Towards the Yangtse
Chongqing,
Chongqing,
China
Friday, May 23, 2008
After the Sanya wedding party myself and Dave hung around for a few days more just doing nothing but reading on the beach and soaking up the atmosphere of strutting Russians in their Speedos and thongs. I have to say I never really sussed them out. Many of them actually seemed to live in Sanya which with its Russian supermarket and fur shops is as close to Moscow as you can get. Our hostel seemed to be full of Swedish and Finnish nurses...now how many times have I gone on about coach loads of Swedish nurses following me around the world and now they are here...if only they had been prettier and if only I could have been arsed talking to them.
I did go for a walk one day along towards the underground nuclear submarine base that the Chinese are apparently building under Sanya but only got as far as the construction site for the next batch of up market resorts. More interesting that the resorts themselves were the squalid conditions that the workers were living in. Whole families seemed to live on a bunk about 4 feet across and I actually saw rats scampering around with my own eyes. Not a nice sight.
So, eventually we managed to drag ourselves away from all that was Sanya. I have to say that we saw very little of Hainan Island as it was so easy just to rest and relax. It's a funny thing this traveling malarkey as you tire yourself out so much running around like an idiot that there is actually little time for relaxing. I actually felt like I needed a holiday after all those train journeys and the hectic schedule of the wedding. So we exchanged a couple of books and spent time lying on the beach reading and swimming. I was quite happy to be in be by 9pm each night even though Dave suddenly seemed to have got over the nightclub night at last and wanted to get out an in amongst it again. As it turns out fun was off the agenda anyway as a 3 day mourning (for the earthquake victims) had been announced and mourning in China means all fun is banned. In reality this equates to internet café's being closed, hotmail being blocked etc. We even tried to have a game of pool one night and were told that was not allowed; eating and drinking were still allowed fortunately.
It turned out to be cheaper (35 quid all in for a 2 hour flight with a glass of orange and some biscuits) and much much easier (i.e. 40 hours and 2 trains less) to fly from Sanya to Chongqing, our next destination. The only issue was the flight didn't leave till late at night so we had to hang out on the beach or the InTime resort all day (I sneaked in for the afternoon to the resort). For our final meal in Sanya we went for the point and I'll have the same as that approach which resulted in us eating a chili laced dish of either sparrow or rat no idea which...it was nice except for the tiny bones everywhere...
This was the 1st time I had used an internal flight in China and it was an interesting experience. Fortunately the plane was a Boeing number so at least I felt safe. When we were coming into land people just started ignoring the seat belt warnings from the staff and started standing up left right and centre doing things like taking their luggage out the racks as the plane was making its decent. Madness.
Backpacking in China can be so easy if you chose it to be; we had booked ourselves into a hostel in Chongqing and they asked if we wanted collection from the airport so on arrival there was a lovely little girl from Tibet waiting for us. She whisked us off to a car and even stopped to buy some food. She got some pigs ears (which she made into a lovely noodle dish for us when we got back) and got us some pig liver to snack on. I have never had pig liver before (well probably have but in the context of sausages that I never knew about) - it was lovely and even sort of tasted a bit like bacon tainted liver.
The hostel in Chongqing was a gorgeous new affair. For 8 quid a night we had a big room with a balcony overlooking the river. It also had a massive sitting room with sofas, DVD's and pool table. With free WIFI etc it was definitely the kind of place you could spend a month writing your next book or your CV...instead I spent my 1st day trying to download the Utd-Chelsea game that I had missed the night before (10 years I have been in Manchester and have managed to be in Asia for both times they have won the European cup. The reason for Chongqing (one of China's largest cities) was to get on a boat cruise down the Yangtze to the Three Gorges Dam but when we arrived it was like monsoon season so we didn't even make it outside the hostel the first day. The staff in the hostel were all just fantastic. They were mostly extremely pretty young female Chinese students who were working and living there to improve their English. Basically when they finished work in the evenings they just wanted to sit down with you and learn how they should compliment people from the UK and such sweet things. I went up to talk to the young guy who was working at the bar one night just to chat some English with him, on asking him what he was up to he explained that he was reading the English dictionary...Yes, he was halfway through B reading and trying to memorise every word in the Oxford English Dictionary. I opened the 1st page of the dictionary and tried to point out to him that even a native English speaker did not know about 30% of the words and really hope he took this on board and went out and got himself a girlfriend. China's obsession with learning English is somewhat bizarre. Bookshops have entire floors devoted to nothing else and it is the aspiration of every educated young person you meet. Did you know that the most watched TV series in the world ever is a BBC English language program called 'Follow Me' - every episode was watched by 700 million people?
The girl (Yi Yi) who had met us at the airport seemed eminently friendly so when we were leaving for tea in the evening I asked her if she wanted to come along. She jumped at the chance which turned into a bit of a god send in the end as she took us on a bus to an ace little local place. Hotpot is a local delicacy can now take the mantle for the unhealthiest food I have ever eaten; beating deep fried pizza and chips from outside Queen Street Station in Glasgow. Hotpot is basically a big vat of boiling oil into which loads of chilies and this spice called Ma is added (Ma is the hottest, weirdest spice I have come across; apparently dentists even use it due to its mouth numbing qualities). When the vat is sufficiently hot you can add various things to it...various things being chicken wings, spam (yes, deep fried spam), beef, beensprouts etc. Now then, everything comes out of the vat dripping with 200oC ultra-spicy grease so what do you have to dip things in...a nice big bowl of sesame oil to which you add some garlic and salt. I tell you after an hour of eating this I felt like one big grease ball. Dave, on the other hand, just started to half close his eyes and smile passionately at Yi Yi every time she glanced in his direction. And so it was to continue for the next few days...not sure if this technique works back home but I have certainly never experimented with it myself.
After tea Yi Yi made us go shopping with her for some unknown reason. She was after a dress but in the end I was the only one to buy anything, getting a fine new shirt. I just love shopping in China, as usual every shop has more staff than customers who just follow you around like they haven't seen a customer since the revolution. But unlike this kind of service in the UK which I would just detest I can have a right laugh with the young Chinese assistants, usually just saying lots of hellos and pretending I can speak Chinese until they outfox me after 6 words are exchanged.
Back at the hostel I had to make a couple of phone calls to try and cancel my flight from India but in the end there was no benefit so I now have a flight from Delhi to Manchester on 26 Nov 2008 to use if I happen to be in India around then. By the time I had come back downstairs Dave had gone from the bleary eyed staring to bleary eyed staring with gentle patting and petting with Yi Yi. In the end I left him to it and went to bed but as I suspected he never really got anywhere anyway.
Yi Yi also seemed to be in charge of trip booking; in fact I now suspect that her only job in the hostel was to befriend you and coax you into booking some trips with her. For the 1st time in China this was pretty convenient as we actually did wish to book a trip down the Yangtze to the Three Gorges. She had an ultra confusing book of trips but in the end we settled for a luxury 3 day cruise with a few stops thrown in for just over a 100 quid. As we were now going to stay in Chongqing for more than the planned one night we tried to get the next part of the trip to go like clockwork which meant booking into a hostel in Wuhan after the trip and sorting out onward train tickets. As I have said before train tickets can only be bought in the province that the train originates from so to book from Wuhan we needed to transfer money from Chongqing. This involved a trip to the Bank of China....I can now understand why the Bank of China has so many massive offices throughout the country...efficiency may be an issue.
In the UK to transfer some money would simply involve logging onto a PC and typing in the recipients account number in sort code. In the worlds next superpower you fill in a form, get a ticket, stand in line till your number is called, get told the form is wrong in some way and return to go...and then loop this around 6 times over the course of 2 hours. Of course some of this may have been down to Yi Yi's inefficiency (as the days developed Yi Yi went from being a very smart Tibetan girl who could speak 4 languages to a weird, half daft con artist; but as this developed it only seemed to enhance Dave's puppy dog attraction to the girl) but certainly not all of it. In fact attempt 4 was rejected on the basis that Yi Yi had written the form in Chinese (as expected), Dave had written his name in English (as expected) but Dave's phone number had been written by Yi Yi in her hand writing. It all worked out in the end but I never found out if Yi Yi did actually rate the jobsworth employee using the little buttons in front of his desk (which then light up some little stars like a McDonald's employee).
We were staying in Ciqikou which was about 10km out of Chongqing itself and was a bit of an old town of rickety old houses propped up next to rickety old factories making all manner of rubbish. Wandering round it was a total maze and quite a few times we ended up in someone's yard/kitchen and get pointed back down another alley by friendly Chinese punters who lived there. Chongqing downtown is a different affair altogether. Chongqing is one of the biggest cities in China and is actually the fastest growing city (in terms of square meters being built and population growth) in the world. I have never seen anything like it. What is different about Chongqing is that people live everywhere, where there would be skyscrapers with banks in the centre of any other cities in Chongqing there are skyscrapers just full of flats. And Chongqing is a city that is just full of blocks of flats, there must be thousands of them and hundreds more being built. Apparently the Chinese authorities have announced plans to move another 4 million people into the city by 2020 in addition to the 1.5 million already resettled from the 3 Gorges Project in the last few years. I have no comprehension of what all these people do. On street corners you see blokes wanting to be rented out as painters (with a roller on their shoulder) or as porters (who you see walking the streets with washing machines on their backs). And besides all the massive new opera house and Gucci shops you can see people who work in the docks living three to a bed in wooden shanties. Chongqing clearly has a rough side to it, going home on the bus at night we passed many red windows brothels, but I have to say I liked it. It was the real China, going places but rough at the edges, world's next superpower in one breath but 3rd world in the next.
We only actually stayed in Chongqing 2 nights but it felt like much more and would have been much more if we could have. There were not many people staying in the hostel. On our second night we sat with some Israeli girls who actually had some sensible things to say about the Israeli issue which was very refreshing. After they went to bed we played cards with the girls who worked there. Now this was just bizarre. They had all dressed up and had clearly sat around all night waiting for us to be free to do something with them. So we played cards till 3am but then thought we best go to bed. No sooner than we were in bed than one of them knocked on our door to say they were making some French fries and could we come down as they didn't know how to make Western food. This was very forward for a young Chinese girl as they are normally too nervous to speak to you. So in the end we stayed up till 5am with them asking questions such as 'do you have free love in your country' but it was clearly going nowhere else and in the end we ran off to bed.
It really was a shame to leave Chongqing in the end after such a short time and meeting so many nice people. I would definitely like to go back one day although if a pandemic is to wipe out the human race its surely going to kick off in a high density living place like Chongqing so maybe I won't rush back.
