Macau, China

We arrived at the seething Guangzhou train station late Tuesday morning on 22 July from Chongqing and after escaping the exit crush we went straight to the nearby Guangzhou Long Distance Bus Station where we boarded a coach that left for the Zhuhai Special Economic Zone 15 minutes later. It was a fascinating trip three hours to the south along a modern expressway that passes through one of the most prosperous regions of China. Along much of the highway there were high rise apartments and offices, and hi-tech manufacturing and technology parks. Approaching Zhuhai city we came to the tropical coast and took the esplanade road where we saw beaches for the first time in several months. On one side of the esplanade were attractive sandy beaches and coconut palms running along the shore of the South China Sea and on the other, apartments and resort hotels. Flotillas of fishing boats and small freighters lay at anchor in the bay. Zhuhai is also a University town with thousands of students in residence – I imagine this would be a great place to be a Uni student.

From the Zhuhai bus terminal it was a short 200 metre walk to the large shiny Gongbei border station where we completed the immigration and customs formalities before walking through to Macau on the other side. Crowds of Macau residents were doing the same armed with large packages and boxes, apparently returning from shopping forays on the other side. Although control of Macau was handed back to China in 1999, this tiny former Portuguese colony occupying less than 30 square kilometres at the mouth of the Pearl River retains a degree of autonomy similar to Hong Kong and although now permanently part of China, immigration and customs requirements still have to be met when coming and going.

Macau is very different from its neighbouring sister Chinese provinces. The language, signage, architecture, traffic direction, power plugs and sockets, and currency all reflect the different history of this former colony. And after becoming accustomed to the pleasing prices in the western provinces of China, there was a very noticeable difference in the prices of things in Macau notwithstanding that the latter are better than those in nearby Hong Kong just a short boat ride away across the bay. We hauled our backpacks around the humid city centre until we found a hotel that suited us, just around the corner from the Kwong Hing Tai Firecracker Manufacturing Company, and spent a pleasant evening studying the helpful maps and visitor guides in our room and planning a walk around the world heritage listed Historical Centre of Macau. This area was added to the Register in 2005, making it the 31st world heritage site in China.

Fujian fishermen and Guangdong farmers were the first known settlers in the Macau area. They were joined in the mid 16th century by Portuguese merchants and explorers who, with the permission of Guangdong’s mandarins, established a city that eventually became a major centre for trade between China, Japan, India and Europe. But its influence waned after the colonization of Hong Kong by the British following the opium war in 1841. In Macau’s heyday over the previous three centuries, missionaries from different European religious orders entered China through Macau, and in addition to engaging in missionary work and establishing churches, introduced western concepts of social welfare and founded the first western-style hospitals, dispensaries, orphanages and charitable organizations.

In much more recent times, temples to mammon have also appeared here in the form of Las Vegas style casinos and hotels, each new one bursting brashly onto the skyline determined to be a quantum level more phantasmagorical than the others. Current honours certainly go to the way-over-the-top Grand Lisboa, a humungous shiny gold edifico that dominates the skyline and stalks around town muscling into whatever photos it can. But Macau is not tacky and tasteless - far from it. There are only a few casinos, and they do not impinge on the downtown world heritage city centre. We spent a day walking through the latter, admiring the beautifully restored and maintained colonial era buildings, including the following:

Penha Hill Church perched on the top of Penha Hill that looks out over the city and surrounding chinese territory;
St Lawrence's Church, overlooking the sea, built by the Jesuits in the mid 16th century;
St Joseph's Seminary and Church, established in 1728. This was the principal base for the missionary work implemented in China and Japan;
Dom Pedro V Theatre, the first western-style theatre in China, built in 1860;
St Augustine's Church, established by Spanish Augustinians in 1591;
Sedano Square, Macau's mediterranean-style urban centre for centuries;
St Dominic's Church, founded in 1587 by three Spanish Dominican priests originally from Acapulco in Mexico;
Ruins of St Pauls, the facade of what was originally the Church of Mater Dei built in 1602-1640 but destroyed by fire in 1835.

At one place along our walk we sought directions from a security officer stationed at the front of an imposing government building. He and his colleagues elsewhere around town all looked very hip in their fancy uniforms and they all could very easily have been whisked off to a movie set and cast as extras in Pierce Brosnan’s latest action flick with no costuming changes required whatsoever.

The food in Macau is excellent, with its greater variety reflecting its Portuguese roots. We had lunch at a packed Cantonese café that proudly displays photographs of celebrities who have dined there. Evidently the former Governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, had a particular noodle dish before boarding his cruiser back to the mother country. We were pleased to continue the fine traditions of the Empire too by ordering that same noodle dish before boarding our public bus back to Guangzhou. But not before dinner at A Lorcha, a busy Portuguese restaurant just around the corner from Avenida de Almeida Ribeiro, Macau’s main street. We had the vegetarian samosas, lamb and potato curry, and grilled sardines with crusty bread and olives and lemon. And a nice bottle of Portuguese wine, the first wine we had tasted for months. It was difficult to believe that we were still in China; Macau is certainly a unique dot in this vast country, and one well worth visiting for a few days. The food and atmosphere at A Lorcha were excellent and we happily handed over a plump wad of Patakas when we were finished.

On Thursday morning we caught a local bus just a few kilometres north to Portas Do Cerco, the Macau side of the border crossing, and after repeating the immigration and customs formalities we walked back into China proper with our second 90 day visa now activated. We retraced our steps to Guangzhou and on arrival at the bus station we descended into the gleaming, technologically cutting-edge and fast Guangzhou metro to whiz under the city for a few minutes before popping up at The 2nd Workers' Cultural Palace stop, just south of the Pearl River that bisects this city of 8 million and only a few steps from the lobby of the Skyline Plaza Hotel where we checked in for a few days.

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Memories of Guizhou province, China

We left Chongqing on Monday afternoon on a 1,700 km overnight train south-east to Guangzhou in Guangdong province, our entry point into China almost three months ago. This train was also modern and clean, and more typically than our recent train journeys, full. We shared a 4-bed compartment with two quiet pleasant Chinese men. The journey took 22 hours and for the first time we ate dinner in the train restaurant car (previously we had taken packet instant noodles and fruit with us). The dinner was OK although not meeting the expectations raised by the glossy brochure in our compartment that claimed that the on-board chefs were all highly accomplished. But the views from the large dining car windows were fantastic; we passed stunning steep hillside scenery interspersed with flat jigsaw-patterned rice and corn fields and long periods of blackness as we sped through mountain tunnels many kilometres long.

Later in the evening I pored for a time over our map of China and saw that our route would take us briefly through the north-east corner of Guizhou province. We had spent several great days in Guizhou in March 2007, visiting the capital city Guiyang and the fantastic Miao villages near Liuzhi in the west and the more prosperous ones in the mountains near Kaili to the south-east. We were very fortunate on that occasion to be driven to those places by a resident of Guiyang and relative of Lee Tuan’s family whom we met over Christmas lunch in December 2006. He and his wife and family were visiting Adelaide and when we told them of our plans they told us that they lived in Guiyang and would be happy to show us around.

The following March we travelled by train east from Kunming in neighbouring Yunnan province and got off early in the morning at the coal mining town of Liuzhi in western Guizhou, with a slightly wild west feel about it. “Su Su” was kindly waiting for us at the station with an interpreter (Jenni) and he hired a taxi to take us into the nearby mountains to the village of Suoga. We passed large expanses of iridescent green and yellow rice and canola fields on the way. Suoga and the more outlying village of Longga are home to the “long horn” Miao people, so called because of the women’s cultural practice of winding their hair, and that of their ancestors, onto a large horn-like frame that they wear on their heads on festive and ceremonial occasions. These days, though, a lot of artificial yarn seems to be used in place of ancestral hair. We spent a couple of hours walking around this photogenic village, snapping away and talking with the locals. Many of them came down to the road to see us off when it was time to go. They are obviously very financially poor people but appeared to be happy notwithstanding the tough lives they live.

After an overnight stay in Liuzhi we caught the morning train to Guiyang where we spent some time at Su Su and his wife’s apartment before hitting the road in Su Su’s car for Kaili and the surrounding villages. Our top priority was to visit the Miao town of Xijiang about 3 hours from Kaili. But out from Kaili the road to Xijiang was being rebuilt and we took an alternative steep mountain track that provided a heart-stopping hour. In one place the track was slightly less wide than the car and there were no guard rails, with the result that we could peer down on nothingness except the faint hazy outline of Xijiang thousands of feet vertically below. On the track we were about an hour of steep downward zigzags from Xijiang, but one foot wrong from our driver and we would have arrived in town in dramatic style within a few seconds. But our host and driver was sure-footed and careful, and it was thankfully more than an hour later after nightfall when we finally made it safely into Xijiang and checked into a guesthouse run by a Miao husband and wife schoolteacher couple and the sister of one of them. They gave us a great dinner and plied us with their home-made rice wine liberally dispensed during many toasts and Miao songs of welcome. Having just flirted with danger to get here made the whole scene even more warm and cosy, and no-one refused rice wine that night.

The guesthouse itself was made entirely of wood, as were all the houses in town. This one was relatively new and beautifully-smelling, and our room was large and cosy with fantastic views over the village. Our hosts had to leave for school very early in the morning and they pointed us towards a food shop in the village where we could have breakfast. We walked there and had a huge bowl of delicious water buffalo and vegetable noodles fortified with a fiery dollop of chilli oil. Then we went on a long walk around the town and in the nearby fields where buffalo-drawn ploughs were tilling the earth and an ancient looking water wheel creaked as it turned. This was possibly the most beautiful village we have seen anywhere in China and we were sorry to leave. Our guesthouse hosts stood by our car and sang a song of farewell as we headed off slowly up the steep winding road out of Xijiang.

We visited a few other villages on our way back to Kaili and Guiyang, most notably Langde where we chanced upon a Miao welcoming ceremony that had just got underway for several coach loads of Japanese, Chinese and Korean tourists. Xijiang is not touristy; Langde most certainly is and it is firmly on the coach tour circuit in Guizhou. The Miao people in this region are into silver in a big way; they believe it has special powers and their ceremonial dress features silver jewellery and silver-looking headgear and other objects. The instant we arrived I spotted an opportunity and we quickly infiltrated the long line of tourists walking up the track to the village, at the top of which a rhythmically swaying row of old men straight off the front cover of National Geographic played their traditional wind pipe instruments, and along which Miao women in ceremonial dress enthusiastically dispensed rice wine from communal clay cups. I had three or four despite Lee Tuan’s tut tuts of disapproval, and my explanation in defence that it would be rude to refuse failed to convince. Later though, I squirmed a little at the potential cross-infection fest I had just participated in and was very glad of the Hepatitis A shots we had a few months before. It brought back memories of Holy Communion at the Lutheran Church I was taken to every Sunday as a boy and the spirited debate that preceded the replacement of the single silver communion cup with a separate vessel for each member of the congregation, one of whom had only recently bounced back from a bad bout of TB. But that’s another story.

Once everyone was assembled in the large village courtyard, the locals put on a touristy but still nice Miao traditional song and dance performance. After it was finished we spent some time in the village shops and walking up and down the winding alleyways that snaked between the houses made even more photogenic by the golden corn cobs hung out to dry from the windows. Then we headed for Kaili where we stayed overnight before returning to Guiyang the following day. In Guiyang our hosts drove us around this attractive modern city and took us to eat at great street cafes. We stayed with them in their apartment before flying out from Guiyang when the time came for us to move on.

That was all in early 2007 and it would have been nice now to slip back down to Guiyang again and head off to fabulous Xijiang for a second visit. But having been in China now for nearly three months, the clock is counting down fast on our 90 day visa and we must be out of the country within the next several days. But this time we came prepared with two 90-day visas in our passports, so once we walk across a border somewhere (Hong Kong or Macau are the two most likely candidates for visa purposes), we can simply turn around and walk back into mainland China and take up where we left off, for another three months. Guangzhou in southern Guangdong province, only three hours by bus or catamaran to Macau or Hong Kong, is an ideal place from which to do just that.

Guizhou memories VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Chongqing, Chongqing province, China

One of the fascinating aspects of China is the enormity of its population and how little we know about most of the cities where its people live. Asked to name some cities in China, most westerners could rattle off Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and maybe two or three others. That would account for about 70 million Chinese people. So where are the other 1,230 million? They are located in the other 600 cities and a myriad of towns and villages, all largely unknown to most outsiders. Who’s heard of Chongqing? Not many foreigners have (we hadn’t until the first time we came here), which is a little surprising considering that it is home to over 20 million people. Located in central China, Chongqing (pronounced Chong-chin) is perched on steep hillsides at the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing Rivers. The streets are so steep that Chongqing is rare amongst Chinese cities and towns in having almost no bicycles. The steepness also means that carrying things around is an issue, with the result that there are many porters on the streets each armed with a short stout bamboo pole and length of rope, ready to carry packages and luggage to wherever for a fee.

Along with Nanjing and Wuhan, Chongqing shares the dubious title of being one of the “Three Furnaces of China” in recognition of its baking temperatures and stifling humidity in summer. It was the latter that hit us the most when we arrived here yesterday on a very comfortable express bus from Chengdu and caught a taxi into the city centre where we checked into the Yu Du Hotel at the end of the glitzy pedestrian shopping mall. On the scale of world cities, Chonqqing is a monster of monsters. It is also a place where gleam meets grime, where shiny soaring skyscrapers happily rub shoulders with dark decaying buildings from previous centuries (and that given the pace of development here, are not much longer for this world).

The section of the Yangtze downstream from Chongqing is the most scenic on the river, with the result that Chongqing is a major terminal for tourist boats plying the waters between here and Yichang about 800 kilometres downstream. Boats of various classes and sizes cast off from the Chaotianmen Dock near the city centre for the two day, three night journey down to Yichang, passing through the famous Three Gorges on the way. We did this short voyage in early 2006 on a Chinese tourist boat for a very reasonable fare of about 1,300 Yuan each. It was a lot of fun, although with about 400 passengers crammed onto a relatively small boat, the trip threw up some challenges and crazy situations to deal with.

There were only about ten westerners on the boat; we two and eight young European backpackers - six Germans and two English brothers sent by their parents to travel alone around China before starting University. They all spoke very little Chinese and gratefully accepted Lee Tuan’s offer to keep them informed on the more important messages periodically broadcast across the decks from the boat’s crystal clear (in Mandarin) loud speaker system. This was after they missed the first message that we would be travelling through the first of the big Three Gorges at dawn. Boy, were they angry when they woke up in the morning to discover that we had already passed through the first gorge! Later we transferred for a couple of hours to small boats to do a side trip down the Little Three Gorges, every bit as scenic as their bigger brothers. Back on the big boat we frequently stopped along the way to see sights on the river bank and to buy food. At one stop I bought and ate a whole Yangtze River fish that tasted good but that night my digestive system had a sudden and complete cleanout within the space of 30 seconds. Luckily I was in our cabin at the time. That was the only significant stomach upset I’ve had in several longish trips to China. Others on the boat though had the fish without any problems.

The journey ended just upstream from Yichang at the site of the massive Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze, the biggest civil construction project in China’s history (with the possible exception of The Great Wall). This development will provide a large amount of much-needed hydroelectricity and will largely eliminate the occasional floods that have historically bedeviled the downstream towns and killed millions. Our boat then entered a lock and we emerged what seemed like a hundred or so feet lower, docking soon after. Although it was only 4am, everyone had to leave the boat at this point and time. Along with many other passengers we boarded a bus to Yichang, then transferred to another bus for the four hour trip to Wuhan, a large city with a major regional airport. A few photos from this river journey are included in this post.

But that was in 2006. This time we spent our brief time in Chongqing looking around the city centre and checking out the developments since our last time here. The city centre is gleaming with massive buildings and modern shopping centres, and this growth is radiating outwards to consume the suburbs that look decades older. The contrast between new and old, rich and poor, is particularly stark in Chongqing. The Liberation Monument in the city centre square commemorates the end of China’s war with Japan in 1945. A huge screen plays celebratory historical wartime footage to the crowds in the square, and all around are dazzling neon advertising displays.

We caught a cable car across the silty Yangtze River that bisects Chongqing and had dinner on the restaurant strip on the other side, admiring the colourful night skyline reflected in the river and the brightly lit restaurant boats that motored slowly along it. The following day we caught a bus about an hour into the western suburbs to visit Ciqikou ancient town overlooking the Jialing River, passing through a firmament of high-rise apartment blocks and flocks of construction cranes on the way. Somewhere in Chongqing there must be a fabulously wealthy crane mogul. Ciqikou is a well-preserved settlement initially established over 1,000 years ago during the Song Dynasty. It later became an important commercial river port during the Ming Dynasty and famed centre of production of fancy blue and white porcelain early in the Qing Dynasty. These days it is a very touristy village of craft, jewellery and food shops, but still worth a visit (just).

The humidity was near total again and after we returned to our hotel late in the afternoon we didn’t relish the prospect of facing the saturated air outside again that day. So we took the lift to the 29th floor and sank into the comfortable chairs of the Nine Level Heaven Restaurant where we watched the Chongqing night skyline rotate very slowly around us as we ate our dinner. This restaurant is very Chinese and the menu contained some wondrous English translations. We could have ordered Rude Fat Cow or The Godmother Fries the Crisp Stomach or Peacock Gizzard or Cow Physique Frozen, or the only one that caused us some unease, Pakistan Person Meat. Hmmm, I thought, possibly putting two and two together, we haven’t seen any Pakistanis around here apart from that anxious looking guy who scurried past downstairs yesterday. We ordered the Ginger Fever Duck and the Crisp Pepper Fragrant Beef, and they were both very good. We were too full for dessert, but had we not been, we would have ordered the Nuclear Crisp Peach Cookies.

Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve, Sichuan province, China

Just inside Sichuan’s northern border, world heritage listed Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve is considered by many to be China’s premier natural attraction.

The Reserve is within a heavily wooded 40 km long alpine valley sparkling with waterfalls and colourful lakes, all set against a backdrop of snowy mountains, and is home to golden monkeys, takins and panda bears. Off the beaten track and a very long way from the East coast, this Reserve was until relatively recently not a major part of the China tourist scene. But this is fast changing with the opening of a nearby airport and enough hotels now at the Park entrance to accommodate more than 20,000 people! A new highway north from Chengdu also made the area much more accessible, but sadly this was destroyed in the recent earthquake and is now closed indefinitely for rebuilding.

Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve reopened to tourists on 8 July following the reopening of an alternative road access route from the south that was itself badly damaged in the quake and has only just been repaired to a sufficient degree to allow traffic back on it. This route follows an arc around the eastern side of the earthquake zone, passing through the towns of Deyang, Mianyang, Riveryou, Pingwu and Nanping. We pulled out of Chengdu’s city centre Xinnamen Bus Station at 8.30am on Tuesday and arrived at the Jiuzhaigou Park entrance 11 hours later after a fascinating trip that took us through lush cultivated countryside and then mountains further to the north. The journey itself was an adventure we weren’t expecting. About 100 km north of Chengdu the road cut through quake-damaged towns and villages, and it was sobering to see the challenges being confronted by the residents in the streets. Many buildings were severely cracked or collapsed, and many standing buildings were vacant. Along the sides of the road for many kilometres were rows of blue tents and elsewhere were seas of blue-roofed wall-to-wall relocatable huts, now the temporary residences of a small percentage of the 3 million people made homeless by the earthquake. One village looked like it had been bombed, with isolated buildings standing between leveled areas covered with stones. The Chinese army was out in force helping the people with essential services and to clean up the debris. We saw large convoys of military trucks loaded with building and other supplies and large army encampments near the roadside. We and a very young French couple were the only westerners on the bus – the Chinese passengers were justifiably impressed and proud of the scale and helpfulness of the work of their soldiers that was plainly visible from the bus windows as we drove along.

The road we travelled on had suffered considerable damage too and we had to make several detours along temporary unsealed tracks and around damaged, closed bridges. At one place we crossed the river on a temporary bridge constructed of steel sections supported by pylons of rubble. Nearby was a former highway bridge now reduced to just a few twisted columns of concrete and steel mesh hanging in the breeze. Elsewhere, whole sections of road pavement and roadside guard rail had been uprooted by earthquake-induced landslides and swept into the river. Pavement sections could be seen poking out of the water and crumpled lengths of guard rail dangled over the riverbanks. Despite all this damage, the authorities have obviously done a great job to get the road back into passable condition so soon after the earthquake. We thought about whether we should make this trip given the overriding priorities of the people in the area. But the road has been officially re-opened to public buses, and people who rely on tourism for their livelihood are very keen for visitors to start coming again. So we decided on balance that it was appropriate to go.

In Jiuzhaigou village we checked into a hotel near the Park entrance. The hotel was nearly empty, many others were still closed, and the village itself was very quiet. On Wednesday we spent the day touring in the Park and walking along its beautiful trails. There were plenty of fellow visitors but only a tiny fraction of the huge number that normally throng through the Park at this time of the year. As we returned to our hotel a big tour bus stopped out front and a crowd of excited Chinese tourists checked in. A good sight to see and no doubt a very welcome one for the hotel owners and staff.

For us, Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve lived up to all the hype we had read and heard about it. It is astonishing that so much natural beauty and so many different features could be packed into one compact valley – it is almost as if this place has been chosen to showcase nature’s repertoire. The waters here are very rich in carbonates with the result that several of the lakes display other-wordly colours, their reflected light casting varying hues of aquamarine pastel. The water is pure and it is possible to see right to the bottom with submerged tree trunks and branches clearly visible. We took some nice pictures but Jiuzhaigou is one of those places where photographs cannot do it justice – you need to be here to fully appreciate its grandeur. A must-see if you ever visit this part of China.

The region’s inhabitants are principally Tibetan and this is strongly reflected in the local architecture. Even new buildings under construction incorporate Tibetan architectural shapes and themes and have avoided the minimalist concrete box look. Combined with the attractive natural scenery, the result is a very pleasant physical environment that would be hard to beat anywhere.

On Thursday we hired a taxi to take us to Jiabo ancient town located in a stunning mountain valley about 30 km west of Jiuzhaigou. Originally settled in the 8th century by Tibetan people, there are some very old buildings in the area that display a unique variation on the Tibetan style. A tasteful tourist village that incorporates this has been constructed nearby and we spent a short while walking around the buildings. But like Jiuzhaigou, it is still very quiet with few guests around. We returned to Jiuzhaigou at around 2pm and had lunch at a streetside café overlooking the fast-flowing stream that winds through the village. We had pork with ginger and stir-fried canola stems, all heavily spiced with Sichuan pepper and dried red chillis. The food and views from the cafe were both great.

We arrived back in Chengdu last night after a return bus trip along the same route and once again checked into the excellent Kaibin Hotel in the city centre. But unfortunately our time in Sichuan province is now almost over - later today we have an East-bound bus to catch.