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Tai Shan: Capturing “The Look”

Posted on November 8, 2012 by strippedpixel / No comments

Maybe it didn’t actually seem as bad as those passing faces would suggest. Maybe, like child birth (or so they say), you forget about the pain and the hours of struggle once it’s over, and eventually look forward to doing it all over again. But as well as the nagging sense of disbelief at your own recent achievement, there’s also always just a twinge – just a tiny little crumb of an impulse – to stand on the steps as the crawlers crawl by, and, for want of less heartless phrase, laugh in their sweaty red faces. On my way down from Tai Shan, that’s essentially what I did.

Sunrise on Tai Shan

Posted on November 7, 2012 by strippedpixel / No comments

7000 steps and over five hours climbing. It had rained almost all the way up until we’d climbed too high for it to rain any more. For the rest of the way to the summit we were passing through a whiteout that still hadn’t shifted by the time I went to bed. It didn’t look good for the sunrise. But you pay you money and take your chance. And if you can see no further than your outstretched hand on the only day you’ve got to go up there, you’d better be praying to everything you can on your way to the top for a clear sky in the morning. I’d set my alarm for 04:15. Sunrise was at 05:20.

7000 steps to the top of Tai Shan

Posted on November 5, 2012 by strippedpixel / No comments

When it comes to mountains, they don’t come any grander or any more renowned in China, than Tai Shan. It is neither the tallest nor the most spectacular of China’s famous peaks, but having been visited by anyone who was ever anyone in Chinese history – from the first emperor Qin Shi Huang to Confucius and Mao Zedong – the mountain today, like Tiananmen Square in Beijing, is a place of pilgrimage for the Chinese people, a chance to connect with thousands of years of Chinese history and tread the same steps as those nation builders that came before them.

His ‘n’ hers: street fashion China style

Posted on October 24, 2012 by strippedpixel / No comments

Have you ever noticed, that when you start to notice something, you can help but notice the thing you noticed with increasing regularity? Like the time I found out that Volvos always drive with their headlights switched on. At first I didn’t believe it. But after I noticed one and then another of these Swedish behemoths happily going about with their lights all bright and shiny, it was soon as if every second car I saw became a Volvo I was seeing them so often.

Qingdao: beaches, beer and more besides

Posted on October 23, 2012 by strippedpixel / No comments

Beer or beaches? Hear the word Qingdao and the thought of one or the other will no doubt be the first that springs to mind. But Qingdao’s trump cards are not the only cards it holds. Regarded by many as one of China’s most beautiful destinations, Qingdao was named the country’s most livable city in 2011, and with an eye to future development to match the legacy of its colonial past, it seems unlikely the city will want to relinquish that honour any time soon.

Close encounters of the sexual assault kind

Posted on October 16, 2012 by strippedpixel / No comments

I’d walked down to the river as I’d done on my first night in Suzhou. Again there was the dancing, the kids on rollerblades, the breeze and general gaiety. I’d spent another day exploring the city, trying to figure it out. It had canals, but it was no Venice. It had gardens, but not nearly as numerous as before. I’d not been disappointed by Suzhou in so far as it had failed to live up to expectations. It was just that those expectations hadn’t exactly been trounced by wondrousness in the meantime.

Why do people go to Suzhou?

Posted on October 9, 2012 by strippedpixel / No comments

Why do people go to Suzhou? I wasn’t planning on going myself until I got talked into it whilst I was in Nanjing. “It’s beautiful,” I was told. “You can see the canals and … there are lots of gardens.” I was skeptical.

Suzhou bills itself as the “Venice of the East,” a moniker my guidebook had referred to as a “hackneyed … chat-up line” that I was unlikely to fall for. It is a town, it continues, that has “had to contend with destruction of its heritage and its replacement with largely arbitrary chunks of modern architecture.” Though Marco Polo, everybody’s favourite China traveller, described it as “a very great and noble city … contain[ing] merchants of great wealth and an incalculable number of people.” He may have been writing seven hundred years before this 11th edition of my Lonely Planet China was printed, but I still didn’t know who to believe.

Suzhou: Big Pants and public dancing

Posted on October 6, 2012 by strippedpixel / No comments

I arrived in Suzhou after a little over an hour’s ride on the high-speed rail from Nanjing. The weather had cooled from the previous week’s mid-30s sweatfest. A light breeze was blowing as I sat overlooking a small square next to the Waicheng River in the south-west of the city.

I was in another rich city of China’s central east coast. While the provincial capital Nanjing was busy transforming itself from aspiring player into 21st century metropolis alongside big brother Shanghai to the east, here in Suzhou, though still relatively small to be competing in the big leagues just yet, there was forward-thinking and an embracing of the economic good times evident all around.

Say cheese! It’s Chinese Domestic Tourism Day

Posted on September 25, 2012 by strippedpixel / No comments

Visit any major tourist site in China – or even any local point of interest for that matter – and you’ll likely witness it yourself. Maybe it’ll be the identical baseball caps you notice first, bobbing along in the collective safety of the sightseeing pack. Maybe it’ll be the tour buses you hear pulling up and emptying out next to some formerly tranquil beauty spot. Or maybe it’ll be the amplified screech of some half-frazzled, umbrella-wielding tour guide that lifts you from your scenic contemplation and dumps you right back down to earth in the crosshairs of the oncoming stampede.

Typhoon dodging with the Nanjing Martyrs

Posted on September 23, 2012 by strippedpixel / No comments

I knew it was coming. The night before I left Hangzhou I’d dreamt of deluges and floods, of trains being swept off tracks and being hounded by lightning strikes. It was summer, typhoon season, and the Philippine Sea was boiling up splendidly, sending swirling chaos towards China’s east coast just in time to leave me scrabbling to avoid it. Typhoon Vicente had already struck Hong Kong a few weeks earlier, leaving a force 10 storm’s-worth of damage and a massacre of dead umbrellas scattered across the city. Moving north, I thought I’d left all that behind.

Nanjing: city of the future; city of today

Posted on September 18, 2012 by strippedpixel / No comments

Nanjing, capital of Jiangsu province, former capital of the nation and a city renowned for its historical and cultural heritage. I’d left Hangzhou after spending the last four days relaxing by West Lake and now it was city time again.

I’d actually been in Nanjing three years earlier on my first trip to China. I’d bought myself a one way ticket to Beijing and was taking the train down the east coast towards Hong Kong. Back then, I hadn’t known what to expect. I’d expected largeness, I’d expected people. I’d actually expected the place to be a lot more inscrutable and harder to deal with than I found it. There were times – mostly when attempting to purchase train tickets – when the situation seemed impossible, but on the whole, I found China to be surprisingly navigable.

Hefang Street, Hangzhou

Posted on September 12, 2012 by strippedpixel / No comments

Back during the Southern Song Dynasty when Hangzhou was China’s capital, the city was perhaps the biggest and richest in the world. The 14th century Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta called it “the biggest city I have ever seen on the face of the earth.” While Marco Polo, whether he ever actually visited China or not, noted that “the number and wealth of the merchants, and the amount of goods that passed through their hands, was so enormous that no man could form a just estimate thereof.”