The story continues...

THURSDAY, 15JAN98
Guilin, PRC; 45-degrees F, overcast

Several months earlier, T/W had decided there were three major things we wanted to see in China (besides our family in Hong Kong and Guangzhou):

• The first was the ancient majesty of the Forbidden City and the Great Wall.
• The second was the thousands of terra cotta soldiers buried in the emperor’s tomb.
• The third was the "pokey" mountains near Guilin (see the photos—"pokey" is a pretty accurate description).

Fortunately, our planned itinerary would cover all three goals. First stop: the "pokey" mountains.

This morning our van took us about 45 minutes south to the Li River. We boarded a "dragon boat" (a diesel powered, shallow-draft barge) and began a four-hour cruise from Guilin downstream to Yangshuo.

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Along the way we saw the famous limestone peaks, numerous tiny villages, and the most daring souvenir salesmen ever (who poled their narrow bamboo rafts alongside the quickly moving barges and tried desperately to secure a line, even though a wrong footing or stray wave would have dropped them into the freezing water where they would have almost certainly died of hypothermia).

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Onboard we also had our first real "Chinese" meal—a hot pot of boiling water is placed on the table, and each person drops in chunks of meat, chicken, fish, vegetables, or tofu. We would see many of these hot pots over the next eight days.

At Yangshuo (YAWNG-shoo-oh) we walked from the dock through the market to the van, so we spent an hour or so buying souvenirs. For $5 Wendy bought a 3-foot-long painted fan (which we hand-carried for the rest of the trip!), and we sat in one alley while a young kid and his girlfriend carved her a "chop," a traditional jade seal or stamp. It was only $4, and says "Wendy" in English and in Chinese characters. It was worth $4 just to sit in the shop and talk with the young couple, who were pretty cool. He also paints T-shirts, so I bought a panda T for $3.

In contrast to these discreet and friendly merchants, Yangshuo was our first exposure to the "HELLO! HELLO!" people. Apparently the one word every Chinese hawker knows is "HELLO!" (Yeah, it’s all caps because it’s always yelled, never spoken.) A typical exchange is, "HELLO! HELLO! Postcard. Ten Yuan. HELLO! HELLO!" My father occasionally got the added respect of, "HELLO! HELLO! Big guy! Postcard! HELLO! HELLO!"

Our tour package included all meals (American breakfast, Chinese lunch and dinner), which was great, because we didn’t have to go looking. Dinner that night was at our hotel’s Chinese restaurant, and was as typical as it gets. Two years ago, Wendy and I had a long debate to answer this question: "If you had to pick only one ethnicity of food (Mexican, Chinese, Italian, British, French, Japanese, etc.), and had to eat it every night of your life, which would you choose?" I remember arguing for Chinese, because of the seemingly endless variety of dishes. Boy, was I wrong—or maybe I was right, if you let me choose American-Chinese.

Beginning with the lunch on the Li River cruise, we started a chain of meals which would vary only slightly for the next eight days. Typically, each table had a lazy susan, onto which the server would place (one at a time) a small plate of thinly sliced meat, followed by a small plate of pickled vegetables, followed by several more plates of hot stir-fried vegetables and meats. Rarely we would get steamed white rice—though never enough for the group. Often a large bowl of broth would follow, and sometimes the whole hot pot routine would be added, even though everyone was already stuffed. At the end of each meal, a small plate of fruit (orange or apple slices) would signal that it was time to go. By the last meal of our China trip, I was ecstatic if the cauliflower was slightly larger, or the cabbage was cut narrower—anything for variety. And get this—I came home from China CRAVING RICE! However, we actually ate a LOT during this trip (REAL food, I mean, in addition to all the Oreos, chocolate-covered digestive cookies, M&Ms, Dunkin Donuts, and McDonalds shakes which supplemented the diets of many in our party). Hey, we even found a Dairy Queen for Darren!

I can’t end there, however. I need to point out that the people around us—including our guide, our servers, and the hotel staff—certainly did NOT eat as well as we did, and I began to feel really bad about complaining—even to Wendy or to myself—when the food was substandard. We heard personal (and credible) stories of recent years when villages were given eight months’ food to last a full year, and of the subsequent starvation deaths of the weak. Other, less-favored villages were given three months’ food to last a full year, so imagine the horrors there. All the time we were whining about cold pancakes and only one flavor of jelly for our croissants. So while reading this travelogue please take my negative statements as simple comparisons to the comforts you and I enjoy everyday—NOT as complaints by an ingrate as he pillaged a less fortunate country.

FRIDAY, 16JAN98
Guilin, PRC; 50-degrees F, overcast
Xian, PRC; 28-degrees F, snowing heavily

This morning, after checking out of the hotel, we spent several hours touring Guilin. First stop was Fobo Mountain (one of those "pokey mountains," only this one was right downtown) for a 396-step climb to the top for a panoramic photo. It was misty and occasionally raining, but the view was great. Beneath Fobo, the river has carved a series of small holes and caves, some of which are now souvenir shops. The river laps into one cave, so that’s where a local woman sets up a bamboo raft and cormorant birds, allowing tourists to dress in traditional robes and take pictures.

From there we drove to Reed Flute Cave, the entrance of which is surrounded (surprise!) by souvenir sellers. ("HELLO! HELLO!") We let one lady sell Wendy and me our first ever camel rides! We also weren’t able to pass up buying several really cool reed flutes (thus the cave’s name) for 15-cents each, and I quickly discovered you could blow into three at once, making chords. (This would be the first time—though not the last—when my father was heard to say, "Did we have to bring Todd on this trip?" I think he was just upset because I asked him to hold the freshly licked flutes while I took a photo.)

Our guide laughed when he found out we had paid 15-cents for each flute. He says they are sold to Chinese tourists for pennies each. In fact, throughout the trip, everybody else in our party did a much better job at haggling. But I felt bad beating down the price of a three-manhour handicraft to $1.25. Once the price got well below what I was happy to pay, I’d strike a deal, probably throwing a wrench in the local economy, but maybe helping someone to actually buy that ninth month’s food. ;-)

After dodging a passing herd of water buffalo, we walked across the street and entered the magnificent cave. We’ve been into several caves before, but Reed Flute is easily the winner for size. I don’t know where it ranks worldwide, but I’m sure it’s near the top of the list. One cavern was as broad and as high as a football stadium, though no photo we took shows the scale. My favorite part was a pool of water in front of a series of stalactites which resemble a city skyline. The water is so clear and smooth that the reflection looked like a second cavern below us.

The bus stopped for thirty minutes or so at Elephant Hill, so-named because a hole eroded through the rock, which gives the hill a (stylized) "elephant" shape (you decide—check the picture). There was a guy there who asked if I would like to touch his monkey, so we all took pictures while the trained animal did a Chinese fighting pose on our extended palms.

At the airport, we found out our plane was delayed several hours due to weather. Frank got us all checked in and through passport control, and then we waited in the unheated terminal playing hearts. (Did I mention that few buildings in China are heated? I don’t mean not centrally heated, I mean NO heat at all.) We finally boarded in a take-any-seat mad dash from the bus to the portable stairs, and then enjoyed an uneventful flight to Xian (SHEE-awn). Our internal-China flights were on China Northwest Airlines, one of the Chinese government’s own airlines. Although presumably the planes are mechanically maintained to FAA standards and the inflight service was good, the onboard lavatories were like all others in China—bare, dirty, and without toilet paper, warm water, soap, or towels. Thank heavens for mom’s "China Survival Kit."

The BAe146 jet landed at Xian in a blowing snowstorm, and used neither reverse thrust nor brakes to stop the plane. Instead, the pilot just rolled the thing from one end of the long runway to the other, using the slush to slow us down. It was weird: We rolled, and rolled, and rolled, finally turning onto the taxiway and heading towards the terminal. Our checked luggage arrived covered in snow and, without heat, the terminal was FREEZING. My mom was the only person warm enough, and she had to overcome pride to keep warm.

Because our flight was late, and because the blizzard turned the normally 60-minute drive to Xian into a 120-minute drive, we missed the Tang Dynasty dinner and dancing show we had scheduled. It was 8:00pm, so our local guide, Niu (NEW), stopped at an airport hotel to feed us dinner. As would become the custom for the rest of the trip, we kept our parkas on as we sat around the restaurant table, trying to get warm by holding cups of hot, green tea (I’m sure the waitresses across China were confused at the big group of guilos who eagerly ordered tea but never seemed to drink any.) Dinner was memorable because my dad encouraged Wendy to dig into the first plate of food—thinly sliced, dried meat—saying, "Oh, good, it’s beef. Have some!" Only after we’d cleaned off the plate did Niu proudly mention that he’d served us donkey meat—somewhat of a delicacy.

Our hotel was the Xian Grand New World hotel, and was quite nice (all the hotels were top-of-the-line by most standards, although in Xian the entire 5th floor—where Wendy and I were--was without heat).

SATURDAY, 17JAN98 (A holiday in many parts of the world!)
Xian, PRC; 22-degrees F, clear

Overnight the weather had cleared, plunging the air temperature and freezing the slushy snow into one big sheet of ice. Our tour van couldn’t even drive up the slightly inclined hotel entrance, so we had to slip and slide on foot down to the street curb.

We drove west, first stopping at Banpo Neolithic Museum. After hiking though the fresh snow, we entered a covered area enclosing the ruins of a Chinese village from 4,000 BC. There were reconstructed huts, clay pots, tools, and even a few skeletons. I’m not much into archeology, but this was by far the oldest site I’ve ever visited (older than anything in ancient Rome, or even the Great Pyramids of Giza, which we hope to visit one day).

From there we drove to Hua Ching Hot Springs, where the empresses would bathe. Unfortunately, the springs were diverted hundreds of years ago, so the buildings were (quite literally) cold as ice. Hua Ching is also famous because Chiang Kai Shek, premier of China prior to WWII, was captured and jailed here in 1939 when his generals allied with generals of their opposition, Mao’s Communists, to fight together against the Japanese invaders—an alliance Chiang Kai Shek had opposed. Xian was beautiful and sunny, but freezing cold.

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The odd part was that most Chinese (except for a few children dressed by obviously concerned mothers) wore no cold-weather gear. Some men wore those fur hats with folding ears (which, of course, Warren couldn’t resist), and many wore army-style insulated trench coats, but most folks wore no hats or gloves—even though our guide assured us it was not a matter of poverty.

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The other odd part was that Hua Ching, the Xian city wall, Ming’s Tomb, most of the Great Wall, and almost all other ancient sites across China are only "five years old"—meaning that they were only restored and opened as tourist sites in the early 1990s. The Cultural Revolution of the 1970s resulted in the destruction and/or hiding of most historical sites. Everything you see in these photos is a reproduction/reconstruction of the original structure.

Not everything got destroyed, though. In 1974, some farmers were digging a well and brought up a terra cotta head. Realizing the significance of their find, and knowing what would happen to it during that period of upheaval, the farmers kept the secret for two years until the Cultural Revolution ended. Then the Qin (CHIN) Dynasty’s great tomb, encasing 6,000 (known) terra cotta figures, could be excavated.

The find was lucky—if the well had been dug ten feet away, it would have missed the very edge of the tomb. Since 1976, a large hall has been built to protect the main site, and subsequent exploratory drilling has located two additional underground tombs. The three structures contain at least 6,000 life-size, unique statues (each real, live soldier of the era modeled for his own statue). In our opinion—and certainly in that of world archeologists—this site equals the Tut tomb or the various pyramids in scale and grandeur.

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In case you’re wondering, a huge souvenir trade has sprung up, so any photos you see of us amid the terra cotta soldiers are most certainly of reproductions. There have been only two thefts from the tomb, and both times the thieves were caught (and killed!), and the artifacts returned.

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Because we had missed the Tang Dynasty show the night before, our guide, Niu, arranged a special birthday dinner for me at a nearby French restaurant. After several days of non-stop Chinese food, the five-course western meal was a welcome change. Wendy had also ordered a birthday cake, so following the standard dessert (which was already quite filling), the server brought out a HUGE birthday cake meant to serve 18 people. After blowing out the candles we asked them to serve the cake, joking among ourselves that they could just cut the cake into six pieces. Sure enough, they returned with six, HUGE slices of cake!

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SUNDAY, 18JAN98
Xian, PRC; 22-degrees F, clear
Beijing, PRC; 18-degrees F, clear

On the bus this morning, Niu answered our questions about his family. He’s from a mountain village 40 miles from Xian, where, even today, they don’t have running water (or even an outhouse—they use the bushes). He met his wife at university, and she’s from a somewhat well-to-do city family, where a maid always took care of her. Each time they go to visit his family, she must take a bus for 20 miles, a motortrike for 10 miles, and then hike for 10 miles. Needless to say, she doesn’t visit as often as he does. After a tour of a museum where they house many of the oldest known Chinese artifacts, we had lunch at the airport hotel and then boarded the flight to Beijing (this time a widebody Airbus A300).

We arrived in Beijing about 4:30pm, met our local guide, Wu (WOO), and then drove to the Peace Hotel in downtown Beijing. Our hotel was only three blocks from the Forbidden City, right next door to the largest shopping mall in China—a huge department store which held its grand opening the day we arrived.

After checking in, we took a thirty-minute bus ride to the (apparently) world-famous Qianmen Quanjude Roast Duck Restaurant. According the photos on the lobby wall, everyone from Castro to George Bush has eaten there. For those who don’t know, Beijing duck (a.k.a. Peking duck) was "invented" because Emperor Tongzhi was craving his favorite barbecue pork on a day when the palace kitchen was completely out of pigs. The chef, fearing an upset boss, used peach and apple wood to flavor some duck to taste like pork. The emperor loved it, and a new tradition was born. When that chef retired in 1864, he opened up the Qianmen Quanjude Restaurant and began serving his unique duck to the people. A full Beijing duck dinner utilizes almost every part of the duck, so that night we ate duck, duck, and more duck. After you’re REALLY getting tired of duck, the chef rolls a cart to your table and carves a whole, roasted duck for you to put into little won-ton-like sandwiches and dip into a spicy brown sauce. It was good, but I think I’ve had enough duck to last for a long time.

MONDAY, 19JAN98
Beijing, PRC 18-degrees F, clear

The nice thing about off-peak travel is having a guide, driver, and van all to yourself. Given that flexibility—and an assertive mother—we were able to make a detour this morning, stopping at the Beijing National Zoo to see the famous panda bears. It was their breakfast time, so we took pictures while they munched on apples. (Todd jumped the fence for this photo--just kidding!)

Our next stop was the Summer Palace. Each year, the emperor and family would ride a canal boat several miles from the Forbidden City to the Summer Palace, situated on a hill overlooking a large lake. In January, of course, that lake was frozen solid—solid enough for Todd to get a few feet out before Wendy (nag nag nag) made me come back to shore. It was soooooo coooooollllddddd that we took every opportunity to get warm, ducking into gift shops or even (on a tip from Scott) leaning up against the stone walls which had been warmed in the sun.

The Summer Palace is famous in China because it more or less caused the demise of the feudal system. The emperors (or, more accurately, one certain empress dowager) had kept the country in isolation, allowing it to fall behind in economic and military power. More than once the royalty had special tax-raising programs to rebuild the (completely redundant) Summer Palace after fires, etc., and one time diverted the entire military budget to pay for the palace’s huge, decorative marble boat. That lavish waste of money was enough to fuel the revolution in the early 1900s. Fortunately, our driver (whose name, when only slightly mispronounced, is the Chinese word for excrement!) has a friend somewhere in the palace guard, so we got permission to drive through the grounds into areas where tourists—Chinese or foreign—are not usually allowed.

After lunch we went to Tian An Men square. The square itself is unremarkable—just a wide area with the occasional monument. However, in addition to its fame after the 1989 student demonstrations, it is also the main access to the Forbidden City. One side of Tian An Men is that famous walled gate with the large painting of Chairman Mao—probably the most well-known Chinese image around the world. Through that gate is another well-known site, the huge courtyard where "The Last Emperor" toddled out to meet his staff at the beginning of that excellent film.

The 500-year-old Forbidden City is a several-mile-square maze of palaces, meeting halls, museums, and courtyards, and we toured quite a bit of it. W/M/S/K left about halfway through, so that they could taxi to the Beijing pearl market. Wendy and I stayed with Wu through the clock and jewelry museums, the sleeping quarters, etc. We saw what were clearly the most expensive items we had ever seen in any museum—antiquities made of gold, diamonds, jade, the even more rare jadeite, and even bird feathers. Some 10-foot-high jade carvings took three years to produce and twelve years to transport from the mountains to the palace.

As we headed back to the hotel we encountered the most complex—and hilarious—traffic congestion we’d ever seen. At one particular intersection of two-lane roads (one each way), we had cars, taxis, motorcycles, bikes, buses, and pedestrians completely and hopelessly intertwined. Even when the police arrived to try to sort things out, they would open up a space and another driver would quickly fill it in, again preventing the snarl from untangling. It was funny to see bicycles boxed in by impatient taxi drivers, cars driving down the sidewalk, and one car literally bumper-to-bumper with two busses "playing chicken"—one headed in each direction, requiring not only for the traffic to clear, but for one of the buses ("Not MY bus," of course) to back up ten feet.

The three-block ride took us over an hour, making us almost miss our 5pm planned meeting time with W/M/S/K, and worrying our guide that we would never make it to dinner on time. Finally at the hotel, 5:00pm came and went, with no sign of the rest of our group. As it stood, our guide said we’d have only 20-minutes to eat dinner, afterwards having to rush to make it to the acrobatic show on time. By 5:10pm, still no sign of W/M/S/K. Realizing that all of us would miss dinner, I persuaded Wu to write taxi directions to the restaurant and the acrobatic show, and then made sure the front desk would deliver that note when those guys got home.

At 5:15pm, Wendy and I left the hotel towards dinner. It turned out that Wu had used another connection to arrange dinner for us INSIDE the Temple of Heaven, otherwise closed at night to tourists. Because we were late, it was dark—the restaurant staff figured by now we weren’t coming—but we stumbled around until someone arrived to guide us through the blackness into a small room. The two of us sat at a table for eight, and the standard Chinese meal began. Exactly 10 minutes later—when we had barely received our main courses, the signal fruit tray arrived, along with our guide who announced that it was time to leave.

Meanwhile, W/M/S/K had arrived at the hotel, received our taxi directions, and immediately left for the Temple of Heaven. When they arrived, however, it was dark, they had no guide, and they chose not to let the taxi leave without them (which was especially smart, because by then we had already left the restaurant). Heading next for the acrobat theater, their taxi driver got lost several times, stopping occasionally to ask for help. Even though the world-standard "dumb tourist taxi detours" are also common in Beijing, they believe their taxi was truly lost, making for a long and frustrating ride for all of them.

Wendy and I, in the tour van, arrived at the acrobat theater about fifteen minutes before showtime, and waited by the front door, carefully watching each taxi that arrived, until 7:00pm, when we finally sat down. At 7:05pm, just before the show began, in walked W/M/S/K—tired, hungry, and mad (at the taxi driver, at Wu, and at me). But hey, they left the scheduled tour for a last-minute side trip which made them miss our agreed-upon departure from the hotel, and if we had waited even five minutes more, ALL of us would have had missed dinner. Call me rude, but I didn’t see how that would have been a better outcome.

Fortunately, the excellent acrobatic show cheered everybody up, and we all had a fantastic evening. If you ever have the chance to see Chinese acrobats (typically children), be sure to get tickets. (In fact, the Splendor of China theme park in Orlando has acrobats and, coincidentally, is owned by our tour agency—China Travel Service.) We saw feats of strength, agility, balance, and endurance which were remarkable for an adult—let alone a ten-year-old kid.

When we got back to the hotel, W/M/S/K walked down the block in search of dinner. It was 8:55pm, so they were disappointed that the nearby Dunkin Donuts was sold out of everything, and McDonalds was a LONG, cold way down the street.

To read about the rest of our trip, click here.

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Updated 19FEB98
Copyright Frog Prints

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