I realized after the last bloggobabble that I may be rushing you after a long day's work. So let's take a step backward to that posh-spice Peninsula Hotel I was talking about in Hong Kong. Follow me into the lobby and we'll have a fattening cream tea. Don't worry, there is no Tibetan rancid butter tsampa here:
How did that taste? Keep track, as we'll be visiting a tea plantation later, where I saw workers playing ping pong in the rain on a sheet of warped plywood with a plank turned sideways for a net.
So let's ride the bus out of Hong Kong to the airport, shall we? I won't make you look at the rumble-tumble chaos of the New Territories, which are like the townships in South Africa. No, for now just notice the giant middle-class hives that begin appearing when you get a mile or so out of city center:
You'll note that, because China is so big, and we stopped in two ports, that I'm doing two entries.
"I wanted to take up lots of room..."
Liza Lee, singing "Loom"
Our old friend, poet Charles Olson, was fond of saying that space has been important to Americans since Folsom Cave, or, if you prefer, "the get-go." Place is a made thang, but space comes as mushy and overwhelming as time. The only way to focus in is to go from the "middle of nowhere" to "now/here." Chinese sages have known this for millennia, long before Icky Toll started making money from a populace that has lost its common sense and needs reminding of "the power of ahora."
Let's think of it this way. America and China are almost the same size:
America: 9,629,091 sq miles
China: 9,596,960 sq. miles
Both countries have a lot of inhospitable land that (so far) can't be farmed. Flying over remote parts of the American and Chinese West, China would win the Death-Valley award for steep, dry mountains, and the growing Gobi Desert.
So first imagine the whole population—300 million or so—of the U.S. living east of the Mississippi (which is roughly the habitable part of China). Now QUADRUPLE that number of people, and try to imagine what it would look like. You'll see soon enough, when we enter the Bladerunner future that has already arrived in Shanghai. For more interesting factoids, try this resource:
http://www.worldfactsandfigures.com/area_country_oceans.php
On our way out of Hong Kong it may be useful to learn some Chinese. How about this key phrase:
That's much more useful than some of the phrases and sentences in Lonely Planet and the other guides. Par exemplo, in my Lonely Planet Phrasebook for Thailand, there was this phrase in Thai: "Where is your ridgeback?" What!@#$@% I saw no ridgebacks in Thailand; did they just have this phrase left-over from the South African Phrasebook, where there are ridge-backs used as hunting dogs, and decided to throw it in? But I digress...(or do I?).
We're off, with all our peccadillos, to the beauty of Guilin, home to so much Chinese painting and poetry. The Chinese have decided they need it to rake in some quick tourista yuan, so they're trying to clean it up while loving it to death. For example, instead of the nasty two-stroke cycles they're exporting to Viet Nam, as we've seen in previous entries, they insist locals use electric scooters, to keep the air cleaner. There's a lot to know and say, so I'll leave that to Wikipedia for now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilin
What you won't find there is the evil Disneyfication that has set in. For instance, when you land at the airport in Guilin, after your on-plane snack of the kind of hot dog that's been floating in the dirty dishwater pond of the vendor at Yankee Stadium for a couple of games, you hit these plastic trees, all lit-up like a Bugs Bunny Bordello:
The trauma of this gave me a flash-forward to the calming, draft Tiger beer at the broke-ass-but-comfy Astor Hotel in Shanghai:
But suck it up, for we must accomplish our main purpose—a boat ride down the mighty fine Li River, in the cora-zone of Guangxi Province. What you need to do is just drift along in the big boat, letting the vendors come close on their weeny, beautifully lashed bamboo skiffs, yelling at you to buy things. While they mostly hawk green plastic Buddhas or local carvings, you could probably get Tylenol Cold Formula, gummy bears or a toothbrush, if you had to. Anyhow, start out on the top deck, and go inside and sip hot tea when the mist and rain start to harrass your chilblains or frostbite. Here we go—woohoo!:
See what I mean, the vendors are arriving:
This whole area is built of limestone karst, which has been eroded, leaving magical camel humps of rock, with the green skin of various mixed forests:
Besides the el grande tourist boats and bamboo rafts, there are many in-between craft:
The soundtrack here is blues jung, played by the Wild Orchid Ensemble:
Here, but for a few million sperm headed in the other direction, go I—a Chinese boatman, singing strange local fishing songs!:
The mist is part of the charm, if you likey silhouettes, as me do:
Care for a quick bit of spelunking? I knew you would; let's row our boat over here, and swim in:
Here I am, the Greenman protected by that Outdoor Research rain jacket that got me dry through the Grand Canyon, keeping a close eye on the cormorants, making sure they follow tourist catch-and-release guidelines:
Let's step off at Yangshuo, okay?:
Hope you don't mind walking in the rain. I walked around in the rain on my lonesome, looking for the elusive pool table. This small city is still neo-hippie valhalla, and I found a table, but it was swarmed with young Aussies.
As always, I noted designs on gas/water covers, and those made out of pebbles in sidewalks all over this region.
I've noticed that there's a similarity to mountain towns all over the world, whether it's here or Tibet or even the fake-Swiss Leavenworth in Washington State. Perhaps it's the wooden buildings and/or balconies. Sometimes it's scary, of course, as you feel an unaccountable urge to get on your lederhosens and start yodeling!:
Perhaps you'd like to stop and get your personal seal carved?:
Is "love" untranslateable?":
More doors/windows to add to my photographic collection:
When it was time to get off the boat and onto the bus, I knew just which one I should get on:
Next we were off to an alternative medicine institute, where the herbs were not sold at yippieIkyAAAA prices. Several of the students decided to try the time-worn practice of "cupping," where glass cups are heated and applied to the skin. This causes suction and the idea is that the intense heat and pressure applied to these patches of skin draws toxins out. There are some pods on Current TV showing this, if you want to see more. The first student threw up when the first cup was applied:
Then we spent some minutos lollygagging around the (if you believe the sign) world's largest banyan tree. There it is, that sphere of green in the distance:
Let's move closer, so you can see the supports that have grown from the canopy down into the ground, to let the tree creep out:
The central trunk is a shrine full of messages:
With my love of the Green Man tradition, I thought you might like some info:
The pebble designs nearby were appropriately circular:
The next day, we visited the main university in Guilin for a lesson in Chinese landscape painting. Here's our teacher at work:
Yup, that's the traditional pic you know so well of bamboo, whose joints are made with the flourish of the hand/brush that is hard to follow:
A more careful version of this:
Marcos del Mundo took a turn, but I'd had enough of my old friend Mr. Bamboo, so did another of those mandala flowers:
Here are a few other styles of painting:
Here's one I like to entitle "The Administrator":
For an American path into Chinese painting and poetry, try Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End. You might also like Werner Speiser's The Art of China: Spirit and Society.
Cowboy up!: we need to move on to the city park. The good news, spring flowers, including azaleas, rhodies and others you would recognize:
And there was an amazing "marimba" made out of interestingly tuned rocks:
The bad news: a city zoo with bored, broken animals, like this camel that was trying to chew the steel bars in two toward his freedom:
If you listen quietly, you can hear this panda saying to herself, "I WILL not wake up. I WILL not wake up.":
Isn't this stagnant water beautiful:
But onward and upward, we need to skedaddle to a chair lift that will take us high into a freezing mist and high winds and no chance of a view. I drew the chair with our guide, "Cherry," whose real name in Chinese is pronounced: "@%%&&*(." Because I weighed A LOT, and she was about as heavy as a peacock feather, our chair lift slanted up the mountain. Neither of us had rented the fake Red Army parkas, so we froze together, doing push-ups (okay, only I did push-ups, 20 at a time) on top of the mountain to stay warm until we could ride back down. A few faculty sat this one out, as their vertigo didn't like riding several hundred feet above the forest on rickety chairs:
I suspect you're getting thirsty by now, so let's go to my tea plantation, where the Greenman will harvest some green tea for you:
I do my best to oversee the constant harvest:
The names/kinds of teas mostly have to do with the way they're harvested, rather on kinds of plants. Here's a first step:
But let's have a cup, shall we? Remember to hold your cup the right way, and drink three times:
I know you're getting anxious after all that stimulation, so we'll head for the famous Reed Flute Cave. Be prepared, it's tricked out with lighting that makes it look like a Disney hooker, if the old roadies for the days-gone-by Grateful Dead were still on tour and in charge of things:
It IS a monstrous cave, and when the lights go completely out every once-in-awhile, there is a sense of total darkness that everyone should experience. Plus, there's a sign that can prepare you for your future rendezvous with Wow-Ming. I wish I'd known how to say this to him when I met him getting out of the Rockets' bus in Portland:
Not far from the cave, we stopped to visit some pearl merchants. China has some of the finest pearls in the world—here are some I couldn't afford to buy any of you:
Let's head back to Shanghai. The MV Explorer was docked on the river with this view of the bulbous TV tower:
Here's just the kind of hair-brained scheme I would want to turn into a business, which seemingly works. This boat has a behemoth screen, and stops to play movies for various buildings or yachts along the way. It can also show ads:
I'll try to give you an idea of what it's like to move around in a city that would hold several versions of NYC:
Near the river there's construction everywhere, as the city races to reconfigure itself for some world championships in a couple years—the equivalent of China preparing for the Olympics in Beijing last year:
It used to be that the bike was king in China, and it was an aphorism that you weren't a Beijinger until you'd had your bike stolen at least three times. Now these are sad relics, used only by the poor or old:
Near the pier where we were is the older part of Shanghai, with its German influence looking sooty and bleak, but European:
Does this sign signal a startling number of late-night jazz trumpeters adding to the white noise, or a blatant attempt to silence Tommy Pynchon's Tristero?:
There's not much graffiti, but I did see this:
As always, I collected photos of doors, gates, window grilles and other designs:
Here's a painting of what the river/harbor looked like in colonial times:
On our last day, I went to the Children's Palace, which is a bit like the juku (after-school school) in Japan. Children dance, like this:
They learn to play traditional musical instruments like this:
And they paint like this (eat yer heart out, Jess):
Out walking on my lonesome, I set out for you-know-what, and found it when I saw this cheeseball sign; alas, the two pool tables stood tempting me, behind closed doors. I had to think back to playing in Hong Kong, in the Whale Pub:
It's best to say hasta la vista to Shanghai by night, when you can't see the leathery gray air that lodged in my lungs, making me one sick little doggie (still haven't completely recovered):
As you'll recall, I really didn't say much directly about the title of the entry on Viet Nam, but a younger generation there has some amnesia about the Viet Nam War, while older citizens seem to remember it in ghostly terms. The same might be said about China, where a younger generation is focussed neither upon the religion that was mostly taken away under Mao, nor the Second World War, which was something before their time. It's harder to tell about what they may or may not know about Tin-in-Man Square.
But you'll notice that this entry didn't really point to the factories in its title, which are being re-located outside the major cities, when possible. But their ghostly presence was everywhere in the air pollution. Try to imagine 800 coal-burning plants going online without inspection in just a few months last year.
But it's important to remember that, in between the two, titanic, rolling brown-out clouds of pollution in Southeast Asia and China, there exists a miniscule sample of what China once was. In 2001 I saw a tracery of it at the Golden Dragon Temple at Wudang Mountain. There, above the clouds, on a balcony that was the extension of homes built into bedrock, and looking out over hundreds of acres of wooded hills, I was surrounded by thousands of butterflies a foot across, with black, mohair wings covered in huge orange spots, as I did tai chi. These worlds still almost co-exist, but the gap is closing fast.
Hopefully we'll see our enormous carbon footprints disappear ahead of us in the near future.
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