China Diaries | StrippedPixel.com

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.”

Ten (alternative) Scenes of West Lake

Posted on September 7, 2012 by strippedpixel / No comments

Revered by emperors and inspiring poets for centuries, Hangzhou has long been considered one of the most beautiful destinations in all of China. “Above there is heaven,” the Chinese say. “Below there is Hangzhou”. Marco Polo even went so far as to describe the city as “the most beautiful and magnificent in the world” when he visited at the end of the 13th century, and if the number of visitors that still flock here to witness this magnificence are anything to go by, its reputation has not waned one bit in the intervening years.

The thing about travelling in China as a Westerner

Posted on September 4, 2012 by strippedpixel / No comments

The thing about travelling in China as a Westerner, as any Westerner that has travelled in China will know, is that at times it can feel like you are walking round with a neon sign above your head advertising your endlessly fascinating other-worldliness. In every city, in every town in mainland China, a foreigner will, more often than not, be seen as nothing more the foreigner he is upon being first encountered “in the wild” as it were.

Anyone for Hangzhou?

Posted on August 26, 2012 by strippedpixel / No comments

Turns out Shanghai by 6am wasn’t such a wild exaggeration after all. The no-lights-on-the-bus situation meant that after sundown, and an hour or so spent trying to write in the dark, I was asleep by 9pm or thereabouts. It was then a night of sleeping and waking, sleeping and waking, in my too-short, too-narrow, upper-middle bunk, as we rocked and rolled our merry way east. It was like trying to sleep in a sledge … as it careered down a snowy hill … for nine hours straight … all the while dreaming of coaches rolling crash barriers, flaming wreckages and head-on collisions to the incessant punctuation of honking coach horns all night long. But at least when I woke we were closer.

Shenzhen to Shanghai by bus

Posted on August 23, 2012 by strippedpixel / No comments

I’ve said it before, and if this were the search for the Higgs Boson we were talking about, we’d almost be at our five-sigma point by now, such is the level of inevitability. Because seemingly without fail, whenever I travel in China, the adventure begins pretty much as soon as I leave Hong Kong. By “adventure” I mean well-laid plans unraveling almost immediately upon crossing the border. It happened last time when I was heading to Beijing. It happened not quite without a little oversight on my part on my Hong Kong to the UK by train trip last year. And now it’s happening again.

Black jails and paranoia in the heart of Beijing

Posted on June 3, 2012 by strippedpixel / 2 comment

“We are about to arrive in our nation’s great capital,” the voice on the train’s intercom said. It was Qing Ming Festival proper, as it would be for the following two days, and if we thought people would stay home to spend quality time with their families during this brief but precious holiday, how wrong we were to dismiss the appetite for sightseeing and patriotism of the Chinese tour group.