Travel Journal

Due to budget considerations, I had booked a seat instead of a bed on the train departing from Shanghai, and I would later regret this, as I hardly slept during the 14-hour train journey to China’s enormous capital.

After arriving in the capital in the morning, I quickly located a nice guesthouse in what is perhaps Beijing’s most atmospheric quarter of Qianmen, with its little alleys known as hutongs. The area has the intimacy of a village, even the sounds of the busy city all around it are reduced to a barely audible hum. The residents take advantage of the warm summer evenings and sit outside their houses, chatting to their neighbours, playing games, and as you walk past the small family restaurants, you smell the many different perfumes of delicious food. In the mornings, the appeal is somewhat less, with the locals performing their disgusting spitting rituals, and you try not to slip on the small pools of phlegm found everywhere on the streets.

As there were so many sights to explore in this city, with their historical, cultural or artistical importance, I allowed myself a full week to see as much as I could. My first stop was Tian’anmen Square, with its long and controversial history. The enormous square is surrounded by a fence, and there are guards standing on platforms, guarding every entrance to the square. To the south is the large Qianmen Gate, to the north Tian’anmen Gate with the famous picture of Mao Zedong, facing his mausoleum in the centre of the square. As you walk past the mausoleum, nearly half of the west side of the square is taken up by the enormous Great Hall of the People, home of the National People’s Congress.

Past Tian’anmen Gate lies the Imperial Palace, known as the Forbidden City, home to 24 emperors during five centuries of imperial rule. As everything in Beijing, past and present, seems to have been conceived and built on a grand scale, so was this Palace, a vast complex, and although a lot of the hundreds of buildings inside were unfortunately undergoing renovations in perparation for the Olympic Games to be held in Beijing in 2008, there was still so much to explore. As you enter the south entrance, you find yourself humbled by the sight of the Wumen, or Meridian Gate. The designation “Gate” doesn’t do it justice, for it is a huge building, from which the emperor would instruct his courts or inspect his army in times of war. Behind three of these gates, divided by large squares, there are several elaborately decorated ceremonial halls, before you get to the Inner City, a maze of corridors with the famous red walls. There are beautiful gates with at times a screen directly behind them, sometimes decorated with murals or Chinese characters. As you walk around these screens, you find yourself in a courtyard, and look out over living quarters of the emperor, the empress, the concubines or the eunuchs. Some of the buildings now have exhibitions in them, collections of artifacts or imperial possessions. In some courtyards, there are statues of animals for their symbolic power. At the north side of the Inner City is the Imperial Garden, which, after hours of walking, is a nice place to rest for a while, and admire the flowers, rock gardens, pavillions. After having left the Forbidden City through its north entrance, I crossed the street and climbed to the top of the hill of Jingshan Park, where I was rewarded with a beautiful view of the Forbidden City and the rest of Beijing. Unfortunately, due to the air pollution, most of the city is shrouded in a permanent layer or smog, resulting in a very hazy view.

There are so many interesting sites in and around Beijing that it would take too much time to describe them all here, but one of the nicest places must be the Yiheyuan, or Summer Palace, located in the northwest of the city. Its collection of stunning Imperial houses, halls, temples and covered walkways with beautiful murals, together with a large lake, makes for a pleasant retreat from the busy streets of Beijing.

Later in the week, I visited one of China’s most famous of objects, The Great Wall. A couple of hours north of the capital, I walked on a reconstructed section of the Wall, and admired the views of the Wall snaking around on the top of the hills as far as the eye could see, while gasping for breath from the steep climb.

As my week in Beijing was coming to an end, I had decided to go to the nearby town of Datong, and went to the central railway station to get a ticket. Due to the sheer number of people, and an astonishing lack of social etiquette, this can actually resemble a nightmare. At the station, all of the 30 or so ticket windows were open, and each had a queue of around 20 people, waiting to buy a ticket. As you stand in line, waiting for your turn, there are dozens of people simply ignoring the queue as they head straight for the ticket window. In many of the Western countries, this would cause an uproar in the queue, but here, nobody tells them to get in line. And then there are the attendants behind the windows, at times downright rude to the customers who have been waiting for half an hour to get their ticket.

Getting on the train, which I did at the biggest railway station I’ve ever seen in my life, the gigantic Beijing Xi Zhan (West Station) is a game of push and shove, with a dozen people trying to get through a single door at the same time, and at times trying to climb over people in the carriages to get to their designated seats. But once the train was underway, this all was soon forgotten, as I watched the beautiful landscape outside Beijing, of lush mountains and valleys with lakes and rivers.

In Shanghai, I got my first taste of a truly big Chinese city. After a 26 hour train journey from Hong Kong, long but comfortable as I had a bed, I arrived at the central trainstation and made my way to the old part of the city. As a lot of the lower range of hostels and guesthouses are not allowed to accept foreigners, I had a bit of trouble finding a place to sleep. But I eventually found a guesthouse, underground in a converted bomb shelter, with walls one meter thick and solid steel doors near the entrance. The shared bathroom in the guesthouse was also used to wash clothes and cook food, and it sometimes felt like I was having a shower in a kitchen, and occasionally found myself shaving next to someone who was chopping up beef for breakfast.

Outside, the narrow streets of the old city still gave the appearance of a village, with people going around on their bicycles, eating outdoors at one of the many small family restaurants, buying fruit or snacks at stalls, and further down was a group of men playing Chinese chess. A man on a bicycle sold crickets, hundreds of them, each in tiny woven baskets, and the noise was deafening. It’s a big hit, though, with many people getting one to get a bit of the sound of the countryside into their homes.

For how long this old part of the city will exist, remains to be seen, as a lot of the small houses and buildings have been designated for demolition, and all around the area are new, towering apartment blocks, with blinking red lights to warn oncoming aircraft. At night, many people, working during the day at one of the hundreds of construction sites, sleep on the sidewalk on thin straw mats next to building materials, with the huge cranes looming overhead, their silhouettes drawn against a sky that never gets completely dark.

Shopping is big in Shanghai, with the long Nanjing Road reportedly being China’s busiest shopping street. When you get tired of the shopping, or wrestling through the crowds, you can walk along The Bund, the boulevard alongside the Huangpu river, where large colonial buildings are looking out over the river, reminiscent of China’s colonial past. Across the river, the Oriental Pearl TV Tower stands out as Shanghai’s landmark, in the district of Pudong. Only ten years ago, this was the “wrong” side of the city, but with the help of enormous investments, it has been transformed into Shanghai’s commerce centre, with an accompanying forest of skyscrapers.

Going around in a city bus is one way to appreciate the scale of Shanghai, as the distances are just too great to go around on foot. One evening, the bus driver turned off the indoor lights and LCD screens while driving over the Nanpu bridge, so the passengers could appreciate the view of the huge city, with all its floodlit colonial buildings, skyscrapers, blinking lights and neon signs.

One reason alone to visit Shanghai is the superb Shanghai museum, at the edge of Renmin Park. The collections of sculptures, paintings, calligraphy, Ming and Qing furniture and ethnic minority arts, to name a few, are very interesting, and thanks to the excellent lighting, the decoration and English commentary, it is all a very rewarding experience.

After a couple of days in Shanghai, the capital of China was going to be my next destination, and I couldn’t wait to get there.

It was an excellent way to arrive in Hong Kong for the first time, as I did, by ferry from Guangzhou. After leaving the Pearl River Delta, as we drew closer to Hong Kong Island, the buildings seemed to rise out of the water, with the green hills behind them.

Although Hong Kong is officially part of China since the end of British rule in 1997, it couldn’t be more different from the mainland. Unlike China, people from most nationalities do not need a visa for entering Hong Kong, and although similar in value, its currency is the Hong Kong Dollar instead of the Chinese Yuan. The silly British custom of driving on the wrong side of the road takes some getting used to again. There’s an armada of double decker buses to complete the extensive and hyper efficient transportation service of the metro in the entire Hong Kong area, and there is even a quaint little tramline in the centre of the city itself. The population is mixed and multi-cultural, with its main Cantonese population, immigrants from the mainland, the Indian subcontinent, the Philippines, Middle East, Europe and North America.

Hong Kong consists of a peninsula with districts like Kowloon and the New Territories. There are a number of islands, most famous being Hong Kong Island, the administrative and business centre. Lantau island is where the busy airport is located, and there are a number of smaller islands.

I had chosen to stay in Kowloon, or the area of Tsim Sha Tsui to be exact. Near the waterfront, there is a beautiful view of Victoria Harbour and the city across the water, and as you look at the hundreds of skyscrapers, freight ships and ferries go by. The first evening after my arrival, a show called “A Symphony Of Lights” was on, held every Saturday evening during the summer months. A number of harbourfront buildings in the city were lit with different colours of floodlights, and synchronised to the music, a fireworks and laser show erupted over the buildings, a magical sight.

The next morning, I took the Star Ferry across the harbour to Hong Kong Island, and went into the city. Walking around in Central for the first time is a wonderful experience. I have always been interested in the modern architecture of cities, having made several documentaries on the subject. Hong Kong is a haven for people like me, and I frequently strained my neck, looking up at the enormous structures, skyscrapers of concrete and steel and glass, while trying not to bump into too many people. On a visit to the beautiful botanical gardens, I took the Central-Mid-Levels Escalator, basically a giant series of escalators and so-called travelators. It runs 800 meters up the hill, connecting the lower streets near the harbour to the residential areas, with towering apartment complexes on impossible slopes. There is also a lovely little funicular railway, called the Peak Tram, in operation since 1888, which brings you up the Peak. It’s a residential area with lots of green, and the views over the city, Victoria Harbour and Kowloon in the distance are breathtaking.

The architecture in the city is as diverse as the people, and some of the world’s most renowned architects have designed stunning buildings here. Like in China, most buildings have been designed with feng shui as an essential part of the preparations. Meaning “wind and water", it’s a form of geomancy, and it proposes the positioning of a building and even an ideal form for a structure, according to the spiritual attributes of a landscape and its surroundings. A striking building houses the headquarters of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. Designed by Sir Norman Foster, it is more than 178 meters tall, and is supported on giant pillars. It has a transparent floor, and as you walk underneath it, you can look up into the heart of the building, a colossal glass atrium. The Lippo Centre with its awkward, bulging shapes is also an eye-catcher, designed by Paul Rudolph. And then there is the more than 367 meters tall Bank of China Tower, world-renowned and it features on Hong Kong’s bank notes. It was designed by I.M. Pei. However, for this building, feng shui was bypassed, and it’s therefor disliked by a lot of Hong Kong residents.

On another day, I took a ferry to Lantau island, almost twice the size of Hong Kong Island. It features a couple of older seaside villages, and as half of the island is designated as parkland, there are lots of green valleys, lakes, and hills with waterfalls. After the ferry had docked at the small town of Mui Wo on the island, I took a bus to the Po Lin (Precious Lotus) Monastery. Near the monastery, the Tian Tan Buddha sits high up on a hilltop, surrounded by a ring of Bodhisatvas offering various gifts to the Buddha. The statue is 34 meters tall and weighs 250 tons, and it’s the largest seated bronze outdoor Buddha in the world. As you look around, there are emerald coloured hills shrouded in mist, among a serene quietness, a nice change from the busy city.

During my stay, on 1 July, known as Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Establishment Day, the eighth anniversary of the region’s handover to Chinese sovereignty was celebrated. Thousands of people marched the streets, protesting for more democracy or in support of the Beijing government, and it once again showed the special privileges this part of China enjoys.

Although I couldn’t get enough of Hong Kong, and with a number of places left that I still wanted to visit, it was time for me to go back to the mainland, going on a 26-hour train journey to Shanghai.