Day 25 - Saturday, Nov. 9 - to Guilin

Countryside

Another early start.  We’re off - by high-speed train - southeast to Guilin.  I won’t be needing the little card the hotel gave me to show a cab driver that says, in Chinese, “Please drive me back to my home in Chengdu” and then the hotel’s address.  Good-bye, toilet seat that lifted automatically when I turned on the light; so long, self-opening window curtains that welcomed me home with a “show’s starting!” touchbutton.
       The railroad station is on the outskirts of Chengdu - much easier, I’m sure, than running this new line through the high-rises.  They check passports here, as they do in the hotels.  Big Brother is watching.  As we wait, a family with their one-son-only eats his morning noodle bowl off their suitcase.  Then dad plays with him while mom mans her smartphone.  I can’t help but think that this child’s China has little in common with dad’s, and dad’s has little to do with grandpa’s, which was certainly very different!  What changes two generations have seen!
       The aerodynamic train looks like a more pointy-nosed version of France’s high-speed train.  (I’ll see old trains on side tracks that look like the squared American ones.)  We board and say good-bye to Kari, our local guide, who’ll stay behind in her hometown.  As for punctuality... the clock hand moves from 8:19 to 8:20, the doors close and we pull out of the station.  We’re off from Chengdu to Guilin.  Six or 6½ hours, with only two stops.  And yet we travel at between 190 and 245 km/hr (118-152 mph).
       To achieve that, when creating a totally new rail line (only ten years old), the Chinese seem to have measured the altitude at the point of origin and the altitude at the destination, then just drawn a straight line between the two.  No curves.  And mostly tunnels.  Mountains be damned!   I’d seriously say 60% of the trip is in one tunnel or another.  In between, we get glimpses of those mountains, plus farmland and forest.  The farmland starts out with small garden patches on land along the tracks in the city.  (In France those plots would be given to retired railroad staff.)  These mountains may still have pandas, but they’re too remote to be part of the Green Great Wall Stanley told us about up north, trees planted annually by Chinese citizens on a sort of Arbor Day every March 15.

       The fog lifts a bit but the sky stays grey.  We pass massive hothouses and some rice paddies.  (We’re headed northwest to southeast, from wheat country to ricelands.)  We also cross areas that show “the old China”:  dirt roads, trails on hillsides, traditional one-story houses in small hidden valleys.  And the architecture changes:  the houses are dark wood instead of white adobe and roof tiles are green, not dark red.  In contrast to this are multiple construction projects almost everywhere:  half-built highways, pillars over valleys for railroads or bridges, concrete vertical trunks awaiting a raised roadbed... with crews working Saturday.
       We pass a town-city being built... the factory first, then streets, then houses.  In the countryside (what we see of it), there are steep slopes being reforested, either to control erosion or grow citrus.  Who carries those seedlings all the way up there?  In other places, leaves are turning yellow.  The outside temperature goes from 16°C to 14° then 20° and finally 24° (60-57-68-75°F).
       At Chongqing, a mother gets on with her 5-year-old daughter.  They share the seat next to me.  It’s fun watching them play rock-paper-scissors, which I didn’t know was an international game.  When we get off at Guilin, after only one other stop (Guiyang), I leave them my seat by the window.  The little girl waves and says “bye bye”, coached by Mom.

Outside the station in Guilin, we meet our local guide, Sonny.  He offers us a little cookie made with the osmanthus plant (plumeria), for which the town is named (Guilin = osmatis forest).  Along with mandarin oranges and kumquats, it grows well in this subtropical climate.  (We’re at the same latitude as Miami, near the Tropic of Cancer.)

       Along the road are mountains of karst, the same rocks we will see along the river tomorrow, and for which the region is famous.  We’re headed to the Reed Flute Cave at the top of one of them, open to the public since 1962.  We take the-little-train-that-could up to the top (“I think I can, I think I can...”) and walk for an hour through the cave’s chambers.  It’s strikingly beautiful inside, and dry, seeing as the monsoon season is over.  The only problem is the crowds - which Stanley says never happened before... but it is Saturday.

Elephant Rock

       Guilin is a small town - population only 1 million - with several ethnic minorities:  Yao, Dong, Zhuang, Miao.  It used to have a city wall around it, like Xian, but that is now gone.  We weave our way past camphor trees whose fragrant wood is used to make furniture and especially hope chests for girls.  And past banyans whose multiple limbs provide much-needed shade in summer when temperatures can reach 100°F (40°C).  There’s also a thinner relative of Spanish moss growing from some trees.
       Half of us get off the bus to view Elephant Rock; the rest go directly to the hotel.  Big mistake on our part!  Although it’s a lovely site - a huge hill shaped like an elephant with a trunk and 600-year-old pagodas on top - there’s going to be a marathon tomorrow and lots of runners and spectators have come.  Traffic jams everywhere in this center of town.  (At best of times, Chinese traffic is just a giant game of chicken.)  It takes 1½ hrs for what should have been a 10-minute tour and a 15-minute drive.
       So it’s off to bed for me.  I eat lunch leftovers - potato chips, a banana and the osmanthus cake... and I’m in bed by 9:30.
       Tomorrow only the river.

Guilin

Day 24 - Friday, Nov. 8 - Chengdu & pandas

Dujiangyan Giant Panda Base

Xi Ming  born 1993

Yue Yu born 1993

The province of Sichuan (pronounced “citron”) in southwest China has 80% of the world’s pandas, and we’re off at dawn to see them at the Dujiangyan Giant Panda Base 2½ hours away by bus, into the mountains.  This facility is run by the Chinese Conservation and Research Center for Giant Pandas.
       First, a bit of history.  Chinese emperors have had pandas for millennia.  The first Westerner to see a panda was probably a certain French scientist who asked a hunter to capture a live one to take back to France, but a dead panda was delivered.  When he asked what happened, the Chinese hunter said it had become “naughty” on the way down the mountain and had to be killed (a lesson used to this day by Chinese parents on their unruly children).  The carcass of that naughty panda is still in the Natural History Museum in Paris.
       Pandas live at an altitude between 5,000 and 10,000 feet (1,500-3,000 m), according to the season.  Males weigh around 250 pounds (113 kg), females under 200 lbs (90 kg).  They only weigh 100 grams at birth, the weight of a stick of butter, and are white with long tails, much like rats.  By the time they’re one, they weigh 80 pounds (36 kg), and almost 100 pounds (45 kg) by age 1½.  They’ll live to age 25 in the wild and about 30 in captivity.  The oldest panda here at the base was born in 1991, so he/she is 28.
       The reason why pandas are disappearing is human incursion.  Man has either cut down the forests where they live or expanded into their territory.  But the panda’s own biological make-up is also a factor.  They mate sometime from late March to late May, with the female climbing a tree while males fight for her below.  The female’s estrus lasts only about two days and pregnancy lasts 3-5 months.  Only one or two babies are born, and the weaker twin will be left to die as there’s only enough mother’s milk for one.  Thus the Center’s rescue efforts.  There were 2,500 pandas in 1975 and only 1,000 in 1990, but by 2015 the population had rebounded to 1,870.  As a matter of fact, Bei Bei, the baby panda born in the Washington, D.C. Zoo, will be flown here for quarantine and later breeding.  Why?  Because all cubs born of giant pandas on loan to foreign zoos must be repatriated when they turn 4.  Tai Shan, born in 2005 in D.C., is already here.

Bing Cheng born 2014

We’ll be suited up to work as volunteers.  Some of us will be cleaning the enclosures of chewed-up bamboo and panda poop; you have to be under 65 to do that for some reason, so only five of us are eligible.  At the end of the visit, after lunch, all of us will make rice cakes to be steamed and fed to the pandas.  (The cakes, not us.  Pandas eat little meat.)

Red panda

       Our tour winds up and down past all the enclosures on the hillside.  Each has a cave-like building, with space around three sides, trees and platforms with toys - balls, tires... Some pandas are alone, others are by twos, if they’re siblings.  (As I said, in the wild, a mother panda can only nurse one cub and will let the weaker one die, so the Center rescues them both.)  We walk for at least two hours, visiting all the pandas, mostly giant pandas but also the more raccoon-looking red pandas, a distant cousin.

  After the tour, and adequate time for rambling, we’re given a chore, which we are thrilled to perform:  feeding carrot sticks to one giant panda in a cage nearby.  “As soon as he bites down on it, let go” we’re told.  But there’s no danger because there are bars between us and the panda, the carrot sticks are long, and the giant is very delicate.  He gently takes it in his teeth.  Photos are taken to immortalize this moment, and it’s truly one of the major thrills of my entire two-month trip around the world.
  Then it’s time for our lunch at the staff canteen.  (Remember, we’re volunteer employees today.)  Different raw veggies, which Stanley has told us to avoid (washed in unpurified water) so we won’t get Montezuma’s Revenge or Delhi Belly or whatever the Chinese version is called.  Plus rice and several spicy dishes.  Stanley has brought bananas and cookies... but the beers he brought along this morning have mysteriously disappeared!
  Dessert is an informative hour-long video about the work of the Center.  Then on to our final task:  shaping cakes out of the rice dough already made up.  They should be about as big as two fists and have no cracks, although some of us - me included - make dents in the form of smiley faces in ours.  From here, they go to be steamed and then fed to the pandas once they’re crunchy.

A tricycle

After that, we shed our blue overalls and board the bus for the long trip back downhill, past lots of small farms, to Chengdu.  It’s still foggy; apparently it’s foggy here two-thirds of the year.  After the mountain roads, we’re back to the toll roads.  (When I ask Stanley what surprised the Chinese most in the U.S., he says it's that there are so few toll roads; you drive for free.)  Unlike the other places we’ve been, most traffic here is trucks and especially motorcycles, many with enclosures to protect from the elements and many more turned into tricycles to carry goods, even though Stanley says most of them are illegal.  And bikes.  There are literally thousands of those rental bikes in Chengdu.  Road laws here are also different - and often ignored by drivers and pedestrians alike.  One thing that is legal is making U-turns from a special left-turn/U-turn lane.
  Safely back at the magnificence of our hotel, we rest before yet another treat:  the Bashu Dazhaimen restaurant (ba meaning 8) with its signature hotpot.  That’s the Chinese version of the Swiss fondue, except instead of oil you cook in broth (chicken and mushroom for me) and everyone has their own little pot.  You go to the counter and make your own sauces from the dozens of ingredients available, the base of which is sesame oil.  I make two:  one with soy, ground peanuts, coriander and green onion; the other with oyster sauce, sesame seed and green onion.  Back at the table, we have a choice of things that all cook for different lengths of time:  thinly-sliced beef and chicken, thicker slices of white fish, square slices of potato, semi-cooked wide noodles, veggie dumplings, pork balls, shrimp balls, all delicious and fresh.  And all washed down with bubbly (aka champagne).  Oh, I forgot:  a thimbleful of rice wine at the start to toast ganbei.  For dessert, a three-layer frosted cake with candles to celebrate Ralph’s birthday!
  We go to bed happily full, to dream of pandas.

(Here’s a link to the panda center’s informative website:  https://www.pandasinternational.org/panda-reserves/dujiangyan-panda-center/ )

Day 23 - Thursday, Nov. 7 - On to Chengdu

We leave our longest home on this tour - four nights.  Habits have been formed.  Friends made - Teddy Garcia, the hotel manager, who felt bad about not being able to find me another room farther away from the noise and vibrations of the ship’s machinery one floor below, and especially Ezz, the Executive Housekeeper who offered me his friendship when he learned I’d been to his hometown of Luxor, Egypt.  I tried to give him a tip for all he’d done - the jasmine tea, the little hanging toy panda, and especially the smile - but he refused, even when I said it was for his children.  “It will break our friendship”, he protested.  Both Ezz and Teddy hugged me as I left the ship.

A long day by bus awaits.  From Chongqing - the largest city in China (in area) - to Chengdu via the Dazu Grottos.  Our local guide is Ken (Lan Lee, one of 95 million Lees in China).  He gives us a few examples of how Chongqing (Chungking until the Republic was founded in 1949) has changed.  Things are crowded.  And it might get worse before it gets better.  With a population of 33 million today, public transport had to step up to the plate.  The monorail high above our bus actually goes through a building, taking up its sixth and seventh floors... and that’s only one of its 18 stations.  Elsewhere in the city, a new bridge is to be built and yet another highway; there are already two or three ring roads, but only limited parking.  And the city is constructing its tallest building:  99 floors to house even more citizens in this megalopolis.
  Chongqing is an industrial city:  textiles, shipbuilding, computers, motorcycle and car manufacturing (two Chinese makes, two joint ventures with Peugeot and another foreign firm).  Unemployment is low:  2.8% compared to over 5% elsewhere in China.  But until recently, foreigners working in any of these joint ventures could only use a special currency and buy in “friendship stores”, like today in Cuba.
       (A bit of Chongqing’s past.  Evidence of human settlement dates back to the Stone Age. Three thousand years ago, the Ba were great warriors and created the Ba Kingdom.  The illustrious Yu the Great of the Xia Kingdom also brought fame to Chongqing, and made great efforts in flood control.  In World War II, Chongqing became the capital of free China, the Japanese occupying the rest up to Yichang.)
  It’s 9:30 in the morning, but there’s still fog.  Actually smog.  After a checkpoint where an officer boards the bus to check we have our seatbelts on and are not overloaded weight-wise, we exit the city through a looooong tunnel of several kilometers - three lanes in our direction, three lanes into town in a second tunnel (China has great building expertise, both vertical and horizontal) but the pedestrian escape passages all have roll-down gates that appear closed.  In case of an emergency, such as any of the recent 1,600 earthquakes, I’d think you might well be buried alive.  But I’m sure they planned for that, as far as one can.

Dazu Grottos

Along the road, crews are trimming hedges on the median strip and tending to trees that Stanley says are hibiscus.  Then he tells us some stories about the region.  It takes quite a while to get to our destination:  the Dazu Grottos in the Baodingshan Hills.  En route, Ken sets the stage.  Most Chinese who follow a religion are Buddhists and go to temple two times a month.  So this is a holy site for them, like Lourdes for Catholics or Mecca for Muslims.  All the rock sculptures were designed by one person 800 years ago and carved directly into the limestone/sandstone rock face, then painted.  The grottos took 90 craftsmen from three families 70 years to complete.

Godddess of Mercy

Once there, Ken explains the carvings as we go.  He
explains there are 18 different hells you can be sent to.  And look!  There’s a hippo torturing a man in boiling oil!  There are also nine heavens with three zones:  east, central and west (which is the best).   It all reminds me of the hell and heaven sides of French cathedral façades.  A more Chinese touch are the lotus babies... heads popping out of lotus blossoms.  Also sections telling the life of Sakyamuni (aka Buddha):  one where he carries his parents, one where he’s leaving home for the capital... In other part is a masterpiece:  a lady playing a flute-like instrument that no longer exists, so no one knows what it might have sounded like.
  Then Ken takes us to the cavern of the Goddess of Mercy, with so many hands to bestow blessings on humans.  She’s totally gilded, which makes her stand out against the dark rock.  That and a few of her hands that stick out toward us, making it 3-D.  Although Ken said his mother is a Buddhist, he said nothing about himself, but as the group moves on, he stays behind to bow three times and leave something on the altar.
  After a last part with seven-meter tall statues and some morals about the three burning fires (greed, hatred and ignorance), we go to have lunch nearby, assuaging our evil of gluttony.

We say good-bye to Ken, and then Kari takes over, telling us about her city, Chengdu, where we’re headed.  On the way we drop Justin and his family off at the Chongqing People’s Hospital.  He’s been sick and really needs IV rehydration.  Steve, his doctor brother, fears pancreatitis, but it’s not.  Kari stays with them to interpret and Stanley takes over for her.  (The hospital ends up not keeping him; it’s not an in-patient facility.  Steve says later that you have to pay for everything first and that IV bags are only 100 cc, not 1,000 as they are at home.  His conclusion:  don’t get sick in China.  They take the fast train after treatment and reach our hotel by 9 p.m.)
  The bus rolls westward through the hills, covered with trees and small farms and villages, even some rice paddies as we get closer to Chengdu.  Many of the two-story farmhouses have a third floor which is roofed but open on the sides.  That’s used to store and dry crops.  There are a few billboards with political messages but lots of slogans on the overpasses.

  Finally, with the sun trying unsuccessfully to come out from the smog, we leave the hills behind and enter the Chengdu Basin, a rich agricultural area forming the east/west gateway through the mountains.  The capital city of the region is at the western edge of a plateau that has an altitude of 1,480 to 2,360 feet (450-720 m).  Chengdu isn’t as big as Chongqing, whose metropolitan area would cover all of Austria, but it nonetheless has a population of 14 million in the city proper.  Unlike most Chinese cities, it has never changed its name, and UNESCO has named it a city of gastronomy.  In addition to its cultural importance, it’s a financial and industrial center for cars, textiles and small manufacturing, and has one of the world’s 30 busiest airports.  Although I see more bikes and motorcycles here than anywhere else so far, it has a metro (subway) system that was opened in only 2010 but already has 20 lines with 350 stations.  When they do things in China, they do them big!
  Our hotel is sumptuous, the rooms humongous, and after a private dinner of spicy Szechuan food we fall asleep dreaming of tomorrow’s pandas.

Day 22 - Wednesday, Nov. 6 - Yangtze River & Fuling

Terraced pomelo hills

Like the Canadian “eh” at the end of a sentence to form a question, the Mandarin Chinese say mah.  But there’s no question how my day on-board starts.  It’s with tai chi on the top deck.  Then breakfast - today a French day with pain aux raisins and croissant with marmalade.
       Later on there’s a demonstration of how to make pork and celery dumplings.  Our guide Willy interprets the chef’s instructions for the English speakers; the Chinese can understand the chef directly.  First he makes and kneads the dumpling dough, which has to rest a while.  Then he mixes the pork, celery and herbs.  He shows us how the dough isn’t ready yet by handling it, then takes some he prepared earlier and stretches it arm’s length in a long elastic strand.  He forms a cylinder, breaks off one-inch pieces, then rolls each out to form a two-inch circle.  In the center goes a tiny bit of the meat; then he folds it in half and crimps the edges closed with his fingers.  These two are to be boiled.  He makes others whose ends are left slightly pointy and calls them “fish” because of their shape.  With yet others, he makes ears at one end and a ball for a tail at the other, calling them rabbits.  These last two types are to be steamed only.  I give it a try, and don’t do too poorly, if I do say so myself.
       Following that comes a presentation by Professor Alec on the topic of “China and the Making of the Modern World”, just for our group.
       After a lunch for which Stanley has organized three typical dishes - BBQ spare ribs, orange duck, and eggs with tomato - we’re off on one of two different excursions.  I’ve chosen the 816 Nuclear Bunker.  It’s very murky this morning and a bit of drizzle, so an inside venue may be the right choice, even for a pacifist.

Fuling

Our guide is Annie aka Jinjin, who is studying journalism, to my mind a profession fraught with danger in this country if you don’t toe the party line.  Her grandfather was a physicist and so her grandparents were sent to the country for re-education.  Unlike the parents of Garry (my first-day Beijing guide), they were banished for ten years.  After their re-education, her grandfather decided to stay in the country and teach instead of returning to the city.
       Jinjin picks us up in the port of Fuling, also called New Town because of the rising water from the Three Gorges Dam that flooded the old city, or Mountain City (named for its topography).  Population?  A mere 1.2 million.  It’s evidently famous for its fish, as it’s located on the Wujiang River at its confluence with the Yangtze.  The area has no big industry, except for pickles, but grows lots and lots of grapefruit that you can find for sale at little stands in front of many, many homes.

       As for the 816 Nuclear Bunker, we fear no radiation because it was never finished and no fuel was ever installed.  China’s first nuclear fusion site was in the Gobi Desert; this was the second.  The site was chosen to keep it hidden among the mountains and workers were not told what they were building as of 1967; they learned only decades later.  Work was halted in 1984 because the money was needed for other things, and relations were better with the Soviet Union by then.  (Evidently that was the enemy more than the U.S.)  China and the Soviets were no longer fighting over Krushchev’s “revisionism” and the border dispute over the Amur River had calmed down.
       The purpose here was to enrich uranium with graphite to make plutonium 235.  We tour the levels, all empty, any equipment having been sent elsewhere.  We visit the room where, in case of a problem, a suicide squad would be sent, and we exit through the little door they would have used to go to the four quarantine chambers.  I see no shower installation to hose them down, but do see a gas mask... highly insufficient.  There was also space to house 3,000 people in case of a nuclear attack... but only for six months!  I'm glad to leave this dark, massive, grim world behind, and take a shower back at our ship to wash it all away.  (Not the radiation; just the bad kharma.)

On the ride back to our ship, we pass more pomelo stands and a few Sinopec gas stations; only a few rare cars are fueling up, as elsewhere across the China we visit.  I notice palm trees standing next to large bonsais; we’re really much farther south now.  Close to town there’s a whole hillside dug up to build more “Chinese concrete bamboo” (high-rises), probably 30-40 floors of them like the ones already standing.  

This is our last night on the ship and our farewell dinner is called “A Taste of China”, with a show before the meal.  First we’re treated to not one dragon but two dancing around and kidding with us.  Then a bevy of five oriental beauties in traditional dress appear to have your picture taken with.  At table, the wait staff is also in costume, the food just keeps coming, and the “lazy Susie” (as Stanley calls it) just keeps turning.  Conversations are warm and almost as if we were parting tomorrow.  But we’re just moving on after four nights on our floating home.