If only I had followed John Collier's wise words in his comments to my last blog and blogged at a more frequent interval and I might not be kicking myself now at having lost most of my china pictures!!
These were in my camera which somehow got mislaid in my last day in Beijing. I take some consolation from the fact that those parts of china that I visited contained not too much worth photographing (often being obscured by smog where it was) and for the two places that did, Beijing's summer palace and the nearby great wall, you will find a couple of web links added to show what they look like. As I soon found, the term beautiful Chinese city is often a paradoxical term. Hangzhou and Suzhou for example are rated as the most beautiful of China's cities and for all but a small part I found this patently untrue.
Whilst they are not beautiful, most of the Chinese city's visited were interesting for one reason or another. Shanghai for example is advancing rapidly and rivals Hong Kong as the business centre for the People's Republic. Particularly impressive was the world beating Maglev train, which whisked me at an exhiliarting speed of up to 430 km per hour (I did have the photo to prove it..) from downtown to the airport, a distance of over 30km in just eight minutes. Built jointly by the germans and the chinese the train can apparently reach speeds of over 500 km per hour. Just think, if it were introduced in the UK we may be able to travel from say Birmingham to London in just over 30 minutes which would allow greater choice to many of us as to where we lived.
In many parts of China, I haven't come acoss many travellers and consequently I have had quite a bit of time to think. Mostly thats been positive but sometimes simple questions can pre-occupy one's mind for longer than they should. A silly example of this which arose after visiting a musuem is whether the Bronze Age preceded the Iron Age or vica versa.
I have also been able to spend quite a bit of time reading and one book that I am currently reading is Paul Therouux's Riding the Iron Rooster which is about a year spent travelling around China on its trains. Whilst reading it, I thought of the contrast with Bill Bryson who has also written a number of travel books. Brysons's sunny optimistic style was ideally suited to travel around Australia. Theroux it has to be said does not suffer from sunny optimism in fact his generally pessimistic view of human nature grates after a time and I found his book hard going in parts, however his conclusions are well supported and I found myself agreeing with him more often than I did when reading Bryson, who I sometimes felt lazily accepted general stereotypes eg in his conclusions on Canberra and more obviously his book on the UK, Notes From A Small Country.
Another book I have read on China also whilst in China was by Hugo De Burgh. China Friend or Foe..? Its an ok sort of book ....although it doesn't answer the question posed .....in that it covers a large area but I disagree with his simple acquiesence with China's lack of democracy. He suggests that China will soon overtake the US to become the world's leading economic power but in the absence of democracy I cant see that there is an effective mechanism to test whether those leading the country are and continue to be up to the job. Don't wish to appear to be categorical (but I will be on this point) without democracy prosperity is unsustainable.
You will see that I have changed the travelogue's title to Travels and Thoughts which more accurately reflect its contents, moving onto the travel bit, you maybe interested to know that the Madagascar TaekwonDo Team were staying in the same hostel as I was in Beijing. They were taking part in the World Championships which were underway at that time. You will all no doubt have heard that the Olympics are to be held in Beijing next year (and there is a huge amount of building, cleaning and general polishing going on which includes Mao as his mausoleum is now closed until September. Also closed for refurbishment was the People's musuem In Tainnamen Square and a sizeable part of the Forbidden City) but you may not be aware that the FIFA World Women's Championships is also being held in China during September.
Also exchanged views with a couple of welsh women who I met at the hostel and an australian who I met on a tour of the Great Wall. He was intending to set up an IT business in China as well as become an english teacher albeit without any knowledge of Chinese. This is easy to do apparently as he had done it previously in Japan. He had some interesting things to say and we had a good session in the Tree which is the best bar I've been to in Beijing for having a session. .
Left Beijing behind last Saturday and since then have been through Mongolia, stayed for just one night which was far too short a time at a ger hut on the mongolian plain; taken a good look around Ulaan Bhataar and had a couple of days here at Lake Baikal. Will cover this in more detail in the next entry which I write. In the meantime, a link to the travel company website and some photos are attached which I hope you enjoy.
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