The End

We've come to our last day in China. This morning we visited a park where the locals come to sing, dance, and visit. Some of them do calligraphy using water brushes on the concrete.

Here is Steph in the rose garden.

Later we went to the market and Steph bought cherries.

Then we visited a Confucius temple.

We had a great time in China but are ready to come home. I'll put pictues and video on my web site www.asilo.com/china in the next couple of weeks.

Shanghai

We cruised into Shanghai this morning and left the boat after our 6 day journey down the Yangtze river. We went to the fantastic Shanghai Museum which is one of the best we've seen. I took many pictures, here are some samples:

I especially like the expression on the guy's face. Then we had a tea ceremony which was informative and tasty:

Later in the afternoon we checked into our lovely hotel perfectly situated on the Bund.

We also got the best meals of our visit so far.

Nanjing

Today we stopped in Nanjing, our last top before the end of the cruise in Shanghai. We visited the Dr. Sun Yat Sen Mausoleum, he was the founder of the Chinese republic. Normally you would expect a great view from a high spot like this but the haze reduced visibility.

It is in large beautiful park and it was nice to walk among trees.

Tomorrow is the end of our cruise. We dock outside Shanghai in the morning, tour the city, then check into the hotel. We're doing dim sum with a local guide, pictures tomorrow.

Yellow Mountain

Today we took a bus ride for 2 1/2 hours from the boat to the Yellow Mountain. This area is the inspiration for many famous Chinese paintings. The area is beautiful but hard to capture in pictures.

This is a classic Yellow Mountain painting.

There were a lot of steps going up and down on the mountain and they offered to carry people (for a price).

Massive Population Changes in China

I haven't seen this reported in the Western press, but China is going through an unprecedented massive population shift. When I looked for it today I found this NY Times article from a year ago.

We have seen amazing building booms in every city - hundreds of huge apartment buildings being built one after another. I heard a lecture on the boat the other day that explained why - China has decided to relocate 250M farm peasants from the countryside to cities over the next 12 years. The problem that Chinese authorities is trying to solve is that the family farmers have tiny farms which are not enough to lift them out of poverty because there is no economy of scale like mechanization of farming, something that has happened naturally in the US over the past century. The Chinese need to aggregate these small family farms into large factory farms and move the rural families to the cities where they (hopefully) will move into the consumer middle class.

Since everything is centrally planned in China, this can't happen organically over the years like it did in the US, it must be centrally mandated and planned. Of course there are many problems, like corrupt local governments that steal the money that the peasants were supposed to get for their farms leaving them with no money to buy the apartment in the city that the are being forced to move to.

Anyone who thinks that China is going to soon rule the world doesn't understand the tremendous internal problems (like horrible pollution) that China will be dealing with.

Food Frustration in China

One of the downsides of traveling with a large group (over a hundred people in this group) is that food becomes a difficult logistic matter. They can't take massive numbers of people to small local restaurants so we end up being taken to buffet restaurants in hotels. Except for one occasion, we have not eaten an authentic Chinese meal. When we were in Xi'an for lunch we took a taxi to a dumpling restaurant described in my Chinese guide book which seemed authentic. Other than that our meals have been mediocre.

We are determined to change that when we get to Shanghai on Friday. It means going off without the tour group, and we've seen that the authentic local restaurants are too daunting for us to handle on our own where no one speaks English, so we have arranged for a local tour guide to take us out for meals while we are there.

I'll take pictures and provide descriptions when we get some authentic Chinese restaurant experience.

Wuhan

The boat stopped in Wuhan today, mostly because it was the city we reached by mid day on our way down the river. Amy and decided we were more interested in walking around the city while Steph & Andree went on the boat tour of a local museum and other sites.

As we walked along we saw this bar but it was too early to stop and have a drink:

We saw this couple having their pictures taken:

We stopped and had a drink at the Hot & Crazy Sugar Daddy.

We walked through areas that were definitely not western tourist areas but still there was a lot of English on signs. I've read that Chinese authorities are disturbed about the leakage of English terms into common use (like "Wifi") and are working to define Chinese equivalents. I remember that France had a similar fit about English leakage some years ago.

Three Gorges Dam

Today we visited the Three Gorges Dam. We had watched 3 documentaries about this dam before coming here and had heard much about it. But it is just a dam, and made less impressive by the fact that the weather was very hazy and this being the dry season no water was pouring thru the dam (unlike all the pictures and video we had seen). Here is the best picture I could get:

This picture looks much more impressive, taken of the model they have in the visitor center:

Our ship had to go through multiple locks to pass through the dam:

All of us on the scenic overlook.

Two of the Three Gorges

Our boat on the Yangtze is a bit old and has seen better days but is the only one to go all the way down the river to Shanghai. Most ships stop at the dam (we'll see tomorrow) and people fly to Shanghai.

Today we went thru 2 of the 3 famous gorges of the Yangtze. The weather was hazy and it occasionally rained so it doesn't look as impressive in the pictures as it was to see.

We were able to enjoy the view from our front deck, which was really a treat.

In the afternoon the ship stopped to let us take a couple hour tour of the Shennong Stream, a tributary of the Yangtze which has similar gorges but smaller and more intimate.

During the night we pass through the locks for the dam and in the morning we visit it. 

Yangtze River

Today we left Xi'an and flew to Changqing to board the boat cruising down the Yangtze River. We have a nice suite on the boat:

Our visit to Chongqing was very short, the hour drive from the airport to the boat. During that time we had a local guide telling us about the city (which we didn't actually see much of). She proudly told us that the city was the largest in the world, which was a surprise since none of us had ever heard of it. I immediately googled it and found that in 1997 some enterprising local Chinese official had the idea of enlarging the boundaries of the city of about 5M to the size of Austria (!) so that the "city" was the largest in the world. No list of the largest cities in the world falls for this.

Terracotta Warriors

Seeing the Terracotta Warriors is the highlight of any visit to China. If you don't know the story of these warriors - who made them and why and how they were found - then you should definitely look it up. It is hard to appreciate the scale from these pictures, it is a huge place with thousands of figurines.

The attention to detail is amazing. No two figures have the same face.

Steph has seen these before but is always amazed.

After a good lunch at a place that specializes in dumplings we walked through the many small shopping streets.

Hopefully you can read the sign on the left that says "Massage by the blind".

Xi'an & the Presidential Suite

Today we left Beijing and flew to Xi'an, famous for the Terracotta Warriors. We'll see those tomorrow, today we visited the Yangling Mausoleum which includes an excavation of the tomb of a Han-dynasty emperor who followed the dynasty that created the full size terracotta warriors. This emperor made miniature terracotta figurines representing servants, domesticated animals, eunuchs, and other aspects of ordinary life instead of focusing on the military aspect.

The biggest (and most pleasant) surprise was our getting upgraded to the presidential suite in the hotel:

The person in charge of the tour here is Dutch and immediately asked about Stephanie's name (Bergsma). She had been told that the presidential suite was available to the tour group and so she needed a party of four (there are two bedrooms in the suite) so the fact that there are four of us and Steph having a name of Dutch origin clinched the deal. This is a huge place, the pictures here only show a part of it.

Great Wall & Summer Palace

Today we visited the Great Wall of China, something everyone has seen pictures of. It took almost 2 hours to drive from the hotel in Beijing to the most popular (and renovated) part of the wall. It looks just like the pictures, though a steeper climb then I expected. I got up to the first high point (there were further ahead) and took this picture:

Then we went to the Summer Palace which is not a palace in the western sense but a park where the royals went when it got to hot in the Forbidden City. There is a large man made lake which provides the cooler temperatures. Some parts of this park were apparently developed using naval money so this ship was built from marble as part of the development:

Here are Steph and Amy in the Summer Palace:

Tiananmen Square & Forbidden City

Today was a pretty standard tourist day in a big city with a large tour group visiting historic sites. I'll bet that sounds exciting. First Tiananmen Square which is big (largest public square in the world) and crowded, but not very exciting:

We had a good tour guide and for the first time we used modern technology - we each had a receiver with an earpiece and the guide used a microphone and a transmitter so we could easily hear her over the noise of the crowd.

The Forbidden City had some interesting architecture.

Afterward we got to go off and have lunch on our own. We found a great place and had some interesting dishes like honey fried anchovies:

Arrival

We arrived at about 3pm local time on Monday (12 midnight CA). The flight was fine though hard to sleep in the afternoon, so we're pretty tired. Tonight we're on our own so we'll look for a nearby restaurant. We start again at 8am heading to Tiananmen Square and other places around Beijing.

Our bus ride from the airport to the hotel:

Our room and the view from the window, showing old and new.