Travel, Theatre, Music, Cricket, Tennis, Writing, Life
I’m not sure why I generated lists of pseudo awards for our China tour. Perhaps it was at the suggestion of the Kuoni guides for some last night of the tour fun.
Perhaps it was my own idea and/or something I did purely for my and Janie’s own amusement.
I have peppered / am peppering the main pieces about this trip with transcriptions and explanations of the individual awards, so I shall not transcribe them again here.
28 Nov Guangzhou – Half day tour in morning – Temple Of Six Banyan Trees & Pagoda & then Chen Family Academy with rice-sized carvings etc.
Temple of the Six Banyan Trees
…and Pagoda…
Chan Family Academy
I honoured the guide on our (Sally’s) coach in Guangzhou, who had the unfortunate name of Dhung, with:
The Neil Kinnock Award For Repetitive Speech
No photos from the latter half of the day.
Dim sum lunch at Friendship Restaurant followed by free afternoon – we just rested – then banquet in evening – food good and fun – went to local bar afterwards and then home.
I honoured one of the waitresses at the Friendship Restaurant with:
The Mr Bean Award For Dexterity
I suspect it was at the end of tour banquet that my “awards” got their airing. Here is a link to a facsimile of all four pages I wrote out:
All the photos we took on that day – by which I mean all 16 photos – can be seen in raw form in the Flickr album below:
27 Nov. Guilin -> Guangzhou. Lie in / late start. Went for walk around Guilin then early lunch…
…outing to reed flute caves (via a hill climb). Caves stunning – wandered around market after and then on to very early dinner (tea) & off to airport.
The notes don’t say so, but I recall that Janie and I were feeling much better this day.
Short flight to Guangzhou – several of our party were nearly run over by a passing plane – straight to hotel – White Swan – wandered round a bit & then early night.
No comment on the near death experience yet again in the hands of early 1990s Chinese domestic airlines.
I did give that China Southern flight second prize in the:
Claustrophobics Anonymous Award For Comfort.
I also honoured that airline/flight with the:
Gatwick Handling Award For In flight Catering for its crunchy water-chestnut drink and Darkie Mints…
…I remember the latter came in distinctly politically incorrect packaging.
All the photos we took on that day – by which I mean all 24 photos – can be seen in raw form in the Flickr album below:
After the excitement of the previous day’s snakes and ladders…
China Trip – From Xian Ladders To Guilin Snakes, 25 November 1993
…it was a bit of a relief to have a more leisurely-sounding itinerary for our full day in Guilin – a cruise on the Li River.
26 Nov Guilin – Li River cruise for most of the day – very picturesque – included lunch – (both Janie and I now feel poorly). Market at the end – returned home teatime – Janie went to bed – I rested a while, then had dinner and cultural show – early night.
This day really needs little more than the above text and some pictures to give the reader/viewer a good idea of what it was like to cruise on that river and observe the beautiful limestone karsts.
The text from my notes infers that Janie didn’t get up for the dinner and cultural show, yet the cultural show photos were taken on her camera and I don’t think I would have taken pictures that look quite like these if I borrowed her camera for the evening. My guess is that Janie emerged for a while at some point in the evening – perhaps between dinner and show.
I do recall that we both felt odd for the last few days in China and indeed that a lot of people on the tour felt a bit poorly by then. Frankly, I suspect that we all had a touch of pollution-poisoning – I especially recall a nasty metallic-tasting cough that didn’t quite clear up until Bali.
All the photos we took on that day – by which I mean all 43 photos – can be seen in raw form in the Flickr album below:
While Xian was fascinating and we had enjoyed a wonderful day there the previous day:
…it was, in truth, a very polluted city indeed back then. The morning fog, which we experienced in several places we visited and which was especially bad in Xian, was, we soon realised, industrial smog.
I honoured Xian, with my metallic-tasting tongue firmly in my cheek:
The Friends Of The Earth Fresh Air Award
Indeed, the smog was/could be so bad, that our morning flight from Xian to Guilin was rescheduled to the early hours of the morning so it could get out of the city before the morning smog descended.
25 Nov – Xian->Guilin. 4.30 wake up call to get us out of Xian before pollution smog grounds us. Plane left on time – only 45 minutes late!). Arrived Guilin – went to hotel and then out to lunch.
The delay for this flight occurred after we had all boarded the small China Northwest Airline plane. It was a “technical problem” which, those of us who were sitting near the relevant wing, witnessed being resolved, whether we wanted to witness it or not. Resolution was achieved by virtue of a couple of men with hammers climbing up ladders onto the wing and then bashing away at something rather vigorously.
The flight also received my:
Claustrophobics Anonymous Award For Comfort
Remember the name: China Northwest Airlines – which just a few months after our visit suffered the worst fatal air crash in Chinese history to date. Actually it has long-since mercifully merged into a bigger, hopefully better, safer airline.
We felt quite lucky just to have got to Guilin in one piece. But Janie also felt quite icky by the time we got to Guilin.
Free afternoon. Janie didn’t feel well. I went for a walk through streets – shops/market/park etc.
I had massage, then out to dinner followed by cormorant fishermen…
You cannot go to Guilin without seeing the cormorant fishermen.
This is a traditional symbiotic fishing method on the lake, whereby the fishermen tame the birds and take them out on fishing expeditions with rings around their necks, preventing them from swallowing the fish. The fishermen help the birds to find the fish, the birds gather the fish and the fishermen let the birds eat the smaller fish.
Is that fair exchange between humans and birds? Who knows. Neither the fishermen nor the cormorants looked particularly happy, but then neither did they look particularly unhappy.
…and then snake feast in local restaurant for eight brave souls and several spectators.
Now here’s a story.
Janie and I were particularly keen to taste snake when we got to Guilin – we had been told that it was a local delicacy.
Our Kuoni guides, Chris and Sally, told us ahead of time that they thought it unlikely that we would be able to try snake. They were only allowed to take us to designated tourist restaurants in those days and such places did not serve such local delicacies as snake. They said that they would ask the local guide when we got to Guilin.
The local guide, Nina, seemed reluctant at first. She explained that the group would have to eat at a designated tourist restaurant, so any visit to a local restaurant would be extra, not part of the tour and therefore not really her (or Kuoni’s) responsibility. She also explained that it would be extremely expensive as snake is a delicacy and we would have to buy the whole snake. Nina mentioned the princely sum of FEC200, which was less than £25. I said that I was happy to underwrite that, even if no-one else wanted to eat or pay for snake.
As it turned out, once the idea had emerged as an “it could be done – is anyone else interested?” idea, there were several other people who were willing to join us and offered to pay for their share of the snake. Further, there were several more people – let’s call them anguine voyeurs – who didn’t want to eat snake but wanted to watch.
We ended up with a group of 15 to 20 people interested in one way or another, so it was agreed that one of the coaches would “snake off to a local eatery” after the cormorant fishermen visit, while the other would coil back to the hotel.
As soon as we entered the restaurant, Nina started barking orders at the staff and they started running around swabbing the floors and boiling up water in order to sanitize the cutlery and crockery for us.
For some reason, I was seen as the ringleader of the snake gang, so I was asked to step forward and choose the snake we wanted from a tank full of snakes.
Quick as a flash, like a University Challenge captain stumped by a question but who senses that a member of the team can answer, I said, “I nominate Nina”. Nina chose the above snake.
Next there was the delicate matter of the snake blood, which, to the locals, is the most prized and most valuable part of the snake. It is said to be re-invigorating and life-lengthening. Frankly, after that early morning start, the smog and the scary journey from Xian, I think all of us could have done with a bit of that.
I was the ringleader, so this honour was initially offered to me. But, frankly, I couldn’t stomach the thought of drinking blood and nor could anyone else in our group. I noticed a little old man sitting on a low stool and guessed that he was the patriarch of the family that owned and ran the restaurant. Nina confirmed to me that my guess was correct. I asked Nina to offer the prized blood as a gift to that gentleman, which apparently was seen as a very generous gift and within the bounds of local etiquette.
In those days China was still a non-tipping culture, but a tangible gift of this kind – well – that was different and very gratefully accepted. The little fella looked as though he needed re-invigorating and life-enhancing more than anyone else around, to be frank.
Then the snake arrived, stewed in a medicinal-style broth of ginger and other roots.
Janie, a little predictably, said that the snake tasted like chicken. I didn’t really think it did. Like all reptile, it tastes like light-flavoured white meat, but not really (to my taste) like chicken.
One more time now, let’s give it up for that magnificent snake.
All the photos we took on that day – by which I mean all 29 photos – can be seen in raw form in the Flickr album below:
24 Nov 93 – Xian – super day! Pan Po Neolithic village excavation plus exhibitions…
-> silk shops & terracotta factory ->terracotta warriors – saw two pits (1 & 3) plus exhibits…
Of course, in those days you could get up close and personal with the 3rd century BCE relics that comprise the terracotta army…
…oh, all right, I just made that bit up – of course you couldn’t get close to the actual relics and you couldn’t even take pictures of them, let alone with them. We were advised to take our holiday snaps in the factory.
-> lunch (nice vegetables)…
One of the advantages of getting deeper into China was that the restaurants were less reliant on westernised ingredients and made do with the local produce. The resulting vegetables cooked in a Chinese style were more to our taste than a lot of the bland meals we’d been served in larger cities. Janie and I were distinctly in the minority on the tour with our praise for this meal.
-> medicine market…
This is one of my favourite memories of the whole China tour. I wanted to buy some Chinese spices to take home, so this “medicine market” was right up my street. In China, the distinction between herbs and spices for food and for medicine is wafer thin.
No-one spoke any English and we didn’t have a guide who could help me to transact. But I was able to recognise, by sight and smell, the components of five spice. My idea was to buy a small quantity of each of those components, mix them up, place them in a spice grinder when I got home and thus be able to cook Chinese food with flavoursome, fresh ground spice that I had personally brought back from China.
I found a patient-looking woman spice merchant. Using pointing and hand gestures I indicated the five spices I wanted and that she could mix all five together.
The only remaining issue was the quantity I wanted.
In those days, there were two currencies in China. The local currency, Renminbi, was not translatable into other currencies, tourists were not even permitted to use it. Tourists were issued with Foreign Exchange Certificates (FECs) which tourists and locals could use and which were, at that time, translatable at 8.5 FECs to the £. Strangely, that rate is quite similar to the rate prevailing today for the single Chinese currency, which is known both as the Yuan and (confusingly) Renminbi.
I tendered the smallest note I had; a 5 FEC note – worth a little under 60p in UK money. I figured I’d get a nice little bag of spices for that money.
The merchant did not recognise the FEC as money at all, so wanted to reject my offer. She showed me her local money and I tried, through gestures, to explain that I didn’t have it and that I couldn’t use it even if I had it.
I knew that the FEC was legal tender for her; she was simply unfamiliar with it, so I gently thrust my 5 FEC note at her again.
She went off with my note to consult with fellow merchants. I could tell that one of them was convincing her to take my money. Presumably, that more knowledgeable friend also told her how much money I had tendered (and/or possibly made her an offer to exchange the note), because the merchant’s eyes lit up, she hurried to grab a carrier bag and started shovelling huge quantities of spice into the bag.
Once she had filled up one carrier bag, she grabbed another large carrier bag and started to shovel spices into the second bag. I tried to stop her – she was very welcome to my 5 FECs without honouring the deal with, in her terms, the requisite quantity of spices. It hadn’t occurred to me that the FEC was so ridiculously overvalued in local terms, that my 60p was a heck of a lot of money to this merchant and therefore worth a heck of a lot of spices.
One and a half carrier-bags-full of spices, to be specific.
I off-loaded some spices onto one or two reasonably adventurous fellow tourists, but still ended up bringing home a ludicrous quantity of spices; I was using that stash for years and years after our return.
->City Wall (bought cuff links) -> food market…
Janie was in her element in the food market, snapping away. This was the first place we visited where the locals seemed quite happy to be photographed in this way. I think Xian was not yet used to seeing lots of tourists, so we were as much a novelty to the locals as the locals were a novelty to us.
-> hotel to change -> mini banquet followed by amazingly naff Tang dynasty show (Janie and I left early).
Janie and I sat through some pretty awful shows on that tour, so that Tang dynasty one must have been especially bad.
All the photos we took on that day – by which I mean all 66 photos – can be seen in raw form in the Flickr album below:
This was a light day on our itinerary. In particular, I would describe it as an “easy morning”:
23rd Shanghai -> Xian – “free morning” (read hour) in Shanghai – went to arts & crafts exhibition (shop) bought a few things -> hotel -> Mongolian Barbie (again!)…
…but the thing I didn’t mention directly in that note, despite one of the undocumented events of that morning being embedded in my memory, was the historic movement of my bowels.
Because, folks (and this is a matter that is rarely discussed in travelogues), I had, until that morning, spent the entirety of our China trip free of any bowel movement whatsoever.
Let me be clear about this. Between our departure from the Excelsior Hotel, Heathrow on 15th November until that morning of 23rd November just before leaving Shanghai…nada.
I even honoured myself with an:
Ex-Lax Award For Industry
This was not an entirely private matter on our tour. People on such tours talk about their bowel movements; in most cases because they are reporting excessive or unusual activity. My deficiency in that regard became a matter of some legend in our tour group.
“Any news?”, I would sometimes be asked by a curious (or plain nosy) fellow tourist at breakfast or perhaps at the start of the evening, after an hour or two of down time in the hotel. I’d reply with a doleful shake of the head, unwilling or unable even to simply say, “no”, or “not yet”.
I suppose this quiet morning in Shanghai was the first opportunity Janie and I had to sit still for a while, take stock on the many events of the holiday (including the lack of one particular type of event) and reflect.
Janie reflected that it was getting to the stage that further prolonging of the inevitable might be a health hazard for me. I was very resistant to the idea of taking medication which might easily send my system into the opposite, therefore even more troublesome, mode.
Janie tried some site-specific massage which, quite quickly, had the desired impact. A quite magnificent offering at that.
I think I might even have got a round of applause on the coach when we announced my (or perhaps I should say, our) delivery.
Flight to Xian -> long drive to hotel -> dinner at hotel and early night.
Of course there must be loads of big hotels in Xian now, but in those days we stayed in one simply named The Xian Hotel, as I don’t suppose there were all that many hotels in that city.
In that hotel, I awarded our floor boy (who was a girl):
The Brain Of China 1993
…although I cannot remember why. I also honoured the hotel itself with:
The Oral-B Tasteless Toothpaste Award
…see also my note in the Wuxi piece about the disintegrating toothbrushes – we always take our own brushes and paste now – even when we are staying in fancy-schmanzy hotels.
At least I was now at ease and ready for one of the most interesting days of our tour; our main day in Xian:
22nd Shanghai – Traffic! – Went to garden and around market in old town…
My comment on traffic was an abiding memory of the day – it took so long to get from place to place in Shanghai at that time. The city was growing much faster than its infrastructure would allow and it really was traffic bound. I honoured Shanghai with…
The Department Of Transport Award For Traffic Congestion
…which took some winning in China back then – all the cities were pretty congested, with a mixture of cars and bicycles, mostly the latter, not well separated.
…Jade Factory and Carpet Factory -> The Bund & Nanjing Road, on to Mongolian Barbecue…
I recall being fed “Mongolian Barbecue” on several occasions on that tour. It was a “bit of a thing” in England back then and I guess the Chinese thought that the English thought that this was sort-of Chinese food. Actually, it turns out that this “comedy dish – Mongolian Barbecue” is slightly more Chinese than I imagined, although it has no connection with Mongolia whatsoever.
Jade Buddha Temple including Monks Prayer Ceremony…
Janie and I loved this bit. Remember, this was before we became “templed-out” and “monks-prayered-out” – this was our first experience of such stuff.
-> Children’s Palace – Chinese violins, ballet, violins, computers…
-> dinner at Rooftop Restaurant (everyone else hated) -> early night
Interesting observation about the Rooftop Restaurant. I guess that Janie and I felt we were getting a rare authentic Chinese meal there, whereas many of the other tourists missed their sweet and sour balls and chips. I don’t really remember – Janie might recall more, but I awarded that restaurant:
The Egon Ronay Award For Most Appetizing Food
Praise indeed.
All the photos we took on that day – by which I mean all 57 photos – can be seen in raw form in the Flickr album below:
21st. Suzhou -> Shanghai. Went to Master Of the Nets Garden – very beautiful.
-> Embroidery Factory -> Water Gate and on to street market (Portobello style)…
I think we were advised/asked not to take photographs in that street market – it would be unheard of for Janie to resist taking pictures in a market otherwise.
Lunch -> sandalwood factory (fan making) with amazing solder artist…
…climbed pagoda…
We both felt the need to provide photographic evidence of the pagoda and the fact that we had climbed it.
-> railway station, train to Shanghai -> straight to dinner -> hotel -> Peace Hotel for Jazz Evening.
The Jazz evening was good fun. I’m not sure whether the loud-looking redhead is Katherine, but I did give an award to a couple named Matthew and Katherine:
The Richard Branson Award for extrovert behaviour.
All the photos we took on that day – by which I mean all 46 photos – can be seen in raw form in the Flickr album below:
20th Wuxi -> Suzhou. Lake view – fascinating breakfast…
I don’t really remember the breakfast. My guess is that I tried a Chinese style breakfast – wontons, congees and noodles – for the first time in China.
The Hubin Hotel in Wuxi is still highly regarded 25 years later, although I awarded it:
A Colgate Award for disintegrating toothbrushes
Janie and I have long since given up using hotel toothbrushes – we take our own whizzy ones.
Wuxi is an industrial City and our touring – to see factory life – felt very much like a commercial opportunity to try to sell us stuff.
…To pearl factory (shop), porcelain factory (& shop) and silk factory (& shop).
Lunch in Wuxi. Barge trip on Grand Canal -> Suzhou. Dinner followed by early night.
We had a guide on that barge trip from Wuxi to Suzhou, who I honoured with:
The Brian Clough Award for liking the sound of your own voice
Mind you, that sounding off might have been safer than the coach we took in Wuxi – I honoured the driver of Sally’s coach:
The Nigel Mansell Award for driving
All the photos we took on that day – by which I mean all 27 photos – can be seen in raw form in the Flickr album below:
