Seoul, South Korea

Seoul was a pleasant surprise – we didn’t expect such a green, clean, stylish even, pedestrian-friendly city.  Sure, it’s a giant, modern metropolis of over 10 million people with high rise for kilometres in every direction, but it manages to make space, and pleasant space at that, for people making their way around the city on foot.    

We visited two of Seoul’s old palaces, watching the changing of the guard at one of them, before strolling for an hour in beautiful Secret Garden behind Changdeokgung Palace, now in its full autumn glory.  From there we took a subway and bus to Seoul Tower to see millions of twinkling electric lights slowly take over from the sun the task of illuminating the city.  

Seoulites have discovered coffee and pastries in a big way – we’ve never seen so many nice coffee shops in a city, and it surely must have more patisseries than Paris.  We stayed at a guesthouse in the Hongik University District and ate at Korean cafes in the surrounding streets.  But it wasn’t all beef and kimchi -  we patronized a nearby bakery more times than we should have, leaving each night with assorted pastries (for tomorrow’s breakfast we told ourselves with little conviction).  Hongik has become trendy, particularly with young people, and on weekends it throngs with visitors and reverberates to the sounds of excellent street bands and performers, several of whom we saw oozing X-Factor for the enthusiastic crowds watching.  Everyone seemed to be having a great time – Seoulites have obviously reached their own personal accommodations with the craziness and dangers from across the border 60 km to the north, and that was great to see too.   

Demilitarized Zone, North/South Korea

We flew from Beijing to Seoul, South Korea, from where I travelled north to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) to brief the Generals.  The DMZ is only 60 km north of Seoul and the highway is lined all the way with multiple coils of razor wire and crossed at several points with mined tank traps that can be detonated at very short notice to block the road to impede an attack from the north.  There are also regularly spaced military lookouts and several lines of control on the way; the first is the civilian line of control that marks the end point for free travel by the South Korean general public.  Further north the 4 km wide DMZ begins, down the centre of which runs the military demarcation line (MDL) approximately following the 38th parallel and effectively the current border between North and South Korea.

After passing through several security checkpoints manned by South Korean soldiers, we reached Camp Bonifas in the UN Joint Security Area to hear a rapid-fire briefing on the history of the DMZ from a US soldier, before proceeding to the United Nations Military Armistice Commission conference building within the DMZ for a sticky beak around.  This room is used for meetings of representatives of North and South Korea, and/or the UN.  It was a strange and slightly eerie place.  The MDL runs through the middle of the meeting room, bisecting the large polished wooden conference table.  Outside, ever since the notorious 1976 axe murder incident, each side must stay on its respective side of the MDL, marked by a concrete strip on the ground.  But inside, while the room was “ours”, we were free to move around as we pleased, crossing at will between South Korean and North Korean territory.  This was achieved simply by walking around to the other side of the conference table – in this way I made three or four short visits into North Korea.  Armed South Korean soldiers manned the doors to prevent anyone defecting to the North (nobody seemed to be contemplating this – most of the group I was with were US ex-army guys) and to prevent anyone entering from the North’s side.  We were under strict instructions not to stand too close to the South Korean soldiers in the room who, we were twice warned, were martial arts experts under orders to lash out without warning at anyone approaching too closely.  But we were allowed to photograph them.

Outside the room, blue-uniformed South Korean soldiers and brown-uniformed North Korean soldiers stared impassively at each other from their respective sides of the MDL, only a few metres apart.  We were permitted to photograph the North side but again were under strict instructions not to stare, gesture, speak or interact in any way with the North Korean soldiers.  And of course, definitely not to step across the MDL.  A Soviet defector from the North side did just that some time ago and the North Korean soldiers opened fire on him.  Several soldiers from both sides were killed in the ensuing fire fight but the defector miraculously survived and eventually found refuge in a third country.

We then moved on to inspect the actual site of the axe murder incident and the Bridge of No Return.  The latter was used following the 1953 ceasefire agreement for repatriating prisoners of both sides.  Each prisoner was given the choice of crossing the bridge to return to his homeland or to remain where he was.  Once made, the decision was irreversible – if he crossed the bridge he could never return.

Our final stop for the day was at Imjingak near the civilian line of control just south of the DMZ.  Here, elderly citizens of both the North and South, separated for decades from their relatives on the other side, only recently began to have short reunification meetings with each other.  A fence at the nearby Bridge of Freedom is covered with ribbons and messages expressing the pain, hopes and solidarity of people from around the world at the tragedy of separation endured by the people of Korea for the past 60 years, and still with no resolution in sight.      

A slightly bizarre day’s experience for a visitor - a lifetime of heartbreak for many Koreans.  With that thought in mind I made my own irreversible decision, heading back south to be reunited with my own Dear Leader who had preferred to spend the day shopping in downtown Seoul.

Beijing, China

A fast overnight train from Nanjing brought us back to Beijing when my class was finished in Kunshan.  It was time to relax a bit after the all-day lectures and nightly banquets, and we spent a couple of days walking in central Beijing.  The centuries old imperial classical garden in Beihai Park just north of the Forbidden City is worth a few hours, and from there we strolled along the winding paths through the touristy but nice Houhai Lake area and back to our hotel in Dongcheng.  Just down the street is Beijing’s famous Guo Jie restaurant strip, almost a kilometre long with hundreds of wall to wall restaurants on both sides of the red-lantern illuminated road.  We dined there each night after a wait in a queue to get a table.  The wait was worth it - the spicy food was great.  The cold has finally come to Beijing and the spruikers outside were dressed in heavy fur coats; inside, the heaters were on full blast to create the environment the Chinese like best – hot.  Their winters are much more extreme than Australia’s, and they seem to overcompensate for the cold by generating uncomfortably hot environments inside buildings.  At least that’s how it seems to us.      

Today we browsed the shops in Wangfujing Mall, Beijing’s premier shopping strip.  We were last here a little over a year ago and the fast-growing affluence is plain to see.  There’s no better way to get around Beijing than by its fantastic subway system.  But claustrophobics would do well to avoid rush hour when the surging crowds almost overwhelm the system.  The crush on board the trains has to be seen and felt to be believed.  Passengers don’t merely brush against each other; they are pressed hard together in a way that would normally be unthinkable between strangers.  And don’t even think about breakdowns or fire in the tunnel.

Kunshan & Zhouzhuang, Jiangsu, China

After Haerbin it was time to go to work, and we returned on an overnight train to Beijing where I conducted the first of my week-long classes.  70 students from Beijing and surrounds attended, with the class held at the Peking University Hospital.  We stayed at the nearby Vision Plaza Hotel built for the 2008 Olympics, and little more distant than a gold medallist’s javelin throw to the “Bird’s Nest” Olympic Stadium. 

When the week was over we travelled 1,100 km further south to Kunshan on the Yangtze River delta in Jiangsu province, midway between Shanghai and Suzhou, where my second class was held.  Kunshan is a major manufacturing centre and the most prosperous city in China.  Companies from 60 countries have set up over 4,000 offices and factories in Kunshan, churning out electronic goods, solar cells, automotive manufactures and a host of other products.  40% of the world’s laptop computers, 20% of its digital cameras, and a significant percentage of its mobile phones are made in Kunshan.  And with over 180 research and development centres located in the city, its future seems bright too.

But this is not why my class was held in Kunshan – hairy crabs are the reason for that.  Nearby Yangcheng Lake, lit up at night like a mini Las Vegas, is famous for its hairy-legged crab, a delicious crustacean that brings thousands of gourmands to Kunshan each Autumn.  This is why my class was held in Kunshan and not in Nanjing as would normally be the case.  And judging from the incredible nightly banquets we enjoyed, it seems that my students are every bit as keen gourmands as they are committed doctors.

An hour’s drive from Kunshan are several small ancient “water towns”, complete with cobblestone walkways and arched stone bridges winding along and crossing the canals that flow through.  We took the opportunity before the class began to visit one of these, Zhouzhuang.  So too did hordes of other visitors on day bus trips from Shanghai.

Siberian Tiger Park, Haerbin, Heilongjiang, China

The Siberian tiger (also known as the Manchurian tiger) is seriously endangered with only an estimated several hundred surviving in eastern Russia, northern China and North Korea.  A significant percentage of these are located at the Manchurian Tiger Park about 10 km north of Haerbin.  The stated aim of this sanctuary is to breed and ultimately release tigers back into the wild.  No doubt in several respects the practices at this sanctuary might not conform with western ideals of endangered wild species management.  Some of the animals are housed in concrete-floored cages with little space to exercise, or apparent opportunity ever to roam more freely.  More unsettling to western sensibilities and, one would think, counter to the objective of ultimately releasing animals back into the wild, is the fact that visitors can purchase meat and poke it through the cages to feed the big cats.

On the positive side, a large part of the sanctuary is free-range with many tigers roaming amongst the trees and bushes.  We joined a safari in a truck with steel mesh sides to ride through the park and see the big cats up close.  And I mean UP CLOSE.  Again, visitors were encouraged to buy chunks of meat and poke them through the mesh.  The tigers were well-conditioned and leapt and lunged at the truck to take the offerings.  They were enormous creatures – standing vertical, their paws could reach on to the roof of the truck.  Anyone concentrating too carefully on their photographs, and not enough on the approaching paws, claws and teeth, could easily have lost fingers, and I wondered whether the occasional human hand might end up blended in with the meal.  There’s no way we’d ever be allowed to see such animals at such close quarters in an Australian zoo or sanctuary, and while conscious of the undesirable conservation implications of some of what we were seeing, we had to admit that it was a thrilling experience.  The tigers’ raw power and feeding vigour left no-one in any doubt that if they were stupid enough to get out of the truck, they’d only have a few seconds left to live.  Fortunately, no-one on board did, or for that matter, took up the option of purchasing a live animal and seeing it released into the big cats’ domain.  The price of a sheep for this purpose was 600 Yuan, a cow 2,000.

The tigers roamed freely around the sides of the truck and in the surrounding bush, providing great photo opportunities.  The setting was a bit Jurassic Park like, with high fences and electrically-operated sliding gates that opened and shut as we toured the park amongst the tigers.  There must have been about 200 of them.

Back at park headquarters, we admired the other species of big cats on display here.  There were cheetahs, white tigers, leopards, jaguars, and even a few rare ligers, a cross between a male lion and female tiger.  It’s a fascinating place, despite its undesirable features.               

Haerbin, Heilongjiang province, China

An overnight 1,000 km journey East on a crowded, cigarette smoke polluted train brought us from Manzhouli to Haerbin, the capital city of Heilongjiang province, part of the region once known as Manchuria.  The area is no stranger to foreign influences having been controlled variously over history by China, Russia and Japan.  And following the Russian Revolution of 1917, a large number of refugees flooded into Haerbin, giving the city a partly Russian character that it retains today in its historical buildings and Russian shops in the old town centre, now renovated and turned into pleasant pedestrian malls popular with Chinese and Russian tourists.

We strolled at dusk down the long, tree-lined mall on Zhongyang Dajie, and dined at Tatoc, an atmospheric Russian restaurant that opened its doors in Haerbin for the first time in 1901.  We had the Bortsch, prawn hotpot, vegetable salad, and Russian sausage pizza with icy cold Haerbin beer.  It was all excellent, and well after dark when we tottered up the steps from the Tatoc to take a taxi back to the Wang Jiang Hotel down past Stalin Plaza, but first stopping for a block of Ukrainian chocolate to have later with our coffees (Traveller’s tip: don’t buy Ukrainian chocolate – it’s not good).

Possibly the most impressive historical building in Haerbin is the beautifully restored Russian Orthodox Church of Saint Sophia, originally built in 1907.  The unrestored interior houses the Haerbin Architecture Arts Centre, featuring the history of Haerbin in a large display of black and white photographs.  We admired the Church from all directions, then sat in the surrounding plaza for half an hour to people-watch and listen to the pleasant Russian orchestral music wafting down on the warm breeze from the loudspeakers mounted in the spires above.  As darkness descended we moved on to Tatoc for another excellent dinner, this time ordering the cabbage rolls stuffed with minced pork and the mixed stewed vegetable hotpot.   

Haerbin is bounded to the north-west by the wide Songhua River; on the other side is the sprawling, pleasant 3,800 hectare Sun Island Park.  We spent Saturday afternoon there, wandering along the paths winding between lawns and trees now sporting their finest autumn colours.  We chanced upon a small village of old, authentic Russian cottages, originally the 1950s dachas (summer houses) of Russian businessmen working and living in Haerbin at the time.  The river dock was only a short stroll away, and from there we caught a ferry across the Songhua back into central Haerbin.  We disembarked in Stalin Park, crowded with visitors strolling along the wide riverside boulevard still decorated with hundreds of fluttering Chinese flags put up for the recent national holiday week celebrations.  And from there, with dusk approaching again, it was just around the corner to Tatoc ….

Manzhouli, Inner Mongolia, China

Tucked away in a far corner of China, 2,000 km north-east of Hohhot, is the booming border town of Manzhouli.  60% of China’s trade with Russia passes through the international border crossing on the outskirts of the city, and it’s here where the Trans Siberian Beijing to Moscow train rumbles across the border every Monday.  During “revolutionary” times, the Chinese and Soviet leaders sped through here on their special trains to confer with their comrades and allies across the border.   

We went to the crossing yesterday for a look.  Just a few more steps would have taken us into Russia, and to the west, we could have fired an arrow into Mongolia.  But having neither visas nor an archery set, we had to content ourselves with surveying the brown countryside to the horizon.  Trains loaded with Siberian timber chugged into China, and Russian and Chinese visitors passed over the line to browse in each other’s shops.  There were many blonde-haired Russians walking on the streets of Manzhouli that has a Russian feel about it and sports much Russian signage.

I soon discovered that if you’re not Chinese here, it’s assumed you are Russian, and many times shop-keepers attempted to strike up a conversation in Russian and were bemused at my inability to respond, except in another strange language.

We took a bus yesterday to the city of Haila’er three hours to the east, and from there a taxi to the Jinzhanghan Grassland, also brown at this time of year.  But the sweeping vistas were interesting nevertheless; it would certainly be an impressive sight in the green season.  But it was now hay harvesting time, and all around the district farmers were loading dried hay from the plains onto trucks for transport back to villages where it was stored in large piles within fenced compounds.

It was hot during the day but very cold after the sun set when we arrived back in Manzhouli.  Russian women strolled along the streets in their thick fur coats and we braced against the chill and made our way once again to the Kopyma (or letters to that effect), an excellent Russian restaurant just around the corner from our hotel.  I ordered a bowl of hearty Bortsch, grilled salmon topped with herbs, and pickled cabbage.  Lee Tuan had the pea and potato soup, chicken rolls stuffed with mushrooms, and the beet and prune salad.  All washed down with hot, unsweetened tea.  Then it was time to turn in for the night and sleep, despite the incessant distant noise of the shunting timber trains readying for their long journeys south.

Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China

We landed in Beijing early Wednesday after an overnight flight from Kuala Lumpur and took a shuttle to the Beijing Railway station where we planned to board a train to Datong in Shanxi province.  But we hadn’t counted on the Chinese national holiday week starting the next day.  The massive crowd inside the ticket hall didn’t augur well, and after waiting an eternity in a hot queue we learned that every one of the several trains to Datong that day was completely booked out.  The attendant told us that more trains were leaving from the Beijing West railway station and possibly we might get tickets for one of those.  A taxi trip across Beijing and another long wait in a queue later, the news was even worse.  There were no tickets on any of those trains today, or tomorrow, or the day after that!  This was not what we wanted to hear, and already hot and jaded, we checked into a hotel near the station to review our plight.  Airflights were heavily booked too but that night a few cancellations appeared on the internet and we swooped on two tickets direct to Hohhot on Friday.  The time in Beijing passed quickly and late Friday night we touched down in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, bypassing Datong.

Hohhot was founded in the 16th century by Altan Khan, about 300 years after Genghis Khan and his Mongolian calvary unleashed one of the greatest conquests the world has ever seen, subjugating much of Asia, Persia and Eastern Europe.  The Chinese finally drove the Mongols out in the 17th century, in the process taking half of the Mongolian homeland too.  Today this is the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia (not to be confused with the sovereign country of Mongolia to the north).  Little of the Mongolian heritage remains in the Hohhot of today, that is essentially a booming, pleasant-enough Han Chinese city with new construction and renovation going on everywhere.  Only a few buildings feature Mongolian-style decoration; the rest are modern concrete and glass high-rise edifices.

We wandered through the impressive Da Zhao temple that features a Buddha figure carved from a single 20 tonne block of Burma jade - the signboard claims that the cassock over the Buddha’s shoulder is inlaid with 41 rubies and 7,000 diamonds.  We later took a local bus two hours out of town to the Xilamuren Grassland.  Apparently this is vivid green from June to August, but with winter approaching is now drab brown.  We hired a couple of small Mongolian horses from one of the great Khan’s descendants and rode along a ridge overlooking the plain.  Our horses seemed to be descended from a more genteel line than those ridden by Genghis and his men - only once did we break into a sufficiently fast trot to entertain fleeting thoughts of a second invasion of Hungary.