June 4 Enamel Factory and The Wall

It would be too much to ask, of course, that we could just go to the Wall in the morning when it was like NOT 35C. Charley maintains that it’s too crowded in the morning and that if we go in the afternoon we’ll have the place pretty much to ourselves. What Charley says goes, as he’s the only guy that can talk to the bus driver.

The morning was therefor dedicated to the Jade Museum and the Enamel Museum, followed by a great lunch. Not to belittle those places, they are very interesting as there is always an introductory tour by one of the staff and there’s always a museum-quality section in addition to the shopping area.

Serious jade.

 

Hard to believe this is cut out of one piece.

Glueing copper doodles onto a copper figurine. Then the areas are painted with different colors, the whole thing is

buffed down to show the dividers, and voila! Enamel.

 

An example of enamel at its best.

What exactly would you use these things for?

Then it was off to the Ming Tombs, which in this case are not dug up yet. The Chinese have learned their lesson, when they opened the tomb of the Terracotta Warriors everything was vividly colored, but the colors faded and disappeared within a few days. So they are very reluctant to open up known treasures until the technology improves and they can preserve the delicate nature of these priceless relics. In the case of the Ming Tombs, there is a large public area out front and a main building that has been converted into a museum. The tomb is just out back; it is a hill about 100’ high and well over a kilometre long, there will be some serious stuff in there when they screw up enough courage to open it. It holds Emperor Dongle (pronounced 'dong-lee'), the big guy around here in the early 1400s.

The museum contains, among other things, a very interesting section on Zheng He. He was a general tasked by the Mings with building an ocean fleet to visit the outside world (they were very insular at the time). He built a fleet of enormous ships that would hold soldiers, courtiers, ambassadors, etc and then visited countries throughout Asia and Africa, and possibly sailed as far as North America. This was roughly 60 years before Columbus. When he got home the Emperor had died and the new Emperor wasn’t interested in that foreign stuff so all the ships were burned and that was the end of that.

This is the tomb. 
 Pretty interesting, no?

A model of Zheng He’s ship. This thing was more than 300 feet long, the arse end is 3 stories of apartments….

 

Debbi at the entrance to the tombs.

This tree is struggling with its role.

After lunch - yippee! - we finally get to the Wall, which is about a 90 minute drive from our hotel. Incidentally, it’s meaningless to describe anything as ‘so many minutes from Beijing’ because it’s over 100 km long and 30 km wide…. It’s quite hilly and the terrain is very pretty, and there are walls all over the place. They go up one side of the valley, fart around on the top for a while, come back down about a kilometre away, go up the other side, wander around on the hill over there, and then come back down pretty much where we started out! What’s with that? 

I decided to climb the section on the other side of the valley as, although it was somewhat lower, there didn’t seem to be anyone over there. Eventually I found out why - I couldn’t figure out how to get over there! After four tries and about a mile of parking lots I gave up and went back to climb with everyone else. It was good. The stairs vary from steep through very steep all the way to f*cking steep, and the stone stair treads are cracked, broken, and uneven. The width also varies; at the bottom the stairways are often 3-5 metres wide, but as you go up and it gets steeper there’s sometimes only room for two people to pass. The saving grace is that some genius installed metal pipe handrails, which I’m sure has saved many a life. My guess is that more soldiers died falling down the steps than ever got killed by invaders!

 

So, up the wall I go. Met Deb and a friend a few hundred metres up the hill; they were contemplating a steep pitch and I think maybe screwing up their courage a bit. I carried on by myself, and as I climbed things generally got more steep and more narrow. Every 300 metres or so there’s a two-story stone guard house where they lit signal fires in the good old days, now we just use them to take photos. I eventually went up through three of them (about 1500’ vertical) and then started worrying about my knees and ankles on the trip down so called a halt. The view was marvellous, and the trip back down was just fine. Unbeknownst to me Deb wasn’t that far behind me, but she got an attack of the scoots that have been plaguing both of us and there aren’t any washrooms up here! Apparently she set some kind of record heading back down.

Looking up from the bottom.

 

A bit narrow and steep-ish in places...

And down from the top.

 

"Password please!"  Second guardhouse.

Another one off the bucket list! 
Note more walls in background.

Just a few more steps and we'll be at the top!

Well, that was pretty cool. By the time we drove back into Beijing it was time for dinner, and Charley took us to a place that specialized in Peking Duck. It was in their extremely modern and upscale financial district, which is really something to see at night but sadly we didn’t get any photos that would do it justice. The duck was good, the meal was great, and it was the last time that our little group of eight would be together. Funny how quickly you make friends when thrown together with a bunch of complete strangers; we have everyone’s contact info and intend to keep in touch with as many as we can….

Cutting up the duck at the table - in Peking.

 

Didn't expect to see this little guy at the door!

And that was that. Next morning was time to get our butts to the airport and head home. It was a really great trip. I still don’t think I have my head properly wrapped around the things we did and saw, everything was so different. The overall impression I came away with was an energetic bunch of people who are very busy building an amazing new country, but who haven’t lost touch with their incredible past. It was much more modern and cleaner and more organized than I had expected, with parks and lakes and green spaces everywhere we went, and while the Yangtze River area is really misty from the high humidity we never encountered any savage levels of air pollution. Just lucky I guess. For those of you who have thought about going to China but never made it, this is an incredibly cheap and safe way to do it. I recommend it to anyone without hesitation.

June 3 Temple of Heaven and Tiananmen Square

Beijing is turning out to be much more demanding than the river cruise. Our day starts with the mandatory wake-up call at 06:30, quickly followed by Death By Buffet at 07:00. Then it’s onboard the bus at 08:00, and we won't be back until after dinner! Today starts with a visit to the Pearl Market, followed by the Temple of Heaven and lunch at the lake. Then we’re off to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, followed by dinner and back to the hotel at 8 pm.  Yikes!

The Pearl Market is exactly that. Big market. Lots of pearls. Nuff said. The Temple of Heaven, on the other hand, is a very cool place. It sits in the middle of a VERY large park which is heavily used by the locals, it’s a place for them to play games and fly kites and knit and chatter and eat. We walked through an open arcade that was at least a kilometre long that was full of people doing all of the above. Well maybe not kite flying, but everything else at least twice.

The arcade in the park, Temple of Heaven.

Where do you do Tai Chi with a sword?
Anywhere you like!

These guys are playing for blood.

Writing with a mop?

  These folks are playing hacky-sack with a bird-thing.

 Finally we got to the Temple of Heaven. It was about 30C and we had 40 minutes to explore the place, 30 minutes of which was spent in a shady little shop that sold cold soft drinks! The Temple is about 400 years old, has been rebuilt umpteen times (people seem to like burning it down), and is the place in which the local Flying-Sky-God-People bless the harvest every spring. Seems to work more often than not, as they are up to 1.4 billion!

The Temple of Heaven 

    Much more popular today - The Snack Bar!

Lunch in the park was in a restaurant in, of all things, a park. The restaurant has a glass wall that looks out on a beautiful setting, it was very restful allowing for the fact that every place in China sounds like the inside of a turkey barn what with all the shouting that passes for normal conversation, it had air conditioning (!) and the food was excellent as usual.

The lake from our restaurant.

   A pretty little gazebo.

 Then we were off to Tiananmen Square. It is the largest square in the world and is rather daunting on a hot afternoon. All of the main access points are via tunnels under the main streets which have security setups similar to an airport. We got about halfways through a ten-minute wait and found out that the new Chairman was making a surprise visit that afternoon, which meant that we were officially out of luck. Rats. Charley, not to be put off, led us around for a bit until he came up with an almost-crosswalk on a busy six-lane street that was only mildly suicidal and quicker than you can say Mao’s Your Uncle we were in!

Needless to say we couldn’t even scratch the surface of the place in an hour but we got the Cook’s Tour, we rubber-necked, and our feet have officially smooched the square. The place is so big, and so full of buildings and monuments and things, that it’s really hard to get a photo that does it justice. One new thing that was really cool; they have just finished putting in two 100’ x 12’ high-def digital video screens (outside, at ground level) in the square, and they show travel videos from around China.

Now THAT is a heroic statue. 

 



The People's Flowerbed.  Really cool topiary.

 

This guy keeps people from stealing the monument.
So far, so good...

  Happy tourists.

Then it was on to the Forbidden City. This place is huge, which is why they don’t call it the Forbidden Village or the Forbidden Town I guess. The towers at the entrance are each the size of a good-size castle in Europe. Many of the buildings in the public area are accessible, and then there is a private city behind everything where the nomenclatura hung out. We had to walk through that to get to our bus, it was probably a mile or more. Big place. The private area was large enough that when one of the emperors had a number of squabbling concubines (we’re talking knife-in-the-liver squabbling) he was able to keep them and their retinues in separate parts of the City so that they never saw each other. That big. We toured the enclave of the Dowager Empress and Charley gave us the lowdown on how a poor-but-beautiful concubine managed to get knocked up by her Emperor whence she got an immediate promotion, then soon after the Emperor died and her son was too young to rule so they made her a Regent. Things kept going her way and at the end she ruled China for many years. I can’t even begin to tell you about Chinese history, partly because I don’t know any but mostly because it’s a huge story about a society that is much more byzantine than the Byzantines. Chinese history makes the Europeans look like a bunch of yokels squabbling over a pork chop. I pretty much gave up trying to keep track of who did what to whom and just laid back and enjoyed the ambience. Many of the buildings have been converted into museums, and house truly world-class collections of lacquerware, carvings, statuary, etc.

 



The main public building, where people made obeisance
to the emperor of the day.

  It’s good to be the king.

I get the guy riding the chicken, but are those giant squirrels following him or chasing him?



Bronze castings in one of the Dowager Empress' courtyards.

Someone built a garden out of stone in the back forty. 
Probably five acres….



A glimpse of the moat which surrounds the city.
It's wide enough that small craft warnings apply.

 

When we finally collected ourselves at the bus it was late, we were hot, and it was time for dinner. Charley gave us a big warning about hawkers and panhandlers and pickpockets in this area as it is a chokepoint and a nice place to pick off gwai lo, but sadly there were none at home that day. Did I mention that the bus has a beer cooler? Electric, right beside the driver, holds about two dozen beers and water, a buck a bottle. I love this country.

Anyway, dinner was great as usual. In the morning we were all hot to explore the hotel pools and spa, but now our feet hurt so much from about 10 miles of walking that all we want to do is bunk out in preparation for tomorrow. The Wall!

 

 

 

 

 

 

June 2 Chonquing-Beijing

Well, here we are in Chongquing and it’s time to fly up to Beijing. Lots of hustle and bustle to get off the boat by 09:00. There’s something different every day around here, today we had to walk across a series of 12 pontoon boats to get to shore! Because we had an hour to kill, Charley arranged a brief walking tour of an 18th century Guild House. It was very interesting, as the locals have taken the original buildings from the 19th century and turned them into a museum of that time complete with dioramas, explanations, and of course a bit of shopping. Then we were off on a one-hour bus ride through Chongquing to the airport. This is the largest city in China at 33 million, and I assumed it would be a bit of a cesspit, but that’s simply not the case. It’s clean and big and well-organized, obviously very busy, there are cranes everywhere. (The joke you here everywhere in China: Q: What is the national bird of China? A: The crane - the common construction crane.) Then I realized what was so odd about this place; there are virtually no old buildings. In a 4,000 year old country virtually everything has been built in the last 20 years. Weird.

Seriously? They had a greeter on every pontoon boat! 

A teensy bit of Chongquing skyline from our ship.

Can’t build bridges fast enough? Double-deckers! 

Cool rooflines in the Guild Museum.

We were supposed to be on a 2pm flight, but Charley got us on the 12 o’clock! A gratifyingly routine flight put us back into Beijing airport in mid-afternoon, this airport is seriously freaking big. It has at least three runways, could be four. The terminals are in three rows between the runways with light rail connecting everything. We taxied for 17 minutes after landing! Now I can see why the main terminal looked so weird when we flew in the first night; the main terminal is built to look like a dragon. A mile-long dragon with a train up its butt….

 

I honestly didn’t know what to expect from Beijing. Would it be crowded, 'oriental', maybe dirty? I was surprised to find a clean modern city with great roads, lots of parks and trees and lakes, everything is well-organized and everything works. It's nice. We got to the hotel and were stunned at the quality. It has an enormous and beautiful lobby, lots of shops with VERY high-end jade and pottery, etc, two swimming pools, hot tubs, and an enormous spa. Our room is huge and very well appointed with great beds. The bathroom has a soaker tub and a nice glass shower stall, the whole room is marble floors and walls. RFID locks! 


The Hovel.

 There's no time to enjoy anything though, as Charley is loading us all back into a bus to go for dinner. It turns out that other than breakfast we're going to eat every lunch and dinner in a different place around the city. This one is great, and Charley says they'll all be the same style. Eight or ten people sit around a round table with a big lazy susan, the staff pile on 10-15 different dishes (mostly asian) plus soup and dessert, you get one beer or whatever for free, and there's unlimited free green tea. The food was excellent.

First dinner in Beijing, with friends from the ship.

Back at the hotel we gave up on exploring as we were dog-tired from a long day and tomorrow would come early.

June 1 Shibaozhai Pagoda

Well, today we BOTH have the scoots. The tour is a late-morning one to Shibaozhai Pagoda, a 12-story pagoda and Buddhist temple on another island in the river. This is a really cool place, and we quite enjoyed it, but it was also very much an exercise in bathroom management. A couple of very close calls.... The only way out there is over a suspension bridge about 500 metres long which is an experience all on its own!

Yes, there really is a staircase going up this thing! 

Come on Steve, you can do it sweetheart! Maybe.

The easy way down the back. Where’s Gollum? 

A very pretty walk goes all around the cliffs. 

 

Tonight was the Captain's Dinner, which everyone dresses up for and it was very nice. Deb wore a lace jacket she bought at the market and she looked great in her new outfit. 

 Our table by now are old friends and we had a very good time and drank too much wine. Eventually we ended up in Ishtar and Alka's room and finished off their Bombay Saphire as they couldn't take it on the plane tomorrow. After all, what are friends for?

Mandy, our server during the cruise.

 

 

May 31 White Emperor City

We woke up to see mountain landscapes on both sides of the ship as we steamed up the lake. Wow, what a difference a day makes! Deb did her first session of Tai Chi on the afterdeck at 07:00 this morning, whilst I swilled coffee and watched the world go by in the forward lounge. There's always something to see here, with boats and people and scenic vistas and wildlife around every corner. Saw a couple goats velcroed onto the rocks this morning, since they were whitish and in the middle of nowhere I presume they were feral. We've passed a number of the 'relocation cities' which look pretty good actually. The lake is definitely a highway, I've seen every type of transportation this morning including car ferries, excursion boats, and hydroplanes.

A portion of one of the relocation cities they are building to house the folks who were flooded out and wish to stay.

 

Combination commercial ferry and cruise ship, the only decent way to get up and down the lake.

There's a half-hour between breakfast and the morning excursion today, and we managed to make it eventful. Deb was on the forward deck when they let out a blast on the horn without warning and they literally nearly blew her eardrums out, took her 10 minutes to recover. I just got the scoots (not from the horn), no drama but scooty enough that I wasn't getting in no boat with no washroom. So here I am, typing on my Transformer whilst Debbi cavorts on a weenie little boat somewhere.

Tying up the chi at 07:00 whilst the world goes by. 

 

 Morning hydrofoil service up and down the lake.

 

I’m thinking this is a job for the new guy. It’s hard to capture the scale of the scenery!

 Deb says the small-boat excursion was spectacular. That afternoon, another 50 miles up the river, we went to the White Emperor City. It’s actually a town on top of Baidi Hill right in the middle of the gorge, and it’s been around for a zillion years. At one time it was surrounded on three sides by the river, now it’s in the middle of the lake and there is an excellent walking bridge out to it. A very interesting place to visit as it has history, artifacts, monkeys, architecture, and a great view of the gorge and the lake. The scenery is spectacular as it’s right beside the Xu Gorge.

Who can argue with a sign like this?

    Or this?

Lots of quiet, pretty little spots on the way up. 

The entrance to the town.

Beautiful dragon fountain.

My princess. 

    Do NOT screw with the locals!