Prelude---Macao---Zhuhai---Chengdu---Llasa---Xian---Beijing

Prelude-How to Travel Without Actually Seeing Anything

“This bread is as dry as a stick,” Sandra said despondently.

It’s strange-the thoughts that go through your head on a holiday. While one should be inspired by new culture, architecture and sheer joy of traveling, it is the hum-drum trivialities that tend to occupy your mind for a disconcertingly large part of the day. The same day-to-day concerns that fill your mind during the working week tend to rear their ugly heads when you’re away as well.

It was the same from the very beginning of the trip. Even on the flight from Bangkok to Macao, when I should have been salivating at the thought of one month exploring China, I found myself fixated by strange group whose origin I couldn't quite place-Kazakhs, perhaps, or some 'stan, who were sitting across the aisle from me. However, it would have been difficult not to notice them, as they were so loud and brash. They spent the flight shouting, waving their arms about and seemed incapable of sitting down, like noisy children in a fairground. Once or twice I dozed off in the surprisingly comfortable chair, but I jolted back to consciousness by someone screaming in my ear. At least, it felt like he was bellowing at me, but as I wiped the drool from my chin, I noticed that the man with a moustache as large as a hedge, was, in fact, gesticulating wildly at the at the man in the loud, shiny and rather vulgar suit behind him, who also sported a moustache that looked like it was ready for an Olympic challenge in the ‘Thickest Moustache in the World’ competition. If there had been any wind on the plane, I’m sure it would have swayed like the branches of a coconut tree. There were three moustaches altogether, and behind them a group of young Chinese girls, in garish costumes and of questionably virtue, who hung back and waited for their sponsors to throw some idiotic witticism in their direction, and dutifully replied with some forced giggling. Are these girls trained in giggling and fawning, I wondered, or do they just pick it up along the way?

The other Chinese and Thai-Chinese on the flight pretended not to notice these shenanigans, but they only ‘seemed’ not to notice. Asians, in general, do not show emotions as blatantly as westerners do. They consider it uncouth and child-like. However, small gestures are permitted to show their displeasure, such as a slight downturning of the mouth, and a tiny arching away of the body and not looking in the direction of the offending behaviour.

The Chinese, I have heard, view the world in terms of a hierarchy of races, much as the old imperialists did, except they see themselves at the summit, rich whites immediately behind them, other Asian groups next, and blacks and Arabs at the bottom of the pile. The idea of Arab men openly consorting with Chinese girls was probably a very unpleasant sight to them, especially when you remember that open signs of affection, even between ‘pure race’ Chinese couples, are highly frowned upon.

As China rapidly resumes its historical place as the world’s most powerful country, the citizens of the ‘Middle Kingdom’ will, I suspect, show their hidden contempt for other cultures more clearly, and their body language may become more blatant. It will still be missed, no doubt, by myopic Westerners, who are blind to all but the most blatant gestures. Can you imagine, for example, Eminem or some other rapper, indicating his contempt for modern society by turning the edges of his mouth down slightly and refusing to make eye-contact with the camera?

But to return to my original point, it is the hum-drum, day-to-day concerns that occupy most conscious though on any holiday, however much you’d like to believe you’re on some epic adventure. At this very moment, for example, I’m sitting in the very centre of Macao, Asia’s first colony, on a bright morning. I should be noticing the tiny pebbled paving stones and the ornate patterns that have been laid into them; I should be marveling at the Portuguese architecture and the fascinating history of the place; my attention should be grabbed by the 400-year fusion of European and Asian cultures.

I should be noticing these things, but I’m not. My mind’s preoccupied by the pain in my hand brought on by my writing with a pen. I’ve been using a keyboard for so long that a pen feels like a pickaxe in my paw, an alien stick-like object I can’t control properly. I’ve also got a dodgy stomach brought on by cheap wine and a gorgonzola pizza from last night vying for my attention, and clouding my thoughts.

Most of all though, I’m preoccupied by a manager in a starched uniform who’s hovering vulture-like around my table, looking nervously at my nearly empty latte and wishing me gone. To add insult to injury, I’m in one of the comfy chairs, the type that don’t induce pain and numbing of the backside after twenty minutes, so she knows I could lounge around here all day if I wanted to. All these chains, from McDonalds upwards, only want you to stay for a limited amount of time, just long enough to shovel their pre-packaged poison into your bleeding stomach, and then they demand you return to whatever box you came from ASAP. They are appalled by the idea of customers loitering in their domain. I’m sure that, at the executive level, there are graphs with the x-axis representing the amount of time a wastrel like me leaves his useless ass parked in a comfy chair, and the y-axis showing the profitability of that said chair during a given time frame.

Corporate America and my part in its downfall.

Of course, they can never openly admit this. After all, Starbucks, as their advertising constantly reminds me, is only in the café business because of their love affair with coffee, and the money aspect doesn’t bother them at all. Indeed, they’re practically a charitable institution, even if they only pay the campesinos who actually grow the coffee beans slave wages. Following the recent tsunami catastrophe, they donated 10 per cent of the profits from their most expensive brand of coffee, a brand I’ve yet to see anyone order, to Tsunami relief efforts. It was just for one day, of course, but you can’t question their golden heart is in the right place. Nevermind that their advertising for this glorious deed probably exceeded the actual money donated. Nevertheless, they can’t ask me to leave, but the manager will keep eyeing me nervously.

Hum… I think I’ll really piss her off by moving to another chair, a smoking chair, and bring my cold and nearly empty cup with me. As long as I don’t actually finish the cold latte, she can’t ask me to leave. Ha Ha, the taste of victory-this is how Chairman Mao must have felt after the Long March.

As I began by saying, it’s difficult not to fixate on the irrelevant, so very difficult.

Macao

Macao, or Ao Men in Chinese, is now a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China, like Hong Kong. It was the world’s first Asian colony, and for 400 years the Portuguese held sway, but they were always a racial minority in their little fifedom, and by the 20^th century they rule was nominal and ghost like.

Surprisingly, the old town still looks remarkably Portuguese, except that 98 per cent of its inhabitants are Chinese. It still has its own currency, the Pataca, and-nominally at least-its own local government, but in reality, Beijing calls all the shots. It’s also got the highest population density of any city on earth. If all the people who live here, about half a million, tried to leave their tower blocks and stand in what little pavement its 25 km squared offers, they’d kill each other in the resulting squash. Thankfully, it’s never occurred to the Macanese to do this. It would be like this in most cities, I suppose. We’ve all got so used to living in boxes that ‘outside’ is merely a medium to get from one box to another. To succeed in life is to live in a bigger box. We’ve all forgotten that ‘outside’ is where we belong.

Macao’s current ‘raison d’etre’ is tourism and gambling. Casinos are illegal in Hong Kong and China, so the weekend sees ferry loads of Hong Kongers and mainlanders descend on the roulette wheels and black jack tables of Macao’s many casinos to place their bets. Some gamble what they can afford to lose, others gamble more than should, and every so often a corrupt party official gambles what is not even his to gamble. I remember a show trial where some cadre or other was publicly vilified and executed for gambling funds intended to resettle peasants whose homes were about to be flooded by the Three Gorges Dam Project.

I went to one of them once, a casino I mean, not an execution. It’s called the Lisboa, one of Macao’s largest, replete with garish lighting and well-worn, but once plush carpets. It was much more run-down than a Las Vegas casino, but I’m sure it beats watching a cock-fight in some dingy subterranean hole. What I remember most was the air of desperation in the place. It was almost palpable. The gamblers look like drug addicts desperately craving their next fix. I’ve never seen a crack den, of course, but I imagine they have the same atmosphere. Of course, there aren’t any flashing lights, expensive suits or cocktail waitresses to distract you in a crack den, but the psychological cues and triggers are fundamentally the same.

I didn’t do any gambling in the Lisboa. In fact, I have never gambled. I could never see the point of it, as the ‘house’ always wins. The gambler is doomed to failure. The facts are irrefutable, so why anyone gambles, and why the Chinese in particular-surely the world’s most logical and calculating race-are so addicted to gambling is a mystery to me. Psychologists, or rather behavioural psychologists, argue that gambling is addictive because of the power of ‘variable return reinforcement schedules.’ To oversimplify, the possibility of short term reinforcement (winning one game of cards) outweighs the lack of long-term reinforcement (eventually losing your money, your rings, your car, your house and in the case of the luckless cadre, your life). Other mammals, from rats to republicans, demonstrate this same tendency. We are wired to think short-term, it would appear. This might also explain why we are making our planet uninhabitably polluted so we can drive large pieces of metal from one box to another. A depressing thought really.

Casinos, chips and those laws of variable return reinforcement

Taipa and Coloane. Actually, recent extensive land reclamation makes the word ‘islands’ somewhat misleading. Macao proper contains the old town and the historic heart of the city, Placa del Leal Senado. It’s a beautiful old Portuguese square with white and black cobblestones inlaid with ships and other patterns, and over the exquisite square, 18^th/19^th century Latin European buildings have been carefully preserved. At one end of the square, an old church remains open for business, but most of the business these days is not the devout, but the feckless tourist. Now and then, however, an aging Portuguese resident ambles in, kneels and prays in a pew, temporarily oblivious to the end of the world she had known.

Placa del Leal Senado

Fountain in same Square

The old town only extends for a few blocks and is rapidly swallowed up by massive, and massively ugly, tower blocks. During World War 2 and the Chinese civil war, refugee numbers massively swelled the city’s previously tiny population, and the government could either let them die on the street or build high rise monstrosities to house them all. I guess if you’re dying on the street, a high rise monstrosity looks pretty good. Land pressures mean the streets are narrow but somehow not too clogged with traffic, as Macao is small enough to make a car completely unnecessary.

Near the end of the old town, an old fort, Monte Fort, still stands on top of a hill and its cannons and watchtowers appear to guard the city. Beside the fort, the front of St Paul’s Cathedral, Macao’s emblem, somehow remains standing, but the rest of the cathedral was destroyed by a massive earthquake. This is taken by some as miraculous, but I fail to see how 90 per cent of a church collapsing, killing those inside, and a piece of it not falling down, can be seen as divine intervention.

In the distance, an old lighthouse stands on a distant hill, and if you look in another direction, China proper builds itself from farmland to city, skipping the intermediary village and town stages, with cranes and sheer determination. The polluted brown grey waters of the Pear River delta discolour the sea, and are further evidence that the China, the ‘sleeping dragon’ is waking up.

Hac Sa (Black Sand) Beach

Ruins Of St Peter’s

In the afternoon, we headed down to Coloane, Macao’s wooded island park for a small hike. The minibus from central Macao only costs 5 Patacas (50 cent) and if you’re quick, and a little bit childish, you can sit up front next to the driver, in what must be the only bus ride in the world that feels like being in a grand prix. The engine roars, and the minibus swerves to and fro around the narrow streets.

The strange thing is that this park/island is almost always empty. Only about 2000 people live there, and since new construction is prohibited, the rest remains unspoilt, On our hike, we only came across a couple of other people there. We finished the trail at Hac Sa beach, but even its black volcanic sand and swimmable beaches, ‘swimmable’ to those who don’t mind swimming in blackish water anyway, couldn’t attract many people. It seemed odd that in the city with the highest population density on earth, the large wooded park remains empty and is left to the birds. People just don’t want to leave their rabbit hutches, I guess. Have humans become a race of agoraphobic bunnies?

Hong Kong

You join me on a ferry from Macao to Hong Kong. It’s super modern-I think it’s called a catamaran, or something, but whatever it’s called, it’s certainly fast-so fast, they make you wear a seat belt, but that might just be for show. Perhaps they feel they can charge you more if they make you feel like you’re on an airplane. Out of the window, tiny islets glide past and we zoom past innumerable little fishing boat, or perhaps their rubbish floats. The interminable mist makes it hard to tell.

Southern China spends about nine months a year shrouded in cloud and mist, and I’m beginning to remember how dispiriting it is. On a more positive note, the sea has changed from dirty brown to pale blue. This means we must have finally escaped the effects of the Pearl River delta. Hong Kong is far enough away from the mainland to be free of it, but Macao and Zhuhai’s waters are permanently muddied by it.

The sea is a very choppy today, and we’re experiencing what a pilot would call ‘major turbulence.’ As I write, the captain has just announced that “the boat is pitching heavily, and we’re experiencing a heavy swell, and you should please return to your seats and fasten your seat belts.” Just before the captain had finished speaking, the sweet sound of vomiting into paper bags made me question the wisdom of that last glass of wine last night, or rather the bottle of wine that preceded it. The rocking of the boat is also bringing back unpleasant memories of when Sandra and I were thrown off a jet ski two months ago in Thailand. I’m not really worried though. Actually, I’ve never been sea sick, unless you count the sense of nausea brought on by watching Leonaro di Capio’s romantic histrionics in ‘Titanic’, but the sound of quadraphonic vomiting is rather unpleasant.

We’re heading into Hong Kong now, I think. The mist means I can’t be sure, but the small fishing vessels are being replaced by massive tankers. Hong Kong has the busiest port in the world, but will soon be replaced by Shanghai. However, we’re not heading to the port, as containers aren’t that interesting at the end of the day, are they? Through the mist, I can now make out the magnificent Victoria Harbour, whose skyline must be unmatchable, and the catamaran has slowed to impulse power, as we dock at Central, Asia’s answer to Manhattan.

Victoria Harbour (covered in mist as always)

Central’s newest and Hong Kong’s tallest skyscraper, or the world’s biggest head

I shouldn’t wax too lyrical about Hong Kong. Whenever you see it as the backdrop to some movie or other-James Bond seems inordinately fond of the place, colony of the crown or not-it’s always swelteringly hot, and beads of perspiration glisten in the scorching sunlight on the heads of wispy young girls in Suzi Wong dresses, while rickshaw drivers avoid the triad gangs using ancient marshal arts to fight each other and Jackie Chan for supremacy.

The reality, of course, is far more mundane. When we docked, everything was enveloped in that omnipresent Chinese mist, and the temperature was a damp 15 degrees. The Cantonese busily and joylessly went about their daily lives in drab clothes, and the place looked about as exotic as Birmingham in the Autumn rain.

I had never noticed it before, but Hong Kongers don’t look happy-busy and purposeful, certainly, but not happy. Perhaps it’s just because I’ve spent the last nine months in Thailand, ‘the land of smiles’, and those guys are so happy they’d make Santa’s Elves look like a miserable bunch of workaholic dullards. In Thailand, one of the worst insults that can be leveled against you is being ‘serious’. The word only has negative connotations there, so it’s not surprising that Thais who visit China are rarely impressed by the place, or more particularly, the people. Certainly, Hong Kongers don’t have the steely-eyed grimness of Muscovites, but they also don’t go through their day with a smile on their face, a song on their lips, and a magical glint in their eye. On the other hand, neither do I, and if I ever start doing so, I’ve instructed my wife to shoot me, or at least poke me in the eye with a chopstick, which she has agreed to do-all too readily, come to think of it.

But let’s return to our trip. We went through the tedious formalities of customs, and I went through my habitual moan about my passport being filled with stamps for traveling from one part of China to another. The problem, you see, is that for foreigners, traveling between Hong Kong, Macao and China proper all require form filling and passport stamping from their boys in black and blue, the border guards-men trained for years in how to go through their entire working day without ever showing the slightest flicker of human emotion. I wonder how they do it. Perhaps they have to sit through old episodes of Star Trek and study Science Officer Spock until they are brainwashed into believing they are part Vulcan and incapable of emotion. These are the things you think of in the endless border queues.

Anyway, after the border formalities, we brought our slightly queasy stomachs onto dry land, and set about looking for a loo. This is not as straightforward as you might think, as Asian Shopping Centre architects set out to hide them in the unlikeliest of places, believing that if they make you walk around for long enough, you’ll make an impulse purchase. Personally, I’ve never enjoyed shopping, and I’m even less likely than normal to pop into Benetton to buy a fluffy jumper when what I really want to do is empty my bladder. But after ten minutes that seemed like longer, and another ten minutes to find the exit of the shopping centre (those sly architects also hide those, the fiends), we found ourselves in Hong Kong, amidst the skyscrapers.

To be more precise, we were on an elevated walkway. The centre of Hong Kong is full of them, and to be honest, I think they’re wonderful. I kind of feel like I’m walking on air, removed from the traffic fumes and the eternally red pedestrian traffic lights. It’s all a bit like being an extra from a Star Trek episode, a contented automaton in a futuristic metropolis. However, if you’re not careful about where you’re walking, you can easily end up in another Mall, and if you wander too far, you may never find you’re way out of it again.

Elevated walkways run throughout Central-no need walk on the street

However, we kept our bearings, and soon descended into the middle of Hong Kong’s financial district, where all the best skyscrapers are to be found. Hong Kong has more skyscrapers than any other city on Earth. I’m not talking per capita of population or anything; I’m talking absolute numbers here. It has a whopping 7,417 of them; 2,000 more than its nearest rival, New York. Moreover, their set between Victoria Harbour on one side and mountains on the other, which only adds to their appeal.

A skyscraper, you might object, is just an ugly building, but I don’t agree. In Central Hong Kong, they look like works of art. They have style and panache. The architects actually seemed to be trying for once (perhaps they grew tired of hiding toilets in shopping malls) and their financial backers must have locked their eunuch counterparts in a Mall toilet and used their balls for once. The centre of Hong Kong is what all cities should look like, and we should live and work in these gleaming utopias, challenging the sky and aiming upwards, upwards, ever upwards. We could get 10-year-olds to design them before the educational system has robbed them of a sense of vision. Even London could be squashed into a fraction of its present size if we tore up the suburbs and let people live in buildings they could be proud of. Not rabbit hutches, not council-built Lego sets, but real buildings. The retreat of the countryside could be halted, and land returned to agricultural production. Children could fight in the school yards about who lived in the coolest skyscraper. All would be perfect, evermore! Or perhaps it’s a terrible idea, but Hong Kong’s skyscrapers can turn a boy’s head.

Central-Hong Kong

Victoria Harbour

In the centre of Central, we took a break, a lunch break. We went to some Yuppie place and had a smoothie, or to give it its proper name, a ‘Power Booster’, and ate a ‘Tofu Full-On Energiser’, and forked over a powerful sum of money for the privilege. However, all the staff enthusiastically wished me a good day, and seemed inordinately keen on me enjoying my meal. I don’t know why they were so taken with me…

The other clientele were very well dressed, and spoke with that quasi-American accent the ruling elite in Asia seem to cultivate in their children. In a group of four Yuppies, who spent 25 minutes saying goodbye to each other near the ever-opening and closing sliding doors, for example, there were four different races speaking with same accent, dressed the same way and displaying the same gestures. Is this the ‘new global society’ I hear so much about, and if so, why did it make me so uneasy?

Perhaps because it’s not quite the egalitarian meritocracy it first appears to be. They might look good in a ‘United Colors of Benetton’ ad, but these future captains of industry are none other than the offspring of the present captains of industry, preened in exclusive private schools, and set to inherit the earth. Positions of power and prestige are not won by hard work and aptitude on a level playing field. They never were. They are passed on from generation to generation. The poor, for the most part, are excluded through lack of opportunity. I wondered if this was the same in mainland China. When the Soviet Union fell from grace, the ‘Communist aristocracy’ scrambled around and grabbed the wealth to preserve their place at the head of the trough. I wondered if the cadres in China were doing the same thing.

My analysis came to an abrupt end when I noticed the group I was studying had realised I was staring at them and taking notes. Even though I am white, which is always a status symbol in Asia, they recognized by my relatively shabby appearance and lack of brand names that I did not belong in their class-not quite ‘white trash’ but certainly not an ‘alpha male’. I stopped writing before they called the police and had me thrown to the dogs, or thrown to the chickens, or whatever animal they throw you to in this part of the world.

In the afternoon, we took a funicular up the side of the mountain, and took in the view from ‘The Peak’, Hong Kong’s park/shopping centre at the summit of one of its mountains. I’d like to say it inspired me, but I’ve already seen it so many times that it did nothing for me, so I spent my time ear-wigging to a telephone conversation between a middle aged obese English woman and her family back home. She spoke of nothing else but what she had bought and how little she had paid for it. I earwigged and earwigged, convinced that she would have to change the conversational topic sooner or later, but she didn’t. Eventually, she hung up, and I was forced to seek other entertainment. I looked at the mist for a while, and felt glum.

In the evening, we had a fantastically expensive but mediocre Indian meal in one of Hong Kong’s ridiculously termed ‘budget’ restaurants. Trying to recover from the financial shock, we went to a bar and paid eight dollars for a beer in one of Hong Kong’s backpacker bars. This particular backpacker was hemorrhaging cash, and decided to head for China proper, where a beer costs a dollar, as God intended.

Zhuhai and surrounding area

Zhuhai is not famous. Marco Polo didn’t bother to visit it, for example, perhaps because it didn’t exist. Indeed, if I had gone there as a teenager, I would have found a sleepy fishing village surrounded by paddy fields. When I first saw it, three years ago, it was my first time in China, propelled there by the mysterious forces that drive EFL teachers to check out the quality of the grass in other fields. It was my first time out of the comfortable paddock of the European Union, and I was surprised by what I found. I stayed for a year, and I had a good time. My students were friendly and the school treated me well. In fact, coming from Spain, where you’re pretty on your own and it’s a case of sink or swim and do it fast amigo, they were embarrassingly helpful. However, in spite of the charms of the place, I spend the last third of my contract itching to leave. It’s simply too small and orderly to hold you, but having said that, many westerns do stay here for much longer, and some never leave.

Let’s begin with a quick introduction. Zhuhai is a Special Economic Zone (SEZ-not to be confused with an SAR-Special Administrative Region, like Hong Kong and Macao). The SEZ’s were set up by the semi-immortal Deng Zhou Ping in his last days to transform the moribund Chinese economy into something more prosperous and vibrant. “To get rich,” he was later to proclaim, “is glorious.” The SEZ’s are where people come to get rich, and the Capitalist economic model of free competition thrives and free markets reign. As a result, Zhuhai went from a forgotten fishing village in the eighties to a rapidly expanding city of about 1.5 million today. This is still small by Chinese standards, but it’s growing daily.

Zhuhai-the future starts here… maybe

Family Portrait at Fountain School

Those Chinese fortunate to live in this new capitalist utopia must obtain permission to work here. In a way difficult to comprehend to Westerners, the Chinese are not free to move from one part of China to another in search of a better job. The Party is keen to create an orderly urbanization in China, and fears the chaos that would ensue if China’s rural poor, who still make up 60 per cent of the population and often live on less than a dollar a day, were to suddenly up sticks and arrive en mass in the cities and the SEZ’s. While one can bemoan the lack of personal freedom, it should be noted that Chinese cities do not suffer from the slums and shanty towns of other third world nations.

So, the people in Zhuhai and nearby Shenzen, China’s number one SEZ bordering Hong Kong, are the lucky ones, who have arrived at the miracle land where fortunes are there to be taken and the streets are paved with gold. They have opportunities and can afford a lifestyle the average peasant could only dream of. Nevertheless, by Western standards, they still lead a tough life, for the most part. For every rich factory owner in a flash car with tainted black windows, there are a thousand factory workers, sleeping 10 to a dorm room, and getting one day off a week, or less. Their real working day is often 12 hours long, and their average salary would not tempt a work shy European dole bird out of bed, but they’re not going to give it up for a life of toil and drudgery in the paddy fields, or a dead end job in some less successful city under the ever watchful eye of their work unit manager. Moreover, with a national growth rate pushing 10 per cent, and themselves at the vanguard of that growth, they know, or at least believe, things can only get better.

Zhuhai is known in China as ‘Zhuhai Piaoliang’ or ‘Beautiful Zhuhai’, because of its coastal location, and immaculately manicured parks. It’s one of the greenest cities in China, and people often come here for their honeymoon, or holiday here, if they can afford it. Having said that, Hong Kongers and Japanese often come here for its relatively cheap prostitutes, but unless you go looking for them, you’ll never see them. The cities tourist centre gurus never miss a trick, and use clever trick photography when they depict the crystal blue waters of the sea, as they’re invariably a muddy brown from the silt and pollution of the mighty Pearl river delta. They also didn’t include the three floating and bloated dog corpses we came across on our last walk along ‘Lover’s Street’, the coastal promenade.

View from our old apartment’s window

City emblem-the Pearl River Fishergirl

The Party has big plans for Zhuhai and Shenzen, and the Communist Party is quite good at turning grand plans into reality. If they succeed, I might return here in 20 years time to find myself in the biggest city on Earth, a metropolis almost too large to imagine. The idea is to link Guangzhou (China’s third city, with a population of 10 million) with Hong Kong, through a massively expanded Zhuhai and Shenzen, and create one massive conurbation-an area the size of France with a 100 million plus population. It sounds crazy, but I think it could happen. The Chinese see nature as something to be controlled and conquered, and the idea of needing a ‘green belt ring’ around a city was an idea my students didn’t really seem to comprehend, much less agree with. The Han see it as their right to rule, and if that means mega cities of 100 million, then so be it. Westerners may bemoan the environmental destruction and inhumanity of such colossal cities, but how many of us would volunteer to return to a life of toil in the fields, or wish such a life on our descendants, to protect something as ephemeral as the environment?

The Party sees its role as one of freeing people, not from dictatorship, but from poverty and want. Indeed, the Party has already freed more people from poverty in the last 20 years than all the NGO’s put together. My only concern is that an increasingly fragile Planet Earth may find itself incapable of supporting a rich China and its inevitable pollution, massive on a scale as yet unknown. Our future, and whether we have one, may be decided in here in the SEZ’s.

My thoughts turned to more mundane matters as we tried to get out of Zhuhai. Travelling is China is rarely easy. Matters are not helped by CITS, the state run official travel agency, and their annoying tendency to hire people with little or no grasp of English, and a complete inability to understand foreigners when they try to speak Chinese. Things are made worse by their consummate lying. We were told by one travel agency, for example, that we had to wait three days for a flight to Guilin, our next destination, but we were told by another that we had to fly that same day. One travel agency says there are no buses to that destination at that time of year, and another tells you you’ve just missed today’s bus. They are also wont to try to change your holiday plans, which you are obviously incapable of planning for yourself, and always keen to send you to an alternative destination, which coincidentally, they happen to have a tour of, and it has a special discounted price.

The trick is to pigheadedly go from travel agency to travel agency until you get the answer you’re looking for, and then buy the ticket immediately before they change their mind. On no accounts should you believe them if they tell you to come back tomorrow or the next day to pick up or pay for a ticket, as this ticket will become mysteriously unavailable. In fact, it will become an ‘unticket’, to use Orwellian newspeak, a ticket that does not exist, will never exist, and has never existed.

On our last night in China, we had dinner with our former Chinese teacher, a charming woman, whose patience with lazy and inept students of Chinese like ourselves is quite astounding . I spoke to her about the possibility of a mega city in Guangdong, but he seemed doubtful. ‘What,’ she asked, ‘could all these peasants do, except clean, wait on tables, and work on construction?’ Peasants, as I had noted before in China, are not well thought of by sophisticated urbanites, who conveniently forget how few generations separate them from the fields. I've noted a similar phenonemon in newly-rich Ireland, in which all problems, from crime to budget deficits, are blamed on 'bloody immigrants.' How long ago was it that Irish immigrants were the 'blacks of Europe?' It's so very easy to forget our past, especially if the memory imposes on current pretensions. However, I'm going off the point again...

She is principally an English teacher, and as near to fluent as any non-native speaker can get. There’s still an occasional mistake, of course, like when she mentioned that the restaurant we were in had been giving out ‘flies’ to passing pedestrians to attract customers. She quickly corrected herself and she had, of course, meant ‘fliers’, but with Gunagdong eating habits, you can never be sure.

Shortly after I first arrived in China two years ago, I stopped walking when I noticed a really cute Siberian husky puppy in a pet shop window. I very much a ‘dog lover’, I freely admit, and as the sweat dripped from my nose in the height of the humid Chinese summer, I felt sorry for the puppy in his glass cage. I then noticed more puppies, kittens, an array of exotic fish and even a baby kangaroo. I couldn’t figure out what the scorpions and crabs were doing there. ‘What an odd pet shop’, I thought to myself. As I peered through some foggy air-conditioned windows to see what other animals could be seen, I noticed rows and rows of tables, the clinking of ceramic chopsticks and batallions of waitresses hovering around in regional costumes, all silk and smiles, as always. It seemed like an odd combination to me-a restaurant and a pet shop. It slowly dawned on me that the pets in the window were actually part of the menu. I felt sick to my stomach, but the puppy kept wagging its fluffy white tail, oblivious to all danger.

My vegetarian instincts told me to run screaming into the restaurant and harass the customers into feelings of abject guilt, and harangue them into bringing the pets home as a sign of remorse. The only problem with this proposition was my own shyness and the fact that I had about 10 words of Chinese at the time. I could just about say that I didn’t eat me, but the rest of my message would have difficult to convey. In hindsight, I’m not even sure there was a message to convey. The British and Americans do like to get on their high horse about cruelty to animals, and the British and Irish, in particular, like to consider themselves ‘top-dogs’ when it comes to the league of animal lovers. However, it is conveniently forgotten that factory farming is most widespread in Britain, and the cruelty of a factory farm greatly exceeds the cruelty of a Chinese one. Perhaps a factory-farmed hen would dream of being able to sit outside in a cage in a restaurant while waiting for death. At least that way, when the customer used his finger to point out his desired victim, as they often do in China, the hen could look his assassin the eye, and take the image to eternity.

In much the same way, I believe, the sterile, cold and calculating holocaust of Dacau is somehow more revolting that the torture chambers of the imperial dynasties. It is those who kill by numbers, without emotion, who shall face the worst kind of hell… especially if God turns out to be a chicken!

On our last day in Zhuhai, we paid a visit to the school we used to work in. The non-Chinese teachers we had worked with had long since flown the coop, as TEFL teachers are a migratory bird, and need to keep moving. Occasionally, they take a fancy to one place, or find a partner there, build a nest and drop an egg or two, or they grow old and return home to die, but in general, they can’t resist the call of the wind, and keep moving.

I sometimes think this need to keep moving is the natural human state. We evolved as hunter-gatherers in the African savanna, but quickly spread out to colonise the planet, more thoroughly than any species before us, and ‘home’ became wherever you laid your spear. Mass migrations continued, even though the world was long since full up. The recent colonization and conquest of the Americas is one example. Today, the third world moves north to claim its share of the pie, and borders, a very modern invention, can only delay rather than stop people moving. It is an innate desire of the species, I maintain, to move on, even though most people in our over-crowded world have to suppress this desire and are born, live and die in one place. Nomadic TEFL teachers are blessed in being able to roam freely and comfortably.

Some of the Chinese staff from the school were still there, however, and they seemed glad to see us again. In fact, much more than I had expected. They said we had left a deep impression in the heads of many of our students, which sounded a bit like we had thumped them in the skull with a hammer and left an indentation mark, but I’m sure they meant something nicer. I was genuinely sad to say goodbye again, and it takes a lot to make a cynical misanthrope like me feel like that.

Eventually, we had managed to buy a ticket out, but it involved an unwanted three hour bus ride to Guangzhou airport. In the airport, a thunderstorm came out of nowhere, just to remind us we were still in the tropics, and the rain fell so heavily that you couldn’t see out the window, which looked like a car window does in a car wash. If you peered closely enough though, you could see the planes were still taking off, dodging lightning forks in the night sky as they went.

Guangzhou airport is super modern, and makes Heathrow look like a museum piece. So much of China looks ultra modern and high-tech. It’s weird. They were eons behind the west, and then in the blink of an eye, they suddenly seemed to have leap-frogged us and become more modern. If this was a 21^st century hare and tortoise fable, we would be the hare, watching as six-million dollar tortoise, rebuilt and bionic, sprinted towards the finish line.

There is still an enormous amount of poverty and backwardness in China, of course, and I had yet to see the worst of it. Even on the bus from Zhuhai SEZ to the metropolis of Guangzhou, the eight-lane dual carriageways past peasant farmers in straw hats tilling the land by hand, with the occasional reluctant help of a water buffalo, much as they have done for centuries. Between the belching factories and the dehumanizing tower blocks, giant oxen plough the fields, and banana plantation trees sway nonchalantly. Bridges so long you can’t see the end of them cross the endless Pearl River delta with ease, as tiny wooden fishing boats try to eek a living by finding what few fish can survive its muddied polluted waters. Any fish that can survive in that deserves a break, I say, and even if they were evil fish which didn’t, I’d rather not eat them. But ‘hunger is a great sauce,’ as my granny used to say.

Rural village in Sichuan

Guangzhou airport

As always, everything was covered in mist, but the nearer you got to Guangzhou, the more acrid and polluted the air became. It looked like the smog was yellowing the mist. I could almost feel it clogging my lungs, or at least, fighting with the cigarette tar for prime real estate.

The plane, to my surprise, ignored the raging storm, and took off into the worst turbulence I’ve ever encountered. The air hostess said something in appalling English, which I couldn’t really make out, but it sounded something like, “We will be holding a Chinese funeral service shortly,” but I’m sure she meant something else. They left the lights out for the entire flight, not just landing and take off, presumably following Nirvana’s sage advice in ‘Smells Like teen Spirit’

“With the lights out

It’s less dangerous”

None of this seemed to remotely perturb the Chinese on the flight, that is, everyone except Sandra and I, and they all slept like babies.

Guilin/Yangshuo

There are few things in life more depressing than finding yourself in a Chinese bus station early in the morning. The sound of hawking phlegm; the hoards of barking Chinese tourists chaotically milling to and fro, as if war had just been declared and they only had 10 minutes to flee for their lives before the Japanese arrived; the indecipherable Chinese characters on notice boards that you can’t help looking at in the vain hope of finding where the ticket office is hidden, or suddenly and miraculously developing the ability to understand the Chinese characters; the unhelpful staff who can’t or won’t understand your pigeon Chinese (“qing-mai piao-na li”/ please-buy ticket-where”); the innumerable dodgy characters who seem to have made a profession of hanging around bus stations eyeing up peoples’ bags, like vultures waiting for a moment of weakness; filthy begging bowls being stuffed in your puss; scheming taxi drivers determined to get that fare of a lifetime by attempting to charge you ten times what they’d charge a Chinese. It’s all made worse by the hunger pangs in your stomach because you just can’t face another bowl of stir-fried vegetables covered in slime. You chain smoke cigarettes for something to do, and to keep yourself alert.

This is one of the down sides of traveling. Some claim the best part of any trip is the journey, but if bus stations were the best part of any trip, I’d never leave home!

Eventually we found ourselves in Yangshuo, which my guide book describes as legendary. The reason for its mythic status are its karsk rock formations. In other words, it contains those limestone pinnacles, those odd jutting sugar loaf type mountains you always associate with China. The entire region was once underwater, and the landscape does look oddly subterranean, except for the lack of fish, of course. In fact, from watching Chinese documentaries, you might be fooled into believing that the whole of China is covered with these formations, which of course, it isn’t.

Those Karst Rock Formations

Man in search of monkey idol

However, they are here, and in abundance-thousands and thousands of them.

They looked strangely familiar to me, and it took me a long while to figure out why. Then I suddenly realized that the memories it stirred in me were dim childhood recollections of the TV series ‘Monkey’. You know, the monkey king who was, as the theme song proclaimed:

“Born on an egg on a mountain top Funkiest monkey there ever was He knew all the magic under the sun He decided to defy the Gods And have some fun Monkey magic Monkey magic”

Monkey TV show

As a kid, I couldn’t get enough of this simian and his magic cloud, which he used to fly from place to place, and could summon it by merely blowing through his fingers. Throughout this holiday, I was often to wish I possessed the same cloud. He and his companions, Fishy and Pigsy, not to forget the sage wisdom of Tripitaka, the monk entrusted to carry the holy Buddhist scriptures from India to China, were unmissable Thursday afternoon viewing for me. Tripitaka’s philosophy of non-violence and the attainment of enlightenment through the elimination of desire left a deep impression of my pre-pubescent mind, and even though the Buddhist message was watered down for kids, it certainly put Scooby Doo to shame. Although I sometimes wonder if the grunge phenomenon of the 90’s is due in no small part to the philosophy of Shaggy, a dead ringer for Kurt Colbain.

The Monkey TV programme and its scenery kept me glued to the box, rather than out playing football, or whatever it is kids are meant to do. Every episode might have been filmed here in Yangshuo, and I kept an eye out for King Monkey, but he never showed up. Perhaps Mao had him purged, or he found himself unable to adapt to free market economic reforms. Come to think of it, the show must have been made elsewhere, as the communists were busy destroying monasteries at the time, and shows about sacred quests would most certainly have been infra dig, and liable to land you in a re-education centre/work cam. Mr Know-it-all Google has just informed me that the show was actually made in Japan! So, I guess Monkey wasn’t here at all, but I kept an eye out for him and his magic cloud nonetheless, especially just before long bus trips.

We were lucky that the mist and cloud cleared for one and we could see the hills in all their undulating glory. We took a short river trip on a small boat and tried to take it all in. CCTV 9, the government run English language TV station in China, which I found my self watching a lot through lack of an alternative, often harks on about this place, and shows pretty young westerners being hyponotised by its scenic spiritual beauty, and then deciding to spend the rest of their lives here. Personally, I think three days is enough. Geological features, I’ve always found, lose their appeal quite quickly, and already they were just becoming tall lumps of green rock, sticking up like giant spots, and there was no sign of Monkey anywhere.

CCTV 9 does give you an insight into how insular and controlled the Chinese media still is. Later in the trip, the pope died, but this was not covered by the media. It didn’t get even the briefest of mentions. On the day he died, viewers were treated to the following riveting programmes: a fascinating insight into the life of Shandon’s big-clawed bad, re-runs of a documentary about a Chinese athlete who had won a few medals in the last Olympics and would have won more if it had not been for a migraine attack, a mid-ranking party leader who had made a ‘historic’ visit to Bangladesh of all places, and promoted greater ties between the two great nations, and bilateral trade deals between American and Chinese manufacturers. The World News programmes went on and on about those wicked separatists in Taiwan who were egging the world into war by questioning the ‘One China Policy’. This was the lead story on the news EVERY day. Clearly, there was not enough time left for trivialities like the death of a pope.

To return to Yangshuo, the mountains are certainly beautiful, especially if you get to see them on foot or on a bike. My ever troublesome left foot, Sandra’s stomach pains, and the ever present threat of rain, meant that serious hiking was out of the question. However, we did manage to haul our creaking frames onto a pair of mountain bikes for a few hours. In order to avoid the hassle of having to read a map and trying to choose a good route, we took a local guide with us. It was only 5 dollars for a half day, but I’m sure I could have bargained him down to one third that figure, if only I didn’t hate haggling so much.

I’ve always disliked guides, but it was too ‘fang bien’ (convenient) to resist. What annoys me about guides is that they always want to milk you for every Yuan you’re worth, so despite my patent and grumpy lack of interest, there was a lot of the usual guide stuff, like trying to flog us unwanted tours and providing unwanted information, such as:

“This-rice field”

“This-buffalo”

“This-farmer”

“This-new department store-I have friend there-you want good Chinese silk?-I get you cheap price-big discount-you want?”

Nevertheless, every so often my steely contemptuous looks would make him shut up long enough to take in some of the scenery, which was, as they say, breathtaking. There are about 20,000 of the of these karst hill things, and they can leave you dizzy, or perhaps that was the lack of oxygen going to by brain, as it had been about five years since I was last on a bike.

You had to keep your eyes on the dirt road too, or you could find yourself sliding into a muddy ditch, or crashing into a rock and going head-over-heels off your bike and head butting a mournful water buffalo. What a way to go-trampled to death by an angry buffalo for disturbing his dinner.

Yangshuo in the mist

And some more misty Yangshuo

The town of Yangshuo is, in itself, an anomaly. I’m writing this in a café in the town’s centre, on Xie Jie, or West Street. It’s a pedestrian zone lined by innumerable cafes, with names like, ‘Minnie Mao’, ‘Drifters’, ‘Wild West’, and my personal favourite, ‘Co-Co’, which used to be called Coca Cola, until the long arm of the omnipotent corporation threatened them with a libel suit. They offer not only English menus, but also reasonably authentic Western food, a welcome rest bite from fried vegetables covered in gunk. I’ve just had a Chinese curry, which is unique in my 12 months in China, in that it actually tasted like the Chinese curry I used to have in Ireland.

The street also supports a repetitive array of souvenir stalls, in one of which I picked up a copy of Chairman Mao’s ‘Little Red Book.’ In one of his sermons, he warns about the dangers of adapting, even slightly, the centrally planned economy, arguing that even a tiny loosening of the communist controlled system would snowball out of control, and allow the Capitalist Roaders and their running dogs, not to mention rightists and reactionaries, to create an economic system based on greed, and this would destroy the socialist nature of the state within twenty years. He got that right! I wonder what he’s make of today’s China, as near as damn it to naked capitalism, red in tooth and claw.

Me and some of the guys enjoying a good indoctrination session with Mao’s Little Red Book

Yangshuo has more than its fair share of touts, and none of them are touting communism, let me tell you. As these karst rock formations are nearly unfarmable, and land here is quite poor, there’s nothing for the locals to live off except tourists, and as this was low season, there were a hell of a lot of locals trying to feed off a very limited number of tourists.

Yangshuo town-West Street

West street by day, as touts prepare to pounce-they’re meaner than they look!

Bloated ‘Foreign Devils’ are especially appealing to the Vampire Touts of Yangshuo, and I only wish ‘Monkey’ was here to protect me from them. The never ending requests to clean my boots are beginning to fray my admittedly limited temper, and the postcard touts, who seem to be genetically incapable of understanding the word “NO!!!” might just send me into a homicidal rage, worthy of my ‘Monkey’ idol.

The hotel touts are the worst. They are tenacious little devils, and they follow the weary and bewildered travellers from the bus station, hanging on to you like barnacles to an old ship, dragging you licking and screaming to their hotels and guesthouses, wearing your resistance down like dripping water will wear down a rock.

I shouldn’t complain too much though, as for only 6 dollars a night, we’ve got a really nice room, and the fact that you can’t take a shit without blocking the toilet is only a minor inconvenience. The landlady also agreed, after some negotiation, to let us have the remote control so we could turn on the heating, and I’m hoping she’ll forgive me for the piece of wood that fell off the bathroom door in my strenuous attempts to yank it open.

At this stage, I would like to give a brief description of Chinese bathrooms. They are best described as ‘functional’, in that they just about perform all the functions they were designed for. However, Chinese efficiency has led to the elimination of certain unnecessary features. Why bother with a toilet seat, for example, when you can just squat over a hole in the floor and drop your stool like a bombardier, and enjoy the innocent fun of listening to it come to a squelchy stop from a height? The ever present danger of toppling over or shitting on yourself add a touch of adrenalin-induced fear to an otherwise mundane act. And to take things one step further, why bother separating the toilet from the shower when you can combine the two by simply placing a drain in the floor? In fact, if you really wanted to save time, you could conceivably shit, shave, brush your teeth and shower all at the same time! To think of all the time I’ve wasted in my life by not doing these things simultaneously. I could have saved at least 30 minutes a day. Some quick calculations show me that I’ve wasted about 1500 hours in my life to inefficiency. If only I could turn the clock back and spend that time learning Chinese, I could thank them for their insight.

Posh Chinese public toilet-I swear this is a fancy one

This is more common

One afternoon, we went to see “Guilin’s Magical Caves-a Natural Wonderland and Heavenly Sight Transposed on Earth.” People come from all over China to see them, and as I hadn’t been in a cave since I was a mere sapling, I was looking forward to it. They were impressive, I admit, but hardly my idea of Heaven. Indeed, if heaven is a stygian cave, then what must hell be like? As so often with Chinese tourist attractions, they had attempted to improve on nature, but in so doing, ruined it. The caves had been lit up in a kaleidoscopic array of colours to make them look more spooky and surreal, but it also had the effect of making them look like something out of Disneyland. However, I seemed to be alone in this opinion, and the Chinese tourists in the flock of sheep we were being shepherded around in ‘oohed’ and ‘ahed’ right on cue. There were an awful lot of named rocks, like the ‘1000 Buddha’s Rock,’ the ‘Chicken Rock,’ or the ‘Golden Key Rock’. In the ‘Rocks that Look Like Something Else’ competition, there was some prize specimens here.

It was just after the ‘Golden Key Rock,’ that Sandra started rummaging in my bag, gasping something about a plastic bad. Even though we were at the back of the flock, I didn’t think it was a good idea to try to steal the ‘Golden Key’. For one thing, it was technically theft, and for another, the rock was about a metre long, and wouldn’t fit in the plastic bag, and what about the excess baggage charge on the next flight However, she wanted the bag for a different purpose. Just after getting the plastic bag out of my backpack, she projected some multicoloured vomit into it, and if there hadn’t been a bag, she would have had to add some more colours of her own on a nearby green stalactite, which might have become a tourist attraction in its own right to future flocks of tour groups-‘the Foul-Smelling Lumpy Psychedelic Stalactite of 2005,’ perhaps. We hung back from the rest of our group for the remainder of the tour, and thankfully the tour guides megaphone dampened the occasional retching cries of Sandra and her steadily filling bag of fried vegetable delights.

Magic Disneyland Caves

Sandra-post puke in the Heavenly Wonderland

Fortunately, Sandra made a full recovery, and that night we went to see another attraction beloved of Chinese tour groups in Guilin, the ‘Light Show.’ It has a cast of hundreds and takes place on a man-made lake. The actors use pontoons to move around the lake, but it looks like they’re floating on water. The choreography, lighting and timing are truly amazing, and I made a mental note not to miss the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. When it comes to choreographed spectacles, the Chinese are unbeatable.

Light Show-it looked better than this but the camera had problems with all the lights

Continue to second and final part