China – Page 4 – Ian Louis Harris

China Trip – From Nanjing On To Wuxi, 19 November 1993

Janie really got the hang of the early morning tai chi…

…whereas I look somewhat “other”, compared with the regulars

This is what I wrote:

19th – Nanjing -> Wuxi – early morning tai chi after breakfast. Mausoleum of Dr Sun Yat-sen…

I recall being quite taken with the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum. Good exercise climbing all those steps too. So much so, Janie and I both wanted photographic evidence that we made the climb:

…then on to museum (real) and art gallery (shop).

A real museum exhibit being observed by a real Janie

I was starting to get a little vexed by the fact that so many items on our itinerary sounded like sites of touring interest but actually were shopping visits. Some people in our group seemed far more interested in shopping than in actually seeing China, so not only were those shopping legs dull, they also tended to be protracted.

I especially remember one woman, Heather, who was a shopaholic and was almost always last back on the coach after a shopping stop. She bought a huge consignment of tacky-looking laughing Buddhas to take home as gifts, so I honoured her with:

The Dali Lama Award for laughing Buddhas.

To be fair, though, Janie actually really liked that “art gallery” stop as there were some interesting artists with their own art works on show. She bought this small work there, which still has pride of place in the bedroom.

Late lunch in Nanjing, followed by Yangtse River Bridge & then on to railway station for train (shop) to Wuxi.

“Not only will this train take you to Wuxi, Sir, but you’ll have all manner of shopping opportunities on board…”

The number of vendors and the extent of goods – or to be more specific, gimcrack – tendered to the captive audience that was the rail passenger community – had to be seen to be believed.

…Straight to hotel for dinner followed by karaoke.

I remember the visit to a karaoke bar in Wuxi well. Chris, one of our tour guides, arranged the evening and only a few of us (mostly the younger folks from the tour) went. The locals clearly took their karaoke very seriously and mostly sang ballads and love songs – some Chinese pop, some western pop in extraordinary accents.

In keeping with the musical style that seemed popular there, I decided to deliver The Ultimate Love Song, which is one of my early parodies which works to the tune of Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love For You:

The Ultimate Love Song, Whoops Vicar, NewsRevue, Ben Murphy…, 29 February 1992

The subtlety of the piece was probably wasted on most of the audience, but karaoke is surely more about the karaoker than the karaokees.

Janie and I both remember our little group having quite a lot to drink. I recall Janie doing a duet with Chris the guide, but neither of us can remember exactly which song they sang. I think it was something along the lines of “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers”, sung melodramatically and very badly indeed.

For sure we had lots of fun that evening.

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:

China Trip – From Beijing On To Nanjing, 18 November 1993

We did a little bit more sightseeing in Beijing before dashing to the airport for an internal flight to Nanjing.

18th – Beijing to Nanjing – went to Lama Temple & briefly Confuzi Temple. Then on to airport for flight to Nanjing*…

*amazing business moving us from Gate 16 to Gate 19 & then back across the tarmac

I think this is the Confuzi Temple but this photo was not labelled at the time, so I might be getting “confuzied”

I remember the business at the airport, because we were solemnly told we needed to relocate to another gate in order to be in close proximity to our plane, then ended up wandering rather haphazardly across the tarmac to our plane, which was close to the original gate. Frankly that was one of my lesser health and safety concerns about the internal flights back then – more on that topic anon.

…straight on to coaches for trip to amazing bird market and then on to hotel – 5-star Jinling Hotel.

As yes, the bird market.

Janie and I found it fascinating and I’m sure these days Janie would have taken dozens and dozens of photographs there. Still, enough above to give you an idea. Some of our fellow tourists found the place unsettling; it certainly didn’t smell like a place where you’d want to try the street food. It’s probably highly regulated and much safer hygeine-wise now.

As for the 5-star Jinling Hotel – so famous and having had so many high-falutin’ guests it gets a Wikipedia entry – it was a strange sort of 5-star. My guess is that there were different grades of room and our tour group was in last grade:

Dig the rabbit-skin hat and rattan slippers. I still have that short- sleeved shirt in my “holiday collection” 25 years later.

My memory had Janie’s hairdryer debacle happening in this hotel, but my notes have now sent me to the Holiday Inn Beijing for the electrical debacle and I now recall that the incident occurred before our peking duck dinner, not before the music concert, so I have moved that anecdote to the previous day’s write up – click here or below:

Squeezing A Heck Of A Lot Into One Day In Beijing – Including Making The Holiday Inn Beijing Go Pop, 17 November 1993

What the “awards” notes do remind me is that the elevators in the Jinling Hotel were somewhat below five star standard. I awarded that hotel:

The London Regional Transport Efficient Elevator Service Award

On reflection, I think our departures from that hotel were always delayed by people unable to lifts get down from their rooms.

Dinner in town – not bad meal – good ribs. Music concert at which we didn’t fall asleep (but almost everyone else did).

So that will have been our very first encounter with Chinese traditional instruments, including the pipa – an instrument that has fascinated us since and which Janie has subsequently likened to a theorbo with predictably hilarious results in the early music world:

William Carter, Theorbist Extraordinaire’s Mystery Punter Outed, 24 September 2010

But I digress.

All the photos we took on that day – by which I mean all 18 photos – can be seen in raw form in the Flickr album below:

Squeezing A Heck Of A Lot Into One Day In Beijing – Including Making The Holiday Inn Beijing Go Pop, 17 November 1993

As a result of a “fog-bound Beijing” 24 hour delay leaving London…

An Anticlimactic Start To My & Janie’s First Big Travel Adventure Together, 14 to 16 November 1993

…we only had one of the two scheduled days in Beijing, at the start of our 1993 China tour.

Never mind. Kuoni would try to squeeze as much into one day as is humanly possible…possibly more than that.

No time to hang around in the throne room

17th – Beijing – went to Tianenmen Square and Forbidden City in morning – then closonet factory – then lunch on the way to Great Wall – food slightly spicy this time but still more Cantonese style than Beijingese. Great Wall in afternoon – walked up a bit bought a rabbit skin hat on the way up for ¥10.7 (£1.30) – straight back for Peking Duck dinner. [indecipherable added note]. Mr Poll Tax explained how to complain about anything.

Ah, so the Peking Duck was the second night, not the first night…still, everything I wrote about the Peking Duck meal (and the Park Inn) still applies.

My abiding memory of getting ready to go out for that meal was Janie’s hairdryer moment. I don’t mean her chewing me out Alex Ferguson style – that sort of hairdryer moment would be more predictable than memorable – no, I mean the moment when Janie, who insisted on schlepping her own hairdryer half way around the world, plugged in said hairdryer and made an entire Holiday Inn’s electricity go “pop”.

OK, it is JUST possible that something else in the hotel made the electricity go pop at the precise moment that Janie flicked her hairdryer switch…but what are the chances of that happening?

I don’t think Janie dared try to use her hairdryer again until we got to Hong Kong.

The Thomas Edison Award for electrical cabling – the Holiday Inn Beijing

I don’t remember much about Mr Poll Tax but I suspect he was a seasoned, semi-professional complainer.

All the photos we took on that big day – just 17 between the two of us would you believe – in those days it was rolls of film and rationing our supplies – can be seen in raw form in the Flickr album below:

An Anticlimactic Start To My & Janie’s First Big Travel Adventure Together, 14 to 16 November 1993

Janie and I embarked on our first big holiday together, to China, Hong Kong & Bali, 25 years ago as I write (in November 2018).

A long while in the planning, I got permission from Binder Hamlyn in August 1993 to take an exceptionally long vacation – four weeks, having accumulated a large backlog of leave, at which point Janie and I promptly booked the holiday and spent the next three months looking forward to it.

We booked this holiday through Kuoni Travel. Being somewhat unseasoned and relatively impecunious travellers at that time, the China portion of the trip was a group tour. In any case, in 1993 it would have been difficult to travel around China independently; it was fairly difficult even on a group tour.

Our excitement was curtailed when we got to the airport to discover that our flight had been delayed by 24 hours due to fog in Beijing.

My tour journal (see as written above, transcribed below) begins:

Excelsior Hotel 24 hour delay of flight – Beijing fog bound. We ate, swam, worked out in gym, ate, swam and ate…

What was the Excelsior Heathrow is now (November 2018) the Park Inn by Radisson Heathrow – if this link still works when you read this, you can decide for yourself whether you’d prefer 24 hours in that place or in Beijing.

I do also remember the tour group leaders, Sally and Chris, arranging a couple of briefing sessions at the hotel, to try to keep us all upbeat, to introduce us to each other and to explain how they were going to salvage what they could of our Beijing site-seeing, which was going to be reduced from two days to one very busy day. I took very few notes.

Departed for Beijing 9pm on 15th – arrived afternoon of 16th – straight to Holiday inn Beijing and out to dinner at rather ordinary restaurant next door.

I have one abiding memory of the flight. When we boarded, one gentleman, very red in the face, who looked like a travelling businessman rather than a holiday maker, elbowing people out of the way – flamboyantly ensuring that he got as much hand-luggage space as possible. He was probably an expert at manspreading too, although we were mercifully sitting a couple of rows away from him. Clearly he was a seasoned traveller and equally clearly not a very nice or polite bloke. Since that flight, Janie and I have always described that type of traveller’s behaviour as “like the man on the Beijing plane”.

Beijing Capital International Airport in 1993 was nothing like the place it is now or even like the place we experienced on our next visit, in 2010. In the early 1990’s, if I recall correctly, the runways and indeed the passenger walkways were more like the top of a great big outdoor wall…

…or perhaps I am getting my photographs muddled up. Perhaps that picture is from our visit to the great wall the next day.

Joking apart, the airport back then seemed very developing world and basic for a major international city. Also, it was extremely cold when we arrived in Beijing – an early season wave of arctic weather – hence snow on the wall.

My comment about the food at a “rather ordinary restaurant” next door to the Holiday Inn was an abiding theme on this holiday. The food was mostly not good and was very samey. There was an assumption that a British tour group would not be very interested in Chinese food beyond a few staple dishes of the pseudo-Chinese, sweet and sour balls variety. Every meal included copious plates of chips, just in case the “Chinese” food didn’t please people. To be fair, most of our fellow travellers were not particularly interested in the food and (unsurprisingly given the quality of food served) were not going to cultivate an interest in Asian cuisine on that touring holiday.

We were given some peking duck in Beijing – the next day it transpires…

Squeezing A Heck Of A Lot Into One Day In Beijing – Including Making The Holiday Inn Beijing Go Pop, 17 November 1993

…but that peking duck was of a far lesser quality than the stuff we were used to in good London Chinese restaurants – for example, the Park Inn – by which I mean May’s wonderful Chinese restaurant on Wellington Terrace, around the corner from my flat – not the Radisson hotel chain known as Park Inn. In the fullness of time shall write up May’s Park Inn for Ogblog. Strangely, though, on Googling it, I found one page – click here for link…

…or here for my 2018 scrape of that page… still listing May’s restaurant some 15-18 years after it closed. I wonder how many other restaurants on that listing still exist?

So it’s not just Beijing and China that have changed in the last 25 years – but I do think the changes there are more dramatic.

Anyway, the point is, evening of 16th November 1993, Janie and I had arrived in China and the touring was about to begin the next day.

China Tour, Pre Briefing Notes, 14 November 1993

While we were fog bound at Heathrow on 14 November…

An Anticlimactic Start To My & Janie’s First Big Travel Adventure Together, 14 to 16 November 1993

…our Kuoni guides, Chris Lucas and Sally Ward, briefed us ahead of our trip.

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