We arrived in Hangzhou, China, at 11pm last Tuesday on a flight from Kuala Lumpur following an earlier flight that day from Penang to KL. In Hangzhou we made enquiries and preparations for our viewing of the solar eclipse on 22 July, then on Thursday morning caught a fast train to Shanghai to meet our American cousin Dick who was due to arrive from the USA in the early evening. Dick is a keen traveler and “eclipse chaser” and we agreed to meet in China, hopefully see the eclipse weather permitting, then show him around some of the sights in China for a couple of weeks.Swine flu is a big topic in Asia at the moment and the airports in the region have installed walk-through passenger temperature scanners. Those travelers who create an orange to reddish image on the screen or who foolishly sniffle or sneeze as they pass are taken aside for closer examination and face the unhappy prospect of a 7-day enforced stay in a hotel or quarantine station. Such an outcome would ruin our eclipse viewing plans so it was with some trepidation that we hurried past the scanners, looking as cool and un-fevered as possible.
Ever ready to meet customer needs, a shop at the Kuala Lumpur airport was selling packets of “Bye-Fever”, a concoction apparently guaranteed to lower the body temperature for several hours and certainly long enough to get past the scanners. We didn’t buy any; I glanced up at the ceiling-mounted security camera and imagined men in white coats in the control room, rectal thermometers already in hand, peering down at the customers gathered furtively around the Bye-Fever and radioing instructions to the guards to round them up and bring them in for inspection. When we touched down in Hangzhou the Captain instructed everyone to stay in their seats as health officials would be coming aboard to take the temperature of each and every passenger. After a delay of several minutes the health officials, all wearing face-masks, came aboard and instructed everyone to stand, drop their daks and bend over.
Just kidding. What actually happened was that after a delay of several minutes the Captain announced that the officials had decided, after all, not to come aboard, and we were all free to leave the plane. Inside the terminal we came first to a long line of desks behind which stood face-masked health officials, and further back were a couple of men pacing up and down, wearing the sort of outfit I imagine you would if you were about to clock on to your regular shift in the plutonium reprocessing lab at the local nuclear power plant. Were they suspecting Ebola virus as well? But I shouldn’t make light of the situation – it was good to see such a careful, professional response to a serious public health issue. We handed over our swine flu declaration forms and the women who questioned us were reassured to learn that although we were Australians, we hadn’t been near the place for the past 10 days. They waved us through and we proceeded to customs.
At Shanghai’s Pudong International Airport, Dick emerged from Immigration just before 7pm after a long flight from Boston via San Francisco and stepped for the first time into the People’s Republic of China. We caught the magnetic levitation train back into the city centre, a journey of about 11 minutes rather than the usual hour in a taxi. It reaches a top speed of around 450 km/hr, a little disconcerting at first to realize you’re travelling at half the speed of a jumbo jet although only just a metre or two above the ground. Once in the city we checked into the New Harbour Service Apartments and later walked around the corner for dinner – we quickly skipped past the Oily Top Level Geese with Enterovirus on the menu and ordered roast duck, pork, noodles and green vegetables.
We spent a few days sightseeing in Shanghai, possibly the liveliest city in China and certainly the one with the most impressive, even slightly intimidating, clusters of high-rise apartments and office blocks. We visited the excellent modern Shanghai Museum in People’s Square and browsed through the shops along the Nanjing Pedestrian Mall that stretches all the way from People’s Square to the Bund, the latter a neighbourhood of elegant colonial era buildings that line the western bank of the Huangpu River. On the other side sit the soaring skyscrapers of the Pudong new economic zone. At night, both sides give impressive but quite different views of the river and Shanghai skyline. We also spent a few hours at the Yuyuan Garden and Bazaar. Suzhou, a city about two hours to the west, is reputed to have the finest classical gardens in China. This may be so, but for visitors without the time or inclination to go there, the Yuyuan Garden is almost as good and a must-see if you come to Shanghai. The nearby Bazaar is a sprawling, touristy market set inside classical reproduction buildings and is worth a browse too, particularly combined with a visit to the Garden.
One of the best aids to any visit to Shanghai is its great subway system. It’s gleaming, efficient, fast, easy to work out and inexpensive to use. Apart from the shopping malls, Shanghai streets are not particularly easy to walk around but the subway system makes travelling across this huge city a breeze.
We took a fascinating boat ride along the Huangpu River, initially passing the soaring Pudong skyscrapers, then the heavy industrial infrastructure that lines both sides of the river further upstream. We passed multiple power stations, shipyards, nests of dock cranes, freight ships and Chinese navy gunboats. Eventually the watercourse widened dramatically as we entered onto the Yangtze River just before it flowed into the East China Sea. Some of the water flowing past us had started its journey on the Tibet Plateau, 6,000 kilometres to the West.
Just an hour or two to the west of Shanghai are several “water” towns. These were established centuries ago and feature canals that snake through the towns and were used to transport goods and people. Today the only craft that ply these waters are small wooden tourist boats catering to the thousands of tourists who visit every day. On previous trips to China we visited Suzhou and Wuzhen. On Sunday we caught a bus to Tongli, another of the water villages that gets good visitor reports. It was a pleasant place but the weather was almost unbearable – the temperature was around 40 degrees C and the humidity was about 90%. Weather-wise it was one of the most uncomfortable days we’ve ever experienced and we didn’t spend a lot of time walking on the baked cobblestone streets and over the arched bridges along the canals.
