China - Autumn 1994

24 Oct

Today I rented a bike (about 10,000 Dong per day) from an alley next to the hotel, and cycled around Hanoi - somewhat aimlessly. It's easy to orientate, full of bikes, scooters and motorbikes, dusty and shabby, but charming. I visited a Vietnamese hospital and changed my wound dressing. Compared with China, the medical facilities seemed far more primitive.

I don't think Hanoi has so much to keep me, but I will take a tour to Halong Bay on Wednesday and Thursday and try to return to China on Friday.

Hanoi is full of beggars, many rather persistent, there are children, mothers with babies, shoeshine boys and postcard peddlers.

25 Oct

Continued the unstressed style of sightseeing on my bicycle. I cycled across the Red River to the bus station to find out where the bus back to Lang Son was likely to leave from. The bridge was a derelict relic with two-wheeled traffic, four-wheeled traffic and trains sharing the same narrow roadway. The far side of the city too was considerable less charming than the old colonial design of central Hanoi.
Very few people speak French, today however I met two French-speaking lycéeistes and discussed the situation in Vietnam with them. Vietnam is still surprisingly popular with French tourists, perhaps some of them served here prior to 1956.

I had lunch at a food stall, various types of spring roll, vegetables and beer. Then it was time to pay my respects to Ho Chi Minhs; first at his home on stilts which was simple and tastefully designed, as a workplace for the uncle of Vietnam, and then at the museum which was bigger but fairly uninteresting. Unfortunately the mausoleum was closed because Uncle Ho was on his annual trip to Moscow for re-embalming.

Regretfully, I returned my bicycle in the evening, it was the only way to see the city in my opinion, although Hanoi is quite compact.

26 Oct

I took a 2-day tour to Hulong Bay, organised by one of the backpacker travel agents. It offered bus trip there and back, boat trip through the bay, accommodation and all meals for USD25. There were 19 western people on the trip (4 Norwegian, 5 French, 3 Canadians, 3 Spanish, 2 Belgians, 1 German and me).

It is only about 150 kilometres to the town of ??, but the road was so atrocious, bridges were one-way, and river crossings by ferry were so slow that it took more than 5 hours.

But we finally arrived, ate lunch, and then aboard the boat; it really was beautiful. It is the same limestone pillars as in Guilin, Wulongyuan, and from Liuzhou to the Chinese border, but here they are rising out of the crystal-clear waters of the bay. We stopped to swim, but the current was very strong.

The hotel provided was not bad, and we spent a pleasant evening sitting outside drinking beer and chatting.

27 Oct

This morning we went out again for another 3 hours, we saw some grottoes, more limestone, and finally a picnic lunch on the boat, before entering the bus for the slow trip back to Hanoi.

Back at the hotel I took a very welcome shower, and then went for dinner with Birgit, the German girl on the Hulong Bay trip to the "Piano Bar" - an interesting restaurant with a Vietnamese duo on violin and piano playing "My Way", "The Yellow Rose of Texas" etc.

28 Oct	It took all day strolling to the railway station and back, eating, drinking, watching people, exploring the alleyways and lanes of the city. The station didn't have much in the way of trains, but it was still an interesting place. Much of the colour provided by a group of porters who enjoyed having their photos taken, and taking pictures of me; we were then joined by three off-duty (I think) prostitutes, and another group of betel-stained old ladies - quite a jolly gathering. I bought some pirate CD:s on the way back for USD2 apiece. When I wanted to listen to them I was unashamedly led up the stairs to the studio where they were churning them out.
29 Oct	I left the hotel at 6 am and took a cyclo to the Gin Lau bus station (17,000 Dong) and waited for the mini-bus to Lang Son. It left at around 8 am and took my 40,000 Dong as on the way to Hanoi. About half-way we passed a rickety old bus going to Lang Son and the driver indicated that I should change to that (the minibus had been signed to Met and Kep, two villages half-way and not actually to Lang Son ). He said that he had, and I think he did pay the bus conductor for me, but that didn't stop the conductor demanding a further 30,000 Dong a few miles up the road. At Lang Son I changed to a motorbike, and was through the border in no time (arrived at Lang Son 14.45 pm and at Pingxiang at 5 pm including an hours difference between Vietnamese time and Chinese time. I found a nicer hotel (28Y for a bed in a triple, no-one else showed up) with a fine balcony overlooking the main drag) and went out for a Chinese meal again. I was a little disappointed with the Vietnamese cuisine, it lacked the finesse and freshness of most of the meals I ate in China. The food in Hanoi is supposed to be inferior to that in Saigon. Anyway, this evening I ate meat shreds with pickled vegetables, aubergine with meat, and a clear soup with a special kind of fungus (22Y). I concluded the evening in a beauty salon where they cut my hair (3Y) and gave me a facial massage (15Y) - hitting me all over the face and chin, rubbing cream in several times, pressing acupuncture points beside the nose and eyes for more than one hour. To the great amusement of course of the entire staff and the other customers. It was a little bit cooler hete - we are higher up than Hanoi, and I needed my sweater this evening.
30 Oct	Today I explored Pingxiang a little more thoroughly, and discovered the main point of interest to be the huge fruit and vegetable market. All kinds of greenstuff in huge piles, including the biggest pile of pineapples I have ever seen. They cost 1/2Y each including peeling them, removing the eyes, cutting them up, and serving on sticks. And they were deliciously ripe and juicy. Liquor was also sold in huge quantities, if you took your own container the price appeared to be 2Y per liter. Of course, being so close to the border there was a considerable trade in most types of consumer goods as well, souvenirs, electrical articles, household articles etc. I ate breakfast at a little open-air restaurant and enjoyed watching the girls deftly rolling, filling and cooking the jiaozi (ravioli like dumplings). Pingxiang is in Guangxi (as well as Nanning, Guilin and Liuzhou - it is a large area) . Guangxi is not actually a province, but a minority peoples autonomous area, these people are the Zhuang, but unlike many of the other minority peoples they are indistinguishable from Han Chinese, and do not appear to have their own costume or culture. There are however nearly 50 million of them, almost all living in Guangxi, which makes them the most numerous of the minorities. And they do have an own language, both written and spoken. However the only time I saw anything written in the Zhuang characters was in the Pingxiang railway station where the name signs are in Chines characters, pinyin, and Zhuang characters. After breakfast I took the 9.30 am bus to Nanning, it took nearly 7 hours to make the journey, thyere were many stops along the way, and the driver was crazy as usual. The hotel situation in Nanning was not good, foreigners cannot stay anywhere so the touts at the bus station refused to show me their cards. I finished up paying 95Y for a somewhat rundown room near the main traffic circle. Nanning is a big city apparently full of racketeers, call girls, dog restaurants - perhaps I am getting tired, but I don't think I will stay here.
31 Oct	I inquired at CAAC about a change of flight from Beijing, they couldn't help and said it could only be done at Beijing. So on the spur of the moment I bought a ticket to Beijing for the same day. The flight was ok, it arrived in Beijing on time, and the in-flight service was better than I remembered, lunch was served, and consisted of a variety of cold cuts plus a tasteless meat and rice dish. No smoking was allowed, and the passengers behaved themselves. At Capital Airport in Beijing, there was no problem in changing my flight to the 4th November. At the hotel desk at the airport I discovered hotel prices were somewhat different from in Guizhou. I booked at the Grand and paid 480Y for some luxury. However I discovered in the taxi that it was not in the best location, but in a suburb somewhere north of the Third Ring Road. But it was very comfortable, and I found a real old-fashioned Beijing restaurant for dinner, with dishes of cold food to start with, with a cold beer, and then a menu with hotpot and other Beijing specialities. The clientele too was Beijing working class as could be heard from their dialect.

1 Nov	Breakfast on the street, and in the vicinity an interesting vegetable market. As winter is approachig the citizens were stocking up on their winter staple, cabbage - and they were everywhere. There is still a lot of the old Beijing (as I remember from 1983) visible behind the modern facades, traffic and high rise apartments and offices. I changed my hotel to the Rainbow, also a fairly luxurious hotel, but a guy at the Grand, a travel agent, gave me a good deal for a three day stay of 375Y a night. The location is much better, just a 10 minute walk south of QianMen. I spent the rest of the day shopping, first at Dazhalan and then at QianMen, and finally along Wangfujing. These areas were still full of people, and lively long into the evening, even if McDonalds has now appeared, as well as KFC and other symbols of American food imperialism. I bought some books in the Foreign Languages Bookstore, and admired fur coats for 43,000Y and leather jackets for 3-4,000Y. I wonder who buys these ?
2 Nov	I failed to find the bus stop for the 106 to Dazhimen, but eventually made the journey by bus and underground. I located the acupuncture supply shop and purchased the 1200 needles. I lunched on fast food roast duck. Afterwards I walked through Liulichang and looked at the antique shops - searching for bamboo paintings. I found two reasonable ones and negotiated a price of 480Y including mounting, but then discovered it would take 10 days. I bought a few odd things, paper-cuts, and calligraphy tools instead. After a rest I made my way to the Donganmen night market and ate my way up the street - fried fish, fried small squid, across the bridge noodles and finally melon (all between 2 and 4 Y).
3 Nov	A frustrating day shopping. I walked around Dongdan looking for the Dong'an market, finally I found it at Wangfujing, and then found it was being rebuilt. So I rode the buses out to Beijing Nan (South Station) and then to Xidan. In the evening I had the company of a tour guide. Mr Song who helped me get the room at the Rainbow, suggested I could have a guide for the day. But I didn't need one, so I met her in the morning and asked if she would come and have dinner with me. She wanted to practise her English she said, but most of the evenibg she chatted away in Chinese. Her English was probably somewhat worse than my Chinese, so she needed to practise if she was to show foreigners around. We went to a Cantonese restaurant close to the Rainbow and ate ink fish of two colours (ie with broccoli), sweet and sour pork, a very sweet sweet-corn soup and some vegetables (65Y for 2). She ate with a very good appetite, and quite plainly enjoyed being taken to a relatively upmarket restaurant. Then we walked up to Qian Men, across Tian An Men Square, and up to the entrance to the Forbidden City before taking a taxi home.
4 Nov	The last morning in Beijing I was up early, and walked to Taorantang park, admired the people practising taiqi in the calm of the early morning. It was cold, possibly frost in the night and just one or two degrees above zero now, it's been surprisingly warm during the daytime here, up to 20-22 degrees, but winter is plainly coming on fast. Time for last wonton and baozi, and the a taxi to Xidan and the airport bus arriving at 10 am. The flight home was uneventful.

China (15 September 1994 - 10 November 1994 part 4)