Canal.
On our way south we decided, based on Thubron's book,
to stop off in the classical gardens of Suzhou. It
was a good choice, as the gardens there are a
distillation of the very best of old Chinese culture
and an antidote to the filth, pollution, hassle and
crass commercialism of modern China. The Humble
Administrator's Garden was large and very pretty, with
a series of sub-gardens with different styles, each
inspired by a line of classical poetry. Little
pavilions gave poetic vistas over ponds, lotuses,
fruit trees and other buildings with exaggerated,
upswept Song roofs. The only jarring element, as
always, was the unbearable throng of loud Chinese
tourists. The Blue Wave Pavilion lay off the main bus
tour route and was peaceful, if a bit dull. The
highlight, the next morning, was the Garden of the
Master of the Nets, a tiny jewel that we went to at
opening time, before the hordes could arrive from
Shanghai or from breakfast at the nearby hotels. I
loved the garden and could have spent much longer
lingering over it had not the bark of bullhorns warned
of the approach of the proletariat.
Suzhou, as a repository of Chinese culture, was a
natural spot for Joanne to buy a collection of Chinese
paintbrushes, while I walked away with a copy of
Quotations from Chairman Mao, the infamous Little Red
Book that started the Cultural Revolution in 1966. It
was a classic piece of Chinese bargaining. "How much
for the Little Red Book?" "80 yuan." "That seems
expensive. How about 15 yuan?" "OK!" I annoyed
Joanne the whole way to Yichang quoting the Great
Helmsman. It was an odd experience, alternately
reading the Little Red Book and Noam Chomsky's
Manufacturing Consent on propaganda in the US.
The rest of our trip through China was a bit more
forgettable. Joanne wanted to see the Three Gorges
before they're flooded by the huge Sandouping Dam, but
it proved to be a waste of time as colossal as the dam
itself. The scenery was not particularly spectacular,
most of the gorges we sailed through at night, we
missed the connection with a fast hydrofoil to save a
day getting to Chongqing, and we had cabinmates from
hell, an elderly couple of insomniacs who conducted
arguments at top volume at hourly intervals throughout
the night. The Chinese, like many people in southeast
Asia, seem utterly immune to noise, sleeping placidly
beside busy highways or in the echoing cacophany of a
Chinese hotel. Peter Fleming, in his 1930s travel
book One's Company, wrote of a typical Chinese hotel
"The night was full of interesting noises. In its
way, this was not a bad hotel, it was simply not one
that I would choose for a peaceful weekend away, or a
good night's sleep." As we approached Chongqing, the
weather got greyer and colder and we shivered in our
cabins, desperate to escape from our floating tomb,
our home for three long days.
In Chongqing we made two good decisions. One was to
splurge on a gorgeous hotel room to exorcise the Three
Gorges demons, and the other was to take a day trip to
Dazu, site of beautiful Buddhist statues that were,
for me, a cultural highlight of China. The peaceful
woodland setting, full of birds, and the placid faces
of the statues was a perfect antidote to the boat.
After a long train and night bus journey, we finally
pitched up one grey morning in Yangshuo, Dali's
partner in backpacker haven-dom. We spent 4 pleasant
days there, despite the grey skies and rain, admiring
the pointy karst peaks (so reminiscent of Krabi,
Thailand and Vang Vieng, Laos) that so define Chinese
landscape painting. Again, it wasn't spectacular but
it was pleasant, especially a boat ride through some
of the nicer peaks in the rain, making for photos that
looked exactly like Chinese scrolls. There was more
cormorant fishing, this time from bamboo rafts, and
more cafes with good pizza and decent tunes. We took
Chinese painting lessons and learned how to paint
bamboo and plum trees. Joanne's efforts were quite
good, but mine were a rather sad show that had our
teacher shaking his head. Then it was time to bid the
People's Republic farewell for a time (for me) and
forever (for Joanne). A luxury bus to the border at
Shenzhen, a commuter train and we were suddenly in the
commercial hurly-burly of Hong Kong.
Hong Kong, like Singapore, is a great change after
slogging through the wilds of the Third World, with
people who actually line up for buses and tickets,
with food that won't poison you, and a feeling that
things work. Of course it comes with a price, and you
realize quickly how often you find yourself in the
bank changing more travellers' cheques. We put up in
the travellers' ghetto of Mirador Arcade, a huge
apartment block full of cheap guesthouses. HK$160 (a
bit over US$20) buys a night in a room about the size
of a double bed, with an aircraft-style bathroom
attached.
We had decided to go to Taipei to see the famous
Palace Museum there, so we ran around getting tickets
and changing reams of travellers' cheques before I
went and spent the national debt of a small country on
spare bike parts in Flying Ball Cycles, the best bike
store in Asia (as well as probably the smallest). The
Hong Kong Museum was full of great paintings that had
Joanne drooling (this time, unlike in China, no-one
was trying to bully us into buying any) and the view
out over the harbour was classic Hong Kong, down to a
junk sailing in front of the skyscrapers beyond.
We spent a day at Ocean Park, an amusement park with a
surprisingly good aquarium and a great panda
enclosure, air-conditioned (unlike the one in Chengdu)
to better simulate the cool, moist habitat of the
panda.
Taipei, at least what little we saw of it, is an exact
copy of a large industrial Japanese city: the same
squat, dumpy buildings covered in dirt and mould, the
same convenience stores selling the same food to the
same Japanese pop tunes, the same sushi restaurants,
the same traffic jams, the same hordes of scooters,
the same hopeless address system. The one difference
is the strip of neon-lit brothels that line the road
from the airport to town. Taipei is said to have more
sex workers per capita than any other city in Asia,
and it certainly looks like it.
There was a typhoon warning when we arrived, and it
rained constantly for 24 hours. We still managed to
find our way out to the Palace Museum, full of all the
national treasures carted off by the Kuomintang when
the Communists drove them out in 1949. The displays
were superb, with great interpretative materials and
truly beautiful pieces of bronze and jade. There was
yet another Tibetan exhibit, this time without the
Chinese propaganda. My favourite items were the
oracle bones, ancient divination formulas etched on
tortoise shells. They're 3500 years old and still
decipherable to a modern Chinese, since the writing
system has changed very little since that time. It
was well worth the airfare just to see what is
probably the best Chinese museum in the world.
And then it was back to Hong Kong for a last day
together before Joanne headed off to Vietnam,
Thailand, Japan and ultimately Canada while I lugged
my bike parts back to Dali. We headed through the Tea
Museum and the excellent free (one of the few things
that are free in HK) aviary in Hong Kong park, had a
farewell picnic in our Mirador closet, and then it was
time to say goodbye. Two days of suspended animation
on the train to Kunming and the bus to Dali and it was
back to the reality of the long ride to Lhasa for me.
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Previous Travelogues
June 29-July 19: SW China
June 27: Laos
June 20: Northeast Thailand
June 19: Cambodia Trip
May 27: Ko Tao to Bangkok
May 25: Diving the Similans
April 25: Southern Thailand
March 28: Kuching, E.Coast Malaysia
Feb. 28: Riding Across Borneo
Feb. 18: Brunei
Feb. 9: Diving Sipadan
Feb. 4: Exploring Sabah
Jan. 24: A Mexican Interlude