Day 29 - Wednesday, Nov. 13 - Shanghai to Hanoi (Part 2)

All this runs through my mind during the three-hour flight from Shanghai to Hanoi.  The trip is easy; the welcome at customs icy.... and particularly slow.  At least two flights have arrived at the same time - through the pea soup and rain:  ours and one from Australia.  The lines stretch into the middle of next week.  And with the customs agents taking three minutes for each, that may be how long we’ll be here!
  When it’s finally my turn, the customs officer looks at me, then at my passport photo, then at my visa.  Then she becomes obsessed with the passport.  For at least 30 seconds she wiggles it back and forth, to get it to catch the light. Then she feels several different pages between her fingers as if wondering if I made this in my bathtub.  Finally, without asking a single question (does she speak English?  Does she speak?), she stamps both my visa and my passport and hands it back to me, without a smile.  Whew!
Obviously my suitcase had a faster, easier time.  It’s already on the carousel when I get to baggage claim.  I escape out the door and search for the promised greeter from the hotel.  Lots of people, lots of signs.  After walking back and forth between the two exits, I see “Mr. Sandy Schopbach” and am whisked off by a driver who speaks almost no English.  Stanley, where are you?!  I’m on my own.

The rain stops after the first half-hour.  (The airport is a long way outside of town!)  We cross a suspension bridge over the Red River, projectors on its columns shifting colors in a loop.  The traffic here is even crazier than in China; rather than picking a lane, drivers seem to aim down the lane lines as the pilot did when he landed our airplane.  And there are motorbikes galore, many with no head or tail lights.

Apricot Hotel, guarded by Uncle Ho

  The architecture in town - what I can see of it now that night has fallen - has something decidedly French to it.  After about 70 years of French colonialism, that’s normal.  It makes this foreign land a bit more familiar than China was.  Plus I can read the signs, even if I don’t understand what they say.  Gone are the ideograms of Japan and China; the alphabet here was also inherited from the French, although the accents are different.  At least if someone gives me a street or a shop name, I’ll recognize it.

At the tasteful Apricot Hotel, the doorman takes my bag, ushers me in, hands my papers to the concierge, who calls over Rosie (aka Kha Han), who makes me my “welcome drink”.  Somewhere in there, Rosie thinks I’m with the gentleman seated across from me, but in fact he’s waiting for his brothers to arrive from Australia.  That gives us something to talk about while Rosie makes my reservations for Ha Long Bay tomorrow.  I’ll probably be seeing him again.
  For the moment, I need to get some sleep.  Aside from walking the Bund, I’ve done nothing.  But all in all, I’ve been in transit ten hours.  It’s time for bed, just after I eat the banana from the fruit basket in my room (better than the Chinese bananas) plus half of my last “Snicker” candy bar, with a heartfelt thank you to Stanley, my candy purveyor for the past two weeks.

Day 29 - Wednesday, Nov. 13 - Shanghai to Hanoi (Part 1)

The Bund - Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank (l), Customs House (f)

Breakfast with Kathy and Becky, plus Lisa later.  Most of the others are there for a last hug, including Stanley and Pingping.  We’ll all be leaving at different times, them home, me on to Vietnam.

       With my spare half-hour, I follow Pingping’s advice and poke my head into some of the magnificent buildings on the Bund.  All have guards, some also have police.  Few wave me away.  With motions, I ask if I can take photos; all but one say yes.  The Custom House has traces of the British age, the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel - once the Shanghai Club - is quite posh, but the tail and both ears have to go to the Shanghai Pudong Development Bank (once the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corp.) with its painted ceiling.

Waldorf-Astoria, ex-Shanghai Club

       I get back to the hotel just in time to see Stanley off - turnabout of our roles - and give him one last hug.  Then Gil and Margie, Kimm and Jane and I share a ride to the airport, where we say our final hug-byes.

A few musings on China.
       First, America thinks it’s the bee’s knees, but frankly it’s been left in the dust.  America is out; China is in... unless things change drastically on one side or the other.  America is yesterday; tomorrow belongs to China.  Again.
       What is flagrant everywhere is the massive effort to keep up with the exploding population, by building high-rises, and to catch up with the Western world by building infrastructure - highways, mostly raised, tunnels, bridges, high-speed trains, subways and even a mag-lev line out to Shanghai Airport... Several of my fellow travelers have been here in China before and all are stunned by the transformation.
       Of course, all this has been made easier by China’s top-down government.  As Stanley said last night on the bus coming back from dinner, if you were told to do something by the government, you just said “yes”.  You didn’t question the order, or you would pay.

Ex-Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank

       At breakfast I asked Stanley a question.  In this luxurious hotel, I saw the new Chinese rich acting with the staff in ways that were... let’s just say “lofty”.  I asked him if such people were still living the principles of Communism or whether they had bought into a world of privilege in their minds.  He basically said “the latter”.  (One thing about our trip:  there were no minders.  We could talk freely.)
       If we follow China’s history of cycles, which Professor Murphy has explained in his presentations, one wonders how long President-for-Life Xi - and thus a simili-emperor - or a Mao Redux - will survive, and what China will become.  Will it stay a communist country, albeit following a different form of communism from Lenin’s?  Or will it come over to the dark side with a form of Chinese capitalism?

TAKE-AWAYS (and remember, this was pre-covid):

- everything is huge;
- all schools are not equal and alike; students pay tutors so their children can pass entrance exams into the better ones that lead to a more enviable future;
- vehicles are photographed on highways, and facial recognition is rampant in the streets.

Or as summed up in an article by the New York Times that I read after my trip:  “China’s historic growth streak was fueled by the creation of an extensive, modern network of highways and railways, the strong entrepreneurship of its people, its skilled work force and a government that was willing to set environmental and labor concerns aside for the sake of ever-greater economic output.”

All this runs through my mind during the three-hour flight to Hanoi.

Day 28 - Tuesday, Nov. 12 - Shanghai

Jade Buddha Temple

Not too early a start today.  All activities nearby.  We drive through streets with few scooters and even fewer bikes.  Not a single bike rental rack on our route.  Until we get to the poorer sections of town.  Parents buy their one child a car now instead of a bike, if they can.

       Our first stop:  the Jade Buddha Temple, an active place of worship in a once-atheist country.  Today’s Chinese Constitution gives the Chinese the right to believe in god(s) or not... but you cannot question communism.  And yes, that is a People’s Republic of China flag flying next to the multicolored international Buddhist flag.  The temple has existed for 100 years, since the late Qing Dynasty, although not always at this site.  (The old site was bombed in World War II.)  It was built to house two jade Buddhas a high monk brought back from Burma - one sitting, one reclining - statues from the Mahayana sect of Buddhism.  It’s all similar to those I saw in Japan, and very beautiful.  But it’s strange to me to see Chinese people bowing and praying.  And I feel that I’m disturbing them.

Old City

Tea shop

Then it's on to the Old City Market in the center of what's left of the old quarter.  Pingping (I've decided I like her real name better) asks permission of the occupants for us to take a look up an alleyway that was once the hallway of a one-family home; now nine families live there.  In two or three years, all this “old Chinatown” will be gone - excluding a few rare nice houses which will be kept as a sort of museum.  Families will be moved to the exurbs.  The new buildings in their place will be for business... for making money, not for residences.  We all visit a shop that sells jade, pearls and tea - a strange combination.  We’re served three teas brewed for us, a choice from the fifteen or so available (including a lotus tea that “regulates menstrusion” (sic), or so they claim).
       We’re unleashed for almost an hour to frequent the myriad shops.  When we gather again by the 500-year-old teahouse at the crossroads of Starbucks, DQ and Pandora, we’re laden with Things... and hungry.

Old City Market

Old City Market

Off to a western lunch along a canal at a place called “Kathleen’s Waitan”.  The menu:  kale and quinoa salad, followed by steak and mashed potatoes and crowned by an excellent crème brûlée.  We all think Stanley is subjecting us to culinary re-education before shipping us home.  As an hors-d’oeuvre, a presentation on bird preservation by a young ornithologist who couldn’t look more American if she tried (though Chinese).  Her subject:  the “aw”-inspiring (my pun) and terminally cute spoon-billed sandpiper, which is being killed off by land reclamation, invasive species and other things like pollution, nets, hunting and global warming.
       After lunch, many of us go to a silk factory cum outlet store where we get an explanation of the mysteries of the silkworm.  That one cocoon yields an entire kilometer of silk.  That it takes 5,000 cocoons to make just one man’s shirt.  That once the pupae are released from the cocoon, they are eaten or used to make things like face creams.  If there are two pupae in one cocoon - twins - their silk threads will be tangled together so such cocoons are used to make a sheet of fabric, not a thread, and those sheets are used to make duvets - 100 layers for a summer one, 300 for a winter one.  One of which I buy, to be shipped to the States.  We all buy something silk:  scarves, blouses, pajamas... After we leave, I’m sure they do a Happy Dance.

       Back to the hotel, and for me a walk along the Bund down the block.  Amazing architecture from the early 19th century reflecting the power of the economy here at that time, even though the wealth was in the hands of foreigners, not the Chinese.
       At six, we head off to a restaurant in one of those ex-concessions:  the French one.  Shanghai and Cantonese cuisine in the Lilac Room of a building where the Prime Minister kept the favorite one of his concubines.  We’ve ordered a surprise cake for Stanley, complete with a gold paper crown that only I, with my experience of “la fête des rois” (French Epiphany) can fit together.  We’ve also passed the hat for him, but he doesn’t know what’s in that present yet.  The meal - The Last Supper - ends in hugs, tears and good-byes.  We’ve become “sticky rice”, as Stanley says.  Friendships have formed and now we’ll go our separate ways.  We may see each other at breakfast.  Some will travel to the airport together tomorrow.  But for many, we may never meet again after this dinner.  Something to think about as we slip between the sheets.

Puxi and its skyscrapers, as seen from the Bund across the Pu River

Day 27 - Monday, Nov. 11 - Guilin to Shanghai

Guilin by night

Le onze novembre.  Nov. 11.  A date full of meaning for the French.  The day of Armistice, the end of World War I, which killed so many of France’s young men - almost an entire generation - turned fiancées into widows and left children stunted from hunger... and often orphans.  I’m probably the only person in this group who thinks of this today, because of all my years in France which suffered so horribly.  A whole generation of men, gone.

Puxi (foreground) on Pu River

Pudong (on right) on Pu River

       No wake-up call this morning.  A luxury.  The construction workers next door are already on the job after working until five yesterday afternoon, a Sunday.  Us?  We’re off to the airport, saying good bye to our guide Sonny.
       The road to the airport is definitely not the scenic route.  We drive past dumps, huge abandoned oil drums heaped in piles, an old car with no tires and blankets hanging out the absent windows, marks of a homeless person’s home elsewhere, but here...?  After a turn in the road, hills planted with citrus trees, except for one that’s being quarried.  Finally past the old air terminal, shut but still standing, and on to the new one made of shiny, wavy metal.
       Two hours later, we’re in Shanghai, a name which means “going to the ocean”.  And we have.  Once a fishing village, the Nanking Treaty turned it into one of the five trade centers opened for commerce with China.  The one in the middle of the coast.  Its geography meant it was perfect for shipping both north and south.  Being on the Yangtze made it perfect for shipping west.  Stanley says it was the land of fish and rice, like the land of milk and honey.  A land of cotton, seafood and mulberry trees for making silk... once upon a time.
       The Treaty created concessions within the city:  British, French, and American, where no Chinese were allowed.  Missionaries were permitted to proselytize, build churches.  The old Chinese society had been a closed one that didn’t evolve.  Change came from this rubbing shoulders with the outside world, its democracy, its equality and other foreign ideas.  Part of China welcomed change.  Most of the Chinese reformers came from these concessions.  From 1845 to 1945 Shanghai was an open city.
       If Xian was China’s glorious past, Shanghai is its future.

The Bund

The city is crisscrossed with canals.  Those canals, plus long, humid summers and the silt carried downstream, make everything grow, including the rice fields we pass.  Halfway to town are individual houses, or should I say mansions, with lots of trees.  Shanghai is a bit of the West transplanted in the East.  Even downtown there are trees.
       The Pu River (actually the Huangpu), a tributary of the Yangtze River, cuts through the city, dividing it into two districts:  modernistic Puxi ("west of Pu") and Pudong (“east of Pu”), the traditional city center where the impressive Bund avenue, the glory of the 1920's, runs and where we will be staying.
       First we stop in Pudong, a Manhattan on steroids, a breeding place of skyscrapers that didn’t exist 20 or even 10 years ago.  Here lay rice fields until 1980.  Our local guide Kelly - or Pingping (“peaceful”) - has our bus driver stop at the corner of the city’s three tallest buildings.  We’ll be going to the top of the tallest one, the Shanghai Tower, to view the sunset.  Built in five years, it’s 120 stories tall, second only worldwide to a skyscraper in Dubai.  Yet the elevator takes a mere 55 seconds to the top!  Below us spreads China’s second largest city, at 25 million, including many expats, especially from Japan and Korea.  After all, Shanghai is the financial center of China.  A real estate investment can bring you profits of five to eight times your initial stake.
       (Here Kelly tells us a story.  Parents used to give their daughters - Shanghai prefers girls - three things:  a watch, a bike and a sewing machine.  Now they give an apartment, a car with license plates and a credit card.  Side-note: a two-bedroom costs a million dollars - double in the center of town - and a Shanghai license plate costs $15,000... other plates do not allow you to drive on the city's fast roads.)
       After an only slightly slower ride back down, we go for a dinner of Cantonese cuisine - everything from hot and sour soup to glazed duck to shrimp and more, right to the announcement of dinner’s traditional end:  watermelon.  Full to the gills once again, our bus takes us to the Fairmont Peace Hotel, an Art Deco gem between the riverside Bund and the Nanjing Road, a shopping mecca.  Kathy, Becky, Lisa and I head up to the 9th floor for a drink and the view of the skyline on the opposite bank, including the pink pearl architecture of the city’s first skyscraper, the Oriental Pearl TV Tower built in 1994.
       Pondering the differentness that is Shanghai, it’s off to bed.  Tomorrow is our last full day in China.

Shanghai by night

Day 26 - Sunday, Nov. 10 - Guilin & Li River

The Li River

In spite of leaving the hotel early, we get snagged in more traffic jams through town.  Let’s blame the marathon.
       Guilin has many small shops, and no building - including apartments - is more than six stories high; taller ones (nine stories) were built in the suburbs.  After all, this is a place tourists - foreign and domestic - come for the beauty of the site, not to see high-rises.
       And surprise!  There’s a bit of a morning mist, but the sun comes out, and the first blue sky we’ve seen since Xian.

On the drive to the wharf in Zhujiang, our local guide Sonny tells us a bit about the region.  The Li River is full of fish, especially carp and catfish.  As for reptiles, there are vipers in the bushes of the hillsides... snakes called “five steps to death” because that’s all the farther you’ll get if bitten.  (We’ll be on a boat, so no fears.  Plus they’re hibernating now.)  Birds?  Yes.  Domestic ducks but also migratory birds like egrets from Siberia and residential birds - kingfishers, wagtails, kites, white-collared crows... and cormorants, once migratory but now trained to fish (with straw braided around their throats so they won’t swallow their catch... you can never be too careful!).

After a sign saying “the end” (and meaning the highway ends), we board our ship and sail off on a four-hour trip downriver on the Li, a tributary of the Pearl River, the third largest in China after the Yangtze and the Yellow River.
       We see the most picturesque part:  Bat Hill, Writing Brush Peak, Snail Hill, Green Lotus Peak, and especially Nine-Horses Hill, which is supposed to be a fresco with a galloping white horse.  I don’t see it really, but it’s all so breath-takingly beautiful, so different from anything else we’ve seen so far.
       The karst “peaks” on both banks of the Li River are made of calcium carbonate from the bones of marine animals that died and sank to the bottom of the sea.  Then the Indian subcontinent crashed into Asia and slipped under the Asian Plate, forming the Himalayas... and also these mountains.  What was once the seabed is now high in the air.  Then erosion did its job. 
       These are the hills you see on so many Chinese works of art, and now I’m seeing them in person.

Our end port is Yangshuo, a “tiny” town of only 10,000 people.  All but a skeleton crew get off.   The boat will head back upriver on a nine-hour sail.  I wish I could sail with them.
       On the bus ride home, we pass farms abandoned because crop prices are very low.  The government won’t raise them - that would be unpopular - so farmers just give up.  The income is not worth all the effort.  So with less rice farmed, China has had to develop a hybrid variety of rice that gives double the yield.
       Back in Guilin, we take a route that avoids the marathon.  We pass many scooters and I notice one driver on a Vespa smoking and actually looking at his smartphone... while driving!  No helmet.  He’s not the only one.  Vespas and other motor scooters are popular... faster than bikes and only 3,000 yuan ($432).
       After a shower and some reading, it’s off to Alec’s fourth and last presentation:  The Rise of Modern China.  Then a lovely dinner with the largest “lazy Susie” yet.  We’ve been together long enough for friendships to have formed and no one has been left out, except the one person who chose not to come.  The rest of us, at two tables, have a gay old time, with lots of laughs, full glasses and an amazing shrimp dish.
       Full and happy - or vice versa - we head off to our rooms.  Tomorrow:  Shanghai.